CURIOSITIES: HAIRBREADTH HARRY (1906-1940)

 In official histories of the comic strip, it's almost de riguer to observe that for about the first 30 years of the medium, almost every kind of strip focused largely on the appeal of "the gag." Not until 1929, which launched characters like Buck Rogers and Tarzan in their own newspaper features, did comic strips begin a love affair with combative adventure-stories. Still, I decided to do some quick research of the early comic strip era, to see if I could find exceptions to the general rule. This consisted of my going through a Wikipedia list of all the prominent strips of the 1900s decade. Sure enough, I saw nothing that suggested the call of adventure-- except one strip, whose description I'll borrow from the late Don Markstein's TOONOPEDIA:

Harry was introduced on October 21, 1906, in a Philadelphia Press Sunday page titled Our Hero's Hairbreath Escapes. The following January the spelling of the word "hairbreadth" was corrected, and the title became Hairbreadth Harry, the Boy Hero. At first, Harry (whose full name was Harold Hollingsworth, by the way) was, as suggested by the title, a mere lad. But he anticipated Gasoline Alley's Skeezix by growing up. Unlike Skeezix, however, Harry stopped aging soon as he'd become big enough to function as an adult.

Harry got his incentive to grow on September 21, 1907, with the introduction of Belinda Blinks, beautiful boilermaker, an adult rescue object (who thoughtfully put off aging while he caught up). Belinda completed the cast, as Relentless Rudolph Ruddigore Rassendale, relentless rogue (whose name was a reference to the works of Anthony Hope and Gilbert & Sullivan), had been on the scene since March 3. Together, the three went through endlessly funny and inventive spoofs of the old music hall melodramas of the 18th and 19th centuries, complete with mortgages, sawmills and railroad tracks.

A problem with evaluating HARRY's combative status arises, though, in the fact that copies of the earliest strips are almost totally unavailable for review. One would think that a strip spoofing the old "mellerdrammers" in which a stalwart hero rescued a damsel from a black-hearted villain would have to involve sustained scenes of combat. But was that the case?

The only online sources for HARRY reprints are reproductions of original comic strip art for sale, or, much more rarely, reprints on sites like this one.     

These two Sunday strips from 1913 are the earliest ones I found, and they don't involve combat as such; just gags. Slightly more promising is this reprint from 1925:

  So this strip at least ends with villain Rudolph getting punched out a window by Harry. But these are the only legible items I found from the strip's creator, C.W. Kahles. He died in 1931, and the strip was continued for the rest of its run by one F.O. Alexander. There are numerous reprints of Alexander's work in Eastern Color's FAMOUS FUNNIES, often styled as the first real "comic book." But of course, by then other strips were getting into adventure in a big way. Here's a smattering of Alexander Sunday strips from FUNNIES. I would judge this version of the ongoing strip as combative, since most of the scenarios end with Rudolph being clobbered or thwarted somehow, usually by Harry. Some verbal testimony suggests that Kahles had been doing the same thing, and it certainly makes sense that Alexander would stick with what had already been working for his predecessor.

The first is interesting in showing Rudolph having access to a one-shot "super-power," that of invisibility.        

Later Rudolph has access to a "diathermic ray." 

Most amusing of these 1934 strips, though, is one in which Rudolph chases heroine Belinda into a women's spa. Harry and the cops can't chase the villain in there, because they're gentlemen, but Harry still triumphs by tossing (through a window) a bar of soap, on which Rudolph slips and knocks himself out. I suspect that the conclusion, in which a dialogue-balloon suggests that Belinda's going to get even by working over the unconscious villain with an Indian club, was a pretty rare instance of her getting some of her own back.

     

UNCANNY AND MARVELOUS UNDER OTHER NAMES

 Some years back I wrote out some chapters of a hypothetical book outlining aspects of the combative mode and the Num Formula in much simpler, less prolix terms that what I employ here. Then I back-burnered the project. Recently I revisited certain sections, and I found that this one, in which I tried to show how "the uncanny"-- here called "The Lesser Metamundane"-- manifested even in narratives devoted to such famous Greek heroes as Heracles and Theseus, known largely for their adventures in the realm of the marvelous, i.e. "The Greater Metamundane." But I decided that most general readers would not be interested in the varied careers of these archaic Greek legends. So I cut Heracles and Theseus and reworked other aspects of the argument. By the way, what I call the metamundane is the same as what I call "metaphenomenal" on this blog, but with two less syllables and maybe less chance of chasing off receptive readers. But I decided to preserve this excerpt here in case it proves useful down the road.              

In the first section of this chapter, I was careful to cite examples of the metamundane that ranged from phenomena that were just barely beyond the mundane, as with my implied mention of The Lone Ranger, to phenomena that took over the entire narrative. From now on I will distinguish between the two extremes as “The Lesser Metamundane” and “The Greater Metamundane.” 

The cultures of the ancient world—Egypt, Sumeria, and Classical Greece—are replete with many stories of gods transforming mortals into plants and animals, or of monster-killing heroes gifted with super-strength or invulnerability. To pursue a parallel with modern comic-book heroes, such extravagant stories might be called the “Superman type” of narrative. However, in the extant culture of the Greeks we also see the rise of a “Batman type” of narrative. In such stories, the audience is still dealing with metamundane subject matter, but with less recourse to monsters or magical powers.

Heracles, for instance, is regarded as the Greek hero par excellence. He possesses unbelievable strength and lives in a world of out-and-out marvels. During his famed Twelve Labors he defeats the invulnerable Nemean lion and the immortal Hydra; he journeys to the edge of the world to gather the Apples of the Hesperides and descends to Death’s realm to capture the Hound of Hades. All of these adventures contain elements that contravene everyday reality so strongly that they belong to a category I’ll call the “Greater Metamundane.”  However, one tale, that of the Ninth Labor, is not quite so extravagant.

In the Ninth Labor, Heracles is charged with the task of acquiring the Girdle of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. He journeys to the Amazons’ domain, and tries to negotiate with the queen. The peaceful negotiations are interrupted by troublemaking Hera, who spreads the rumor among the other Amazons that the Greek hero intends to kidnap the queen. The Amazons attack Heracles, and he kills several of the warrior-women before retreating with a valuable capture, the queen’s daughter. Later Heracles ransoms the princess for the girdle, and so accomplishes his mission.

In my view the Amazons belong to the domain of the metamundane subject matter just as much as Cerberus and the Hydra. Yet it’s obvious that these mortal warrior-women aren’t nearly as overtly fantastic as Heracles’ usual opponents. The hero doesn’t perform any super-feats to defeat them, and any competent Greek warrior could have simply taken a hostage to gain an advantage. There is no archaeological evidence that the Amazons ever existed. Yet the idea of a matriarchal cult of warrior-women, while far from the continuum of everyday experience, resonates as “something that might happen” under the right circumstances. The Amazons choose to diverge from the norms of Greek society—meaning patriarchal rule—and so they became, for the Greeks, “monsters” in a purely figurative manner. This figurative, less extravagant manifestation of the metamundane I term “the Lesser Metamundane.”

