SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES, AGAIN PT. 2

 "Oh, God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place!"-- Beatrice lamenting the limitations of her not very muscular gender, MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.                                                                                                                                                                                                     "No one wants to be born a woman."-- Dave Sim, long before anyone knew what trans ideology was.                                                                                                                                                                       Obviously, Shakespeare's audience did not think that Beatrice really wanted to be a man, just because she fantasized about becoming one so that she could go toe-to-toe with Claudio-- who, admittedly, is something of an asshole. But since she knows she can't change her sex, she's okay with using her sexual favors to motivate Benedick into assaulting the target of Beatrice's wrath. As for Dave Sim's infamous statement-- which may have been made with an eye to being provocative-- it goes without saying that some men do wish they had been born women, whether or not one credits the diagnoses of gender dysphoria as an illness. In fact, some statistics suggest that trans women outnumber trans men two-to-one.                                                                   

I've no use for the ideology-based pseudoscience of imagining endless genetic blueprints for whatever gender-combinations can be imagined.  I consider it more logical to see even the syndromic desires to be the opposite sex to exist in a continuum that includes non-syndromic fantasies about possessing the characteristics of the sex opposite to one's birth-sex. Even the syndromic compulsions share much of the "grass is greener on the other side" mentality. I don't agree with the sexual determinism of conservative thought, but neither do I agree with the liberals' falsehood that biology can be (or should be) entirely circumvented.                                                                 

Fiction, as I've said many times, is a world where anyone can indulge any number of fantasies as to the true nature of the world, and those that challenge an alleged "status quo" are not perforce more imaginative than those that do not. For example, Dave Sim made many snide remarks (with which I have disagreed) about the fantasy of the heroic female because he thought the archetype ran contrary to "real life," even within the context of his own independent fantasy-world-- which was, of course, responsive to his own fantasies. But most of the ultraliberal feminists (which includes male feminists like Kevin Feige) wanted more female heroes not out of a deep passion for the archetype and all its possible permutations. but for an artistically barren concept of ideological representation. In my mind at least, there's no doubt that Sim is an artist and Feige is just a lucky hack, possibly one whose greatest accomplishments were entirely collaborative in nature.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    That'll teach me to bring up Dave Sim here; I totally got off the subject of the dimorphism blues. Maybe I'll make it there in Part 3.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE PT. 2

Whereas empirical thinking is essentially directed toward establishing an unequivocal relation between specific "causes" and specific effects, mythical thinking, even where it raises the question of origins as such, has a free selection of causes at its disposal... Cassirer, MYTHICAL THINKING, p. 46.

In Part 1, I wrote:

...the term "patterns" aligns better with the process by which all forms of concrescence-- whether belonging to the mythopoeic potentiality or one of the other three-- in that I at least can picture how various motifs coalesce to reinforce one another and thus become a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

As I reconsidered this in greater depth, I feel it necessary to explain that though the kinetic and the dramatic potentialities certainly do draw upon "patterns" derived from sense experience, those two potentialities don't make substantial use of what I've called "epistemological patterns." I suppose I might term the first type of patterns "existential," since these two potentialities are more concerned with translating existence as the fictional characters *seem* to experience it.

The other two potentialities, however, are rooted in a fictional form of epistemology, because the forms they deal with depend on abstract constructions. Once more with feeling:

The DIDACTIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbols.

Ernst Cassirer's passage above is one of many I've cited to clarify how modern "empirical thinking" (or "theoretical thinking" in other passages) develop out of mythical thinking. Both "symbols" and "ideas" are abstract constructions, but symbols offer the artist "a free selection of causes"-- which I have aligned with my concept of "affective freedom"-- while ideas depend more upon establishing a chain of cause and effect, which I have aligned with "cognitive restraint." But both abstract constructions depend upon the use of fictive epistemology.

Now, to repeat my conclusion from Part 1, all epistemology in fiction can only lead the reader to the experience of "half-truths," whereas epistemology in philosophy can lead the reader to the perception of "truth," at least for that particular reader.

In CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2,  I discussed some of the interpenetrations of the mythopoeic and the didactic potentiality. My example of a work dominated by the mythopoeic potentiality was Gardner Fox's Hawkman origin, but even while establishing that primacy, I also mentioned that the author had utilized "metaphysical tropes that were discursively organized by their pagan proponents." In contrast, the various CEREBUS excerpts I analyzed were all dominated by the didactic potentiality, but I asserted that author Dave Sim was at his best when he created an "expressive underthought to complement the rhetorical overthought."

Nevertheless, even though Fox is of the "affective freedom" party and Sim of the "cognitive restraint" persuasion, both authors construct their narratives around principles of an abstract nature, and so are both purveyors of sacred half-truths.

