MYTHCOMICS: "THE PROFESSOR AND THE PIXIE" (OUT OF THE NIGHT #17, 1954)

OUT OF THE NIGHT was an ACQ title that lasted 17 issues from 1952 to 1954. I'd mentioned in an earlier essay that I'd read very few of that company's offerings from the 1940s and 1950s, so I decided I'd finally sample NIGHT because it was a short run, and because it ended right before the Comics Code became a force for publishers to reckon with. Issue #17 is dated October 1954, which means that it was probably on newsstands two or three months previous, probably the summer before the Code was instituted in September of that year. What I found from this brief survey was that, in contrast to the ACG scripts of the 1960s, OUT OF THE NIGHT published a fair sampling of creepy stories (mostly written by head editor Richard Hughes), albeit including none of the gore favored by other pre-Code publishers. In contrast to the absolutely scare-less "horror" titles of DC Comics of the early 1950s, at least the OOTN stories allowed the monsters to win roughly half the time. Since the only two Hughes stories I'd reviewed on this site were in the nature of Thorne Smith romances, I wondered if Hughes had allowed himself to tap darker currents when he was providing most of the "straight" horror stories. What I found, though, was mostly adequate formula terror, with none of the deeper resonances that make a mythcomic, and in OOTN at least, the only story that qualified for my criteria was-- a Thorne Smith type of fantasy.                                           

    This story, which I'll abbreviate as "Pixie," is a good example of how a mythcomic can portray psychological symbolism even though none of the characters possess anything like a simulated personal psychology. We open at a girls' college, Smathers by name, as the pipe-smoking Professor Dobbins seeks to ignore the lovelorn glances of his students. Hughes wastes no time on whatever past interactions Dobbins may have had with the fair sex; all we know is that he doesn't want to truck with adoring females. Based on the cinematic screwball comedies that probably influenced Hughes, Dobbins is probably supposed to be a normal healthy male who's cut himself off from real romance like the Cary Grant character in BRINGING UP BABY. He does nothing to invite the attentions of yet another adoring female, this one a pixie from the spirit world, but the reader is from the first page ready to see Dobbins taken down a peg.                                                                                                              

The Pixie doesn't even specify that she was looking for Dobbins in particular when she got her boss, "The Sublime Creep," to send her to Earth hunting a mortal husband. She just has her "spirit beam" trained on Smathers College so that she can blend in with all the female students, because it goes without saying that an all-girl college is the perfect place to hunt for men. Since the Pixie never makes any attempt to play student, I suppose readers should assume that once she caught sight of Dobbins, love at first sight prevailed. Dobbins does not reciprocate and wants the Pixie to go away so that he can get back to the fascination of grading papers. Just as the dean is about to walk in on their tete-a-tete, the Pixie tells Dobbins how to banish her. The dean doesn't see the Pixie, but he does see the level-headed young man acting the fool.                                                         

    

For once, though, the stuffy character's embarrassment isn't the only reason to bring about a threat to his pecuniary fortunes. Apparently even though Dean Crabtree is the only one who sees Dobbins playing Napoleon, the dean's loose-mouthed enough that both the faculty and the student bodies all find out that he's become addle-pated-- though the primary reason for his dismissal is that Smathers College is out of money. Dobbins blames his ill fortune on the Pixie, and when her spirit beam manifests in his office that night, he becomes aggressive, planning to "hustle [the Pixie] right back to the Sublime Creep." The reader is spared from seeing him attempt to do this when a fanged demon, implicitly male, pops up and socks him.    

                                                     

Dobbins tries to escape via his upper-story window, but when the female students try to come to his rescue, he makes the odd decision to face the monster rather than create an "uproar." He returns just in time to see the Pixie show up and banish Fangface, claiming that his advent was just a mistake from the Sublime Creep's central dispatching.                                                                                            

The Pixie then confesses that she did have something to do with convincing the whole school that the prof was bonkers, purely to get him away from the temptation of other women. Dobbins still shows no sign of succumbing to her unearthly beauty, and he doesn't even look particularly sad when she vanishes again. However, he doesn't do himself any favors with the dean by telling him that he wasn't trying to jump out of the window to his death; he was just avoiding "a monster." Regardless, the female students hold a demonstration to keep Dobbins on staff, and it must be a slow news-day, since the place is "cluttered with reporters" covering this collegiate protest.                 

