TSUNDERE, TSUNDERE

 (Apologies for the above pun to Blur and their nineties song, "Sunday, Sunday")

On this blog I've written quite a bit about the appearance of sadistic tendencies in various fictional characters, particularly of the feminine gender, who as a group are better known for "giving" than for "taking." Jordan Peterson has noted that females are generally more "agreeable" than males and less given to overt confrontation. Yet I think there are often currents of aggression that become intermingled with the most agreeable temperaments, and one might say that many of these have, in Japanese culture, manifested in what has been termed the "tsundere"-- the understanding of which is crucial to my impending conclusion to my ongoing GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI analysis.  

So what's a tsundere? Grokipedia and Wikipedia agree on this basic definition:    

A tsundere (ツンデレ) is a character archetype originating in Japanese anime, manga, and visual novels, depicting an individual who initially behaves in a cold, hostile, or irritable manner—known as the "tsun" phase—before gradually revealing a softer, more affectionate and vulnerable side, referred to as the "dere" phase.

Grokipedia also adds a categorization I don't find in the Wiki essay:

The archetype has evolved to include variations, such as "Type A" (harsh exterior dominating initially) and "Type B" (affectionate by default but with tsun outbursts)

I for one have only seen the tsundere term used for Type A: the sort of character who projects hostility or indifference, whether to many people or to one specific person. I can see at least a chain of logic for Type B, though, and I can also see how readers of manga, and of fiction generally, will particularly have a tendency to use the term interchangeably for (a) those that project an aggressive vibe but have some level of agreeability hidden beneath a tough exterior, and (b) those that project an agreeable temperament but also evince aspects of aggression on occasion. Neither Type A nor Type B are intrinsically feminine character-types, and indeed I can think of prominent male archetypes along roughly the same lines. However, in this essay I'll confine myself to feminine examples, because traditionally aggression becomes more problematic, psychologically and socially, for females than for males.

Grok and Wiki also agree that the term "tsundere" was not coined until the very early years of the 21st century, though there had been several fictional progenitors of both types. Takashi Shiina's Reiko Mikami is unquestionably a member of Type A, and if the online translation of Mikami's final story, circa 2011, is an accurate one, that story might be among the first manga-stories to incorporate the newbie term. Rumiko Takahashi's Lum is sometimes labeled as a Type A as well, though I deem her a Type B based on the above description. But Lum may be the first major manga-female who intermingled agreeability and aggression so thoroughly that she's often deemed the first of the type, though she appeared over 20 years before the term was coined.

              

Shiina's indebtedness to Takahashi has been mentioned in online interviews with the two of them and is played for laughs in one of the late SWEEPER stories, "GS Mikami 78." This tale depicts a demon-battle in the career of Mikami's youthful mother Michie and includes a cute in-joke wherein young Rumiko Takahashi witnesses the fight and is inspired to create URUSEI YATSURA. Shiina is very careful to make sure his readers know that the joke has Takahashi's approval. That said, Michie is a closer analogue to Lum than Mikami is, and the "GS 78" arc even shows Michie winning over a reluctant male lover with her passion-- a thing Lum repeatedly seeks to do with Ataru, though with far less success.

Actually, in her very first appearance Lum does have some strong character-traits in common with Mikami. An alien race, strongly resembling the traditional Japanese ogres called "oni," threatens to conquer Earth. But the ETs offer a deal: they will withhold all attacks if a randomly chosen Earthman engages their champion in a game of "oni-tag." Lum is the champion, and she's totally okay with helping her people conquer an unoffending planet. Earth's champion can only win the contest if he tags Lum's horns, but her ability to fly makes that difficult. Ataru only earns Lum's wrath-- her "tsun" characteristics-- when he manages to pull off her bikini-top, which might be viewed as a deflected defloration motif. Lum then begins fighting Ataru on a personal level, the female responding to the male's crude advances, and she even sneers at his lack of toughness when he's knocked out by a fall to the ground. However, the moment Ataru defeats Lum, this time using her stolen bikini as bait, Lum shifts into the "dere" phase, and for the rest of the series she tries to convince Ataru to marry her willingly-- which is precisely where Lum's resemblance to Reiko Mikami ends. 

One assumes that on some level the Lum character knows she's not really Ataru's wife until they have the ceremony, but she reacts to his dalliances with other women as if he were a cheating husband. This leads to the series' most familiar trope: Lum violently punishing Ataru for his fickleness. In this she's certainly a revenge-figure for every woman who dealt with a trifling male, even though the comedy stems from both (a) the fact that she doesn't have any literal claim on Ataru, and (b) the fact that, if only because of their propinquity, Ataru does come to love Lum better than any other appealing woman-- though, much like Shiina's perpetual victim Yokoshima, Ataru always wants as many women as the world offers. But Lum generally projects an agreeable "Type B" personality no matter how many times she's moved to violence.

