DITKO ON THE SPECTRUM OF SADISM PT. 2

 In PART 2, I cited one possible formula for all of fictional narrative, based largely on the radical of conflict:  

most if not all art requires the element of *transgression*-- simply expressed, that X wants Y but someone doesn't want X to have Y (where the "someone" might even be Y). 

This conflict doesn't always eventuate in fictional violence. But the first two important critics of the comic-book medium, Gershon Legman and Frederic Wertham, thought that, at least within the context of children's entertainment, fictional violence was always capable of poisoning the well of young minds, resulting in the unwanted syndromes of sadism or masochism. Though their ideals were not the same, Legman and Wertham favored the same sort of one-sided, hectoring arguments to prove they were right. Today, Legman is barely known to comics-critics, and Wertham is seen as a massively dishonest, though possibly well-meaning, fraudster. I may be the only person who's critiqued them in tandem within essays written for this century, emphasizing that neither of them seemed to know how to distinguish between syndromic and non-syndromic forms of sadism. In SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND I wrote:

"Casual sadism" as I conceive it is not a syndromic phenomenon. It is just one of many affects communicated by many forms of fiction generally and the adventure-genre specifically, and it refers here to the pleasure one takes in seeing a "villain" violently beaten by the hero. For that matter it can occur in any number of non-literary contexts, particularly those of adversarial sports. Legman and Wertham assumed, perhaps both of them were so phobic to any kind of fictional violence, that "casual sadism" could develop into the syndromic kind.

I'm also probably the only writer who ever gave either of them any credit for getting anything right in the midst of their overall wrongness. In the 2024 essay GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE, I mentioned how at age 10 I encountered a mention of Legman in this 1965 TIME essay, whose writer was enamored enough with Legman's 1949 book LOVE AND DEATH to quote a significant passage, part of which reads:

...in the identifications available in the comic strips—in the character of the Katzenjammer Kids, in the kewpie-doll character of Blondie—both father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated and degraded daily.

Now, suppose in that same year of 1965, there had been another young reader of that TIME essay, name of "John." Being also about ten, John would have been reading comic strips since he could read, including both BLONDIE and KATZENJAMMER KIDS, but he probably wouldn't have known anything about sadism or masochism. But John reads that passage, and though he doesn't give a squat about the Katzenjammers, John gets a bit of a buzz from the idea of hapless Dagwood being "degraded daily," in such a way that all the pains and humiliations he suffers, no matter their origins, are somehow ascribable to "the kewpie-doll character of Blondie." John isn't sure, because of Legman's vague language, as to exactly why the adult readers of Chic Young's domestic comic strip would find such fantasies attractive. But the broad implication would seem to be that something about seeing Dagwood forced to be The Eternal Goat must also give those adults such a buzz.

Now-- was John, or any of the millions of Americans who regularly watched the tortures of Dagwood, necessarily a syndromic sadist because he, or they, derived some sadistic or masochistic pleasure from seeing those tortures? Legman would have said so. I would say that one only becomes a syndromic fetishist of any kind because the subject continues to seek that particular pleasure over and over, rather than just getting the buzz from time to time when one encounters the stimulation in a "casual" fashion, without especially looking for it. This is the same "casual sadism" that moved Elizabethans to watch both "bear baiting" spectacles and Shakespearean dramas, because the cruelties of both were diverting, though not necessarily syndromic.

Now suppose that I read every Ditko comics-story in existence, and I found no sadistic/masochistic content in anything but in his collaborations with unquestionable fetishist Eric Stanton. That could prove that Ditko had no more than a casual creator's interest in the dynamics of sadomasochistic art. We don't seem to have any testimony from the reticent Ditko as to what he thought or felt about working with Stanton. However, Stanton did make a significant comment on general relationships of artists sharing the same studio.

PURE IMAGES: I've shared studios with different artists and you can't help but work on each other's stuff. You'll be there reacting with energy to their work, and in turn they get excited about the project.

STANTON: Yes, you have to. You'll be working in one train of thought and you don't even realize that there are other opportunities.

PURE IMAGES #1 (1990)

To slightly reiterate my point from the first essay, if Ditko were a syndromic sadist, I think we would have seen much more evidence of his inclinations in his rich career. I would expect to see something closer in spirit to the oeuvre of Tom Sutton, who produced both sadomasochistic art for the erotic comics market and edgy mainstream horror stories that dripped with perversity. But that's just how things look to me at a point when I've yet to read every story Steve Ditko ever produced.             

GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE

If I had a continuous run of the BLONDIE comic books, to say nothing of the strips, both would prove valuable in illuminating the interdependent mythos of male masochism and female sadism.-- MYTHCOMICS #2: BLONDIE #150 (1962)

Legman’s argument was that BLONDIE was important to American audiences because it showed an American housewife temporarily getting the better of her husband, though in theory she would always have to return to a condition of subservience. I have no way of knowing what BLONDIE strips Legman saw at the time he penned the essays in LOVE AND DEATH. Yet I tend to doubt that Young ever varied his act by much, so in all likelihood the only “subservience” Blondie ever suffered was having to cook Dagwood’s meals...-- SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICA PT. 2.

In an earlier essay today, I mentioned that as a kid reading newspaper comics in the 1960s I took notice as to how violent Chic Young's BLONDIE strip was. I also observed a concomitant level of mayhem in original comic-book stories of the time-- with almost all of the brutality aimed at Dagwood, the Goat of the World. Over fifty years later, I've continued to touch on the strip's unusual psychology on blog-pieces here, despite being fully aware that BLONDIE is far from one of the great comic strips. But I haven't had occasion to mention that I might have got a little help from the "devil" in my title, Gershon Legman.

In or near 1965, a family member, knowing that I liked the strip PEANUTS, gave me an issue of Time Magazine because it contained an uncredited article about Charles Schulz and his creation. Oddly enough, though nothing the author wrote about Schulz was all that illuminating, he decided to contrast the good-heartedness of PEANUTS with the darker manifestations of early comic strips, and with that in mind the writer quoted a passage from Legman's 1949 LOVE AND DEATH. From 1949 until his death in 1999, I don't believe Legman ever again turned his attention to comic books or strips, but the unbilled writer was evidently a fan of those 1949 observations.

Fun Without Flagellation. For the perennial critics of the comics, the new strips like Peanuts should come as a welcome relief. Taking the comics, in their own way, as seriously as Europeans, some Americans have castigated the funnies for offering a distorted, often brutalized view of life. In Love & Death, a brilliant indictment of the medium, Folklorist Gershon Legman writes: "Children are not allowed to fantasy themselves as actually revolting against authority—as actually killing their fathers. A literature frankly offering such fantasies would be outlawed overnight. But in the identifications available in the comic strips—in the character of the Katzenjammer Kids, in the kewpie-doll character of Blondie—both father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated and degraded daily. Lulled by these halfway aggressions—that is to say, halfway to murder—the censorship demands only that in the final sequence Hans & Fritz must submit to flagellation for their 'naughtiness,' Blondie to the inferior position of being, after all, merely a wife."-- THE COMICS: GOOD GRIEF.

