"CHALLENGE OF THE GIANT FIREFLIES," MYSTERY IN SPACE #67, 1961)

 

"Challenge of the Giant Fireflies" is not one of writer Gardner Fox's better titles, though he might have emphasized the incredible insects just because big fireflies looked neat on a comic-book cover. The true challenge for hero Adam Strange is a race of fire-creatures who supposedly live in the sun of Adam's solar system, and the big bugs are just the champion's means of "fighting fire with fire."

Adam's regularly scheduled sojourn to the alien world of Rann (and to his beloved Alanna) gets delayed when the means of his cosmic traversal, the Zeta-beam hits a solar prominence and temporarily carries a fire-creature from the sun to Rann. Parenthetically, Alanna mentions that for once, Rann's scientists solved another crisis without input from the Earthman, as a plague of big fireflies presented a danger but were largely quelled by weapons that extinguish the insects' fiery tails. Fortunately for the Rannians, this doesn't kill the bugs, but only eliminates their ability to create conflagrations. Fox skirts the fact that the bioluminescence of the real insects doesn't give off heat, though maybe the mutation of the little bugs into big ones changes that biological aspect.

One of the more interesting aspects of the "Sun-Beings" is that they don't have any desire to conquer or destroy Rann. They're utterly unaware of other worlds until the Zeta-beam snatched one of their number and temporarily deposits him on Rann. The effect wears off and the first Sun-Being goes back where he came from, but because he gained the power of sight on Rann, he talks his kindred into traversing the gulfs of space back to that world. (Bloody lucky they don't just decide to visit the third planet from their domain.) The Sun-Beings' only motive seems to be curiosity, and they presumably don't even understand that they're a danger to the residents. 

Though not a scientist himself, Adam knows his high school science and determines that they can put out the fire-aliens with carbon dioxide. And then the survival of the giant fireflies proves fortunate, so that the Rannians can ride the heat-resistant critters into battle and spray the Sun-Beings into extinction-- except for one, whom Adam allows to escape to make sure its brethren stay in their own solar courtyard. (Again, nothing about Fox's scenario keeps the Sun-Beings from visiting other worlds in the DC Universe.)

Naive as the story may be in some particulars, I find that Fox and artist Carmine Infantino are having some good myth-making fun with the phenomenon of fire, not unlike the way Windsor McCay did with cold phenomena in LITTLE NEMO IN THE PALACE OF ICE. The deviations from actual science don't lessen the mythic discourse, for as I've frequently written, the truths of myth are strong precisely because they are "half-truths."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE GHOST OF KRYPTON PAST" (DC COMICS PRESENTS #82, 1985)

 

Though Superman and Adam Strange were created over twenty years apart, and only one of them was explicitly conceived to be a DC Comics hero, both share some inspiration from a hero created over twenty years before Superman: Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter, first appearing in 1912's A PRINCESS OF MARS. The indebtedness of Adam Strange is more obvious. Earthman John Carter was mysteriously spirited to the red planet Mars, where he indulged in lots of fighting in defense of his cherished princess Dejah Thoris, whom he married in the third book. Adam Strange was yanked from Earth by a Zeta-Beam originating on the planet Rann in Alpha Centauri, and once he reached Rann, he indulged in lots of fighting in defense of his girlfriend Alanna (who would become Strange's wife some time after the demise of the original series). Superman's debt, though, is more apparent than real. Though it seems well established that Jerry Siegel was familiar with the Burroughs hero, all he really emulated from John Carter was the idea of a super-strong hero amid lesser mortals. Siegel's original idea seemed to be that all denizens of Krypton had super-powers even on their own world. But once the Man of Steel fell under the aegis of other editors, the hero became much more Carter-like, powerless on his homeworld but empowered by the conditions of an alien planet.

Written by Cary Bates and both penciled and inked by Klaus Janson, "The Ghost of Krypton Past" (which happily does not force any other Dickensian tropes into the mix) opens with Adam and his wife enjoying a picnic on Rann. Alanna thinks Strange is trembling at her touch but it's really a Rann-quake, caused by the advent of a Kryptonian "ghost." The continuity of what happens next is muddled, but Strange apparently rescues her from the cataclysm, after which Alanna falls into a trance and starts speaking Kryptonese. This moves Strange to have his father-in-law Sardath summon Superman to Rann via the Zeta-Beam. 

