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.

THE LOVECRAFT CONUNDRUM

The works of H.P. Lovecraft present a challenge to the newly born science of crossover-ology. Though there were assorted crossover stories in prose fiction prior to HPL, the Providence author, along with Cross Plains scribe Robert E. Howard, was among the first to tie together several fictional narratives with a common mythology.

But are all of those references true crossovers? I've formulated the theory that such crossovers require "agency" between at least two distinct icons or icon-groupings. A simple reference to the activity of a given icon in one narrative within a second icon's narrative is not sufficient, as per my reading of Dennis Wheatley's 1953 novel TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER.

Many Lovecraft stories don't directly show the horrific beings invoked in the narrative. THE DUNWICH HORROR is about the half-human spawn of a human woman and the extradimensional demon Yog-Sothoth, so the spawn is an icon, but Yog-Sothoth is never seen, and so has no agency in the story. "The Whisperer in Darkness" references most of the Great Old Ones of the so-called "Cthulhu mythos," but they're not actually in the story, and so that too may not be any sort of true crossover, but only a "null-crossover."

I've fantasized about doing a massive re-read of HPL, but that doesn't seem likely at present, However, a tome called THE NEW ANNOTATED H.P. LOVECRAFT has gathered together all the stories that editor Leslie Klinger thought most relevant to the Mythos, which, as Klinger helpfully notes, HPL only called "the Arkham Cycle" in his correspondence. Klinger does not include every story with a "Cycle" reference, for he omits the short novel DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. But the 22 stories selected probably comprise the better part of the Cycle, and so may be useful for my purposes here.

Just to bring up a minor comics-context, the annotated collection sports an introduction by Alan Moore, but IMO he doesn't say anything of importance about Lovecraft, much less crossovers (though Moore did work various HPL references into his LOEG works, including a "true crossover" appearance for Nyarlathotep in BLACK DOSSIER.

CENTRICITY AND RESONANCE

On this blog I've devoted thousands of words attempting to imagine the diffuse operations of literary endeavor into more specified categories, but I don't feel I've managed to do so with the concept of centricity. A little while back, I played around with the idea that centricity might subsumed by the agency of a given narrative's superordinate icon or icons. But the word "agency" is too easy to confound with other principles, so I'll probably confine its use to all matters related to interordination comparisons, as laid out in GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1.

It sometimes helps, though, to imagine what abstract principles would act like if they were incarnate entities, and one day I was trying to imagine "centricity" as if the icon in it were "doing something" in order to express, as mentioned earlier, the author's priorities. And the image that came to me was that of the icon as a human singer, projecting his/her voice outward so that it enveloped all the subordinate icons within his/her span.

Since I've also specified that icons don't have to be human or even humanoid beings, another possible metaphor would be that of the tuning fork, that, when struck, sets up a resonance that affects its surroundings. 

By extension, an ensemble of superordinate icons would be like a set of tuning forks, some of which might be struck at different times in order to produce their effects.

One reason I like the resonance metaphor is that it's a means of describing how authorial will spreads out from different types of icons in similar forms of narrative.

For instance, in the 2012 essay DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PART 2, I compared two television shows in the "occult crusader" subgenre, the 1974 KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and the 1987 FRIDAY THE 13TH--THE SERIES. I can express the opinion that the former is centered on Kolchak, the endotheric identification-figure, or that the latter is centered on the Curious Goods shop, the exothelic source of evils for the continuing characters to thwart. But the argument, as I've previously framed it, is perhaps easier to picture (though it may not compel any greater agreement) with one's experience of the way everything in the KOLCHAK series is permeated by the resonance of the hero, while everything in the FRIDAY series is permeated by the resonance of the malefic shop of evil wonders.

A similar example can be made with respect to a type of icon that would seem to have the least possible "agency:" the dead-person-who-tells-a-story." In the 1950 film SUNSET BOULEVARD, the story is related by murder victim Joe Gillis, but the audience is barely made to care about the provenance of this character. The character with the greatest resonance is clearly Norma Desmond, the faded silent-film star who pulls Gillis into her world and ends up killing him.

So Desmond has both the greatest agency and resonance. However, in 1947's SCARED TO DEATH, I think it's arguable that Laura, the murdered narrator of the movie, has greater resonance than any of the usual "old dark house" support-characters, or even than the green-masked villain who kills said narrator. Like most of the victims in the old PERRY MASON TV show, it's the murdered person who's the center of the mystery, but what little authorial will exists in SCARED stems from Laura, whose malevolence makes the plot go. 

