THE READING RHEUM: THE SLEEPING SORCERESS (1972)

 

SLEEPING SORCERESS was the second of the Lancer paperbacks to spotlight novel-length adventures of Elric. It's not nearly as well-composed as the first novel and is more transparently a fix-up of separate stories. All the stories here are, like the tale "The Singing Citadel" in the collection of the same name, are prequels to 1962's "The Stealer of Souls," in that they all concern Elric's conflicts with his first major enemy, the sorcerer Theleb K'aarna. The stories written from the 1960s and 1970s set the foundation of Moorcock's multiverse, but as he himself has commented, he was often making up things as he went along.   

Book One of SORCERESS, entitled "The Torment of the Last Lord," is the source of the image of a sleeping enchantress whom, one presumes, the hero will rescue-- though in the whole of the book, this is only true up to a point. Elric and his sidekick Moonglum have just left behind Queen Yishana in "Citadel" in order to pursue Ka'arna, and they encounter a castle inhabited only by the sleeping body of Empress Myshella, an ally of the Powers of Law, just as Elric is aligned to the powers of Chaos. Myshella instantly reminds Elric of his lost love Cymoril, whom he tried to rescue but slew instead, but despite those bad memories, he finds a magical means to revive her. Myshella wakes up just as Theleb K'aarna, allied to an army of Mongol-like warriors, marches on the castle to eliminate its potential threat to Chaos. Myshella summons forces that destroy the horde but K'aarna escapes. Not surprisingly, Myshella is instantly drawn to the brooding albino, and she soon becomes the newest in Elric's "Bond Girl" collection.

Book Two, "To Snare the Pale Prince," is a needlessly confusing sequel to the story "To Rescue Tanelorn" from CITADEL.  "Tanelorn" seems to take place after Elric meets Rackhir the Red Archer in the 1972 ELRIC novel before the latter has visited the mystical city of Tanelorn, while in the short story Rackhir resides in the city and protects it from a Chaos-inspired invasion by an army of beggars from the corrupt realm Nadsokor. Elric is referenced in "Tanelorn" but he does not appear-- and yet, "Prince" tells readers that Elric has visited Tanelorn at some previous time, and thus the albino and his buddy become allies with Rackhir's forces as they defend themselves from a new invasion. This time K'aarna allies himself with Urish, King of Nadsokor, who also has a previous grudge against Elric. The two villains conspire to steal a magic ring from Elric, knowing that he and Moonglum will come to Nadsokor to retrieve it. The evildoers also unleash a new invading force upon Tanelorn, a gaggle of demons who look like women and who therefore prove difficult for Tanelorn's defenders to strike down. Elric summons a troop of male demons, described as "ape-like," who destroy the female creatures and then die as well. ("Beauty and the Beast," anyone?) Elric recovers his ring and there's a rather pointless exchange with the hero's demon patron Arioch. K'aarna gets away again but kills Myshella in the process. His next foray against Tanelorn transpires not much longer afterward.

Book Three, "Three Heroes with a Single Aim," takes place during a period when Rackhir has invited Elric and Moonglum to abide in Tanelorn. The peace of the eternal city does nothing to dispel Elric's anomie, so he rides out into the wilderness, possibly hoping to die. Instead, he stumbles across K'aarna utilizing a mystic device to transport alien reptiles from another cosmos in order to attack Tanelorn. When Elric seeks to destroy the device, it hurls him into another dimension, which is the hero's first real encounter with the Moorcockian multiverse. He meets both Prince Corum of the "Swords trilogy," conceived around the same time, and Erekose, a character whom Moorcock loosely formulated in 1957 and then updated for a stand-alone novel in 1962, and they all realize, in some vague metaphysical manner, that they're all aspects of the same "eternal champion." I wrote up my impressions of "Heroes" in a previous post and my re-reading now does not alter my verdict:

Trouble is, while such heroes are interesting individually, they're not quite as interesting when they meet each other.  In the 1972 "novel" THE SLEEPING SORCERESS-- actually a collection of three separate novellas featuring Moorcock's most popular character, Elric of Melnibone-- the albino-skinned protagonist encounters two other heroes. Both are, like Elric, aspects of the "Eternal Champion," a sort of archetype that remains constant in many multiversal domains.  One is "Prince Corum," who had his own series of adventures around the same time as Elric. The other calls himself "Erekose," though he's not entirely identical with the character from the one-shot 1970 novel THE ETERNAL CHAMPION. For one thing, the Erekose-warrior in this story is explicitly black-skinned. I have not recently reread ETERNAL CHAMPION, but as I recall no reference is made to the race of the original Erekose. I assume Moorcock was having a bit of fun playing around with the racial identities of his heroes in different incarnations.

The crossover-novel brings the three heroes together in the equally eternal city Tanelorn, where they battle the magic of an evil sorcerer. It's a decent enough story but loses some punch given that all three heroes sound and act pretty much the same. Further, this sequence of SLEEPING SORCERESS was originally derived from a similar section in the 1971 Corum novel THE KING OF THE SWORDS. Since they're pretty much the same story, I decided to count the Elric version as "best crossover," simply because it stands upon its own better as a crossover-tale.  Further, it's a good basic representation of Moorcock's "Eternal Champion" concept, though perhaps not its most complex manifestation.