CONVERGING ON CONCRESCENCE PT. 2

In Part 1, I wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 1

Nietzsche's "high spirits" line from TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS prompted this current line of thought. Once more, with (high) feeling:

"Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part."

I last used the "high spirits" in M FOR EFFORT to assert that such spirited-ness was a necessary component to both of my "big M's," megadynamicity and metaphenomenality. I won't be addressing the latter, because I've decided to focus on a (comparatively) new concept: viewing the mode of the combative through the lens of sex rather than violence.

The combative mode, as I've generally defined it, comes about only when two or more megadynamic agents in a narrative contend with one another. Combative works are, I've specified, a subset of the total set of works dealing with any form of conflict, be it physical, moral, psychological, etc. Over the years I've tended to compare combative works with works that included some form of violence that was not combative, though I've also frequently written about works that have no violence, or works in which the conflict is extrinsic to the narrative.

So in recent weeks I've been meditating on the following topic: if in combative works "high spirits" are best shown by the act of combat between near-equals-- the quintessential "male" theme of war-- then what do "high spirits" look like in works in which the conflict-emphasis is more oriented upon the "female" theme of love?

It's axiomatic that male audiences generally like violence and contentious situations, and female audiences generally like love and domestic situations. There are basically just two extant explanations for this differentiation of gender-taste: either the tastes are expressive of the physical natures of the respective genders, or the tastes have been manipulated into existence by the Evil Culture Industry. Anyone who reads this should be able to guess which explanation I find more credible, but even though I agree that physical nature is a primary influence, I don't agree with those who consider it determinative.

I'm aware, of course, that the latter explanation is the one most favored, possibly because it gives its adherents the chance to wallow in victimhood. To them, absolute equity between the genders is the only possible ideal. In this essay I took issue with Heidi McDonald's ideal of equity by saying:

The whole "who's exposed more" question should never have been one of pure equity.  Equity is something to be observed in the workplace or the boardroom, but not in fiction.  Fiction is a place where fantasy reigns, and as I said in the essay, it's simply a lot harder to sell hyper-sexualized fantasies to women than to men.  I tend to think that this is because in general men are hornier bastards than women, but others' mileage may vary.

A couple of years previous, I wrote DEFINING PSUEDOFEMINISM, in which I contrasted remarks by a writer I considered a "pseudo-feminist" with remarks by noted "anti-feminist" Dave Sim. Both, I pointed out, attempted to shore up their opinions with appeals to what each of them considered empirical fact. Sim's views about female athletes dispensed with any considerations of equity whatever. I observed:

Sim "proves" that women are "inherently, self-evidently, inferior beings" by asserting that women cannot beat men on an equal footing.  Hence fantasies of women kicking butt, in sports or in other forms of entertainment, are related to "the Charlie's Angels Syndrome," and so stand as further proof of women's inferiority.

In addition to disproving Sim's view in that essay, I championed the concept of the "fighting woman" archetype in several essays, and showed in NON-ADDICTIVE VICTIMAGE that I was not allied to the "biology is destiny" crowd.

I wouldn't have written as much as I have on the subject of "the Fighting Woman Archetype" if I believed that the greater body mass of the human male decided all questions of supremacy. But if it's almost inevitable that most men are stronger than most women, then this physical factor inevitably will be reflected in fiction. This inequity will at all times comprise an "is" that cannot be negated by any *ought.*  Even comic books, which have arguably been a greater haven for the Femme Formidable than any other medium, can't refute the basics of physical law. 

To re-state: even though I don't believe that biology is the sole determinant of gender differentiation, I categorically do believe that the biological potential of males to develop greater strength and body-mass makes a crucial difference in their tastes in fiction. The next logical questions, then, would be:

(1) What tendency of females can be seen as the "objective correlative" (borrowed from T.S. Eliot, even if I don't agree with his application of it) for the female preference for "love and domestic situations?"

(2) Assuming that I find such an objective correlative, in what way do fictional love-narratives express "high spirits," paralleling the expression of similar spirits in fictional war-narratives?

More in Part 2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PICTURE-LESS WORDS AT AN EXHIBITION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COMPLEXITY, MEET DENSITY PT. 2

For the most part, whenever I've used the term "complexity" on this blog since its beginning in 2007, I've been referring to "symbolic complexity," a.k.a. "mythicity." As I recall my earlier writings for THE JOURNAL and AMAZING HEROES on myth-criticism didn't define the potential of literature to be "myth-like" in terms of a level of symbolic activity, or, if I did, I may have followed the lead of Joseph Campbell in declaring narratives to be "myth-like" if they closely followed a template derived from authentic myth. Over time, though, I've tended to view narratives in terms of Jung's idea of phenomenology, which emphasized the multifarious nature of the human personality. This was the type of "complexity" with which Jung dealt, and of his many dissections of the human soul, the one that I find most persuasive is his concept of the four functions, which he boils down thusly:

The essential function of sensation is to establish that something exists, thinking tells us what it means, feeling what its value is, and intuition surmises whence it comes and whither it goes. 

