COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 6

My formulations on observations re: static and dynamic alignment in Part 5 only discussed villains appearing in serial features in subordinate roles. But the same distinctions apply to all Sub characters, including those that might ordinarily be described as "support-cast" members.

In ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES PT. 3, I took pains to establish that the 1981 HEAVY METAL anthology-film was a crossover-movie, but not because some of its stories adapted icons from established features, specifically "Den," "Captain Sternn," and "So Beautiful So Dangerous." If the film had just introduced each story with some non-diegetic interlocutor figure akin to EC Comics' Crypt Keeper, then there would have been no crossover-elements. But the demonic Loc-Nar, a creation of the movie-script, both tells the stories and participates in them as an icon with agency-- though not more agency than any of the characters with which Loc-Nar interferes. It's possible that the deleted "Neverwhere Land" sequence might have shown Loc-Nar with true agency, since it involved him creating an entire civilization, only to destroy it. But in the existing sequences, Loc-Nar usually just sets events in motion. He causes comical consequences in "Dangerous" and "Sternn," heroic ones in "Harry Canyon," "Den," and "Taarna," and tragic ones in "B-17," but in each story the primary agency is not Loc-Nar but those he influences. Even "B-17," in which Loc-Nar wreaks an unalloyed evil by turning a dead airman crew into killer zombies, the primary agency rests with the animated cadavers, who attack the plane's pilots. One pilot escapes the assault and parachutes down to an island-- where, it would appear, Loc-Nar has also animated the corpses of other slain airmen. The agency here is with the living dead men, for though they have no conscious motives, they arouse revulsion in the viewer out of the conviction that if the dead could come to life, they would seek to slay those still living, for spite if nothing else.

In formal anthologies-- that is, collections of completely separate stories that may have a "guest-host" interlocutor-- the agency of the story's Prime icon or icons appear within the story proper, and if the tale-teller could be deemed any sort of status at all, he would be a Sub rather than a Prime. The only way an interlocutor could become a Prime would be to enter the story proper and assume agency through specific actions. "Horror Beneath the Streets," a 1950 tale in HAUNT OF FEAR #17, posits that the two writers of EC Comics, William Gaines and Al Feldstein, begin discussing the idea of publishing magazines devoted to horror stories. They are then duly ambushed by the Old Witch, the Crypt Keeper, and the Vault Keeper, who force the beleaguered authors to give them all contracts to host their own respective titles. Clearly the horror-hosts are the stars of this story, and one could even deem "Streets" a crossover of characters who are usually subordinate icons in other, otherwise-unrelated stories.

However, in another EC story the Old Witch enters a story but just remains another type of Sub. "A Little Stranger," in HAUNT OF FEAR #14, depicts the romance of two Prime characters, vampire Elicia and werewolf Zorgo, whose unholy unison begets the Witch herself, who's only in the story proper for one panel.

Since Part 6 ended up running extra-long with its analyses, I'll save the actual remarks on static and dynamic alignment for Part 7.

NULLMYTHS: "THE FLYING SAUCER INVASION" (WEIRD SCIENCE #13, 1950)

In contrast to my previous post, there's no complications about this story-- whose art and story are both credited to Al Feldstein-- having been derived from an earlier model. However, "The Flying Saucer Invasion"-- published in what was technically the *second* issue of WEIRD SCIENCE, not the thirteenth-- might have been vastly improved had it swiped from another author.

The cover-- showing a military fellow dismissing the rumors of flying saucers as "poppycock" while overhead a real saucer zooms in for the kill-- gives away the whole game. Gaines and Feldstein are reputed to have had a strong interest in the "flying saucer craze" that took America by storm in 1947. Yet "Invasion" reads like nothing more than a recitation of a few basic UFOlogy cliches-- for example, that the saucers only show up in rural settings, never urban--and that the government's sole response was to try to cover up the whole business. Most of the story's eight pages are devoted to rather static head-shots of people's stereotypical reactions. Page six is easily the high point of the story. Here the reader gets to witness a comic-book character dissing the disreputable aspects of the comic book medium, when a psychologist deems the saucer-sightings "a pathological illusion aggravated by continuous publicity given it by press, radio, and comic books."