It's interesting that Northrop Frye made use of the term "resonance" in his book THE EDUCATED IMAGINATION, where he said that resonance was the process by which "a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance." Frye was not talking about centricity as such, more about the general function of narrative. But since I've defined narrative here in terms that focus upon the interaction of what I now call superordinate and subordinate icons, the coincidence seems felicitous.

ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES PT. 3

 At the end of 2020's EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PT. 2, I wrote:

The same dynamic also applies to those serials that often or always focus upon “guest stars”who never again appear in the series. Early installments of Will Eisner’s SPIRIT are structured like almost every other adventure-hero feature, in which the Spirit helps good people and vanquishes bad people. However, even in the earliest years Eisner sometimes devoted stories to one-shot characters who seemed to take center stage, in that their triumphs or tragedies received the most attention. However, the Spirit was still the thread holding all of those one-shot characters together, and so he retained the greatest stature, even in stories like THE CURSE, in which the hero barely appears. As discussed in HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE, the only exception to this centricity formulation appears in certain anthology titles. When a continuing character merely appears as an interlocutor—Jorkens in Arthur C. Clarke’s TALES OF THE WHITE HART, or the many “horror hosts” in comic-book titles—then whatever focal presence inspires the most conviction in each story possesses the greatest stature-vector, though not necessarily the greater charisma-vector.

But, it's occurred to me from time to time, what if the interlocutor telling the stories is also a part of them, as the Spirit always has potential agency in the anthology-stories in his series? 

My conception of "agency" came up at the end of last year, with GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1, where I defined the term thusly:

..."agency" will be used to describe interordination comparisons, which will be seen to possess both narrative and significant values.

The relevance of such comparison to the current question goes like this: if the Spirit can have dominant agency even in all of his stories, even those where he does next to nothing, then why would the same NOT be true of icons who appear in all the stories within a self-contained anthology?

In the above essay, the reason I split agency into both "narrative" and "significant" values was because it's more than evident that central characters may have no agency at all within the diegesis of their stories, but may have it in an extra-diegetic sense. My example was Willy Loman of Miller's play DEATH OF A SALESMAN, who has no power within his story to change his circumstances, but has agency insofar as his fate manifests the primary concerns of the author's will. Similarly, though the serial character of The Spirit may not have much narrative agency in all of his stories, he has significant agency as the source of the authorial ethos that ties together all the characters in his world.

So, when an interlocutor-like character participates within the diegesis of a story, one must ask if the author's will is most fully expressed in this icon's actions and outcome. 

The 1981 HEAVY METAL presents viewers with a frame-story in which a glowing green sphere, billed in credits as "Loc-Nar," accosts a young girl, whose father he has just killed, and tells her stories about the many ways Loc-Nar has spread, or tried to spread, evil throughout the universe. 

In one of the narrated stories-- which the listening girl views, as if Loc-Nar were a crystal ball-- Loc-Nar has only a minor effect, encouraging a robot to go sex-mad in "So Beautiful, So Dangerous."

In two stories, "B-17" and "Captain Sternn," Loc-Nar wreaks capricious changes on human beings, reviving dead pilots as zombies in "B-17" and mutating a not-quite-innocent individual in "Sternn." 

In the story "Harry Canyon" Loc -Nar, pretending to be a priceless artifact, leads two subordinate characters to their doom. However, the centric character is never even aware of Loc-Nar's power, and fortune so favors him that he makes a pile of money off the weaknesses of those who seek to profit from the artifact.

In the other two stories, "Den" and "Taarna," Loc-Nar's influence takes different shapes. The entity does not directly seek to tempt the heroic Den, but other characters present Den with the possibility of using Loc-Nar to rule his new world, and Den nobly refuses.

 In "Taarna" Loc-Nar seeks to dominate an entire future-world. Some denizens of that world summon the heroine Taarna to oppose Loc-Nar's forces, and after several battles, Taarna makes a direct assault upon Loc-Nar. The entity makes its only direct attempt at temptation, offering Taarna rulership, but the warrior-woman destroys Loc-Nar-- which, through some unfathomable resonance, causes the interlocutor Loc-Nar in the frame-story to perish as well. The movie ends upon a triumphant note, even though of the six stories, Loc-Nar succeeding in promulgating evil in three narratives, but did not wholly succeed in the other three. 

