NULL-MYTHS: SHI / CYBLADE: THE BATTLE FOR INDEPENDENTS (1995)

While looking around for a second "woman-themed" mythcomic for this month, I came across this one-shot from Crusade Comics. I was minimally aware of both Cyblade and Shi, but I'd never heard of their having crossed over. And, crossover-enthusiast though I am, I definitely hadn't heard of a project that guest-starred a host of other characters from what nineties comics-fans called "independent comics"-- hence, the project's punny subtitle, "The Battle for Independents." 

Such conceptual battles had generated comics-projects before. The 1982 one-shot DESTROYER DUCK united the talents of Steve Gerber and Jack Kirby to lambaste the exploitative nature of Marvel Comics (against whom Gerber had filed a suit over the ownership of Howard the Duck). But SHI / CYBLADE is a little closer to the model of SPAWN #10 (1993), in which Dave Sim penned a jeremiad against the foolishness of artists signing away their works to big corporations. 

The deliberately thin plot, co-written by Crusade publisher Bill Tucci, has Cyblade and Shi wake up in front of a wall, which Shi's inner monologue has already referenced as a wall she built to keep her dreams from interfering with her reality. That's about all the symbolism we get from them, for it's soon made clear that the two heroines have been called here to exterminate a threat to human creativity.

Cerebus pops up to tell the girls about "the bad thing out there that wants to eat us," much the way Dave Sim encouraged independent artists and publishers to avoid the rapacious maws of the Big-Two-Who-Purchase-All-Rights. He magicks the ladies over the wall (aren't they both super-athletes?) and lands them in a swamp called "Wallace Woods," which includes a gravestone for Kirby and a sign stating "Ditko Was Right." There the heroines meet Mr. Spook of BEANWORLD, who more or less repeats Cerebus' dire warnings and then disappears.

The heroines behold a great golden tower where their unnamed enemy dwells. An equally nameless blonde guy calls out for help, so Shi and Cyblade scale the tower-walls to help him. In a big narrative hiccup, both of them get captured somehow. They're next seen hanging in a laboratory while a megalomaniac rants at them about how easily he can crush all the creative voices that rebel against his control. (Maus and Omaha the Cat Dancer are marginally seen in viewscreens). Some characters I've never heard of rescue Shi and Cyblade and they all escape, making for the safety of the wall. (So the wall's GOOD now?)

The tower turns into a ray-blasting mecha-robot to chase them, but Fone Bone of the BONE comic shows up to trip the mecha. "That seemed a bit too easy," opines one character, and this notion is reinforced by the way a cavalry of mostly obscure independent characters appear out of nowhere to fight the robot. I did recognize Usagi Yojimbo, Megaton Man, Katchoo and a half dozen others. Most characters only get one-panel cameos, though there's a concordance for the curious in the back of the comic.

Just so no one forgets who are the stars of the comic, Shi and Cyblade deliver the finishing blow and reveal that the mastermind is a literal weenie. 

Whereas Dave Sim's screed for SPAWN #10 was concise and affecting, this self-indulgent rant is all over the place-- which is probably a big reason I never heard of the comic back in The Day. I for one would be interested to read a fictional treatment of both the good and evil aspects of corporate entities, since their existence seems pretty much an immutable aspect of modern life. I'd like to see something that was neither a superficial rant like this or a one-sided apologia a la Ayn Rand. But I suspect this desire will never be realized.

CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2

In Part 1, I wrote:

Conscresence, more than its roughly equivalent term "coagulation," suggests the process by which seemingly unrelated phenomena "concretize" into a greater whole. Thus images, symbols and story-tropes which can only have a very limited meaning by themselves, take on greater depth when associated with others that have a reinforcing effect.

What causes this "reinforcing effect," though? Upon rereading August's FOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE PT. 3, it occurred to me that most of the mythcomics essays I've printed here depend on the authors having organized their symbolic constructs around what I called "aspects of discursive symbolism." The full context is as follows:

Thus, it would seem that even when humans are seeking to plumb the depths of presentational symbolism in order to employ tropes that transmit deep emotional states of mind, the same humans cannot help but reproduce aspects of discursive symbolism characteristic of the theoretical mind-- which may later have some repercussions to my evolving theories regarding the interactions of human work and human play (to be discussed at some future time).

In other words, in order for a narrative to manifest the strongest form of symbolic concrescence-- a.k.a. "hyperconcrescence," as I currently like to call it-- the author(s) must first draw upon what they know of the real world, the world which can be represented by discursive symbolism (or "work"). Then, to make this knowledge function in a fictive world, the kernels of information must be transformed into the tropes of presentational (also called "expressive") symbolism (or "play"). Thus the mind's ability to "work hard" proves essential to the process of "playing hard," and therefore, "playing well."

I have to reiterate that it's always possible for an author to "dumb down" the expressive symbolism in a narrative in order to get across some limited didactic message. When an author does so, he has to some extent sacrificed "play" on the altar of pure "work" by making the narrative function as persuasive rhetoric. That said, creators who have deep reservoirs of imagination may still at times produce narratives that have the qualities of mythic play even though the authors are trying to convert an audience to some position.

Case in point: Dave Sim's CEREBUS. Most of the time, particularly in the later issues, Sim is seeking to persuade readers of his philosophical positions, and this is probably no less true in the narratives I've deemed mythcomics (the last part of LAST DAYS here, and the first part of GUYS here) as in a narrative I deemed a "null-myth" (the horror of CHASING YHWH). But irrespective of Sim's conscious intentions, his imagination is "working" full blast at the same time his conscious intellect is formulating the didactic schemes of the prior two works, while in YHWH, his imagination has sort of given up the game. So, although discursive symbolism is at work in all three, in CHASING YHWH there is no such transformation of Sim's rhetorical stance into the playful discourse of art. Thus, even though I personally disagree with Sim's position re: "fanboys" as he expresses them in GUYS, I had to give him some props for "promoting a satiric version of Spider-Man to make his points about creeping emotionalism." Thus there's an expressive underthought to complement the rhetorical overthought.