Shiina's final SWEEPER story appeared in or around 2011, the year that a great earthquake devastated Japan, prompting several manga-artists to contribute special stories .to generate revenue for victims. Possibly, had the earthquake never taken place, Shiina still might have found some other reason to present this capstone to his original series, which had concluded in 1999. The cover highlights Mikami's comeback by mentioning that Shiina's profit-seeking ghostbuster had "arrived in the 21st century"--though thus far this two-part tale has remained the last hurrah for Mikami and her crew. It does show that by 2011 the term "tsundere" has become accepted by manga-practitioners, enough that Shiina expects his audience to understand the context. And in the final SWEEPER story, Shiina pokes a little fun at how the term's meaning might, or might not, apply to so extreme a personality as Ghost Sweeper Reiko Mikami.

               

ON POSTWAR MASCULINITY

 Another day, another messboard topic...

________

With respect to post-WWII gender roles, the first thing I think of is that when the war ended, the surviving American men returned home expecting to return to their status as family breadwinners, while women who had substituted for them in factories et al would return to being homemakers. Some contemporaneous women expressed the same sentiment. Some, like Betty Friedan, did not, and so we got the rise of second-wave feminism. 

How did that affect depictions of men and women in postwar movies? I agree with the general proposition that one major trope to come out of the changes was "men have become weak and there's nothing that can be done about it." That's where your example of INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (and the Matheson novel published the previous year) belongs, and there are surely others in the same vein.

However, we also get the trope "men have become weak but with the right approach they can re-assert themselves." I don't recall the specifics of REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, but it's strongly suggested that James Dean is messed up due to his mother, and near the end the father puts his foot down and reasserts his authority. HILDA CRANE (1950) spends most of the movie with Joan Crawford manipulating her husband, but then he walks out on her at the end. You can also see this type of trope in a fair number of stories predating America's entry into the second world war, not least the 1936 GONE WITH THE WIND novel.

The movie we're discussing, DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS, is a little different, and it's also not precisely "postwar" since it's based on a play performed the year before Britain entered the war against the Axis powers. It's not that the men in the DOD movie are weak, but they're unable to deal with the ways women think and interact, which constitute a separate social world. You see the same ethos in the 1939 Bette Davis weepie THE OLD MAID, which came out the same year as the GWTW adaptation. The world of men there just barely impacts on that of women, even though the story takes place against the backdrop of Civil War violence. 

ANGEL AND THE BADMAN is a different trope still. John Wayne's bandit character is never weak at any point in the story, but he's a creature that needs to be civilized by the gentle Quaker girl, who takes him off the path of doom. That too is a very "woman-centered" ethos, though it doesn't depend on nullifying masculinity, as does HILDA CRANE and maybe REBEL.

There probably are other movies, not least SF-genre films, that get into the trope of men falling victim to either too much or too little masculinity. You mention NEANDERTHAL MAN, and MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS might be another example of the latter. But I find it interesting that in the late forties and fifties we start seeing a fair sampling of low budget "action girl" (often swashbucklers) and "monster girl" films, far more than I think one can demonstrate from the beginning of sound films through the end of WWII-- and DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS is one of these. But whether that indicates a real shift in genuine gender roles would be food for a second discussion.                            

   

MYTHCOMICS: "THE LAST DAY OF THE AMAZONS" (WONDER WOMAN #149, 1964)

 

In my overview of Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN comics of the 1960s, I asserted that the writer hardly ever made much use of the mythical elements present in the mythos bequeathed to DC by creator William Marston. In contrast to Kanigher's contemporaneous METAL MEN, wherein the author sometimes managed to imbed his juvenile formulas with the substance of epistemological myths, Kanigher wrote as if he thought his readers too simple-minded to care about consistency or elucidation of fantasy-concepts. However, at the end of the essay I added that I found one story that achieved mythopoeic concrescence. True, it's flawed. A lot of time is wasted with a side-plot showing Wonder Woman in her Diana Prince ID, where she has to rescue a rocket crew from disaster without revealing her identity to Steve Trevor. However, one of the corniest elements found in many WW stories of the time actually works to the advantage of LAST DAY OF THE AMAZONS. 

I noted in the overview that I was no fan of Kanigher's "Wonder Woman family." a sterile emulation of the Weisinger "Superman family." Back in the Golden Age Wonder Woman was always an adult. Her only family member was Hippolyta, the immortal queen of Paradise Isle, who created her daughter Diana from clay with the help of the Amazons' patron deities Athena and Aphrodite. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, though, Kanigher added to Hippolyta's brood two time-tossed incarnations of Diana, one the teenaged Wonder Girl, the other the toddler Wonder Tot. By 1964, the time of DAY, Hippolyta has evidently grown contemptuous of the perils of time-paradoxes, for all three versions of Diana co-exist on Paradise Isle and have adventures together. They begin DAY with all four Amazons asleep, though all the later scenes are in daytime, so apparently the catastrophe waits until dawn to strike. A massive earthquake strikes the island, and the Amazons have to form a "human chain"-- a favorite Kanigher trope-- to keep Wonder Tot from falling into a chasm.