The big twist ending-- that the saucers are real-- comes as no surprise at all, and the story doesn't even hint at the more captivating myths of UFOlogy. Feldstein's real focus is the government cover-up, which rates as a sociological myth, but of a very low mythicity. Perhaps this sequence's only interesting myth-motif is that after the saucer-debunking Secretary of Defense gets finished undermining the testimonies of the rural citizens--one of whom speaks with a comic Southern accent-- he also plows over the testimony of an Air Force lieutenant. The fact that the lieutenant is depicted with a stock "leading man" handsomeness suggests that he incarnates an American heroic archetype, and that the Secretary, by dismissing him, has metaphorically undermined American fighting-capacity, anticipating a similar motif later found in the RAMBO films. However, that one motif doesn't make up for a generally lackluster narrative.

MYTHCOMICS: "LOST IN THE MICROCOSM" (WEIRD SCIENCE #12, 1950)

My first choice for a "mythcomic" from the House of Entertaining Comics creates some problems. Though I didn't say so when I began this series, it's generally been my intention not to count anything that was a direct adaptation of a story published in another medium. For instance, I consider Robert E. Howard's short Conan story "The Tower of the Elephant" to be one of the great myth-stories of popular fiction. But I would never cite the Thomas-Smith adaptation of the story, published in Marvel's CONAN THE BARBARIAN #4. It's arguable that Thomas and Smith may have added their own mythopeic elements to the mix, but nevertheless, the source of the mythic structure is a prose story, not a comics-story.

Similarly, I would never include any of EC's famous adaptations of Ray Bradbury's work. Yet what about "swipes?" As this Wikipedia entry makes abundantly clear, publisher William Gaines had the habit of delving through published SF-stories and "lifting" ideas, which were then redone as "new" stories by raconteurs like Al Feldstein. The story goes that Gaines lifted one of Bradbury's stories, and that Bradbury wrote him, politely asking for payment for said adaptation-- a bit of indirect dickering that led to several fully approved Bradbury adaptations by E.C.

Yet a swipe doesn't have to be an exact reproduction of the original story. I have not to my recollection read the 1936 Henry Haase prose tale "He Who Shrank," but this blog-summation of the story suggests to me that writer Feldstein and artist Kurtzman only swiped the basic idea of a protagonist who is (a) exposed to a element that causes him to shrink endlessly, and (b) because of this, finds himself plummeting through a host of recursive micro-universes.

The dominant Campbellian function evoked here is the *cosmological,* in that Feldstein's protagonist Karl is constantly witness to all the wonders of the microscopic world, seen for the first time on an equal footing. I can't prove it, but when he shrinks into the "sweat ducts" of his mentor and learns that the older man has tuberculosis, that sounds a bit more like Kurtzman's wry sense of humor than Feldstein's-- though for all I know it might appear in the Haase story.

In addition, the story is particularly accomplished in the psychological arena, in that Karl is constantly shifting from being a godlike giant, able to cause havoc to lesser beings with no more than a sneeze, to dwindling into relative nothingness-- which is perhaps a little further than even Jonathan Swift went with the basic "relative size" trope.

Interestingly, the story's conclusion holds out some meager hope that someday Karl may shrink into some super-advanced cosmos where he can be cured of his affliction-- though the dominant effect of the story is to remind the story's interlocutor (who listens to Karl's story) that even Earth's advancements may pale before "what exists in the infinite cosmos."

E.C.? P.C.!-- PART 3

This essay-series began in reaction to Gary Groth's statements on behalf of Fantagraphics' republication of certain stories from the EC Comics oeuvre.  I've already addressed Groth's peculiar remarks on William Gaines' "generosity" in Part 1.  But before I can address Groth's more recent 1-23-13 essay on the Comics Journal site, I have to address the review that sparked them; Chris Mautner's 10-20-12 review of the first two Fantagraphics EC-reprints.

In keeping with my title, I find Mautner's reaction informed by a certain degree of political correctness.  It's fairly minor in comparison with the idiocies one can find in the essays of Chicken Colin, critiqued here and here.  Unlike Chicken Colin, Mautner never stoops to producing a Barthesian reversal of the work's textual meaning. 

What I would critique in Mautner's review is the conflation of contemporary political priorities with what Mautner calls "aesthetic value." 

The first substantial critique appears following a plaudit for Kurtzman's "Corpse on the Imjim":

...Air Raid!, Kill! and Big If! all hold up rather well, despite being invested with more than a bit of overwrought melodrama.
 

The sentence is unclear to me.  Are the cited stories being faulted because they contain melodrama? Or is it OK with Mautner if they're melodramatic, as long as the melodrama isn't "overwrought?"  The two are certainly not synonymous.