I will expand on the final paragraph from FOUNTS PT. 3:

I should add that I regard even scientifically incorrect theoretical conclusions, like the concept of the seven spheres of heaven, or early theories on spontaneous generation, to be well within the scope of the discursive.

In similar fashion, I regard Sim's sociological connections between comic book people and "creeping emotionalism" to be incorrect on two counts: one, because there's no way to prove such a connection, and two, because even if there was one, how would it be categorically different from the "creeping emotionalism" present in any other ingroup-- say, Canadian hockey fans?

Hyperconcrescence, then, most often takes place when the discursive mode of work, the overthought, reinforces the expressive underthought. The main exceptions are those narratives that seem to have no strong discursive overthought, like the origin of the Golden Age Hawkman. Yet even here, author Gardner Fox is conjuring with metaphysical tropes that were discursively organized by their pagan proponents. And thus familiar tropes, such as the one regarding the soul's fate after death, still exhibit the modern author's understanding of the original structuring principles, even within the venue of a superhero comic book.

MYTHCOMICS: "GUYS," 208-210 (1996)

Dave Sim will likely never read any of my analyses, unless I choose to snail-mail them to him. But though he would likely have no good opinion of my mythcomics project-- based on statements he made to me in the long-gone CEREBUS letter-column--  he ought to feel slightly complimented that I felt CEREBUS important enough to classify according to my CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH.

OK, probably not, as Sim was not exactly a big fan of critics anyway. But in my literary universe, CEREBUS is not a "novel" in the accepted sense of the word, given that it's not unified enough. However, it conforms well enough to the general schema of what I term "the episodic novel," which would put Sim in good company with MOBY DICK and TOM JONES.

Despite the appearance of various unifying tropes and themes, I would never view the entire "episodic novel" of CEREBUS to be a mythcomic. But it's entirely possible to devote essays to its constituent parts, such as "short stories," "long arcs," and the subject of this essay, a short-arc-within-a-long-arc.

I view the long arc of GUYS. initially appearing in CEREBUS #201-219 (1995-97), as Sim's attempt to define masculinity in all its disparate elements. In this he was vocally opposed to the increasingly popular ideological construction of "patriarchy," as conceived by feminists of the Second and Third Waves. I'm only dealing with one "short arc" within the long arc, but it should be said that the long arc takes place in a society where a fascist feminism has become dominant. Men are barely able to speak a surly word within the controlling matriarchy, and their only refuge is the local bar, where women do not usually trespass, and where most of the story's action takes place.

The short arc with which I'm concerned largely defines the friendship of former fellow-soldiers Cerebus and Bear. Issue #208 starts with an episodic bit of business, in which Cerebus honks off Bear by saying uncomplimentary things about his mother, but when the main plot commences, Bear seems to have shrugged it off and engages Cerebus in a one-on-one game of "five-bar gate." Their exchanges of insults and badinage are interrupted by one "Dandy Don"-- based on comics-pro Donald Simpson-- who's hawking a form of comic books called "reads."

Bear could care less about this form of literature. But Cerebus takes one look at the adventures of a Spider-Man like hero-- given the satiric name of "The Wanker"-- and the hardened aardvark warrior suddenly becomes a drooling fanboy. Further, he becomes an evangelical fanboy, trying to convert his fellow barflies to the pleasures of "graphic reads."

In many comics-stories previous to this, comics-fans themselves might be seen as nerds, but they were usually "nice-guy" nerds, or even "smartest-guy-in-the-room" nerds. Sim, by merging the image of the obnoxious fan with that of his perpetually bad-tempered aardvark, scored a deeper satirical blow against fans than any of the clumsy attempts of alleged "artistes" like Daniel Clowes. In the light of clear day-- that is, of appropriately masculine men-- the fantasies of superheroes come off as both juvenile and loaded with unconscious sexual symbolism. Cerebus is filled with a sulking rage when the barflies don't validate his tastes. Bear, weary of his companion's over-emotionalism, tears the aardvark a new butthole with the ultimate insult to a guy:

"It's like yer part CHICK 'r somethin'!"

This is a slight in-joke for CEREBUS fans, since an earlier issue asserted that the aardvark was born a hermaphrodite without ever having been aware of the fact, though there are scarcely any moments in the series wherein Cerebus gets in touch with his "feminine side." Nevertheless, despite Bear's critique of the shortcomings of Cerebus-- as well, indirectly, of the self-importance of evangelical comics-fans-- things are somewhat mended not by the feminine method of endless discussion, but by simply returning to the ball-game they were playing. The two guys compete ruthlessly, continuing to insult one another at every opportunity. Yet, Sim also shows that the guys are capable of relating to one another in terms of honor and empathy that are presumably foreign to the "fair sex."

Some critics undoubtedly would not respect Sim's masculinist (as I would term them) views. To be sure, neither the long arc of GUYS nor the short arc I examine here are capable of saying everything about "what it means to be a guy." There's also rich irony in the fact that by the long arc's end, Bear, despite sometimes being seen as hyper-masculine, is conquered by the "love-bug," spread by a particularly two-faced shrew, which event in turn leads to the dissolution of the bar-group.

Nevertheless, Sim's uncompromising satire of two of the "sacred cows" of comics-fandom-- of the importance of "graphic literature" and of the fans who read it-- shows far more sagacity than the witless elitists who continue to support mediocrity in the service of political correctness.

ADDENDUM: I should clarify that the major discourses in this sequence are focused on the potentialities of the dramatic (i.e., the interpersonal relations of Bear and Cerebus) and of the didactic (i.e., Sim's criticism of feminism). However, I consider that Sim, in promoting a satiric version of Spider-Man to make his points about creeping emotionalism, is propounding a myth of "the superhero as masturbatory crap." It's usually a symbolic trope employed by liberal critics, but here the superhero's pernicious influence is a threat to Sim's conservative ethos, and so must be thrown off by the masculine spirit (even though superheroes were always marketed with male audiences in mind). Mythically, this usage is at least more complex than his modestly entertaining but simpler superhero-spoofs: "Moon Roach," "Punisheroach," and so on.

