MYTHCOMICS: "THE DOLL'S HOUSE" (THE SANDMAN #10-16, 1989-90)

In the same year that Neil Gaiman began his long run on THE SANDMAN title, he also did a couple of (apparent) tryouts for the SWAMP THING title: scripts that appeared in SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5, reviewed here. One of Gaiman's stories, which revived DC's "Brother Power" character, posited a world of "doll elementals" as the reason for Power's existence, in line with the plant elementals Alan Moore had introduced as a rationale for Swamp Thing's existence.

Over the next two years the SANDMAN title showed Gaiman stretching his creative muscles, as he varied between "short dreams" (essentially stand-alone stories, often featuring Morpheus of the Dreaming as the "host") and "long dreams" (longer, more involved story-arcs, some of which did not bear fruit until the end of the series). The first long arc, "The Doll's House," also invoked the image of dolls, but, like the famous Ibsen play, with a somewhat negative connotation, in which dolls were seen not as magical non-living presences-- as in the Brother Power story-- but as metaphors for being helplessly controlled by another's will.

As rendered by then-current Mike Dringenberg, the world of the Dreaming was taking on increasingly more complex, almost Jungian connotations, and this in part accounts for readers' enthusiastic reception of a world where dreams were real. "Doll's House" is perhaps not the best exemplar of this unique perspective. Though it's a long arc, parts of it are still more like short stories than anything, particularly "Men of Good Fortune," which has nothing to do with the plot of the arc, though it has a loose thematic relationship to the rest of the story.

At this point in the series Morpheus, having been released from magical captivity, is dealing with various problems in the dream-world he rules. Four entities, his "creations," have escaped the Dreaming, and there's an additional threat in the appearance of a "vortex," a rare phenomenon in which a mortal manifests the ability to wreak havoc on the dream-world. Morpheus must corral his errant creations and terminate the threat to his kingdom.

I said that Gaiman's conception was "almost" Jungian, because at this point Gaiman is still strongly oriented upon the Alan Moore model. In his early works for DC Comics, Moore helped pave the way for 'adult comic books" within the context of genre-productions, and one of his main strategies was to take an ironic or reductive view of key genre-fantasies. I won't attempt to recount the fine details of Gaiman's arc, particularly since they don't dovetail particularly well, but almost all of them relate to the ides of exposing some personal or cultural fantasy as deeply flawed or misunderstood. Taking them on an issue-by-issue basis:

#10-11 -- this issue introduces Rose Walker, the mortal vortex, who will in time learn that her everyday waking existence is actually a threat to the world of dreams.

#12-- Superhero Hector Hall, who took upon himself the identity of "the Sandman" within the pages of another DC comic, is exposed as nothing but a ghost with delusions of grandeur, manipulated by two of the nightmare-creations that escaped Morpheus' realm. The issue not only undermines the original Simon-Kirby conception of a "dreamworld superhero," from which Gaiman's Sandman was very loosely derived, it also features a few sequences in which a young boy experiences fanciful dreams evocative of Windsor McCay's "Little Nemo," but wakes up to ugly realities (a rat biting his face, for example),

#13-- the "Good Fortune" issue, in which Morpheus allows a mortal man to enjoy virtual immortality. During Morpheus' visit to Elizabethan England, it is revealed that a certain Bard owes his talent to having made a Faustian bargain with none other than the King of Dreams.

#14-- Morpheus tracks down one of his nightmare-creations, the Corinthian, to a very special convention, in which seasoned serial killers come together to discuss their avocation. In addition to destroying his creation, Morpheus forces all of the mortal killers to see themselves without the benefit of self-delusion. To some extent comic-book conventions and their attendees are the butt of the issue's satirical jokes, though it's reasonably clear that Gaiman isn't drawing a one-on-one comparison of comics-fans and serial killers.

#15-16-- Morpheus finds that the last of his errant creations, an entire dream-realm known as Fiddlers' Green, has taken mortal form and come into contact with Rose Walker. Though Morpheus' initial contact with Rose saves her from one of the serial killers, he then tells her-- within one of her dreams-- about her true nature, and that he must kill her to prevent her from destroying his world. He almost does so, but learns, through a very involved plot-line I won't recapitulate, that one of his supernatural siblings has been manipulating him to commit that transgression in order to destroy him  Although Rose survives, she lives on with the feeling that all of humanity are merely "dolls" to greater, merciless forces, echoing Shakespeare's theme in KING LEAR: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport,." However, in his confrontation with his plotting sibling, Morpheus reveals a new wrinkle: that he and all of his metaphysical kindred are also merely "dolls," for they are brought into being by the passions and aspirations of mortal beings. At the end the sibling in question refuses to acknowledge the truth revealed by Morpheus, and the story ends with her thinking that she's "nothing like a doll at all."

It's a promising theme, that of the interdependence of mortals and their archetypal creations, but "Doll's House" doesn't live up to its potential. It's obviously an amalgam of separate story-ideas that Gaiman sought, only with partial success, to meld into a unified structure. Nevertheless, even if this early Gaiman work goes a little overboard with all of the "beautiful dreams hide nasty realities" schtick, there's still enough attention to the symbolic resonance of the dream-world that it isn't totally reductive in nature. One example is "Fiddler's Green," who is apparently the incarnation of an Earthly Paradise, without any attempt to reduce him to something else. Rose Walker is a little on the dull side, as if Gaiman wanted to make her as simple as possible for contrast's sake, but I found this simply made it harder to invest much conviction in her character.