As soon as the Man of Steel arrives, though, the happily married Alanna greets him like a trollop trying to pick up a sailor, remarking on the "physical and psychic magnificence" of the Kryptonian race. It's immediately evident that Alanna's being possessed by a spirit who's both vixenish and unsubtle-- she comes on to Superman right in front of her "husband"-- and on top of that, she speaks in tongues, or rather, the one tongue of Kryptonese. But even before Superman reveals the significance of the foreign phrase, the spirit changes Alanna into a monstrous form (with risible lobster-claws), wounds Strange, and escapes while Superman's helping his buddy.

Superman then provides a mini-history of the Kryptonian legend of Zazura, "a space-succubus, a female demon who subsisted by devouring the life-force of other human beings." It's not clear if Zazura is an alien creature or a metaphysical construct, though the former seems more likely, since we're also told that Zazura dwelled in space just beyond Krypton's atmosphere. This bit of retconning plays into a commonplace of the Krypton mythos: that for one reason or another, the super-advanced people of the planet eschewed space-travel, so that they were caught flatfooted when their world went boom. Thus Zazura, who for some time devoured any Kryptonian astronauts who came her way, bears indirect responsibility for the near-extinction of the race. Superman further theorizes that Rann has become infected by Zazura's presence since the Alpha Centauri star-system has passed through space once occupied by Krypton, and that the demoness plans to eradicate Rann to devour the energies of its inhabitants.

While Superman flies off to find the demon, Strange characteristically uses brain-power to deduce that Zazura isn't the only phenomenon that has appeared on Rann. Strange and his father-in-law learn that particles of crystal from Krypton's ancient "fire-falls" have entered Rann's atmosphere; crystals which weaken the creature the way kryptonite harms Kryptonians. When Strange finds his way to the locale from which Zazura is working her evil will, he finds that she's already subdued the Man of Steel. But the Champion of Rann shoots her with firefall-crystals, thus separating the spirit from the body of Alanna. This wound weakens the demon enough that Superman breaks free and administers the coup de grace: setting off Strange's second weapon-- a bomb full of firefall-crystals-- so that Zazura is destroyed and Rann is saved.

I said earlier that there's no precise proof that Zazura was in any way connected to Krypton's worship-systems; that she could as easily be an alien force interpreted as a "space succubus" (though negative incarnations of femininity were certainly a big part of the Judeo-Christian religion that influenced much of the Superman mythology). Being an alien rather than a magical demon doesn't keep Zazura from having metaphysical significance, though, and in any case the conclusion of "Ghost" reveals a different sort of mystical import. Rann, having passed into the space-sector of vanished Krypton, also came into contact with the spirits of that long dead race. Those spirits (whose plurality means that the title should have read "Ghosts") were aware of Zazura's malign plans. They, not Zazura, caused Alanna to speak her initial Kryptonese words, so that "their planet's last surviving son" would be called to Rann. As that world passes out of the Krypton sector, the final two pages show Superman enjoying a fleeting communion with his deceased ancestors.

"Ghost" is definitely far better than the usual run-of-the-mill stories seen in DC COMICS PRESENTS, and possibly artist Klaus Janson had some uncredited story input, in addition to his producing a stark yet evocative take on the wonderworlds of Rann and Krypton. Both Janson and Bates do credit to the classic Jerry Siegel-Wayne Boring story "Superman's Return to Krypton," wherein the Fire-Falls and other Kryptonian spectacles debuted. In addition, as shown above, a 1965 Supergirl story by Leo Dorfman deserves credit for first using the fire-falls as an exorcism-device, for when Supergirl becomes demon-possessed, only the surviving phenomenon of the falls can purge the evil in a Kryptonian's heart.

ADDENDUM: I initially didn't make much of Zazura's name, since it didn't seem to correlate with any established names from myth and legend. Of course I noticed that the demon's name begins with the last letter of the English language, while Alanna's begins with the first letter. This by itself could be an example of positive-negative mirroring, where "A" is "the beginning" and "Z" is "the end." But I then noticed that Bates (assuming he created the name) went a little further by (a) having the two names possess the same number of syllables, while (b) the first three letters of each name is a palindrome: ALA for Alanna, ZAZ for Zazura. A little more evidence of non-formulaic thinking in the story as a whole.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE METAL CONQUEROR OF RANN" (MYSTERY IN SPACE #79, 1962)