            

The Amazonian quartet goes outside. Their two patron deities materialize and tell them that Paradise Island is falling apart due to Hippolyta's transgression against Athena's law, that no man may be allowed to tread upon a sanctuary meant only for the immortal Amazons. The presence of a man in Greek armor, "The Prince," is at the root of the trouble, but since Hippolyta insists on explaining how things came to this pass, even juvenile readers would have figured out that DAY is a tale beginning "in media res," which gives Kanigher the chance to start things off with a bang before settling in for a big explanation.

Hippolyta briefly mentions that her unnamed Prince was her consort, if not husband, back in the days before she was granted immortality. However, he was lost at sea and presumed dead. However, because Kanigher also wants to acquaint his readers with the lives of Hippolyta's daughters, the exegesis is delayed so that the reader can see a lot of incidents in the lives of the three Wonders. Eleven pages go by before Kanigher tips his hand. In contrast to all the other stories in which Hippolyta sends her children off to have heady adventures, this time she's haunted by the memory of her lost love. In a nice bit of irony, Wonder Tot swears to stay with her lonely old mother, but then in a short time the child ventures forth to have a one-page exploit with her wacky buddy Mister Genie. 

While Hippolyta's lost prince was never mentioned before this story or afterward, at this time the amazon queen feels her lovelorn state exacerbated by the fact that all of her daughters have interesting, vital lives. So to anneal her sorrow, Hippolyta creates a stone statue of her beloved. But as she goes to sleep-- presumably the night immediately before the earthquake-- she makes the mistake of praising only the sculpting skill lent her by Athena for giving her a semblance of her lost love. By doing this, Hippolyta emulates the act by which she brought her child Diana to life from clay, though without any intention of making the stone come to life.

According to Kanigher's cosmos, though, Aphrodite was responsible for imbuing the clay statue of Diana with life. The love-goddess is affronted that her worshipper Hippolyta would credit Athena with anything concerning love. There's some justice in this. Athena, the virgin war-goddess, is the image on which all of the Amazons have modeled their (presumably celibate) lives. They seem to evoke Aphrodite not with respect to forging romantic alliances-- although both Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl are pursued by attentive males-- but with respect to invoking Aphrodite in a vague spirit of beneficence, one that Marston tended to call "lovingkindness." This arrangement seems to have been okay with Aphrodite until Hippolyta credits Athena with anything pertaining to the exigencies of romantic love. This is probably the only time in Kanigher's career that he portrays the Greek gods of the WONDER WOMAN cosmos as being as fractious and petty as they often are in traditional stories.

    

A massive fire-creature sticks his head out of a crevasse, and wonder of wonders, Kanigher actually explains that this is "the God of Earthquakes," whom Athena presumably summoned to devastate Paradise Island. All of the Wonder Family members try to sacrifice themselves to save the other (barely seen) Amazons, and once again they form a human chain to support one another. Aphrodite is not impressed by acts of heroism; she only wants to see a sacrifice rooted in romantic love. The animated statue-- which for all we know might incorporate the long-dead spirit of the Prince-- then gives the love-goddess the sacrifice she wants. Once his intrusive male presence has vanished from the island, Athena is free to cancel the execution, and the goddess leave.

Given that almost every bit of characterization in Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN is annoyingly flat, the conclusion proves eyebrow-raising. The three daughters realize that their mother has lost her only love a second time, and they try to soothe Hippolyta by telling her that they'll devote more time to her. But Hippolyta's last words are those of an aging (and not immortal) parent ceding power to the younger generation, giving them permission to live their own lives, no matter how it isolates her. Perhaps Kanigher allowed himself this isolated moment of sensitivity because mortal men, as much as mortal women, feel time's winged chariot hurrying near. And even an immortal queen, devoted to the battle-ethos of Athena, must satisfy all forms of erotic romance, even in the form of memories, to the exclusive claims of the Goddess of Love.                

AMAZON ATROPHY

 Yesterday I decided to do a deep dive into a section of the shallow pool known as "Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN." I didn't want to try reading everything that he might have written since he (almost exclusively) took over writing the DC feature following the passing of William Marston in 1947. But since I think Kanigher was a guy who had real talent, I wanted to get as much info as possible about why he didn't seem to show any of that creative ability during the decade of the sixties. He was doing some good scripts in that decade for BATMAN, METAL MEN, and the war books, but as far as WONDER WOMAN was concerned, a Kanigher script from the 1960s reads just like anything he did in the 1950s. I don't fault him so much for being dull in the 1950s, because the majority of the stories from DC Comics were dull then, as the company sought to keep its squeaky-clean image amid industry controversies. But why couldn't he seem to craft a decent story for the Amazing Amazon?