Theseus is generally deemed Athens’ belated attempt to design a Heracles of their own. Modern readers usually know the Athenian hero for his one monster-killing feat, slaying the Minotaur of Crete. Prior to the Cretan adventure, though, Theseus has some episodic adventures that are closer in spirit to the Lesser Metamundane.

The hero is raised in the Greek city of Troezen, his mother’s city. Upon reaching manhood he travels overland to meet with his father, the ruler of Athens. On the way the hero—who, despite being the son of the sea-god Poseidon, has no special powers—encounters a bunch of mortal brigands, most of whom seem like the archaic ancestors of Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter. The bandit Cerycon has a thing for waylaying travelers, challenging them to wrestle, and then killing them. Theseus accepts the bandit’s  challenge and breaks Cerycon’s neck. Then Theseus meets Sciron, who has the habit of kicking travelers off a neighboring cliff. Appropriately, the hero introduces this brigand to the wrong end of the same cliff. Finally, the hero encounters an innkeeper worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. When Procrustes allows guests to sleep in one of the beds at his inn, he insists on making the guest fit the bed, either trying to lengthen the guest’s limbs on a rack-like device, or cutting off body parts that are just too darn long. Theseus forces the innkeeper to sample his own hospitality, putting him to bed and chopping off the evildoer’s head with Procrustes’ own axe.

These tales have a simpler ring to them than many Heracles stories, following the folkloric pattern of “the biter bit.” One can find this simple pattern in stories like the Aesop’s Fable “The Cock, the Fox, and the Dog,” which depicts how a predatory fox, seeking to prey upon a rooster, gets lured into the jaws of the rooster’s buddy, a fox-killing hound. Like the Amazons, and like Theseus himself, the three brigands have no special powers. What makes them metamundane is that they diverge from the practical ways of real robbers. Each criminal has an almost fetish-like preoccupation with executing victims in some particular way. Given their impractical preoccupations, the brigands of Theseus loosely anticipate Batman’s fetish-oriented fiends, who pattern their crimes after birds (The Penguin) or cats (The Catwoman) in a perverse assertion of their quirky identities.

Roughly contemporaneous with the culture of Classical Greece is that of ancient Israel. The stories of the Hebrew Bible are generally regarded as belonging to religious mythology, and so there are many narratives of God and his angels. Yet the Lesser Metamundane also appears here, as seen in the narrative of David and Goliath. Goliath is called a “giant,” but standing a mere nine feet by current reckoning, he’s a long way from the behemoths that stormed Mount Olympus. As with the story of Heracles and the Amazons, if one disregards the deities hanging on the periphery of each story, the physical contest is very close to a mundane battle. Yet Goliath, like the Amazons, belongs to the Lesser Metamundane in being a lesser transgression of the expectations of everyday experience.

During the Christian eras that followed, non-Christian mythological tales became verboten, though some of the material of mythology was recorded in the form of stories of olden days. Some storytellers, like the composer of Beowulf, attempted to fuse the charms of a Celtic warrior-ethos with the moral meaning of Christianity (Grendel is called “the son of Cain.”) Other writers, usually monkish scholars, recorded the myths of their ancestors with some degree of fidelity, as seen in such compilations as the Elder Edda and the Book of Kells. However, only in the 13^th century did Christian Europe develop a purely literary mythology: that of the courtly epic. The original Arthur appeared in a chronicle from the sixth century, where he was simply a skilled warrior. Yet over the centuries he became not only a king but also a lodestone drawing other heroes into his field of influence, so that in time names like Lancelot, Gawain and Tristan began to sustain their own legends. Aside from Arthur, who wielded a magical sword, most of the knights were ordinary skilled men wielding ordinary weapons. Yet the element of knights’ armor was sometimes used for a metamundane effect of the Lesser kind. When Malory gives readers a Black Knight, or Spenser uses a Red Knight, both authors are emphasizing the metamundane aspects of the knights’ appearance, in a way that would eventually be mirrored in the costumes of 20^th-century superheroes.

ADLER PATED PT. 3

Not that I've mentioned it before, but I've been working on a book explaining my take on the superhero idiom. What I'm printing here now is a section that I wrote for a first draft, only to decide that it no longer fit the general plan any more. This excerpt may repeat some of the points from the ADLER PATED series, beginning here, but that's because it wasn't written for this blog.

______________

As I noted in Chapter 1, Aristotle’s assertion that all fiction includes an agon or conflict has become a commonplace principle in literary criticism. Aristotle says nothing about any type of conflict being inherently better than another form. However, combative forms of conflict—those in which a dispute was resolved through two or more characters coming to violent blows—became less commonplace in literature as poetic epics gave way to realistic fiction. Violence still occurred in realistic fiction, but it usually lacked archetypal dimensions. There was no sense of a monumental contest when Robinson Crusoe simply used a rifle to shoot down a tribe of bloodthirsty cannibals. In some metamundane works of the post-Renaissance period, such as Gulliver’s Travels, conflict tended toward absurd resolutions. When Lilliput suffers an attack by an enemy fleet, gigantic Gulliver discourages the invasion by urinating on the attackers. Not exactly in line with the Marquise of Queensbury rules.

After I watched an action-movie with a friend, I asked him afterward what if any meaning he assigned to the film’s climactic fight-scene. Why was it pleasurable? His answer was one that most readers will find familiar: audiences enjoy watching characters engage in life-and-death struggles because audience members can’t enjoy such visceral pleasures in real life without consequences. Punch out your mean boss in real life; you get fired and/or go to jail.

Between the years 1907 and 1911, psychologist Alfred Adler formulated the concept of “compensation.” Having studied the ways in which the human body compensated for “innate anomalies of organs”—for instance, weakness of sight—Adler extended his observations into the realm of psychology. Adler argued that from childhood on, human beings inevitably found themselves challenged by their physical and social experiences. For instance, Adler, a second child himself, sometimes discussed how sibling rivalries could evolve when a child felt that his sibling was receiving all the parental affection, thus leading to feelings of inferiority and emotional deprivation that could affect the child even in later life

Though Adler is not as well known today as his contemporaries Freud and Jung, his compensation theory has become axiomatic in modern culture, particularly when dealing with questions like “why people like fictional stories.” The usual response goes something like, “People lead boring lives, so they like to compensate by reading about fictional characters who lead exciting lives.”

There’s undoubtedly a partial truth in this. Even some fictional works, such as Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, focus upon characters unable to separate reality from fantasy. However, Alfred Adler was a little more nuanced than the routine reading of compensation theory. The psychologist distinguished between positive and negative forms of compensation, one being an activity that strengthens the individual, while the other activity has a weakening effect. For instance, in his lecture “Outcomes of Overcompensation,” he points out that paranoiacs are so obsessed with seeing their perceived truths that they manifest “hallucinatory fits.” However, an artist can channel his desire for better sight into art. Adler cites the example of Johann Schiller, a playwright known to have suffered from weak eyesight. Rather than seeking to see better than he could in real life, Schiller channeled his desire for superlative sight into fiction, by creating a hero who could see well enough to shoot an apple off his son’s head: the semi-legendary William Tell.

