NEAR-MYTHS: ["HUMAN TORCH'S ORIGIN"] (MARVEL COMICS #1. 1939)

In a couple of essays like this one, I've established that I don't think Carl Burgos' Human Torch feature ever lived up to its potential. While no one would expect an early Golden Age superhero to excel into didactic or dramatic terms, some of them are quite good in the mythopoeic department. The Torch, unfortunately, generates more heat than light.

There was a lot of potential for mythic "light" in Burgos' reworking of Mary Shelley's novel FRANKENSTEIN. Was Burgos aware of the book's subtitle, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, and that the subtitle referenced a Roman modification of the Greek Titan's history, one that gave Prometheus the ability to make men out of clay? If so, that might have provided the association between Prometheus the fire-thief and Prometheus the maker of artificial men-- resulting in the idea of a fiery android.

Or maybe the inspiration came from Universal's Frankenstein films, three of which had come to the big screen by the time of the Torch's first appearance (cover dated October 1939, meaning that it came out a few months previous). The cinematic monster had a legendary fear of fire, and so its possible that this eventuated in the idea of an artificial man who incarnated fire-- though personally, this seems to me more of a leap than the previous associational chain.

In any case, the first half of the origin is a masterpiece of potential myth. For no well defined reason, Professor Horton creates his flammable android, and is almost immediately convinced to seal him away, not unlike a guilty mind concealing a forbidden sin.

For a moment, Burgos gets some of the emotional sense of what it might be like, to be a man whose very body caused conspicuous destruction. 

However, the moment Burgos injects a common crook for the Torch's first real enemy, the story devolves into mediocrity.

I've read only a smattering of the original Human Torch's adventures, and though they display some interesting moments of grotesquerie, the feature never developed beyond a very basic pulp-action concept. Its strength depended almost entirely on the kinetic appeal of a man made of fire, flying through the air, tossing fireballs, and absorbing the flames of random fires. Even in his crossovers with the Sub-Mariner, the android comes off like a penny-ante hero, with no strong character of his own.

Given that the second Human Torch also didn't do too well in his own feature, it may be that the true myth of this "Promethean Frankenstein" has yet to be told.

NULL-MYTHS: CAPTAIN MARVEL #1 (1966)

From the sublime to the ridiculous-- what could provide a better contrast than comparing the 1966 Captain Marvel (briefly published by Myron Fass Enterprises) to the classic Fawcett character?

Of the many bad superheroes spotlighted on the Internet, '66 Cap Marvel may have received the most attention to date. As the cover shows, the titular hero's distinction is that his power seems so counter-intuitive for a superhero. Instead of being able to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous villains with the brio of Billy Batson's alter ego, '66 Cap can separate the sections of his body-- hands, arms, feet, legs, head, and torso-- so that they're able to go flying around on their own. It's not impossible to confer power upon particular body-parts when they're separated from their proper form-- one thinks of "killer hand" movies like 1946's BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS, and "hideous head" flicks like THE THING THAT WOULDN'T DIE. But all parts are not equal, and the idea of a superhero's torso or legs-- or even his disembodied head-- zooming around the sky has proven endlessly risible. 

There are three stories in Cap's first issue, and they're all pretty dismal, though not totally without interest from a psychological standpoint. 

The first tale falls back on the old "hero can't remember who he is" in order to give the readers the lowdown on his true nature. An unnamed blonde man finds himself in a house in some American city, and can 't remember who he is. However, with only minimal effort, he recalls that he is an android named Captain Marvel, created on an unnamed planet torn apart by warfare. His creators, a group of unnamed humanoids, know that their world is doomed, so they want him to personify "the knowledge of our people" and to "use it to help others." 

As for the "splitting" power-- this is almost the only idea in the story that's given a degree of logic. The head scientist tells Marvel that the purpose of this power is "to prevent an attack by more than one person," after which they demonstrate how said power can be used:

I suppose the intent was that this power might seem appealing to a person who's ever had more than one opponent "gang up" on him. Yet I tend to think even the most naive young reader still would've preferred the idea behind the original Captain Marvel: that you could both assume a bigger, better version of your own body *and * gain a multitude of powers that allowed you to beat up any quantity of enemies.

