COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 6

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

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

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

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

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

FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2

 I first used the terms "formal postulate" and "informal postulate" here, but I've devoted many earlier posts to sussing out which aspects of  a story appeal to the intellect, which to the imagination, and which to a combination of both abstract "vertical values."

But as I want to try out the new terms on something, it's time to break down some examples in terms of the didactic and/or the mythopoeic potentiality.

The famous EC Comics story "Judgment Day" (WEIRD FANTASY #18, 1953) is my selection of a story that appeals only to the didactic potentiality, and thus is a pure formal postulate. Symbol-hunters like myself would search in vain throughout Al Feldstein's story for any of the symbolic discourses familiar in prose science fiction-- discourses about whether robots can take on a wide variety of human traits, or man's quest to conquer the cosmos. Feldstein subordinates everything in this one-story universe to making one pedagogical point: that even in the far future, the scourge of bigotry will still exist, improbably incarnated in artificial beings-- despite the intimation that actual humans have overcome bigotry, which is the point of showing the galactic inspector to a Black man.

Since this essay-series started with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the reader will notice that it's no coincidence that I'm going to pick particular stories by each to illustrate two other types of vertical value.

I mentioned that some stories combine the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities, and this combination appears in the Stan Lee-John Buscema story "Origin of the Silver Surfer." For this story, Lee-- almost certainly the dominantly creative member of the team-- sought to give the character more humanity than the "science fiction angel" in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR, who was essentially beyond commonplace humanity. Lee's new origin not only posited that the  Surfer had once been a mortal alien humanoid, Norrin Radd, but also that he hailed from Zenn-La, a civilization that had advanced so far that it held no challenges for one as restless as the future hero. This new element had a didactic purpose-- beware of becoming too coddled by advanced technology-- but there's a mythopoeic quality to Norrin's discontent as well. He's seen as a throwback to a more venturesome era, one who would be more suited to Zenn-La's frontier era. In other words, the Silver Surfer was just a "space cowboy."

Then Galactus comes calling, making a mockery of Zenn-La's defenses as the gigantic alien prepares to devour Norrin Radd's homeworld. Here Lee follows through on the loose God the Father/Jesus the Son opposition that arguably appeared in the Galactus Trilogy. But this time the Surfer is not an inhuman angel sacrificing himself for Earth-humanity; he's a mortal sacrificing his freedom to save his own world. So he's a cosmic Christ-cowboy, but significantly, this mythopoeisis still carries a didactic message. As the Surfer bids his beloved farewell before beginning his servitude to Galactus, he tells her. "Let not the spirit of our ancestors be lost a second time! Let not our people grow soft and indolent!" Norrin Radd gets his earlier wish, to emulate the ways of Zenn-La's early explorers, for now he can range the entire universe in his quest to find non-inhabited worlds for his master. Even the Surfer's estrangement from his girlfriend resembles the sacrifice of similar pleasures by heroes in Western films, in order that they may serve a greater cultural cause. So "Origin's" vertical values include a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates, though in this case I find that the mythopoeic postulate predominates.

Lee's story-- which may be the finest single story he ever wrote without input from "The Other Big Two"-- was the beginning of a series, but for my selection from Kirby, I choose a conclusion, the end of the NEW GODS series, issue #11, which bears the curious title, "Darkseid and Sons." Some fans speculate that prior to scripting this story, Kirby had been told the axe was about to fall upon the majority of the Fourth World. Thus he had but one issue to present some rough thematic conclusion to his series, while leaving the door open for a follow-up. An earlier issue had established Kalibak, son of Darkseid, had been captured by humans following Kalibak's inconclusive battle with his frequent rival, the heroic Orion. So Kirby chooses to match the two powerhouses against one another for his NEW GODS finale.