After Elric helps the other two heroes overcome an adversary in the other dimension-- a singularly underwhelming threat-- Elric returns to his own world and uses magic derived from the other dimension to thwart K'aarna's plot. Again, K'aarna gets away, as he must to satisfy the continuity. But the threat of Myshella is arguably greater. She has to perish because, if she's allowed to survive, she might tempt the hero away from his dolorous quest to slay lots of sorcerers and monsters before he dies. In the final analysis, there is enough symbolic discourse in all three chapters to justify my saying that its mythicity is high. But SORCERESS is not even close to being as aesthetically pleasing as ELRIC OF MELNIBONE.    

          

MORE TALES OF TWO COSMS

 While I don't know if my new terms "ontocosm" and "epicosm" are destined for permanent status in my system, I may as well take a shot at applying them to a series of interlinked stories-- what I'm tempted to call a "mosaic," coined as I recall by Thomas F. Monteleone for a novel he assembled out of separate narratives. (To be sure, Jules Verne might have been the first to tie together two independent narratives in his 1874 MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, a blending of plot-threads from both 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA and IN SEARCH OF THE CASTAWAYS.) Under the influence of Stan Lee, Marvel Comics became the 20th century's greatest source of such mosaic-narratives, and the first one I explored on this blog back in 2007: what I might call something Marvel-esque, like "Rise of The Valkyrie." Here I'll take a stab at using this series of interlinked stories as a means of showing how an ontocosm evolves alongside an epicosm.

The first part of the mosaic is the 1964 Lee-Kirby THOR story, "The Enchantress and the Executioner." I noted various associations, which I would now call mythopeic correlations, that I found in the story. though I don't think I sufficiently emphasized the way each villain signifies aspects of gender: violence for the male, sexuality for the female. These correlations make up the epicosm of this story, for there are next to no significant didactic cogitations involved. But the correlations are communicated by the lateral values of the narrative. The factors of "energy," stemming from the kinetic potentiality, are not exceptional-- the erotic appeal of The Enchantress, the battle between Thor and The Executioner-- but the emotions of the dramatic potentiality are much stronger, drawing in the reader with its depictions of Jane Foster's jealousy, Thor/Don Blake's true-hearted devotion to her, and The Enchantress' wrath at being spurned. This is a quick illustration as to how a particular epicosm can grow out of a corresponding ontocosm.

    As I remarked in the THOR analysis, Enchantress and Executioner didn't exactly go on to great glory, as they were tossed into an assortment of AVENGERS stories where they were basically henchmen to master planners like Baron Zemo and The Mandarin. HULK #102 presented an exception, in which they attempted to conquer Asgard and were defeated in part by a certain green-skinned mortal. The ontocosm here is mostly focused on the kinetic energies of The Hulk contending with the evil duo and their pawns.

  Oddly enough, the next big phase of the Enchantress' career appears in an extremely weak story from Roy Thomas in AVENGERS #83. I already critiqued some of the intellectual and imaginative failings of the story in this essay, noting: 

By itself “Revolution” is probably not a fair representation of whatever Roy Thomas might think or have thought about feminism, but on the face of it the story bears strong resemblance to the “myth” (note the quotes) propounded by anti-feminists, viewing feminists as either deluded females or women resentful of not being able to get/keep a man.

Nevertheless, there was one really interesting correlation put forth here: that of a sorceress whose power lay in deceptive femininity caused her to take on an opposing feminine archetype: that of a forthright warrior-woman. Nothing in issue #83 suggests that The Valkyrie is anything but The Enchantress taking on a heroic form, albeit one derived from Norse mythology, that she thought would appeal to other female heroes and turn them against their male compeers.

Roy Thomas came back to the Valkyrie, though, in INCREDIBLE HULK #142. I covered these event in this essay, noting stronger correlations of "the war between men and women," i.e, Hulk and Valkyrie, as a limbo-bound Enchantress just happens to spy on the Hulk, giving her the idea to project her Valkyrie-persona onto a mortal pawn. It's hard to tell if Thomas had any plans to spin off Valkyrie into a regular Marvel character or not.

The mosaic's last piece is DEFENDERS #4, which I discussed here, along with some side-discussion of The Enchantress and the Black Knight. There's not much of an epicosm here, for it's almost entirely an action-opus, focused on kinetic violence. Enchantress belatedly seeks to battle the sorceress who stole Executioner from her, and gets imprisoned with her paladin-partner. But Enchantress finds a new pawn into whom she can project her female-warrior imago-- one assumes it would only work with another woman, since she doesn't try it on The Black Knight. There is an interesting correlation in that Valkyrie is "mothered" by Enchantress, who is seen as interested only in very tough dudes for her lovers. Is the Valkyrie's "father" The Executioner, or is The Black Knight, whose mount and weapon Valkyrie claims? I don't think any later iterations of Valkyrie explore that aspect of the heroine's character, though, so even though the epicosm in this mosaic-series is highly variable, the ontocosm is fairly steady, even if it varies in emphasis between the kinetic and the dramatic.        

MYTHCOMICS: "TRIUMPH OF THE TORNADO TYRANT" (JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #17, 1963)

This Gardner Fox JLA tale, while not as well-thought-out as the classic "Justice League's Impossible Adventure," nevertheless possesses a good myth-discourse which upgrades the standard "problem" of heroes overcoming villains to a "conundrum" about how that scenario can be validated.

The first page of the narrative proper begins with the heroes of the JLA celebrating their triumph over some stony-faced aliens. Batman opines that evildoers ought to realize that they have no chance against the forces of justice. J'onn J'onzz counters by saying that it's because such menaces exist that "they make us heroes." Just then, all of the heroes' bodies dissolve. An attack by one of those menaces?

