MYTHCOMICS: "LAND OF THE TOTEM POLES" (FOUR COLOR #263, 1950)

 

In my somewhat scattered re-reads of the two Disney titles wherein Carl Barks created his most distinctive work, UNCLE SCROOGE and DONALD DUCK, the latter series has usually seemed to show less potential for myth-mining. The Donald of the comics did become much more articulate than his animated forebear. But even when Donald went on wild adventures without his money-hungry uncle, those exploits didn't seem to spark Barks' imagination quite as much, as when the artist cooked up such bizarre entities as Magica DeSpell. The Larkies, and the inhabitants of Tralla La.

To be sure, with the selected story "Land of the Totem Poles," the main opponents faced by Donald and his resourceful trio of nephews aren't that distinctive. In fact, many modern readers would probably consider Barks' depiction of a primitive tribe of Indians in British Columbia to be condescending. But Barks' main theme in "Totem" revolves around his comic validation of American entrepreneurship, and so the Indians-- I'll name them after the punny river in their terrain, "the Kickmiquik"-- exist primarily to become his ambivalent customers.

Though in this story Donald Duck does show a great deal of determination in his pursuit of a hefty sales commission, though not that much common sense. Not only does he not research the area he's assigned to sell his goods in, he barely seems to have looked at the item he's supposed to sell. He tells his nephews that he thinks it's "some sort of pressure cooker," when the item he's supposed to sell to primitive tribes is a giant steam calliope. In contrast, the three kids bring along their own set of commission-goods, but those goods-- mostly makeup items-- are both sensible and easy to transport. After Donald fails to sell anything to his first prospect, while the kids succeed, he orders them to switch with him. Of course, the second customer, a remarkably hairy hermit, does buy what the kids are selling, so that Donald fails again. This trope, in which the kids frequently outpace their uncle in some way, was one Barks surely used to appeal to his kid-audience. 

However, just so the Ducks don't have an easier row to how, the kids take the hermit's order but don't leave him their "sample case," being just as motivated as Donald to make a big score even in unlikely circumstances. However, just as the river comes to an end, the Ducks see smoke signals. Donald in his blind chauvinism assumes that primitive Indians will go gaga over his sample case of makeup items. Barks takes a slight jab at this assumption, since the Kickmiquicks have heard that all palefaces are "bad medicine" and try to avoid the intrusive salesman. 

Donald does manage to rope in several tribe-persons with a demonstration of the makeup, but they start using the junk before he can make any explanations, and they turn on him. 

By good fortune, the nephews luck onto a method by which they can drive the calliope to the Kickmiquik village, all unaware of Donald's flight from dissatisfied customers. 

When the kids find out what's what, they try to rush to the rescue, but in so doing, they destroy the calliope. However, with typical Junior Woodchuck cleverness, they transfer some of the calliope's mechanisms to the natives' totem poles. And thus they again trump their uncle, for though at first the Kickmiquiks are terrified of their totems making horrendous sounds, they rapidly change their minds and become customers for a product that the salesmen never actually intended to market. You can't get a much better validation of entrepreneurship than that, even allowing for the many comic reversals in the story.

In closing I should add that Barks didn't just draw a bunch of stock Native Americans, as a lot of artists of the period would have in his shoes. Since Barks' story hinged upon the visual pun equating calliopes and totem poles, he clearly researched the attire and artwork of the Indians most associated with totem poles, those of the Pacific Northwest. So, even if the artist's treatment of the primitive tribe might not seem virtuous to many readers today, Barks certainly exerted himself to ground his story in the actual art seen in the real-life "lands of the totem poles."

NULL-MYTHS: THE OZ-WONDERLAND WAR (1985)

 

By coincidence, this null-myth suffers from the same symbolic deficiency as the last one I reviewed here, WONDER WOMAN: WAR OF THE GODS.  Said deficiency might be called "the shoehorn problem," in which the creator becomes preoccupied (whether out of personal taste or from business considerations) with shoehorning so many disparate elements into the narrative that none of them possess any individual charm. But whereas as a multi-crossover work like WAR OF THE GODS had to tie into a dozen or more other DC comics features, the raconteurs behind this 1985 project-- plotter E. Nelson Bridwell, scripter Joey Cavalieri, and artist Carol Lay-- might have been able to trim away a lot of the extraneous elements in order to allow the strictly necessary characters some room to breathe. (To be sure, the project's editor was Roy Thomas, so based on his eighties writing, he too might have thought that "more is always better.")

