THE READING RHEUM: DOCTOR WERTHLESS (2025)

 

For some years I've wondered: what kind of child was Frederic Wertham? There are no official biographies of the man who "nearly killed the comics industry." Even the friendliest overview of the psychiatrist's career, Bart Beaty's 2005 FREDERIC WERTHAM AND THE CRITIQUE OF MASS CULTURE, contained no more information than Wikipedia: born in 1895 and raised by middle-class Jewish parents in Nuremberg, Germany, moved to the US in 1922 to pursue his psychiatric career. Of the childhood of the doctor who became famous for analyzing the fantasies of children, there was nothing to say if he had problems as a Jewish child in pre-Weimar Germany, or if he ever read German translations of pulp characters like Nick Carter or the (fictionalized) Buffalo Bill.

But thanks to the graphic novel DOCTOR WERTHLESS by writer Harold Schechter and artist Eric Powell, it's clear that Frederic Wertham's psychological past probably will never be plumbed. Schechter and Powell's biography-- admittedly also "fictionalized," though only in the sense of creating imagined dialogue for real-life persons-- establishes that Wertham never publicly discussed his early life. He also became estranged from the rest of his family even before moving to America, so like many other Euro-expatriates, the US was the place where Wertham re-invented himself.

And yet, that reinvention had almost nothing to with American popular culture, much less comic books, which did not become a mass medium until the late 1930s and didn't excite Wertham's attention until the late 1940s. He gained celebrity from his somewhat lurid studies of the serial murderers Albert Fish and Robert Irwin, whose crimes dominate the first half of WERTHLESS. Here I'll note that readers may need strong stomachs to tolerate the detailed descriptions of their many perfidies. And yet those details are important to understanding Wertham's career. 

WERTHLESS is careful to show that according to what records we have, Wertham was generally empathetic toward all of his patients. And this empathy is key to understanding how the doctor could treat the iniquities of an Albert Fish with clinical dispassion: to Wertham, Fish was simply sick. The source of the sickness lay outside the patient, though the labeling of that contagion would not take place until Wertham tapped into the postwar mania linking juvenile delinquency to popular culture. Other pundits of the period went after popular culture in general, but comic books became Wertham's Great White Whale; a virus he could imagine stamping out.

Despite Schechter and Powell's (correct) negative assessment of the doctor's search for easy solutions, the authors are careful to show the positive aspects of his empathy. For about a decade Wertham donated his expertise to a low-cost psychiatric clinic in Harlem, and he gave valuable court testimony that led to the downfall of "separate but equal" segregation. The authors pass a little rapidly over his association with the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, but it's possible the doctor was simply fooled by their pose of innocence. Though Wertham as drawn by Powell looks unprepossessing, he had assorted minor encounters with a smattering of celebrities-- Al Capp, Richard Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, and James Lipton-- so it would seem that Wertham possessed some charisma in addition to his empathy. Indeed, celebrity-spotting is one of the pleasures of WERTHLESS.   

Yet in both the first and last pages, Schechter and Powell make clear their disagreement with Wertham's "belief that brutal aggression was not innate in human nature but [was] the product of social and environmental forces." Wertham opposed the execution of Albert Fish because, being insane, Fish was not responsible for the many people he murdered. Yet in Wertham's 1954 alarmist screed SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, the psychiatrist excoriated comic book creators as being responsible for crimes and murders, even though he never cited a single case proving that any comics story had engendered a crime. To all of those artists and editors, Wertham attributed aberrant motives for "seducing" children-- and since none of the creators were clinically insane, Wertham could condemn them absolutely as he could not morally condemn serial killers. The accumulation of knowledge about serial murderers was supposedly valuable enough to justify preserving their lives in asylums for study, even when it was clear that the killers took immense pleasure in their acts. Readers' pleasure in fictional depictions of violence and sex, however, was something for which Wertham could not or would not allow any justification. Eric Powell redraws several of the scandalous comics-images Wertham reproduced in SEDUCTION, the better to boost his crusade and to sell his book.  

Wertham never overtly retracted his opposition to fictional violence, though Schechter and Powell present a curious incident that may have been spun partly from their imaginations. It's a fact that in 1957, artist Wally Wood-- one of the artists Wertham criticized for horror-comics-- produced a satire of Wertham, "Doctor Werthless," for MAD Magazine. It may be the fantasy of the two biographers that Wertham framed the cartoon strip and kept it on his wall. If that is not just a fantasy, it could indicate an indirect admission of his biggest error. But the biographers also indicate that one of the last things Wertham wrote before his death in November 1981 was a response to a correspondent posing the question as to whether Wally Wood had "produced monsters"-- and Wertham answered in the negative. Wertham did not live a worthless life. But the crusade for which he's best known, and all the skewed data he used to support that jeremiad-- those truly are without worth.                  

ADDENDUM 5-24-26: I wrote this as part of a recommendation of DW to another blogger:

"From the title alone, one might think DW a hit job. But the authors were remarkably even-handed. They mention how he ran a free psychiatric clinic in Harlem and contributed valuable testimony to the cases that led to the Brown vs Board of Education verdict. (Despite the gravity of the testimony, FW managed to bring up his anti-comics obsession, which is quite funny.) The biggest irony of FW's life is that had he not invested so much energy into his anti-comics jeremiad, which was drivel, no one would remember any of his good works."     

                   

HORMONE TROUBLE

 I'm trying to frame this as a response to a post claiming that in the 1980s "comics became a medium for young guys who didn't want to grow up, and who wanted the signifiers of adult themes without the complexity and ambiguity that could be found in novels and cinema." _________________

C.S. Lewis once said something along the lines of, "It's unfair to assume that fairy tales are for children, for many adults like them, and many children do not."   

I feel the same way about the general assertion that adventure stories, in the comics or anywhere else, were aimed at kids and/teens. Don't some adults like the genre all their lives, while some children turn their nose up at superheroes and barbarians when very young?

It's true that adolescents may pursue a genre or form of storytelling avidly for some years and then lose interest. Getting older MAY be a factor why those persons move on to other things. However, the best seller lists suggest that the greater numbers move on not to Nabokov but to "beach books."

