NEAR MYTHS: "THE JUNGLE CAT-QUEEN" (1954)

The back cover copy for this week's mythcomic, CATWOMAN DEFIANT, correctly states, "Since Catwoman made her debut in BATMAN #1 in 1940, she has become one of comics' most popular villains." However, like other Bat-villains of the Golden Age, Catwoman's potential for symbolic discourse always remained somewhat restricted. I've mentioned some of this potential in other essays, as I did in LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION:

... because the established mythology at the time of this 1954 comic continually emphasized a romantic tension between Batman and Catwoman-- that's the narrative value-- the scene (which isn't in the story) takes on a significant value of "battle of the sexes," which is certainly one motif within the story proper (a reformed Catwoman returns to crime because she wants to challenge Batman again). We cannot know if the adult raconteurs who crafted the story (Edmond Hamilton and a "Bob Kane" ghost) were aware of the S&M associations of the whip, particularly when it's wielded by one gender against the other, but if they did they may've assumed that the scene would "tease" readers into buying the comic even though, being 1954 juveniles, they might not know consciously why the scene seemed appealing.

The one Golden Age story that comes close to realizing Catwoman's potential-- 1954's "Jungle Cat-Queen" from DETECTIVE COMICS #211-- was also her last appearance during that Age, after which she vanished from DC Comics for undisclosed reasons, only re-appearing in 1966.

The feline villainess, who had briefly reformed a few years earlier, came back to the criminal life with a vengeance, and makes one of her most potent appearances robbing a mail-plane with the help of a big black panther, and then escaping in her "Cat-Plane."

Batman and Robin are quick to pursue in their Batplane, and just as they're nearing her island hideout, Catwoman performs a "wing-ecdotomy" on the Dynamic Duo's vehicle.

The site of a giant cat-plane shredding the Batplane's wings is alone worth the price of the story, but there's more to come. The heroes bail out and land on the island. They come across a small coterie of white hunters, but the hunters trap the heroes, revealing that they're crooks working with Catwoman. When the villainess shows up, she's attended by a lion and a tiger, suggesting that she's somehow become a "mistress of animals," when before the biggest creature she ever controlled was a housecat. It'll later be revealed that all the big cats have been circus-trained-- implicitly brought into Catwoman's hands by the crooked hunters-- but for the time being, Catwoman plays her image as a "mistress of animals."

For no good reason, she forced the captive crusaders to don animal-skins a la Tarzan, and chases them through the island-jungle with the cats. She claims that she plans to unmask them when she catches them, but this may be a cover for preserving their lives against the other crooks, since she's seen luring her own beasts off the heroes' trail. Inevitably, Batman and Robin get the upper hand over the beasts and their trainers, but Catwoman gets a reward her for refusing to kill the good guys, in that the script allows her to get away at the end.

Given that one of the big attractions of Edgar Rice Burroughs' TARZAN mythology is sexual in nature, scripter Edmond Hamilton seems to be upping the sexual elements by having Batman (and, to a much lesser extent, Robin) turned into jungle-men. There's naturally no actual sex between Bat and Cat here, but their contention through the agency of controlling lower animals may be deemed a displacement of such sexual energies.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE LEGION OF SUPER-MONSTERS" (ADVENTURE COMICS #309, 1963)

Once more, a quick reiteration of my definition of "near myth:"

..."a near-myth" is a part of a narrative that sustains a mythic kernel of meaning, but does not become unified into a fully-developed "underthought" throughout the narrative. [the latter being the definition of a fully consummate myth]

A quick personal note about this week's "near myth:" although as a sometime Legion fan I was rather hyped to see this story when I read old ad-hype for it, I never found a decently-priced copy of the original issue until recently, nor did I happen to buy the relevant Archives collection with the story. I'm rather glad I waited, because it's the sort of appealing but cheesy story that should be read in its original form.

"Legion of Super-Monsters" loses the cover spot to a much shorter Superboy story. Said tale's only interest is that it speaks to a psychological myth that DC Comics had exploited since the Golden Age and used heavily in the Silver Age: the fear-of-replacement myth. Comics-stories of this ilk usually focused on the starring heroes about to be replaced or marginalized in some manner, and they tend to be fairly one-note.

Closely related to the "replacement myth," though, is the "exclusion myth," in which a starring character finds himself left the odd man out in some desirable group of society.  Indeed, the first story in which the Legion appeared dealt with Superboy being excluded from potential membership.