Gary Groth's essay takes extensive issue with Mautner's next assault, where he finds "jingoism" in certain stories.  Loathe though I am to agree with Groth, I feel that he disposes of these objections so well that I need not cover them.  Apparently the faults of some stories in the "Imjim" volume come down to these two offenses, "melodrama" and "jingoism."

However, Mautner finds the majority of the stories in the companion volume, "Came the Dawn," to be "banal and overwrought."

Mautner's pronouncments on the "Shock Suspenstories" material suggests to me that he's not thrilled with melodrama in general.  He writes:

These reveals would usually be of the stupefying kind one could see coming a mile away that added little to the story . To wit: the anti-Semite accidentally discovers that he was adopted and his biological parents were Jewish! The bigot turns his back on a neighbor of mixed race … only to discover that an African-American had given him a life-saving blood transfusion as a child!
 

I can't make sense of Mautner's criticism about these reveals "adding little to the story." In melodrama such broad effects ARE the essence of any given story.  Wikipedia defines melodrama as "a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions."  In my book that means that a melodrama is all about jazzing up the audience with hyper-emotional effects, not about making an appeal via the relative subtlety of so-called "serious drama."

I'll simply note in passing my disagreement with the politically correct statement that "saintly, martyr-like" ethnic characters are precisely "the flip side of Sambo."  But Mautner's yearnings toward literary probity shine forth most strongly here:

There’s also a sexism and misogyny that runs through Dawn that’s more than a little creepy. The title story deals with a man who stumbles into at first what seems to be a Penthouse Forum fantasy only to become convinced his dream girl is not to be trusted, with — ho hum — deadly consequences. The Assault is even more disconcerting, as it features mob violence (a favorite reoccurring motif for Feldstein) in the service of a seemingly abused teen girl who (of course) turns out to be a conniving slut and seductress. That’s not even mentioning the scenes of women being tied up and whipped by Klu Klux Klan figures not once but twice in Under Cover! and The Whipping. Clearly, these guys have some issues they needed to work out.
 

Again, Mautner doesn't take into account that this alleged misogyny, like that of the exaggerated melodramatic endings, was first and foremost an effect meant to entertain the audience, rather than a revelation of the authors' own personal leanings.  That isn't to say that there's no connection between the two, but Mautner has not taken the care to evaluate the audience EC's creators aspired to captivate, nor the prevalence of those effects in other mainstream entertainment of the period.

In Part 4, we will see that Groth, even in defending the EC raconteurs, will prove if anything even more politically upright (or is that uptight?)

E.C.? P.C.!-- PART 2

The more I think about the matter, the stranger it seems to me that Gary Groth, as I noted in Part 1, should even raise the question of how "generous" William Gaines was to his artists.  What form of largesse could possibly be of any significance, given that Gaines neither allowed creators to own their own works, nor returned art to the artists?  Why not just laud the EC work in terms of its excellence, and leave the question of Gaines' ethical deportment for separate consideration?

Gaines, I believe, is frequently given a "pass" in these matters due to the critical position EC Comics occupies in the minds of the Bloody Comic Book Elitists.  As example-- and this is, to be sure, not a COMICS JOURNAL-specific concern-- I cite these passages from ALTER EGO's interview with Sheldon Moldoff, conducted by Roy Thomas.
 

MOLDOFF: Well, as I said, you've got to come out at the right time and the right place. An interesting part of my career-and I have written proof, since I've kept all my records from 'way back-
When Max Gaines was killed in his motorboat accident, his son Bill took over EC. I had met Bill before, but now he was in charge, and I was doing some work for him. I asked him, "How's things going?" He said, "Lousy. The family's considering closing up and getting out of the comic book business." I said, "Bill, if I give you an idea which I think will be the next trend, will you give me a contract and a percentage of sales if it shows a profit? I only want it if there's a profit; I'd get paid a percentage of the profit. I think I know what's going to come in next." And he said, "I'd be glad to!" I said, "Okay, I'm going to bring you a couple of titles and a little breakdown, and show you what I have in mind."

Moldoff asserted that this handshake deal wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.