Other adolescents, like the majority of comics nerds under discussion, can't be said to simply "not want to grow up." If they like a genre deeply enough, they'll pursue it. Maybe they'll embrace trash as readily as diamonds; maybe they won't. But since the "adult world" supports quite a lot of trash too, getting older doesn't seem to have anything to do with one's tastes.  

   

TAKING STOCK OF 2025

 While this blog is never at the best of times a hub of excitement, for me the most compelling event was my identification of the first post-Renaissance exemplars of the superhero idiom: the two Scottish knights of Sir Walter Scott's 1805 THE LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL. I confess that in my original analysis of the poem, and of Scott's relevance to the idiom (a three-part essay-series starting here), I thought that one of the knights, William of Deloraine, was the eminent icon. But on reconsideration, I decided that the heroic action of the narrative was split between Deloraine and his "friendly enemy" Henry of Cranston, and I recently amended the essay to that effect. My increased interest in Scott also led me to read and review his BRIDE OF LAMMEMOOR, with less than positive results.

I reviewed all of the Burroughs "Earth's Core" books, though the only ones I really liked were the last two: LAND OF TERROR and SAVAGE PELLUCIDAR.  

In this post I firmed up the connection between tropes and icons.

I framed an aesthetic of nonsense, which came in handy for an analysis of a Bob Burden FLAMING CARROT story.

I trifled with sexual dimorphism and told a tale of two cosms.  

I attempted a definition of literary modes (using only magical-era fantasies as one example) according to the scale of the pivotal characters involved. 

Both Peter David and Jim Shooter passed this year, and I gave them props for standout stories. 

I defined the new term "eminence," which at least sounds better than "centric." 

I reworked my concept of "magical-era stories," and formulated the terms "thymotic" and "epithymotic." 

I completed a five-part review of Von Harbou's METROPOLIS and a three-part essay on the ethics of "keeping and giving," which ran in altered form on BLEEDING FOOL.

And for my year-end finisher, I got two posts out of the SPIRIT story "Li' l Adam" and one in which I FINALLY found an "Archie-Typal Mythcomic."

Favorite reviews on THE NUM BLOG: 

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY 

ASTRO BOY

THE TITANS

JUSTICE LEAGUE Seasons One and Two

THE INVINCIBLE BROTHERS MACISTE

All the episodes of BUFFY and ANGEL.

THE COLOSSUS OF NEW YORK

OLIVIA

"THE NIGHT OF THE UNDEAD," WILD WILD WEST

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT

TO KILL WITH INTRIGUE 

BLONDE IN BLACK LEATHER (in memoriam Claudia Cardinale)

SWEET SWEET RACHEL

BEETLEJUICE

THE HYPNOTIC EYE

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN

A KNIFE FOR THE LADIES

CHAMBER OF HORRORS 

THE LEGEND OF FRENCHIE KING (in memoriam Brigitte Bardot)

ORPHEUS

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Thanks to all who checked in or even lurked!

TAKING STOCK OF 2024

 I've mentioned in previous year-summaries that I've been sharing some of my essays on the comics-site BLEEDING FOOL. My most ambitious project for 2024 was an essay-series entitled HEROES BY THE HUNDREDFOLD: 100 BEST COSTUMED-CRUSADER FILMS, based on one of the categories I've been regularly exploring on the GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA blog. The final section finished up in December 2024 here, and the series of course has received thunderous acclaim. ***JUST KIDDING.*** But it was an enjoyable undertaking, worth doing for its own sake. It gave me a chance to exercise my ability to suss out superhero movies with respect to other potentialities than the kinetic one for which the public knows them. The essay-series is partly a response to the anti-superhero polemic of Martin Scorsese, last addressed here.                                                                                                                                   Meanwhile, back at the ARCHIVE, my most challenging project was probably to define the nature of literary (as opposed to real) evil in the EVIL, BE THOU OUR GOOD series, beginning here. This occasioned a small return to the poetics of Bataille, which might spawn some future ruminations down the road. Second on that list would be the formulations on my category of "magical fantasy stories," using the conceptual framework of Mircea Eliade to arrive at a concept of a pure magical fantasy in contrast to those rendered impure by intrusions of modernity, or non-magical nonsense-concepts. Though I've seen a fair number of critical studies that privilege the appearance of magical fantasy in archaic societies, I think MIND OUT OF TIME PT 2 might be unique in stating that the archaic society is part of the equation that allows for conviction in the magical rationale.                                                                                                                                                                                                           The "phase shift" is probably the only significant term introduced in 2024. I furthered some of my investigations on durability, ravishment, and ontology, any of which may breed more involved ruminations later on.                                                                                                                                                                                                   I produced in 2024 a handful of overviews of either serials or concepts. My examination of the Lovecraft "mythos stories" was tabled for other projects, but hopefully I'll finish it up this year. I provided a fairly detailed analysis of Chic Young's BLONDIE here, as a means of providing context for the particular type of "sadism in domesticity" myth I've found in that franchise. In contrast to Young, who found his metier with BLONDIE and stuck with that strip until his passing, the manga-artist Nanashi brought his serial NAGATORO to a conclusion in 2024, and though I wasn't satisfied with the serial's conclusion in every respect, I noted here that the artist's determination to bring closure to his teen-romance brought forth Nanashi's only mythopoeic narrative, which is no small feat since his dominant focus was upon the dramatic potentiality.                                                                                                                            In addition to the Nagatoro and Blondie "1001 myths" entries, I also particularly enjoyed working on those for Tezuka's UNICO, Nagai's KAMASUTRA, a Binder MARY MARVEL tale, Druillet's DELIRIUS, another wacky WONDER WOMAN from Marston, and one of Gardner Fox's classic sensawunda tales for ADAM STRANGE. No new non-fiction reads in 2024 that really set my brain afire, but there were some worthy new fiction reads, like the original Pinocchio, and the Winternight Trilogy by Katherine Arden, which I started reviewing here. It's not that I didn't keep busy reading various new works in my three book-groups, but there just wasn't all that much I could build upon, aside from my observations on Dotoyevsky's NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND. I suppose I'm glad I read Wyndham's TRIFIDS, Rohmer's GREEN EYES OF BAST, and Barker's SCARLET GOSPELS even though I found all of them not-as-mythic as I could have wished. In addition to my long-form attempts to suss out the Lovecraft mythos, I probably put in the most effort to explicate both Faulkner's LIGHT IN AUGUST and LeFanu's CARMILLA.                                                                                                                                                                                       Over on the NUM blog, I like to think I elucidated some interesting myth-tropes (even if sub-concrescent ones). Some reviews of possible interest: WATCHMEN (2009), HIS NAME WAS HOLY GHOST (1972), TOWER OF SCREAMING VIRGINS (1968), LITTLE MISS INNOCENCE (1973), THE THRONE OF FIRE (1983), THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1940), WANDA THE SADISTIC HYPNOTIST (1969), CUTIE HONEY (2004), SUPERMAN VS. THE ELITE (2012), THE BLACK SWAN (1942), LUPIN III: FUJIKO'S LIE (2020), THE FISH WITH EYES OF GOLD (1974), HEY, GOOD LOOKIN' (1982), INVADERS FROM MARS (1953), GHASTLY PRINCE ENMA, BURNING UP! (2011), and, just to round out the year with something I'd been seeking for some time (but didn't want to pay for on streaming), THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU (1980). Though I also completed a good number of series-reviews, there wasn't much to explicate in GOTHAM, THE TICK, INVINCIBLE, or even STARGIRL, though I very much liked the latter show providing a final decent three-season run in marked contrast to the horrible idiocies of so many other CW shows. There was more to analyze in the six seasons of XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS, though also a lot of formula junk to sort through there. TEEN TITANS probably was more rewarding in terms of providing more fair and good stuff to offset the weak sauce. I also finished Season 2 of SMALLVILLE, but who knows when I'll find time to do individual show-critiques of the later seasons.                                                                                                                                                        So Year 2024 offered quite a bit of variety, and maybe 2025 will at least keep pace. I would be remiss not to mention one dominating political event: the re-election of Donald Trump. Though I believe none of the fervid fantasies of the Far Left as to his assumption of power, I also don't believe that the next four years will be smooth sailing, as Trump's adherents imagine. He's going to mess up on one thing or the other, maybe several things. But the change was necessary, because the Democrat Party had just become such a polluted mess, and I think that no matter badly Trump does in some particulars, the alternative would have been far worse-- though of course, no one will ever truly know what might have been. We will be living in interesting times, to be sure.                                                         