I won't dwell long on arguments that Legman himself tossed out in a willy-nilly fashion, but I want to establish that when he made these remarks, Legman was not stating that early comics like BLONDIE and KATZENJAMMER KIDS were what the Time author called "offering a distorted, often brutalized form of life." Since Legman was in those days at least a nominal Freudian, he would have found it inevitable that the adults reading the comic strips-- and Legman does explicitly state that the comic strips are aimed only at adults-- should project "fantasy attacks" on "real frustrations," the latter being the "hell of other people." Legman only goes into all this detail about Young's BLONDIE and Dirks' KIDS, which supposedly conclude by returning the adult reader to the status quo for one reason. Legman wants to contrast such "status quo" entertainments with the overweening sadistic content of children's comic books, which as far as he's concerned do NOT return the reader to the status quo of relative realism but allow the kids to indulge in "the Oedipean dream of strength."

Legman's argument is littered with dopey ad hominem arguments and logical inconsistencies, and his contrast of comic strips and comic books is nonsense. (Despite his having excoriated teen humor books in the same essay, he somehow managed not to notice how often such stories also returned their protagonists to the same "status quo" experienced by the Katzenjammer Kids.) 

I like to imagine that even the ten-year-old me would have perceived how nonsensical his argument about BLONDIE was, because in the actual Young strip Blondie was never subservient to Dagwood. After he got beat up by his boss or his neighbor, or even (very rarely) by Blondie herself, she would tend his wounds, but one could rationalize that this was necessary because Dagwood was the breadwinner. She was almost always the boss in the relationship, with only occasional exceptions where Dagwood got his way by yelling and stomping his feet. So Legman clearly did not read BLONDIE very closely. And yet, he did home in on the fact that Dagwood was "degraded daily," and I never forgot that he had shown me one hidden cultural aspect of what most readers dismissed as forgettable trash.   

Parenthetically, in the same article where he favors BLONDIE's relative realism over the unrestricted fantasy of the superheroes, Legman nevertheless conflates the two, stating, "[Wonder Woman] is straight Wunschprojektion for the envious female-- Blondie with a bullwhip..." In the next paragraph Legman claims that the Amazon "lynches her spate of criminals" (even though Wonder Woman's villains were rarely even slain, as was the case with many other comic book features) and that she "humiliates and big-sisters all the other males in the strip" (which overlooks the fact that the heroine was not indulging in humiliation for its own sake, but attempting to convert recalcitrant men to her doctrine of feminine "loving-kindness.") If anything, Blondie has far more claim to being in the mode of Sade than Wonder Woman and her lasso ever has had.

But still, I give Legman his due for having a good instinct-- once in a while.

MYTHCOMICS: ["RINGSIDE BLONDIE"] BLONDIE #169 (1963)

 

In my overview of Chic Young's BLONDIE comic strip series-- parts of which were sometimes reworked for newsstand comic books-- I took pains to emphasize that Young had a special talent for formulating certain repeated gags that took on almost folkloric status. I observed that most of these gags were articulated in the BLONDIE strip after 1933, when the feature changed its focus from "young rich guy pursuing flighty young girl" to "middle-class husband constantly suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous matrimony." However, one humor-trope appeared even in the pre-matrimonial years, and that was the trope I termed "the Peacemans and the Bickersons."

This trope isn't exclusive to married couples. One can find the Bard himself plowing that particular field with the two couples in 1599's MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, which follows the travails of two non-married couples are depicted. Hero and Leander fit the bill as "Peacemans," for under normal circumstances they appear to be entirely lovey-dovey. Benedick and Beatrice, though, are "the Bickersons," expressing their deep affection by sniping at each other. It's a fair assumption that for Elizabethan audiences, the Peacemans supplied an idealized vision of romantic love, but the Bickersons were the fun couple to watch, even though they only battled verbally.

This dynamic continued through most popular romantic comedies throughout the 20th century, with a secondary romantic couple being contentious with each other while the primary couple was depicted more "seriously." And as I also observed in the overview, Blondie and Dagwood were, on the face of things, "the Peacemans," because they weren't repeatedly shown fighting with one another, verbally or physically, while other couples filled the role of "the Bickersons." Further, one reason it wasn't necessary for Chic Young to focus on fights between Blondie and Dagwood was because Dagwood was constantly being tormented in one way or another by almost everyone he encountered. Young's infusion of frequent slapstick into the Bumsteads' middle-class world ensured that Dagwood was almost always the Goat. His endless sufferings-- mostly from sources outside the home, but occasionally also from Blondie, his kids or his pets-- were the source of the strip's successful humor.

That's what gives the strip I call "Ringside Blondie" the heft of a psychological myth; that of Chic Young expanding on the context of a familiar repeated gag by taking it in a relatively new direction. "Ringside" is almost certainly an earlier twelve-panel Sunday comic strip by Young, reworked for Harvey's publication in a comic book format, so I'm glad to have found an example of Young himself playing with his tropes, in contrast to the earlier BLONDIE mythcomic I examined here. 

In effect, "Ringside" gives Dagwood the chance to be the chance to be on the inside looking out, enjoying the spectacle of another male being tormented. In the first four panels, Blondie scolds Dagwood for openly watching a neighbor-couple, the Flizbys, having a "battle royale." Dagwood notices that Blondie herself peeks at the ongoing fracas before pulling down the window-shade, but she makes a lame excuse that doesn't fool the reader. She'll shortly show herself to be a hypocrite, for she takes just as much pleasure as Dagwood viewing someone else's marital troubles despite saying that it's wrong.

I'll note at this point that no one reading this strip would confuse any of these married martial battles with real spousal abuse. That's why, on the second page, Dagwood keeps remarking on how hard Mrs. Flizby is hitting her husband: "She must've taking boxing lessons when she was young." This sort of remark adds what Northrop Frye called "the protective wall of play," making clear that this is a comedic setup, in which no one is really harmed.

Anyway, Dagwood just goes back to scoping out the neighbors' fight. Once again, Blondie makes moralistic pronouncements while sneaking more than a peek this time. Dagwood acquires binoculars from his son Alexander and stations himself on a balcony to get a better look. Blondie shows up, scolds him again, but somehow ends up using the binocs herself. (Even Daisy the dog gets in on the scopophilia.) Then the pugilistic Mrs. Flizby shows up and sarcastically suggests that both nosy neighbors ought to come over and watch the fight close up. Blondie refuses, claiming she's "insulted," while Dagwood is only too happy to have a ringside seat, peacefully smoking a pipe as if he were watching a TV show. 