PICTURE-LESS WORDS AT AN EXHIBITION

In this essay I cited FRANK'S REAL PA as an example of a mythcomic that communicated its mythic content purely through wordless images. This begs the question: can one have any kind of comic comprised of words without images?

Patently the answer is no: comics are communicated first through sensory tropes and second through narrative tropes. Still, a more interesting corollary query would be: what's the least amount of images that a comics-work can utilize, while still remaining a comic?

And the answer would be: one, as shown by this randomly chosen page of the sequence "Jaka's story" in Dave Sim's CEREBUS.

If the entirety of CEREBUS were structured in this manner, though, it's questionable whether it would be deemed a work in the medium of comics. In recent years some critics have extended the rubric of comics to include illustrated books, which are either exclusively or dominantly devoted to single-page illustrations with long text. I don't favor this definition myself, though I can see why some comics-fans, endlessly seeking mainstream validation, want to induct popular authors like Maurice Sendak and Doctor Seuss into their ranks.

Were I going to review a sequence of CEREBUS that was all in the "illustrated book" format, though, I would have no problems deeming said sequence to be within the medium of "comics," because most of the entire CEREBUS project involves a more traditional combination of words and images.

Still, the one exception to this "rule" would be "pure-text" pages, such as the "Viktor Davis" text-pieces in the sequence "Mothers and Daughters," for these would not be subsumed by the aesthetic of comics. Though the text-pieces may be seen as loosely intersecting with the CEREBUS concept, if only for the use of the term "reads"-- a faux-coining for "comics"-- they are essentially slightly fictionalized essays on Sim's philosophy, largely indistinguishable from essays written in his authorial voice. Even the fact that the Davis essays are interpolated amidst the ongoing "regular comics" continuity of the title character does not confer on the text-pieces the status of "comics."

Thus, though I could have a lot to say about the mythic discourse that I find within Sim's philosophical essays-- regardless of the fact that Sim would not validate such a definition of his philosophy-- I could not count such an analysis as one of my "mythcomics."

But I have been considering ways to approach the structural anomalies of the "regular CEREBUS comic," and will hold forth on same in the week's actual mythcomic.

GRAPHICALLY ROMANTIC

As a prelude to this week's mythcomic  I have to comment somewhat on the ideas behind the so-called "graphic novel."

The term was coined by Richard Kyle in a 1964 contribution to the apa-zine Capa-Alpha (of which I, by coincidence, am a current member). However, the term didn't catch fire until after the 1978 publication of Will Eisner's A CONTRACT WITH GOD.  Clearly, given that the word "novel" carried far more gravitas than "comic book," the use of the term was an attempt to separate ambitious graphic narratives from pamphlets aimed dominantly at a juvenile audience.

I'm going from memory here for the time being, but as I recall Dave Sim was one of those who took issue with using the term "novel" in this sense, arguing that most of the candidates for the term simply lacked the scope to justify the term-- as opposed to his then-ongoing work on CEREBUS, which when finished in 2004 displayed an impressive length (6000+ pages) and covered more than a fair share of intellectual topics.

This raises the question, though, of whether scope is the proper way to define the novel. Wikipedia mentions that in the 17th century "romance" was sometimes used to denote a narrative of epic length, while "novel" was applied to shorter works. Nevertheless, though the term "romance" had a venerable history, having been applied to prose works from the Hellenistic period, the term "novel" superseded "romance" in the 20th century. In the mid-1950s Northrop Frye made a perhaps futile effort to restore the term "romance" to respectability, asserting that it was a better description for those 19th-century works, such as MOBY DICK and WUTHERING HEIGHTS, that included a "subjective intensity" not present in more down-to-earth works. But to date the culture as a whole still deems these works "novels" no less than much shorter works, such as John Barth's END OF THE ROAD.

A further complication is that "romance" as a literary term also has ties with the rambling type of stories from medieval and Renaissance times, the so-called "chivalric romance." Arguably these romances replicated the scope of the verse epics in which much of our current knowledge of archaic myths is preserved. Some verse epics are as thematically coherent as many modern novels, such as the EPIC OF GILGAMESH. In contrast, although Aristotle praises Homer for centering the ILIAD upon the retreat of Achilles, this particular verse epic is not nearly as unified as the Sumerian epic, given that many chapters are devoted to spinning forth numerous traditional tales of the Trojan War that don't technically have much to do with Achilles. By the late 19th century verse epics had perished-- one of the last, THE SONG OF HIAWATHA, showing some rather "superheroic" aspects-- and the epic poem's killer was none other than the prose novel.

Many of the best-known novels of this century-- DAVID COPPERFIELD, LES MISERABLES-- tended toward an "epic" scope, and authors like Trollope and Balzac sometimes wrote interrelated novels set in the same fictional "universes." The early 20th century continued in the use of the term "novel" for both relatively short works, like the books of London and Hemingway, and very long works like Dos Passos' "USA trilogy. But though there were some minor experiments in the "graphic novel" during this period, none of them set any trends, and for the first thirty-eight years of the twentieth century, Americans largely experienced the comics-medium only through the newspaper comic strip.

In my essay-series THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, I came to the conclusion that gag-oriented comic strips were as a rule too short to allow for Aristotelian "complication." I further asserted that narratives had their greatest capacity for mythicity when they possessed the traditional "beginning, middle and end," which worked to maximize a given story's potential for "connotative associations." However, in this essay-series I did not deal with the "long form" of the comic strip, the "story-strip," which usually focused on one dominant narrative arc, usually with no more than one subplot, usually a setup for a future main plot.

Some forgotten comics-critic once opined that Dave Sim's scope-oriented definition of the novel was his means of giving CEREBUS a unique position in the history of comic books. The same critic suggested that many manga artists had already produced works that were at least as long as CEREBUS, though one may doubt that these stories were quite as intellectually provocative as Sim's massive work. Still, that critic might have mentioned a precursor "closer to home" than any manga-epic, and that is the type of "long melodrama" that flourished in newspaper comics from the late 1920s until roughly the 1950s-- which is about the time when "story-strips" faded from prominence in newspapers.