TAKING STOCK OF 2023

I suppose 2023, in comparison to the previous two years, sums up as more of a re-elaboration of old concepts than a bounty of new ones.

I continued my exploration of the dynamics of how icons function in crossover-universes. One two-part essay, here and here, dealt with how Marvel Comics apparently concocted its first interordinate icon-association not with the idea of selling funnybooks, but just as a means of banishing authorial boredom. This was a strange beginning, for before Marvel, crossovers had only been intermittent anomalies. But after the 1960s, they would arguably become  the measure of all modern popular literature from the 1960s on, more expected by the general audience than not.

DOMINANT PRIMES AND SUBS put forth a terminology capable of clarifying how a stature-icon can retain its stature despite being placed in the most compromising subordinate positions, like the unfortunate Lord of Vampires being dragooned into appearing as a sub in such gems as BLACULA, THE DRAK PACK, and (perhaps the ultimate comedown) WITCHMAS.

STALKING THE PERFECT TERMS: THE FOUR POTENTIALITIES hopefully settles at least on accurate terms for the *quanta* that I perceive as fundamental to each of the potentialities.

TIME OUT OF ALIGNMENT succinctly states why crossovers brought about through regularized breaches in fictional space-time don't merit consideration as crossovers.

And the ICONIC BONDING essays, starting here, provide a rationale as to why icons with certain bonding situations also don't count as the crossing over of fictive universes.

On the non-crossover front, I finished Whitehead's SCIENCE IN THE NEW WORLD, and I don't think I'm by any means finished with exploring his work with relation of my form of literary concrescence, but MIGHT AND MYTH is a pretty fair start.

There's also more to be written about the history of the science fiction genre's influence upon the comic-book superhero genre, but I flatter myself that I made a pretty good start in THE EXCELLENT SEEDS OF HIS OWN DESTRUCTION. which also argues that Jack Kirby unleashed something of a creative demon he couldn't entirely control. This essay was reprinted on the conservative comics site BLEEDING FOOL.

Also on the essay front, coincidence brought me to a high-falutin' online essay about a so-called "incest aesthetic," which I refuted in INCEST WE TRUST PART 7. But I think WHAT VS. HOW might be my best essay as far as elucidating the dynamics of lateral meaning and vertical meaning.

As for reviews. a number of these were of famous works of pop fiction-- Carroll's ALICE books, the first of the OZ books, Doyle's LOST WORLD, THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I did NOT even get close to finishing an annotated edition of Lovecraft's "Mythos stories," don't know if 2024 will prove better on that front. But my most interesting discovery was finding a treasure trove of naive myth in Burroughs' RED HAWK.

As for mythcomics, some of these were also works that I already appreciated, such as THE SONG OF RED SONJA, but there's a little more sense of adventure in exhuming forgotten gems (that some would call "moldy oldies") like THE MONGROL MAN and THE LEGEND OF THE LONG THIRD FINGER.

As for the NUM reviews, here's a list of the shows that most challenged me in sussing them out, even if a couple were interesting just as rare birds.

