NULL-MYTHS: THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, THE GOLDEN CHILD (2019)

With most of the works I term "null-myths," it's easy for me to see how the artists involved messed up the symbolic discourse of something like a simple formula-tale. But with Frank Miller's newest work in his ongoing DARK KNIGHT RETURNS series, I have no idea what Miller was trying to accomplish.

The original DARK KNIGHT RETURNS from 1986, while not flawless, remains a monumental story, as well as signaling the irreversible movement of the superhero genre into the domain of adult, rather than juvenile, pulp. In 2001 Miller returned to that "future-Batman" universe and produced THE DARK KNIGHT STRIKES AGAIN, which resembles nothing more than an artist tossing together a bunch of wild ideas into a semblance of story, though some critics liked STRIKES just because it was so brain-fried. In 2015, Miller collaborated with Brian Azzarello to produce THE DARK KNIGHT: MASTER RACE, which I asserted to be the closest thing one could get to Miller doing a Justice League story, and this was the first worthy successor to the original 1986 work. In 2015, Miller collaborated with Azzarello and John Romita Jr on the single-issue outing, THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: THE LAST CRUSADE. This prequel to RETURNS purported to show some of the events that led up to the murder of Jason Todd.

GOLDEN CHILD begins a few years after MASTER RACE. Superman's daughter by Wonder Woman, Lara, is about the same, but the super-couple's son Jonathan is now perhaps five years old. Rather than displaying the talents of either parent, Jonathan possesses some non-specific mental powers, while he's drawn with receding hair, as if to give him a resemblance to all the "big-brained future men" that once populated pulp magazines and Silver Age comics. Superman is only briefly seen, and it's later explained that he and other adult heroes are off on some mission. Batman's heir Carrie Kelley still maintains the role of Batwoman. We later learn that the three youngsters are charged with keeping an eye on things, and for some reason that leads Lara and Jonathan to go floating around Gotham City, as Lara scorns the masses of humanity, much as she did in MASTER RACE.

A riot breaks out between political factions. One is a group of violent hoods wearing Joker-style costumes, one of whom shouts the slogan, "Buy American! Be American!" The other faction is not identified by anything but a couple of signs expressing dislike of Donald Trump, and they're getting the worst of the encounter until Batwoman and her cadre of erratically-garbed Bat-enforcers show up and kick butt. The Joker-goons flee.

So far, it sounds like the sort of thing that happens in Gotham City in any era. Then Lara and Batwoman converse in some Bat-habitat, and it's revealed that somehow this mundane fracas was organized by-- Darkseid, Ruler of Apokolips and the Guy Who Got His Thunder Stolen by Thanos. Neither heroine comments on the hoods' Joker-motif, but since they don't seem surprised when the Miller version of the Clown Prince is walking around, all alive again, I guess the reports of his earlier extinction were grossly exaggerated. And these two reigning DC villains have teamed up in order to-- elect Donald Trump????

Is there an alternate Earth on which someone could write a good satire based on this dippy concept? Anything is possible in the multiverse. But Miller didn't write one, in part because he drops whatever critique he has of the Presidential candidate and zooms right to the Big Honking Battle-Scene. Joker flees when Lara and Jonathan show up at the campaign HQ and attack Darkseid, who apparently decided to visit Earth with none of his usual Apokolips retinue. An odd sidebar: Jonathan grabs a couple of midget-looking guys in Joker-makeup and Lara tells her brother to drop both midgets-- who launched no attack-- from a great height. Are they robots, like the animated dolls Joker used in the 1986 story? Who knows? (We don't see Jonathan do so, anyway.)

After some super-power exchanges, Jonathan uses his undefined powers to zap Darkseid while Lara turns his own omega-beams against him, and the villain seems to get disintegrated. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!

For three pages the disembodied spirit of Darkseid shunts around the cosmos for a while, meditating on his status as "the end of all that is" and marshaling his power to destroy the Earth-- which I think he could have done a long time ago if that was his motivation, and without rigging any elections.

Then, as if to compensate for all the cosmic chaos, Batwoman spends the next eight pages with "street-level" action, taking down the Joker and his thugs. Then Batwoman hears Donald Trump broadcasting a speech that's apparently having a hypnotic effect on the populace, just as Darkseid did briefly in a separate scene. (So, if Darkseid and Joker could do that the whole time, why were they bothering with the ballot boxes?) Batwoman jams the hypnotic signal, and Darkseid just happens to manifest the next moment, blowing up a few city streets. 

Lara shows up, and the two super-beings fight for a couple of pages before Darkseid casts his hypnotic mojo over her, his speech implying that he's got plans for her nubile body. Jonathan hurls another humongous power-zap at the overlord, freeing Lara, and then--

And then Darkseid kneels on the ground while Batwoman shows up and gives a speech about how the spirit of free-thinking mankind will never die. Or something like that. And that's the end of the story.

This muddled and incoherent excuse for a narrative probably resulted from Frank Miller's attempt to serve two masters, and both are Jack Kirby-- though for argument's sake I'll call one "Social Commentary Jack" and the other "Cosmic Jack."

The figure of Donald Trump, while a valid target for well-done satire, is just the half-baked spawn of Miller trying his hand at the social commentary Jack Kirby worked into his NEW GODS saga. Trump-as-Darkseid-pawn is just a retooling of Glorious Godfrey, Kirby's religious-fanatic satire of Billy Graham. However, Godfrey made sense within the context of Kirby'[s setup. His Darkseid used assorted strategies to find the Anti-Life Equation within the minds of the teeming Earth-people, and Godfrey was just one of such strategy of mental manipulation. 

But in the latter half of GOLDEN CHILD (a title that doesn't seem to have much meaning), Miller's Darkseid-- who never has any reason for his election-fixing scheme-- suddenly pivots into Cosmic Kirby territory. Yeah, Kirby-Darkseid spouted some Macbeth-like line about being a "tiger-force," but he didn't go jaunting around the universe like Galactus, playing the role of Cosmic Hot-Shot. This sort of powerhouse doesn't need to play mental games, or to employ maniacal clowns as stooges. And given that he almost decimates the world, one wonders what errand kept the elder heroes busy wherever.

GOLDEN CHILD, in short, is nothing but a leaden bore.

ADDENDUM: Raphael Granpa shows himself to adapt well to the Millerverse despite the incoherence of the story. Granpa came to prominence with the highly enjoyable graphic novel MESMO DELIVERY, a hyper-violent shaggy dog story. Possibly Miller had some notion of emulating Granpa's more successful foray into wacky humor.

ON ADULT READERS OF GOLDEN AGE COMICS

 Another response-post, this time to a thread dealing with the extent to which newsstand comics of the Golden Age (such as the Prize title of the late forties, BABE DARLING OF THE HILLS) aimed their content at older readers.

_____________

I don't dispute any of this, but would add that young adult readers read comics on the sly, because there was still a sense that comics were meant for kids, and for an adult to read them suggested naivete at best, like Gomer Pyle with his eternal "Shazam." 