Right off the bat, the project-- henceforth abbreviated to OZ-- has to work with a team of seven main characters, the members of "Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew." This group of anthropomorphic animal-superheroes debuted in 1982, written by Roy Thomas and penciled by Scott Shaw, and the OZ storyline was originally intended to appear in the regular magazine. The feature was cancelled, so the idea of the Zoo Crew countering a threat to both the fantasy-lands of L. Frank Baum's Oz and of Lewis Carroll's Wonderland became a stand-alone opus. The narrative consisted of three issues published in 1985, just one year before Captain Carrot's world of humanoid animals would be expunged (however temporarily) by the Crisis of Infinite Earths.

I should note here that I was not a fan of CAPTAIN CARROT at its best moments, for its creators tried to walk a tightrope between adventure and humor, and succeeded in neither arena. At most I experienced a mild liking for the design of the group's "Thing," a big porcine crusader named Pig Iron. But all the others were tedious in the extreme. If they weren't just blandly designed and poorly characterized-- Captain Carrot, Rubberduck, Fastback and Little Cheese-- they also had horribly punny names like Yankee Poodle and (ugh) Alley-Kat-Abra. So on top of finding deeds for all seven of these comical crusaders to accomplish in the narrative proper, Bridwell and Cavalieri-- possibly working to Thomas's specifications-- had to find a rationale for the beast-heroes to go adventuring in both Oz and Wonderland. Further, while the title seems to suggest a literal martial conflict between those two fantasy-domains, the truth is that there's just one evil overlord, the Oz-derived "Nome King," who's attempting to subjugate both realms.

I won't dilate upon the plot, which IMO is just a patchwork of episodes in which the Zoo Crew jaunts from one fantasy-realm to another for this or that forgettable errand. This extremely loose structure allows the writers to work in numerous characters from Baum and from Carroll, which might have worked out well if Bridwell or Cavalieri had shown any ability to continue the witty characterizations of such figures as the Mad Hatter or Dorothy Gale (who appears in OZ, though there's no accounting for Alice, the feminine muse for Wonderland). But the writers might as well have been attempting to emulate stock figures for a D&D game. As with the regular ZOO CREW comic, OZ is astoundingly unfunny and underwhelming in the adventure department.

Carol Lay's art is OZ's only saving grace, for her successful tightrope-act consists of rendering all the beast-heroes in typical bigfoot style, while the Carroll characters are all rendered along the lines of illustrator John Tenniel and the Oz characters follow the conceptualizations of illustrators Neill and Denslow. And there's one decent joke at the end of OZ, for after Captain Carrot has returned to his home from defeating the Nome King, the story ends with him getting yet more barely-welcome visitors: DC's klutz-heroes The Inferior Five. Their appearance is just a nod from Bridwell, since he wrote the Five's series, which I think is probably more fondly remembered than Captain Carrot even though the former didn't even rack up twenty issues. Frankly, since Bridwell seemed in my opinion more comfortable with writing the Five's baggy-pants comedy, a Five crossover with the Zoo Crew might have stood a slightly greater chance of being funny. 

I suppose that one other positive aspect of this project is that its concentration on Oz-mythology-- a necessary result of the multitude of Oz-books compared to the two canonical Carroll tomes-- might make some readers want to sample the Baum canon. 

MYTHCOMICS: "MIDEAST MADNESS" (TALES OF THE JACKALOPE #3, 1986)

Today R.L. Crabb's TALES OF THE JACKALOPE is a largely forgotten funny-animal comic book. It came out about two years after the debut of TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, and should probably be seen as a reaction to the Turtles' success in the direct market, though not to their success in the mainstream market, since that was still a little ways down the road. I have a vague memory that JACKALOPE was one of the few independents of the "black-and-white glut" that Gary Groth praised in the JOURNAL, though I don't intend to go looking for the exact quote.