After a few panels of training, Captain Marvel dons a pair of astro-boots that will allow him to traverse space, and flies away from the only home he's known, watching as it explodes behind him. 

His memory breaks off at this point, but for the last three pages, a young boy named Billy Baxton shows up to fill in the rest of the gaps about how the android happened across Earth, and how Billy helped the Captain acclimate and take on an Earth-identity.

The idea-- but not the actual execution-- of this Captain Marvel is credited to Carl Burgos, who's best known for the Golden Age Human Torch. Like most Burgos superheroes, the Torch was an android, and off the top of my head I'd say he was the only artificial hero of the Golden Age who enjoyed enough popularity to headline his own title. Fans will never know why the editors of the new title, having decided to co-opt the name "Captain Marvel" on the assumption that it had fallen into public domain, also decided to go with the idea of the new hero being an android. Maybe the editors weren't sure about their legal position and wanted something that wasn't too close to the original.

Ironically, aside from the hero's use of "magic words" to activate his powers-- he says "Split" to separate his body-parts, and "Xam" to bring them back together-- the '66 hero seems to swipe more from Superman. Not only does he rocket to Earth from a doomed planet, he's also the repository of his alien culture-- though technically, this idea didn't become popular in Superman comics until the late 1950s and early 1960s. '66 Cap also shared the Man of Steel's tendency to whistle up new powers whenever he needed them: laser-beam eyes, thermal waves, and so on.

The other two stories, both of which feature Marvel taking on alien invaders, aren't worth analysis, but the last one in the book is amusing in one respect. For eight pages, the tale is a cut-rate version of "The Day the Earth Stood Still," as it starts with aliens coming to Earth to remonstrate with Earthlings for their warlike ways. Then for the last eight pages, the aliens are relegated to back-seat status, for the story suddenly becomes all about the weird character in their ship, who gets loose and causes trouble on Earth-- a character named... "Plastic-Man!"

According to some fannish speculations, MF Enterprises's attempt to pilfer the name of yet another Golden Age character may have alerted DC Comics to the fact that they actually owned the right to publish Plastic Man since purchasing an assortment of Quality Comics properties in the mid-1950s. As a result, DC Comics quickly rushed an ersatz verison of the classic Plastic Man into the "Dial H for Hero" feature, about three months after CAPTAIN MARVEL #1 had appeared on newstands, and then launched a series proper toward the end of 1966.

I rate the MF Captain Marvel a "psychological myth" because I think its creators had some notion that their peculiar idea of a "body-in-pieces" hero should actually have been empowering to young readers. Since it was not, that alone would qualify the android as an inconsummate null-myth.

REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, PT. 1

For once I'm going to link to a UTILITARIAN post without dumping on its author. I'll still disagree with him, but this time I can see the difficulty of his position.

For some time a writer named Robert Stanley Martin has providing HU with an abbreviated look at the chronological publication of key North American comic books. He focuses only on what he calls "the aesthetic cream of the crop," an elitist position with which I disagree, as did a poster who replied:

Apparently, the “history of North American comic-book publishing” includes almost nothing other than Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, and Plastic Man books, with a bit of Disney thrown in. Seriously??? -

Martin defends his concentration on the cream of the crop, stating that he doesn't plan to include anything from, say, the Batman title except things like "the first appearances of Batman and Robin" and "the debuts of the better known villains."  By so doing, it goes without saying that Martin is deferring to the community of comics-critics who tend to marginalize Batman in favor of, say, Plastic Man. I might advance the counter-argument that even though Cole's Plastic Man may boast superior design-work than the best of the Batman artists, the former is not necessarily better written than the latter. Indeed, many of the Cole issues Martin cites are bland tales from the standpoint of the writing, and would never have earned their place amid the "aesthetic cream" if they had been drawn by a less heralded artist-- even if it was by one who was arguably Cole's equal in formal talent, like Paul Gustavson or Lou Fine.