This is a rare departure for Chic Young in that Dagwood isn't the Goat for once, except in a very minor way: his son charges him for renting the binocs, and Dagwood accepts the condition. Blondie scolds Dagwood, but she's the main source of humor since she won't admit her nosiness as Dagwood does, and even pretends to be offended when she's correctly called out for her intrusive curiosity. Dagwood pays no real price for satisfying his curiosity, though the spectacle he gets to watch is still that of a male humiliation, as the beleaguered Mr. Flizby is clearly getting the worst of it. But in the more frequent altercations in which Herb Woodley or Mr. Dithers get clobbered by their termagant wives, sometimes the violence would spill over onto Dagwood-- but never, significantly, onto Blondie. This time Dagwood is as insulated from the violence as the readers of the comic strip. 

SOME BASICS OF BLONDIE

I'm entitling "some basics" rather than "The Basics" because I'm not writing a distanced, Wikipedia-style article about the comic strip/comic book BLONDIE, but about particular aspects of it that are relevant to my critical system. And if I weren't setting up a mythcomics-essay on the subject, I might not delve into all this ancient comics-history.

I'll start out by stating that I'm aware that even to younger comics-fans with some interest in the medium's history, BLONDIE isn't exactly a hot topic. For at least the past 20 years, the daily strip has been exceedingly dull, with gags as mediocre as the worst sitcoms. And I can't claim that the original run of creator Chic Young, from 1930 to 1973 (when Young passed away), made his most successful strip into any sort of major breakthrough in American humor.

BLONDIE's significance is that though Young wasn't doing anything transformative within his limited sphere of domestic comedy, he built up a trove of running jokes that, over time, illuminated some interesting aspects of American culture. He did so in contrast to newspaper strips that some critics would find superior in artistry, like Cliff Sterrett's POLLY AND HER PALS or Frank King's GASOLINE ALLEY. It wasn't that there was anything startlingly original about the couple dozen running gags that became associated with Young's BLONDIE in its heyday-- Dagwood crashes into the mailman on his way to work, Dagwood makes himself colossal sandwiches. It was that Young kept variations of these jokes running for so long that they assumed an almost folkloric status, a shorthand for the ordeals of married, middle-class life.

Yet for the first four years of the BLONDIE strip's existence-- collected in the hardbound book seen above-- the narrative barely touched on any of the tropes that made the later version of the strip world-renowned. 

Young broke into the world of syndicated comics in the 1920s. He specialized in what some have called "pretty girl strips." It may not be total coincidence that Young's first strip premiered in 1921, one year after the United States instituted universal suffrage-- though there had been many manifestations of the phenomenon of "The New Woman" during the previous twenty years. One of the most famous was that of "the flapper," usually seen as an independent young woman of means, and one who felt free to date men without making firm commitments. Some flappers were even known for adopting quasi-masculine fashion statements, like mannish clothes or bobbed hairstyles. This description seems appropriate to Young's third pretty-girl strip, DUMB DORA, which was his greatest success up to that point. Young used the relative success of DORA to launch BLONDIE, of which he had some if not total ownership. 

BLONDIE began in September 1930. In some ways it was much like DORA, being dependent on gags in which the female protagonist would stun her listeners with some display of quixotic feminine logic. However, the above collection notes in its intro that Young expressly distanced his new heroine Blondie from the earlier flappers by making her more hyper-feminine in her attire. His most constant beau was also introduced in the first strip: Dagwood, an empty-headed young heir to a wealthy family. The two were passionately in love but their marriage was opposed by Dagwood's rich parents, who deemed Blondie a gold digger.

For four years the strip followed this rather tepid pattern, without becoming more than a modest success. I surveyed all of the daily strips collected in the cited tome, and less than twenty of the nine hundred or so entries ended with any sort of slapstick, in contrast to the dominant pattern of verbal jokes.

One of the few interesting exceptions-- for which I have no illustrations-- was a pair of strips from June 19 and 20, 1931. In these strips, Blondie and Dagwood are considering how they will survive on a limited income if they marry. So, executing a trope I'll call "the Peacemans vs. the Bickersons," they seek out other couples, only to find all of them violently quarreling with one another. The first strip shows a married couple arguing about money in front of the young lovers, and as the latter couple leave, the reader sees the husband getting clubbed by his wife. The second strip shows two more encounters in which the couples are verbally arguing all the time. Blondie tells Dagwood that not all married people fight, and she uses Dagwood's own parents as an example of marital bliss. Naturally, the young lovers then walk in on a scene in which the elder Mrs. Bumstead is threatening to crown her hubby with a vase, while he's haplessly climbing a curtain to get away from her. This "Peacemans vs. Bickersons" trope would be one Young returned to again and again. On the face of things, Blondie and Dagwood were "Peacemans" who did not physically fight each other, while others-- their neighbors the Woodleys, and Dagwood's boss and his wife-- were "Bickersons" constantly having violent quarrels, usually with the wife hitting her husband with vases or other bludgeons. More on this trope in my mythcomic-post.

In 1933, Young was encouraged by his syndicate editor to make over the strip into a middle-class marriage strip, jettisoning the whole format of "young rich guy dating a lower-class girl." Dagwood's parents disinherited him and never to my knowledge appeared again, even in comic book originals not produced by Young. And as others before me have observed, Blondie morphed away from an air-headed young woman. She became a sensible homemaker, able to manage a household of kids and dogs-- though she still showed some of her old frivolousness in yet another repeated joke-trope: constantly spending Dagwood's hard-earned money on new apparel. 

Dagwood, who wasn't the brightest bulb to begin with, became the Goat of the World. This was one of the psychologically significant tropes that I believe made BLONDIE widely popular in many countries: the trope of the wage-earning male as the constant target of abuse from everyone. When he wasn't under physical attack by his most familiar nemeses-- neighbor Herb Woodley and boss Julius Dithers-- he was frequently assaulted by total strangers. As I pointed out above, slapstick was rarely a big feature of the first four years of the strip, and there wasn't even a lot of verbal humiliation for Dagwood in particular,

Amusingly, when Blondie and Dagwood did marry, the wedding sequence contained the following humiliation for Dagwood:

However, a few strips later-- for which I have no illustration-- is even more apposite. Immediately after the wedding vows, Blondie warns Dagwood that they ought not to leave the church through the front door, as well-wishers will pelt them with rice and old shoes. Dagwood scoffs at this warning and opens the front door, only to get hit in the face with a thrown shoe. I don't imagine Chic Young immediately shifted into slapstick gags right away, and even in the BLONDIE in the 1960s-- the period with which I grew up-- there was never a total absence of verbal humor, wherein Blondie would confound Dagwood with feminine anti-logic. But the BLONDIE comic books-- which included both original stories and reworkings of comic strips-- are replete with images of Dagwood's physical torments. For instance:

Even when I was reading BLONDIE as a kid, I didn't think it was an exceptional strip. But I was impressed by the intensity of the slapstick violence in the series, whether the violence resulted from Dagwood doing stupid things or other people putting him in dangerous situations. In contrast to fans who represent BLONDIE as being a success for depicting the stalwart love between the titular wife and her spouse, I think that the strip retained its popularity for most of its history because it allowed its audience to dally in "sadism of the casual kind."