                   

On the third (consecutive?) night, Dobbins does seem to get a little concerned that if the Pixie doesn't join with him, she might get assigned to some other suitor. For her part, the angelic apparition shows up at the girls' dormitory, where a chance phrase from a student gives the Pixie an idea. She calls upon the Sublime Creep to send a bunch of spirits to the campus, which then possess (one assumes temporarily) the other glamorous student bodies, turning them all into ugly beasts. (This touch actually seems a better marker of feminine, rather than masculine, psychology.) Lickety-split, some news station decides to buy exclusive rights to the demonstration-story from the college, and Smathers is immediately saved from penury. The Pixie's more or less unselfish gesture causes the stuffy professor to fall for her, and their romantic coupling is ensured. I did find myself wondering less at any of the mythcomics' plot holes than at what kind of "defense job" a de-winged mythical entity thought she could seek in 1954. Now, if she had said she planned to get a job with the Comics Code Authority-- that would have made perfect sense.                                                                     

NULL-MYTHS: "THE MAKING OF A MAN" (ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN #145, 1963)

Just to show that the same author can produce a "poor myth" as easily as a "good myth" when he uses his favorite conceits badly, here's a story that ACQ's Richard Hughes published about four years after "Queen of Uranus." In contrast to "Queen," which was a pretty decent insight into feminine psychology, here Hughes attempted to use his Thorne Smith bag o'tricks to define the male star of the portentously titled "Making of a Man."

The story starts out in typically Hughesian fashion, presenting protagonist Bill Weston as a brow-beaten weakling who, thanks to the influence of a mean aunt who threatens to send him to an orphanage, continually dodges conflict throughout his life. Hughes may have thought of the majority of comics-readers as similar dreamers who "sought refuge in... books," and yet dreamed of being he-man adventurers. (Indeed, Hughes' fan-favored feature HERBIE is postulated on almost nothing else.)

By a series of unfortunate accidents, Weston gets stuck in a rocket that takes him to the far-off planet Lomara. On the fortunate side, though, Weston is able to breathe the atmosphere of Lomara. Even more fortunately, for no particular reason being on Lomara endows Weston with super-strength a la Burroughs' John Carter.

Hughes then takes the next logical step, having Weston rescue a princess, name of Lynda (Hughes was not Burroughs' equal in coming up with exotic names). However, in a strange inversion of the John Carter mythos, Lynda and other, uniformly-gorgeous females rule the planet. The ugly pot-belled goons that attacked Weston and held the princess captive are the males of the planet's humanoid species, and whom Lynda regards as being "of a lower order." Weston, rather than becoming a sword-wielding warlord a la Burroughs, uses his scientific knowledge to repel the males' next assault on the females. This sounds like a great escape from Weston's earlier humiliating routine. Yet Hughes clearly doesn't want Weston to even think about staying on the alien world, for at battle's end he's already thinking about going home (naturally, so that Weston can deal out a comeuppance to the bullies of Earth).

It turns out that even though the battle was won, the war is bound to be lost to the men, who have greater forces and who desire "an equal voice in government." Clearly this was a toss-off story for Hughes: he was interested neither in the female Lomarans' claim to greater mental powers or the male Lomarans' desire for equity, only in what both of them could do for his protagonist's damaged ego.

I'm not sure about how conscious Hughes was of his title's irony. Since he drops the John Carter fantasy almost immediately, that might suggest that the writer meant to play around with the usual tropes of "manhood-making." Still, the story seems too clumsily assembled to suggest intentional irony. The real reason Hughes is in such a hurry to get Weston and Lynda back to Earth is because Lynda brings with her a treasure-trove of diamonds, and that allows him to buy out his old company and kick out his mean boss.