Still, though I disagree with Martin's emphasis on artists who have been validated above their peers for dubious reasons, one of his points is unassailable. Neither he nor anyone else could or should try to include everything. If I attempted such a list, I'm sure that on first consideration I would default to the fannish tendency seen in comic book price guides: to focus on events in DC or Timely Comics that affected the later avatars of those companies-- the first battle between the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch, or the first appearance of the Injustice Gang of the World in the JUSTICE SOCIETY feature. Yet on second consideration, I think I'd realize that these events shouldn't be any more important than events that influenced comics whose publishers did not survive into the Silver Age.

Companies like Hillman, whose big seller was AIRBOY, seen here encountering the ghoulish villain Misery...

Or Lev-Gleason, which gave us the memorable multi-issue crossover of the villainous Claw and the original Daredevil-- part of which was drawn by Jack Cole.

As a pluralist I would maintain that these are as good examples of their genre as Plastic Man is, so I wouldn't concur with the elitist POV that puts them beyond consideration. (The reasons for that superficial opinion I'll detail elsewhere.) However, these examples raise another point: are only the "big events" worth considering in a pluralist "best of" list? Further, to extrapolate from a point Martin makes: are the first appearances of Batman's iconic villains their best "aesthetic" moments? Is the first Joker story the one every comics-fan ought to read? Will it tell the non-hardcore reader everything he wants to know about the Joker? Or would the reader be better off reading a less Gothic but arguably more "aesthetically pleasing' story like "The Joker's Millions" from DETECTIVE COMICS #180 (1952)?

Yet even with the most pluralist will in the world, something has to be left out, and one has to form some criteria for disinclusion. As a reader I feel less fondness for Carl Burgos' seminal "Human Torch" character than for his earlier, much goofier hero "the Iron Skull," shown below (with art by Sam Gilman) bouncing bullets off his indestructible noggin--

--yet I know that if push came to shove, my Golden-Age list would have to include some notation on Burgos' Human Torch, even if I thought it was a great concept that Burgos totally muffed. Old Iron Skull would have to be left behind in the annals of obscurity, because the Torch had one thing going for him that the Skull did not: a superior design, albeit by a less than superior artist.

I can't speak to Martin's aesthetic priorities, but I'll take a wild guess: like many critics influenced by the COMICS JOURNAL-- an influence he cites in another of his posts-- his choices are informed by a vision of comics becoming something other than what they were in the Golden Age. Cole's "Plastic Man" feature didn't really escape the genre-boundaries of the superhero, but a lot of critics, not least Art Spiegelman, pleased themselves to think that it did. That gave Cole's stretchy dogooder a luster that lifted it above the majority of Golden Age work-- not to mention the majority of Jack Cole's other comics work.

But, then, the question arises: how does one form standards for formula-work that was meant to be standard-less? I'm certainly not speaking only of the superhero genre, for which comics became famous, but all of the genres that were meant to be read quickly and tossed away. Is there anything in the first twenty years of ARCHIE that merits celebration, and if so, what makes those ARCHIE stories better than other comics in that genre, like Harry Lucey's GINGER and Morris Weiss' MARGIE?

My "mythcomics" feature was instituted to explore one of the four "potentialities" around which creators organize their narratives, and through which audiences experience them. This is an entirely feasible approach to assigning merit to formulaic material that sought to meet "aesthetic standards" only insofar as they promoted good sales, and thereby put money in the creators' pockets. However, though I consider myth-analysis to be a heuristic device to that of aesthetic criticism-- whose failings I pointed out here-- I must admit that the myth-criticism methodology must be firmly grounded in a sound understanding of the way popular art works-- which I'll cover in Part 2.

KIRBY'S CHOICE PT. 2

Before coming to a conclusion on the nature of freedom, I should elaborate on the remark with which I closed KIRBY'S CHOICE:

...Kirby, in doing what his inner nature bade him, rather than simply adjusting himself to fit the contingent circumstances, showed a "will to freedom" that remains exemplary for its time.