In essence, the same paradigm applies to Loc-Nar that applied to Willy Loman. Loc-Nar has considerable narrative agency, but the point of the author(s) is to show that his agency can be defeated, and so in each story the centric icon is whatever entity the Loc-Nar impinges upon. Therefore he does not have significant agency across all six stories, as the Spirit does in all of his tales.

However, some of the characters appeared in other comics-stories before their adaptation in HEAVY METAL, and of course Loc-Nar, as conceived by the movie's authors, did not appear in the stories of "Den," "Captain Sternn," and "So Beautiful So Dangerous." Therefore, since these are "familiarity icons" being "crossed over" with the "novelty-icon" of Loc-Nar, HEAVY METAL qualifies as a crossover-film.

(Note: the name Loc-Nar comes from one of the "Den" comics-stories but there's no connection between that name and the movie's icon. Additionally, though Wiki says that "Harry Canyon" and "Taarna" are derived from two separate Moebius stories, neither qualifies as an adaptation.)

THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD PT. 2

(Note: in writing this sequel to my one essay on the topic of novelty and recognizability, I've decided to replace the latter term with the term "familiarity." Accordingly I've altered the tag to reflect the change, but not the text of the first essay. I will try to replace the unwanted term in any other essays written since the first one, though.)

My meditations on the linked concepts of novelty and familiarity, beginning here, lead me to correct one of my earlier statements: that all crossovers are interactions of two or more familiar icons, with or without subordinate icons of their respective "universes." 

One of my main examples from Part 1 contradicts this: Sir Walter Scott's 1819 novel IVANHOE. Whether the individual reader experiences Scott's story in its original prose form or in some adaptation within some other medium, Ivanhoe and all the subordinate figures in his orbit (which, as I said earlier, may even include historical figures like Richard the Lion-Hearted) comprise their own universe. And since that universe never appeared anywhere before, and since Scott wrote no sequels, the novel is forever characterized by novelty. The only elements of IVANHOE that possess familiarity are those relating to the universe of Robin Hood, and thus IVANHOE is a crossover between one "novel" universe and one "familiar" universe. Further, as mentioned in the CONVOCATION series, this stand-alone novel became such a major literary event that its universe possesses a high level of stature of the Qualitative kind, which means that despite only appearing once Ivanhoe is the same exalted company as those icons more dependent on Quantitative Escalation, such as Batman and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Books of Pellucidar.

(Parenthetically I will note that other authors created serial versions of the Ivanhoe universe-- a 1958 TV show starring Roger Moore, and a 2000-2002 teleseries with lots of XENA-style action. But, while it's possible for adaptations to outstrip their source material in terms of stature, neither of these shows did so.)

So IVANHOE is a crossover meeting of two icons, one characterized by "eternal novelty" and the other by "eternal familiarity." It qualifies as a High-Stature Crossover because the two icon-universes interact in a significant way, even though the stature of one results only from Qualitative Escalation, while the stature of the other arises from both Qualitative and Quantitative forms.

The 1972 BLACULA provides a comparable example of the intersection of a novelty-icon and a familiarity-icon, but in a mode of lower stature. Though Robin Hood and his Merry Men are subordinate icons within the story of Ivanhoe, they are important to the narrative, which affects the stature of the crossover. Dracula, despite having a Qualitative Stature as great as that of Robin Hood, exists in the 1972 film only to spawn Blacula and to bestow on him a familiar if somewhat risible cognomen. From that point on, Blacula is only slightly dependent on the mythos of Dracula, for the whole project of the film is to re-interpret that mythos in keeping with seventies cultural concepts, such as "Black Pride." Blacula, unlike Ivanhoe, has one more installment in his universe, but two entries in a series do not confer much Quantitative Escalation. Blacula has a certain degree of Qualitative Escalation, but not enough to raise the level of this crossover above a low position. 

Proto-crossovers within a serial context offer a slightly different view of novelty, in that the novelty of a newly introduced character can suggest an aura of "future familiarity." AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #14 is from the get-go a hero-crossover for the presence of starring hero Spider-Man and his admittedly fractious "guest star" The Hulk. But I've also argued that it's a villain-crossover between The Enforcers, who were familiar from one previous appearance in the title, and The Green Goblin, who made his debut here. Yet though the Goblin can only possess formal "novelty" at this point in his career, it's clear from the narrative that the authors intended for him to become a regular opponent of the hero. But The Goblin only possesses a "future familiarity" because later readers know how significant he proved to be within the Spider-mythos.

