MYTHCOMICS: "I AM THE LAST MAN ON EARTH" (STRANGE WORLDS #1, 1958)

I went into a lot of detail in this essay about the importance "philosophical SF" had on both Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1950s, prior to their contributions to "The Marvel Superhero Universe." Thus it behooves me to provide at least one example of such a story from the period following Kirby's return to the company.

Since the title STRANGE WORLDS only lasted five issues, from 1958 to 1959, it was relatively easy to read all five in quest of mythcomics with a philosophical slant. Now, I never claimed that every story at Atlas/Marvel was in the vein of Arthur C. Clarke (any more than was true of the celebrated EC SF-line). Of the fifteen or so comics stories in STRANGE WORLDS, most of them are "gotcha" stories in which some fool or criminal gets his destined comeuppance, or the opposite, in which some steadfast character's travails are validated, if only in the viewpoint of the reader. But LAST not only has a philosophical bent, it also manages to breathe new life into what's often considered one of prose science fiction's hoariest cliches.

After the first two panels, most of the story is related by the "last man" in flashback, though by his own testimony he will continue alongside what is implicitly "the last woman." The flashback establishes that this Future-Earth has banished the majority of human ills, but has remained hemmed in by biological constraints, since humans still only live eighty years or so. But then a report from a space-mission brings back biological data on the planet Xernes. On Xernes, the atmosphere  will allow humans to endure for five hundred years. This immediately fills almost all human beings with a passion to emigrate, to leave a qualified paradise for a garden where the grass seems much greener.

I'll mention in advance that the emigrants never suffer, to the reader's knowledge, any dire "gotcha" fate. As far as the reader knows, all of the emigrants are wildly successful in reaching Xernes, settling the planet and living extended lives, with absolutely no consequences. Such a gotcha, in my opinion, would have diluted the author's philosophical question: is it right for people to desert the "cultures that were born out of the pain and suffering of countless millions of people?" The Last Man doesn't go into detail about why he considers the emigrants "ungrateful, greedy fools." But he avers to the Last Woman that the two of them will manage to build an "even better world" even without all those greedy souls; a world that implicitly will be marked by the struggles and triumphs of their ancestors.

As noted above, there are a number of science fiction stories which end with a man and woman of some futuristic civilization traversing space and becoming stranded on some Edenic alien world, with the big revelation that the man's name is Adam and the woman's Eve, with the clear implication that the "alien" world is really "our" Earth. Usually this trope is simply a bland attempt to recast an archaic myth into science-fiction terms, and some iterations, like the 1966 WOMEN OF THE PREHISTORIC PLANET, are content to use the situation with characters not named Adam and Eve. At most the point is to present the reader with a conclusion that suggests the continuity of the human species in a paradisical environment, wherein Adam and Eve will be fecund and multiply.

Fecundity, however, is not the point in LAST, but rather, continuity between the labors of the past and the labors of the future. Whatever the original intent of those who first told the story of Genesis, the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden has usually carried a tragic note. Because the first two human beings disobeyed God, they were cast out of Paradise and forced to labor for their bread, and Eve, who may or may not have been able to bear children in Eden, became the first woman to know the pains of childbirth. The broad implication of Judeo-Christian myth is that through future obedience to God, mortals have a chance at some "Paradise Regained," if only in some afterlife.

LAST, however, anticipates a contrarian reading of the Story of the Fall along roughly the same lines as the 1967 STAR TREK episode "The Apple." This story also validates the virtues of hard work and the necessity to bear children in response to limited lifespans (though to be sure the STRANGE WORLDS author does not bring up the question of restoring the population except in the most general sense). But since the TREK narrative deals with a genuinely alien race, that tale cannot address the question of a continuity with earlier, hardier cultures. 

LAST interestingly takes both God and The Serpent out of the picture. All that exists is the temptation of Planet Xernes, which takes the place of the Tree of Life in Genesis. Clearly the world of The Last Man is one in which humankind has never been in Eden at all, but has from the start pulled itself up by its bootstraps, and after centuries of suffering, has finally rejected violence and endorsed reason. But whereas all the children of Adam and Eve in the Bible have no choice but to labor by the sweat of their brows, the human beings in LAST *are* given a comparable choice-- not in terms of being free from labor, but in terms of being able to enjoy the fruits of one's labor for five times the normal human span. The story's author does not quite say that shorter lifespans force humans to take more risks and to live life more fully. But I think that's implied, and it was certainly a familiar enough theme in 1950s prose SF.