In making this statement, I do not want to give the misleading impression that free will is signified only by Kirby making "the right choice."  Free will must be seen as a spectrum of possible choices, which would include not only choosing to exert oneself to the fullest, but also the possibilities of "sluffing off" or even doing nothing whatsoever, at least in terms of continuing to write/draw comics.


I also stated that Kirby's 1950s work for DC Comics looked more like hackwork to me than his work for 1960s Marvel. I said this with full awareness that at DC Kirby was hemmed in by conservative editors and that he was not free to do his best.  But the DC work still represents the kind of work produced when a given artist is ruled by contingency.

It may also be asserted that Kirby might not be the best example of "free will" given that he was a genius, and most toilers in the comics field-- or in any medium, whether "popular" or "artistic"-- are not geniuses.

Consider then the example of Carl Burgos.

Failing some revelation that Burgos had some great Golden Age work that has escaped fannish notice, Burgos' stellar moment in the history of comic books remains his creation of the Golden Age Human Torch.  The early Torch adventures are raucous, unpolished work, and it could be argued that Burgos never fully exploits the fantasy-potential of a man who can turn into flames.  Nevertheless, there are strong mythic moments in the Torch's oeuvre, worthy to stand with anything created by Jack Kirby.

In contrast, here's a Burgos work from late in his career, where it would appear that he had no intention of exerting himself unduly.

 

"Human thing-a-ma-jig," indeed. Even apart from the use of the name of Fawcett's Captain Marvel-- which may have been the idea of the publisher or any other collaborator-- the art and scripts for the "M.F. Enterprises" CAPTAIN MARVEL are the very definition of hackwork.  The most one can say for this short-lived series is that some modern fans enjoy seeing such a silly-ass character take form.  This is of course an enjoyment popularized by the celebrated "so bad it's good" meme, but this is a pleasure one takes in viewing a demonstrable lack of competence.  In contrast, as rough and unpolished as the Human Torch work is, the appeal of the character and his raison d'etre show a fundamental inspiration. 

Again, this formalist analysis does not erase the possibility that some readers might enjoy CAPTAIN MARVEL more than HUMAN TORCH.  In the first part of KIRBY'S CHOICE I made it clear that there are some fans who prefer "pure Kirby" at all times, over "Kirby in collaboration." And there is no accounting for tastes:

... I pointed out that there was no objective means by which one could prove any group of comics, superhero or otherwise, to be universally "better." The only objective fact is that if many people like a thing, that liking is objective purely in an *intersubjective* sense, as an agreement of tastes between discrete individuals. 

Every expression of personal taste, I suggest, is informed by what I will now dub "proto-propositions."  In attempting to justify my liking of FANTASTIC FOUR over CHALLENGERS, my mind might initially formulate the proto-proposition, "I like The FANTASTIC FOUR better than CHALLENGERS for the emotions in FF."  With conscious thought I can expand this statement into a full-fledged proposition, one phrased so as to show how the FANTASTIC FOUR characters show many dimensions while those of the CHALLENGERS do not, complete with examples and counter-examples to support my propositional logic.  Equally valid is the proto-proposition of a fan who might not like superheroes of any kind: "I like CAPTAIN MARVEL better than HUMAN TORCH because the first one shows superheroes as silly."  This can be expanded into a formal propostion as well, and buttressed with quotes about "masculine incoherence."  But no matter how good or bad the formal proposition, it remains rooted in a "proto-proposition" that expresses whatever validates the individual subject-- a validation I relate to the concept of "constant tastes," elucidated here.


In short, this is about as far as one can get from Kant's notion that valid judgments of taste can be derived from a "disinterested" state of contemplation.  Contemplation is one means by which the viewing subject seeks to bring a new work into his mental compass of things liked and things not liked, and then to decide whether or not the new thing fits better in one category or the other.  But it is not, in itself, a path to any sort of universal truth-- and even *intersubjective* agreements are significant only to the degree one finds their statistical dominance important.