Superboy's exclusion is naturally overturned by story's end as a Big Misunderstanding. In "Super-Monsters," though, the Legion decides to exclude a candidate, one Jungle King, because he shows a lack of caution in the use of his power to control animals:

Jungle King gets mad and decides to form his own Legion, made of wild alien beasts who are compelled to obey his commands. Taking the alternate cognomen Monster Master, he embarks upon a career of crime, using the fabulous powers of his creatures against society, thus provoking the Legion of Super'Heroes to come after him.

In their initial encounters, the human Legion has no small trouble in dealing with the monster-Legion...

 ..and to make things seemingly worse, one of the members who passed the group's standards, Bouncing Boy, messes up by exposing himself at a critical point. However, he gets to redeem himself in a sense, using strategy to defeat a beast of much greater power.

I said that the replacement myths were usually one-note, and Edmond Hamilton's "exclusion-myth" script isn't much better. Not only are the Legion's standards validated by Bouncing Boy's success, Monster Master is shown to be a hypocrite who makes a snap judgment about one of the beasts that "auditions" for the monster-legion. The villain rejects a "gas creature" because the critter's not impressive enough, but the beast gets pissed about its exclusion and subjects Monster Master to a fatal "gas attack."

Still, though "Super-Monsters" is a little preachy in this regard, it does have some pleasingly bizarre sci-fi monsters, and that makes up for a lot.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE MENACE OF DREAM GIRL" (ADVENTURE COMICS #317, 1964)

In this 2014 essay I cited the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES character Dream Girl as an example of being one of the first recurring female characters to evince a greater level of sexiness than was the norm for stuffy-seeming DC Comics.

I debated with myself as to whether this story by writer Edmond Hamilton and artist John Forte qualified as a mythcomic. The situation depicted on the cover-- very much of the "oddball school" prized by Silver Age enthusiasts-- represents a standard trope that seemed to pervade a huge number of DC comics: that of the "Back-Stabbing Betrayer." Often the betrayer was someone known to the main character-- Superman and Superboy were forever being shafted by their girlfriends, parents, or other relations for some elaborate reason. But occasionally the betrayer was "the enemy within." The Legion, as a cosmopolitan group that was always recruiting new members, also left itself open to infiltration by insidious agents.

However, sometimes the "betrayer trope" was inverted, and the story revealed that the person apparently scheming for the hero's defeat was actually trying to help him in some bizarre, counter-intuitive manner. Most persons reading this blog will probably know that Dream Girl remains to this day a regular Legionnaire (though I've no idea if the character still keeps the original name and persona). So I'm not giving away much to state that every anti-Legion action taken by DG is actually an attempt to keep the heroes from being killed in an accident that she's foreseen with her prophetic ability.

Hamilton's story is loosely plotted for a DC tale of the period: he also introduces the villainous Time-Trapper to the feature's readers with scarcely any backstory.  This blogpost at the Silver Age Comics website contains some speculations as to why the story has some awkward moments. Yet it may be that Hamilton, though best known for his galaxy-smashing space operas in prose, simply sought to structure the tale as a "day in the life" for the Legion, for they also spend time running about surveying post-atomic debris and carving monuments for worthy personages. Then their seeming routine is broken when a new member shows up.

Saturn Girl expresses imperious disdain toward the new member's claim to read the future:

However, Dream Girl quickly gets the male majority on her side, even as she ticks off all of the female Legionnaires. Of particular interest is the reference one of the girls makes to her "baby-doll face," a characteristic strongly associated with the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe, on whom Dream Girl may be physically modeled.

These juvenile sexual politics ('uh-oh, competition!") have much more potential in terms of sociological myth than the herky-jerky main plotline. I noted that DC, possibly in response to the unwanted attention of Frederic Wertham, tended to keep its post-Code female characters fairly demure in terms of costuming-- though admittedly the company was never a great haven for sexploitation in the Golden Age, either. True, the three "old" Girl Legionnaires aren't fully covered up, and are at least showing their legs. But there were also females who remained completely covered up, like Phantom Girl:

And Shrinking Violet may sport the single worst costume ever seen on a Silver Age superheroine.

But clearly even the ones who showed a little leg were no competition for this:

Costumes as such are not mythic: their ability to attract or repel belongs to what I term the "kinetic potentiality." But DG's ability to fascinate the male of the species does bear some degree of comparison to the many feminine beguilers of myth and folktale, even if her power aligns more with the figure of the Greek prophetess Cassandra. Initially DG's actions seem designed to return the hostility of the Girl Legionnaires by causing them to be expelled for various petty offenses, or by causing their powers to malfunction (DG's Naltorian science is responsible for altering the powers of "Lightning Lass" to those of "Light Lass," for anyone who cares to keep track.) However, as the tale wends on, she targets males as well as females, though as mentioned before, she's only doing it For Their Own Good.