So, is the moral that "the making of a man" is all about-- marrying a rich babe who has a fortune? Even for a comedy, this is a pretty muddled message.

The whole story can be read here. In line with the thoughts expressed in this essay, the story is subcombative because Weston's "John Carter" act is not carried through to the climax.

MYTHCOMICS: "QUEEN OF URANUS" (FORBIDDEN WORLDS #58, 1959)

Just to get the obvious joke out of the way: of whose anus was the main character supposed to be queen, anyway?

Like most of ACG's stories, this one was written by the editor in charge of the line, Richard Hughes. Following the institution of the Comics Code, ACG continued to print comics books with titles that seemed to promise the thrills of the horror-tale-- FORBIDDEN WORLDS, ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN-- but what Hughes served up was more in the nature of supernatural whimsy, along the lines of Thorne Smith. Since the ACQ line survived until 1967, Hughes must have found a readership of some sort. Many of his stories focused on misfits or nebbishes who had their lives changed, often for the better, by encounters with the supernatural or science fictional presences.

I commented on this story a while back when it was reprinted on this entry of "Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine," stating the following

I'll give Richard Hughes this much: he might not have been especially insightful about feminine psychology, but he is at least making some attempt in this respect.

Basically, Miss Purdy (as in "you shore are purdy") isn't so much pursuing her own path as butting her head up against societal expectations. Her tension suggests to me that she doesn't have any philosophical reason for wanting not to get dolled up; she's masochistically enjoying the disapproval she gets from society in order to stage an ongoing "pity party." Didn't Aristotle say something about how the man who walks around with a hole in his clothing may be showing off just as much as the man who wears fine clothes?

The story's joke is that when Kryptos ("hidden") responds favorably to her dowdy looks, she doesn't exactly respond to him with such fervor. His appreciation, though, gives her the gumption to get gussied up, which wins her the approval of her peers-- which is arguably what she's really been after all along with her "dressing down."

To expand on the "pity party" interpretation somewhat, here's the second page of the story, which will indirectly play into Miss Purdy's encounter with real aliens:

Note that Purdy was assigned to complete a creature-costume a month ago, and that when her principal Mr. Cannon asks her about it in a very professional manner, she complains about all her troubles managing "the children," as if she were a wife grousing to her husband. Clearly Purdy has put off her assignment-- a responsibility that she shares with the other teachers at the school-- because she seeks attention in a somewhat masochistic manner. On a subconscious level she wants to be dressed down so that she can complain about her lot in life. Yet she's conscious that she meant to be "charming" to Mr. Cannon, and that she made a bad job of it. At this point she's not even aware of having any romantic interest in Cannon, but her interaction with the mild-mannered principal shows that she wanted some validation from him.

On the same page she seeks validation as a teacher from the children by trying to get them to share her interest in her collection of tektites (meteor fragments). The kids don't care about rocks; they want to know that she's going to have the creature-costume ready for their play. The final panel suggests that Purdy has identified with the tektites as something outside the dull round of her existence.

Sure enough, the meteor-fragments are her gateway to redemption. The tektites start glowing, and two child-sized aliens show up in Purdy's room. whisking her away to meet with their ruler Kryptos. The alien, who describes himself as "overlord of Uranus," tells Purdy that the tektites were sent by the Uranians to remote parts of Earth to provide homing-beacons for Uranian scoutships. The story says almost nothing about why the Uranians wanted to visit Earth, but the broad implication is that they're simply making a covert scientific study of Earth-people, even though their leader Kryptos finds the faces of Earth-people "hard, selfish, empty of feeling." Yet he's immediately smitten with homely Purdy, and invites her to come back to Uranus with him and reign as queen. Purdy, though confused, is deeply affected by Kryptos' ardor, and immediately seeks to upgrade her appearance.