And comics were dominantly bought by kids. In the late forties a lot of titles, including the aforementioned BABE, cut back their page count in order to keep the cover price at ten cents. Even in the sixties and seventies slight changes to that expected price had consequences for whatever company tried to boost the price.

This discussion does throw some light on a comment Frederic Wertham made in SEDUCTION. He wanted comics prohibited from kids under a certain age, and I've always thought that was a cynical way of wanting to expunge the entire medium from existence. I still think that *would* have happened, had his totalitarian desires been enacted. But he may have TOLD himself that there was an audience of older teens who might support the medium-- which he viewed as irredeemable due to the corruption of the companies-- and that comic books would be given the chance to flourish or perish like any other media aimed at adults. 

It's possible that the publishers of BABE, just to keep to that example, were hoping to draw in the kid-audience with silly hijinks without their actually being aware of the fetish-connotations, while getting a little sales boost from older readers "in the know." A fair number of horror comics exploited such content as well, naturally,

NULL-MYTHS: PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL VOL. 1 (2018)

I''ve never read any of the PUNISHER features with any regularity, even back when the character's popularity skyrocketed in the nineties. I've enjoyed odd issues in the same way that I've enjoy Chuck Norris films: lots of extravagant action with not much plot or characterization. Nevertheless, the Punisher has gone through many permutations, and so it's possible that he might take on mythic stature in one tale or another.

I picked up a library copy collecting PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL from the 2010s. I had some vague memory of having heard that this one was one of the better Punisher titles, though now that I've read the collection, I feel sure that I must've heard some compliments for an earlier incarnation of the title. All of the stories in this collection, authored by Matt Fraction, are lightweight in the extreme. I've read little or none of the work for which Fraction became popular in the 2010s, but his other work must have more content than this garbage. 

The eighties was a time in which many comics professionals, particularly those from Merrie Old England, began producing "grim and gritty" versions of superhero features aimed at the dominantly older DM comics-audience. Yet all of these pros had been raised on the G-rated comic books of the Silver and Bronze Ages, and many of them sang the praises of the comics' "age of innocence." Grant Morrison did a story of an aging superhero in some issue of ANIMAL MAN, Neil Gaiman did a Riddler story, and Alan Moore wept crocodile tears for lost innocence with the Kool Aid Man.

A reader could read any of these and get the gist of Fraction's work on the first twelve issues of WAR JOURNAL. Of course, Moore, Morrison and Gaiman all showed numerous times that they could do much more than self-conscious parody. But that's all there is to Fraction's Punisher.

Here's Frank Castle deciding that he just won't put up with the silliness of the Silver Age, by blowing away the Stilt Man's junk.

Later, at the supervillain's wake, a bunch of classic and not-so-classic villains, mostly from the Silver Age, get together and talk about the Good Old Days as if it was all a big game, and didn't involve them trying to murder the heroes who interfered with them.

(On a side-note: even though these old villains used G-rated violence, G-rated violence can still kill a person! One of the main virtues of SPIDER MAN HOMECOMING was the bracing scene in which the movie's version of the Vulture shows just how dangerous a flying villain can be to a non-flying crusader.)

There's not much more to these twelve issues than the dubious pleasure of seeing a "realistic" hero blow away all these colorful fantasy-figures. Fraction has no psychological insight, even of a deconstructive kind, into either the Punisher, his allies (an obscure seventies villain, Rampage, gets recast into the role of the main hero's weapons maker), or any of the villains. It's all pseudo-Moore sardonicism with none of Moore's skill with satire. It's as if Fraction read Moore and the other "adult pulp" writers of the eighties and thought that their pretensions to realism were the only things worth imitating. 

Oh, and I don't know if Fraction started this, but now the vigilante hero has a deep and abiding regard for Captain America for some reason-- apparently because Cap beat up Frank Castle during some army training maneuvers? These issues take place around the time that Steve Rogers was temporarily killed off, so there's an arc of stories dealing with how a new, white-nationalist version of the Hate-Monger tries to usurp Captain America's uniform. Fraction is just as incompetent in dealing with "real problems" like racism as he is in playing games within Marvel's immense fantasy-cosmos.

Next to self-important tripe like this, even throwaway trash-tales of Castle shooting up a bunch of drug-dealers are preferable by far.

NULL-MYTHS: BLOOD AND JUDGMENT (1986)

I should preface my remarks on Howard Chaykin’s four-issue SHADOW series by stating that I was never (unlike the celebrated Harlan Ellison) a strong fan of the character prior to Chaykin’s take on him. Growing up in the sixties, I heard fragmentary references to the hero and his mythology, most of which probably stemmed from the popular radio show rather than from the pulp magazine series wherein the crusader originated. There were no paperback reprints of The Shadow until 1975, and the only comic book that took a shot at reviving the Master of Darkness was an insipid superhero title from Mighty (Archie) Comics in the mid-sixties. The short-lived DC Comics adaptation in the early seventies was my first real exposure to any accurate version of the character, and though I found the series enjoyable, it was not one of the high points of the period. Sadly, most revivals of the Shadow in comics since then have failed to last into the high numbers of the pulp magazine’s decades-long run, and the hero was scarcely served any better in the media of TV and movies. These days, I’m reasonably well acquainted with the mythology of the character, especially through copious reprints of the original pulp tales. But even now, I’m not a big Shadow fan.

I didn’t like the four-issue BLOOD AND JUDGMENT any better in 1986 than I do now, but I must admit, it stands as one of the few times a comic-book adaptation of the Shadow made good money for its publishers. To be sure, a lot of extrinsic factors played a part. In comic books the relative freedom of titles aimed at the “mature readers” in comic-book specialty stores made it possible to stretch the boundaries of what one could do in “masked avenger” narratives, resulting in what I’ve chosen to call “adult pulp” in contrast to the juvenile variety seen in most though not all actual pulp magazines. A lot of eighties comics were just the same puerile stories with greater sex and ultraviolence—THE OMEGA MEN comes to mind—but there were valid makers of adult pulp as well, talents who shone in the eighties as they never could have in the seventies. Miller and Moore were the top of the heap, but Chaykin, something less than a “fan-favorite” in the seventies, became a Big Name Creator with First Comics’s 1983 publication of AMERICAN FLAGG. Whatever FLAGG was, it wasn’t just warmed-over clichés with more violence ladled on top, and at least three (if not more) critics for the hero-hating COMICS JOURNAL reviewed the title in its heyday. (I was not one of them; despite initially liking the series, I just didn’t have much to say about the feature back then.)

By the middle eighties DC had fully embraced the aesthetic of adult pulp, with the four-issue SHADOW series appearing in May 1986, roughly three months after the debut of Frank Miller’s wildly successful THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Miller explicitly stated that at the time he thought of RETURNS as a “brass band funeral” for the superhero genre, even if Miller’s reborn bat ended up becoming more of a meal ticket in the long run. But what did The Shadow mean to Howard Chaykin?

As seen in the first link above, Harlan Ellison manifestly despised Chaykin’s take on the character. I expressed some doubts as to how “mythic” the original pulp character was, but on the whole, if a creator wanted to reduce a famous hero to a travesty of his (or her) original self, I thought said creator ought to have a really good reason, beyond putting money in his bank account.