I include "Menace of Dream Girl" as a mythcomic largely because it presages the recrudescence of sexploitation elements in the comics medium, which from then on became a far more prominent element in superhero comics.  In addition, the story proves interesting for building up the previously nominal character of Star Boy. In this story he gains his first strong character-trait, that of being drawn into the "orbit" of Dream Girl. On a comics-forum post, I noted the negligible nature of Star Boy up to that point:

Speaking as I am of marginal characters, I was looking through old LSH stories to see when each Legionnnaire debuted in an actual Legion story, as opposed to being a guest-star in a Superboy or Supergirl tale. I was surprised that Star Boy, introduced in a 1961 Superboy story, doesn't actually appear in a story for over twenty issues of ADVENTURE COMICS. That the editor was trying to insert the character is shown by the fact that he appears in group photos of the membership, in keeping with the status he was given in the Superboy tale-- but Jerry Siegel never puts him in an actual story, and not until #317 in 1964 does Star Boy get something substantial to do. Maybe Edmond Hamilton, who'd been writing the series for about a year, got bugged by his editor and finally decided to make SB the boyfriend to the new female character he introduced in #317: Dream Girl. But for all the emphasis the character got before that, the readers probably could have easily forgotten that he even existed.

At the end of this story Dream Girl leaves the Legion to "perfect" her dreaming-powers, since she didn't exactly shine in making an inaccurate prediction about the Legionnaires getting killed. Star Boy does not leave at that time, but his next major story-arc involves him being forced to kill an enemy to protect his own life, and thus violating the Legion constitution. Expelled, he joins up with Dream Girl, and although they're re-instated in a relatively short time, the two of them always retain an air of ambivalence as far as their allegiance to the group. In contrast to most other superhero-groups, the Legion was like a real club in being subject to infighting and defection, and for all the juvenile nature of the plots, retains a significant place in the development of so-called "comic book continuity."

OF MAD SCIENCE AND SCIENTISTS

Back in my essay OCD ON A HOTPLATE I found it strange that even though Jerry Siegel’s early SUPERMAN stories possesses strong mythicity in relation to the hero’s character, most of his opponents, whether they were mad scientists or abusive orphanages, had little mythic quality. I expressed surprise that SUPERMAN, despite the marvelous nature of its protagonist, seemed unable to sustain a pulpish level of myth-symbolism I such as I found in the BATMAN stories of that period, analyzed here.


I’ve also mentioned the “inconvenient truth” that a decade after Superman’s creators Siegel and Shuster lost control of their character, the franchise took on greater complexity during the early years of the Silver Age. To be sure, Jerry Siegel, working as a freelance scripter, was instrumental to creating some of that mythology during that, but he was entirely answerable to the authority of Mort Weisinger, who enjoyed editorial control of the SUPERMAN titles. Now, thanks to some of the articles and interviews in THE KRYPTON COMPANION, a 2006 TwoMorrows compendium of articles and interviews related to Superman, one can trace some of the diverse ways in which that mythology evolved.

One aspect that enhanced the symbolic complexity of the feature was the increased use of science-fiction elements. In fannish circles it’s often been said that the early Silver Age was the first time the series boasted such elements, whereas the stories from the previous ten years were dominantly more mundane in content, like episodes of the popular 1950s television show. Until recently, I tended to believe this, having only fragmentary knowledge of SUPERMAN comics of the late Golden Age. However, in one COMPANION essay, tellingly titled “The Superman Mythology,” author Eddy Zeno established that there was an increasing use of science-fictional concepts as early as 1952, mostly from writer Edmond Hamilton. “By 1952,” Zeno relates, “nearly every issue [of SUPERMAN or ACTION COMICS] had at least one of [Hamilton’s] tales of [exploring Kryptonian culture”]. Thus it would seem that, even though Hamilton is credited with just roughly 250 Superman stories, his skill with science-fiction scenarios may have convinced Weisinger to use more SF-concepts than one saw from Jerry Siegel in the Golden Age.