But that's a separate essay in itself.

DOMME COMS

Regarding my new term in the title, it came about when I encountered TV Tropes using the abbreviation "Dom Com" as shorthand for "domestic comedy." I've been aware of the term "domestic comedy" since I first began reading about fictional genres, and everyone's heard the term "Rom Com" that became popular in the 1990s. But when I read "Dom Com," I responded with my own "Domme Com."

Now, there are a lot of serial comedies in which two or more characters contend in small ways but end up making up, like the classic I LOVE LUCY. This is the basic aesthetic of what I've called the "accomodation narrative." But any comedy, self-contained or serial, that emphasizes an ongoing imbalance of power would broadly qualify as a Domme Com. I'll concentrate here on heterosexual entanglements, though I'll touch briefly on other possible combinations.

(1) The primary type that I've examined here I'll call "The Delectable Domme." Such stories feature a female Domme constantly exerting her power over a male Subbe (a spelling I'll toss in to distinguish the term in my mind from my other use of "Sub.") Examples I've covered over the years include, with assorted variations, include URUSEI YATSURA, RANMA 1/2, NISEKOI, and NAGATORO. Usually these are one-on-one encounters, though various support characters may irregularly torment the male protagonist to provide variety.

(2) A second type, "The Deflected Domme," forswears any power-imbalance between the two main hetero characters, but one or more support-characters exert power over one of the main ones. Said support-characters are not necessarily limited to being of a gender opposite to that of the Subbe. For instance, relations between Darrin and Samantha on BEWITCHED are usually pacific and balanced. But many of Samantha's witchy relations intrude on the couple's marital bliss to torment Darrin, usually with minor, annoying transformations. In keeping with countless mother-in-law jokes, Endora is the main Domme, but it may be no coincidence that Samantha's lookalike cousin Serena is the next most frequent female tormentor. Yet Darrin also frequently gets "subbe-jected" to humiliation by his father-in-law and by Endora's brother Arthur, so male Dommes are seen there as well.

(3) I'll term the third type "The World is His Domme," in that there's a Subbe character who's constantly the butt of torments from nearly everyone, male and female, with whom he comes in contact. In the teleseries ABBOTT AND COSTELLO, Costello's character is sometimes given bad treatment by Abbott. But Abbott is in no way Costello's main tormentor; he's just one of many, male and female.

(4) Finally, I'll term the fourth type "Queen of the Tormenting World," because the Subbe suffers from any number of diverse torments from separate sources, like the Costello character-- but the Subbe suffers all these torments largely because he's become tied to a Domme female. The comic strip BLONDIE, which I'll be examining in future essays, is one where husband Dagwood has become the target of everyone in his circle-- neighbors, bosses, cops, pesky salesmen-- specifically because he's married to a dominant spouse. Blondie, for her part, sometimes appears to be an accommodating spouse like Samantha Stevens. But close examination shows that on a semi-regular basis Blondie exerts power over Dagwood, either overtly bullying him in one way or another or humiliating him with acts of "innocent sadism." (Example: Blondie moves a ladder while Dagwood's working on the roof of their house; after Dagwood falls to the ground, Blondie seems unaware of having wrought harm.) 

A second "Queen" example I've often discussed here is MARRIED WITH CHILDREN. In this show Peg Bundy barely makes any bones about tormenting husband Al. Al, unlike Dagwood, responds with insults, but his impotent responses merely underline that he's just as much under Peg's thumb as Dagwood is under Blondie's. MARRIED offers an unusual variation in that the husband-wife couple is mirrored by the relationship of their teenaged kids. Bud, in contrast to the Al-Peg dynamic, occasionally does manage to degrade Kelly because she unlike her mother is stupid. Nevertheless, the majority of their battles validate Kelly, if only because of her dumb luck, so it's pretty obvious that the sibling relationship was designed to mirror that of the married couple.

Next up: Chic Young's not-so-innocent sadist.

SOCIAL JUSTICE VS. SADISTIC EROTICA PT. 2

In the essay SADISM OF THE CASUALKIND, I pointed out that writers like Legman and Wertham viewed every apparent act of fictional sadism to be deeply revelatory of how messed up the audiences were. In this the two authors followed the example of Sigmund Freud, who, despite his disavowals to the contrary, hardly ever met a cigar he didn’t deem a phallic symbol.

I’ve pointed out various salient differences between Wertham and Legman, but historically they’re on the same page insofar as both men believed that American popular entertainment offered far too much sex and violence for a healthy culture. At times both authors slanted their arguments to apply to the effects of such unwholesome diversions upon children, but both also caviled at the effects of bad books and movies on adults as well. Neither of them seemed capable of imagining that for the majority of consumers, the depiction of excessive sex and violence, even those configured into sadistic actions, provided little more than “casual” entertainment, temporary respite from the dull round of the workaday world.

Instead, for these worthies, everything in popular entertainment—the muscles of comic book superheroes, the “bitch-heroines” of paperback thrillers—denoted something deep and syndromic in American culture. Wertham in particular expressed the belief that children could be bent into deviance as easily as the proverbial twig, as if psychological syndromes sprang out of some “monkey see, monkey do” impulse. By saying this, I don’t deny that some individuals may have psychological syndromes that are brought to the fore by their encounters with various types of art. But this phenomenon certainly isn’t confined to encounters with popular entertainment. One of the most famous syndromic avatars of literary sadism was the Eton-educated Algernon Charles Swinburne, who didn’t need crime novels (or crime comic books) to write such odes to sadistic women as “Anactoria” and “Faustine.”