Jung did not apply the functions to literature at all so far as I know, so I did so, extrapolating from the four psychological functions four potentialities, as described in FOUR BY FOUR. The potentialities don't follow the same ontogeny as the functions, because the former apply not to general perception but to the application of the functions in human art, which result in four potential modes of literary action:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbols.

In Jung's schema every human psyche must include all four functions, though inevitably individuals will favor one over all the others. However, not every work of art is designed to reflect all four potentialities. An artwork can favor one potentiality and display no direct reference to any other, as I also said in FOUR BY FOUR:

I might attempt to use Jung's function-terms to assert that Dave Sim's cerebral CEREBUS privileges the function of "thinking" more than any other, and that Frank Miller's SIN CITY privileges the function of "sensation." 

Naturally, even authors who may be fixated upon a particular function always have the potential, so to speak, to try their hands at the other three.

Now, throughout this blog I've largely been analyzing works from the standpoint of the mythopoeic potentiality. This concentration stems from my rejection of ideological criticism, which centers principally upon the the didactic. I've distinguished between "functional" and "super-functional" uses of symbolism, in which "super-functional" implies largely the same as "high symbolic complexity," as well as Wheelwright's notion of "the plurisignative." But in previous essays I had not evolved a symmetrical approach to the other three functions, which is what I seek to do at this point.

For instance, here's Dave Sim, with his focus on "thinking," providing a complex (though not irrefutable) take on the philosophy of one particular character:

In contrast, Miller doesn't tend to give his character particularly complex didactic outlooks:

I could muster other examples of "complex vs. simple" applications of the other two potentialities as well, perhaps one that would be more to Miller's advantage than to Sim's. But the point is that any excellence within a particular potentiality stems from a given author's mastery of the narrative complexity relative to that potentiality. Raymond Durgnat's term "density" has some application as well, for it is through the density of details that even sensational fictional effects have the greatest impact upon readers.

For instance, these three DAREDEVIL action-panels by Miller--

Are innately more complex than these two rather static DAREDEVIL panels from Bob Brown.

I don't plan to continue tracing the different forms of complexity/density within each of the four potentialities: the mythopoeic is still my particular obsession. However, I have a bit more to say in future essays on the general theory of the four potentialities.

GRAPHICALLY ROMANTIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO QUICK SIM COMMENTS

After reading the news of this future Dave Sim project on THE BEAT, I made these two observations:

I loved the “history of comic art” segments of GLAMOURPUSS. I have no idea if they will be in any way reworked or supplemented when republished as STRANGE DEATH, but I can’t imagine any hardcore comics-fan not giving it a fair try.

I almost started to disagree with Brian H about whether Sim himself always brings up the anti-feminism thing. Then I remembered that one of the best things about STRANGE DEATH will be that one can read all that goodness without interacting with the not-goodness of Sim’s satires of fashion models, et al. Yes, he did himself no favors there…

And:

It’s pretty problematic to attempt analyzing an author’s foibles based on such fragmentary info [re: Sim's stay in a mental hospital of some sort]. Dave’s not Sylvia Plath, you know. And if you’re going to blame his extreme philosophy on drugs, are you going to blame drugs for Dick Cheney and Donald Trump too? It’s too an easy an out, IMO.

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

At the end of the previous essay, I said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PRACTICALLY INCONSUMMATE IN EVERY WAY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE SIR WALTER REFLEX

One more quick observation on the subject mentioned in my last post:

It occurs to wonder, why would NB be so intemperate about an offhand post that did not directly assail the pro-feminist beliefs of the essay under discussion. My post on the subject of the Asselin-CBR imbroglio wasn't even a matter of playing devil's advocate. It was on the level of "crossing a T" with respect to the reportage of factual news.

Yet, in a thread referenced here, I made copious direct comments in express opposition to another poster's ultraliberal views on race, as well as those of NB himself, and NB never threatened me with deletion.

I theorize that NB's attitude re: feminism is rooted in the "Sir Walter Reflex," a reflex that comes into play only when a male debater thinks that he is acting in the defense of womanhood.

I didn't name the reflex, but I witnessed it before while responding to another "hit-and-run" excuse for a critic, Chicken Colin. In his Sequart hatchet job on one of my essays, he tried to claim, falsely, that Kelly Thompson didn't need him to defend her. Yet when Thompson chose not to engage me in prolonged debate, the Chicken attacked my analysis of Thompson's essay in terms that were, like NB's, oriented on painting me as a male chauvinist.