The “negative compensation” explanation for fictional pleasure is often applied to combative forms of fiction, but it would seem to apply across the board to everything. Do you read stories about romantic love? You don’t have enough love in real life. Do you read stories about faraway places? You’re fed up with your current location. Do you read stories about mad kings and melancholy Danes? You must have a deep-seated envy for the privileges of the monarchical system. By its nature, this concept of compensation accentuates the negative to such an extent that anyone’s taste can be reduced to a simple equation: “You only like X in order to compensate for Y.” Indeed, critics have so often put forth the negative compensation argument against things they don’t like—be it cozy mysteries or big-budget superhero movies—that even the fans of those types of fiction have been known to utter the same arguments, along the lines of “I know it’s junk, but I like it.”

What would criticism look like if it used Alfred Adler’s full proposition, rather than just the half that makes the critics feel good about themselves? Then critics would have to agree that readers of any type of fiction are capable of approaching that genre or form in a positive, self-strengthening manner or in a negative, self-weakening manner. If this is the case, then there must be ways in which combative stories exemplify positive compensation, rather than simply being substitutes for experiences that the audience cannot access.

I said in Chapter 2 that fantasy elements in fiction had the power to open the nearly limitless powers of the imagination. Fictional combat stimulates the imagination as well, though it’s oriented largely on a specific theme: what I’ve called ‘the archetypal battle of good and evil.” In real life, outbreaks of violence are often stupid, pointless, and chaotic. Certain sports-games, like wrestling and football, pit athletes against one another in violent activities, though the activities are dictated by a set of rules. Some fans become so invested in these games that they have been known to riot— usually because their team has lost, though on occasion they even do so when their team wins. But at the core, the society as a whole doesn’t believe that the “villain” in the wrestling-ring is really evil, or that the home-team’s victory makes the community’s life any better.

In fiction, fantasies of a struggle between good and evil can be fully explored, the better to understand one’s ideas of good and evil when they’ve been embodied in the forms of heroes and villains. The fact that the combative form of fiction has been able to prosper over centuries, despite the opposition of so-called “higher culture,” speaks to its pertinacity.

COMBATIVELY YOURS

                 

In the three-part LOVE OVER WILL (FOR NOW) series, starting here, I listed five of the mythcomics I’d reviewed here because I deemed that they all rated as “accommodation narratives” rather than “confrontation narratives.” In my many observations on the combative mode in confrontation narratives, I’ve continually sought to make clear that although many narratives resolve conflict through violence, said narratives are only combative if the violence has a particular level of organization. I further observed that many other narratives of the accommodation type resolve conflict through romance and/or sexual activity, and that they would follow the same dichotomy. The stories would only be “combative,” so to speak, if two or more characters with *megadynamic * wills are brought into conflict, with that conflict resolved by their romantic interaction. 

That essay-series didn’t look at any of the accommodation narratives through the lens of the four mythoi, as I did with four confrontation narratives in STATURE REQUIREMENTS. I’ve now improved my interpretation of the mythoi through the metaphors of “the four ages of man” in the DYNAMIS essays, starting here, and so I’ll use that approach in comparing and contrasting four accommodation stories, one for each of the four mythoi.

Again, for an accommodation narrative to register as combative, the contending wills must have a high level of dynamicity, expressed in terms of sexual rather than martial conflict. If the tropes of combative energies in battle are embodied by famous myth-stories like Odysseus slaying the suitors (“extroversive”), the tropes of energetic sexual cooperation are embodied by a model like the one in Yeats’ “Solomon and the Witch,” wherein Solomon and Sheba have such great sex together that it seems as if the whole word has been temporarily annihilated (“introversive”). This would be the kind of interaction that Hollywood advertising calls “tempestuous,” so that’s what I sought in the four examples I’ll examine. Three of the examples are taken from the LOVE OVER WILL series, while the fourth is new to these considerations.

In the DYNAMIS essays, I’ve allotted the mythos of comedy to the first age of man, in which the main character, regardless of how old he may be, is placed in the situation of a child seeking to negotiate his way through the arbitrary, often ludicrous rules of society and/or nature. In “She Tried Her Own On,” a self-contained story from the series DOMINA NO DO, the humor proceeds out of nature. Lead female Hikari has been keeping her supposed boyfriend Takeshi in her mansion for some time, subjecting him to her confused sadomasochistic attentions. Then, like the Melancholy Dane, she begins to have “bad dreams.” She imagines that Takeshi menaces her with a titanic phallus, despite the fact that she’s seen his actual joystick and wasn’t consciously impressed. But Hikari begins to feel guilty about having abused Takeshi, so she decides to “walk a mile in his wang” by having her sorcerous grandma give Hikari a temporary penis. The experience doesn’t fill the young woman with anything akin to “penis envy,” but the ordeal does solve Hikari’s nightmare-problem, because now she can imagine “dueling” Takeshi in her dreams.       

Next of the four ages is that of adolescence, when the thoughts of young men and women turn to goals of heroic accomplishment. In the NEW MUTANTS story “To Build a Fire,” one of the titular heroes, Magma, finds herself stranded in the Amazonian rainforest with Empath, a member of the Hellions. Though the New Mutants and the Hellions belong to rival mutant schools, the ongoing continuity had Magma leave her team to sojourn with the “bad” mutants. The reasoning for the “school transfer” always remained murky, but the author’s main purpose was probably just to get Magma and Empath together. As her name suggests, Magma can call streams of lava from the vasty depths of the Earth. In contrast, Empath’s mutant power is entirely mental: he can persuade almost any woman to fall in love with him. When the two teens are stranded in the forest, they quarrel about whether Magma should use her power to call attention to their plight. The young woman gives evidence that she’s attracted to the rather skeevy Hellion even when he’s not using his power on her, and the mere fact that he might try to master her—albeit only mentally—may have a lot to do with her refusal to “give it up.” The story concludes with an accommodation between the two, in that Magma does use her power the way Empath wants, but only after both belting him and kissing him, leaving him confused about whether he influenced her at all.

Like “To Build a Fire,” “Rite of Spring” is a nonviolent story within a series that is dominantly violent (and within the combative mode as well). Like most stories centered upon a monster-protagonist, the SWAMP THING series falls into the dramatic mythos, particularly because Swamp Thing’s experiences as a monster don’t emphasize thrilling physical triumph (as with say, the Thing of the FANTASTIC FOUR), but the tragic dimensions of life, of the limitations that dog every mortal’s tracks when he transitions into the third age of man. The swampy protagonist, however, gets a bit of a new lease on life, when his female companion Abby, after having followed him around for years as a friend-in-need, suddenly confesses feelings of love for the plant-monster. He for his part reciprocates. Since the Swamp Thing is a mass of plant-growths in humanoid form, he doesn’t have the equipment to consummate a romantic relationship after the human fashion. So instead he encourages Abby to “eat of his flesh,” a specific tuber growing from his body. Not only is the tuber psychotropic, it apparently enhances Abby’s psychic senses so that she can behold the spirit-energies of living things that Swamp Thing can normally see. Swamp Thing and Abby then link minds and experience an ecstatic communion with all the surrounding life-forms of the swamp—which is portrayed as being both as intense and as intimate as any human coitus. Yet the advancement of their relationship into a sort of sexual congress signals that they've moved outside the sphere of triumphant adventure; that they've entered the sphere in which men and women have congress in order to create their replacements when they pass on-- even if the exigencies of comic book ensure that neither Abby nor Swamp Thing shall perish from their earth.