I should further note in some cases an author may repeatedly use transgressive materials not because they express some syndromic aspect of the author’s psychology, but simply as an avenue of captivating a large audience. Though I considered most of Gershon Legman’s identifications of sadistic entertainments to be fatuous, I agreed with him to some extent regarding Chic Young’s newspaper comic BLONDIE. Still, when I read a collection of the original BLONDIE strips from 1930, I found barely any such sadisterotic motifs there. The early strips are all over the place, even writing Dagwood out of the story for a time. The feature didn’t enjoy sustained success until Blondie became a hausfrau and Dagwood a harried victim of the middle-class rat-race. This suggests to me that Young may have happened on his formula — “torture the husband”—by sheer accident, and that he and others who followed the formula did so simply to make a buck. I would not even argue that a syndromic consciousness was behind the one BLONDIE episode that I’ve thus far identified as mythically concrescent, a two-page comic book story signed (but probably not produced) by Young.

Legman’s argument was that BLONDIE was important to American audiences because it showed an American housewife temporarily getting the better of her husband, though in theory she would always have to return to a condition of subservience. I have no way of knowing what BLONDIE strips Legman saw at the time he penned the essays in LOVE AND DEATH. Yet I tend to doubt that Young ever varied his act by much, so in all likelihood the only “subservience” Blondie ever suffered was having to cook Dagwood’s meals—though, as I showed in the analysis of “Shaved and Clipped,” she seems to have no problems telling him that she can cut off his meals any time she pleases.

I’ve also differed with Legman on the sadistic content of teen humor comics, for reasons I detailed in the BLONDIE essay and won’t repeat here. But because Legman made the assertion, I have at times sought to test his hypothesis, perhaps more rigorously than he did—as I will show in the ensuing “near myth” essay.

HOW TO HANDLE A TOXIC MALE

I already trashed DICK GRAYSON VS. TOXIC MASCULINITY in this essay,  but thought I ought to examine this particular absurdity in greater depth:

Even as Dick aged out of the Robin role, these elements remained: youth, feminization, subtextual queerness and campiness, passivity in romantic relationships. 

Author Plummer is by no means unusual in pursuing the idea that male characters can be "feminized" by being threatened (he calls Robin a "damsel in distress"), by being inferior to a stronger woman (Robin's relationship to super-powered girlfriend Starfire), or even by being killed. I'm not sure when this trope became popular, but I would assume it grew with the proliferation of "queer studies." While I myself have devoted no small amount of time to analyzing the overlaps between the fictional phenomena of sex and of violence, devotees of queer studies play a one-sided game. They don't mind seeing the image of masculinity torn down, but what happens when feminine characters are subjected to humiliation, violence, and death? Are any of these characters "feminized," or are they just--

WOMEN IN REFRIGERATORS????

Since Kraft-Ebing codified the phenomena of sadism and masochism in the late 1800s, it's been impossible to doubt that certain men and women have mentally translated violence-- whether real or imagined-- into sexual stimulation. What modern ideologues want, however, is not a careful consideration of the ways both men and women think and feel. They want to find ways to ennoble marginalized women by placing them outside the bounds of violence, while degrading that horror of horrors, the straight white male, by "feminizing" him.

Those titans of tedium, Gershom Legman and Frederic Wertham, represent early attitudes of the "Freudian Marxist" to the threat of the macho male, whose epitome was that of the costumed superhero. Even though organized fascism had been defeated on the stage of world affairs by the time both men wrote their respective screeds, both men evinced extreme fear that Neo-Nazis lurked behind every fictional depiction of violence. Yet the closest that either one came to suggesting a feminized male appears in Legman's LOVE AND DEATH. The author suggested that in comic strips like BLONDIE and THE KATZENJAMMER KIDS, "father and husband can be thoroughly beaten up, harassed, humiliated, and degraded daily." However, I don't think he was suggesting that this was a way of "queering" the paternal targets of this degradation. It was simply a means of allowing female and juvenile readers of the strips to indulge in fantasies of hostility. It's a limited rebellion, though, since Legman specifies that paternal authority will remain despite these escapist notions-- which just shows that he didn't read BLONDIE very carefully. While "the Captain," the main male antagonist of "the Kids," usually re-asserted his power by paddling the Kids' butts, Dagwood is rarely if ever able to reclaim any dignity, especially not against his quietly domineering wife.

Finally, I find it odd that Plummer is arguing that queerness should be associated with passivity.
I think most gays would find that rather offensive, not to mention impractical, as it would force them all to be "bottoms with no tops."

MYTHCOMICS: [THE ORIGIN OF BATMAN], DETECTIVE COMICS #33 (1939)

I remarked in THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH PT. 1 that the shortest comics-story in which I've found mythic content was this 1962 BLONDIE comic-book story.  For one reason or another, though, it occurred to me that there were a couple of much better examples of two-page wonders. And here's the first of them.

I noted in LONG AND SHORT that most features this short are more in the nature of "vignettes" than of developed stories, saying that "even when [such narratives] do possess super-functionality, it's used for very restricted purposes." However, whereas the Blondie two-pager is the essence of what I've called an "unpopular myth," this two-pager-- which leads into a Gardner Fox story but which has been sometimes been credited to Bill Finger-- has become a very popular myth in many iterations, in many media-- and this despite the vignette's probable indebtedness to Lee Falk's PHANTOM comic strip.

Clearly the Batman origin satisfies my demand that even in two pages the author must create enough elements of Aristotelian complication to make possible a mythic discourse. I'm not quite sure from the PHANTOM excerpt that it does so, since I haven't seen the sequence in context. The maybe-Finger narrative, however, presents the (originally juvenile) reader with a more dynamic opening that Falk's Phantom origin. Young Bruce Wayne actually witnesses the deaths of his parents, whereas the current Phantom only knows from hearsay how his ancestor suffered and thus bequeathed the role of the "Ghost Who Walks" to his descendants. Young Bruce's torment then becomes the fulcrum, the "middle" of the narrative, in which Bruce struggles to make sense of his parents' deaths by dedicating himself to crimefighting. The climax, in which a grown-up Wayne muses on the alleged "superstitious" nature of criminals, may be the primary element that the author derived from Falk, for the Phantom's undying nature is clearly an appeal to the superstitions of tribal peoples in the hero's jungle domain.

In theory, this vignette could have functioned as part of a superior myth-tale, much as Frank Miller's re-interpretation of the Bat-origin functioned within the greater scope of THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS narrative. However, this was not the case with the greater story that is preceded by the origin-vignette. I've established that Fox wrote some strong mythopoeic Bat-tales during this period, one of which, "Peril in Paris," appeared one month after Batman's origin. But the lead story of DETECTIVE #33-- the hero's seventh appearance, titled "The Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom"-- is not one of the character's more notable outings. To the best of my knowledge no one has ever bothered to revive the villains behind the deadly dirigible-- Doctor Carl Kruger and his "Scarlet Horde"-- and Kruger's main schtick was to imitate the conquering ways of Napoleon Bonaparte with 20th century technology.