I devoted a good deal of space to the setup for the Silver Age "Adam Strange" feature in my essay on the story "Shadow People of the Eclipse," but for clarity's sake, I'll repeat a little of it here:

Adam Strange became DC’s most prestigious space-opera hero of the period when Schwartz  came up with a “thinking man’s” version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter. In Burroughs’ Martian cycle of stories, Carter and other Earth-heroes not infrequently found themselves transported to the exotic world of Mars, where they would immediately get involved in assorted feats of derring-do. In similar wise, a device called a “Zeta-beam” regularly transported Strange, an archaeologist on the planet Earth, to the planet Rann in the Alpha Centauri system—a planet that was repeatedly menaced by alien invaders and extraterrestrial creatures. Though Strange promptly outfitted himself with a fancy uniform and some of Rann’s superior technology—a jet-pack and a ray-pistol—the essential appeal of the stories was that the hero always used logical thinking and good old American know-how to defeat the exotic incursions. The series also provided Strange with a little more erotic reward for his efforts than most superheroes got. A beautiful Rannian girl, Alanna, fell in love with him—but most of the time their union couldn’t prosper, for the Zeta-radiation in Strange’s body would wear off and he’d cycle back to Earth, condemned to wait for another beam to take him back to the world of his lady love.

I also mentioned in that essay that many of the stories were gimmick-driven, often based in the editor's attempt to catch the eye of the impulse-buyer, and that only occasionally did the stories-- usually collaborations by Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino-- ascend into the realm of the mythopoeic. However, perhaps Fox, the primary architect of the stories, was on something of a roll in 1962, for the story considered here-- "Conqueror" for short-- appeared just one issue after "Shadow People."

"Conqueror" also led me to realize just how often the series structured its perils around the idea of disappearance and what we now call "alien abduction." "Shadow People" reads a bit like a cross between THE ODYSSEY and an alien abduction yarn, but only a handful of people, including Adam Strange, are kidnapped by the alien Llyrr. However, a lot of stories deal with Planet Rann's whole population being abducted or transformed somehow, or even with the planet switching its place in the cosmos with some other planet. In the Burroughs "Mars" books, there's little if any explanation of the force that transports John Carter and other heroes to Mars. But because it was a regular recurring element in the Adam Strange stories-- a device by which the creators sought to make readers continue to purchase the series-- its presence may have encouraged Fox to place "cosmic checkers" with planets and their populations in similar fashion.

"Conqueror" is not quite that cosmically oriented, but the cover does show Fox's penchant for exploiting images suggestive of Frazer's "sympathetic magic," wherein an image of a person can influence what happens to the person.

The visual element of the lightning striking the statue may have been a suggestion from editor Julie Schwartz, for in truth the bolt from the heavens plays only a very minor role in the story.  But it does begin with both a re-appearance and a disappearance, for as soon as Strange manifests on Rann, he sees his sweetheart Alanna waiting for him-- only to behold her vanish before he reaches her, seeming to dissolve into smoke. Strange's reaction is muted by modern standards, due to DC's tendency to downplay strong emotion, but Infantino's body language does suggest that Strange is wracked with doubt about Alanna's fate. He promptly seeks out Alanna's father Sardath in the capital city, but the scientist has no clue about the disappearance. For once, Rann seems free of alien intrustions, and the only thing going on in the city is that its citizens have recently set up a statue of Adam Strange, commemorating his past accomplishments.

Fox's script doesn't overtly touch on the usual connotation of such statues-- that they usually commemorate the heroic dead. However, the equation is suggested when the force behind Alanna's disappearance manifests in the statue. The energy-display from the sky causes Strange to fade away just as Alanna did. Then the entity inside Strange's image projects a telepathic voice to Rann's citizens, explaining that he is "Ikhar the Undying, master of the mineral world." He proclaims that he now rules the planet, and that he sent both Strange and Alanna offworld to eliminate Strange as a threat. (He never says why he chose to include Alanna in his plans, since she didn't usually play an active role in helping Strange repel alien invaders.) While the statue of Adam comes alive and struts around as if alive, the mineral-being inside it further informs the citizens of other details. Both Strange and Alanna have been turned into petrified versions of their living selves, and left to wander in space inside a spaceship far off in uncharted space-- in fact, the same ship by which Ikhar came to Rann. The mineral-creature can transport his intelligence into any inorganic object, but he needed the ship to cross space-- and now he's using it as a prison in which the "inert, lifeless bodies" of Strange and Alanna are to be "carried eternally onward through an interstellar emptiness."