The hero of RAT GOD is actually more of a demihero, an upright New England man who finds himself entrapped in a Lovecraftian cosmos, including a degenerate town that I called “an Innsmouth for rats.” Clark Elwood, like many protagonists of such stories, finds himself forced to fend off a cult that worships the titular rat god. But whereas H.P. Lovecraft would have emphasized the brooding terror of the rat god and his followers, Richard Corben focuses on Elwood’s overly flattering view of his own racial heritage, as against, say, the local Indians. The only reason Elwood gets embroiled with the rat-worshippers is out of sexual passion, as he pursues his love-interest Kito. The real cosmic joke on Elwood is that he doesn’t realize that Kito is an Indian girl, meaning that cohabitation with her ought to be verboten for an upright Caucasian. This sort of a joke, in which the protagonist is caught in some ludicrous situation that he has no power to meliorate, is characteristic of the final age of man, as a person loses his health and faculties with increasing age. To Elwood’s credit, he does overcome his prejudices on a basic “but I really want her” level, and though Elwood’s not a real fighter he does show enough determination to outwit the rat-worshippers. Afterward, Elwood settles down to some sort of romantic accomodation with not only Kito, but also with a rather degenerate looking white woman named Gharlena. This is about as close to a happy ending as one ever gets from a predominantly ironic narrative. As seen in the conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide, the protagonist does not so much triumph as escape from the craziness of the madding world.

I mentioned in QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2 that the master tropes governing the organization of the violent combative mode were either “univectoral” or “multivectoral.” The first three of these “combative love-attacks” emphasize the back-and-forth exchanges of Hikari and Takeshi, of Swamp Thing and Abby, and of Empath and Magma, so all three would be multivectoral in nature. Only RAT GOD would be univectoral, since the story’s main emphasis is upon Elwood, with Kito, despite her erotic charms, taking the position of a support character.  

DEATHMATCH AND DEATHBLOW

One of my title words sounds like the name of an Image superhero, and the other sounds like it might as well be one. But these are, for the time being, working titles for the tropes I discussed in GIVE-AND-TAKE VS. THE KILLING STROKE—neither of which names were ever more than provisional placeholders.

The trope I call “deathblow” subsumes two structurally related sub-tropes. One sub-trope represents the concentration of will/power in order for a megadynamic character to overthrow a character of far greater dynamicity, and in GIVE-AND-TAKE I cited the example of Odysseus and his men wounding Polyphemus in such a way to cripple, though not totally enervate, the Cyclops. The other sub-trope is practically the obverse of the first and concerns a character of superior dynamicity concentrating will/power to overthrow a character of lesser dynamicity. In the essay SELF-MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 3, I used the temporary term “reverse killing stroke” to signify both Classical examples like Dionysus’s destruction of Pentheus and pop-cultural examples like the Spectre hurling “the wrath of God” down upon lowly criminals.

The trope I call “deathmatch” is more unitary, and for most of this blog’s history it was the sole trope by which I defined the mode of the combative: that of roughly matched adversaries matching their respective forms of “might” against one another. In the essay ON MASTERING SELF-MASTERY I mentioned a variation on this form, that of the “indirect commander” who doesn’t usually contend with an opponent himself but has “henchmen” who do his fighting for him, which was the case with almost all of the Fu Manchu novels. But the “deathmatch” in all forms requires the opposition of roughly equivalent incarnations of dynamicity, as opposed to the “inferior vs. superior” and “superior vs. inferior” sub-tropes.

Now, in 1913’s THE ETHIC OF THECOMBATIVE PART 2, I wrote “One only proceeds away from the condition of ‘non-might’ by acquiring ‘might’ oneself.” But over the years I progressed away from the idea that megadynamicity was determined only by a certain level of physical power, and I allowed for the idea that the condition of “self-mastery” could be equally significant. In 1912 I rated Jack Burton of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA as merely “mesodynamic” because he wasn’t an extraordinary all-around fighter. However, in the series WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS I viewed Burton’s mastery of his “one good trick” as a factor that allowed him to enter the ranks of the megadynamic. Yet I would still disallow from those ranks many characters who conquer superior forces through the use of tricks that don’t indicate self-mastery, such as the folktale-kids Hansel and Gretel. By the same token, there are many examples of “superior force” that don’t connote self-mastery. The Spectre shows self-mastery whenever he punishes a mortal transgressor with some diabolical fate, but there exist dozens of monsters who reverse the Hansel and Gretel paradigm, luring hapless victims into traps but not really doling out well-crafted punishments. In fact, Freddy Kruger starts as this sort of subcombative ghost. But with the third installment the filmmakers begin to endow Freddy’s opponents with the ability to engage in oneric “deathmatches” with the evil spirit—. Oddly, it’s after that film that Freddy himself starts making more use of the “deathblow” trope.

And though it seems obvious to me, I should note at this point that "deathmatch" and "deathblow" are metaphors, and as such can apply to situations where no life is actually taken, or even truly threatened, as in the ONE POUND GOSPEL stories of Rumiko Takahashi, where the starring boxer is never in literal peril of losing his life.

CHALLENGER VS. DEFENDER PT.2

Though the terms “challenger and defender” are patterned on the idea of physical conflict, they can be applied to any number of narrative forms, such as those involving a conflict of expectations.

In THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT I observed that Bradbury’s short story “The Last Night of the World” as one that has nearly no conflict in the “X vs. Y” sense. A man and wife, the only characters in the story, become privy to the fact that the world is about to come to an end. Yet instead of their registering emotions of fear or frustration, the couple is totally okay with such a transcendent doom, implicitly because it’s better than the fate of nuclear annihilation. I noted in the essay that because the story focuses on the characters’ mental turnabout rather than on the phenomenon of the world’s death, so that in my current terminology, the world’s doom is the thing that challenges the select couple, and they are defenders not in the sense of rising to the challenge, albeit only in the sense of professing their total acceptance of their fate. Indeed, during my reading of Poe’s complete prose works, I became aware that in some of his vignettes—“Island of the Fay,” “The Oval Portrait”—the viewpoint characters have even less internal conflict. In both vignettes, the “defenders” are just windows into the author’s perspective, as he illustrates how something fair devolves into something foul.

The “conflict of expectations” feeds into a trope I discussed in CHANGING PARTNERS IN THE MONSTER-DEMIHERO DANCE, where I surveyed the use of the focal presence in a number of comic-book horror stories. I remarked that there’s a dominant tendency for the “monster”—what Frank Cioffi calls “the anomaly”—to be the star of the story. “The Gentle Old Man” overtly follows this tendency, while both “Grave Rehearsal” and “Bridal Night” do so in more covert fashion. At the beginning of each story, there’s an evil presence—respectively, Madame Satin and Count Von Roemer— both of whom take the role of “the challenger” and who seem more than able to overpower each of the viewpoint characters, respectively B.S. Fitts and Helena Ayres. But Ayres, though she is a defender, has greater power than Von Roemer and easily defeats him. B.S. Fitts does the same to Madame Satin, though Fitts only gains power after Satin has killed him.