In this essay I suggested one reason:  

"[Kanigher's] use of myth-ideas was both derivative and desultory, giving one the impression that he could barely summon any enthusiasm for the series, even when dealing with characters he himself created, or at least substantially re-worked, like the idea of “Wonder Woman as a girl.” Another reason may have related to his insider knowledge that DC wanted to keep control of the franchise in those days, before the company bought the character from the Marston estate outright. His knowing that the company wanted to keep their hold on the character, and that they didn't seem to have any concept of what to do with the Amazon except to emulate Marston (but without as much bondage), probably contributed to Kanigher's sense that he could do anything he wanted, as long as he kept turning in scripts on time.   

I started collecting superhero comics after the debut of the Batman teleseries, so Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN was my first experience with the heroine. I remember thinking at some point that I didn't initially like the Andru-Esposito art or the romantic aspect of the Amazon's ongoing romance with Steve Trevor. Was any of that just the usual antipathy of a pre-teen toward matters of sex? Possibly, but if so, the phase didn't last, as I welcomed the change to "Mod Wonder Woman" with the new editorship of Mike Sekowsky, and even bought those issues off the stands new-- and there was a fair amount of romance appeared in those stories.

I didn't confine my study only to issues in the 1960s but rather extended it from issue 105 (April 1959) through issue #176 (May-June 1968). I did so because #105 introduced the aforementioned "Wonder Woman as a girl." Since these stories usually took place before the juvenile Wonder Woman became a superhero, a lot of them took place in the fantasy-domain of Paradise Island and various vague fantasy-domains. But here, as described, Kanigher just tossed out his concepts willy-nilly, with no attempt to ground them in any knowledge-system, as one could find in titles of the time like FLASH and SUPERMAN. Thus even though Wonder Girl might have been introduced to give the title "teen appeal," both her character and her adventures were superficial. As time went on, Kanigher devised ways for all three members of the Wonder Family -- Wonder Girl, her adult self, and Wonder Tot, a baby-wonder-- to appear in the same adventures. But this merely made Kanigher's attempt to imitate the "Superman Family" of the more popular SUPERMAN titles more forced and therefore pathetic. In both sets of stories, the authors were attempting to get readers invested in the recursive nature of the SUPERMAN and WONDER WOMAN worlds; worlds in which repetition of motifs was intended to be reassuring. But though there were a lot of dull 1950s SUPERMAN stories too, there were also tales that sustained a sense of juvenile charm, particularly in the late 1950s, when editor Mort Weisinger became somewhat more venturesome in his choice of story-subjects.    

The Marston feminist message was given no more than lip service during the sixties decade, even in the brief period when Kanigher and his artists emulated the general look of Golden Age WONDER WOMAN. However, there was an aspect of the Superman books that both Marston and Kanigher imitated: the hero's use of incredible powers to perform unique feats. Kanigher's concoctions of bizarre tasks were no better or worse than those of Marston, but generally speaking Marston usually provided some rationale for the menaces WW faced. In the above excerpt from WW #154, Kanigher wastes no energy figuring out why a giant flaming humanoid happens to be dwelling right under Paradise Island. Is the Boiling Man a member of a subterranean race? An ancient Greek Titan confined to the underworld by the Olympians? It's astounding that Kanigher worked in comic books for so long but had so little insight into what his audience wanted. Yes, the flashy super-feats might be the primary concern of kid-audiences. But Marston sold well in part because he challenged his audience, while Kanigher seemed to have had a low opinion of kids' capacities.

Yet there was one type of super-feat Kanigher avoided in the six years of my survey: the hand-to-hand fight-scene. Marston's Amazon was a jock; she liked not only entering athletic contests but challenging opponents, particularly conceited males, to fights. Kanigher didn't show any reluctance to show his Golden Age creation Black Canary duking it out with male crooks, so he wasn't personally repelled by "tough females." Even his female robot Tina of the contemporaneous METAL MEN was a spitfire. So it's possible that the low incidence of fight-scenes in the five-plus years from #105 to #155 (July 1965) was a dictate from DC editorial not to make the heroine seem too masculine, since that had been a major complaint about the character from the fanatic Frederic Wertham, the man whose fulminations made the 1955 Comics Code necessary for the comics-industry. However, evidently by 1965 sales on WW had declined enough for Kanigher to attempt impressing readers with his Marston-imitation, beginning in issue #156. Sales probably did not appreciably improve, but this new direction resulted in much more physical violence between the Amazon and her opponents for the remaining three-or-so years of Kanigher's tenure. Here are a few examples from that period:

    

This development certainly allowed artists Andru and Esposito to make the art more dynamic. Another possible factor is that even though the Marston-emulation took place before the debut of BATMAN in January 1966, by 1965 many DC superheroes began getting more "punchy," possibly in recognition that Marvel Comics was cutting into DC's action with the hyperkinetic fight-scenes of Kirby, Ditko and others. But apparently, even once the Marston-schtick ran its course in about eight issues, Wonder Woman's sales did not improve despite more fight-scenes either. This resulted in the aforementioned phase of "Mod Wonder Woman," which seemed to do a little better for the first year before its sales also declined.