No, all the heroes seen here are proxies for an alien being, the Tornado Champion-- who in some ways is using the Justice League of his comic-book universe much as the readers of the title do: to celebrate the virtues of goodness. The Champion had one exploit as "The Tornado Tyrant," menacing the planet Rann until being defeated by Adam Strange (also written by Fox in MYSTERY IN SPACE #61). He comes to admire the Justice League so much that he wants to emulate them exactly, and so he creates an exact duplicate of Planet Earth, except that he himself embodies the Justice Leaguers so that he can experience the inevitable triumph of good over evil.

However, Tornado-Fanboy doesn't overcome the evil in his own nature quite that easily. From "the ocean depths" (or maybe from the collective subconscious of the tornado-species), a duplicate Tornado-Being manifests, and this new Tyrant masters all of the Champion's ersatz Leaguers, mostly by either undermining their powers or turning them against one another. But before the Tyrant can eradicate the heroes, the Champion re-absorbs its component parts (using a "tornado-ship" like the one seen in the ADAM STRANGE story). He then decides that the only way he can formulate a counter strategy is by traveling to Earth to find out how the real heroes would cope. This means that he must, in essence, take the part of his villainous self, splitting off a part of his Champion-self to create a phony Tornado Tyrant to bedevil the real heroes.

Now, simplistic though all these complications may sound, Fox set himself a conundrum: to come up with a rationale as to WHY good should always be able to conquer evil. Six years later, a STAR TREK episode, "The Savage Curtain," tries to do something similar, though the conundrum there was to explain the difference between good and evil to an alien being. But how does one provide an answer for a foregone conclusion dictated by nothing but a literary trope?

And Fox's answer to his own conundrum-- is continuity.

So the Real Leaguers are defeated by the Fake Tyrant, just as the Fake heroes were defeated by the Real Tyrant. But unlike the imitation heroes, who only enjoy the simulacra of real lives, the real crusaders have gained a wealth of experience contending with menaces-- rather than, say, conjuring up faux enemies that can be vanquished easily. 

Thus, while the heroes collect their thoughts, they apply a certain amount of ratiocinative deduction. They debate as to whether the Tyrant's proxies might have been seeking to eradicate centers of atomic power to cover some vulnerability, but then dismiss the idea as untenable. However, the reason Author Fox included that blind alley-clue was to lead the heroes to a correct conclusion, even though only the real-world readers know why it's correct. The Tornado Being is not created by radiation, but it does have a dual personality-- and Green Lantern, drawing on one of his previous adventures (actually written by Fox's colleague John Broome), chooses to use "anti-energy" on the Tyrant as he did on a previous enemy that was a split-personality resulting from an atomic mishap. This strategy works for the Earth-heroes and destroys the Fake Tyrant. Yet the same process can't work for the observing Tornado Champion. If he tries to create anti-energy to destroy his evil self, he'll destroy himself as well.

But the Champion still prevails, by using another form of continuity. Since his proxies can't create anti-energy, they transport the Real Tyrant into the universe from which anti-energy came: "the anti-matter universe"-- which I assume is also a bit of continuity Fox also derived from Broome's GREEN LANTERN, though Fox doesn't explicitly reference Broome's "world of Qward."

If this was Fox's intention-- omitted to save space or reduce confusion in his young audience-- this would be doubly impressive, because in Broome the anti-matter world is also one dominated by evil-- and thus sending the Tyrant there is like consigning the "devil" in one's own nature back to perdition. 

I should note that in his Silver Age career Fox showed a penchant for stories in which he presented secondary scenarios in which characters "re-wrote" whatever initial scenarios Fox placed them in. I see this penchant as contributory to the way this Fox story solves the conundrum of "how can good always conquer evil:" by recognizing that this question itself is a literary trope, and that it can only be "solved" by invoking other tropes.

MYTHCOMICS: [THE LORDS OF ORDER] JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK (2018)

The story-line I've designated as THE LORDS OF ORDER appears within two TPB collections, respectively subtitled "The Last Age of Magic" and "The Lords of Order." I've chosen to designate all pertinent material under the umbrella-title LORDS OF ORDER because said characters constitute the primary menace. Not all of the material collected in these two compilations is relevant to the main plot, which appears principally in issues #1-3, 5-6, and 8-12. Cutoff points for the narrative are problematic, and without reading the entire 29 issues of this JLD incarnation-- the second to focus on a "Justice League of Weirdies"-- I would not be surprised to learn that one or more raconteurs kept some of the subplots going to the bitter end. But issue #12 at least supplies some conditional closure, supplied dominantly (though perhaps not exclusively) by writer James Tynion IV and artists Alvaro Bueno and Daniel Sampere.

I'll explain my highly complex term of "weirdies" in a subsequent post. I have read a few of the issues of the 2011 JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK series and I found them unremarkable. Tynion, however, did show a greater facility for exploring aspects of DC's "weirdoverse" (a term DC itself advanced for a quartet of inter-related "supernatural" titles during the late nineties).

Taking place following the so-called "DC Rebirth," ORDER builds upon a relatively-new rethinking of the DC multiverse, to the effect that it's mirrored by a "dark multiverse," possibly inspired by the so-called "Dark Web of the Internet." I believe that Tynion is the first to claim that all of the magic in Regular Multiverse has been stolen, a la the Fire of Prometheus, from the Dark Multiverse, but he may have had inspirations from previous works. 