Having reread BLOOD AND JUDGMENT, I don’t think Howard Chaykin gave a ripe fart about the Shadow or his mythology. He does take various elements of the pulp stories—principally, the ideas that the Shadow acquired his mental skills in some far-Eastern domain, and that Lamont Cranston, the hero’s supposed alter ego, was merely one of his many disguises. Since BLOOD AND JUDGMENT takes place contemporaneously, Chaykin gives the Shadow a straightforward hero-origin. After crash-landing in a Tibetan super-science enclave named “Shambala,” pilot Kent Allard is enlisted to become a “paladin” for the Shambalans, who for vague reasons want to have their own urban avenger fighting crime in big cities. Chaykin puts no more into this origin than he must to make the story work; he’s manifestly uninterested in the Shadow’s career and barely gives a reason for his retirement to Shambala for some 35 years. Super-science does allow this version of the Master of Darkness to remain young while all of his former aides have become doddering old men and women. Apparently Shambala gave Allard a nose-job as well, since by 1986 he’s become the spitting image of Reuben Flagg.

What interests Chaykin is presenting a raucous, ribald vision of the modern world. It’s never a vision of great depth, but it certainly has a personal vibe to it. There’s copious violence—a mystery villain, Preston Mayrock, starts killing the Shadow’s former aides in order to lure the hero out of hiding—but the real emphasis is kinky sexuality. This makes an odd fit with The Shadow, who was one of the least sexual of the pulp-magazine heroes. Chaykin’s ageless Shadow has already fathered two offspring—both fully-grown Asian men. In addition, he is served by an agent named Lorelei with a super-sexy voice (her word balloons are all hearts) and after he seduces a woman who hates him, she ends up calling him “master.” Preston Mayrock is even more of a fount of perversion, being a wheelchair-bound old man who’s married a ripe twenty-something chippie. He allows his wife to screw his clone-replica “son” because Preston plans to have his brain transplanted into Preston Junior’s body.

It’s all very racy, but not much better developed than one of the “saucy stories” from the pulp-magazine era. The prose stories of the original Shadow were naïve and juvenile, but they weren’t incapable of depicting shades of feeling and characterization. The only time Chaykin’s era doesn’t seem like a self-satisfied parody of a hero is a single scene in which the villain sics guard-dogs on the Shadow, and the hero spares the “innocent ones” by mastering them with mesmerism. Without characters to engage the reader, most of Chaykin’s visuals prove busy and ultimately off-putting.

For me the only positive aspect of this mini-series is that because it sold well, DC kept this SHADOW series going for nineteen more issues, usually scripted by Andy Helfer and penciled by such luminaries as Bill Sienkiecwicz and Kyle Baker. Most of these stories are not much deeper than Chaykin’s, but Helfer embraced a more genial, Miller-like comedic approach in adapting the adventures of this classic crimefighter, so they’re more fun to re-read than Chaykin’s smarmy sensationalism. His outlook worked better with a series of his own creation, though, on a side-note, I reread a handful of the AMERICAN FLAGG installments and found them also lacking in mythicity.   

WHAT THE WELL-DRESSED SUPERHERO OUGHT TO WEAR

... "ought to wear," that is, in terms of impressing adult readers and thus giving rise to the reception of the genre as a legitimate category of what I've called "adult pulp."

In one of my old JOURNAL essays I started off by noting that superheroes wearing costumes was the one element that made adult readers consider the genre as pulp-fiction of an irredeemably juvenile kind. And there's no question that a lot of adults say that the thing they find most off-putting about superheroes is their tendency to wear their underwear on the outside. (Incidentally, this excuse for a joke made the most sense back when Americans wore "long underwear" of one kind or another.)

However, I've come to think that the costume-complaint may not really be as substantial as I thought earlier. In the pop-culture world as we know it today, there are a lot of characters who have superhero-like powers, weapons or adventures, and who wear commonplace attire. James Bond may be the foremost example of this type, and there's no doubt that the prose novels qualify as adult-oriented pulp. However, Bond's enormous popularity across many cultures stems principally from the movie adaptations, which may have caught fire from being culturally "in the right place at the right time." Before Bond, popular fiction-- prose fiction, movies, comic strips-- played host to innumerable characters who wore ordinary clothes but enjoyed extraordinary adventures, whether they chased down weird masterminds (Doc Savage), mystic menaces (Jules De Grandin, Mandrake the Magician), or just freaky-looking criminals (Dick Tracy). For every one of these that became moderately well known, there are presumably dozens that have been forgotten. The question is, did even Dick Tracy-- arguably one of the most famous "plainclothed crusaders"-- earn any deep and abiding respect because he pursued Flat Top and Pruneface while wearing regular clothes?

Say, for sake of argument, that the leotard-style costume never caught on in comic books. Early sketches of Superman suggest that Joe Shuster originally meant for the hero to wear street-clothes a la Doc Savage, and that the image of the costume that was added later, almost at random, in imitation of  such carnival performers as strongmen and acrobats. Given the appeal of a "modern-day Hercules," it's not impossible that a non-costumed Superman might have begotten an extended  family of mufti-clothed crimefighters, and that costumes might have appeared only occasionally, as they did in the period of the "hero pulps." Assuming that the level of talent and production of such comic books stayed the same, is there any reason to think that comic books full of supermen in plainclothes would have earned any more deep and abiding respect than the costumed versions?

Despite the fact that a lot of adults have scorned costumes as elements of childish make-believe, I think the genre of adventure itself is the real source of contempt. In an earlier essay I referenced Ursula LeGuin's animus toward prose genres like space opera and sword and sorcery, which certainly don't involve "costumes" as such. There are a few 19th-century prose novels in the adventure-genre that have become acknowledged classics-- IVANHOE, THE THREE MUSKETEERS, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. But it took about a century for academic critics to embrace adventures with metaphenomenal content, such as DUNE and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. In the last twenty years academics have become somewhat more latitudinarian about the adventure- genre, with or without elements of fantasy. But old attitudes die hard.

There are various "adult superhero" graphic novels out there, and it may be significant that a lot of them aspire to literary quality by using the tropes of irony and satire. I think a great "adult superhero" graphic novel in a purely adventurous mode is still a possibility, but it would have to have the complexity of a Melville novel to overcome the casual contempt so often directed against the genre.

MYTHCOMICS: "A HOPE IN HELL" ( SANDMAN #4, 1989)

Neil Gaiman's SANDMAN series remains at the forefront of the Vertigo books that contributed so much of the cultivation of the superhero idiom into the form of adult, rather than juvenile, pulp.

To be sure, Gaiman's "Sandman"-- an immortal, almost conceptual being who belongs to a small family called "the Endless"-- was not a superhero as such, and most of his stories did not even participate in the combative mode that I deem the primary domain of the superhero. But Gaiman, perhaps much more than earlier groundbreakers like Moore and Miller, infused DC's superhero universe with the qualities of myth and fantastic literature. Small wonder that Gaiman received something less than a warm welcome by the elitist critics of the 1990s. The JOURNAL, which specialized in well-rounded discussions even with many creators their critics did not like, couldn't seem to get a handle on Gaiman's work, resulting in not one but two really blah JOURNAL interviews.