It's a flawed story, but not so over-intellectualized as to fall into the category of the "null-myth," and it does prove to be of major importance in elucidating Gaiman's not-quite-Jungian concept of a universe of dreams.

MYTHCOMICS: "LITTLE NEMO IN THE PALACE OF ICE" (1907)

In Part 3 of THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, I discussed in some detail the circumstances under which I would currently rate gag comic strips as having or not having symbolic complexity. One of my examples was Winsor McCay's DREAMS OF THE RAREBIT FIEND, in part because I'd listed that strip in my 2008 ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY. As LONG AND SHORT should clarify, I've changed my mind on this matter. My current view is because most if not all FIEND-strips are no more than short gags, that structure keeps it from demonstrating true plurisignativity.

But thus the queston arises: what about McCay's subsequent and more famous strip, LITTLE NEMO IN SLUMBERLAND-- an admitted classic, though I didn't mention it in my 2008 LIBRARY.  Since NEMO unlike FIEND did allow for story-arcs, that means it had the capacity for mythic complication, whether or not it took advantage of that capacity.

Though I admire LITTLE NEMO in terms of its artistic accomplishment, it's never been a favorite of mine. I esteem it more than a lot of its comic-strip contemporaries, but the repetitive structure never grabbed me, dealing as it does with a child-protagonist who wanders through assorted dream-world wonders until he wakes to prosaic reality. Thus I don't have a lot of NEMO stuff in my collection. However, I do have Dover's 1976 album, LITTLE NEMO AND THE PALACE OF ICE AND FURTHER ADVENTURES. Fortuitously enough, the "Palace of Ice" adventure does meet my criteria for a "mythcomic."

This story-arc lasts eight installments, which appeared initially as full-page strips. As I've established, brevity in itself doesn't absolutely prevent a comic from displaying mythicity; it just stacks the odds against it.

Dover begins their reprint with nine-year-old Nemo and his female friend, the daughter of King Morpheus, about to be admitted to the ice-bound palace of Jack Frost. However,Nemo and the Princess are pursued by another recurring character, the troublemaking Flip, son of the dawn-god. Though he's visually reminiscent of Negro stereotypes of the period, one source says that Flip is supposed to be an "ill-tempered Irishman."

Not only does Flip intrude upon Nemo and the Princess' visit to the palace, in the first strip he has a malign witch pursuing him, presumably a carry-over from a prevous continuity. Fortunately, the guards of the palace grounds bar the witch, and so she plays no real part in the arc. Flip himself becomes the source of conflict in the arc, which seems to have been the role he played throughout the strip. Nemo and Flip become companions in many adventures, though in this arc Nemo seems diffident toward Flip's presence-- probably because Nemo wants to see Jack Frost and his icy wonders, while Flip keeps disrupting things. He constantly demands to have his whims satisfied by threatening to summon his sun-god uncle to vaporize Jack Frost's world.

Though it's a short sequence, "Palace of Ice" does an exemplary job of potraying a world in which one sees an array of fantastic sights associated with cold phenomena. It is of course a child's version of the metaphysics of ice and snow, taking in from juvenile pleasures like toboggan-riding and snowball-fights as well as the more profound wonders of the Northern Lights and the mysterious North Pole, from which all the winds of the world originate. Every episode necessarily ends with Nemo's dreamland-journey being interrupted by some accident, be it one of Flip's antics or something native to Jack Frost's realm, like a snowball-fight by brainless snow-people.

The big meeting with Jack Frost is also a visual wonder, though actually nothing much happens as a consequence of the ice-ruler greeting Nemo and the Princess.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that Flip isn't present in Jack Frost's courtroom, and this turns out to be a set-up for the arc's resolution. Flip, almost always seen with a cigar in his mouth, resents being told that he can't smoke in the throne room. He disappears, and two strips later, he shows up with a series of ice-trucks in his wake. The truck-drivers then proceed to dismantle Jack Frost's fabulous ice-palace, breaking it up into square ice-blocks of the type used in household ice-boxes prior to the refinement of artificial refrigeration.  It's not explicitly stated that Flip summoned the trucks, and in one dialogue-balloon he claims that Jack Frost's people are forced to allow their palace's destruction "'cause they need the money, I guess"-- though given that Flip has been repeatedly threatening to destroy the realm, he seems more than a little implicated.

The decimation of the ice palace might tie into sociological myths on the evils of consumption, in which the beautiful art-objects of a declining aristocracy are broken up and turned into raw material for the use of the average consumer. He need not have been a Marxist to think of this; after all, he himself was creating beautiful art that was being used to sell periodical newspapers. In addition, the breakup of the palace mirrors the dominant narrative trope of LITTLE NEMO: that all the beautiful conjurings of the artist's pen are doomed to be dispelled by "cold" reality.

Another sociological motif would be the fact that while Nemo generally seems demure and respectful to everyone he meets, whether or not they are in positions of authority, his "shadow" Flip is irreverent and a frequent troublemaker.As others before me have suggested, Flip may be the "shadow" of Nemo's conscious mind, always more interested in strutting his own stuff than in anything else.

Since I have a deep interest in the history of fantasy literature, I suppose NEMO also leaves me less than enthusiastic because its type of fantasy depends entirely upon the vagaries of dream-- not unlike Carroll's Alice books, which may have influenced McCay somewhat. Five years before NEMO, L. Frank Baum created Oz, which some deem to be the first fantasy-cosmos created by an American author. Unlike Slumberland, Oz was supposed to be a real place with its own rules and culture-- though it's a further irony that the best-known cinematic adaptation of Baum chose to banish to the same gates of dream that contained Slumberland.