While the penciller of LAST is unquestionably Don Heck, I've been circumspect about the writer because the story bears no writer's credit. Stan Lee usually signed any story he fully wrote, so it's possible that either (a) he had nothing to do with this tale, or (b) that he supplied a basic idea to a writer who completed the actual plot and dialogue. GCD also notes that LAST was used as a template for two other "Adam and Eve" anthology-stories with altered plots, and of those two, Lee DID write and sign one. It's my opinion that writers usually find it easiest to swipe from themselves rather than others because their own earlier works always encode the writers' own story-priorities. In any case, there are also a handful of other Lee works that stress the necessity for risk and conflict, most notably THE ORIGIN OF THE SILVER SURFER. So in my mind, I AM THE LAST MAN ON EARTH is a prime example of Lee himself using, or at least signing off on, the use of science fiction for philosophical reflection.

ADDENDUM: I neglected to note that the title contains a mythic irony not present in all similar Adam-Eve SF-tales, since this version of Adam is at once "the last man" and "the first man" on Earth. "The last shall be first," indeed.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE ORIGIN OF THE MANDARIN" (TALES OF SUSPENSE #62. 1965)

In my previous essay I mentioned that of all the early Iron Man foes, only the Mandarin attained "epic status." This status was entirely built upon the type of racial-- not necessarily racist-- myth-motifs that editor/writer Stan Lee and artist Don Heck brought together for the character's early Silver Age appearances. None of the early Mandarin stories are mythcomics, as they tend to be structured as fast-paced thrill-rides, usually forcing the armored avenger to plumb the depths of his Oriental opponent's gadget-filled hideouts.

The principal myth-motif Lee borrowed stems from the late books in Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu series. When the series began in 1912, the author modeled his Asian villain on the upheavals of the Boxer Rebellion, and Fu's desire was to restore China to its former power, while implicitly keeping its culture and social stratifications unchanged. Over time, it became clear that Chinese Communism had destroyed "Old China" more thoroughly than any colonial invaders ever could have, and thus in the late Rohmer books, Fu Manchu was just as often in conflict with the Chinese Communists as with Nayland Smith.

This racial /political myth of a conflict between Old and New China appeared next in Atlas Comics' 4-issue YELLOW CLAW series. Neither Lee nor Heck was creatively involved with the unsuccessful series. However, since Lee did edit the title, it's probable that he remembered how the titular villain frequently embarrassed the Chinese Communists, showing New China to be thoroughly inferior to his scientific wizardry. The Mandarin's first appearance in TALES OF SUSPENSE #50 reflects the same pleasure at seeing modern Communists terrified by the spectre of aristocratic China.

The villain's first appearance doesn't have much else to offer, except that, as the above scene shows, Iron Man's initial encounter with the Mandarin comes about not because the masked menace has done anything, well, menacing, but because the U.S. government is nervous about what he MIGHT do. For superhero comics of the period, which usually asserted that only the bad guy struck first, this was a very atypical "pre-emptive strike."

The story from SUSPENSE #62 is actually the second of two parts, the first part ending when the Mandarin captures his armor-clad enemy, and the only part of the story that shows a strong mythic consciousness is the Mandarin's origin, which he narrates to his helpless foe.

I mentioned before that the Mandarin, like earlier models, incarnated "aristocratic China," and nowhere is that more apparent than in "Origin." The villain doesn't disclose his original given name, but claims that his father was descended from Genghis Khan. In addition, the Asian villain also states that his mother was "a high born Englishwoman." Both parents perish on the day of the Mandarin's birth, and he claims that the displeasure of the Chinese gods caused his father to perish beneath a fallen idol, while his mother then passed of a "broken heart." The infant is then raised by his sole living relative, his father's sister-- but she wants her brother's fortune for herself. She considers leaving the child in the care of poor parents, so that the aunt can have the inheritance and the future Mandarin will be raised "as a peasant." Yet, the moment she thinks of doing this, a chandelier almost hits her-- and so she decides to raise her nephew with an eye to making him hate all humankind, the way she does. Admittedly, Lee's script suggests a characterization of the Chinese people as overly superstitious-- and yet, the overall effect of the story is to agree; that the Mandarin has been marked as having a special destiny.