The overall quality of THE SANDMAN, the feature that made Gaiman famous, is to be sure uneven. In many stories the Sandman-- usually given names like 'Dream" or "Lord of Dreams"-- is a peripheral presence, looking on as misguided mortals destroy themselves in pursuit of foolish dreams. But in the earliest issues, Gaiman had to establish Dream himself as a sympathetic character. In the first issue, Dream escapes captivity after having been bound by a mortal sorceer, and in issue #4, which I'm considering here, he journeys to Hell itself, to get back a sacred helmet acquired by a demon during Dream's durance vile.

The centerpiece of the story is a word-battle between Dream and a demon named Choronzon. This form of contest seems roughly derived from the word battles of opposing bards in archaic Celtic tradition, though the implication here is that to some extent, the two supernatural beings do "become" the creatures of which they speak. This too bears a striking resemblance between the literal battles of Celtic magicians, such as the magical battle of the wizards Fruich and Rucht, cited here.  Literal magical battles took place in a number of Celtic stories, but here, Gaiman is to an extent using a less directly violent, somewhat theoretical version of the transformations. Nevertheless, if Lord Dream fails to "trump" his opponent in terms of his imagined transformations, he will pay the price of becoming the demon's servant in Hell.

Throughout the story Gaiman emphasizes Dream's reliance on "hope"-- hope for his own abilities and powers, in particular. By the end of the contest, Dream asserts "Hope" as a cosmic principle that can in theory cancel out even the destruction of the universe. Even after the contest is won, and the sore-loser demons threaten to menace him anyway, Dream defeats the denizens of Hell by telling them that "the dream of Heaven," and the hope to be free of Hell, are in truth the only things that sustain them against perdition's horrors.

"A Hope in Hell" is a good, though not great, Gaiman story: clearly it functions in large part to help readers map out the "Sandman universe." It's also a foretaste of Gaiman's best work in the title, paving the way for 
"adult pulp's" propensity to find ways to express conflict that did not involve major property damage.

MYTHCOMICS: "WHO HAS BEEN LYING IN MY GRAVE?" (STRANGE ADVENTURES #206. 1967)

"[Jack} Miller said he had a book that was in trouble, and would I come up with some kind of a superhero. I was tuned in to what was happening around us at that time. One of the things was a movement of young people toward Asian philosophies, Asian rituals, etc. So here I was in the middle of a Zen-Buddhist movement and I thought, "Maybe I can use that for my main character," and I came up with this notion: the Deadman, who is able to enter other people's bodies. I introduced the idea that some power somewhere made it possible for him to do this. My intention was to get much more involved in that aspect of it and get some concept of what this power was like, and the structure of the machine that the power used around the world. What I had in mind was comparing two civilizations, our world, and that other world, and to indicate that I thought they were probably pretty much alike. There were baddies in heaven just as there were on earth. That was the way I wanted to go with it, but I never got a chance to. We had a disagreement. I was to have received a major page-rate increase, and the boss man reneged on that deal. So I walked away."-- Arnold Drake, SEQUENTIAL TART interview.


In one of my early essays on adult pulp, I cited a particular scene from Neal Adams' run on DC Comics' "Deadman" feature as a example of how even color comics began to push the envelope into the vein of hard-boiled violence. The entire 1960s "Deadman" series deserves to be analyzed in terms of its contribution of envelope-pushing, but here I'm only addressing the very first issue of the series. As noted in the interview-excerpt above, writer Arnold Drake asserted that he was the principal source of the concept. Initial artist Carmine Infantino may have had some creative input as well, but given that most DC comics-features were prepared from a full script, it seems likely that Drake largely formulated this unusual approach to a spectral superhero.

For most of DC Comics' history, the company had generally steered clear of such subgenres as hard-boiled crime and visceral horror. Thus, it was far beyond the company's "comfort zone" to feature a cover like this one.

Or a scene in which the main hero-- not a crimefighter, but a simple costume-garbed trapeze artist named Boston Brand-- dresses down a nasty cop and gets him to lay off the fortune-teller who works at Boston's circus.

Disrespect for the law was one of the verboten tropes in the Comics Code, as was any reference to illegal drugs. As if Drake wanted to combine two forbidden tropes in one, later in the story the nasty cop is seen dealing in drugs-- though it's suggested that he might be a phony cop, which was probably a concession to the dwindling influence of the Code. But even with that caveat, this scene alone depicted a world far beyond the safe juvenile havens of DC's regular superheroes.

Drake's first DEADMAN story is also unique in proposing a view of life that I find comparable to that of Martin Buber's conception of the "I-it" and "I-thou" relationships, which I last addressed here. In most DC Comics, the paradigm was the "cops and robbers" trope, in which the robber related to the greater community as an "it" to be exploited, while the cop existed in a "thou" relationship to said community, protecting it from various depredations.

From the beginning of the opening story, though-- whose title is a peculiar echo of a line from the story of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"-- Drake creates a seedy sub-cosmos that anticipates the later transformations of Gotham City. The carnival-cosmos of Boston Brand, soon to become Deadman, is just a business that's just barely holding on: "Movies killed the circus, and TV buried it." Brand is the top dog at the circus-- of which he owns a percentage-- because he constantly risks his life doing a trapeze-act without a net. His dialogue with co-owner Lorna shows that he refuses her attempts to see heroism in him, and that he regards most of his circus-colleagues as "sick,dangerous children."

In contrast to traditional "cops and robbers" comics, the reader of this sequence is drawn in two different directions: perhaps wanting to believe that the lead character is a tough guy with a heart of gold, while also seeing that he demonstrates contempt not only for his colleagues, but also for his audience, telling Lorna that "the dumb johns pay their money to see one thing-- they're here to see me DIE!" This is patently his way of keeping any and affection at a distance, either from Lorna-- whose relationship to Brand seems more intense than that of a simple partner-- or from the simple-minded strongman Tiny. However, the diminutive Hindu mystic Vashnu asserts that his goddess Rama Kushna, who permeates the entire universe, intends to reward Brand with 'some special gift, waiting for you alone."

The gift is, to say the least, ambivalent: Brand, who has perhaps tempted fate by billing himself as "Deadman," is shot during his high-wire act by an unknown assailant. Deadman lives on as an impalpable ghost, but Rama Kushna herself intervenes to inform him of the gift she's given him, the power to possess other bodies.

There's a rich, implicit irony in this cosmic joke: the man who wanted to keep everyone at a distance, regardless of his true feelings for them, finds himself reduced to a spirit who can only have agency in the world by invading the bodies of others. In a sense he must use the bodies of the living in an "I-it" relationship, since he takes over their bodies without their consent. Yet he must relate to them in the "I-thou" constellation as well, since he puts them in danger by using them in his personal quest to find his killer. Indeed, in "Grave" he briefly considers ignoring the crimes of the drug-dealing cop and his circus-contact, since that crime has nothing to do with finding his killer. But he proves himself a hero, albeit a reluctant one, by taking down the two dealers before pursuing his own destiny.