 So I went running down there, and they're still at Lafayette Street, and I said, "Bill, what is this?" He said, "I knew you'd be here." I said, "Well, do you blame me? We have a contract, and you're supposed to use mine! I'm supposed to be the horror man!" He said, "Well, I decided I'm not going to give percentages. I don't want to give percentages. I'll give you all the work you want, but no percentages." I said, "No, we had an agreement, and I want you to honor it!" He said, "Well, there's nothing you can do about it, Shelly. I decided I'm not paying anybody percentages."

 Thousands, perhaps millions, of words have been written to pillory the employees of Marvel and DC for their heinous acts in "stealing" the works of Jerry Siegel, Jack Kirby, et al.  In the quote reprinted in Part 1, Gary Groth accused Marvel of "impoverishing" its employees.

How many words have been written, online or in print, to excoriate William Gaines for his alleged crime, for which there's at least as much evidence as there is for the "crimes" of Stan Lee?

Has anyone so much as alluded to Moldoff's allegation when making an assessment of Gaines, be it in the JOURNAL or anywhere?  I honestly would like to know, as I can't very well read everything.


Assuming that my hunch is correct-- that Gaines' problematic status has received little to no comment-- am I alleging a conscious conspiracy to protect the rep of William Gaines, because he's one of the Fathers of Quality Comics That Snooty Elitists Like Best?

No.

But I think that elitists are unconsciously selective when it comes to the purported offenses of their heroes.  Gaines' offenses, even if they are genuine, are just old news, no one cares about whether or not he cheated a minor player like Moldoff.  But Stan Lee's offenses against Jack Kirby, DC's against Siegel and Shuster-- these are "evergreen," because Marvel and DC remain "the enemy," now and forever, World Without End.

In Part 3 I'll address certain contemporary reactions to EC comics.

E.C.? P.C.! -- PART 1

So what could possibly be "politically correct" about the "E.C." Comics of the above title? 

Taking the second item first, Wikipedia provides an exhaustive definition of "politically correctness," claiming that it "is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts, and, as purported by the term, doing so to an excessive extent."

This would not seem particularly applicable to EC Comics itself, given that the company was known for championing social issues in an uncompromising manner. 

However, I'll argue here that the term does apply, not to the original comic books, but to their forthcoming republication by the company Fantagraphics, which is also known for (generally) championing their own set of issues.  The full announcement can be read here, as well as Gary Groth's remarks on the project.  It is these remarks by Groth that I find to be "politically correct." In the following paragraph, Groth minimizes any potential "offense" in his reading of William Gaines in order to distance him from the common ruck of other "mainstream publishers."

The more I think of Gaines, the greater a publishing figure he becomes," Groth continued. "EC couldn't have existed without Gaines, specific books couldn't have happened without Gaines. He nurtured a lot of books, and had a sense of quality that virtually no publisher could match with the possible exception of St. John. Although he was somewhat paternalistic, you can see that from today's point of view, Gaines was incredibly generous to the artists by the standards of back then. He's a remarkable figure in comics publishing. I think among mainstream publishers he still might stand alone.

The "politically correct" keyword of this paragraph is the word "generous."  In what way was Gaines "generous" to his artists?  Did he give them the right to own their stories?  Did he return their art?  Did he occasionally fete them with expensive dinners and similar largesse?


Of the three rhetorical examples I posed above, I have only heard an affirmative with regard to the last one: Gaines did apparently dole out largesse to *some* of his contributors.

However, I don't get the sense that mere largesse has ever been the standard by which either Groth or most of his Comics Journal contributors have judged publishers.  The common position voiced at the Journal is that any publisher who does not fully endorse creator ownership is the lowest barnacle on the ship.  A quick example of this disdain for such publishers appears in this Journal essay by Groth, in the context of a historical argument about Marvel's return of art to its artists:

By 1976, because of a confluence of historical circumstances, which mostly amounted to raised commercial and creative consciousness among artists, both Marvel and DC were returning original art drawn for their current comics. DC also dug through their archives at that time and returned to the artists all the old art in its possession. Marvel did not until 1984, when, under pressure from artists, they too began to return older original art. But there was a catch. The artist had to sign a one-page “release form” that was a retroactive work-for-hire contract, cementing Marvel’s ownership of the reproduction rights of the art and any concepts or ideas within it. Most artists didn’t have any objections to signing this, or at least not sufficient objections to prevent them from signing it in order to get their original art back (which they could, for example, sell on the then-growing original art market — which was an important economic consideration, insofar as working for Marvel over their lifetimes had impoverished many of them).