The other six issues of JACKALOPE are enjoyable anthropomorphic amusements, better drawn than the majority of the quickie black-and-whites, and they benefit from a cute idea: centering around the mishaps of a jackalope named Junior, and his squirrel pal Suicide. The first issue relates the folk-history of how jackalopes originated from the interaction of jackrabbits and antelopes. Junior at least favors his rabbit-daddy more than his antelope-mother, since he looks like nothing but a very lanky anthropomorphic rabbit, who happens to have antlers.

"Mideast Madness" presents an interesting sociological myth, one at odds with many of the Islamophobic messages seen in 1980s pop culture. I don't say this to express easy contempt for such messages, since I've stated my agreement with Salman Rushdie that freedom of expression includes the freedom to offend. But one may find interesting forms of expression in push-back against reactionary positions.

The cover-- the only art I can lift from the web-- looks like it ought to be expressing Islamophobic sentiments, as the two starring critters, Junior and Suicide, are surrounded on all sides by evil Moslems, though as it happens the weasel (?) with the knife isn't actually in the story. The bird on the left is Khadafy Duck and the one in the middle is the Ayatollah Khokamamie, and it should be unnecessary to spell out what 1980s figures are being spoofed here. In reality, the two Islamic leaders had nothing to do with one another except for the way they affected American sentiments toward Islam, but here, the two of them are joined in a great super-villain version of Jihad. Junior and Suicide journey to the land of "Ilibystine," where the inhabitants worship the name of "Moolah." The two American anthropomorphs are looking for Junior's cousin One-Eyed Jack, who sent them a postcard about some sort of espionage plot involving a mysterious "capsule."

Arriving in Ilibystine, the travelers' first contact with a native is a benign one. He tells them to get away, because "it is against the law to be a foreigner in this nation." However, the moment he gets a clear look at Junior's antlers, he runs away from the "horned devil." The travelers hike to the nearest city, making an attempt to conceal Junior's horns, but a hostile crowd attacks them. Junior and Suicide are saved, after a fashion, by Khadafy, who acts in the name of the religious leader Khokamami. Khadafy shows his guests his hospitality by hanging them by the arms, because he thinks that Junior must be in league with Jack, who's hidden the mysterious capsule from his "Mooslam" enemies. Khokamami shows up, also wanting info from the captives, and the two villains expatiate on their plans to further division in the world. Khokamami gives the Americans a lecture on the evils of the Crusades and the evils of self-expression. Their Jihad is rooted in a metaphysical manipulation of the "false gods" of the outside world, and the only thing that can stop their plans is a Far Eastern weapon called "the Cosmic Capsule."

Junior and Suicide are in danger of suffering tortures beyond those of super-villain monologues, but two agents of foreign powers intrude on the scene and rescue the squirrel and the mo-- er, jackalope. Both agents have punny names, one being counter-intuitive-- a tough bull-guy who calls himself "T-Bone"-- and the other being totally incorrect, "Ninjun," who is essentially a "ninja Indian." His combination of a black ninja-suit with an Indian-feather-- seen below from the cover of issue #5-- fairly screams "only in the eighties."

After Ninjun and T-Bone spirit Junior and Suicide away, the four of them make common cause and find One-Eyed Jack. Jack gives Ninjun the capsule, and the quintet race to intercept Khokamami and Khadafy as they conjure forth the "false gods." The logic doesn't track too well, but the "gods" seem to be mythic representations of the United States and Russia, respectively a giant eagle and a giant bear. Khokamami wants them to fight and destroy one another-- which I guess would somehow weaken the power of the real Great Powers. Ninjun prevents this by firing the "cosmic capsule" into the sky, and after it explodes, it unleashes a "fallout" consisting not of radioactive particles but of people, whom Ninjun calls "the most powerful force on Earth." The conflict of the giant bear and the giant eagle is averted in a manner that just misses being sappy: the people spell out the word "peace," giving the giants no further excuse to fight, or to intervene in the affairs of Ilibystine or any other Mooslam country.