In early NEW GODS issues, Kirby had dropped broad hints that Orion might bear some shadowy relationship to Darkseid, Lord of Apokolips, and then he let fall the other shoe in NEW GODS #7. That story explicitly stated that Orion, Darkseid's son, was raised on New Genesis from perhaps age five onward, while Highfather's son Scott Free was raised on Apokolips, in an exchange one might call "hostage-fosterage." So it's a little anti-climactic when Darkseid makes a reference to Orion and Kalibak having fought as "children," though apparently neither warrior remembers growing up alongside the other. During Orion's battle, he more or less guesses that he and Kalibak are brothers. Kalibak himself has apparently never told of his parentage, but even the basic idea inflames him with nascent sibling rivalry.

The title actually gives the game away: the final revelation is not that either sibling, but that of Darkseid's own history. NEW GODS #7 also introduced the reader to both Heggra, Darkseid's mother, and Tigra his wife, also Orion's mother. There's no didactic point to this revelation, but there's a very big mythopoeic quality evoked by Kirby. Darkseid he complains that his two sons "darken my future as surely as their maternal forbears ruled my past! My mother, Queen Heggra! Orion's mother, Tigra! And the sorceress Suli!" It's not just an instance of misspeaking for him to include Heggra, who was obviously not mother to either of Darkseid's sons. Symbolically, he's including himself alongside his sons as having been "hag-ridden" (or "Heggra-ridden?") by powerful women. He wanted Suli, who possibly complemented Darkseid's own evil by spawning the brutish Kalibak. But Tigra, the choice of Darkseid's mother Heggra, unleashed from the seed of Darkseid's loins a force for good, a son capable of opposing his father rather than serving him. The story strongly suggests that Darkseid comes to admire the son who fights him, even though he retaliated for Heggra's murder of Suli by an act of indirect matricide. 

Kirby got one final chance at a sequel to NEW GODS in the graphic novel HUNGER DOGS in 1985, but he didn't bring up this maternal trope again. Did the artist, who was at least lightly conversant with some of the famous plays of Shakespeare and the Greeks, just happen upon the same trope so frequently evoked by Greek playwrights, in which stalwart heroes are undone by conniving females like Medea, Electra, and Clytemnestra? I think he incorporated the maternal motif into NEW GODS because he understood its dramatic appeal, at least on an instinctive, mythopeoic level. But because he doesn't have a didactic point to make with these revelations, "Darkseid and Sons" can only be what I term an "informal postulate," because there's no attempt to subject the correlation to intellectual cogitation.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE INFERIORS" (WEIRD SCIENCE FANTASY #28, 1955)

Possibly the most iconic story to spring from EC's science fiction line was the 1953 "Judgment Day." "Day" was one of publisher Gaines' many "social message" stories, and has remained celebrated today, partly because of the behind-the-scenes drama about publisher Gaines's conflicts with the Code regarding the story. However, though Joe Orlando's art is impressive, Al Feldstein's script is a routine allegory about race-relations, using two differently-hued robots to perpetuate the conflicts of Earth ethnicities.

I've been surprised, however, to see very little online criticism of "The Inferiors," a Feldstein-Wally Wood story which conveys a similar club-the-reader-over-the-head message, yet actually grounds the morality in a deeper level of symbolism.

On the first page, the story's title seems to apply to a mysterious race of vanished aliens. Exploratory forces from planet Earth have found the ruins of the unnamed aliens' culture on many planets, but there remain no clues as to why these beings committed what one authority calls "race suicide." 

Functionally there are only two characters in the story: "spit-and-polish" young lieutenant Robert Saunders and his unnamed captain, whose baldness connotes greater age and experience. Both serve on a spaceship that has discovered another Earth-type world, but the monotony of the frequent discoveries causes one low-ranking space-navy soldier to remark, "Who cares why a bunch of hairy goons with tails committed suicide, anyway?" Lt. Saunders upbraids the underling, but in his conversation with his commander, it's evident that Saunders shares the opinion that the scientific advancement of the "hairy goons" doesn't matter, for they clearly were cowards who couldn't face life's demands, as Earth-people can. The captain is not quite as sure about things as his junior officer, and even admits to a little fear himself, when their expedition comes across one edifice that seems undamaged by the forces unleashed by the mass suicides.