Happily, the Batman origin stands on its own, even if it has been subjected to endless ideological readings like those of Christopher Nolan, more or less along the lines of "Batman is a fascist because he's a rich guy who wants to keep down disenfranchised poor people, who wouldn't be holding people up for their belongings in a non-capitalist world." To such ideologues, it would be irrelevant that few of Batman's early rogues were common crooks. Even before the introduction of the Joker and the Catwoman in 1940, and the many other villains to come, the first year of Batman's feature was devoted to other exotic figures like Kruger, with names like Doctor Death and the Monk. None of these figures make good stand-ins for the oppressed proletariat. One might argue that over the years Batman encountered far more ordinary thugs than he did super-crooks, but one would still have to demonstrate some sense that these malefactors are opposed to some absolute vision of a law informed by rich (implicitly white) privilege. In contrast, many Bat-adventures focus on the ways in which crime victimizes ordinary citizens-- which I suppose an ardent Marxist would choose to view as mere "protective cover" for the "real" meaning.

Perhaps the one element of the origin-vignette that has remained irreducible to simple politics is the conclusion, in which Batman is inspired by the ominous appearance of a bat. In later years some writers would try to impute greater complications to the Bat-origin, but the simplicity of the original story foils all of these overly labored efforts. The original writer, be it Fox or Finger, intuited that the bat's main importance was to reflect the tormented darkness in the young hero's soul, not where the bat came from or what might have brought it through that window at the most propitious moment.

ADDENDUM 1-30-2018: Within the last few months I've read the first PHANTOM stories, and find that the vignette dealing with the original Phantom's origin does not have the "elements of Aristotelian complication" that I found in the "Batman origin" vignette.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH PT. 3

Returning to the subject of comic strips:

I stated in Part 1 that I had in past found mythic material in such comic strips as Windsor McCay's DREAMS OF THE RAREBIT FIEND and Gary Larson's THE FAR SIDE. However, both of these were "gag-strips" rather than 'story-strips." Given my contention that a "literary myth" should be an actual story with a beginning, middle, and end, it behooves me to consider to what extent a "gag" is or isn't an actual story. Certainly a gag can at least convey a "myth-motif," but even so, not all "short myths" are equal-- hence, the possible use of Wheelwright's concept of *amplitude* (see Part 2) to sort out the mythic from the not-very-mythic.

I've not read all of McCay's FIEND strips, but I have the strong impression that they all follow the same structure. They all begin within someone's psychedelic dream, which runs its course until the dreamer awakens and groans about the folly of having eaten a Welsh rarebit. The strip depended on fulfilling this base function, regardless of whether the dream had or did not have "more to say." Thus, by the rules of *functionality* that I defined here, the strip would be "stereotypical" or monosignative when it did no more than fulfill its base function, yet "archetypal" or plurisignative if it went beyond the base function, and became in some way "super-functional." (The Campbellian part of me sees this "going beyond" as encoding one of Campbell's four functions, but others' mileage will vary.)

For my first example, here's one McCay strip that I consider merely monosignative:

The idea of a dreamer being chased and/or devoured by dream-monsters is fairly typical, and the motif of a dreamer extrapolating his bath into a river with a devouring hippopotamus seems to lack any special characteristic. Thus the cartoon also lacks what Wheelwright calls *amplitude.*

On the other hand, here's another strip:

This is a little more psychologically interesting because it deals with two older persons taking in a small dog that grows to monstrous size, to the point that they try, without success, to destroy the canine. Even though the overall situation satisfies the same base function as we see in the "hippo cartoon," McCay has invested more imagination to this cartoon-- not least because the monster dog never responds to the couple's attempted executions, but simply endures them stoically. Within the cartoon there are no diegetic parallels drawn between the dog and a human child. And yet this McCay scenario cannot help but beg such parallels. Because the second cartoon can call forth deeper associations, it possesses a greater amplitude, defined in physics as "the maximum extent of a vibration or oscillation, measured from the position of equilibrium."

Now here's a monosignative FAR SIDE cartoon:

The cartoon is amusing enough, but it depends entirely on the reader's recognition of the story-trope, "wolf in sheep's clothing."  Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be anything else going on.

This Larson gag also plays upon a reversal of biological norms:

However, this is the sort of cartoon I considered when I assigned symbolic complexity to the FAR SIDE strip. Larson is known to be a nerd about matters biological, and here he's having fun with the notion that a given biological adaptation-- in this case, sharks' dorsal fins-- might be more of a stumbling-block than an advantage within the shark's environmental niche. It's perhaps even more amusing when one considers the situation of real creatures who are victims of their own biologies, such as the peacock.

Larson's cartoons were always one panel, though on occasion he subdivided that space for the sake of telling a joke with some sort of progression. In contrast, the McCay FIENDs were usually either a quarter-page or a half-page, so McCay could do as many panels as he could fit into the designated space given him. Nevertheless, I would not consider either "McCay's dog" or "Larson's shark" to be mythic narratives simply because they possess an amplitude beyond the merely functional. They tell gags that can reduced down to simple motifs, rather than having the "tying-untying" progression of a genuine narrative.

Chic Young's BLONDIE, although its Sunday pages had as much space to work in as did McCay's FIEND entries, tended to construct mini-stories that conform more to Aristotle's narratology. I've observed in earlier posts that the "base function" of BLONDIE was generally to show Dagwood as "the Goat of the World," constantly being victimized by his wife, his kids, his boss, his neighbors, and almost everyone else. But again, some cartoons merely fulfill the function, and others go beyond it.  Here's a stereotypical example:

The "complication" is that Dagwood proposes that he might grow a beard, and everyone in his family goes postal in exaggerated reaction: the resolution comes when he gives in and promises not to become a "beatnik." This is typical "family-comedy" schtick, but nothing more.

On the other hand, there's this Sunday page:

Again, the base goal is realized; Dagwood is made the Goat. But there's a deeper psychological angle here. Alone, Dagwood tries to relax in the bathtub, but "his master's voice" intrudes even the privacy of his home. Rushing to answer the phone, he trips and injures himself-- all for nothing, because it's just Blondie calling for no particular reason. As a final irony, Blondie's friend avers that Blondie's gesture is the sort of thing that that makes for good marriages. I've argued that the comic-book BLONDIE story that I analyzed here shares a similar idea of inflicting pain on Dagwood through the supposedly "innocent" acts of Blondie, resulting in something of a "domme-sub" relationship-- although the camouflage of slapstick comedy concealed this from the strip's mass audience.