"Madness" is equal parts silly slapstick and non-interventionist screed, and certainly differs from the Islamophobe narrative by suggesting that American intervention is no more desirable than that of Russian Communism. It's also a dated work-- today, few if any persons even remember "Qaddafi's Line of Death," so that a modern reader won't have any clue as to what Crabb is spoofing when he has Khadafy Duck draw a line in the sand. But though it's not a major myth-comic in terms of popularity, it's noteworthy for taking a slightly off-kilter approach to sociological discourse.

TYPOLOGY WRITING

In BATTLING THE ELEMENTS I said:

[Campbell is] entirely justified in making generalized observations of hypothetically universal patterns. No one would criticize a physicist for asserting that gravity ought to work pretty much the same everywhere, except under circumstances that have unusual physical propensities. 

This week, I came across a Jung quote that justifies the use of typology in similar terms:

It is not the purpose of a psychological typology to classify human beings into categories--this in itself would be pretty pointless....we could compare typology to a trigonometric net or, better still, to a crystallographic axial system....it is an essential means for determining the 'personal equation' of the practicing psychologist, who armed with an exact knowledge of his differentiated and inferior functions, can avoid many serious blunders in dealing with his patients

I won't reiterate my observations as to why such typologies are disliked by ideological critics, which are adequately covered in PLENITUDE: IT'S NOT JUST FOR THE END-TIMES ANYMORE. But I will pursue some of the differences between Jung's use of "typology" for the purpose of analyzing the mental problems of living human beings, and its use by literary critics-- Frye being one of the principal "myth critics"-- for the purpose of analyzing the essence of literary characters, who have never lived. It should be patently obvious that even when an author brings some real historical personage into the mix, be if Jesse James or Martin Luther King, the historical figure is transformed into a literary character, even if said historical figure is not seen doing anything he did not do as recorded in our historical records.

Jung's quote is astute in that he clearly realizes how many persons will object to "classifying human beings into categories," even when those "opponents of typology" are not motivated by pure ideological concerns. But what is the objection to trying to classify literary figures into a typology, given that they're not living creatures?

The most frequent objection I've seen is the fear that typological criticism or "myth critcism," however one chooses to define these, will distort what the author was "trying to say." This assumes that fictional works are defined by their rhetoric; that they have moral or ethical concepts to put forth and that anything that doesn't fall in line with those concepts is an error.

Though I disagree with this definition of literature, I've certainly seen a great number of essays in which I felt that the critic was projecting his or her own worldview upon that of a given author. But what is the root cause of such misprisions?

In PLENITUDE I stressed Frye's distinction between "primary concerns" and "secondary concerns." "Secondary concerns," Frye writes in THE DOUBLE VISION, "include our political, religious, and other ideological loyalties," whereas "primary concerns" are those that we share with the animals; "food, sex, property, and freedom of movement."  The "secondary concerns" I have called the "mental strategies" by which a given human seeks to optimize his availability to the "primary concerns," whether he does so for his own ingroup or for some outgroup with whom he sympathizes. Frye specifies that one cannot put aside these more abstract interpretations of reality, and so it's in a sense inevitable that readers will make misinterpretations of one kind of another. Noah Berlatsky accuses me of wanting to "erase difference" by viewing superhero comics through a typological lens, and I accuse him of the doing the same thing through an ideological one.

Yet not all projections of the reader stem from the abstractions of "secondary concern." I remember a remark in THE COMIC BUYERS' GUIDE by Big Name Fan-Writer Don Thompson, wherein Thompson expressed aversion for anthropomorphic sex comics because he correlated the idea with bestiality. Since to the best of my knowledge anthropomorphic comics, sexy or otherwise, do not literally advocate bestiality, Thompson's correlation falls into the realm of "primary concerns." Seeing humanoid characters with the characteristics of beasts connotes "a kind of sex that is not good," and so he projected that animus upon whatever comics he was looking at. My own take, for what it's worth, is that the bestial aspects of anthropomorphic characters are skin-deep, and what one is seeing in, say, OMAHA is less "cat making it with a man" or even "cat making it with dog" than it is two (or more) human beings wearing animal-costumes.