Neal Adams took over the art-chores in STRANGE ADVENTURES #206, while Drake contributed his last Deadman script, the Biblically titled "Eye for an Eye," before severing relations with DC. It's inarguable that Adams' dynamic art made the feature popular with fans. Adams and his collaborators, notably editor Jack Miller, put forth their own conceptions of the Eastern mysticism underlying the first story. Readers will never know how Drake might have explored "the structure of the machine that the power used around the world," which I take to be the author's metaphor for the pantheistic presence of Rama Kushna. I feel safe in venturing, however, that in some way Drake would probably have explored the connectedness between all human beings in this melodramatic mystery-context. Perhaps the only answer to the titular question of "who's been lying in my grave" would be nothing less than--

Everyone.

ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that I may have oversold what Drake might have done with the series had he remained, so I read issue #207 for comparison's sake. Said story was a pretty routine story about Lorna's "bad biker-brother" showing up and making trouble for the circus, as well as becoming the first-- but not the last-- suspect in Boston Brand's murder.

THE MIGHTY MARVEL COLLECTIVE SUBCONSCIOUS

In the previous essay I stated the reasons that I disagree with Tim O'Neil interpretation of Marvel Comics' "we're the underdogs" myth. Here I'll address an aspect of his essay that speaks to "why people read popular entertainment at all."

Conspicuously absent from O'Neil's essay is any coherent reason for why Marvel enthusiasts became so, um, enthusiastic about their reading-matter, apart from O'Neil's claim that they bought into the "myth of the underdog." If one prunes away everything related to that theme, one winds up with these statements:

Marvel was what cool college kids read - literally, your older brothers' comic books, not like those staid Superman magazines you read as a child.

Marvel was cool and the books were better than National - and all their later imitators - and all that was true, at least for a while. 

Marvel was the place where a few crazy middle-aged men had accidentally created a counter-culture incubator, as the company became increasingly dominated by younger men (and even a few women) who had grown up reading the books and very much wanted to be a part of the clubhouse Stan had built.

Perhaps because the main point of thes essay is to point out the gulf between Marvel's underdog-myth and the reality of their unethical dominance of the market, the third of these statements glosses over the fact that a lot of "younger men" invaded the New York comics-companies that weren't exclusively in love with Marvel. Archie Goodwin was one of the first comics fans to turn pro, but by all accounts I've read, he was primarily an EC fan, and his first substantial contribution to the comics-medium came during his employment from 1964-67 with Warren, which company was in essence reviving the spirit of EC with its horror and war books.  Jim Shooter was another early emigrant to the New York publishing-world, but he broke in to that staid DC world, and though he later became a Marvel head honcho, arguably he brought to Marvel a regimentation akin to that of his former boss Mort Weisinger.

So it wasn't just the charm of Marvel that lured all those Young Turks to New York; it was a fascination with the possibilities of the comics medium. Both DC and Marvel had hardcore business reasons for employing all the young folks, of course; the publishers and editors cared primarily about making money, not giving people creative freedom. The sales of newsstand comics had dipped critically following the conclusion of the national Bat-Fad, and publishers were clearly seeking to tap markets less chimerical than the younger juveniles who had remained comics' primary demographic for the last thirty years.

But even if one could prove that Marvel alone was crucial to pulling in the "cool college kids," what made Marvel Comics cool in the first place? Given that older juveniles had long scorned comics as "kid stuff," what made Marvel "better than National," as O'Neil says?  Saying that Marvel's creators excelled at "being both more primitive and more sophisticated than their rivals" really says nothing of substance.

An easy answer would be the gimmick of "heroes with problems," but this has always been an oversimplification, even when Marvel creators themselves used it. What Stan Lee seems to have conceived was the potential of bringing a particular type of drama to the superhero genre. Significantly, it worked for superheroes far better than for Marvel's western and war books, in part the American audience was already used to seeing quasi-adult drama in the cinematic versions of those genres. I don't buy into Stan's myth that he simply wanted to do comics-stories "for himself;" the bottom line was always Stan's concern. Perhaps, having worked well with Kirby and Ditko on the SF-horror books, which allowed for a greater emphasis upon dramatic intensity, Lee was simply trying to find a formula that would make his superhero books sell modestly better. I'm sure it was a surprise to him, as to Kirby and Ditko, to find themselves being championed as "hip reading" on various college campuses. And Lee was quick to seek a way to capitalize on the enthusiasm, briefly branding a handful of 1965 comics as "Marvel Pop Art Productions" in order to feed off the vagaries of the highbrow art-world. 

The fact that I term Lee's editorial approach a "formula," though, does not mean that I think it was only a gimmick. There's a species of Lee-criticism in which it's asserted that Stan Lee's only contribution to the Marvel Universe was that of hype, and O'Neil's essay suggests that position with his insistence that Marvel became a success via its "clubhouse" approach. I've frequently argued that neither Jack Kirby nor Steve Ditko seemed consistently interested in the "heroes with problems" formula either prior to or subsequent to working with Stan Lee, so that my verdict is that Lee primarily evolved the formula, though not without many false starts, stumbles, and outright bad stories.

I take the position that the only way any cool college kids would have bought into the Marvel Universe would have been if they were convinced that they were getting a slightly more sophisticated-- but still fun-- version of the superheroes with which they'd grown up.  And it was actual talent, not hype, that convinced them that Marvel Comics were more than kid stuff.

One of Northrop Frye's most trenchant observations on popular literature was that it provided a "window" through which one could view Jung's archetypes in pure form, as opposed to seeing those archetypes reflected covertly in the scenarios of fine literature. In this "pure" archetypal sense (one might also say "primitive"), Marvel comics of this period were no better or worse than the contemporary works of DC, Dell or Charlton. But Marvel found a way to persuade older readers that there was some dramatic heft to be derived from stories of spider-men, thunder gods, and giant green-skinned monsters.  

As noted before, O'Neil is less concerned with the aesthetics of Marvel Comics than with the poor ethics of the company. I have no doubt that Marvel's representatives have committed many evil acts in its long existence, as is the case for most if not all large companies. However, evil is not the exclusive province of big companies, nor has ethical merit ever been a viable factor in determining the quality of art.  

The expansion of Marvel's business plan to gargantuan proportions concerns O'Neil far more than I. To paraphrase Captain America regarding the Red Skull: "You're the most evil man of all time... But then, someone has to be. If it wasn't you, it would be someone else."  I don't disregard particular acts of evil as irrelevant, but then, I don't think their presence nullify all claims to virtue, either-- mine being a perspectivist concept of morality, as I've detailed in this essay.