"I've got a reason to do something about my looks," she says to herself. This line reinforces my above interpretation that at base, Purdy always wanted attention, but she took the easy way, choosing to eschew makeup and pleasant attire, drawing negative attention in the fashion of the individual who refused to mend the holes in his garments.

I can see how a critic might make the error that the story is all about socializing women to look pretty for men. But Hughes repeats on page 31 Cannon's judgment that Purdy suffered from tenseness, and puts it in the head of Purdy herself: "Now that I'm no longer tense, the children have quieted down!" A refinement of this catchpenny psychology would be to state that. along with Wilhelm Reich, that people often maintain defensive, "armoring" reactions to potential conflict. But once Kryptos sees beauty where everyone else-- including Purdy-- saw only plainness, Purdy is able to "strut her stuff" with confidence. The children respond positively to her new confidence, and so does Principal Cannon.

It will surprise no reader that when Kryptos sees the changes, he proves that he only liked her because she was so different from the majority of Earth-people, which is, at base, no better than liking someone exclusively because one is beautiful. It's also significant that before Kryptos manages to express his horror at Purdy's refined appearance, she's already decided not to accept his proposal. Purdy is more than happy to release Kryptos from his commitment, and in a rather commonplace twist ending, all Purdy wants from the alien is one of his men's conveniently child-sized costumes, to use in the play.

An additional note: I'll admit that it's hard to be sure whether or not Richard Hughes was enough of a wordsmith to know that the Greek source for the name "Kryptos" carried the original meaning of "things hidden." If he did know it, then Hughes may have been referencing the hidden nature of Purdy's psychological complexes. But of course, comic books have made the root-word famous in the context of the adventures of DC Comics' Man of Steel-- and I must admit that "Queen of Uranus" might also carry the connotation of a rewritten Superman/Lois Lane encounter; one in which the alien does NOT get the girl.

Both the full story and the others in the comic can be read here.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE GHOST WHO LOVED A GIRL!" (ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN #156, 1964)

Though I've often asserted that I think that the comic-book medium has lost out on the juvenile market for a host of reasons-- the economics of the business, the influence of the fan-subculture-- I can sympathize somewhat with those fans who associate comic books exclusively with children's entertainment. Even allowing for these fans' tendency to remember only to the outstanding kids' comics and to gloss over the many mediocre efforts, one can't help but be a little nostaglic for the days when childish whimsy was a viable commodity.

I've never made a detailed study of the Golden Age era of American Comics Group. During that era the company is best known for producing the first ongoing horror-tale comic book, ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN, but though I believe I've read one or two reprints from this period, I don't get the impression that this was a "golden age" for the company in particular. Editor Richard Hughes is known for having both edited and scripted a wide range of material in many genres, but he probably attained his greatest following in comic-book fandom for his Silver Age titles: his two superhero books NEMESIS and MAGICMAN, and the supernatural-comedy series HERBIE, which also became a sort-of-superhero feature at one point. In my review of MAGICMAN I commented that the feature NEMESIS had a little more "heft" than MAGICMAN, even though in both titles the superheroes maintained the wacky, whimsical tone of HERBIE and the various one-off stories.

There was a good economic reason for this: ACQ had managed to survive the institution of the Comics Code by eschewing the visceral horror that had earned the medium such opprobrium. In place of chills and thrills, ACG pursued supernatural comedy as its dominant aesthetic. As Hughes was never interviewed in his lifetime, there's no way of knowing whether or not Hughes took any personal satisfaction in this alteration, though naturally he defended his company's approach in the Silver Age lettercols. But I will note that an awful lot of his stories, both in one-off stories and within regular features, dwell upon the separation of persons in love in life and their consoling reconciliation in the afterlife.

NEMESIS was essentially DC's Golden Age Spectre (note the slight resemblance of the cowled costume) filtered through the whimsy of Fawcett's Captain Marvel. Like the Spectre, Nemesis was the ghost of a murdered crime-fighting mortal who was allowed to return to Earth and fight all forms of evil. He had a wealth of supernatural powers but despite being a ghost was more vulnerable to injury than either the Spectre or Captain Marvel: he could be knocked out by gas or have his power reduced if he saw his own reflection. Nemesis had two routine crime-fighting adventures before Hughes decided to emulate one other aspect of the Spectre's Golden Age adventures: the hero's attempts to maintain a relationship with a living, mortal woman.