I want to be very careful in evaluating what if any ways that the "long melodrama" strips of the classic comic-strip era-- PRINCE VALIANT, TARZAN, FLASH GORDON, WASH TUBBS-- have to being any sort of "graphic novels." While the individual story-lines of these strips do have greater potential for complication in the sense of being mythic, they don't have much of the "scope" often applied to the general idea of the novel. Since each of these storylines is just one narrative arc, without a lot of complementary development, such arcs might be better compared to the novella than the novel proper.

However, I have come across one anomaly among the comics strips of the classic period-- one in which the author managed to combine an "epic" quantity of plot-developments over a period much longer than the usual three months assigned to most narrative arcs in this medium. More on this anomaly tomorrow.

MEETINGS WITH RECOGNIZABLE PRESENCES

Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

What Kipling describes in this quatrain is a sentiment akin to Francis Fukuyama's concept of recognition, as he extrapolated it from both Hegel and Hegel-commentator Kojeve. Kipling describes what Fukuyama might term a variety of *megalothymia,* in that it describes "two strong men" taking one another's measure. The quatrain is part of a longer poem, but by itself the final phrase does not specify whether or not the strong men standing "face to face" are allies or opponents. As I view the lines, the recognition of a commonality that derives from similar levels of strength is not dependent on whether the two strong men are allies or enemies. Further, this sort of recognition would be opposed in spirit to that of Fukuyama's countervailing tendency, *isothymia,* for this mode of consciousness specifies that all human beings share the same innate rights, regardless of their strength.

As I peruse the handful of "1001 myth" entries I've done since restarting the series in July, I see a common thread evolving, though I didn't consciously plan it. All of the entries for which I've recently claimed mythic status posit an opposition between two strong presences. In contrast to Kipling's wording, these presences are just as capable of being female as being male, and in keeping with my writings on focal presences, such presences would not even necessarily need to be human, or even sentient. In contrast, the opposing "null-myths" usually fail to exploit the nature of the conflict. I esteemed as mythic the final three issues of Dave Sim's CEREBUS in part because the author provided the protagonist with an opponent-- his own son Sheshep-- who symbolized all of Sim's animadversions to pagan culture, feminism, and (apparently) any sort of hybridization process. But I viewed the preceding CEREBUS sequence "Chasing YHWH" as "null-mythic" because it was no more than a barely-coherent diatribe against celebrity figures ranging from Carl Jung to Woody Allen (who in Sim's universe somehow became a Jungian, even though little if anything in the real Allen's ouevre reflects a Jungian outlook).

Now, at the end of my essay on Ditko's mythcomic "The Destroyer of Heroes," I quoted myself from the ETHIC OF THE COMBATIVE essay-series:

The shaman deriving power from his numinous presences, the warrior gaining supernatural presents or guidance from his patron god, the bondsman studying the ways of the mortal lord in order to overthrow him-- all of these participate in the ethical dimensions of the combative mode.  Thus "might" exists to continually challenge others to partake of its nature...This potency, to challenge one's own will to greater acts of agency, is the essence of the ethic that springs from the combative mode.

Having raised the topic of the combative ethic, I want to make clear that the trope of an author opposing "two strong presences" against one another is not solely associated with the actual combative mode. Certainly real combat-myths ranging from "Hercules vs. Antaeus" to "Batman vs. the Joker" derive their narrative tension from a physical, life-and-death struggle between hero and villain. Yet clearly it's possible to evoke the *megalothymia* of two opposed strengths without actually manifesting the combative mode, given that the totality of CEREBUS is a subcombative work.

Most of the other stories recently cited are stories that fit the combative mode without much elaboration: the aforementioned Blue Beetle tale, the Flash-Mister Element story, the FF-Red Ghost story, the Man-Thing/ ghost pirates story, and the Blackhawk "Dragon Dwarves" story. The two exceptions are instructive, though.

I surveyed the first three SPIDER-MAN stories together because they tied together in terms of the psychological myth evoked. The conflict of the first story is a mixed bag, for it's more "man vs. himself" than "man vs. man." By the story's conclusion Spider-Man has met and defeated a common burglar with the greatest of ease, which doesn't make for much of a combative situation, unless one chooses to view the burglar as a symbol for all criminals, as I discussed in a related topic here. The second story is more or less "man vs. nature" in that the hero must save Jonah Jameson's astronaut son from a malfunctioning space capsule, though it sets up an ongoing conflict by making Jonah Jameson a recurring thorn in the superhero's posterior. Only the third and last story surveyed pits Spider-Man against a villain who has his own special strength-- and of course, the Vulture was the first in a line of extremely durable super-villains, each of whom had an individual style and a great capacity for what I've termed "acts of agency,"

The first new entry in the current series, "Superman's Super-Courtship," features two characters who are dominantly combative types, Superman and Supergirl, but the story under consideration is not combative. As I demonstrated in the essay, the story's conflict pertains to Supergirl playing matchmaker for her older cousin, but in such a way as to reinforce her own ego, particularly by finding him a mate who looks like an adult version of herself. The conflict then is a comic one in which Supergirl more or less moves her cousin around like a chess-piece, much like the relationship discussed here between Cosmo Topper and the Kirbys in the 1930s film TOPPER. In the original film Topper's recently deceased buddies use their ghost-powers to force the fuddy-duddy to have fun, whether he likes it or not. Arguably Topper's ghosts do him more good than Supergirl does her cousin.

So here we have three subcombative stories that manage to create a tension between strong presences-- Cerebus and Sheshep, Spider-Man and Jonah Jameson, and Superman and Supergirl-- without actually entering the combative mode. Still, two of the stories appear in series that are meant to be dominantly combative, while the CEREBUS conclusion is a religious irony fashioned in part upon the model of Robert E. Howard's barbarian-fantasy.  So my conclusion here is that even if the combative mode is not strictly necessary to create a symbolic discourse between two or more "strong presences," its narrative pattern may influence even those narratives, like CEREBUS, that eschew the ritual of violence.