What Fox has done here is to re-arrange tropes common to the ideas about the afterlife, so that lifeless bodies, rather than free spirits, are hurled into a void of "emptiness." However, even though Strange has been outmaneuvered, his body contains residual zeta-radiation, and so once he's in the ship, he transforms back to a living human being. (The cynic in me wonders why Ikhar has a working atmosphere in the spaceship, since he, being a mineral entity, shouldn't need to breathe-- and he certainly had no reason to supply Strange and Alanna with breathable air.) Alannah remains in the petrified state Ikhar wrought upon her, but Strange manages to figure out a way to take her with him when the zeta-beam effect causes him to jaunt back to Planet Earth.

Though the trip to Earth doesn't undo Alanna's petrifaction, the interval gives Strange time to devise a tnethod to defeat Ikhar. Suffice to say that when the zeta-effect transports Strange to Rann once more, he's worked out a clever way to take advantage of Ikhar's boast that he can project his being into any mineral substance. Strange tricks the alien into entering an organic object that simply looks inorganic, and, mirabile dictu, the effect is just like trapping a genie in a bottle. (There are quite a few genie-in-a-bottle tropes in Fox's work overall, but that's another essay.) Ikhar is obliged to reverse all of his "spells," including that of enchanting Alanna, and then is released once he swears not to be bad again, more or less like the genie in the 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD.

It's an engaging story, with a bit more sense than most of the heroes' nearness to real death. Like all of their real-life readers, even heroes must eventually be transformed from the "quick" world of the living to the "dead" world of inorganic inactivity-- though "Conqueror" gives Strange and Alanna the respite of reversing that entropic trope, and of enjoying impermanent life a little longer.

MYTHCOMICS: "SHADOW PEOPLE OF THE ECLIPSE" (MYSTERY IN SPACE #78, 1962)

Silver Age DC Comics, particularly during the company’s most creative period (roughly 1959-1966), have gained the cachet of easy recognition to later generations of fans. Younger fans probably can't put themselves into the mindset that looked forward to seeing heroic characters in bizarre situations, as with the example of the Flash being turned into a living puppet, to cite one of the best-known. But the younger generations of fans may be able to recognize the general look of Silver Age DC covers, especially those from the editorial stable of Julius Schwartz. Often these covers focus on wild visual gimmicks, aimed at the impulse-buyer—but only a close reading can tell one whether the gimmick is all there is to the story, or whether its apparent absurdity functions as a door into the mythopoeic dimension.

The “Adam Strange” series is one Schwartz title no longer much celebrated even by the older generation of fans, in part because the title character was not a superhero as such. Adam Strange became DC’s most prestigious space-opera hero of the period when Schwartz  came up with a “thinking man’s” version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter. In Burroughs’ Martian cycle of stories, Carter and other Earth-heroes not infrequently found themselves transported to the exotic world of Mars, where they would immediately get involved in assorted feats of derring-do. In similar wise, a device called a “Zeta-beam” regularly transported Strange, an archaeologist on the planet Earth, to the planet Rann in the Alpha Centauri system—a planet that was repeatedly menaced by alien invaders and extraterrestrial creatures. Though Strange promptly outfitted himself with a fancy uniform and some of Rann’s superior technology—a jet-pack and a ray-pistol—the essential appeal of the stories was that the hero always used logical thinking and good old American know-how to defeat the exotic incursions. The series also provided Strange with a little more erotic reward for his efforts than most superheroes got. A beautiful Rannian girl, Alanna, fell in love with him—but most of the time their union couldn’t prosper, for the Zeta-radiation in Strange’s body would wear off and he’d cycle back to Earth, condemned to wait for another beam to take him back to the world of his lady love.

Even the most ardent sentimentalist would not deny that many of Strange’s adventures-- dominantly written by Gardner Fox and illustrated by Carmine Infantino-- were a little too gimmicky. Indeed, in MYSTERY IN SPACE #63—which introduces characters that are important to the story under consideration here—Gardner Fox may have been inspired by the common vacuum cleaner. In this tale the invading aliens, “the Vantors,” are armed with weapons called “vacuumizers.” With these devices, the Vantors could dissolve their opponents into their component atoms, which the Vantors promptly stored in the tanks they carried on their backs. 