The DC Universe, like its One True Business Rival, is and always has been something of a never-ending palimpsest. For instance, the character of Nabu, perceptor of the hero Doctor Fate, appears with little backstory in the character's 1940s origin tale. But not until the 1970s is Nabu said to be a member of "the Lords of Order," the opposites of their eternal foes "the Lords of Chaos," both of whom were probably borrowed from the early 1960s prose stories of Elric by author Michael Moorcock. In general Nabu and his fellow Lords were depicted as positive forces in comparison to their antagonists. However, even as early as a 1987 AMETHYST min-series, the Order-Lords sometimes came off cold and unfeeling,

Tynion posits that in the earliest phases of DC prehistory, the Lords were responsible for codifying all the rules and rituals surrounding the magic called up from the Dark Multiverse. But now the denizens of that domain are coming to reclaim their stolen powers, though the Dark Multiversals are something of a side-threat in ORDER. The Lords have decided to cut their losses and eradicate magic from the non-dark multiverse, and that forces Justice League Dark to get involved.

As with Geoff Jones' cosmic restructuring from a couple of years earlier, "the plot is not the thing" here. Tynion uses some of the same team-members seen in the earlier series, particularly Swamp Thing and Zatanna, but other members are de-emphasized, such as the popular mage John Constantine. Wonder Woman, a heroine with a foot in both magical and scientific worlds, becomes the leader of the 2018 group. The new lineup includes BATMAN's monstrous foe Man-Bat and Detective Chimp, a DC character from the late Golden Age who was reworked into something of a supernatural sleuth, as well as being tied to marginal sword-and-sorcery crusader Nightmaster. Tynion throws out a lot of subplots for the various characters, but none of them are extraordinarily consequential for the Lords of Order narrative. And only one Lord of Chaos, the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES villain Mordru, becomes tangentially involved as well.

The most visionary aspect of ORDER is the way Tynion depicts the passing of the old order. The denizens of DC-Earth did not beseech the Lords of Order to give them magic, but once many of those denizens built their lives around the existence of things mystical, the Lords seem a bit like Promethean Indian Givers. To his credit, Tynion does not simply dodge the problem he's created with a wave of his hand. Magic does get eradicated, but the heroes are able to bring it back by what one might call "returning to the factory default," which means that all the old rules have to be rewritten. The ORDER narrative concludes while this reboot is still in progress, but it's a more effective conclusion to yet another multiversal reshuffling.

Bueno and Sampere provide better than average design elements that put across the mood of the eldritch, particularly in the image of the Wonder Tree (though this creation was the result of a yet earlier Tynion narrative).

QUICKIE REVIEWS OF (FAIRLY) NEW STUFF

Probably because of my current fascination with crossovers, I've been seeking out whatever related items I could find in public libraries. None of my readings have been impressive enough for a full review, but I might as well set down a few impressions of 21st-century treatments of crossovers.

First, though, I'll note that prior to these investigations I reread all the WEST COAST AVENGERS issues written by Steve Englehart in the 1980s. I enjoyed these stories much more than the current offerings, for all that I don't have a ton of remarks on this mini-oeuvre. My main takeaway is that in the eighties, the ideal of Marvel continuity was still rigorous enough that a hardcore fan-writer like Englehart could bring together dozens of stories by himself and other raconteurs in order to forge the identity of the WCA super-group. Characters like Tigra, who had flourished neither in solo outings nor in the original, New York-based Avengers acquired much more substance as a result of Englehart's efforts. Not all his decisions were without flaw-- Moon Knight as Avenger was never a good fit-- but it's a solid series, regrettably torpedoed when fan-favorite John Byrne took over the title.

I can't pin down a particular diegetic event that made Marvel less unitary in its approach to continuity, though I imagine the two main factors in the twenty-first century were (a) the emphasis on "celebrity" arists and writers, who would often just do their take on a given character or series and not worry about being "in continuity," and (b) the fact that by the 2000s there was just too much continuity to keep track of. Thus in all of the books I explored, continuity is something of a "catch as catch can" game.

DOCTOR STRANGE DAMNATION-- One of the co-authors of this outing was Nick Spenser, who gained fame (or infamy) for the fake-out story in which Captain America was revealed to be a Hydra agent and thus a kissing cousin to Nazism. DAMNATION spins off a development in some other story, wherein all of Las Vegas is destroyed. The Master of the Mystic Arts arrives and brings the city and all its slain people back into existence (sort of a lesser version of the reveral of "the Thanos snap.") But before being destroyed the Nevada "sin city" went to hell, and now Mephisto controls the strings of the reborn metropolis. Strange then forms a team of mostly oddball choices to beat the devil. Biggest plus is that the concentration on the fate of one city proves more appealing than the usual universe-threat. Biggest minus is that none of Strange's allies play off one another in any interesting ways, so the crossover aspect is wasted.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Volumes 1-3-- These were all Brian Michael Bendis stories, and as such they're very freeform, with minimal plotting. There are a few good fight-scenes, particularly the one between Gamora and Angela. (I'd never heard that Marvel bought the character off Neil Gaiman. Way to get rid of some dead weight, Gaiman.) But Bendis most reminds me of the dozens of TV writers who tried to write like Joss "BUFFY" Whedon. Those writers missed that each of Whedon's characters had individual voices, and so just gave everyone funny-sardonic lines. Bendis is like these writers, except he's never funny.