Of all the stories I studied, only one merited the designation of a myth-comic, and I'll devote a separate essay to Kanigher's only exceptional WW story of the 1960s.   

MYTHCOMICS: "THE (SECOND) ORIGIN OF THE CHEETAH" (1944)

 'density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience."'  -- GOOD WILL QUANTUMS 

Thanks to my acquisition of IDW's collection of the complete run of the 1944-45 WONDER WOMAN newspaper strip, I found a good example of a prominent author-- i.e., William Moulton Marston  -- taking a second shot at an early story and infusing it with greater density. 

Though Marston put a lot of (shall we say) mature content into the Golden Age WONDER WOMAN comic book, often the creator of the Amazon heroine tended to write down to his audience in terms of plotting. This was true of most raconteurs of the era: they assumed kids who bought comics just wanted as many marvels to gawk at as possible. But Marston took a different tack with the newspaper strip. He knew there was at least a chance of reaching an adult audience-- a chance eliminated by the strip's cancellation-- so in many cases he dialed down the sheer quantity of wild inventions. And in the case of his rewrite of the 1943 comics-story "Wonder Woman and the Cheetah," he upgraded a story with only fair mythicity into an exemplar of good myth. Unfortunately, there are almost no free scans of the newspaper strip available online. Thus I'm flung back to my practices during this blog's early days: depending on textual description with minimal illustration, partly taken from the 1943 story.

In the original CB story, Marston starts out by having Wonder Woman show off her prowess at a stateside benefit. However, she doesn't show up on time, and the chairman of the relief fund tries to placate the anxious audience by introducing debutante Priscilla Rich. This only exacerbates the audience's fervor to see the Amazon, and there's just one panel devoted to Priscilla being slightly miffed that the audience ignores her. Then Diana Prince shows up on stage, demonstrates her inability to move a heavy piano, and then cedes the stage to her powerful alter ego.

But in the CS version, Marston takes a more layered approach to introducing Priscilla. In a sequence that took up two weeks of daily strips, Priscilla shows up at the office of General Darnell, barges past his secretary Diana, and asks the officer to put her in contact with Wonder Woman, to ask her to appear at the benefit. This establishes a slight animosity between Priscilla and the heroine, but Wonder Woman quickly shows up and agrees to appear. However, on the night of the benefit, Diana Prince goes out dancing with Steve Trevor and just happens to forget her commitment. Thus, not only is Priscilla personally embarrassed by the absence of the special guest, Marston subjects the upper-class woman to more humiliation. She tries to placate the audience by performing "The Death of the Swan" with her balletic skills, but she earns only catcalls. Then the heroine shows up, curiously in both her guises, and satisfies the audience's desires.

 In the CB story, Wonder Woman proposes a second stunt-- apparently one she arranged with the relief effort in advance-- which involves her being chained and submerged in a tank. CB Priscilla, for no reason, decides to bind WW with her own magic lasso, making the heroine's escape more difficult. But in the CS story, Priscilla does have a reason to resent WW for her superior popularity. 

In both versions, Wonder Woman escapes despite the added difficulty, and Priscilla pretends she didn't mean to endanger the Amazon's life. In the CB version, Priscilla is merely miffed because the heroine goes to dinner with the benefit chairman, though there's no real indication that Priscilla cares about him in a romantic sense. Out of nowhere, the rich girl simply looks into a mirror in her room at home and her "evil self" manifests in the mirror. There's no particular reason for Imaginary Evil Priscilla to wear a cheetah-costume, except that there happens to be a cheetah-rug in the room, and Evil Priscilla tells Normal Priscilla to make it into a costume.

The CS version is much more psychologically compelling. After WW breaks free, she lets Priscilla off the hook, but Steve Trevor and a half-dozen other people accuse the girl of attempted murder. This sort of attention Priscilla did not want, and she flees, thinking, "Everybody adores Wonder Woman and hates me... I feel so low, so inferior!" She hides in a theatrical prop room, and there she encounters the dummy of a woman in a cheetah-costume. In this arrangement, Marston juxtaposed Priscilla's desire to escape her inferior feelings with her discovery of the dummy, and thus a more believable symbol-association is made, whereon she again imagines herself talking to her evil self, convincing her to become a costumed criminal.

In the 1943 story, Cheetah steals the benefit money and tries to improbably frame both the chairman and Wonder Woman for the crime. Since Priscilla doesn't really care about the chairman, the next five pages of the cops arresting the accused are nothing but filler. However, the 1944 continuity has Cheetah set fire to the theater-- which arguably involves her taking vengeance upon the audience that rejected her. In the former tale, Cheetah lures the heroine into a death-trap, while in the latter, the villainess captures the Holiday Girls, friends of her nemesis, which amounts to a more personal attack. 