NULL-MYTHS: "CHASING YHWH" (CEREBUS #282-289, 2002-03)

At the end of the previous essay, I said:

When I do a corresponding "null-myth" for this entry next week, I'll endeavor to choose a story that relies on purely didactic elements, to its detriment.

Whenever I think of comics-artists who are capable of producing mythic material, but have let their didactic tendencies overrule their symbolic discourses, my short list comes down to three names: Steve Ditko, Alan Moore, and Dave Sim. After due consideration, I decided I should give pride of place to Sim in the didactic department. And nowhere does Sim go further down this particular rabbit hole (inside joke: "maybe it should be "RABBI-hole?") than he does in the sequence "Chasing YHWH," close to the final issues of CEREBUS THE AARDVARK. Among CEREBUS cognoscenti this sequence is sometimes referred to as "the Cerebexegesis," since it largely consists of the main character performing an exegesis on various books of the Hebrew Old Testament. On the whole most of the issues in this sequence consisted of a few pages of "normative" comics-panels, various stand-alone illustrations, and solid pages of small-type text in which Cerebus dissected the Old Testament, sometimes with minor rejoinders to his interlocutor Konigsberg (a spoof of Woody Allen).

This null-myth occupies a unique place in my personal cosmos of badness. In general I believe in re-reading works before writing about them, but I simply can't stand to expend any more minutes of my life in putting the critical microscope to "Chasing YHWH"-- to say nothing of having to use a magnifying-glass to discern all that tiny, tiny type.  So I'll confine myself to some general remarks.

For many CEREBUS-readers, Dave Sim's decision to embrace his personal vision of Christianity-- a little past the midpoint of his 300-issue magnum opus-- proved problematic for the literary values of his work. I was one of the few critics who did not reject all aspects of that sea-change, and I specifically praised the conclusion of this comics-epic here, calling it "a stunning mythopoeic creation." That said, one thing remained constant: both before and after the sea-change, Dave Sim liked to burn up a lot of issues with "much ado about nothing." Because Sim was, and still remains, one of the few artists intelligent to be interesting even when he's essentially running off at the mouth, there's no doubt that one could find interesting concepts and motifs within the corpus of CHASING YWHW. However, since one can find Sim using the same concepts and motifs in more felicitious forms in the "regular" CEREBUS stories, there's not much to be gained from sussing them out in a form designed to be nearly impenetrable.

The title of the sequence is a chimerical one, for Sim's "YHWH" is not the four-letter "God of the Fathers" worshipped by the ancient Hebrews. Rather, Cerebus is chasing "Yoohwooh," an inferior copy of the One True God. As Sim doubtlessly knew, the Gnostics of the early Christian Era were famous (or infamous) for splitting off various manifestations of the Godhead: for instance, the entity that actually created the heavens and the earth might be viewed as a "demiurge," while the entity that was the true source of all things-- including the demiurge-- would be far above the cosmos of profane matter. In a similar manner, Yoohwooh is described as a female spirit with "bright ideas." In addition to using Yoohwooh to critique modern-day feminism and its "bright ideas," Sim can also use Yoohwooh as a hermeneutical tool, albeit within a literary context, as opposed to writing actual religious hermeneutics-- and show how anything that he finds vexing in the Old Testament can be laid at the door of Yoohwooh.

Issue #286 sticks out in my mind, because it's an attempt to re-write the findings of non-religious interpretations, such as the narrative of Genesis 32 that is commonly called "Jacob wrestling with the Angel." A religionist of Sim's absolutist mold cannot hold with the proposals of modern folklore-studies: that the unnamed Angel is literally a representative of God the Father. Sim's solution is to claim that the angel, or "cherubim" as Sim calls it, is actually "Yoohwooh's cherubim, who guards Yoohwooh's garden and who, ordinarily, would make quick work of any one of Adam's descendants. But what's [the cherubim] going to do against Jacob? Jacob is Yoohwooh, who stole away the blessing and birthright of the elder Esau. It's also a reference to the fact that just as God judges Yoohwooh's 'wrestling' with all of her bright ideas... the men wrestle with her bright ideas, and with Yoohwooh." (I left out a phrase or two, hopefully without distorting the essence of the idea.)

As I'm a pluralistic myth-interpreter myself, it's possible that I was on some level offended by Sim forcing his tortured, anti-feminist metaphors upon the original material. Still, if his only aim had been to satirize myth-hunters like Joseph Campbell and Robert Graves, Sim could have accomplished that in a much more condensed form. In some sense the Cerebexegesis exists not because Sim literally believes in Yoohwooh, the way that a Gnostic might've actually believed in the Demiurge, but because Sim wanted to create a means of re-interpreting many problematic texts in the Old Testament so that they would line up with his own vision of the true deity-- though, again, I emphasize that this method has relevance only within the literary cosmos of CEREBUS.

Many null-myths are created when the artists involved merely toss out random ideas that possess little or no symbolic resonance. But in works that emphasize the didactic potentiality, the ideas are not random but rather over-determined, after the fashion of allegory, which Northrop Frye correctly defines as "forced metaphor."

ADDENDA: I should note that in CEREBUS #288, the aardvark has a long conversation with an interlocutor-- whose identity is a Big Surprise, and about the only thing fun in CHASING YHWH-- and that in that discourse, Cerebus reveals that he sometimes made shit up if he couldn't figure out a particular scriptural passage. I believe Sim did this in part out of concern for verisimilitude: his aardvark character was semi-educated at best, and in some ways his scholarly fuffering about Biblical hermeneutics broke from his usual character. Nevertheless, I don't think that the artist Sim, who put all those tiny-type words into Cerebus' mouth, in any way compromised his message by admitting that Cerebus was an unreliable interpreter. Even if the interlocutor points out problems with the "angel-wrestling" interpretation-- though not the same ones I've identified-- none of the discrepancies take away from Sim's essential message: that all the "bright ideas" of Yoohwooh are stupid because they foolishly attempt to supplant the wisdom of the True God. So even though Sim probably does not believe in Yoohwooh as a literal entity, she remains a potent literary symbol of the artist's animadversion to a host of modern-day "bright ideas."