Some defenders are the stars precisely because the evil in their nature calls up some sort of reciprocal evil, and this pattern is seen in both “The Speed Demon” and “Den of Horror.” The evils that doom both defenders fit the role of challengers, but they have a subordinate role, not least because they seem to evolve from the defender’s own nature, not unlike the doppelganger in Poe’s “William Wilson.” At the same time, irony doesn't always imply consubstantiality, for Prince Prospero, despite the way he perishes while defending himself from the Red Death, is not the personified plague's sole victim.

THE MOST FAMOUS SUBCOMBATIVE ADVENTURE

In ROBINSON, CRUSADER OF MEDIOCRITY PT.2, I detailed some of the problems with which I’d grappled in terms of assigning ROBINSON CRUSOE its place within my literary system. I didn't have any problems in stating that CRUSOE qualifies as “the first major work of popular fiction.” The book’s mode of communication is markedly different from the mode of earlier elite-culture works that happened to become popular with the masses, ranging from Shakespeare’s PERICLES to Cervantes’ DON QUIXOTE. I also view CRUSOE, as well as its first sequel, as touchstones for the modern development of the adventure-mythos. However, this distinction must be qualified. Readers during the Enlightenment may have believed that chivalric romances belonged to an outmoded genre, but both “high” and “low” readers remained aware of how that type of fiction worked, how knightly heroes disported themselves. As I remarked earlier, Crusoe is anything but knightly in his bourgeois orientation, and though I do consider Defoe’s two Crusoe-novels to fall into the mythos of adventure, Crusoe himself is at best a demihero, and not a very impressive one. Even Friday, describing how he took the life of a wild bear just for kicks, comes closer to the model of the combative knight than does Robinson Crusoe.

Now, as my essay-title portends, Robert Louis Stevenson’s TREASURE ISLAND (published as a book in 1883 but serialized in a kids’ magazine two years previous) is also subcombative in terms of the dynamicity of its protagonist Jim Hawkins. However, while not all readers may think of ROBINSON CRUSOE as a pure adventure-novel, TREASURE ISLAND is practically a watchword for the mythos. To be sure, it’s preceded by many other classics in the same mythos, particularly the Big Three Perennials: Scott’s IVANHOE, Dumas’s THREE MUSKETEERS, and Cooper’s LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Yet though there had been numerous adventure-tales—now mostly unread—that featured juveniles as protagonists, ISLAND seems a breakthrough in terms of creating a true hero who simply happens to be a juvenile. By “true hero” I mean the type of character who fits the persona of “the hero,” more devoted to glory than immediate survival.


Hawkins is not utterly without economic motive. As much as his “good mentors” Livesy and Trelawney, and his ‘bad mentor” Long John Silver, Hawkins wants to profit by uncovering the lost treasure of pirate captain Flint. But there’s a sense in which the treasure gives Jim an excuse to get away from the mundane life of running an inn with his widowed mother. To be sure, he doesn’t expect to meet danger during the voyage to the isle of treasure (called “Skeleton Island”). Peril only looms its head when Hawkins learns that Silver has brought hardened pirates into the crew, who are willing to murder or maroon all of the ship's honest citizens, once the pirates have acquired Flint’s treasure. Nevertheless, twice in the story Hawkins boldly strikes off on his own, first to explore the island, and then to recapture the ship when it’s set adrift. Hawkins can’t fight or shoot, and he’s saved from being killed in his only battle-scene by losing his footing and falling down a hill. Nevertheless, Hawkins displays both the honor and courage of a hero. The sense of honor extends even to the duplicitous Silver, for Hawkins refuses to break his word to the pirate even to save Hawkins’ own life, and his courage is all the more remarkable because of the very real fears he experiences. Cinematic adaptations sometimes are accurate in conjuring with the terror-aspects of the boy’s early encounter with the fearsome Blind Pew, or Hawkins’ life-or-death struggle against the murderous Israel Hands. But the island itself is rarely shown as Stevenson shows it, as a place of potential malarial sickness, inhabited by “huge slimy monsters” (sea lions, unfamiliar to the young Englishman). And I’ve never seen a film that ended as the novel ends; with Jim Hawkins, years later, still haunted by nightmares of piratical iniquity, summed up by the memory of Long John’s parrot, mindlessly screaming “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

Like many of Stevenson’s works, TREASURE ISLAND was originally directed at young readers, for its original title was THE SEA COOK: A STORY FOR BOYS. I for one did not read the novel in my youth. My first memory was that of seeing a thirty-minute cartoon adaptation as an episode of THE FAMOUS ADVENTURES OF MISTER MAGOO, in which a version of Magoo, an actor rather than a blind old coot, essayed the role of Long John. The cartoon, like many live-action adaptations, played up Silver’s charm and wit, and downplayed the consequences of his intentions toward the honest treasure-seekers. I didn’t read the book until I was in my fifties or thereabout, when I sought to sort out the book’s relationship to the literary form of “the romance.” Indeed, Stevenson’s epigraph alludes to “the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way,” which I take to be a reference to the chivalric romances, whose spirit Scott had revived in IVANHOE. To be sure, I doubt if any medieval romance ever had a villain as ambiguous as Long John Silver, who is the dark side of Hawkins as much as Hyde, five years later, would become the alter ego to Jekyll. Ironically, while Jekyll and Hyde perish together, Stevenson allows Silver to escape the fate he’s earned and to steal a sack of coins for his trouble, while Hawkins on the contrary is too haunted by his experience of “man’s inhumanity to man” to enjoy his share of the pirate treasure.

Despite the many horrific images in the novel, TREASURE ISLAND is entirely naturalistic, just like the Big Three Perennials. However, the book is indirectly responsible for spawning the cornerstone of the nineteenth century’s formulation of the superhero idiom. After reading ISLAND, H. Rider Haggard bet a friend that he Haggard could write a novel as good as Stevenson’s work. While there had been pirate adventures before ISLAND, KING SOLOMON’S MINES instituted the subgenre known as the “lost race novel.” Perhaps more importantly, MINES introduced one of the nineteenth century’s first serial characters whose adventures were both (1) predominantly metaphenomal in nature, and (2) predominantly based around the agon of combat. Allen Quatermain, star of MINES and the eight books that followed, does end up chasing a legendary treasure as does Hawkins. But Quatermain is a seasoned campaigner rather than a beardless boy, and though Haggard killed off his character in the second book, the series was popular enough for the author to bring Quatermain back in six “prequels.” To my knowledge Stevenson never wrote anything that belongs to the superhero idiom, but TREASURE ISLAND remains an important link in the chain of events that led to that idiom, ranging from Nick Carter to Tarzan and John Carter and on through the costumed offspring of four-color comics.

SELF-MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 3

My application of the “killing stroke” trope to the combative mode may serve me in formulating an answer to one long and nagging theoretical problem: that of combative characters who are not overtly challenged by most of their opponents.