The only thing that separates NB and CC is that even though both are equally oriented on defending womankind from the Evil Chauvinists, NB at least engaged me a few more times than the utterly cowardly Chicken.

I won't even get into the extent to which the views of Dave Sim-- as incoherent as they were-- were assailed not for their incoherence but for their failure to support an unquestioned ultraliberal narrative.

VICTIMOLOGY 101, PT. 1

I mentioned here that I don't agree with Dave Sim's assertion that Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND was a precursor to modern feminist "victimology."  I don't know Sim's precise reasons for making that determination, so I can't refute him in detail. But I will validate him on one score: victimology is rampant in most discussions of gender-interaction, often on both sides of the discussion at once.

Victimology, to be sure, is a word that originally means "the study of victims," usually with respect to the victims of criminal offenses. Sim's use of the term, however, is pejorative: it implies what is called a "false victimology," an assigning of blame to a supposed perpetrator that is either disproportionate or inaccurate.  This is the sense that I use the term here.

One comics-fandom argument I've frequently referenced on this blog is one I consider more disproportionate than wholly inaccurate: the "male characters are idealized, female characters are sexualized." I've demonstrated why the argument is an oversimplification, but I've also stated that to the extent that there is a real disparity, that disparity is rooted in real factors. The oversimplification comes about from an over-willingness for those who promote the argument to play the victim card, which amounts to playing a chorus of Linda Ronstadt's "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me."  If feminine sexual display was *never* a road to fame, riches, and comparative prosperity, I might tend to join the ultra-feminists in shedding copious crocodile tears for their sufferings.

Other arguments would seem to be more in the vein of bearing false witness.  In my essay STINKING ULTRALIBERALLY PT. 2  I critiqued my reasons why the media stigmatized celebrity-chef Paula Deen after her aggrieved former employee Lisa Jackson brought a suit against her, alleging that Deen promulgated racist speech and behavior at a place of business.  About a month after I wrote my essay, the suit was dismissed by the presiding judge with prejudice, which according to Wikipedia "indicates misconduct on the part of the party who filed the claim and forbids that party from refiling the case." This may well suggest that the judge thought Jackson was full of hot air, but I'm not interested enough to search out his precise stated opinion, if any.

The peccadillos of comics fandom are generally not this serious. Nevertheless, the biggest problem with making false or even oversimple accusations is not only that it victimizes those who may be falsely accused, but that it also distracts the culture's attention from other, real abuses. Practitioners of indiscriminate victimology seem to believe that they can cry wolf indefinitely, and that no one will ever call them on it-- or more likely, that they can throw enough crap at the walls that some of it will stick, and seem to validate them.

In Part 2 I'll address a relatively new book that manages to throw a little too much crap, managing largely to obscure its better facets.

DIVORCE HERS, DIVORCE HIS-- SOMETIMES

In this essay I referenced Dave Sim's GLAMOURPUSS writings, which reflected, in part, on the career of Margaret Mitchell. I pointed out that Sim's conclusions about Mitchell and many other female celebrities could be valid only in terms of the concept of intersubjectivity. I'm reasonably sure that Sim would not agree with this perspectivist take on "truth:" at most, he might admit-- as he does in an essay I'll touch on later-- that as he is not God he can't be absolutely sure as to what is or is not true.

While I've dismissed some psuedofeminist complaints about the "old boy's network," in GLAMOURPUSS #25 (May 2012) Sim made one remark on Margaret Mitchell that left me nonplussed.  In a printed exchange between Sim and his interlocutor Eddie Khanna, Khanna remarks on the disparity between Mitchell's first beau Clifford West, a decorated war hero who died in battle, and her first husband Red Upshaw, an alleged drunk and wife-beater. Sim replies:

It's one of those sad instances, I suspect, where a woman gives full vent to the extent of her heartache-- going completely "over the edge" as an expression of her darkest emotions and her extreme sense of loss-- and thereby does a grave disservice to the memory of a genuine hero who has paid the ultimate price.

To back up slightly for context, Mitchell certainly used aspects of her own life to provide the dramatic pattern for GONE WITH THE WIND.  Clifford West, whom Mitchell never actually married, provides a loose parallel to Charles Hamilton, the man Scarlett O'Hara marries out of spite when Ashley Wilkes rejects her. Mitchell's first husband, who sounds like a reprobate, is transformed into the rather more charming scalawag, Rhett Butler, who becomes Scarlett's third husband.  Rhett, in contrast to the alleged acts of Red Upshaw, never beats his wife. Rhett does rape Scarlett, but this, as mentioned earlier, is something less than a punishment.

To some degree I could understand Sim's polemic if Mitchell had been actually married to Clifford West.  Though divorce hardly if at all carries the social stigma that it once did, there are some persons who believe that even after one spouse dies the remaining spouse is not free to re-marry. Sim's negative feelings about divorce are expressed to some extent in this essay on the MOMENT OF CEREBUS blog, though they are not apposite to the subject of re-marriage after one spouse's death.