THE SUPER SNOOPER

BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA

Peter Jackson's THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy

THE BEAUTIFUL BEAST

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM

LOLA COLT

BURNED AT THE STAKE

PANDORA'S BOX (Mighty Mouse)

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE

INFERNO

REVENGE IN THE HOUSE OF USHER

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY 3

WOLF DEVIL WOMAN

MIRACULOUS FLOWER

DAGON

THE WOLFMAN

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY

JONNY QUEST (1964)

MONDO KEYHOLE

THE INCREDIBLE PROFESSOR ZOVEK

XENA SEASON ONE

THE LAST DRAGONSLAYER

HELLBOY (2019)

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

SUMURU

GODZILLA MINUS ONE

BRAVESTARR THE LEGEND

I can't say my GRAND SUPERHERO OPERA blog is burning up the Internet, despite my placing a link to the blog on the aforementioned BLEEDING FOOL. But I attribute that to the fact that most fans are not bugs for categorization as I am. I will continue that project, though, because it suits me. I look forward to more such categorization conundrums in 2024.

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I noted that a lot of film critics have ample ways of authenticating the major developments both in general film history and with respect to particular film genres. When a cineaste like Martin Scorsese talks about a genre like film noir, he can draw upon a wealth of critical writings about the most important exemplars of the genre, and about the overall history of the genre's development. 

In Part 1 I also pointed out that comics-fans have over time generated both general histories of the comic book medium and of the particular genre of the superhero in comics. Yet none of these histories has any impact on the development of superheroes in the film medium, any more than a history of noir books would impact on noir films. And in essence, there is no strong developmental history of superheroes on the big screen, not even when one shows how that history intertwines with the history of superheroes on the small screen.

If one uses the term "superhero" only in its more restricted sense of "the costumed crusader," then in American cinema the genre starts in silent cinema with 1920's MARK OF ZORRO. But that film, and its 1940 remake, were one of a very small number of feature films spotlighting costumed crusaders prior to the 1950s. The main source of costumed crusader cinema were the serials, which also began in the silent era, but which did not make substantial adaptation of superhero (and superhero-adjacent) properties until the late 1930s, the beginning of the so-called "Golden Age of Serials." Zorro put in an appearance in the serial format in 1937's ZORRO RIDES AGAIN. while 1938 saw the cinematic debut of two other prose-derived superheroes, the Spider and the Lone Ranger. Many "superhero-adjacent" comic strips also were filmed around the same time, particularly those of FLASH GORDON and BUCK ROGERS. Finally, in response to the burgeoning popularity of costumed heroes in comic books, ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL in 1941 provided the first adaptation of a particular comic book superhero. Comic book superheroes continued to be adapted until the studios quit making serials in 1956, resulting in a list of adaptations that includes Spy Smasher (1942), Batman (1943), Captain America (1944), The Vigilante (1947), and Superman (1948). Serials never indulged in the gory violence seen in many Golden Age superhero comics, but they shared the same basic aesthetic: action, action, and more action.

Serials, which made their money from kids regularly going to the movies to see the latest serial-chapter, were doomed as soon as television began offering serial-style entertainment for free. Yet television in that decade, and through the early 1960s, paid the superhero almost no attention, even as juvenile entertainment. Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. Slightly later, Disney produced in 1963 a three-part limited teleseries, THE SCARECROW OF ROMNEY MARSH.

The same basic dynamic informed the genre of animated theatrical shorts, which appeared alongside theatrical feature films. In the "golden age of cinema," two costumed-crusader cartoon-series predominated, resulting in seventeen SUPERMAN episodes and eighty-one MIGHTY MOUSE episodes. TV's competition with the movies meant the eventual doom of cinematic cartoon shorts and the rise of TV cartoons. On the small screen Mighty Mouse arguably gained a greater following than he ever had on the big screen, enjoying a long run as repackaged Saturday morning fare in the form of 1955's MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE.

There had been a very tiny number of costumed-crusader feature films in the 1940s, such as three SHADOW B-films from Columbia. But in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were only a smattering of mostly forgotten "masked swashbuckler" B-flicks and two LONE RANGER feature films, the latter issued by the same production company that made the TV show. 

The upshot of all these changes was that even though the Silver Age of Comics had brought new life to the superhero genre in the late 1950s, neither the big screen nor the small screen evinced any strong interest in the genre-- until 1966.

Was '66 BATMAN influenced first by a producer reading a BATMAN comic book, or by Hugh Hefner screening the old Bat-serials for a laugh, or by Pop Art usages of comic book art? Primacy does not really matter. But although "camp Batman" was opposed to the "straight" content of the more streamlined BATMAN comics of the Silver Age, the 1966 show was the first film/TV serial that successfully communicated the appeal of a superhero who continually battled a horde of repeating adversaries. Indeed, one could argue Silver Age Bat-comics began emphasizing the hero's colorful rogues a lot more than Golden Age Bat-comics ever had, and so the 1966 show was very much in tune with that sea-change.

 Later that same year, Hanna-Barbera's cartoon studio jumped into the costumed crusader business with galaxy-protecting superhero SPACE GHOST. The same company would present six other such TV cartoons, among them an adaptation of FANTASTIC FOUR, before concerned parents campaigned against this fancied increase in Saturday morning violence.

But neither the large screen nor the small screen did much else with the superheroes for the remainder of the decade. However, one could posit that most of the superheroes of the 1970s were in the same mold as BATMAN and SPACE GHOST, and at least some of the Silver Age comics: colorful, fairly intelligent adventures with light humor and none of the gory violence seen in Golden Age funnies. This aesthetic embraced not only moderately successful 1970s teleserials like WONDER WOMAN and INCREDIBLE HULK, but also misfires like the 1975 feature-film DOC SAVAGE. Roughly the same Silver Age aesthetic stayed in place for the four live-action SUPERMAN films and the considerably less noteworthy super-films of the eighties, such as LEGEND OF THE LONE RANGER and MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. During this "late Silver Age" of film and TV, I tend to find most of the costumed crusaders from cartoon-land to be nugatory, with the possible exceptions of 1983's HE-MAN and 1987's TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES.