As I said, the two BLONDIE strips are closer to real stories than the other strips, regardless of the presence or absence of plurisignificance. Still, they would best be labeled "sketches" or "vignettes," which means that even when they do possess super-functionality, it's used for very restricted purposes. For this reason, I doubt that I'll include many of these type of "gag strips" within the corpus of the "1001 myths project:" at present the aforementioned "Linus the Rain King" continuity is the only one that seems worthy.Ideally, the stories chosen for this project show the mythopoeic potentiality at its highest possible potential. And just as we judge the best dramas as being those that convince us that we're seeing simulacra of real people talk believably to one another, the best myth-stories are those that establish a believable "dialogue" between a variety of symbolic representations.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, PT. 1

I've been contemplating the place of comic strips with respect to the "1001 comics myths" project.

I've always thought that comic books have proven themselves a more fertile ground for the  mythopoeic potentiality than comic strips.  I further believe that comic books' greater capacity for myth has nothing to do with the profligacy of superheroes within the American medium; it's a capacity rooted in the comic-book medium's ability to make a more nuanced use of words than the comic-strip medium can. If one could disinclude all of the superhero or superhero-like features from both media, I believe that one would still find that comic books are superior at producing the discourses of myth, which elsewhere I've related to Philip Wheelwright's concept of "poeto-language."

That doesn't mean that I don't find worthwhile "poeto-language" discourses in comic strips. In my essay AN ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY, I mentioned the following strips: Chic Young's BLONDIE, Harold Gould's DICK TRACY, Windsor McCay's DREAMS OF A RAREBIT FIEND, Gary Larson's FAR SIDE, Herriman's KRAZY KAT, and Caniff's TERRY AND THE PIRATES.

However, it may be a mark of the difficulty with critiquing such serial comic strips that I didn't write myth-analyses of any of these, though in the first year of this blog I did devote some attention to a particular PEANUTS conitnuity, which I entitled LINUS THE RAIN KING.  I've latterly decided that this too belongs within the corpus of the 1001 comics-myths, and I'll probably retrofit the original essay slightly for this series at a later date.

Of course PEANUTS may have benefited from the fact that its author Charles Schulz was a lay preacher, so he had a working knowledge of the "poeto-language" of the Bible.

Nevertheless, as a Jungian pluralist I don't believe that one has to have special education to tap into the potentiality of the mythopoeic.

I considered the possiblity that the rather truncated form of the comic strip might tend to force it into a verbal straightjacket, so that it became the dominant practice to use words only in a denotative manner, rarely tapping their connotative associations.  This is certainly a possibility, although Schulz's example shows that one can find ways to use the medium's limitations to produce mythic effects.

Of the six comic strips I mentioned above, the most mundane is Young's BLONDIE, which was certainly not a haven for metaphysical musings. Nevertheless, though I've never devoted any space to the Chic Young strip, in my "Mythic Monday" project I gave a mention to one short tale, "Shaved and Clipped," from a 1962 issue of Harvey Comics' licensed BLONDIE comic-book title. The tale is only two pages long, yet it is more plurisignative than most BLONDIE comic-book stories, to say nothing of many of the comic strips. From this I conclude that the actual length of the narrative doesn't always mitigate against symbolic complexity.

I'm currently considering the proposition that mythopoeic scenarios, much like those of the other potentialities, need to be formulated to allow for *complication*-- though this need not be entirely identical with the Aristotelian term given that translation, as seen in this essay.

I should weigh in on these weighty matters further, in at least one more essay.

MYTHCOMICS #2: BLONDIE #150 (1962)

PLOT SUMMARY for "Shaved and Clipped" (2pages):

Though it's Dagwood's day off, Blondie orders him to shave. "Why can't I give my face a day off?" gripes Dagwood. "Because,"retorts Blondie, "I have to feed that face! No shave-- no supper!" Dagwood goes to the bathroom upstairs and lathers up. Suddenly from downstairs Blondie yells for him to come quick: "It's an emergency!" In his haste Dagwood trips over a carpet-sweeper and tumbles down the stairs. Blondie calmly takes money out of his wallet, explaining that she just read about a shoe sale and must hurry to get a bargain. She leaves Dagwood on the floor with the departing words, "Aren't you lucky to have a wife who saves you money-- I'll be late-- you'll have to fix your own supper!"

MYTH-ANALYSIS: The comic-book cover reproduced above is a rare example of a gag-cover that actually reflects one of the stories inside. (Some of these stories may be comic-strip reprints but most of the Harvey Comics BLONDIES seem to be originals, possibly produced by Chic Young's studio).

The cover actually demonizes Blondie as being even more of a money-grubbing vampire than the inside story. In the story she's a little shocked to see Dagwood tumble down the stairs, though she doesn't pause before plundering his wallet. On the cover Blondie seems positively gleeful as she reaches out for the rain of money, and entirely unaware of Dagwood's impending injury. Indeed, since Dagwood trips on a housekeeping item-- rather than something not directly connected to Blondie, like a child's toy-- one could easily imagine that the carpet-sweeper is Blondie's trap, set to catch an unwary breadwinner.

The vast majority of BLONDIE stories, in comic strips and books, are simply gag-vignettes rather than stories. Like this one their primary purpose is to set up Dagwood as the guy who gets humiliated in some way by his wife, boss, kids, neighbors or complete strangers. Dagwood is almost always the Goat of the World, and most of the stories depicting his goat-ness are no more than *monosignative.*

I rate this 2-page tale as plurisignative, however, because it so adroitly sums up the logic of the BLONDIE franchise--which is to say, a logic in which BLONDIE is always the "domme" to Dagwood's "sub."

It begins with Blondie nagging Dagwood to shave, but less like a wife speaking to a husband than like a mother addressing a small child. The first panel shows her reminding Dagwood that she told him to shave "an hour ago" while the second shows him trying like a child not to hear her, promptly a motherly "I'm talking to you!" Dagwood's rebellion, reasoning that he the breadwinner should be allowed a day off from shaving, is quickly overruled by an appeal to his stomach: "no shave, no supper."

 

Gilles Deleuze notes that in narratives of masochism like those of Sacher-Masoch, the masochist insists on a contract that establishes just what his tormentor can or can't do to him. But as soon as Dagwood acquiesces to his marital contract with his innocently-sadistic wife, Blondie changes the rules. Her desire to buy some new bit of finery-- a constant motif in the BLONDIE comics-- overrules her promise to feed Dagwood's face if he shaves it. She cries "emergency," prompting her victim to take his pratfall, the direct result of (1) her telling him to go upstairs and (2) her careless deployment of the carpet-sweeper. Then, after Blondie has ignored Dagwood's pain and "clipped" him of his money (note the double-entendre of the story-title), she puts aside the contract for her own narcissistic pleasures and tells him he has to make his own dinner. Dagwood, lying on the floor in pain, gets the last pathetic word: "*Gulp!* She won't have to feed this face after all!" Based on similar strips, one can even imagine a coda in which Blondie comes home with her purchase and insists that Dagwood admire her new acquisition, while he can only think about how his hard-eared money has been frittered away.