PRACTICALLY INCONSUMMATE IN EVERY WAY

I said at the end of PLAYING WITH FUNCTIONS that I'd seek to find examples of the four potentialities that might be more accessible than the novels I cited (GONE WITH THE WIND being the only one of the four that is widely read these days). But it's occurred to me that since I revived the concept of the potentialities alongside the Langerian concept of consummation, adapted here with application to literary merit.

I chose "potentialities" as the term for these four types of relationship between literary elements because such elements are not "given," like physical elements. The author is, as Tolkien rightly says, a "sub-creator," and for a work to succeed with respect to any of the potentialities, a significant number of readers must feel that all or at least most of the proper elements are well enough assembled that the work feels "finished," which is the definition of the adjective "consummate," But when the audience feels that the work is "unfinished" in some way-- i.e., "inconsummate"-- the result is audience dissatisfaction. Of course, "consummate" and "inconsummate" will never replace common terms like "good" and "bad," or even "cool" and " sucky." But I believe that they are not only more accurate with respect to the vagaries of taste, the dichotomy allows one to explore the potentialities with a somewhat more objective eye.

I've stated in a general way that most works are dominated by a particular potentiality, but here I want to state that my principle of centricity applies to the potentialities as much as to mythos. In JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY I stated:

 One of the key features of my ongoing theory is the notion that every coherent narrative, even if it contains elements of all four of Northrop Frye's mythoi, only one of the mythoi dominates the narrative.... I find it interesting that even though Frye does not invoke Jung's four psychological functions (sensation, intuition, thinking, feeling), Frye's "logic of dominance" (my term) mirrors the logic Jung uses to assert that only one of the psychological functions can be dominant when it is in a "conscious" state. 

The same logic pertains to the potentialities. In FOUR BY FOUR I used Dave Sim's CEREBUS as an example of a work dominated by the potentiality of "the didactic." (And though I've never stated it outright, its overall structure conforms to the mythos of the Fryean irony.) The same "logic of dominance" pertains to both. CEREBUS contains elements characteristic of the drama, the comedy, and the adventure, but overall the elements of the irony dominate. And like all works that are primarily about "thinking," its potentiality is dominated by the didactic. Elements of the kinetic, the dramatic and the mythopoeic are all present, but they don't inform what Frye would call the "total vision" of the work.

Now, since Sim was a superlative (if problematic) artist, even the "inferior potentialities" are generally well executed, even if they are "side dishes" to the main entree. So in none of my four categories do I consider Sim's work "inconsummate."  In contrast, if a work seeks to craft even a side dish, and does so in an unsatisfactory manner, then the work is inconsummate with respect to that potentiality. For instance, in this essay I judged that Mark Millar's WANTED fails in the domain of the dramatic. Dramatic relations are certainly not the focus of WANTED, but since Millar fails in this department as much as he does in the centric area of WANTED-- that is, the sensation-oriented "kinetic"-- then in these two areas the work is inconsummate.

Similarly, Millar botches any mythopoeic elements that might have been inherent in his proposition that "this is what happens when the villains win." So WANTED is inconsummate with respect to those three potentialities.

But is it fair to view WANTED as having failed in the domain of the didactic? Millar isn't really dealing with abstract ideas at all; he doesn't even bother to lend any intellectual rationalizations to the characters' actions. I would probably judge the potentiality of the didactic to be inconsummate as well, but in a different way than the others. It's not so much "tried to run the marathon and failed to complete it" as "didn't even show up at the starting-post."

ADDENDA: I should add that it's certainly possible for an author to use one of his non-centric potentialities in a minimal fashion, yet still prove satisfying and thus "consummate" with respect to that potentiality. Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, like Millar's WANTED, is primarily intended to evoke the audience's thrill in pure kineticism, and so like WANTED, the other three potentialities are all used to a lesser extent. Yet whereas WANTED fails to support its extravagance with any hint of abstract concepts, RAIDERS evokes didactic concepts-- like modern man's indebtedness to ancient history-- to a degree which is satisfying even though it remains even more minimal than the film's dramatic and mythopoeic components.

SIM SIM SALLAH BLAM PT. 2

Just for a laugh, let's take Gary Groth's paradigm and see whether or not it applies to him just as it does to Sim.

Once more into the Groth-quote:

Consider this: TCJ, as has been pointed out, sold half of what Cerebus did. (That sounds about right: Cerebus probably sold around 20,000, the Journal around 9,000). Surely, a greater proportion of Cerebus readers cared about Dave Sim and Cerebus than that of Journal readers. It was Sim who first published a Dave-Sim-Is-Hitler analogy comment in a forum that would have far greater impact on Dave Sim’s livelihood than the Journal — his own comic, read exclusively his his own fans. Logically, then, Sim did far more to cultivate what he perceives as the Sim-Is-Hitler public persona that he believes currently exists (which, keep in mind, only exists in Sim’s head). So, we have several layers of lunacy at work here: the first is that there’s wide perception of Sim-as-Hitler (which there isn’t) and the second is that the Journal was solely responsible for this when it was in fact Sim’s own Cerebus that was, logically, far more responsible…..

Let's suppose an analogous situation, but with Groth as the subject.

Groth writes an editorial that, surprise of surprises, at least one of his readers doesn't like.

That reader writes a letter to the JOURNAL, calling Groth "an aesthetic Nazi."

Groth decides to print this letter in order to refute it, as I presume Dave refuted the letter in which one of his readers called him a Nazi. 

I think the idea of Groth-as-Nazi is such a striking piece of satire that I commission a Bigtime Artist to do a sketch of Groth in jackboots, maybe strutting in front of a barb-wire fence in which a bunch of superheroes are confined.  Maybe Nazi-Groth says something like, "Our good friend Doctor Wertham was entirely too EASY on you."  I print the sketch on my blog.

Miracle of miracles, though my presence on the web garners far less attention than that of COMICS JOURNAL, the image of Nazi-Groth creates a little controversy. 

Now, if I understand Groth's logic above correctly, then it follows:

Any responsibility I might bear for the dissemination of the Nazi-Groth image is far less than the responsibility Groth himself bears for:

(a) Printing the offending letter publicly in order to refute it,

(b) Penning an essay so offensive that it moved a reader to call him a Nazi,

(c) Both of the above.