I did a quick re-read of the other Nemesis adventures and found that none of them, except for "The Ghost That Loved a Girl," were anything but pleasant but superficial exercises in whimsy. Thus I'm not claiming that the series as a whole is any neglected treasure-trove; only the story in #156 displays an interesting take on a metaphysical myth-motif.

The first two Nemesis stories involve Nemesis battling the Mafia gangster who was responsible for the death of the hero's mortal incarnation, detective Steve Flint. Just as Nemesis received power from heaven, the Mafioso received power from his master Satan (surely one of the Devil's few literal appearances in commercial comics of the early 1960s). In #156 Nemesis finally puts paid to his murderer by descending into Hell and consigning the thug's "ectoplasm" to destruction in ghost-destroying hellfire. Satan, irritated at the loss of a promising henchman, grapples with Nemesis. The hero, despite his godlike powers, finds that he's no match for the Lord of Evil, the only being in the universe who possesses "devil essence." Nemesis barely manages to escape back to the living world. However, he's fearful that Satan will come looking for him, so he starts researching ways to "beat the Devil."

Hughes promptly makes up a tradition of "devil kryptonite." Nemesis learns that Satan once fell in love in bygone centuries, and that though the mortal woman spurned him, the Devil lost much of his power. Hughes' primary consideration here was surely finding a way to cause the ghost-hero to encounter a contemporary lady-love,but it's nevertheless interesting that Hughes doesn't provide any metaphysical rationale as to why the Devil should lose power as a result of feeling love. In the absence of any such rationale, it seems likely that Hughes accidentally evoked a common trope of folklore: that men "lose power" in the presence of women, whether they actually make love to them or not.

By sheer dumb luck Nemesis stumbles across Lita Craig, the modern-day descendant of the woman Satan loved, so the hero assumes the appearance of his former living identity Steve Flint in order to meet Lita. He promptly saves the young woman from some marauding thugs, who shoot at him without having any effect. Despite this incident, Lita doesn't immediately tip to the fact that Steve's a ghost until she researches his name and finds out that he's dead. By that time, they're both hopelessly in love, but Lita agrees to let Steve/Nemesis take her to Hell so that he can use her in his anti-Satan campaign. Down to Hell the lovers go, and sure enough, Satan goes soft as soon as he sees Lita. Nemesis then beats up the source of all evil and forces him to behave himself from then on, or at least not to go beyond his usual devilish pursuits.  For the remainder of the series, Nemesis and Lita continue to date one another, defying heaven's rules about non-fraternization between the living and the dead.

I've detailed my numerous disagreements with Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex on this blog, but I would say that this tale is one of the few that conforms to the complex in a naive manner-- that is, without any suggestion that Hughes himself drew Freudian parallels. Satan isn't just the master of Hell evil here; he's also an evil authority-figure whose power utterly dwarfs that of the young hero. I find it interesting that while Nemesis can't defeat the Devil one-on-one, he can do so when he enlists a female presence against the "older man"-- a female whose earlier incarnation Satan could not seduce, and whose mere presence saps him of his infernal mojo.

On a side-note: I will note that Hughes' minimal "superhero line" at ACG-- launched in early 1964-- seems not to have been influenced by news of ABC's BATMAN teleseries. News of this impending series did spark a fair number of comic-book companies-- Harvey, Dell, etc-- to launch superhero-lines in order to coat-tail on the TV-show. Some sources assert that some TV producers were trying to make a deal for the rights to Batman as early as 1963, and perhaps Hughes, who had a business-relationship with DC Comics, knew about these dealings. But since no show had been announced in early 1964, it seems more likely that Hughes, even though he didn't show any affinity for the superhero genre, was seeking to emulate the genre's popularity on newstands.