Now, one might say that cinema started exploiting the grittier nature of the comic-book Bronze Age with Tim Burton's first two BATMAN films in 1989 and 1992, and maybe even with the 1989 PUNISHER and the 1990 DARKMAN. However, if elements of the comic book Silver Age only appeared in very rough fashion in American comic books of the 1970s through the 1990s, such elements continued to appear alongside the edgier fare in movies and TV shows of the nineties. Thus the other two BATMAN films of the 1990s sought to hearken back to 1966 BATMAN, albeit in a very clumsy manner. Similarly, the hallmark superhero cartoon of the nineties, BATMAN THE ANIMATED SERIES, emulates the tight plotting of Silver Age Bat-comics and, unlike the first two Burton Bat-films, eschews the transgressive violence found in Frank Miller's signature Bronze Age DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. The live-action TURTLES films followed the lead of the eighties cartoon, choosing light humor over blood and guts.

As I see it, even in 2023 we remain in a sort of "superhero soup" in cinema and TV, constantly mixing together either the sunny Silver Age motifs (the MCU's ANT MAN) or the dark and transgressive tropes of the Bronze Age (ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE). It's like modern superhero movies and TV can't decide if they want to follow the lead of Stan Lee or of Alan Moore. 

In one respect, modern costumed-crusader films and TV shows have allied themselves with the comic-book "Iron Age." In PATIENT ZERO PONDERINGS, I hypothesized that the 2009 "diversity hire" of the MS MARVEL creator marked the beginnings of hyper-politicized comic books. MCU films would not substantially begin following this storytelling model until roughly 2015, but to date the studio has not deviated significantly from said model. I don't know what it would take, in any of these media, to re-orient storytelling priorities enough to produce a "New Age" not entirely beholden to any of the others, but I suspect something's got to change eventually, even if its the extinction of the superhero genre in all its variegated forms.

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 1

 In 2019 Martin Scorsese said, in part:

Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

I've already responded loosely to aspects of Scorsese's essay in this post, and I won't repeat my response here, except to say that the director's main target, "franchise films" within the superhero genre, belong more to the category I've called "artifice" than to "verisimilitude." Works in the category of artifice are by their nature more aligned with generating meaning, when they do so, by examining literary tropes rather than consensual reality.

But one problem with critiquing "escapist works" is that it can be difficult to demonstrate how they develop over time. I recently re-watched Part 2 of the director's PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN MOVIES (the only part that happened to be free on Youtube). I noticed that in the documentary Scorsese directed a great deal of attention, at least in the subsection "The Director as Illusionist," to the linear development of various forms of directorial technique, ranging from D.W. Griffith to Alfred Hitchcock. Today anyone can read comparable histories of the development of film techniques, or particular film genres, because general film history has been analyzed in great depth by many writers, long before Scorsese's analysis.

There are a few good general histories of comic books, though none that go into a lot of detail about overall diachronic development of genres (say, how superheroes and funny-animals dominated much of early original comic-book content). However, many histories provide a good linear history of superheroes only, which usually breaks down by designated "ages." I supplied my breakdown of the ages in this essay, but there I focused only the "big events" that defined those ages. A more nuanced analysis, devoted to describing how each age responds to the use of artifice-tropes, would go something like this:

THE GOLDEN AGE-- Because nearly all publications are aimed at children, the entire age is defined largely by wild, pulpish artifice and almost no verisimilitude. Even standout comics artists like Eisner, Cole and Barks only invoke verisimilitude conditionally.

THE SILVER AGE-- Possibly in response to the demands of the Comics Code, the long-time editors of Marvel and DC made an effort to explore techniques that lent greater verisimilitude to their still-pretty-wild fantasies. With DC it was greater use of organized motifs of sci-fi or occult fantasy, while Marvel worked on making characters seem two-dimensional. Almost no other companies followed their lead, though.

THE EARLY BRONZE AGE-- Mainstream comics got edgier, and superheroes followed suit. THE NEW X-MEN, for example, often looked as breezy as many 1960s superhero groups, but often Chris Claremont surreptitiously worked in story-elements suggestive of sadomasochism and rape, among others.

THE LATE BRONZE AGE-- What was kept fairly sub rosa in the seventies became big business as mainstream superhero comics embraced the ideal I've called "adult pulp," of which WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS were the exemplars.

THE IRON AGE-- With greater examination, I might end up dividing this era into "early" and "late" as well, since the "adult pulp" tropes from the eighties and nineties are first compromised by a chimera one might call "the Literary Superhero," and later by "the Politicized Superhero." 

But even if one does not agree with my characterizations, it's possible to see how the superhero genre showed definite changes from era to era. 

But superheroes in cinema-- that's a question for Part 2.

FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE

I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I'm a big fan of one of Leslie Fiedler's quotes from his 1982 book WHAT WAS LITERATURE?: "Mythopoeic excellence is independent of formal excellence." I've never invoked the quote in any of my various analyses of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, either singly or in collaboration. Yet the quote came to mind while I was mulling over some recent friendly arguments between fellow comics-bloggers Kid of CRIVENS and Rip Jagger of RIP JAGGER'S DOJO, if only because both of them made some allusions to "myth."

Now the thing called "myth" is a many-splintered thing, and no one entirely agrees on how to define it. My overall concept of myth is probably not the same as that of Kid, Rip, or Leslie Fiedler. However, one possible common element may be the idea that mythic elements in fiction are those we commonly call "larger than life," and possibly all of us would agree that these two titans of comic-book storytelling predominantly told stories that were "larger than life." (I include Fiedler because he did make a couple of positive remarks on the Fourth World, though I believe he credited the opus to Stan Lee.)

I'll get to quotes by Kid and Rip soon, but first I want to clarify that I'm not entirely sure what specific targets Fiedler was reacting against when he coined his quote. In the book he generalizes a lot about the literary elitism of his time, without naming specific opponents. The way his quote is worded, one assumes that there were critics who believed that "formal excellence" in literary works was everything. If a writer like Virginia Woolf (my example, not Fiedler's) could turn out highly finessed prose that one could admire for its own sake, it would seem that Woolf's lack of any "larger than life" story did not matter to such critics. Fiedler represented himself as someone who could appreciate what he called "myth" in popular as well as elite culture; could appreciate a bestseller-type like Margaret Mitchell as much as he appreciated a literary light like William Faulkner, if not in the exact same way.