Since "Inferiors" is only an eight-page story, it will surprise no reader to find that the Earthmen uncover the answer to their mystery on this planet, thanks to a recording in the form of a "three dimensional projection," wherein one of the aliens gives a lecture about the fate his people plan to undergo. Thanks to the use of an "automatic translator," the humans can listen to one of the "hairy goons" explain things-- though the captain first listens to the recording alone.

Later, having built the requisite suspense, the captain allows Saunders to hear the translated recording as well. Saunders, a confirmed xenophone, remarks on how "nauseating" the image of the alien is, though Wood draws it as a bipedal lizard-creature with a tail and none of the hair Feldstein's script specifies. Saunders also can't help expressing contempt once again for the aliens' cowardice: "and these are the things some people thought were superior to man!"

Naturally, this being an EC story, "Inferiors" has a "gotcha" ending. The recording reveals that the widespread lizard-people, having endured in peace for centuries, suddenly became aware that some of their people were using violence against one another. The aliens concluded that their race has evolved as much as was possible, and that now it is doomed to devolving into mere beasts. Almost all of the aliens choose mass suicide through the use of their advanced technology, except for a small contingent of creatures who don't care about their "moral decay," wanting only to live at all costs. The aliens use brain-draining machines to erase the mentalities of the decayed lizard-people, and allow them to survive as "brainless hulks" on an obscure planet. Saunders continues to heap scorn on the "hairy goons" until the alien lecturer just happens to add a warning to any listeners: showing what they think their decayed relations will turn out like. Surprise, surprise, the hairy goons with tails are the fathers of Man.

Like "Judgment Day," "The Inferiors" is all about shattering any illusions the readership may have about the innate superiority of their culture. However, even though the "Inferiors" ending was hoary even back in the 1950s-- "And the name of the planet was EARTH!"-- Feldstein's story is grounded in the twentieth century's intellectual debates over evolution. Since the Earthmen never say anything about their own evolution from lower creatures, the broad implication is that a terminally upright type like Saunders sees his entire race as having been given the Keys to Creation from the get-go, which approximates the position of the religonists who viewed human beings as separate from Darwin's apes. Or perhaps one should say "monkeys," since Darwin's theory was so often parodied by association not with the tail-less apes, but with the various tailed species of monkeys-- hence, the "Scopes Monkey Trial," not "Ape Trial." Artist Wally Wood didn't really translate Feldstein's scripted image of the Great Wise Race as "hairy goons with tails," but this is probably fortunate, since making them look in any way like primates would have given the game away too early. By using reptilian aliens, Wood and Feldstein also conjure, however briefly, with the associations of serpents and wisdom. This proves more than a little appropriate to the story, which rewrites the Garden of Eden, the foundation of man's special destiny, into a bucolic forest where a bunch of brainless, bipedal rejects got dumped.

MYTHCOMICS: "DADDY LOST HIS HEAD" (VAULT OF HORROR #19, 1951)

In one of my old articles I don't wish to look up right now, I cited EC's 1953 story "Foul Play" as a mythic story, purely because of its imaginative-- if extremely improbable-- gore-met conclusion. These days, though, I'd dismiss the tale as something of a one-trick pony, at least in symbolic terms.

These days I believe mythcomics ought to suggest a greater play with symbolism than many of the better-loved EC stories do, and thus I find that VAULT OF HORROR #19 yields one such story.

"Daddy Lost His Head" doesn't seem to have been one of the more lauded EC-tales, nor did it earn the opprobrium that Frederic Wertham devoted to similar stories in which nasty adults got their comeuppance. Possibly the story lacked a certain impact because a young child deals out the punishment in all innocence, rather than, say, plotting to do away with Mommy and Daddy. Yet, given that "Daddy" was created entirely by male authors in a mostly-male bullpen, it shows a certain pro-feminist outlook.