FEARLESS DEFENDERS-- Don't think I ever read Cullen Bunn before, though I'd heard his name. This six-issue tale, titled DOOM MAIDENS, teams up one actual Defender, The Valkyie, with a motley crew of unattached Marvel femmes: Misty Knight, the New Mutant once called Mirage, and "Warrior Woman," which is a new name for the Amazon Hippolyta. Oh, and there's a lesbian scientist who tries to get it on with Valkyrie, so that helped Bunn get a GLAAD nomination, but she's pretty forgettable. The "doom maidens" of the story are a bunch of dead Valkyries brought back to life to menace the world, but Bunn can't get the vibe of Norse mythology to save his life. After being routed by the undead warriors, these dim Defenders debate bringing in other superheroes, even some male ones. But for fuzzy reasons, the Bad Valkyries can only be repelled by female heroes, which allows Bunn to work in eleven other heroines. Though this sounds like a potential Great Moment in Comics Pulchritude, the fights in FEARLESS are poorly choreographed and all the heroines sound like one another.

DEADMAN-- This was one of Neal Adams's swan songs, as he returned to the DC character that brought him to fans' attention, This godawful series might prove that a lot of old-school artists lost their discipline in the 21st century, except that I think Adams' early successes were largely contingent on his collaborators. DEADMAN makes all the other offerings look coherent by comparison, as the Ghoulish Guardian once more tries to figure who really, really killed him way back in the sixties. At least Bendis made some efforts, however limited, to distinguish his characters from one another, but here you've got characters as different as Deadman, the Spectre and the Phantom Stranger all speaking in one voice: The Last Angry Spook. In the sixties Adams' heavy melodrama was a breath of fresh air compared to the overemphasis on exposition, Now it's a stone drag, man.

SUPERMAN: AMERICAN ALIEN-- Another revisionist retelling of Superman's origins, emphasizing his identity as Clark Kent of Kansas. I don't know writer Max Landry, but he has better control of melodrama than anyone else being reviewed here. His Kryptonian hero does seem to get drunk on Earth-booze pretty damn easily, though. ALIEN contains yet another contentious first meeting between Batman and the hero who's not yet Superman, and I don't care for Superman getting the idea of his costume from the Gotham Guardian. Nice fight with Lobo at the end. Not likely to become a dominant paradigm for Superman's early years.

HOWLING COMMANDOS OF SHIELD-- I'd seen reference to this "SHIELD Monster Squad" in some SPIDER-MAN cartoon, so I had to check this out. Apparently most of the monster-themed characters had appeared in other Marvel titles, though I was only familiar with Man-Thing, Orrgo (one of those giant Kirby Kreatures from the early sixties), the short-lived Manphibian (whom I actually don't remember, though I think I have his first appearance), and SHIELD agents Jasper Sitwell and Dum Dum Dugan. Or rather, simulacra of the two agents, since Sitwell is a nearly brain-dead zombie and Dugan is an artificial version of the deceased original "Howler." The oldies and the relative "newbies" don't play off one another's powers very well, and some, like Man-Thing, just don't belong in the "spy game." However, artist Brent Schoonover provides some appealing action and emotional scenes, and writer Frank Barbiere does the best job of any writer here at giving each character a particular voice. I don't think these "Creature Commandos" went on to further adventures in the comics, but at least their one series was diverting.

COORDINATING INTERORDINATION PT. 2

In Part 1, I emphasized that when I spoke of my newly christened category of "interordination," I conceived it to be a subset of all those narrative strategies that Julie Kristaeva designated as "intertextuality," stating at the essay's conclusion: 

I don't expect to use interordination on a regular basis, except as a means to clarify the ways in which crossovers belong more properly to this specific type of "quotation" rather than to the more generalized category of intertextuality.

Upon exploring even the basic Wiki writeup of intertextuality, I find that other critics have attempted to make distinctions between different forms of the concept:

Intertextuality has been differentiated into referential and typological categories. Referential intertextuality refers to the use of fragments in texts and the typological intertextuality refers to the use of pattern and structure in typical texts

The term "typological" has some appeal to me because in INTERORDINATION PT. 1, I devoted particular attention to the example of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN as comprising several forms of intertextuality, none of which relate to the subcategory of interordination as I've conceived it. But even "typological" needs some finessing. What is Alan Moore doing when he bases his WATCHMEN-heroes upon the Charlton heroes? He is *emulating* certain *tropes* that he observed in the earlier stories of the heroes, after which he then crossbreeds those tropes with other tropes. Of course, all of these were borrowed from other sources as well.

In fact, all literature as we have it now is founded in "trope emulation." From caveman times on, one author puts forth an icon of some sort (not necessarily an original one) that his auditors find pleasing, so the next author tries to emulate something about the icon in order to enjoy similar popularity. In Classical times, one can observe this process in Athens' belated attempts to formulate a city-hero, their Theseus, in loose emulation of Thebes' protector Herakles.

Now, going back to Wiki: what does the essay's author mean by "referential intertextuality?" Without going into this too much, the basic contrast is that this form directly borrows from passages in earlier works. Though this concept is not a direct parallel to my line of thought, it's close enough to suggest a contrast to "trope emulation," and that is "icon emulation." In the latter formulation, a derivative author does not choose to create a new character, but attempts to tell a new story with an old character. To be sure, "newness" is difficult to ascertain with archaic figures, given that it's impossible to be 100% sure when a given Herakles story originated. At best, archaeology can tell us the earliest known record of a given story. However, we can be relatively sure that even the earliest Herakles stories were not all devised by one writer, but by innumerable authors-- some of whose stories may have simply fallen off the cultural map. 