LAST ROUND-UP FOR THE JUVENILE WESTERN (IN FILM AND TELEVISION)

In my essay THE LITTLE NEOPURITANS I wrote:

...I feel revolted by the base Werthamism that crops on some comics-fan boards when those fans choose to rail against any and all use of pulpish sensationalism.  It doesn't matter if it's as well done as Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT or as badly done as Mark Millar's WANTED; anything that keeps funnybooks out of the hands of kids is part of the vast evil conspiracy of nasty pandering comics-companies, usually though not invariably "the Big Two."

I understand that such overreactions may come from a "good place," in that most devoted superhero fans are introduced to the genre as kids. When these fans become adults, it's not unreasonable to want their own kids to experience something like the same "joy of superheroes," and that's only possible when there are at least some viable superheroes in the vein of "juvenile pulp." For my purposes juvenile pulp would include both those narratives expressly aimed at juveniles of  various ages-- for instance, the DC Comic TINY TITANS-- and those narratives defined as "all ages". I'm cognizant that there are many "all ages" narratives that are capable of appealing to adults, and indeed this amphibian capacity explains much of the success of Silver Age Marvel Comics. In THE DIVIDING LINE PART 2 I noted that I found a "juvenile tone" in some "all ages" comic books like GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW and THE VIGILANTE.

I've spoken before of a juvenile "tone" in works like CONAN, GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW, OMEGA MEN and VIGILANTE that in my consideration do not qualify as "adult pulp," as opposed to Miller's DAREDEVIL and Chaykin's AMERICAN FLAGG, for two. (Side-note: I might view the Thomas/Smith CONAN as at least a transtional work between the two states.) This tone I evaluate based not on the presence or absence of taboo material but on the degree to which, even in an escapist work, the story's content is influenced by the adult concept of "work" rather than "play." The adult's consciousness not only of "work" as a profession but as an insight to the way the world and all its elements "work" is what provides the dividing-line between "juvenile" and "adult." Across this Maginot line of maturation, both the narrative aspects of extreme sex-and-violence and the significant aspects of deeper and more portentous cognitions are united to create all manner of adult entertainments, both "escapist" and "realistic."

The closest I could come to defining what separates "adult tone" from "juvenile tone" is that the former possesses a quality I termed in the above essay "rigor." I didn't use the term again, but the concept underlies many of my other distinctions between "work" and "play."

Key to the Neopuritans' argument is the desire to keep superheroes accessible to juveniles. However, the possibility has occurred to me more than once superhero comic magazines may have reached a point at which they can only be sustained by adults, at least in the United States. And moreover, the specific genre-medium blend of "superheroes in comics" was preceded many years ago by a similar "adult-eration," with the death of "juvenile western films."

In the 2010 essay STANDARD BARING PART 2  I went into some detail about the parallel ways in which adult and juvenile narratives co-existed in Classic Hollywood cinema, perhaps to an even greater extent than they had for that genre in the pulps and dime novels. But one thing this overview neglected was the huge number of juvenile westerns that appeared during the Classic period. Dozens upon dozens of cheaply-made B-westerns offered only the most elementary plots, inhabited with all-good heroes and all-bad villains. The reign of the many cowboy-heroes of the period-- Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Durango Kid, Lash LaRue, and many others-- came to an end in the 1950s, when television usurped the economic logic of the juvie-western, and offered similar fare free of charge. As I was a baby-boomer, this was the only form of juvenile western I ever knew, so I grew up enjoying programs like LONE RANGER and CISCO KID-- though by the time that I saw any of the earlier films on television, they seemed far more cheap and repetitive than the TV westerns that I grew up with.

For whatever reason, westerns did not endure in the realm of live-action television aimed at the juvenile. The only western theatrical films aimed at juveniles were a smattering of western-comedies that appeared throughout the sixties and early seventies: things like 1968's THE SHAKIEST GUN IN THE WEST, 1969's SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SHERIFF (and sequel), and 1978's HOT LEAD AND COLD FEET. Admittedly "all ages" westerns prospered in the 1950s and 1960s, but by the mid-1970s the TV-western had begun an almost irreversible decline. As for the world of the cinema, the "all ages" westerns had been all but displaced by the movies' version of 'adult pulp." Aging John Wayne was the last viable exemplar of the "all ages" form, and despite scattered films from other aging icons like Burt Lancaster and Henry Fonda, the wave of the future had been launched by Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood in 1964 via the seminal A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, and the majority of successful westerns were increasingly aimed at a purely adult audience. Any kid who grew up in the 1980s and had a yen for westerns would have been forced to watch genre-works aimed primarily at adults, such as HEAVEN'S GATE or THE MAN FROM SNOWY RIVER-- though of course there were the inevitable exceptions, like the YOUNG GUNS series and the megaflop LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER.

By now the parallel I'm suggesting should be obvious: the juvenile form of the western was largely marginalized by the successful growth of the western in its primarily adult form. And while I'm loathe to define any genre's success or failure purely in terms of socioeconomic factors, it seems that parallel factors have caused a similar marginalization of the "juvenile pulp" superhero comic book-- and not, as some fans, like to think, merely the greed of pandering comics-companies.

Admittedly, juvenile westerns do seem to remain vital in other media, as one can see from this list of young adult historical novels.  But in the world of cinema and live-action television, they seem to have been effectively displaced.

THE ONLY GOOD RAPE IS A FAKE-RAPE PT. 1

In one sense the above is true of any criminal activity: it may be amusing to imagine oneself a daring thief or a flawless assassin, but one suspects that both play better than they live.

Rape is another such criminal act, but it does not spring from some amorphous "rape culture" centered in the conspiracy of men to keep women down. To be sure, individual men do strive to do this, but they don't comprise a "culture" any more than do retaliatory attempts by women to control or diminish males.

Whether one is speaking of the phenomenon of rape as practiced by men or, more rarely, by women, it becomes significant in art primarily because it blurs the distinctions between sex and violence. In VIOLENCE *AINT* NUTHIN' BUT SEX MISSPELLED PART 2 I wrote:

While there are ways in which sexual partners can attempt to "assault" one another-- ways which include, but are not confined to, rape-- sex is dominantly isothymic, in that sex usually requires some modicum of cooperation. Violence, then, dominantly conforms to Fukuyma's megalothymic mode insofar as it usually involves a struggle of at least two opponents in which one will prove superior to the other, though in rare cases fighters may simply spar with no intent of proving thymotic superiority.

As I have also said before, the fact that I advocate freedom in the depiction of both sex and violence does not mean that I consider all usages of these kinetic elements to be good uses of that freedom.  In this post I took issue with a BEAT-poster who seemed to want to see rape depicted only in ways that supported a particular ideological position. However, that doesn't mean that I haven't seen stupid, unimaginative depictions of this particular crime. Brad Meltzer's 2004 series IDENTITY CRISIS stands out in this regard.

The only thing one can say in defense of this idiotic story is that when Meltzer chose to have Doctor Light rape Sue Dibny, he was to some extent following in the footsteps of many professional comics-creators who had sought to make superheroes more "realistic" by having them encounter greater levels of sex and violence-- that is, graduating from the levels appropriate to "juvenile pulp" to those of "adult pulp." The transformation has been ongoing since the late Silver Age, as I chronicled in broad strokes here.  So, even though IDENTITY CRISIS is a very bad comic book, it is not, as one critic claimed, "the comic that ruined comics." That ruination, if one chooses to deem it that, was in the works a little before Meltzer was born-- though it is amusing that he came into the world in 1970, the same year I deem to be the beginning of the Bronze Age, the time when commercial comics took their first major steps toward "adult"-erating their products.