BUT-- of course, Mitchell was not married to West; God never "joined them together." So I cannot fathom, either from the specific essay in GLAMOURPUSS or in any other Sim essay of my acquaintance, in what way Mitchell did a "grave disservice to the memory of a genuine hero."

(I note in passing that though Khanna describes Upshaw as a "debauched, violent, alcoholic bootlegger," Sim says nothing in issue #25 about Upshaw, who, according to this post, not only married again after his divorce from Mitchell-- just as Mitchell did-- he also left his wife and child to fend for themselves. I'm not sure why Upshaw wouldn't make just as good an example of "going over the edge" as Mitchell-- except that his example would weaken Sim's ideological concentration upon the supposed greater emotionality of women.)

Anyway, the question arises: is Sim imparting this special privilege, that of a woman being somehow bound to a beloved even sans marriage, to all men? I don't think so; this seems to be a special case, due to the fact of West's stellar military performance. Prior to Sim's remark about Mitchell, he contrasts West's "genuine heroism" to that of Alex Raymond, who was *potentially* heroic in that he refused a "natural deferment" but did not end up making a "similar ultimate sacrifice."

The odd thing about Sim's remark is how much he sounds like certain characters in the Atlanta of Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND-- namely, the generally female gossips who castigate the widowed Scarlett for a host of cultural offenses. But again, within the novel's fictional context, all of these castigations make some sense: Scarlett is an actual widow, seen as doing a disservice to Hamilton's death by dancing with, and keeping company with, scalawag Rhett Butler.  In contrast, Sim is apparently perturbed because Mitchell made herself "a public disgrace in Atlanta;" because she did not don "widow's weeds" and remain chastely unmarried for the remainder of her days. Amusingly, this goes further than even the fictional old biddies of GONE WITH THE WIND would have gone, even though they "existed" in an Atlanta of over a hundred years ago.

This, in conclusion, supports my earlier statement that emotion is not opposed to reason, as Sim has claimed. Rather, emotion "provides a lens through which everything, including rational cognition, is colored."  Sim's focus upon "haughty women brought low" indicates that he has chosen his examples of irrationality in a fundamentally irrational fashion.

A side-note: Sim also calls Mitchell's novel "a precursor of today's feminist 'victimology.'  I don't agree with this assessment, though I've found myself opposed to many other manifestations of false victimologies, particularly those of Kelly Thompson and Gail Simone. But in making this irrational attack on the character of Mitchell, Sim practices his own male-oriented form of victimology, and so pokes holes in his own polemic.

WRAPPING UP FAKE-RAPE

In this essay I cited this Heideggerian morsel:

"'How we find ourselves' expresses the fact that we are thrown into a 'world' already there before us -- this is most evident in the radical sense of Birth. Hence, one is literally 'thrown into a world' beyond one's control -- but this 'world' is not merely a particular environment -- it has its place in history: one is, broadly speaking, thrown into a historical moment."

I didn't return to this point at the conclusion of Part 4 of the "fake-rape" series, but I will here because I think Heidegger's general concept of being "thrown into a world beyond one's control" applies very well to the topic of fictional rape.

No world is entirely beyond all control, of course. If I say that I want to promote freedom in the arts, I'm trying to influence others to my point of view, which is at least a limited form of controlling others. And if a feminist ideologue claims that my defenses of sex and/or violence are an attempt to validate male privilege, that too is an attempt to control one aspect of the world.

Obviously, I think that the latter interpretation only holds if one disregards the facts of nature I discussed in the above SWEPT AWAY essay. I'm aware, of course, that there are individuals who have used "facts" to validate repressive viewpoints. I will briefly re-quote Dave Sim on "male-female difference," though I examined his perspective in more detail here:

For a man to win an LPGA tournament would be humiliating for the man. It would be like entering a children’s T-ball tournament and really tearing up the base-paths and smacking some major home runs. There isn’t enough money in the world to overcome the resulting humiliation of knowingly competing against…(pay attention, “ladies”)…
…inherently, self-evidently, inferior beings. -- Dave Sim, CEREBUS 293.

It would be easy for an ideologue to look at what I've written here and to assume that I, by speaking of such aspects "male-female difference" as strength-weight comparisons, am trying to validate fantasies in which males are inherently superior.  This is not the case, however.  Gender difference is a fact that influences many fictional scenarios-- whether Doctor Light tries to rape a woman rather than a man, whether serial killers with mommy problems choose to assault females or males. However, in my philosophy, the fact of male-female difference does not determine the status of either gender, either in fiction or reality.