In THE SAD STORY OF SUPERHERO SADISM I mentioned that during the Golden Age characters like Superman and the Spectre (both, as all sagacious fans know, linked by the authorship of Jerry Siegel) only occasionally encountered opponents who could fight them in terms of “give-and-take” combat. Even other powerhouses of the period were given convenient vulnerabilities so that they could be placed into peril—said vulnerabilities ranging from a special weakness, like Green Lantern’s inability to influence wood, or something more generic, wherein a super-strong character like Wonder Woman could be downed by a blow to the back of her skull. At the time, my main rationale for still deeming Golden Age Superman and Spectre as combative heroes was that, even though their individual gangland-foes were no challenge, Crime as a Whole was a constant menace not to the heroes but to law-abiding innocents.

Now, as per my Cyclopean example, the “killing stroke” usually represents a weaker character’s attempt to marshal both skill and strength to overcome a more powerful enemy, usually in some appropriate way (a one-eyed monster is made to lose his only means of seeing his prey). But it’s occurred to me that if one reverses the valences of power in the killing-stroke paradigm, what one has is akin to “the curse of the gods.” Greek mythology in particular is replete with numerous stories of gods who strike impious mortals with curses that fit those mortals’ impieties. Lycurgus the reaper is made to reap his own kindred, Pentheus the foe of Dionysus ends up meeting being ripped apart by Dionysian maidens, and so on.

Again, while both of Siegel’s co-creations would have many fully combative adventures during and after the Silver Age, it’s important to point out that their combative status in the Golden Age doesn’t depend on the trope of the “back-and-forth” fight. Instead, Superman and the Spectre depend on a trope I choose to term “the reverse killing stroke.” In contrast to a relatively weak character who slays a more powerful entity via strategy, the practitioner of the “reverse killing stroke” is, like a Greek god, far more powerful than any of the mortals he blights. But, for the extrinsic sake of the story, this godlike hero can’t just destroy his criminal targets any old way. The superhero-god must use his power strategically, for the sake of imposing a divine irony upon the victim.

The second part of Superman’s debut story, retitled “the Coming ofSuperman,” shows the hero acting the part of a trickster-god. Once Superman ferrets out the identity of a nasty munitions-maker, obviously the Kryptonian could destroy or imprison the villain in any number of ways. But in order to make a good story, Superman badgers the fellow into joining the U.S, armed forces—at which point he’s forced to face the real-life conditions of the wars he’s fostered. To be sure, the hero allows this villain the chance to reform, but in other contemporaneous stories, the Man of Steel uses his power judiciously, in order to make the enemies of law and order destroy themselves.

The Spectre presents a more bald-faced evocation of the “wrath of God” motif, which may be one reason the character wasn’t especially popular in the Golden Age (nor have any subsequent treatments scored that well, with or without the emphasis on said wrath). Siegel didn’t seem to exploit the idea of the “reverse killing stroke” quite as artfully as he did in Superman, but there’s a little use of irony in the origin-story. After Jim Corrigan is slain by gangster Gat Benson and his two cronies, the heroic cop rises from the dead, empowered by the power of Heaven to war on crime. Not yet donning his crimefighting togs, Corrigan overtakes his murderers, and the first one to meet Corrigan’s gaze instantly dies. Not much irony there. Yet the second death is more accomplished. When the second thug fails to kill Corrigan with bullets, he unwisely tries to grapple with the dead policeman. He pays for this “impiety,” since touching Corrigan causes the thug’s flesh to dissolve, making him into a living skeleton for a few macabre seconds, before Corrigan decisively slays him. Curiously, the gang-leader Benson is spared, as Corrigan merely allows him to fall unconscious and to be arrested. In subsequent stories, some of the Spectre’s killing strokes had an ironic appeal, and others were nothing special. Arguably the Bronze Age series by Fleischer and Aparo exploited the gruesome potential of the concept to greater effect, in that the Ghostly Guardian consistently devised dooms for dastardly villains that would have fit the EC horror-anthologies.

So, can one call any aspect of these godlike punishments “self-mastery?” Certainly such “reverse killing strokes” don’t engage one’s sympathies in the same way as the normative killing-stroke. Nevertheless, Superman and the Spectre must be judicious in order to destroy evildoers in an ironically meaningful way, and this ties in with my general concept that self-mastery entails a form of self-limitation. Thus the killing strokes used by these heroes to deter criminals can be deemed a special form of strategy-combat, and thus qualify for the combative mode even without a lot of back-and-forth battles.

SELF-MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 2

I’ve only devoted three essays to the concepts of interiorization and exteriorization, but it seems to me that the concept of self-mastery is implicit within those essays. Here I’ll attempt to extend those nations into greater elaboration.

Interiorization is a narrative pattern in which a character literally or figuratively draws upon his inner resources or character in order to become a more imposing figure, be it Doctor Jekyll unleashing his evil side or Billy Batson summoning up an idealized adult persona. As should be evident from these two examples, this pattern can be subcombative as well as combative, and even the combative example, that of Captain Marvel, requires a little further analysis. Golden Age CAPTAIN MARVEL stories don’t overtly posit that the hero is the adult form of Billy Batson, but the Captain seems to enjoy no existence independent from that of Billy. Although Billy’s ability to summon his adult self needs to be jump-started by the “Shazam-lightning,” which confer the power of legendary characters upon the Captain, Billy’s own self is strongly implicated in the formation of the hero, and therefore this qualifies as a form of self-mastery.

In contrast, I’ve cites a number of examples in which great power is thrust upon this or that character, in such a way that no self-mastery can be adduced. My review of SCOOBY DOO AND THE SAMURAI SCHOOL provides a pertinent. The characters of Shaggy and Scooby Doo are meant to be much more ludicrous in nature than Billy Batson, but all three are roughly on the same level of dynamicity. It would not be impossible to imagine a situation in which Scooby and Shaggy gained great martial-arts skills through the use of some improbable crash-course. If Howard the Duck could do it, why not Scooby and Shaggy? But the writers of SAMURAI SCHOOL may not have wanted to diverge that far from the duo’s default characterization as lovable goof-ups. Thus the duo get samurai-powers thrust upon them by an outside agent, with no indication of self-mastery.

THE COURT JESTER is another film in which the release of interiorized energies is somewhat undermined by the principal thread of the narrative. While a spoof of the swashbuckler genre does not have to be subcombative, JESTER sets up its main character Hubert Hawkins to undermine that aspect of the genre. In the early scene Hawkins wants very much to be fighting on the front lines with the courageous resistance, headed by the vaguely paternal Black Fox. Instead, Hawkins is relegated to protecting the infant heir to England’s throne. Yet in a roundabout way this “maternal” activity puts him in the position to take the identity of jester to the evil king’s court, giving him the inside track by which the king’s forces are eventually defeated. Hawkins’s only deeds of physical valor come about when a witch puts a hypnosis-like spell on the jester, making him into a wizard with a sword. Now, though this sounds like the same process described in SAMURAI SCHOOL, the setup allows for an “out” in terms of self-mastery. Since at the outset Hawkins admires the heroism of the Black Fox, it’s not impossible to imagine that he has watched sword-duels even if he never personally achieved mastery with the blade. The witch’s spell could be seen as a jump-starting process like that of Shazam’s lightning, unleashing hidden in the hero abilities that he always possessed in utero. However, the script doesn’t shoot for an integration between Hawkins’s external and internal personas, for he loses his sword-skill when he’s snapped out of his trance, and when Hawkins does defeat his main opponent, it’s done through a stratagem that undercuts the swashbuckler genre’s trope of the dazzling climactic duel.