Kathy is a doe-eyed eight-year old whose real father is long deceased and whose sickly mother married what the opening caption calls a "mean old stepfather." Kathy is first seen weeping because her stepfather Martin Blackson had just given her a beating, though the story never directly depicts corporal violence.

In a rapid-fire exchange between Martin and his wife, he's given a motivation for his hatred of his stepchild: Kathy resembles her original father, and her presence constantly mocks Martin's status with his wife. "I know you never loved me-- that you only married me for security!" The sickly wife doesn't deny this state of affairs. Way to encourage his wrath against your daughter, Mom!

Fortunately the weakling wife isn't the only representation of femininity around. The Blacksons' next door neighbor is an elderly woman with the coy name of "Mrs. Thaumaturge" (Greek for "miracle worker.") Martin doesn't like his neighbor any more than he likes his wife or stepdaughter, and he's quick to accuse her of being a witch, if only to subject Kathy to greater psychological terror. Kathy is thus caught between being curious about the old woman and being scared that, as Martin says, "She'll bake you... in her oven..." Writer Al Feldstein probably didn't mean the reader to assume that Martin seriously believed that his neighbor was a witch. Still, the mean stepfather's evocation of the cannibal crone from "Hansel and Gretel" turns out to be the key to his undoing-- especially when one remembers that the crone of the old tale was also something of a kitchen-witch.

The mother has another attack of her unspecified illness, and passes from this world, leaving Kathy entirely in the hands of the man who hates her. But providentially Mrs. Thaumaturge reaches out to Kathy, and makes her a special doll, made out of some sort of candy, and given a slight resemblance to the mean stepfather. (The colorist makes it look like chocolate.) Because the lonely girl becomes engrossed in playing with her new toy, she fails to do her chores. Martin sends her to bed without supper-- and in so doing, sets himself up for his timely fate. Kathy is so hungry that she can't resist biting off her doll's hand-- at which point, Martin just happens to be using a wood-saw, and well--

And then comes the typical EC "just desserts"-- for once, using a real dessert.

I won't waste a lot of time with Freudian noodlings about the equivalence of beheadings and castrations, though I would venture that such equivalences were much in the cultural air around 1951. But I rather like the empowering wrap-up proffered by the Crypt-Keeper, where the ghoul tells the reader that Mrs. Thaumaturge adopted the girl, and is "giving Kathy flying lessons-- on a broom!"

Though there's some reference to fetish-doll magic here, there's no real metaphysical symbolism of any importance. But when you've got the psychological chutzhpah of a little girl biting off the head of her bad daddy-- who needs metaphysics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OBJECTS, GIVEN LUSTER

I've never asserted that it's unilaterally easy to identify the focal presence of a given story. I've stated before that I think Dracula is the focus of his eponymous novel. Yet I understand what an author like Marv Wolfman means when he states-- as he did in ALTER EGO #113-- that the human protagonists are the real stars of the book. I presume that Wolfman strove to write his renowned TOMB OF DRACULA along the same lines, emphasizing the vampire's various foes more than the vamp himself. Yet, though I respect this POV, I'd still argue that DRACULA is an "object-oriented" novel, in that the narrative is far more concerned with mapping out the villain's nature than any of the heroes. It's certainly possible to revise the Stoker narrative so that the revision focuses on one or more of the vampire-hunters, as with the 2004 film VAN HELSING. However, I wouldn't say that the TOMB OF DRACULA feature accomplishes this shift in emphasis.

One can scarcely argue against a narrative's "object-oriented" status, though, when that narrative's only viewpoint character is the abstracted mass of all humanity. Case in point: "The Destruction of the Earth," from EC Comics' WEIRD SCIENCE #14. "Earth" is one of many Al Feldstein stories of the period that preached against the destructive capabilities of hydrogen bomb technology.