Isn't logic wonderful?

SIM SIM SALLAH BLAM

Shows how much attention I pay to either Fantagraphics or Aardvark-Vanaheim these days, as I just found out last week from this BEAT post that there had been some lengthy discussions as to whether Dave Sim might allow Gary Groth, Inc. to republish CEREBUS in a bookstore-friendly version.

The "blam" in the title refers to the fact that the discussions seem to have blown up in everyone's faces, but I'm not interested in discussing the viability of seeing these two dialectically opposed comics-figures become "strange bedfellows."

One of the many comments Sim made (through a representative) was to vent his resentment of a cartoon that the JOURNAL published in which he was compared to Hitler.

... I was certainly surprised when one of the individuals responsible for labelling me as being co-equivalent with a Nazi concentration camp commandant was suddenly — quite publicly — talking about publishing my work and breathing new life into it... And if I did respond then I would be reinforcing the legitimacy of me being depicted as a concentration camp commandant, 18 years later. Otherwise why was I negotiating with them/him?"-- from "Dave Sim Responds" here.

Sim's aggrievement also doesn't concern me here just now.  Still I found my eyebrows substantially raised by Gary Groth's refutation of Sim's objection, helpfully excerpted on THE BEAT.

Consider this: TCJ, as has been pointed out, sold half of what Cerebus did. (That sounds about right: Cerebus probably sold around 20,000, the Journal around 9,000). Surely, a greater proportion of Cerebus readers cared about Dave Sim and Cerebus than that of Journal readers. It was Sim who first published a Dave-Sim-Is-Hitler analogy comment in a forum that would have far greater impact on Dave Sim’s livelihood than the Journal — his own comic, read exclusively his his own fans. Logically, then, Sim did far more to cultivate what he perceives as the Sim-Is-Hitler public persona that he believes currently exists (which, keep in mind, only exists in Sim’s head). So, we have several layers of lunacy at work here: the first is that there’s wide perception of Sim-as-Hitler (which there isn’t) and the second is that the Journal was solely responsible for this when it was in fact Sim’s own Cerebus that was, logically, far more responsible…..

What amazes me about Groth's comment here is that while I was a constant and (I think) thorough reader of CEREBUS back in the day, I had no idea what 'Dave-Sim-is-Hitler-analogy-comment" Groth referenced.  Groth states that it appeared in response to the incendiary issue #186, but the comment wasn't originated by Sim, though he did respond to it.

I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how Sim responding to a comment "did far more to cultivate... the Sim-Is-Hitler public persona."  Did anyone remember this lettercol exchange before Groth mentioned it as a proximate cause that inspired the offending cartoon?

I don't think that Sim is "responsible" in any way for fomenting the intellectually lax "Sim-Is-Hitler" meme, even with the consideration that he could have chosen not to print the originating comment in the CEREBUS lettercol.  I can imagine that many people who didn't like Sim's views would have made comparisons between Sim and Hitler had Sim never printed that comment, or any similar comment, and also if THE JOURNAL had never printed the offending cartoon.  Comparing one's enemies to Hitler has spawned its own "law," if one can fairly call it that.

But if you ask me what did the most to spread the Godwinian comparison-- some little comment in the CEREBUS lettercol, or the fullblown cartoon in the JOURNAL-- well, obviously, the JOURNAL cartoon had the greater effect.  Such is the power of the image: *seeing* a comics-celebrity like Sim in Nazi attire will always sear its way into the cerebral synapses in the way that a verbal debate cannot.  I don't imagine that the JOURNAL's low sales prevented the dissemination and discussion of the cartoon in many quarters that paid no attention whatever to the lettercol referenced.

By saying this, I do not side with Sim on the question of whether it was right or tasteful for Groth to have published such a cartoon.

But Groth's attempt to shift the burden to Sim's shoulders is more than a bit egregious.


 

MYTHCOMICS #3: CEREBUS #298-300

(I would think it would be self-evident that no one would read, or want to read, this analysis w/o having read the entire CEREBUS run. Nevertheless, SPOILERS, SPOILERS, and MORE SPOILERS.)





PLOT-SUMMARY of “LATTER DAYS 33-35:” Having reached the end of his days, Cerebus the Aardvark lies bedridden at his estate. He receives a visitor: Sheshep, his only son by human female Joanne. Sheshep, who shows no trace of aardvark ancestry, reveals that he plans to overthrow the religious orthodoxy Cerebus worships, with the help of his mother. Sheshep shows Cerebus the fruit of the grafting techniques he and Joanne have derived from Cerebus’ old enemy Cirin: a human infant hybridized with a lion cub. Moreover, the baby is a clone of Sheshep, and he believes that when the technique is perfected, they will produce a monstrous sphinx-like creature, one that shares Sheshep’s consciousness, and that in that form he will rule the world as a living Sphinx: “Harmaclus, the Egyptian god of morning.” Cerebus is appalled by his son’s perfidy and tries to get out of bed and kill him, but the Aardvark collapses and dies. His spirit leaves his body and he finds himself ascending into a radiant heaven populated by all of the people he knew in life. At the last moment Cerebus realizes that he’s approaching something more like a hell than a heaven. He tries to retreat, calling on God for help, but the light sucks the spirit of Cerebus into nothingness.


MYTH-ANALYSIS: A full myth-critical analysis of the 300 issues of CEREBUS is clearly impossible in this venue. Aside from the sheer quantity of issues involved, such an analysis would also have to deal at length with author Dave Sim’s own philosophical shift during the course of the CEREBUS serial project, in which he essentially converted from a position of religious relativism to one of absolutism. Based on my exchanges with Sim, I feel certain that Sim would not philosophically agree with the idea of his work being analyzed in terms of its archetypal “fictional myths.”