But authorial intent only counts when the intent is made manifest. A 1942 Batman story introduced a new Bat-foe, a thief named Mister Baffle (clearly modeled on the prose character Raffles). The story ended with the villain's escape and the suggestion that he might come again, though he never did, so the suggestion of his re-appearance counts for nothing in the Escalation game. In contrast, the villain Deadshot, appearing just once in 1950, was also characterized only by pure novelty. But thanks to his mid-70s reworking, he became not only a regular Bat-foe but one who was involved in a "static crossover" series, THE SUICIDE SQUAD-- though almost all of the characters had been, like Deadshot, subordinate icons within the universes of various heroes.

GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 2

As I indicated at the end of GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1. "vectors of agency" are what determine whether or not to judge a given crossover as being either high or low in terms of stature or charisma, or effectively null in terms of either.

Without re-examining all of my posts on the subject, I sense that I may have occasionally intimated that a given crossover might be "null" just because one of the icons involved doesn't do very much in the story. At least I see why one could come to that conclusion from reading my meditations on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, in which the one-shot main character interacts in very minor ways with two stature-icons (John Carter, Ulysses Paxton) and with one charisma-icon (Jason Gridley). But if I misspoke, I'm now clarifying that even a low agency-vector-- like simply being physically present while the story's Prime icon gets all the action-- still counts as a crossover. 

The critical difference between "really low stature or charisma" vs. "null stature or charisma" was best described in A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 1. In that essay, I contrasted two works' usage of the Dracula icon. In one, 1972's BLACULA, Dracula appears only to initiate Prince Mamuwalde into vampirism. This is a low-stature crossover because of the qualitative significance of the Dracula icon, and if for some reason the character used had been some comparatively minor figure who never enjoyed stature, then it would only be a charisma-crossover. But even very minor agency is still different from no agency at all, which is what one gets from my other example, 1935's DRACULA'S DAUGHTER, in which Dracula has been staked into oblivion, the Count has no agency, and so this is at best a null-crossover (though one in which the character of Countess Zaleska is stature-dependent upon her absent father).

Even a simple cameo in which a given character, whether possessed of stature or charisma from another work, stands and does nothing counts as having crossover status. For instance, as I recall the majority of videogame characters who cameo in WRECK-IT RALPH don't even say anything. But as long as such characters are "on stage" and capable of doing something, even just reciting a line of dialogue or showing a reaction, they have "potential agency." However, "repeat flashbacks," in which one text simply reproduces a scene that appeared in another text, do not possess any vectors of agency. If DRACULA'S DAUGHTER had included a scene from the 1931 film with one or more of the main characters, or had filmed a totally new scene purporting to represent action from that film, those "repeat flashbacks" would possess no vectors of agency, no matter what they showed the characters doing. A "non-repeat flashback," though, would be one which repeated part of the action but with new information added. The most famous examples of such a flashback are seen in movie serials, when a given chapter repeats an earlier chapter's scene in which the hero goes over the cliff, but adds a new scene with the hero managing to catch a handhold rather than being dashed on the ground below. Such a scene could possess a vector of agency, though it might or might not have any relevance to the second work's crossover status.

GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1

 Let's see if I can get in one last new analytical term before the year ends...

I was musing on the concept of dynamis in the literary sense that Northrop Frye promoted it, or at least as I extrapolated that usage within my own Frye-influenced system. In essays like 2012's STATURE REQUIREMENTS, I focused most on the notion that dynamis, which Frye defined as a "power of action," applied specifically to the differing ways in which characters in different literary mythoi have their power of action determined by their respective mythoi. Here's my breakdown of the mythoi according to the protagonists' power of action:

Adventure-heroes always win, or at least lose so rarely that most audiences take no account of the losses.  Ironic heroes rarely win, and when they do, the victories mean nothing.  Dramatic heroes occasionally win but they go through such pathos-inducing straits that they don't get much of a thrill out of it.  What's left for the comic heroes?