At any rate, Doctor Light's rape of Sue Dibny is a "fake-rape," not least because it is depicted through the medium of two fictional characters. However, I don't state above that all "fake-rapes" are good; just that, if there is good in this crime, it will appear only in gestural entertainment.

It would be easy to refute the notion "rape should not appear because it aggravates the female audience and/or because it's the last resort of a lazy creator" by quoting the use of the crime in artistic types ranging from Shakespeare to Joyce Carol Oates. But since I'm defending the crime's provenance in popular fiction, it behooves me to cite two works of popular fiction-- both of which are also politically incorrect for a variety of reasons, apart from the depiction of "sex-as-violence."

THE LITTLE NEOPURITANS

Though I've said as much as I need to for the time being on the function of "beautiful people" in narrative, I find that this line of thought returns me to the discussion of "adult pulp," last discussed in detail here.

As I noted here, I was fairly bullish on the concept of "adult pulp" in 2012.  Even though critics as politically diverse as Bill Willingham and Dirk Deppey sneered at "superhero decadence" for very different reasons, I felt that the continued success of decadent superhero comics-- regardless of whether I liked them all or not-- validated my interpretation as to the necessity of the sensational in art, be it of the canonical or popular variety:

...art is built upon a sensational foundation, though with the caveat that everything in art is a "gesture" in the Langerian sense-- an attempt to capture experience which is necessarily less immediate than experience.

I was aware, of course, that there were people who still took opposing positions-- again, for politically diverse reasons.  In Chicken Colin's attack-essay on Sequart, CC took issue with my calling them "anti-pulpsters."  His objection was of course thick-witted, since he had made up his mind from the start not to represent my conceptions accurately.  His sole tactic was to read "sensationalism" as a cover for the "sexism" to which his ultraliberal sentiments were welded, and his strategy was your basic "get thee from me, Sexist Satan" admonition, which seems to have worked pretty well on the majority of Sequart readers.

I will admit, though, that "anti-pulpster" was a clumsy term for those opposing the validity of sensationalism.  It required far too much explanation to be useful.

Now I prefer to call them "Neopuritans," though they still divide up along lines similar to those that separate Willingham and Deppey.

On one hand, we have Elitist Neopuritans like Gary Groth and Dirk Deppey.  Their base conviction is that superhero comics should not include adult levels of sensational material because superhero comics are for kids.  Extreme usages of sex and violence should be for the sort of reading material aimed at actual adults, though to be sure the usage of such sensationalisms in "trash fiction" aimed at adults, such as Mickey Spillane, will usually reap the same contempt shown to the "kiddie" superhero stories.

On the other, we have the Populist Neopuritans.  I haven't read enough of Willingham to describe him in this fashion, but Kelly Thompson is probably an adequate substitute in this respect.  The Populists are on the whole still emotionally engaged with superheroes, as opposed to the elitists' conviction that the superhero genre ideally should be set aside in favor of "better things."  However, the Populists follow the Elitists in subscribing to the idea that extreme sensationalism is no more than pandering, and so many of them would prefer to return comics to the status of "all ages" entertainment.

Though I've said before that I think the days of "comics as juvenile pulp" are a thing of the past, I won't rule out the possibility that someone might conceive of a new marketing approach that could lure back a lot of younger buyers.  That market would probably never again reach the heights of sales in the Golden Age of Comics, but some paradigm shift is still possble.

However, I feel revolted by the base Werthamism that crops on some comics-fan boards when those fans choose to rail against any and all use of pulpish sensationalism.  It doesn't matter if it's as well done as Frank Miller's DARK KNIGHT or as badly done as Mark Millar's WANTED; anything that keeps funnybooks out of the hands of kids is part of the vast evil conspiracy of nasty pandering comics-companies, usually though not invariably "the Big Two."

I remarked on one of these threads that I had little confidence in the kid-market:

Getting kids to buy Batman coloring books and Wonder Woman underoos doesn't mean that the kids will go out and try to buy Batman and Wonder Woman comic books. That's the point: historically a lot of kids wandered away from pamphlet comic books long before the effects of the DM had fully manifested. You say that the Eisners include a lot of children's comics; are any of them in pamphlet form? I suspect most of them are in book-form, which means that those works have successfully moved in on the market of prose-oriented children's books.

In response to a poster who claimed that other countries' comics didn't pander to "the male gaze:"

 Japan for one country has exactly the same kind of attitude I've endorsed here: sexy comics for men and sexy comics for women, as well as other types. The point is, if you're endorsing Japan as a superior example of a comics-producing country, then you can't claim that all the US has to do is clean up its act. To be more like Japan, the US needs equal opportunity dirt.

One idea I repeatedly encountered was that superhero stories weren't "meant to be" sexy in nature, and that all of the recent "adult pulp" endeavors were, in the same fashion Dirk Deppey claimed, perversions of kid's entertainment.  To this I replied (and got no answer):

 But I've also said that superhero comics in their earliest days often had sexual aspects to them that one doesn't find so readily in comics for younger kids, so in that respect they did have their wankery-aspects. They weren't ONLY that, but they were never as squeaky-clean as some people like to think. Thus to have "adulterated" versions is no different than reading a Tijuana Bible where Betty Boop gets it on with Popeye.

 So far I have yet to encounter any rejection of my "bedrock of sensationalism" theme that does not draw upon a Puritanical tendency to cast out anything that smacks of sensual appeal.  I suppose that those who do so have managed the sort of mental separation I argued for in this essay, in which I stated (among other things) that not all violence had a sexual component, as George Bataille had argued.  However, the Neopuritans have taken that separation much farther than I ever would have, claiming that there's a vast divide between "non-erotic violence" and "erotic violence" when in truth the separation between the two is more like a membrane.

As I commented in PRIDE OF PREJUDICE, the affect informing these elementary mistakes is that of pride: the desire to feel that the medium with which you have associated yourself is something in which you can take pride. But what sort of pride is it, that requires validation from those parts of the community who would never consider picking up a comic book at all?  Especially since those readers have their own avenues of sensationalism, ranging from PLAYBOY magazine to FIFTY SHADES OF GREY.

PRIDE OF PREJUDICE

          All moveables of wonder, from all parts,
          Are here--Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,
          The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,
          The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,
          Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,          
          The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,
          The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft
          Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,
          All out-o'-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,
          All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts
          Of man, his dulness, madness, and their feats
          All jumbled up together, to compose
          A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths
          Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill,
          Are vomiting, receiving on all sides,                
          Men, Women, three-years' Children, Babes in arms.
         ---William Wordsworth, THE PRELUDE, Book 7.