If I had a continuous run of the BLONDIE comic books, to say nothing of the strips, both would prove valuable in illuminating the interdependent mythos of male masochism and female sadism.

COGNITIO/ DISSONANCE

Once again I return to Northrop Frye's concept of the four "archetypal themes" or "radical roots" of his four mythoi: for romance/adventure, the agon, for tragedy/drama, the pathos, for irony, the sparagmos, and for comedy the anagnorisis, which he asserts is more or less equivalent to the Latin cognitio.

Back in this essay I expressed more than a little discomfort with Frye's analysis of the comedy mythos, in which he tended to overemphasize, in keeping with Greek New Comedy, comedy's power to join together disparate parts of society, often through a climactic banquet or wedding-scene. It's true that there are some indications that the tradition of the "happy ending" climax might even go back to Greek Old Comedy, so that aspect of comedy may predate New Comedy's concentration of romantic plot-devices.

That said, when Frye writes something like this--

"These five phases of comedy may be seen as a sequence of stages in the life of a redeemed society."

-- I can't help but feel that something's being left out of the equation, like the question of whether the archetypal theme of comedy should relate to aspects of life we find funny, not redeeming as such. Surely one can find aspects of redemptive value in the other three mythoi as well.

Here's the longest thing Frye writes on the question of why we find things funny:

"The principle of the humor is the principle that unincremental repetition, the literary imitation of ritual bondage, is funny...Repetition overdone or not going anywhere belongs to comedy, for laughter is partly a reflex, and like other reflexes it can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern... The principle of repetition... is well known to the creators of comic strips, in which a character is established as a parasite, a glutton... or a shrew, and who begins to be funny after the point has been made every day for several months."

This passage, whose theory of humor sounds strikingly like that of Henri Bergson's, demonstrates that Frye was well acquainted with modern forms of repetitive comedy. Indeed, his description of the glutton sounds a lot like Dagwood Bumstead.

The problem, however, is that a comic strip like BLONDIE is so repetitive that it's hard to imagine it being one of the "stages in the life of a redeemed society." Rather, BLONDIE seems a New Comedy in reverse, where the romantic plot that originally drove the feature was concluded, so that from then on all the humor stemmed not from a young man overcoming opposition to his romance but from an older man finding himself trapped in what Marshal McLuhan called the strip's "mothering-wedlock."

So anagnorisis does not really seem to apply to a work as fiercely repetitive as BLONDIE, which makes one wonder if the term really serves for the archetypal theme of comedy. In that earlier essay I noted that I might use Frye's term with the caveat that I really referenced not his notion of "comedy as redemption" but something more like Kant's "comedy as incongruity," but since that's an easy point to fall by the wayside, I'm now planning to use the Latin cognitio in place of the Greek one. And I seem not to be the first to need something more expansive than the Aristotelian term: according to Terence Cave's study of the concept of literary recognition, Renaissance critics (covered in Chapter 2) also used cognitio to denote a wider concept of recognition that the one favored by Aristotle, which Frye channels into his interpretation of characters experiencing some epiphanic redemption.

I mentioned in the Comedy-and-Irony essay that I thought the archetypal theme of comedy should be capable of embracing every form of incongruity from the philosophical ruminations of Woody Allen to the slapstick of the Three Stooges. I still believe that, but if one believes that the essence of humor is not repetition but incongruity, then it implies that the pleasure we get from humor is not in cognitive knowledge but in knowing nothing in life ever quite coheres the way we think it ought to, as in Milton's encomium on Socrates:

“The first and wisest of them all professed
To know this only, that he nothing knew.”

Thus my theme of cognitio is fundamentally about knowing that humans don't really know anything, but whereas this "discovery" is often a cause for despair or deep reflection in the other three mythoi, in comedy such knowledge is the source of the pleasure itself.

This attempt to refine aspects of Frye's archetypal themes will tie in with a later essay that will cover my earlier-mentioned reading of Theodor Gaster's THESPIS, and why its influence on Frye's ANATOMY might be extended into new territory.

MYTHS WITHOUT FANTASY

The following analysis was a messageboard response to the imputation that all myths, literary or otherwise, had to involve "fantastical, larger-than-life heroism or villainy:"

...I haven't actually checked dictionaries to see if any of them employ this definition, but I would certainly say that "larger than life" is a colloquial meaning of "mythic." This has ramifications for one of my specialized definitions of mythicity, since I defined myth in terms of "emotional tonality." Following Cassirer, who offers the term "tonality" in this sense, I would say that "mythic emotion" manifests more strongly where the fictive representations have a larger-than-life quality, and I think that can be shown by contrasting two famous comic-strips that belong to the same subgenre. Additionally, though both are "cartoonish" and exaggerated, neither has explicit fantasy, or heroes & villains as such.

BLONDIE and BRINGING UP FATHER are my choices. Both belong to the subgenre I would call "the perplexed paterfamilias," in which the bulk of the humor is the repeated humiliations of the male breadwinner. In the case of McManus' Jiggs in BUF, he's a lower-class guy who's been catapulted into high-class life, with the consquence that his social-climbing wife Maggie is constantly nagging and abusing him to become more refined.

Dagwood, the real star of BLONDIE, is on the other hand permanently stuck in the middle-class rat-race, but his sufferings are, if anything, far more exaggerated than those of Jiggs. Slapstick violence, found in both strips, is amped up to an often-bizarre level in Chic Young's BLONDIE (which bears little or no resemblance to the milkwater strip that runs today). Of course both strips also used a fair amount of simple verbal humor as well, but I think both are best known for slapsticky shenanigans: Jiggs getting thumped about by his harridan wife, or Dagwood being harried by his boss, his neighbors, his children or his wife (though Blondie usually confined her abuse to nagging, rather than violence).

The crux of the difference between these two similar strips, IMO, is that Jiggs' humiliations are more particularized, and so less "mythic." BUF is probably the better drawn and written strip of the two, but though Jiggs has some "universal" aspects (otherwise no one could relate to him), his sufferings are fairly unique to his situation.

Chic Young's Dagwood, in contrast, is EveryHusband-- or maybe EveryGoat, since far more than Charlie Brown he is the Goat of the World, constantly under attack by someone out to aggravate or humiliate him. Occasionally he brings these sufferings on himself but more often than not he's just the "schlemozzel," the guy that things always happen to. If then one accepted that "mythicity" could be equated with "emotions of a larger-than-life character," then I would say that a demonstration of Dagwood's superior Goathood would make him a more mythic character than Jiggs, even though none of their adventures involve either "fantasy" or "heroes & villains."