In the CB, Marston then devotes two separate sections to Cheetah finding new ways to assail Wonder Woman. One involves using a beauty salon and a mind-reader to learn military secrets, which leads WW into a tangential battle with Japanese troops in the Pacific. In the final section, WW gets involved with training female soldiers on Paradise Island, and Cheetah infiltrates the program. There are several moments in which the villainess continues to express the hatred of all Amazons for their athletic superiority, but this twist means that Cheetah is no longer specifically focused on her star-spangled nemesis. She steals the magic girdle of Aphrodite, which empowers her to battle WW on her super-strong level, but she's defeated and consigned to an Amazon reformatory. The first section of the 1943 tale garners at least fair mythicity, but I'd probably rate both of these sections as poor, being just a collection of random incidents.

As for the remainder of the CS story, Cheetah imprisons all the Holliday Girls at her mansion and subjects them to various humiliations (with copious bondage of course). Cheetah also lures WW to the mansion, and despite various upsets, finally binds WW with her own lasso and forces her to make an Amazon "shocking-machine." This device (admittedly the most ludicrous item in the story) brings out the "subconscious personalities" of the Holliday Girls in a manner supposedly analogous to the way Cheetah was born, though in the case of the Hollidays, they actually become anthropomorphic animals. (Etta Candy naturally becomes a pig-girl.) WW finally defeats Cheetah and restores the girls to normal. However, when Priscilla is arraigned at trial, WW's personal lie-detector, the lasso, can't prove that the rich woman's the Cheetah, because in the Priscilla ID she no longer remembers being a super-villain. And so ends the career of Comic-Strip Cheetah, as Priscilla is sent to an asylum for examination. Obviously, it was Comic Book Cheetah who became an enduring opponent for the Amazon Princess, but the "Second Origin" provides an interesting example of a revision being more symbolically complex than the original, which is generally not the norm.  

      

                  

 
                                                            

NEAR-MYTHS" "THE MUTINY OF THE SUPER-HEROINES" ( ADVENTURE COMICS #368, 1968)

 

There's no way to be sure whether or not Jim Shooter read Jerry Siegel's 1964 "Revolt of the Girl Legionnaires." There are no direct callbacks in "Mutiny," and so it's just as easy to believe that Shooter came up with his tale purely as his own take on "the war between men and women." But whereas Siegel had used the trope of "Delilah conquering Samson with sex and guile," Shooter's trope is more like 'what if Male Samson meets Female Samson"-- which is pretty much what the cover depicts.

The narrative opens on a violent male activity, although it turns to be merely a training exercise, in which Karate Kid's "murdered" sparring-partner is the invulnerable Superboy in disguise. We don't see how the female Legionnaires occupy their free time until page 7. 

Extreme feminists would be irate that the girls are all seen cooing over fashion and furniture decorations. Princess Projectra poses an interrogative about their recent encounter with Thora, ambassador from a matriarchal world, Saturn Girl seems to think female dominion absurd, Light Lass provides some pushback by claiming that their Kryptonian XX member is as powerful as any old XY version, and Supergirl herself demurs, suggesting that at base her super-cousin is probably her superior in pure strength.

   

  

Shooter weaves no mysteries around Thora: she's immediately shown using special technology to artificially boost the powers of the Girl Legionnaires. She doesn't immediately employ brainwashing techniques, but is content to sow dissension as the males find it difficult to accept the change.

Things soon come to a head-- or maybe, bonking heads.

Despite the fact that the Legion's leader Invisible Kid claims to have figured out Thora's plans, he and the other males just bull their way into fighting her female pawns, and, in contradistinction to the Siegel stories, the power-boosted XXs stomp the XYs into the ground. Supergirl is actually the one who foils Thora's plans, after which she commits suicide and everything goes back to status quo. But what causes Supergirl to break Thora's brainwashing? We see it in an earlier scene:

  Some quick background: for several 1960s stories, Supergirl and Brainiac 5 dated off-and-on, but in the two-parter introducing Shadow Lass (AC #365-66) the new girl makes a very mild overture toward the cerebral Legionnaire, though it goes nowhere. Issue #368, appearing just one issue after Shadow Lass's debut, the blue-skinned heroine seems to have some sort of grudge against the green-skinned boy, as she fantasizes about forcing Brainiac 5 to be her servant. Supergirl's memories of romance with the brainy youth cause her to be offended by the theoretical assault on Brainiac's dignity, and it's her feminine protectiveness toward a boyfriend-- even though the two of them are never precisely "serious" -- that saves the day-- though there's also an element of feminine competition involved as well. There's not a big symbolic lesson here, unless it's that women are the best weapon men can have in "the war between men and women."      

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE REVOLT OF THE GIRL LEGIONNAIRES" (ADVENTURE COMICS #326, 1964)

 I decided I would dedicate this day to the recently passed Jim Shooter by writing about Jerry Siegel. Well, to be more precise, I've wanted for some time to sit down and cross-compare the respective takes each author took toward the trope of "the war between men and women," as expressed through a series both raconteurs worked on: The Legion of Super-Heroes. One might argue that Siege's shortcomings in this case shine a brighter light on Shooter's bushel-- or something like that.