I'm fairly sure that with some digging I could find passages that excoriated, in much harsher terms, any publishers who purchased work under the "work-for-hire" stipulations, but this one will do for now.  Marvel is bad because it exploited its artists and continued that exploitation by enforcing these retroactive "work for hire" contracts in order to protect Marvel from legal complications.

Why then is Gaines immune from this lofty scorn?  In what way did he take care of his artists, and how if at all was it different from the standard practices of Gaines' contemporaries, including the company that would later be known as Marvel?

Or is Groth's praise of Gaines influenced by a "political" need to distance Gaines from those practices?

More in Part 2.

ANYTHING THAT CAN BE DONE WELL, PART II

"This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up, which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?"

"Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic."



In PART I of ANYTHING, I said:



"The high/low prejudices [of elitist critics] can be much more virulent when dealing with works in differing modes that do not have humor as their aim."



Historically, nothing displays this fact better than the above-quoted 1954 exchange between Senator Estes Kefauver and William C. Gaines, publisher of EC Comics, during a congressional committee's investigation of what Senator Robert Hendrickson called "the problem of horror and crime comics," which he defined as "pamphlets illustrating stories depicting crimes or dealing with horror or sadism." Ostensibly such comics were a concern for the committee (and for the legions of offended parents whom the congressmen represented) because comics stood accused of facillitating juvenile delinquency. But given the slanted nature of the committee's inquiries, one could be justified in finding a different motive for the investigation, as does David Hadju in THE TEN CENT PLAGUE:



"The issue at stake... was not really juvenile crime... but the idea of taste-- the proposition that aesthetic values are relative." (p. 272)



But while I agree with Hadju's interpretation as a whole, in one small matter he's not quite correct, for Gaines doesn't argue for the overall relativity of taste. Gaines' argument that a gory comics-cover is perfectly proper to a horror comic book is promptly mitigated in his next response, where Gaines seeks to elevate his personal taste above that of some hypothetical competitor's rendition of the same material:



"A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen to be dripping blood--"



Let it be said that even though I'm going to critique Gaines' argument on my own terms, I acknowledge that nothing Gaines could have said would have made any difference to Kefauver or the rest of the committee. The "someone else's taste is worse" argument certainly did nothing to deter the governmental guardian, for Kefauver simply pointed out that there was blood on the axe and coming from the head's mouth, and stated that most adults would be "shocked" by such explicitness. Given that mindset, Gaines' argument of being less explicit than he could have been counted for nothing.



But the "someone else's taste" argument is also a mistake in terms of anyone seeking to defend a mode of expression, since it comes down to backpedaling. Gaines was correct to assert that there was a defensible aesthetic to a horror comic-- particularly a horror-comic in a particular mode of expression-- but was not correct to backpedal and assert that his taste as to crafting and presenting a good horror-comic was essentially more restrained than that of some hypothetical other editor.



I argued on the differing modes in ANYTHING PART I that two examples of them from the genre of comedy would be the "sophisticated comedy" and the "grossout comedy." Not surprisingly, fans of horror-narratives have also at times divided off different types of horror, sometimes with direct reference as to how viscerally horrible they may be. "Gross horror" is one name for the type/mode that emphasizes viscerality and the violation of the body, while "subtle horror" is one name for horror-works that suggest more than show horrific events. A synoptic view of horror-narratives would have to say that both have the possibility for merit-- but should one judge the virtue of a "gross horror" narrative according to the degree of *restraint* practiced by its creators?

Maybe one could appreciate a display of restraint in a particular instance-- like using a particular cover-illustration to sell a mass medium magazine-- but surely if a mode like "gross horror" has any merit, that merit would have to line up with the mode's tendency to shock and horrify with in-your-face viscerality. Viscerality isn't the only virtue that critics of a later day have found in the same "horror and sadism" magazines Hendrickson disparaged, but that virtue would be likely be among the top three.

Naturally, it was politic for Gaines to have defended himself as a publisher with a degree of restraint. Had he come out defending the virtues of gross horror in the unrepentant tones of a latter-day Marquis de Sade, as logic says he should have, he probably would have been ridden out of town on the proverbial rail.

As it is, there's some irony that Gaines' business survived thanks to the translation of the MAD comic book into MAD magazine-- thus indirectly demonstrating my contention above: that many aspects of narrative reality will get no free pass in "serious" stories, but can squeak by with comparative impunity when shielded by the power of humor.