OK, so here are the relevant quotes from Kid and Rip from this comments-section of this Dojo post. First Rip mentions two of the more "mythic tales" of Jack Kirby's Fourth World  cosmology, and Kid responds:

I think it likely that many of the themes that people saw in Kirby's work, weren't actually there (or were exaggerated) and had probably never even occurred to him. The Fourth World is laid against a superficial backdrop of 'myth', purely for the purpose of telling stories about good guys versus bad guys.

And Rip responds:

I disagree with you adamantly that Kirby's tapping of mythic themes was by chance. He was intentionally evoking those themes. The "Anti-Life Equation" is a core idea that permeates the stories and is all about the individual freedoms we aspire to.

Now at this point one may be thinking, "okay, all three quoted persons said something about myth, but where does all the fuss about 'formal excellence' come in? Neither Jack Kirby nor Stan Lee was any sort of 'literary light' with a reputation for fine wordsmithing." Quite true. But Kid makes clear that he didn't find Jack Kirby's solo works, Fourth World and otherwise, to be as "readable" as the collaborative works between Kirby and Stan Lee, and this has been a frequent complaint from many other fans over the years in assessing the virtues of the Lee-Kirby collaborations as against the "Solo Kirby" stories, including but not limited to the Fourth World.

It's true that the sort of critics Fiedler was responding to would have deemed both comics-makers to be melodramatic trash. However, I believe that Fiedler was arguing that certain authors did tap into a special type of creativity, one that didn't require a well-turned literary phrase at all. But "readability" was another aspect of story-crafting, and it's as good a word as any for what fans liked in the Lee-Kirby collaborations that they didn't find in the Solo Kirby stories.

Since I'm not trying to make any new enemies, the only reason I quote Kid and Rip is to ground my own responses to their estimations, not to attribute to either blogger something he did not say. And my response is as follows. I agree with Rip that there's a lot of intentional myth-making in the Fourth World, though not so much in the rest of Kirby's solo oeuvre. But I also think Kid is correct that many contemporary comics-readers found the Fourth World hard to follow, and I believe that the hardcore comics-fans didn't invest themselves in Kirby's myths because by 1970 many of them had come to expect a certain level of "formal excellence" even in funnybooks. 

What does "formal excllence" look like on the low level of comic-book melodrama? I see one crucial element that Lee brought to the collaborations that Kirby was not able to master despite his best efforts-- and I'm going to capitalize this element to indicate its importance--

THE APPEARANCE OF CONSISTENT TWO-DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS (defined as characters who seem to have two or more dominant characteristics that give the impression of consistency)

Now, I say "appearance" because of course there were dozens of Marvel characters, either by Stan and Jack or by other creators entirely, who were only one-dimensional (defined by just one trait) or no-dimensional (defined by the function the character performs in the story). Both Lee and Kirby grew up with comics in which one-dimensional and no-dimensional characters practically defined the medium, and the main exceptions were in the works of particular raconteurs like Will Eisner and Carl Barks. Lee and Kirby separately experimented a little bit with two-dimensional characters, mostly in one-shot anthology stories, where they didn't have to worry about a serial status quo. 

I might argue that both authors had made minor inroads toward two-dimensional characterizations, Kirby in the comic strip SKY MASTERS, and Lee in his collaboration with Joe Maneely on the five issues of THE BLACK KNIGHT. But they weren't moved by any lofty literary aims in either case. By the late 1950s the comics-business was in chaos, and no one was sure what would sell. DC, long the home to the reigning super-dude, had started pushing superheroes in the last years of the decade. But even these were at best one-dimensional. Barry Allen was a dogged police scientist, Hal Jordan was a slightly more venturesome test pilot. 

Then Lee and Kirby, who had both been doing a lot of stand-alone SF/horror stories for the Company That Would Be Marvel, came together for FANTASTIC FOUR. In those anthology stories both men had sometimes emulated the two-dimensional characters in 1950s SF-films, and they brought a similar dynamic to this new group of superheroes. The feature's success was a blend of Kirby's great talent for character design and Lee's sensitivity to the different "voices" each character might possess. I would never credit all the "myth-elements" to Kirby alone, or all the "characterization-elements" to Lee alone. But each of them had their primary strengths, and together they were able to present a variety of larger-than-life fantasy-situations that seemed more "relatable" because the characters had an apparent consistency of voice and attitude.

I may build on some of these considerations elsewhere, since Fiedler's use of the word "formal" reminds me of my distinction here between "formal and informal postulates." But none of those hypothetical essays are likely to involve the eternal "Stan and Jack" question.

QUICK ADDENDUM: Here's an example of what I would deem a two-dimensional character by Stan Lee, which story he completed with John Romita long before Kirby returned to Martin Goodman's company.

THE FIRST MARVEL CROSSOVER PT. 2

So in the first part of this two-part essay series, I analyzed all the stories in "Marvel's first shared-universe, multiple-series crossover," and I came to the following conclusions.

All of the stories are ordinary at best. There's no significant content in the stories that Stan Lee-- whether he wrote all of them or orchestrated a few through other writers-- was trying to promote.

Of the four stories, only one is definitely situated to be a "hype-job" for a new series: the PATSY WALKER tale which advertises Marvel's recently debuted LINDA CARTER STUDENT NURSE title. The other characters had all been around in some form over the course of years. Lee, having worked in the comics business for most of his life, surely knew that the majority of his customers were what might be called "browsers," who did not keep track of things like crossovers, and would not be likely to increase purchases of titles because of such "big events." In the very early 1960s comics-fandom was in its infancy, and most of those fans were both male and focused on superheroes, so none of them would have noticed the interaction of the protagonists of "girls' comics."

I also pointed out that Lee did not seem overly invested in character-crossovers for the first year or so when he began writing and editing Marvel's new superhero line. In 1963, once FANTASTIC FOUR was a definite success, he at last had characters like Hulk and Ant-Man guest star in the title, as well as making the foursome guest-stars in the inaugural issue of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. Because of this hesitation on Lee's part, I tend to doubt that his motives for the "girls' comic" crossover had any relevance to the editor's later, very business-oriented focus on crossovers after 1963.