  

The first page of "Revolt" shows some of the Girl Legionnaires shows them occupied with mundane activities, but the second ramps up the action, revealing that the six female Legionnaires have sent six male members of the group off on a phony errand. They then discuss their plans to lay traps for the remaining males in order to destroy them all and claim the club only for Girl Power.  

First, Light Lass mousetraps Element Lad. "Thrilling," right, EL?

Then Triplicate Girl splits herself in three, makes up to three separate males, and forces them all to admit that size does count.

Saturn Girl makes only a token effort at seduction, but then tricks Superboy into a rescue mission that gets him trapped.

Supergirl, who could easily twist any form Chameleon Boy might take into knots, feels it necessary to use some arcane formula to block his shape-changing power.

  And finally, Phantom Girl goes back to the Delilah-mode, liplocking Star Boy before she makes him imprison himself with his own powers.

-

There's not much myth-material in all of these simplistic "betraying women" scenarios, but there is a little bit in the Big Explanation. Queen Azura of the planet Femnaz (paging Rush Limbaugh) brainwashed all of the girls into hating men, because for many years the Female Femnazians had become obsessed with war-games, to the extent that they exiled their pacifistic males. Jerry "hurry-up-the-damn-exposition" Siegel conflates the Femnazians' desire for warfare with their ritual of shooting rockets at the moon-- which, in Earth cultures, most often represents feminine intuition and periodicity. Apparently shortly after the tyrannical women exile their men, they also decide to spread their desires for female supremacy to the Legion, if not to Earth generally, and use magical jewels to infect the Girl Legionnaires with man-hatred. But the other male Legionnaires, whom Saturn Girl sent on a false errand happen to pass by Femnaz, and two of the members keep the planet's moon from colliding with the planet. The heroes also reunite the chastened, no-longer-overaggressive females with their (presumably still pacifistic) males, while the Girl Legionnaires release all of the Boy Legionnaires from their traps, and good times are had by all.

The repetition of the Samson-and-Delilah seduction-trope is pretty repetitions, as if Siegel were indirectly suggesting that the girls had to resort to duplicity in most cases because girls just couldn't conquer boys (with the exception of Light Lass, who really does overcome Element Lad in a power-over-power struggle). However, there's more complexity when Siegel reworks elements of the Superman-origin for this little jaunt. Instead of a planet exploding, it's the moon of Femnaz, though the planet is saved by two Superboy-like heroes. Instead of a noble mother and father dying together as their child survives, there's a whole group of Amazons who kick out their wimpy males for being too tolerant, though the two groups are brought together, and an exile ends rather than an adoption of one survivor by a younger culture. But Siegel's conflation of two conflicting myths-- that of the martial Amazons and that of the seductive Deliah-- work agsinst one another here. In my next essay, I'll show that Shooter's pursuit of this theme was at least more unitary.               

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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.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

TOTALITARIAN TOKENISM PT. 3

I suppose that this essay-series is a very roundabout way of approaching the subject I first raised in my review of Season One of the Netflix SANDMAN teleseries. In that review, I specified that I wanted to discuss the formal properties of the show, and deal with the "politically oriented alterations" elsewhere. But before doing so, I wanted to explore the background of said changes. In Part 1, I described the way that a given phenomenon could be viewed as either a "negative token" or a "positive token" according to one's presuppositions. In an intermediary essay, I analyzed the conditions of the early 20th's century's "Status Quo," in which positive tokenism had very limited potential, and in Part 2, I proceeded to specify the early inroads of this form of tokenism in the 1960s decade. I did not deny the possibility of negative tokenism. However, whereas many people have used the term to connote a superficial pretense to follow certain political principles, I've defined negative fictional tokens as those that shows no individuality, but are defined ONLY as sociopolitical indicators, whether for "Liberal" or "Conservative" purposes. While the showrunners showed a great deal of sensitivity in adapting the Neil Gaiman stories from the SANDMAN comic book, their efforts were compromised by the constant emphasis on virtue signaling through Netflix-approved DEI casting. Instead of making all the race-bending, gender-bending and kink-bending seem natural, the message of forced inclusivity serves as a constant reminder of a new-- and totalitarian-- Status Quo.                                                                                                                        So what were the various "bendings" of SANDMAN SEASON ONE?                                                                                                                  

"The Sleep of the Just"-- Alex Burgess, who has custody of Morpheus at the time that the dream-lord breaks free, is given a gay lover, played by an apparently-Black British actor. Lucienne, the librarian of The Dream-World, is depicted as a White male in the comic book, becomes a Black female in the TV show.                                     

"Imperfect Hosts"/"Dream a Little Dream of Me"-- the original Gaiman stories concern male John Constantine, who gives aid to Morpheus in exchange for help with his opposite-sex lover. In the Netflix narrative, John becomes Johanna, but her lover remains female. In the comics John Constantine was sometimes defined as bisexual, but I suspect Johanna swings only one approved way.                  