Returning to the importance of names outlined in I THINK ICON, I THINK ICON, Moore took all of the tropes he borrowed from Steve Ditko's hero The Question, plus all those he took from other sources, and thus forged a new character, Rorschach. No matter how many fan-readers know about the influence of The Question, the name of Rorschach keeps him distinct from the Ditko character, far more than any of the formal differences between the characters.

Such formal differences are of lesser importance because in many cases an author utilizing "icon emulation" may deviate from the original model just as much as does the one utilizing "trope emulation." 

Steve Ditko's character of The Question appeared in about half a dozen stories for Charlton Comics, and since these were produced under an implicit work-for-hire contract, the stories and the character both belonged to Charlton. When DC bought up all or most of the Charlton superheroes, DC then produced several new "icon emulation" variations on those characters-- and of these variants, none diverged quite as far from the original model as the 1987 Question first produced by writer Denny O"Neil and artist Denys Cowan. Ditko supplied nearly no character traits or back history for "Vic Sage," the secret identity of his crusader, and only a very marginal rationale for the hero's blank-masked appearance, since Ditko was principally concerned with using the hero as a spokesman for philosophical belief. O'Neil not only paid zero attention to any of the philosophies exposed by the Ditko character, he formulated a detailed back history for Sage-- even to the extent of stating that his name was a revision of an Eastern European cognomen-- and gave the New Question all sorts of "film noir" adventures in which the nature of good and evil was never as distinct as it was in Ditko.

Yet, by keeping the name of the character and a few choice bits of his mythology, O'Neil's Question is an icon derived from an icon, rather than being an icon created from some of the tropes that constituted the original icon.

It's because of this "crypto-continuity," as I dubbed it earlier, that it's possible to view derivative icons as being coterminous with their original models. Thus, despite all the dissimilarities between the Kong of the 1933 film and the Kong who fights Godzilla, the two Kongs are coterminous because the second icon was grounded in the identity of the first one. The same applies to all of the various icons based on non-fictional originals like Billy the Kid and Jack the Ripper. I've pointed out that such characters are based on what I term "innominate texts," meaning that the models are not purely fictional, but there's still a icon-to-icon derivation, rather than a trope-to-icon derivation.

In closing, I devoted some space in I THINK ICON to the fact that "icons" included countless entities that are not characters as such, but only cited a couple of examples. Another noteworthy example is Edgar Rice Burroughs' land of Pellucidar, an environment characterized by its assorted flora and fauna as well as its unique location at the center of the Earth. In the formal "Earth's Core" series, the entire environment of Pellucidar is simply a subordinate icon to whatever hero is the star of the story. However, in 1929 Burroughs produced his most distinctive crossover of two franchises, by having Tarzan, superordinate icon of his own series, have adventures within the environment of Pellucidar. Because Pellucidar is not normally aligned to Tarzan's adventures, this interaction rates as a "charisma-crossover."

ADDENDUM: Since I've previously made some remarks on spoof-versions of established figures, the sort I'm now calling "icons," I feel I should expand on these remarks. Spoofs are for the most part "trope emulations" because the artists simply borrow tropes from the originals, frequently (though not always) distancing the spoof-characters from the originals with goofy names like "Batboy and Rubin." But it's possible for an author to produce an "icon emulation" that is loosely coterminous with the original, even if said author decides to alter the myth-radical that dominates the established icon. Such icons as Superman, Modesty Blaise, and The Lone Ranger all belong to the mythos of adventure. However, the filmed stage play of SUPERMAN-- THE MUSICAL is a full icon emulation of Superman, but in the mode of comedy, while both Modesty Blaise and The Lone Ranger got redone into modes of irony for the big screen.

THE DIFFICULTY OF WHAT'S FASCINATING

I subjected most of my essays on crossovers to a spot-reading and came to a conclusion: I don't think I've spent enough time on why people can and do become fascinated-- if not to the extent that I do-- with the way different characters and concepts intertwine.

Looking back on my OUROBOROS DREAMS essay THE LOGIC AND APPEAL OF CROSSOVERS,

 I provided this observation:

... the overlapping of distinct storylines would seem to intensify the degree of mental effort an audience-member must exert in order to participate in the crossover's intersecting universes.  For instance, when Rider Haggard takes a character who exists in a moderately realistic universe, i.e., Allan Quatermain, and causes him to encounter a character whose nature is overtly supernatural, Haggard must find some way to treat both characters with integrity, even though the ground rules of their universes are in conflict.

And then, slightly afterward:

 It's something of a given in literary criticism to state that audiences, literary or sub-literary, maintain interest in fictional characters by identifying with them.  This commonplace observation is not so much wrong as overly simple. As I am what has been called a "myth-critic," I assert that the process of identification comes about as a reader (or viewer) realizes what kind of role the character plays in the story, and what that fictional role means to the reader. This does not mean "identification" in the simple-minded sense of "I want to be like this person," for identification can take place with any number of villains (the Joker, Freddy Krueger), monsters (Godzilla) or even mysterious locales (the subterranean domain of Jules Verne's "Center of the Earth.")  It is more properly an appreciation of what I will call the "mana" appropriate to the character or concept's role in the story. 

This essay was written in April 2014, a good five years before I refined my analysis on the two primary types of reader-identification, in INVESTMENT VS. FASCINATION. These two categories described in more precise terms the dichotomous ways in which readers "identified" with fictional figures. The way of investment was one of sympathy toward one or more figures, loosely sharing their joys or sorrows. The way of fascination was one of seeking to understand the ways of one or more figures who were more antipathetic in nature. The latter type of figures, which would include all of the examples given in the second citation above, might be fairly called by the Sartrean term of "the other," though this phrase only holds value in a comparative sense. What I called "mana" in the 2014 essay I would probably now reference as "the totality of correlations and/or contemplations that make this or that character resonant," drawing somewhat on Frye's idea of myth as "a treasure-trove of literary tropes."