Possibly the most improbable representative of combative interiorization can be found in the deservedly obscure Italian comedy BLONDE IN BLACK LEATHER. In this very rough precursor to THELMA AND LOUISE, Claudia Cardinale plays an abused housewife who meets a motorcycle-riding free spirit, played by Monica Vitti. Vitti encourages the naïve Cardinale to desert her heavy-handed husband and to embark on a series of rambunctious adventures. During one exploit, a gang of seven or eight gangsters surrounds the two young women, intending to commit mayhem. Neither female has displayed any skill at fighting, but Vitti performs a sort of “hypnosis” on Cardinale, saying (more or less):

Your husband beat you, didn’t he? So do what your husband did, and beat them up!

The resulting fight shows Cardinale, with barely any help from Vitti, clobbering all the gangsters with basic fisticuffs. The farcical mood is very close to that of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, where the rabbit can pull any weapon or contrivance he wants out of thin air. BLACK LEATHER is very close to being this type of fantasy-farce. Yet the basic intent still seems to be that of validating the ability of “helpless” women to kick ass if they really want to, in contrast to JESTER, which seeks to undercut the appeal of extravagant ass-kicking.

The pattern of exteriorization occurs when a character creates or empowers some other entity, or entities, to do his fighting for him. Most robot-protagonists, ranging from Gigantor to Bozo the Iron Man, are obvious combative manifestations of this pattern. However, in TO BREAK OR NOT TO BREAK PT. 2 I devoted a great deal of space to showing why a big fight at the end of 1934’s BABES IN TOYLAND, between king-sized toy soldiers and some nasty boogiemen, did not result in a combative work of art. I did not invoke the idea of self-mastery in the essay, but I emphasized the notion that there was no purposive connection between the soldiers and their dimwitted creator Stannie Dum. He builds the toy soldiers, but his achievement comes about through dumb luck, not as a means of exteriorizing his own buried passions and/or talents.

I’ve remarked that in the earliest extant telling of the story of Aladdin, there’s no combat between the lazy youth and the evil lamp-swiping magician. Disney’s version of the story gives Aladdin more swashbuckler-like abilities, though much of the film emphasizes romance more than action, and the conclusion depends largely on Aladdin undoing Jafar through strategy rather than direct combat. A more inventive, albeit forgotten, iteration was offered by 1952’s ALADDIN AND HIS LAMP.  Here as well, Aladdin is a tough sword-fighter, so he doesn’t entirely need the genie to do all of his fighting for him. Indeed, the script works in the idea of both “obedient genie” and “disobedient genie.” Though the genie will grant his new master’s wishes, the genie will also try to kill Aladdin in order to win free from his service. Since Aladdin must be vigilant to counter the genie’s attempts at assassination, this supernatural creature is more like Mister Hyde than like the traditional obedient servant of the lamp-bearer. That said, the genie ends up serving his master through Aladdin’s self-mastery strategy. The film’s villain manages to steal Aladdin’s lamp, but doesn’t keep his guard up against the rebellious spirit and thus meets the doom that could have befallen the hero.

SELF MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 1

GIVE-AND-TAKE VS. THE KILLING STROKE proposed that these two tropes provided the principal narrative strategies through which authors have created the combative mode. In my earliest mediations upon the subject, I tended toward the view that the key manifestations of the mode were those narratives in which some clash of equal dynamicities transpired, usually at the story’s climax (as noted in PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX). But to some extent this view was a consequence of my over-emphasis on the mode of dynamicity, since it was 2013 that I formulated the complementary combinatory mode. That said, I still devoted considerable space on my blogs to narratives in which a concluding conflict failed to convey the dynamic-sublime, ranging from canonical artworks like MACBETH to pop-art creations like WORLD WITHOUT END.

I did allow for a major exception to the “combat-climax” proposition, and this was what I originally called the use of strategy. For instance, I viewed FORBIDDEN PLANET as a combative film even though its major dynamicity-clash takes place in the film’s middle. Rather, the Id Monster is defeated by a strategic move on the part of the heroic space-soldiers. I hadn’t coined the term “self-mastery” in this period, but it seems clear to me that this is what I was aiming for, in valuing this movie’s conclusion as combative even though the soldiers use “brain” more than “brawn.” That said, I would not have deemed comparable characters, like those of THE ANGRY RED PLANET, to be combative figures, given that they didn’t show any real penchant for “brawn.” And within the same period, I viewed that the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS film was not in the combative mode. There’s a major clash of dynamicities in the middle of that film as there is in FORBIDDEN PLANET. But the Martians aren’t defeated by either the brain or brawn of the Earthpeople, but by sheer dumb luck.

The trope of “the killing stroke,” as exemplified by Odysseus’ blinding of the Cyclops, still depends on a clash of dynamicities, but it’s one characterized less by an exchange of powerful blows than by one principal thrust, often at a more powerful opponent’s weak point. Arguably self-mastery, with the attendant idea of “digging deep,” takes a more concentrated form in this trope. In the GIVE-AND-TAKE essay, I pursued a similar logical path in my comparison of the protagonists of two works: the 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD and Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE. The denouements of both works involve the protagonist using a magical weapon to strike down a more powerful menace: Abu shoots the wizard Jaffar with a magic arrow and Mayhew stabs a big monster with a magic sword. But Mayhew exhibits no self-mastery, while Abu does so prior to shooting Jaffar, particularly in the young thief’s battle with a giant spider.

However, such distinctions become a little harder to make when the “star of the show” is the monster. For a monster-centric film to be combative, the monster’s opponents, while often forgettable as characters, must evince the quality of self-mastery in order for the work to qualify as combative. Two such examples, from very different periods of filmmaking, are 1955’s IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA and 2010’s SHARKTOPUS. Yet it’s difficult to quantify what separates the climaxes of these films from those of, say, 1975’s JAWS and 1994’s TREMORS. It’s my conviction that even though these films have very violent climaxes, I don’t find either the trope of contending dynamicities or strategy informed by self-mastery. The triumphs of the monster-slayers in the latter two films are impressive—but just not “super-impressive.” And I make this judgment in spite of all the other literary factors that make TREMORS a better film than IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, and JAWS (pretty much without question) a better film than any latter-day shark-opus.

Next up: considerations of self-mastery’s effects on the patterns of exteriorization and interiorization.

CONCRESCENCE AND THE KINETIC POTENTIALITY PT. 2

In Part 1, I concluded the essay with these words:

In the case of the kinetic phenomenality, the operation of concrescence depends on bringing together disparate elements into what appears a seamless whole, just as it does with respect to symbolic discourses.

In that essay, I viewed the physical dynamicities expressed by two artists-- Jack Kirby and Mike Zeck-- and gave my reasons for viewing a Kirby panel as "good kinetic discourse," while Zeck's panel was"bad kinetic discourse." Nevertheless, in previous essays, I've gone on record as stating that even badly done kinetic discourses may fall within the combative mode. One such essay on that subject was INTENT VS. EXECUTION. In that 2015 essay, I compared two mediocre movies, 1956's WORLD WITHOUT END and 1984's AMAZONS, both of which conclude with less than impressive fight-scenes. Yet, since I rated AMAZONS as combative and WORLD as subcombative, for me this begs a question regarding the function of concrescence in this conceptual model.