Comic heroes, whether they are as powerful as Ranma Saotome or as bumbling as Johnny Thunder, tend to win out, though they tend to do so less by superlative skill than by dumb luck.  Ranma usually displays superlative fighting-skills, and he does win most of his assorted battles with other comedic kung-fu opponents, but the emphasis is clearly upon finding ways to amuse the audience by undercutting the hero's triumph with silly pratfalls, comic embarrassments and the like.  Thus his stature within his mythos exists to be a vehicle not for thrills but for the jubilative mood of the *incognitio,* the comic incongruity-- which, in Ranma's series, often takes the form of his transforming from a young guy to a big-breasted young girl.

 Anyone who reads that essay now should observe that back then I was floating my first use of the term "stature" to describe how the characters compared with one another. in terms of their mythoi-associations, which I would later bring into line with Ovid's famous formulation in 2018's THE FOUR AGES OF DYNAMIS. But I didn't utilize stature in this sense more than a few more times. In 2019's SUBS AND COES PT. 1, I tipped my hat goodbye to the old usage of that term. Then I began using both "stature" and "charisma" exclusively to describe the forms of authorial will as they manifest in superordinate ("starring") icons and in subordinate ("supporting") icons, and so those terms became completely associated with my concepts of centricity.

At one point, while loosely associating my current concept of "mythos-dynamis" to the concepts of stature and charisma, I made the correlation: "dynamis is agency," though that proved to be something of an oversimplification. "Agency," for one thing, has only one major connotation in contemporary criticism; when a critic uses the term, he or she means that a given fictional icon is empowered in comparison to some less empowered fictional icon. Since this is a determination a critic can only make by comparing icons within one or more narratives, "empowerment-agency" qualifies as what Frye called a **narrative value,** a value that relates only to relationships "from inside" a narrative. In contrast, "mythos-dynamis" was purely a **significant value,** a value perceived by a reader who examines an entire work as a whole in order to discern patterns in the work, which means looking at the work "from outside," as it were.

 I found myself then revising the current concept of agency to serve a wider purpose, to distinguish what separates a superordinate icon possessed of both stature and charisma from a subordinate icon possessed only of charisma. I've been writing about my concept of centricity since the early days of this blog, and though I feel I know it when I see it, it's been hard to describe it except through concrete examples.

Therefore from this post on, "agency" will be used to describe interordination comparisons, which will be seen to possess both narrative and significant values.

In 2018's KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 1, I agreed with Nancy Springer that the central hero of Walter Scott's IVANHOE was not the novel's most "charismatic" character. For Springer, the lack of charisma (in the ordinary sense of the word) was enough reason for her to disallow Ivanhoe as being anything more than a "common thread" who united a bunch of more interesting characters. But I believe Springer was treating her concept of "real heroism" in a **narrative-value** sense. To her, Ivanhoe was not interesting in comparison to other characters, so she did not deem him t he "real hero." I argued that Ivanhoe being the "common thread" was exactly what did make him the main character. This form of agency would be a **significant value,** because the interpreter is looking at the entire design of the work "from outside" in order to decide which icon (or group of icons) gets the most narrative emphasis, regardless as to how interesting the icon may be compared to other characters in the story.

The same principle applies to many modern fictional characters who had far less colorful lives than that of Ivanhoe. Willy Loman of Miller's DEATH OF A SALESMAN has no "agency" in a narrative sense, and in fact he exists to be a failure as a salesman and as a father. But this is still agency with respect to the principle of centricity, because Loman is the focus of the author's will to depict a dire and depressing outcome.

Now, how can agency also be a **narrative value?** I return to the example of Ivanhoe. I've mentioned earlier that Scott's novel is an example of a stature-crossover, in that the centric character, whose base level of stature is boosted thanks to the literary fame of the book, crosses paths with the legendary character of Robin Hood. This is a *narrative value** because Robin Hood's legend is of importance within the story as well as holding significance to the readers of the story. Even though Robin Hood functions as a Sub in comparison to Ivanhoe's Prime, the bandit of Sherwood has a special level of agency because his legend possesses an irreducible (and qualitative) stature. This means that by analyzing the relations of the characters within the narrative, IVANHOE qualifies as what I termed a HIGH STATURE CROSSOVER in this essay. 

A similar analysis of intra-narrative factors may lead the critic to determine how the vectors of agency function in other interordinate relationships, and so other crossovers may be also by low-stature, high-charisma, or low-charisma, as detailed in the essays of the CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS essay-series.

More to come in Part 2.