So I can conceive of but one real motive: boredom.

Consider: we know Lee claimed in his most cited reminiscence about the early, pre-hero Marvel period because he said he was thoroughly bored with his job as Marvel editor and was strongly thinking about quitting. There's no way to know whether or not this recollection is true in every respect, but there certainly doesn't seem to be much evidence of Lee feeling creatively engaged with much of anything published in 1961, with the possible exception of his collaborations with Steve Ditko. In 2009 Lee recollectedL

"All I had to do was give Steve a one-line description of the plot and he'd be off and running. He'd take those skeleton outlines I had given him and turn them into classic little works of art that ended up being far cooler than I had any right to expect"

Lee evidently liked the Ditko stories enough that he transformed AMAZING ADVENTURES, one of the standard horror-mystery titles that had run for six issues throughout most of 1961, into AMAZING ADULT FANTASY. The first issue of AAF, continuing the AA numbering and thus starting with issue #7 was, like the girl-crossover comics, cover-dated Dec 1961. AAF was subtitled "The Magazine That Respects Your Intelligence," and emphasized Lee-Ditko collaborations. However, the new version of the magazine was not successful and was placed on the chopping block-- which, ironically, led Lee and Ditko to launch the chancy concept of Spider-Man in the fifteenth and last issue of the title, cover dated August 1962.

So around roughly the same time, Lee debuted FANTASTIC FOUR #1 and issue  #7 of AMAZING ADULT FANTASY, which would seem to be comics he found less boring than most of what he'd been doing, at least within recent months. And in that same time, he also came up with the girl-comic crossover.

Since the four stories in this "shared universe" were not at all ambitious in any way, I theorize that Lee's use of the crossover-concept was not intended to be profitable, just a good gimmick to fill pages. 

In this OUROBOROS DREAMS post, I mentioned a crossover between two war-themed Fawcett characters, Commando Yank and the Phantom Falcon. Though one or both characters probably got their character-names on the covers of WOW COMICS (their only venue), neither was a high-profile figure. Since their teaming up would not be likely to make customers buy more issues of the exact same comic, it's likely that the writer of the interlinked Yank-Falcon stories just thought of the crossover as a "gimmick to fill pages." Following the growth of Marvel's GENUINE shared universe, dozens of writers would write hundreds of comics-stories in which crossovers were just gimmicks that took the place of writing compelling stories with new characters. And this is most likely to be the only reason Lee wrote three of these four inconsequential stories, with the fourth being motivated, however weakly, by the rationale of hyping a new feature.

I'm sure that even if any fan has asked Lee about the girl-comics crossovers a few years after he'd done them, he probably would not have remembered them. For my own satisfaction, though, I wanted to work out whatever significance The First Marvel Crossover might have-- and the only take I find satisfactory is the idea that it shows Stan Lee as the spiritual perceptor not only to all the good crossover stories-- many of which he personally wrote-- but also to all of the bad ones as well.

 

THE FIRST MARVEL CROSSOVER PT. 1

I didn't get much out of Douglas Wolk's 2021 book ALL OF THE MARVELS, an admittedly yeoman effort to observe how Marvel Comics used its chosen tropes both in a historical, synchronic sense and in a developmental, diachronic sense. Ironically, if I'd actively disliked it, I probably would have reviewed it here. But as things stand, I'll confine myself to praising Wolk for pointing out what he called "Marvel's first shared-universe, multiple-series crossover, which was published immediately after FANTASTIC FOUR #1." 

Some histories speak as if the initial issue of FF marked the transition between the new Marvel brand and such older (sometimes tenuous) publishing-entities like "Timely" and "Atlas." However, the company changed its branding status--denoted the letters "MC," stylized to form a barely noticeable insignia-- on the covers of two magazines dated June 1961, PATSY WALKER #95 and JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY #69. A quick scan of both comics online shows that all of the stories in these issues are indistinguishable from other monster-tales and teen humor antics that the company had been publishing for several years, so whatever purpose the re-branding served for the company, it was not to indicate a new approach to the type of material published. Indeed, these would probably be the sort of stories Lee was reacting against when he set out to do superhero yarns to suit himself (at least in part), rather than confining himself to anticipating the tastes of a perceived audience.

There is of course no hint of a shared universe in the earliest issues of FANTASTIC FOUR. Issue #4 revives the Golden Age hero The Sub-Mariner as a recurring opponent for the quartet, but Lee and Kirby don't stress Namor's history as a previously published icon. In issue #5 the Human Torch is seen reading a HULK comic and baiting the Thing about his resemblance to the Green Goliath, but the first true crossover, with the actual Hulk appearing in the FF's pages, doesn't take place until issue #12, dated March 1963. Other features launched in 1962 display no great hurry to acknowledge any connections in Marvel's slowly evolving superhero line.

Yet in late 1961 and early 1962, Lee apparently took it into his head to suddenly tie together the protagonists of three "girl humor" comics and one "female professional" comic. It seems unlikely that the only person in authority over Lee, publisher Martin Goodman, would have ordered this unusual stratagem. By all accounts Goodman was largely concerned with his more profitable publishing ventures and only rarely interfered with Lee's editorial decisions. 

In Part 2 I'll devote more space to why Stan Lee might have chosen to institute the first Marvel Comics crossover, but for now, I'll confine myself to the content that appeared in this initial "multi-issue crossover."

KATHY #14 (dated Dec 1961)-- The titular "teen-age tornado" (who's really just a standard "nice girl") alerts her friendly enemy Liz to the fact that the comic magazine PATSY AND HEDY #78 has just reached newstands. Kathy anticipates that the comic will spotlight a fashion design she sent to the company to be reproduced for one of the characters to wear, which was a standard real practice in "girls' comics" dating back to the forties. Snarky Liz becomes irate because she too sent in a design, but she wasn't contacted. Liz insists that they go to Patsy Walker's house and beard her in her lair because, in a trope also later used in FANTASTIC FOUR, the characters in published comics actually have a lived existence on this Earth. The teen girls are received by both Patsy Walker and her boyfriend Buzz (who in the 1970s  will be transformed into super-heroine "Hellcat" and super-villain "Mad Dog"). Liz yells a lot, and is mollified when Patsy tells her that her submitted design will be used in future. In this silly story's only witty joke, Buzz flirts with Kathy by asking, "how come you aren't in a comic mag of your own," and the poor teen-age tornado can't find the words to tell him that they're in her comic at this very moment.