Nevertheless, the conclusion of CEREBUS is a stunning mythopoeic creation, eclipsing any comparable fiction-myth from so-called “artcomics.” Over many years a series that began as a simple funny-animal parody of Marvel’s CONAN THE BARBARIAN comic-book adaptation took on increasing layers of mythic and literary complexity, referencing the Bible, famous literary figures, and what James Thurber called “the war between men and women.” Yet one part of the CEREBUS myth remained grounded in the mythos of Robert E. Howard, who made a similar use of a fictive Egypt as a locus of obscenity and decadence. Howard’s Hyborian world was always represented as a distant “ancestor” of later real-world civilizations, but toward the end of CEREBUS Sim dispenses with this sort of fantasy-worldbuilding, and begins letting real-world culture, particularly that of the Old Testament mindscape, bleed into Sim’s world of “Estarcion.”

To be sure, Sim’s vision isn’t always coherent. The idea of pagan recrudescence is never far from either ancient Christian polemics or modern versions of same, including Sim’s own. Yet in a mishandled attempt to reference the division between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds, Sim has Sheshep tell Cerebus that the new worshippers of “Harmaclus” [sic] will be “a new group of believers… called Muslims!” Given that Sim stated on many occasions that he deemed the Koran to be a holy book equal to those of the Jews and Christians, this conflation of Muslims and archaic Egyptian pagans is puzzling in the extreme.

Nevertheless, Sim is inspired insofar as he draws parallels between the theriomorphic deities of ancient Egypt and modern Judeo-Christian fears of human-animal hybrids. I confess I do not know by what cultural quirk the Old Testament’s rules against plant-grafting became so inflated in modern American culture that even George W. Bush railed against the potential for blasphemous hybridizations, presumably in reaction to the innovations of cloning technology. However, Sim’s Sphinx-metaphor is ideal for portraying that fear of physical and spiritual pollution.

Sim also adroitly suggests that Sheshep’s grand design is doomed to failure. Sheshep believes that his consciousness will merge with that of the Sphinx (though he confesses that as yet he and his mother haven’t managed to keep the hybrids viable). Cerebus, though not directly referencing the Greek “law of identity,” exposes the foolishness of Sheshep’s plot, pointing out that Sheshep can’t experience the sensations of even the infant-hybrid he holds. There’s an additional irony that Sheshep, born of a union of a human woman and a humanized fantasy-animal, rejects his father’s beliefs but physically wants to become theriomorphic, like his father. Admittedly, he does trump his father by wanting to become an animal with more noble associations than the humble aardvark.

There’s relatively little in these three final issues that directly concerns Sim’s controversial opinions on male-female relations. Of course Sim’s demonization of femininity has its mythopoeic role to play: in contrast to the real world’s cloning experiments, which were produced by a dominantly male scientific hierarchy, in Cerebus’ world the evil of hybridization results from the impious efforts of evil feminist Cirin, the aardvark’s estranged wife Joanne and “mama’s boy” Sheshep. Furthermore, when Cerebus ascends into the “false heaven,” he sees foremost in the crowd of phantasms the three human beings who had the greatest impact on him—two of whom are male, while the other is his first true love Jaka. But it’s the face of Jaka, not the two men, that corrodes before Cerebus’ eyes to reveal her demonic nature: the male phantasms, though presumably no less demonic, aren’t seen as insidious specters.

Certain other sections of CEREBUS possess similar levels of mythicity. I imagine I’ll cover a few of them in my “1001 myths” project, but as none of them are as rich as the conclusion, I felt that “the last had to be the first.”

FOREIGN TO CORRESPONDENCE

As I originally formed this blog for the purpose of preserving certain ideas or articles, I haven't felt moved to reminisce about my history as a comics-fan or any of my experiences with comics-professionals. I don't expect I'll do much in future, though anything's possible.

During the 80s I wrote various reviews and essays for THE COMICS JOURNAL, which led me to review Dave Sim's CEREBUS in JOURNAL #67 (Oct 81) -- specifically, the first two issues of HIGH SOCIETY. I later met Dave himself at a handful of conventions and signings, and wrote occasional letters to the CEREBUS letters-page.

Fast-forward to the present: as of this month, Dave Sim (who now calls himself "the Pariah King of Comics" due in large part to his writings on feminist topics) feels so embattled that he has asked potential correspondents to sign a petition stating that they do not believe he is a "misogynist." If they sign, then Dave will correspond with them: if not, then not.

Much has been written about Dave Sim's state of mind when he made this demand, but I don't propose to discuss that here. My sole purpose here is to point out that this is not the first time Dave Sim has chosen to cut himself off from correspondence.

Without having issues of CEREBUS or actual correspondence to hand, I have to guess on dates, but there was a period-- I believe whenever Dave was working on the Hemingway section of CEREBUS-- when Dave had been engaging in regular correspondence but wrote at least three "regulars"-- one of whom was myself-- that he would have let all discussions hang fire for some undetermined period because of the intensity of the work he was doing.

This is, to be sure, a strong consideration that all artists have; the fact that time spent to any activity secondary to the art-- be it meeting fans, corresponding with fans, or anything similar-- is time taken away from the art.

And while many speculations have arisen as to Dave Sim's motives for demanding the petition-signing as a prerequisite for correspondence, one motive-- that of simple time-constraints-- has been omitted, though not by Dave. On 5-10-08, he wrote this to two of the participants of the Cerebus Yahoo group:

"The bottom line for me was: there just aren't enough hours in the day. I looked at the pile of 60 or 70 letters that had built up overthe last three months and I realized NONE of those people was willingto stand up and say they didn't think I was a misogynist. So why would I invest three or four days of work answering all of them?"

The full text of the message is here:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cerebus/messages/148682?threaded=1&m=e&tidx=1

I am of course not claiming that this motive for the petition-- to reduce his backlog of correspondence-- is Dave's only one. I can't know that. I'm not even sure Dave, or anyone else in a similar position, can know that.

But I wanted to point out that it's not the first time he's taken an unusual route to reduce that backlog. For that matter, even the Hemingway-era retreat was not the first: there's a period in the 80s where Dave simply stopped writing answers to letters in his own lettercol, and pretty much left the fans to talk amongst themselves.

And that, aside from all other motives, is why I would say that Dave is constitutionally--

Foreign to correspondence.