Most of the family fortune goes to schooling the young nobleman in "the sciences of the world, the arts of warfare, and the subtle crafts of villainy." But the proto-Mandarin and his aunt neglect to pay their taxes to the new regime, and so they're turned out into the street. The aunt immediately pops off, and the nobleman wanders from place to place, refusing to toil for his food like a low-born citizen. To his good fortune, before he can starve, he trespasses on the fearsome "Valley of the Spirits," showing a lordly, fearless attitude toward the spirits.

What he meets isn't precisely a spirit, though it does have the semblance of a dragon, long the symbol of Chinese imperial power.

He learns that the "dragon" is actually the remains of a dead alien, and he taps the long-dead creature's machines to master a level of super-science beyond the level of humankind. Thus he rises to his position as having sovereignty over his own little kingdom in China. The origin-story ends, and so does the overall story's claim to mythic status.

Neither Lee nor Heck ascribe any symbolic import to the villain's most recognizable feature: the ten rings from which he projects an array of super-forces. Additionally, the Mandarin's hands are not as "claw-like" as one sees in most "Yellow Peril" comics. In this essay I advanced a hypothesis as to why Asian claw-fingers became so prevalent in American imagery of these villains.

I think it worth pointing out that the widespread icon of the Asian with Clawlike Fingers may have come about as a Western response to the Chinese custom of incredibly long fingernails. For the Chinese long fingernails signified an aristocrat's freedom from the necessities of manual labor, but many Westerners, whether actively racist or not, plainly found the image off-putting and so evolved their own reading of this icon.

By the mid-60's, I believe editor Lee was trying where he could to eliminate imagery that seemed overtly racist. For instance, though one online reference claims that the Mandarin was drawn with "buck teeth," the Mandarin suffers from an overbite in only two panels of his first appearance, and never again. Yet the visual idea of the rings does call attention to the fingers-- even though they're neither claw-like nor long-nailed-- so that the rings' presence may owe something to an earlier and no longer acceptable image.

ELLISON AND ELITISM PT. 1

A recent forum-post reminded me of the momentous 1980 Harlan Ellison interview in COMICS JOURNAL #53. I hadn't read it for a while, and my memory was that the first time Ellison slagged the work of artist Don Heck, he was doing so in the mistaken impression that Heck had done the art to the 1970s comic NOVA.

Instead, as I reread the interview, it turned out that the NOVA reference came second. In the course of the interview Ellison was ranging all over the place, holding forth on his personal gospel of artistic excellence vs. journeyman mediocrity. On page 76, Ellison has just finished exulting in his own escape from the hell of network TV: "...they get you to write this shit and they corrupt you and writers are turned into mere hacks. I won't do it any more but there are plenty who will..."

Slightly later he makes the caveat that in some cases the willing hacks don't even have talent to start with, which brings him to an excoriation of the total worthlessness of all mainstream comics then current. Ellison asks interviewer Gary Groth to name the "worst artist in the field," and Groth names Don Heck.  When Groth also mentions that a particular publisher once praised Heck, Groth assumes that the praise was for Heck's ability to turn the work in on time. For Ellison this is tantamount to compromising the integrity of the work for a paycheck. Somehow it never occurs to Ellison that this contradicts his earlier point: if Heck had no talent to begin with, then, one may reason, how can he compromise the work?  But then Ellison is off again, touting Neal Adams as a conscientious professional who respects the work over the demands of the industry. After opining that "five thousand Don Hecks are not worth one Neal Adams," THEN he remembers how much he disliked the art of NOVA. He wonders if Heck was the artist on that work; Groth agrees that it was terrible art (as do I, incidentally) but neither remembers that Sal Buscema committed the crime against great art.

Four JOURNAL issues later, the magazine's lettercol carried several responses to Ellison's tirade, one of which came from Steve Gerber. Gerber praised some of Heck's work, not coincidentally work on which Heck and Gerber had collaborated. Then Gerber asserted parenthetically that Heck had suffered some personal tragedy in his life. In his response Ellison did not retract his opinion on Heck's work, but he did admit that in some situations "one should watch one's mouth."

Strangely, I recall reading an interview with Heck-- who passed away in 1995-- in which he denied that he had experienced any personal tragedy that had interfered with the quality of his work. In fact, I recall that Heck claimed in said interview that the story had taken on "urban legend" status in his field, where dozens of fellow workers believed it but no one knew precisely what had supposedly happened to the artist. But since I cannot at present remember where I read this, readers are advised to take my recollections with a grain of salt.

Next up: examining the roots of an elitism from over thirty years ago.

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.