My borrowed Heideggerian metaphor of "throwness" merely means that one must accept some facets of reality as having a non-ideological level of influence. Most women are "thrown" into a world in which, 99% of the time, the men they encounter are both bigger and stronger. This does not determine their status as one of inherent inferiority. But it does influence any attempt they make toward self-determination. To disregard the way the world often works, or to claim that it is a creation of "male privilege" or "rape culture," remains a fundamental dishonesty.

And now-- back to the boring literary analyses!!

BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE ALWAYS WIN PT 1

My title for this essay-series is meant not as a statement of unalloyed fact, but an indicator of a tendency that I feel to be grounded in the fundamentals of narrative communication. In this, I think it's a little more philosophically sound than a famous, and equally attention-seeking, assertion by Dave Sim; i.e., "No one wants to be a woman."

In one of my earliest blog-essays here I wrote:

For most genre-fiction-- particularly those media which, unlike prose, hinge on depicting the appearance of the characters-- the standardization of sexual attractiveness is a useful narrative tool. In romances, for instance, it's almost de rigeur to depict both hero and heroine as meeting a bland standard for attractiveness. This is not because the narrative is trying to convince anyone that homely people don't mate in real life, but because it's advantageous to the narrative's smooth progression to depict only good-looking people becoming romantically entwined. As long as the hero and heroine meet a basic standard of attractiveness, an audience-member is less likely to be thrown out of his/her participation in the story to think, "How can Character A possibly be attracted to Character B?"

Though my essay touches on some of the disadvantages of this standardization, other critiques by such low-wattage luminaries as Julian Darius and Kelly Thompson show little or no awareness of how this standardization-- or objectification, as some prefer to call it without exception-- serves a consistent narrative purpose. This purpose remains constant regardless of the intensity utilized in a given work, be it one of GLAMOR, TITILLATION or PORNIFICATION.

By way of demonstrating this consistency, I cite an excerpt from this post by fan-blogger Barry Pearl.  In this essay Pearl quotes from an interview with Silver Age IRON MAN artist Don Heck:

“I used to think of Pepper Potts as Schluzie from Bob Cummings’ “Love That Bob” (TV Show). She was always interested in the boss and never could go out with him, and she’s thinking of all these dumb broads Stark is going out with. Happy Hogan was just a pug type, like Joe Palooka.” “Stan called and said he wanted Pepper to be prettier,”Heck laments. “That wasn’t my idea. As far as I was concerned, that killed it. If she’s homely and she winds up going out, then it’s a big deal. If she’s prettier, who cares? “Then, Stan said, ‘Make Happy handsomer.’ I liked him with his banged-up ears and crooked nose. He was fun to do at that point. When suddenly everybody had to be pretty, then I didn’t like him.”

Here we have what many fan-writers would automatically assume to be an appeal to the male reader's groinal region.  Don Heck wanted to depict support-character Pepper Potts as a slightly homely young girl, modeled on, but not quite as homely as, the actress who played the part of "Schultzie" on TV's "Love That Bob."  Under editor Stan Lee's direction, Pepper soon became as "model-gorgeous" as any of the jet-setting babes with whom Tony Stark cavorted.  I believe that writer Archie Goodwin finally tossed in a note about how Pepper had transformed herself, but clearly Heck was justified in feeling that his conception had been put aside.

However, note that Lee also wanted Heck to make the pug-ugly character of Happy Hogan handsomer.  Why would an editor require that if he's just trying to appeal to horny young boys?

The truth may lie in the fact that Lee was less concerned with giving Heck the latitude for more naturalistic-looking characters-- with which I do think Heck did a fine job-- and more concerned with developing the characters in the soap-operatic style that he Lee had started developing for the Marvel superhero titles. 

Soap opera, of course, is all about romantic torment.  Rarely on real soap operas does one see a homely girl catch a handsome guy, or a homely guy nab a real looker.  Why?  Because, even though such things do happen in real life, they seem unlikely to the audience, which expects that "beautiful people always win," particularly with respect to the prize of "other beautiful people."  It's a pecking-order that most if not all human cultures internalize, and even when one sees exceptions, many rationalize the deviation by saying something like, "X married Y for Y's money."

Stan Lee's scripts for IRON MAN show Tony Stark going out with various models and rich bitches, but as far as romance goes, only Pepper Potts resonates as a real romantic interest.  I surmise, though, that Lee thought his readers would find it incredible had the playboy started dating his homely secretary.  Hence "homely" must change to "hottie."

At the same time, Lee surely wanted to promote the "triangle" aspect of the Tony-Pepper-Happy relationship.  In the original Heck version, most readers could imagine Happy and Pepper together, but not Pepper with Tony, nor Happy providing any competition for Tony if the playboy decided to date his homely secretary.  Therefore I surmise that Happy gets a makeover so that he will appear as a credible romantic rival.