This story is engagingly silly but not much more. The tale considered here, though--“Shadow People of the Eclipse”-- both follows up on the Vantors and demonstrates how well the Adam Strange feature functioned when Fox and Infantino collaborated on an idea with deeper mythopoeic resonance.

Often the hero’s stories began with him waiting to intercept the Zeta-beam, which usually struck Earth in some out-of-the-way location. As an added touch, Strange would often encounter phenomenon on Earth that would prefigure his predicament on Rann. In “Shadow,” Strange is jet-packing above the Matto Grosso to intercept the beam, just as a solar eclipse occurs. Natives of the jungle start shooting fire-arrows at the moon for obscuring the sun, and Strange grabs a couple of fire-arrows to take with him as the Zeta-beam zaps him to Rann.

To his surprise, Rann too is suffering a daytime eclipse during the day, but this one has lasted an entire day. It’s  also created an oppressive heat that drives the Rannian natives out of their advanced cities and into the wilds. (Almost every story starts out with the invading force having neutralized Rann’s superior technology somehow.) Alanna brings Strange up to speed on the weird eclipse-phenomenon, but it’s not until the next day, when the darkness has vanished, that the villains—those vacuumizer-happy Vantors—show up with the real threat: a giant black globe able to eclipse the light of Alpha Centauri. Instead of just creating more darkness, the giant globe shoots shadowy rays down to the planet’s surface. Whenever the rays strike the Rannian people, they’re turned into living shadows.

The purpose of the shadow-effect is soon revealed, for Strange, Alanna and several anonymous Rannians find themselves on another alien planet. The planet is ruled by a tall, one-eyed alien billed as “Llyrr, the Cyclops of Space.” Llyrr, the last of his race, endures a solitary life on his barren world, and can only break the monotony by consuming the mental experiences of other creatures, thus killing them. Strange and Alanna learn that Llyrr empowered the Vantors with the black globe so that they could function as his hunstmen, sending back specimens from many extraterrestrial races.

I won’t give a blow-by-blow of Strange’s method for defeating the space-cyclops-- except to say that it depends on basic Earth-science-- nor will I detail the manner in which the hero manages to expel the Vantors back to Llyrr’s world while returning the Rannians and other alien captives to their rightful places. The story’s significance lies in its skillful manipulation of mythopoeic presences.

First, not even the most skeptical elitist could doubt that Fox based Llyrr upon literature’s famous cyclops, Polyphemus of the Odyssey. Admittedly, in some cases, Fox reflected the indebtedness through inversion. Llyrr doesn’t eat people—which would’ve been too visceral for commercial comics of the period—but the alien consumes their experiences, with the same fatal results. Where Polyphemus is savage, Llyrr is urbane, mocking his unwilling guests by saying things like, “You’re making my formerly lonely life an exciting one!”  But the alien’s most interesting similitude with the Greek monster is in his name, for Polyphemus is the child of the sea-god Poseidon, who will later curse Odysseus with an exile at sea for the wounding of the cyclops. This situation is also inverted for heroic purposes: Llyrr—most probably named for the Celtic sea-god Llyr—exiles the people of Rann and of other worlds to his “island universe” first, and only thanks to Strange’s heroic endeavors is that exile ended. And though Llyrr isn’t defeated the way Odysseys wounds Polyphemus—that is, with a fire-hardened spear that some critics compared to a “fire-making drill”—it’s of more than passing interest that Strange first comes to the darkness-cursed Rann with a couple of fire-arrows in hand; arrows that duplicate the essential appearance of the Greek hero’s cyclops-wounding weapon.

So what’s the connection between sea-deities and eclipses? In archaic mythology, both have been interpreted as harbingers of death: of forces that threaten the order of the living world where life and light reign. The sea is a chthonic realm, and so is the moon, whether in the form of an actual sun-obscuring lunar body—as Strange encounters on Earth—or in an artificial form: that of the black sphere that creates the shadow-rays. Even the idea of transforming human beings into “shadows” carries the associations of death, given that “shade” is a common term for the spirit of a deceased person.

In contrast to the religious myths of archaic times, where Death’s power is absolute, the Adam Strange world has more in common with the fairy tale, where death can be overturned when it’s convenient to the story, and even the Huntsmen of Death can be consigned back to their own realm. But fairy tales are replete with myth-elements even if they may at times be “writ small” as it were—and DC’s “Adam Strange” feature, despite its gimmickry, stands within that same mythopoeic tradition.