The appeal of crossovers would also seem to line up more with the process of fascination than with investment. With investment one takes the "short view," identifying with the struggles of Spider-Man or Stephen Daedalus or whoever. But as soon as one brings together characters who are part of a larger design-- even if it's just Batman fighting The Flash's enemy The Weather Wizard-- then one is taking something of the "long view" that allows the reader to understand what makes a Joker or a Godzilla tick, for all that one doesn't really especially sympathize with them. 

So much for the reader's response to crossovers. But how do professional writers use pre-established concepts to craft stories? The writers implicitly want the readers to be fascinated-- that's what puts food on the table-- but all writers don't approach crossover-materials the same way.

Every original character or concept provides a template for later creators to either follow closely or to depart from as needed. Readers of serial concepts often perceive how much or how little a given author can accurately reproduce the desired aspects of a particular favored feature. In some cases, even a creator of such a concept may change his creative stance for personal or exigent reasons. BATMAN co-creator Bill Finger collaborated on some of the early stories, with all their delirious Gothic imagery, but he probably ended up authoring far more of the gimmicky "Candyland Batman" stories. 

My loose categories of the template deviations have been thus far the "weak deviation," "the strong deviation," and "the total deviation."

 "Total deviation" applies to figures who may copy some visual or designative aspect of a character, but who actually have no substantial connection with the template. So far I've included in this category characters who impersonate famous figures (or are constructed for that purpose), parodies, and doppelgangers who strongly reference famous figures.

"The weak deviation" is the one where, in theory, the storyteller shares the devoted reader's fascination with the involved continuity of a character, or of the continuities of an ensemble of characters, and does his best to keep everything "on-model," to borrow the animation phrase.

"The strong deviation," however, is the one in which the narrative's creator feels a great deal of freedom to riff on the original template-- and that's where the fans of a given franchise usually come out with knives drawn. I've produced my share of jeremiads on this subject, such as my ruminations on the dramatic shortcomings of Kevin Feige. Nevertheless, I part company with those critics and podcasters who automatically dislike every alternative take on a given template. I admit that it's more common for an alternative take to be bad than to be good, but it does happen. One high-profile version is the Grant Morrison version of DOOM PATROL, which I examined somewhat in the 2011 essay CHIEF CONCERNS. 

From one standpoint, a crossover-production with a great deal of fidelity to established continuity, like the Busiek-Perez JUSTICE LEAGUE/AVENGERS, ought to sustain the readers' fascination with all those involved story-threads. Morrison's strategy with DOOM PATROL-- which had nominal crossover-aspects in certain issues-- was to maintain some minor continuity-aspects while seeking to fascinate readers with Morrison's erudite reading of culture and aesthetics. Morrison's take was successful enough that a number of later creators attempted to follow his lead rather than emulating the older incarnations (though I imagine John Byrne's tenure, which I did not read, was the exception).

Interestingly, on occasion Morrison shows some of the same "political correctness" for which I've faulted Kevin Feige. However, Morrison does have other interests beyond superficial politics. Thus even a scene like the one above-- in which two Silver Age super-villains confess "the love that dare not speak its name"-- has an appealing absurdity. So Morrison, unlike Feige, that makes me, for one, curious about the "new DOOM PATROL universe" Morrison creates, "strong deviation" though it may be, because it's not simply preaching at me.

MYTHCOMICS: JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE DARKSEID WAR (2015-16)

 

In the thirty-something years since 1986’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, DC Comics has published many similar multi-feature crossovers, few of which have possessed any mythic content. But the subject of this essay—henceforth WAR for short—not only achieves such symbolic amplitude but does so through some inventive riffing on many of the myth-tropes of CRISIS. (Note: I’m not reviewing here any tie-ins to this Justice League series.)

The purpose of the 1986 CRISIS was not purely artistic, for its purpose was to merge the many parallel worlds of the diverse DC universe into one cosmos, patently emulating the successful business model of Marvel Comics. As I observed in my CRISIS review, the authors did so by interweaving two loosely related concepts from DC’s Silver Age. The first was the idea of parallel Earths in which the archetypes of DC heroes took on somewhat different configurations—a Flash named Jay Garrick on one Earth but named Barry Allen on another, or a world where all the characters who were heroes in the Justice League became instead a group of criminals called “the Crime Syndicate.” The second was the notion of universes that were made either of “positive matter” or of “negative anti-matter.” The Earths of the Justice League and all their congeners fit into the positive universe, while the negative universe was represented only by the irredeemably warped world of Qward. In CRISIS, the positive universe gave birth to a protective super-being, the Monitor, while the negative continuum spawned the Anti-Monitor, an entity obsessed with annihilating all other realities (and thus serving the purpose of the authors). It’s interesting that DC’s way of getting rid of all the unmanageable doppelgangers from their company’s long history was to spawn a pair of cosmic twins, though both are dead by the end of the series like the other troublesome duplicates. The authors also threw in at least one other new doppelganger: a good version of Lex Luthor, who also gives rise to a son, Alexander Junior, who took on something of a “secular savior” role by story’s end. In addition, the reordering of the DC cosmos gave the company the chance to debut brand new versions of Superman, Wonder Woman and others.