Such were the demands of beauty in the innocent Silver Age.  In Part 2, I'll examine some modern permutations.

SIM SIM SALLAH BLAM PT. 2

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

Once more into the Groth-quote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(c) Both of the above.


Isn't logic wonderful?

SIM SIM SALLAH BLAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


 

QUICK BIO-SKETCH

I recently troubled to excerpt a portion of a Dave Sim letter from about fourteen years ago.  Having delved that far back in the past already, I may as well put that matter in my personal historical context.

I remember being fascinated with comic strips and kiddie comics as soon as I could read, though the only thing I can date is a 1960 sequence from DICK TRACY, which would have been in newspapers when I was five.  When I saw the sequence reprinted in a post-1990s TRACY reprint book, I clearly recognized a visual involving a villain named "Spots," who possessed literal spots floating before his eyes.  When the story concluded with Spots dying in a shootout with Tracy, the "spots" evaporate like his dissolving soul-- and I was sure I'd seen the same scene before.  Whether I really remembered it from the age of five, I do not truly know.

I didn't get into superhero comics initially.  Around '65 I remember seeing some Julie Schwartz comics that grossed me out.  Then in 1966, my opinion on superheroes changed and I dropped the kiddie comics for superheroes, westerns, and the occasional horror-genres.  I think the changeover had something to do with a TV show that had the sound "Da Da Da Da Da Da" in the theme song.

I remained pretty isolated from fans, except for one or two "pen pal" relationships.  In 1972 I met a couple of local fans with whom I kept contact, which may have encouraged my fledgling fan-writing.. Though I'd started getting comics-fan mailers through the post, it was one of those friends who first showed me the JOURNAL around 1976. Impressed with the magazine's thoughtful and inquiring tone, I submitted, and my first JOURNAL essay saw print in issue #35 (June 77), three issues after the magazine took on its current name (having been "THE NEW NOSTALGIA JOURNAL" before that).

I remained loosely associated with the JOURNAL throughout the 1980s, except for a brief period in which I tried to quit the fannish thing, with no evident success.  Toward the late 1980s, as I mentioned elsewhere on the blog, I became very critical of the JOURNAL's increasingly elitist attitude.  My last overture to the magazine occured during 1989.

However, also during that period I'd also come to admire the lively discussions in Dave Sim's CEREBUS lettercol, and I'd written Sim letters off and on.  A few years after I quit submitting to TCJ, a feud broke out between Gary Groth and Dave Sim around 1992.  Since the Internet still wasn't viable, Dave's lettercol became for me a enjoyable place to debate matters of comics criticism, including the faults of the JOURNAL-- though I had a sense that on one level Dave was just as elitist as Gary Groth.

Dave gave me irrefutable evidence of that in a essay called "Annotated Hart," and I wrote what I considered a letter of friendly rebuttal, focusing on the old Wildean debate between "ethics and aesthetics."  Dave didn't precisely answer my objections, but he did take major exception to what he considered a conflation of popular fiction myths and the genuine revelations of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions.  I could be wrong, but until then I don't think he'd completely "come out" as to his religious convictions, or I might not have made the comparisons I made in quite the same language.

Naturally, I wrote a long re-rebuttal letter, but Dave didn't print it for reasons too involved to mention here.  (I've sometimes considered excerpting parts of the letter here for my own amusement.)  Dave did print a much shorter rebuttal in CEREBUS #243 (June 99) and did not append any reply, which was better treatment than I got from AMAZING HEROES in response to assorted complaints.  Even without making further contributions to the lettercol, though, I continued to follow CEREBUS to the end and sent Dave a congratulatory letter when he finished his epic, to which he replied in cordial fashion.

Oddly, the end of the 1990s, when I wrote my last letters to Dave Sim, was about the time when the Internet took off, which gave me new venues wherein I could be a bane to bloody comic book elitists everywhere.

RE: RELIGION AND THE METAPHENOMENAL

"But for intelligent people-- and I've always considered you a very intelligent person, Gene-- to see Moses and Jesus as the end product of mythopoetic traditions, fictional characters raised above Spider-Man and Tarzan only by literary pedigree, seems to me to be a first intellectual failure.."-- Dave Sim, responding to my letter in "Aardvark Comment," CEREBUS 236 (Nov 1998).

When I first began formulating my concept of "the metaphenomenal"-- partly in response, as I've alluded, to those film-compendia that attempted to collate all fantasy, horror, and SF movies-- I wanted a term that encompassed the one type of "fantasy film" such compendia tended to overlook: the religious "fantasy-film."  The compendium I found most useful, John Stanley's CREATURE FEATURES GUIDE (whose sixth and final edition emerged in 2000), was silent on such films as THE TEN COMMANDMENTS or SODOM AND GOMORRAH, which clearly depicted violations of consensual reality.