The story begins in  a standard manner. A scientist named Holman meets with two government officials in Washington, trying to convince them not to execute a new hydrogen-bomb test. He shows them copious proofs to indicate that the bomb can trigger a chain reaction that will destroy the Earth. The politicians, concerned only with their own political advancement, ignore Holman's warnings and conduct the test. But Holman doesn't get to come back on stage for an "I told you so," nor does either politician get any chances at a mea culpa. Once the chain reaction begins on page five, the rest of the story is devoted to showing the spectacle of Earth's devastation and the extinction of humanity.

So, in such a story, what is the story's focal presence? The chain reaction? It causes chaos on a global scale, just as Rene Clair's THE CRAZY RAY causes all humanity to become frozen. But the story really isn't concerned with the abstractions of physics. The focus would seem to be the Earth itself, albeit in the status as a planet whose violent destruction illustrates mankind's hubris. Further, it doesn't stand in the relationship of "monster to victim," as Wonderland does to Alice. Rather, the Destroyed Earth itself is a victim, and therefore aligns more closely with the concept of the demihero.


Elsewhere I've written that it's almost impossible for a place to be a heroic entity, but the closest I've been able to find-- albeit without readily-available illustrations-- is a Gardner Fox story from STRANGE ADVENTURES #109 (1959), more easily found in reprint form in FROM BEYOND THE UNKNOWN #24 (1973) . Whereas the Feldstein story is rife with moral preachment, the Fox story-- "Secret of the Tick-Tock World"--  is an almost ludicrous example of the sort of "gimmick-oriented" story published by DC Comics in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

"Tick-Tock" is the second in a series called "Space Museum." Each story, to the best of my knowledge, began with a father and his young son visiting their local museum in a generic space-opera future. The boy would inquire about some relic, and the father would tell a stirring story associated with the relic.

In this case, the relic is a simple, regularly-ticking Earth-watch. (It will surprise no one that Fox did not anticipate the digital revolution.) The watch was worn by an Earth-astronaut as he departed home in a spaceship equipped with a faster-than-light drive. The astronaut makes it to another solar system, where he finds a succession of planets that reproduce exactly different time-periods that parallel those on the single planet Earth--an idea probably borrowed from E.R. Burroughs' Caspak trilogy, in which a prehistoric land reproduced different evolutionary eras within the same terrain.

Once the Earthman reaches a planet that approximates the Earth of his time, he descends to talk turkey with the natives. He learns that the planet is threatened by an energy-burst that has already destroyed other worlds in the system. The Earthman, showing boundless faith in exact historical parallelism, jumps to the conclusion that the same destructive phenomenon once menaced Earth, but some mysterious something kept said phenomenon from dooming Earth.

Without regurgitating the story in depth, the Earthman figures out that the "something" were Earth's watches, whose regular ticking somehow drove the destruction away. Therefore, on the Earthman's advice, the planet's population mass-produces Earth-style watches-- and so they transform their planet into a "tick-tock world" that banishes the evil energy-phenomenon.

From the viewpoint of verisimilitude. "Tick-Tock" is a very silly story. However, despite its overarching silliness, it is in one sense more deeply mythical than "Destruction of Earth." Fox knew a great deal about primitive traditions, and surely knew that in some cultures a mundane activity is given soteriological status-- a trope also seen in the mythic tale trope that declares that Nordic peoples should always be careful paring their nails, lest the toss-offs be used in constructing the doom-ship Naglfar.

Again, though one might argue that the Earth-astronaut plays an active role in the story, he really is not the story's focus. Its focus is the spectacle of an entire world resounding with titanic "tick-tock" sounds, by which planetary doom is averted. This trope loosely aligns the "Tick-Tock World" with the agon of the heroic figure, though I would hesitate to classify this particular focal presence as a "hero."