WAR was not such a reboot, but it followed in the wake of a 2011 crossover event in which the DC cosmos was once more re-arranged, this time to allow for the return of many of the alternate worlds, including (most prominently) that of the “Crime Syndicate” Earth. During that reboot, familiar franchises were once more rebooted, but only two are relevant to the WAR storyline. First, Wonder Woman no longer enjoyed an immaculate conception via clay statue, but became the offspring of the deity Zeus with Amazon mother Hippolyta. Second, Cyborg’s artificial body, originally the invention of the hero’s scientist-father, became interfused with the technology of the New Gods from the classic Jack Kirby series. Both the good and bad gods of that franchise—respectively from the worlds of New Genesis and of Apokolips—sat out the events of 1986’s CRISIS. In contrast, the new origin for Cyborg insured that the revised 2011 Justice League would be strongly linked to the New Gods sub-cosmos. To be sure, the New Genesis gods barely figure into WAR, except that one of their kindred becomes the hero Mister Miracle. In WAR most of the authorial attention goes to the mythos of Apokolips, to whose activities Cyborg becomes attuned. Aside from the modifications to Wonder Woman and Cyborg, the rest of the starring characters—Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, Shazam, and Lex Luthor—are broadly recognizable. The newbie in their ranks is one Jessica Cruz, who bears a complicated relationship to the evil Green Lantern from the Crime Syndicate cosmos, which I’ll forbear to discuss here.

Johns wastes no time in doubling down, so to speak, on the presence of doppelgangers. A flashback reveals that on the night that Hippolyta birthed Princess Diana on the island Themiscyra, another Amazon, Myrina, produced yet another female child, but her father was Darkseid, more or less the obverse of Zeus’s role in the Wonder Woman cosmos. Myrina names her child Grail, referencing the mystic Celtic vessel that restores life, because the Amazon mother believes that Grail will save the universe from the evil of Darkseid. (This idea may owe something to the mythology of Achilles, a child whom oracles claimed would overthrow his father— which prophecy restrained the usually randy Zeus from having sex with Achilles’ mother.)

Just as Grail is deeply implicated in the New Gods mythos, so too is the new version of the Anti-Monitor. In Kirby’s original series, he includes the character Metron, a relentless quester after knowledge, who moves about the cosmos in his “Mobius Chair.” Kirby never implied that anyone but Metron constructed the miraculous mobile throne. In Johns’ world, Mobius is the mortal inventor of the chair, as well as an inhabitant of the Qwardian anti-matter universe. In addition to gifting Metron with the chair, Mobius duplicates the function of the Guardian Krona in CRISIS, being a man obsessed with peering into forbidden secrets. As the result of Mobius’ prying, he beholds the “anti-life equation”—another NEW GODS concept, now tied to the “anti-matter universe”—and is thus transformed into the Anti-Monitor. Some story extrinsic to WAR causes the newborn fiend to annihilate the Crime Syndicate world, and this will eventually lead to the surviving super-criminals of that world making common cause with the Justice League. However, in the early chapters the cosmic colossus doesn’t immediately rush out looking for new worlds to destroy. Grail is the agent who calls him into conflict with both the Justice League and with Darkseid, the father whom Grail wants to murder.

To make things even more complicated, throughout the story most of the heroes undergo assorted transformations into god-like beings—a tacit response to the many superhero fans (like me) who view superheroes as recapitulations of archaic myth-figures. Some transformations are merely functional in nature. Batman becomes bonded to the Mobius Chair because Johns needs one of the good guys to tap into the chair’s ability to endow the sitter with copious knowledge. More promisingly, the Flash becomes bonded to the Black Racer, Kirby’s “New God of death,” which plays into the fact that Flash is one of the heroes who dies during CRISIS. Johns’ best scripting deals with the quarrelsome team of Superman and Lex Luthor, who get teleported to Apokolips and have to work together, but not with very positive results. 

On top of all that, the main subplot with the Crime Syndicate, out to avenge themselves on the Anti-Monitor, involves their one female member giving birth to a sort of anti-savior. Said female, Superwoman, is an alternate-world mashup of both Wonder Woman and Lois Lane, and the father of her demon-kid is a nasty version of Alexander Luthor, who was a good guy in CRISIS.

Whew.

I’ll forbear to discuss the very involved denouement here. I’ve long been aware that Geoff Johns knows his DC history inside and out, but this is the first time I’ve been strongly impressed by his artful repourings of old wine into new bottles. Not everything works, of course. Near the beginning Johns tosses in references to Brainiac and to Aquaman that may relate to some extrinsic stories, but which have nothing to do with WAR. Also, the deific names Johns gives to the transformed characters are lame. Shazam becomes “the God of Gods”—why exactly?

But I do like other playful recastings of continuity points. Luthor, abandoned on Apokolips by an evil-ized Superman, is taken in by a group of anti-Darkseid rebels, and they’re led by a woman named Ardora. In the Silver Age this was the name of an alien woman who fell in love with Luthor, and it’s through contact with the new Ardora that Luthor usurps the destiny of his enemy Superman and becomes the potential savior of Apokolips. Johns even has the Crime Syndicate version of Superman mention a woman named Luma Lynai, who in the Silver Age was a potential lover for Superman, for all that she looked like an age-appropriate version of Supergirl, as well as not being in any way related to the Man of Steel.

I freely admit that only a continuity-hound would get much mythic impact out of this highly referential opus. But for those so invested, the game is definitely worth the candle.