To my knowledge no compiler of fantasy-films has gone on records as saying, "Such and such is why I don't include religious films" alongside the reviews of, say, THE LORD OF THE RINGS.  Yet the reason behind the omission probably comes down to the fact that many potential readers of such compendia-- largely though not exclusively Christians-- don't regard such films as "fantasies," but as depictions of a higher reality, no matter how compromised by contemporary concerns.  In other words, such films are accorded not a higher "literary pedigree" (Dave Sim's somewhat inaccurate extrapolation of my expressed beliefs) but a "religious pedigree."  Thus even contemporary stories of "Moses and Jesus" are considered a thing apart from any other stories, religious or otherwise.  Elsewhere in his response-- which I may examine more fully in other essays-- Sim states that he has no problem with comparing "Diana and Zeus and Hermes" to modern characters like "Wonder Woman, Superman and the Flash," because all of them are "birds-- not Birds-- of a feather." However, in Sim's opinion the "luminaries of God's prophetic tradition" should be off limits to such comparative analysis.

I remain, contrary to Dave Sim's charges of intellectual failure, a devoted comparativist.  That doesn't mean, however, that I don't recognize differences in mode and content between what I've called "religious myths" and "literary myths."  But in contrast to one of my old cyber-foes on the Forum That Deserves No Name, who felt that those differences so great that nothing literary should ever be called "mythic," I maintain that any story in any medium can be compared to one in another medium, often if not always fruitfully, and that the emotional feelings aroused by religion and by art are, at base, consubstantial.

Now, some may wonder, "What set this off?"  Simplicity itself: I'm planning to review some religious films in the next few days on the NUM blog, and I wanted to provide context.  I don't usually write theory-essays on NUM, so it's here instead.

Dave Sim, as it happens, is not my only contact with a Christian who had an "off limits" attitude to associating Christian myths with those of other "pedigrees."  I recall, albeit only in fragments, a disconcerting conversation with some Zealot co-worker whose name I've forgotten.  I don't remember how the conversation got on the subject of God's use of supernatural forces, but I remember intently that she didn't like the use of the term "supernatural" for anything having to do with the Christian God.  I made one attempt to remain civil, suggesting the term "miracles" instead.  To my surprise, even though this is a term not infrequently invoked by Christians of all persuasions, this particular Zealot didn't even like to say "miracles," since in her mind that somehow implied that what God did wasn't a part of "reality."  At that point the conversation drifted off into inconsequentiality.

I have remembered that part of it, though, because it does suggest a peculiar mental attitude that conflates the "magic" of one's own religion as an intrinsic part of reality, even when it's patently obvious that no human beings goes through life experiencing burning bushes or tongues of fire every quotidian moment.  My invented term "metaphenomenal" has one advantage: it doesn't imply that a given extraordinary phenomenon is necessarily "unreal," merely that it goes beyong the average phenomena that are, as Heraclitus said, "common to all."

In the 2008 essay in which I introduced the term, I compared it to the more-frequently-used academic term, "the fantastic:"

Some fictive universes depict only representations of what our culture calls its consensual reality; the things that a majority agrees on as being real. Other fictive universes depict things that may never exist, or which do not yet exist, and this requires the author to describe such things largely from imagination rather than experience as such. This struck as me as a loose parallel to Kant's "noumenality" in some ways but not in others, so I discarded his term and substituted one for purely literary purposes: "the metaphenomenal," meaning "beyond the phenomenal." I consider it a better catch-all for all things that owe their existence to mankind's imagination than the usual catch-all employed in academic studies: "the fantastic." There's both logic and tradition to using the latter term, yet it seems at times cumbersome when dealing with phenomenon that go beyond phenomenal limits within a given universe, and yet are not supposed to be regarded as "fantastic" within that universe even though they may be to the majority of readers.

By the terms of this argument, even works in which the authors believed (or may have believed) in the metaphenomena depicted-- such as Zeus in Homer's ILIAD, or Isis in THE GOLDEN ASS of Apuleius, or God in Milton's PARADISE LOST-- can still be fruitfully analyzed in terms of how the author imaginatively depicts his concepts of godhood.  Further, one can analyze how emotional expressivity is consistent in spite of rhetorical goals.  There is a common expressivity in the stories of both Zeus and Tarzan, at least in that both are weaned by friendly animal-helpers, and also (dare I say it? I dood it) in both the stories of Moses and Spider-Man, in that both are called to a duty neither initially embraces.

In closing I should add that though I am a comparativist, in that I believe no religion takes precedence over any other (as Dave Sim explicitly does), I don't embrace the empiricist attitude of some comparativists.  For me, all religions are significant in terms of the intersubjective archetypes they evoke.  Further, unlike the belief-systems of empiricism, those of religion are at least obvious about their status as projections.