Oddly, though INTENT links with an earlier essay that discusses the narrative-significant schism. I didn't bring that concept into play in any direct manner. However, I gave Paul-Michael Glaser's AMAZONS credit for having a combative "intent" that I did not find in Edward Bernds's WORLD:

So, even though both Paul Glaser and Ed Bernds fall short in terms of execution, I give Glaser the nod because his work shows some "intent" to provide a combat that resolved the differences of the opponents, while Bernds seemed unaware that his main hero had to do something at least semi-impressive. 

It belatedly occurs to me that what I called "execution" in the essay parallels with the concept of a work's narrative value with relation to the combative mode: that if the work doesn't display the contending of impressive energies, then it cannot be combative. Yet, though Glaser's film isn't much better in terms of showing those contending energies, it does show "intent," which in my system would line up with a "significant value"-- ergo, the concluding fight is important TO THE READER for such-and-such a reason.

Thus, I find that while the kinetic discourse of both works may be inferior in terms of narrative values-- and thus, not fully concrescent-- AMAZONS is concrescent with regard to the significant values possible for both works, while WORLD is not, and so registers as subcombative.

 

COMBATIVE CHRISTMAS COMICS #8-9

"Look what's coming down the chimney! It's an imitation of ALIEN (though technically it's a supernatural demon-thingie...)"

And let's not forget how Marvel put the "Sweet Christmas" in the Xmas season, when HERO FOR HIRE #7 pitted Luke Cage against a villain called "Marley" in a story titled "Jingle Bombs."

COMBATIVE CHRISTMAS COMICS #5-7

"You see this cat Claus is a bad mother--"
(Shut your mouth!)
"But I'm talkin' 'bout Santa!"

_________

Here's a team-up between Santa Claus and Superman, where the jolly old elf helps the superhero fight Toyman. Claus himself doesn't participate in the action, but his elves make a bunch of toys that out-fight the villain's killer devices.

________

One of the better comics-versions of a "bad Santa" appeared in BADGER #70. The hero meets a fat greasy biker-type in a bar, and it turns out he's "Klaus," who's sworn off delivering toys on Xmas.  Badger goes with him to the North Pole, watches as Klaus beats up a rebel elf, and talks the foul-mouthed fellow into making his Xmas journey. Badger does end up having to discipline Santa when he's naughty, though. Lots of good jabs against political correctness.

______

Not nearly as good is this LOBO CHRISTMAS SPECIAL. Some Lobo-stories combine a certain amount of wit along with the skull-busting ultraviolence. Not this one, though.

ON MASTERING SELF-MASTERY PT. 2

I concluded Part 1 by sketching out three primary story-tropes used by fictional characters to demonstrate self-mastery:

(1) Combat between bodies, which in fiction usually takes place as "hand to hand combat" between human beings, though it can also include beasts in combat with claw and fang, and all analogous conflicts.

(2) Combat through the use of "extensions," which can range from weapons modeled on those of the real world to unreal "super-powers" not natural to the human form, such as X-ray vision, fire-breathing, or even peculiar uses of parts of the human form, like stretching this or that part of one's anatomy.

(3) Combat through the use of physically independent pawns, which can be other human beings, beasts, robots, etc.

In Part One I stated that with the first category, it's relatively easy to get a sense as to whether the combatants demonstrate greater-than-average dynamicity, what I termed "megadynamicity" in this 2012 essay. The second two, however, can be more elusive.

In my recent essay THE INVISIBLE FORCE OF INVESTIGATORS, I stressed that most "police procedurals" don't allow for "battles of personal glory." Many though not all shows in this genre are all about the power of cops to sweep through the city and overpower the criminal element by dint of superior numbers. The viewer assumes that every fictional cop has been through some form of training, both in armed and unarmed combat, but the stories themselves do not generally stress whatever megadynamic talents the policemen and policewoman may possess. Thus I would not label the cop-characters of HAWAII FIVE-O or LAW AND ORDER as megadynamic. In contrast, some less "procedural" cop-dramas definitely emphasize the violent conflict of order and chaos, ranging from cinema's DIRTY HARRY series to the gleeful absurdity of T.J HOOKER.

Now, in a less "civilized" genre, such as the western, one usually presumes that anyone who wields a gun knows how to use it-- or at least, any man. In every medium, the western tends to represent women as wielding weapons purely in self-defense. A female western character on average is at best mesodynamic, which means more or less that she can wield a gun well enough not to shoot herself with it. Only a precious female characters are touted for their skill with weapons. The real-life trick-shooter Annie Oakley has given rise to fictionalized versions like the 1954-57 teleseries with Gail Davis.

That said, a given character may demonstrate self-mastery, but not in a combative situation. In 1935 Barbara Stanwyck starred in an equally fictionalized version of the famous markswoman's life. However, this version of ANNIE OAKLEY was a romantic drama, with no combative content.

To segue a second time, I've sometimes debated with myself as to when a character with a gun registers as *mesodynamic* rather than "megadynamic." Prison-films-- particularly of the species known as "women-in-prison"-- can prove highly variable in this regard. A lot of guns are fired at the conclusions of THE BIG DOLL HOUSE, THE BIG BIRD CAGE and SWEET SUGAR, but I derived no sense that most of the character shooting off big guns were especially skilled. As with the character of Mayhem, discussed in Part 1, their power comes not from themselves but from the sheer power of the weapons they acquire.

In contrast, though a number of female characters in the 1974 CAGED HEAT wield guns, the big shootout at the conclusion shows that the two characters played, respectively, by Erica Gavin and by Roberta Collins are skilled at picking off armed enemies from a considerable distance. I don't plan to review HEAT in the near future, as I found it somewhat boring. But at least director Jonathan Demme set up a situation in which his "femmes formidables" had to exchange sustained fire with a bunch of unsympathetic prison-guards, thus satisfying the combative mode.

Moving on to the second of the difficult categories, it's a given that there are many characters in fiction who are capable of unleashing vast armies against other armies: kings and queens, emperors and empresses, popes and popesses (?) But countless stories merely imply this power without seeing it in operation, just as numerous police-types do not demonstrate their dynamicity but simply imply it. Shakespeare's kings are forever going to war about this or that, but it's not a given that all of them are megadynamic figures, particularly when the wars are conveniently offstage. Henry V is easy to pronounce as "combative" in part because he's out there fighting with his troops. But Macbeth comes to power by assassination, and though there's a fight between Macbeth and Macduff while their respective armies contend, it's hard to state outright that either of them is a megadynamic type.

In this situation, female rulers may be no less complicated. Shakespeare's Cleopatra does not fight in the trenches in the fashion of Henry V, or even the Bard's tough-gal version of Joan of Arc. But the play does attribute to her the indirect power over Egypt's armies, so that one might indeed regard her as satisfying the combative mode. However, there are numerous Cleopatra tales-- not least Shaw's CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA-- in which the queen displays no queenly dynamicity, and thus she would register as mesodynamic at most. I might say the same for the Timely Comics version of the character Venus, though since she's given a definite super-power in later stories, the determination is perhaps moot.