LIFE WITH MILLIE #14 (also dated Dec 1961) -- Kathy then jumps books not to guest-star with either Patsy or Hedy, but with Marvel's oldest "girl humor" comic character, Millie the Model. The above cover stands in for the story well enough, depicting the travails Kathy goes through trying to get the autograph of the world-famous model.

PATSY WALKER #98 (ALSO dated Dec 1961)-- This time it's Patsy, who in theory is a high-school teenager, who decides to attend a costume party dressed up as the world-famous Millie. Even though Millie is theoretically an adult and ought to look rather different from a teenager posing as her, Millie's boyfriend Clicker encounters disguised Patsy and is totally fooled. (Fun fact: the boyfriend's name was originally "Flicker;" can't imagine why the publishers decided to change it...) 

PATSY WALKER #99-- Though it's the very next issue of PW, its cover-date is Feb 1962, but I think it's reasonable to assume that Lee either scripted the issue (or assigned the scripting) around the same time as the other three stories. Of all four stories, this is the only one that strongly looks like hype for a new series, since the first issue of Marvel's LINDA CARTER STUDENT NURSE (dated Sept 1961) had just debuted a few months previous. It's an odd story since it lacks any humor except for snarky remarks by Patsy's friendly enemy Hedy. Linda Carter simply turns up at Patsy's class and talks to girl students about the importance of nursing as a career, and a final hype-box encourages readers to check out Linda's own comic.

In Part 2 I'll discuss possible motives for this comparative orgy of crossovers, but I'll state right now that Lee certainly wasn't trying to be ambitious in any way. All of these are really bad stories for their genre, and I speak as someone who has a minor liking for "girl humor" comics-stories. I didn't try to read all the other stories in the cited issues, but by chance I did read a separate tale in LIFE WITH MILLIE #14. This isn't a crossover, but it's metafictional like KATHY #14. Millie's parents show up at her studio and inform their daughter that they've been reading her comic, and they've decided to upbraid her fellow model Chili for constantly messing with Millie. However, Chili overhears Mom and Pop discussing their intentions, and she moves to defuse their anger by shamelessly flattering both of them. The two rubes are so stoked by her praise that they end the story by criticizing Millie for not appreciating her nemesis. I'm not saying this is a GOOD story either, but it looks forward to oddball superhero stories like FF #10, in which Lee and Kirby are seen creating a FANTASTIC FOUR magazine with at least partial input from Reed Richards.

Before I address the crossover-situation more in Part 2, I will note that Stan Lee wrote a ton of these humor comics, and though none of them are extraordinary, they did help him hone his skill with witty badinage so that he became renowned as the best writer of verbal humor in comics, albeit with considerable backup from his artist-collaborators. Every time I read the endless sniping between one of the Nice Girls and her Nasty Girl counterpart, I hear Lee whetting his wit for the endless yakkety-yak between the Thing and the Human Torch.

TAKING STOCK OF 2022

 Year 2022 was dominantly my "year of the crossover." Though I started my first systematic analysis of the phenomenon in late 2021, most of my key writings on the subject took place in the newly departed year. Among other things, I believe I finally came to some conclusions about what separates a crossover from a mashup.

Although I'd devoted an earlier post to the subject of the "Asian claw imagery," I gave the subject a thorough investigation here, ranging from Sax Rohmer's novel THE YELLOW CLAW to Marvel Comics' various iterations of their same-name villain(s). Only an equally Rohmeresque subject, it was fun to re-examine the author's 1918 GOLDEN SCORPION, which for me encoded some clues as to why the author might have played down his best known creation Fu Manchu for roughly a decade.

I finally came up with serviceable names for the quanta of the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities here.

In the year of George Perez's regrettable passing, I was finally able to isolate a story from his WONDER WOMAN run that I could designate as a mythcomic. Similary, though for years I'd known that Ra's Al Ghul was a strong villain, 2022 was the first year I learned that he was also a mythic villain.

I learned about some interesting dichotomies in the work of the philosopher Wittgenstein thanks to reading and reviewing one of Stuart A. Kauffman's books.

I concluded my reviews of Dennis Wheatley's four most renowned occult novels in TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER. And while I may never get around to reviewing *all* of the Moore-O'Neill LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN novels, I was moved by O'Neill's passing to review the first and the last, which together offer some interesting data as to what the authors did and did not accomplish.

Lastly, I enlarged upon an earlier concept, consummation, so as to illustrate what makes fiction different from reality, and why the former is most desirable when it's least like the latter.

As for the NUM blog, some key reviews in terms of giving me good mental exercise in their analysis include:

The 1931 DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE.

The anime AQUARION and the two seasons of HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY.

The 2022 BATMAN.

The four ALIEN films, starting here.

The psycho-thriller WHAT THE PEEPER SAW.

The bizarre BLINDMAN.

The 2001 METROPOLIS, a good version of a mediocre Tezuka work.

TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER, even if it was a poor version of a good book.

And in December, I finished reviewing all the ATOR films, with the pleasant surprise that the only one with mythic resonance-- despite still being riddled with goofy inconsistencies-- was IRON WARRIOR, which I'd seen once and barely remembered. WARRIOR was also the last film reviewed for the year, which at least took away the taste of the HE-MAN/SHE-RA CHRISTMAS SPECIAL.

Finally, though I usually don't play up the things I put on my "junk-drawer blogs," I devoted several posts to surveying the sadism tropes found in the HEAVEN'S LOST PROPERTY manga, starting here.

As for the current year will bring-- quien sabe?