That said, Zeno admits that this relative increase of SF-stories “slowed to a trickle” in the Superman books over the next few years. This makes an interesting contrast with the fact that in 1950 DC launched STRANGE ADVENTURES, the first of a very long-running line of SF-comics. This would indicate that the company's management believed that there was a juvenile audience hungry for SF-tropes. But despite the fact that Weisinger had been a science fiction fan before he became a professional editor, he chose not to continue emphasizing science-fiction elements generally, or Kryptonian mythology in particular, for more than a year or two. Not until roughly 1958 did Weisinger and his stable of writers began emphasizing a consistent mythology for both Superman’s homeworld and his cast of characters. In all likelihood comics-fans will never know why Weisinger’s editorial prerogatives changed, so that a mere flirtation with SF-mythology in 1952 became a more sustained effort six years later.


Such was the background against which Superman’s Silver Age stories were forged. But what of the Superman stories of the next “age?”


By 1970—which is the year I personally consider to be the beginning of the “Bronze Age”-- Mort Weisinger had retired from DC, and the “Superman Family” books had been farmed out to an assortment of different editors. Julie Schwartz assumed custody of SUPERMAN and ACTION, but though Schwartz had been celebrated in fan-circles for his Silver Age titles, such as THE FLASH and GREEN LANTERN, Schwartz’s editorship on SUPERMAN was not quite as renowned. The SUPERMAN stories of the Bronze Age used as much science-fictional gimmickery as the tales from Schwartz’s Silver Age titles, or those of Weisinger’s SUPERMAN. But Schwartz’s Silver Age writers—principally John Broome and Gardner Fox—were able to impart symbolic resonance to the gimmicks, most of Schwartz’s Bronze-Age writers were not so accomplished. After enduring most of the wacky but one-note villains Superman faced in the 1970s—Terra-Man, Vartox, Karb-Brak—one might prefer the one-note Siegel villains of the 1940s.


However, there was IMO one major exception in the work of writer Marty Pasko, one of many interviewed in THE KRYPTON CHRONICLE. Ironically, Pasko’s remarks on the Superman concept make it sound like he would be the least likely writer to do anything insightful with the character:


“Most superhero characterization… is non-existent. Or so preposterous that a truly sophisticated, naturalistic, character-driven story is virtually impossible to achieve unless you ignore most of the ill-conceived backstory and reimagine it…”


I do not think superhero fiction works well when conceived primarily in naturalistic terms; at best, naturalism should be used as a leitmotif, to consistently play off the fantastic pheonomena of the stories, as best exemplified by the scripts of Stan Lee. And yet, despite his bias toward naturalism, Pasko demonstrated a more adventurous attitude toward at least one aspect of Superman’s mythology: his super-powered “rogues’ gallery.” Michael Eury, interviewing Pasko in THE KRYPTON CHRONICLE, observed that Pasko build up the formidability of several old-time Superman menaces--Toyman, Metallo, Bizarro. Pasko responded:


“…my goal was to take the old villains that Julie disdained and give them an edge, in hopes of attracting new, older readers. I seem to have succeeded in doing that, since the numbers on SUPERMAN went up while ACTION’s sales plateaued, and the only difference in the creative teams on the two books was the writer.”


Clearly, unlike his contemporaries Cary Bates and Elliott Maggin, whose stories reflected Julie Schwartz’s preference for gimmickery, Pasko was interested in refurbishing the established mythology of the older SUPERMAN books.


That’s not to say Pasko always succeeded in his goal. The original Metallo story by Robert Bernstein remains a strong evocation of the mythic trope of “the evil Superman,” even though the Metallo character dies at the end of the story. Pasko’s rebooting of the character resulted in a Metallo that was merely another good sparring-partner, though prior to Pasko the character had no more than minor status in the overall Superman mythos. However, Pasko succeeded in giving Toyman what the writer called “the creepy incongruity of a criminal mind lurking behind that avuncular, Ed Wynn exterior,” and Pasko’s Bizarro becomes once more the tragic Frankensteinian outcast seen in that character’s first few appearances.





Moreover, Pasko’s story for SUPERMAN #318—which takes a novel approach to Superman’s vow to preserve life—remains one of the best experiments with deepening Superman’s emotional resonance.

Thus one may observe the capaciousness of the SUPERMAN mythos, in that it was able to take fire from the diametrically opposed works of an Edmond Hamilton, a writer steeped in boyish SF-gimmickery, and of a Marty Pasko, a writer disdainful of those very elements.


ADDENDUM: I should note that it's entirely possible that Weisinger was ordered to tamp down the SF-motifs because the TV adaptation of the hero, THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, debuted in 1952. Perhaps Weisinger's boss ordered him to make the comic look as much as possible like the low-budget teleseries, but because Weisinger had already bought a number of SF-themed scripts, it took a year or so for the comics to finish off that spate of SF-stories and assume complete fidelity with the TV show.