What Wordsworth scathingly calls a "Parliament of Monsters" (including an "Invisible Girl" who apparently appeared long before H.G. Wells' "Invisible Man") was nothing more than the many attractions of the St. Bartholomew Fair in London.  Yet clearly to Wordsworth these "freaks of nature" signify something more. He's greatly affronted by the base appeal to the sensation-loving audience, to their love of "far-fetched, perverted things."  Although the archaic myth-figure of Prometheus often carried favorable connotations in Wordsworth's era, this poet is surely conferring no approval in speaking of such sights as "Promethean thoughts."  I would hazard that his invocation of the famous Titan is meant to suggest rebellion against the proper order of things, as also seen in the subtitle of a more famous work from the same era: FRANKENSTEIN, OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS.

Wordsworth was by no means original in decrying base appeals to sensationalism.  Socrates, insofar as he spoke through Plato's REPUBLIC, endorsed the state control of poetry, because it could set bad examples for youth.  Much of the history of literary criticism has been the history of validating "good literature" over "bad literature," with the implication that bad literature wasn't just formally bad, but existed as a snare and a trap for the unwary.

I am reminded of this salient fact by a particular excerpt from the post of comics-fan Synsidar, which I previously reprinted in OFF THE BEAT AGAIN:

There’s little effort made to write superheroes as people in stories for children, because the children don’t need the realistic details.

This is yet another permutation of that comics-fandom phenomenon I've called the Pedagogical Paradigm.  I coined the term with Gary Groth in mind in this essay.

Groth said of Will Eisner (among other things):

Eisner refused to take the [superhero] genre trappings seriously -- which was about the only intelligent way to approach a strip that was designed to imitate the look of comic books, which were at best semi-literate, yet appeal to the adult readership of newspapers.

I replied in part:

The Grothian superiority dance here also evokes the adult/juvenile distinction. Groth makes the assumption that Eisner's SPIRIT feature was superior because it (unlike all or most superhero strips in the juvenile-oriented comic books) chose to appeal to adults.
 

Of course not every individual who subscribes to the Pedagogical Paradigm follows it in the same manner.  Groth has said on many occasions that he regards the superhero genre as inherently for kids; that's why he approved of Eisner treating the genre in semi-serious fashion.  In contrast, as I understand Synsidar's frequently-repeated arguments on THE BEAT, he's convinced that by writing "superheroes as people"-- that is, with "realistic details"-- could garner an adult audience beyond the one that exists today.

On this issue, given that I've repeatedly expressed my view that the DM audience already comprises such an audience for "adult pulp" in the form of sueprheroes, I'm closer to Synsidar than to Groth, though both of them seem to be on a similar page as far as unilaterally condemning what's currently produced for the DM. Yet while the two writers are far apart on the Matter of the Superhero, they are alike in thinking that there's some intellectual "upgrade" that can be made to superheroes to make them intellectually respectable-- "realistic details" for Synsidar, an "unserious" approach to "genre trappings" for Groth.

At base, the two have in common a particular kind of "pride": a pride in one's own ability to discern what aspects of literature are best-- aspects which are almost always oriented upon some intellect-based comprehension of some given subject matter.  It could be argued that in so doing those guilty of this form of "pride" are guilty of Kant's pronouncement upon Leibniz, that of "intellectualizing phenomena."

I understand the appeal of this pride; I've felt it myself.  But I also take pride in my ability to see the many-faceted appeals of sensationalism in both genre-fiction and canonical literature.  The best writers do not, in my opinion, simply turn up their noses at sensation as do Groth and the poet Wordsworth.  They harness the power of the "Parliament of Monsters," without prejudice against the role it plays in their work.

OUTCAST OF THE COMICS-ISLANDS PT 1

In previous essays I've applied the concept of "socialization" to some of the critics with whom I disagree, using the following definition:

a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position.

Now, because I've applied that concept to those I consider bad critics, does that mean that it's inapplicable to good critics? Or even to my favorite critic, who is (inevitably) myself?

Of course, it's entirely applicable. Socialization values stem from ideology, and as Northrop Frye (among others) has noted, ideology arises from any nexus of needs and priorities. In my recent arguments with Charles Reece I called his position "ideological" and he returned the designation.  Naturally each of us will consider that our personal ideologies are as a mote in our respective eyes, while the opponent's walking around with the proverbial beam sticking out.

The distinction I have made between us (with which I also don't expect Reece to agree) is that it makes a difference as to whether one considers ideology a primary orientation in itself, or whether it is secondary to the aforesaid nexus, which may be regarded as coterminous with "myth," or at least "mythicity." I've addressed this distinction at length elsewhere and won't explore it further here.

So, yes, when I advocate Camille Paglia's ethical cleavage between art and reality, it's a given that I would like to "socialize" others into accepting as significant some of the conclusions I've made, or have extrapolated from those of other writers.  It's probable that even if this took place, I would not be aware of the extent of any effect I had.  In any case, nothing separates me from bad critics Kelly Thompson and Chicken Colin in terms of the *desire* to have such an effect.  They do have, however, somewhat more of a "network" than I do, though in fairness quite a few respondents to Thompson's "No, It's Not Equal" essay disagreed with her assertions.

One of the cardinal aspects of my critical work is the assertion, based roughly on Jungian hermeneutics, that the experience of life begins with the infant's first sensations in the womb, and that everything else is built upon that bedrock-- though not after the fashion that the empiricists would argue.  Similarly, art is built upon a sensational foundation, though with the caveat that everything in art is a "gesture" in the Langerian sense-- an attempt to capture experience which is necessarily less immediate than experience.

To that end, I devoted a good many essays on Sequart to the topic of "adult pulp." I did so because I considered that much of the online comics-criticism still tended to regard the sensational elements of the medium as the opposite of what was considered "good art." Thanks to this demonstrably false belief, most "artcomics" rhetoric has been devoted to assailing the DM-dominant genre of the superhero, though it's axiomatic that if horror or westerns were dominant, those genres would be assailed in the same manner.

To say the least, the "network" of Sequart readers didn't get the significance of the "adult pulp" conception.This could be put down to my expression of the concept, though I saw no indications of any willingness to deal with these matters in anything but the ideological terms of the ultraliberal mindset. Chicken Colin remains the reductio ad absurdum of this lack of understanding, as in the section of his essay where he complains that I have not used the socially-approved terms like "gender" and "obectification" in my discussion of the Thompson essay:

instead of “sexism”, we appear to have “sensationalism”, and so on.

Whatever my failings as a writer, its clear to me that no one-- not Leslie Feidler, not Georges Bataille-- could have penetrated this sort of thick fog of know-nothingness  "Duh, a'course 'sexism' don't got nuthin' to do with sensations, George.  Now tell me about dah bourgeoise rabbits, George."

I confess that it's indulgent of me to keep attacking the Chicken. Gary Groth once complained that he hated to think that Harlan Ellison had become his "arch-enemy" (I paraphrase), since Groth did not consider Ellison worthy of that honor.  To each his own, but I'd love to have Ellison for an enemy.  Whatever his faults as an arch-enemy, at least he wouldn't be chickenshit.

More to come in part 2.