"A Hope in Hell"-- In the original Gaiman story, a male demon in Lucifer's domain acquires Morpheus' helmet, and the dream-lord enters Hell to challenge the demon, name of Choronzon, for custody of the prize. In the TV show the challenge proceeds largely as it does in the comic, except that Lucifer, now played by Gwendoline Christie, takes Choronzon's place in the contest, for no discernible reason but to give the actress playing Lucifer more lines than the actor playing Choronzon. In a subplot, the madman John Dee escapes an asylum and catches a lift from a female driver. In the comic the driver is a White woman, whom Dee kills when he's done with her. In the TV episode, the driver is a Black female, but Dee not only spares her. he gives her a protective charm for no plot-related reason.                                   

     "24/7"-- As in the original story, John Dee enters an all-night diner and uses his powers to manipulate the personnel and customers. The comic included a White "power couple." but here they become an Asian wife and a Black husband. The original story includes a young lesbian woman, who gets to stay the same. But that's not enough for the TV show: the Black husband is secretly gay, and so is the diner's cook, with whom waitress Bette thinks she has a romance of sorts. The cook not only reveals that he's gay, but that he's slept with Bette's younger brother. Somehow the writer manages to omit the question of anyone gay committing child sexual abuse.               

"The Sound of Her Wings"-- In the comic, Dream's sister Death is depicted as a Caucasian-looking Goth girl with skin as chalk-white as Dream's, so of course she must be played by a Black actress here. Hmm, since she's a conceptual being, couldn't she have also satisfied DEI had she been played by a dark-complected Hispanic or one of several different Asian types? But no, we have a hero who's White, so a Black "sister" is the necessary counterbalance. One or two minor characters go from White to Black as well.                                         

    "The Doll's House" and the next three episodes-- The characters Rose Walker, her brother Jed, and her great-grandmother Unity go from White to Black. Yet Jed, separated from his family when his Black father dies, lives with his Aunt Clarice, played by a White performer, as is her abusive husband Barnaby. Was Clarice's sister, mother to Rose and Jed, supposed to be White too? Maybe someone in the writers' room didn't think things through? Or they just thought it was OK for villains to remain White? Another conceptual entity, a nightmare named Gault, is played by a Black actress, but this time the two entities she substitutes for were generic monsters, not belonging to any racial type as such. Rose's friend Lyta Hall, a White character in the comics, is played by a Lebanese-British actress, but her late husband Hector? Starts with "B," ends with "k--" again.         

   "Dream of a Thousand Cats" and "Calliope"-- though there a few minor characters who are race-bent, there are no major changes here. But that may be because the main human characters-- a couple who drown some kittens for expedience, and Ric Madoc, a man who keeps a Greek muse in captivity-- are White People Doing Bad Things.                                                                                                                                                                                                                Yet "Calliope" displays the most interesting script-change in any episode. In the original story, Madoc is an immense hypocrite. Though he exploits his imprisoned, suffering Muse so that he becomes a celebrated author, Madoc describes himself to his adoring fans as a "feminist writer." This line is also in the episode's script. However, someone on staff added a rather revealing line. Madoc is on the phone, talking to what one assumes to be an agent about a TV-adaptation of one of his books, and he says, "I need [the producers] to guarantee at the outset that the cast and crew will be made up of at least 50%  women and people of color, and that we need to publicize it so they won't get out of it when it comes to hiring people."                                                                                                                                                                                             Now, what does it mean that someone-- be it the credited writer or one of the showrunners-- inserted that line? Was it meant to carry the same irony as the Gaiman line in which Madoc describes himself as a feminist writer? It's possible, but the line is weird, coming from a writer working for a company that insisted on the very pattern of virtue signaling that Madoc uses to make himself look virtuous. Did the writer of the line want to imply, however covertly, that virtue-signaling Netflix wasn't any more virtuous than Ric Madoc?                                                                                                                             That's one possibility. Another is that the writer of the line really did believe that it was both moral and necessary to make companies commit to DEI hires, because otherwise they would revert to the bad old days of "if you're White you're all right." I should point that, although SANDMAN Season One came out in 2022, as of this writing Netflix remains firmly committed to DEI, unlike a number of companies that have at least modified their more extreme positions.                                                                                                                                                                                                   To pursue my tokenism metaphor to the bitter end, usually the word is used for one character of a divergent race, gender or proclivity whose presence "proves" that an author, or the characters the author creates, is/are free of bigotry against the divergent type. But tokenism inheres just as much in mass quantities of virtue signaling. In the minds of the politically correct, they believe they're fighting the good fight. But how "inclusive" can their multi-ethnic, polysexual characters be if they exclude themselves from accepting any of the "badness" that belongs to the entire human race? Their demands to be in all ways sympathetic and/or heroic hold the ring of totalitarian propaganda-- particularly that of the totalitarian seeking to drum up a war against an enemy's alleged wrongdoings.