I've repeatedly taken the position that I'm no fan of the statement that "all readings are subjective, therefore one's as good as another." Yet although any number of readers can make objectively wrong readings, even the bad ones are rooted in a desire for significance of some sort, as noted in Part 1 and Part 2 of THE INTERSUBJECTIVITY SOLUTION. A broad typology of the many avenues through which human beings seek significance is therefore indispensable for the pluralist critic.

MASKED MASTERMINDS AND SPECIOUS SPECTRES PT. 3

At the end of Part 2 I stated that the power to create illusions was a definite power, although one should deem it to be of a different order than the ability to directly affect physical objects or entities. 

The specific example cited in Part 2 were the assorted "specious spectres" of the cartoon teleseries SCOOBY DOO, WHERE ARE YOU?  In my essay WHEN FUNNY ANIMALS ATTACK I went through some pains to specify that the basic concept of the series, in which some mystery-solving teens pal around with a talking dog, aligns the series with the domain of the marvelous.  The talking dog trumps the villains, who are aligned with the uncanny trope I termed "outré outfits skills and devices."  If there had been no talking dog in the series, then the show would have been uncanny, based on the dominant motif of said villains.

The studio Hanna Barbera produced many imitations of SCOOBY DOO's mystery-solving teens, and almost all of them also fall into the marvelous phenomenality. The well-remembered JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS (1970-71) went SCOOBY DOO one better in the department of marvel-making: borrowing more from H-B's own JONNY QUEST than from the "haunted house" comedy-mysteries of Hollywood, the globe-trotting Pussycats continually encountered evil masterminds (usually not masked) rather than schemers pretending to be spooks.  That said, JOSIE still kept up its quota for intelligent animals, as the cast included a devious feline, one Sebastian, who couldn't talk but did a number of un-cat-like things, like opening locks with his claws.

The closest thing Hanna-Barbera did to an series without marvels seems to be THE AMAZING CHAN AND THE CHAN CLAN (1972).  Perhaps because the series' main idea was to focus on the famed detective's large brood of offspring, there was just one comical animal, the dog Chu Chu. However, as memory serves he neither talked nor acted like a human being; he was closer to the model of Bandit in JONNY QUEST, in that he was for the most part a "real" dog.  As for the villains, they were cut from a more mundane cloth than SCOOBY's, but at least some of them did dress up in weird costumes and chase the kids around a little before ultimately getting caught in slapstick fashion.

None of these series register as "combative" in that there is no opposition between two exceptional types of power, as stated in THE NECESSITY OF SPECTACLE:

in the past year I've formulated the idea of "the combative mode" as one that exists exclusively where at least two exceptional-- or "megadynamic"-- forces come into conflict, thus producing Kantian dominance

The "specious spectres" of SCOOBY, CHAN CLAN, and various other ghost-chasing comedy-cartoons might not have a lot of power-- that is, they would be on the lower, "exemplary" level of the "x-type."  Ncvertheless, as long as their opponents were at least on that same level, then one would have a combative narrative.  However, because these cartoons were inspired by comedies in which the protagonists generally won out through luck rather than might or skill, the casts of SCOOBY DOO and that show's imitators were usually what I've denoted as "z-types," ranging from "poor" to "average' levels of dynamicity.

What would a combative version of the SCOOBY DOO template look like? If the heroes were exceptional naturalistic fighters, they would provide a megadynamic force able to contend directly with the uncanny menaces.  The 2002 SCOOBY DOO live-action film toyed with upgrading the characters of Fred and Daphne in this regard.  However, the sequel to that film did not emphasize this element, nor did any of the three Scooby Doo teleseries that followed the first film. 

The famous "Hardy Boys" book series might come closer to the mark, given that the main heroes were usually described as above-average combatants. However, I don't know whether or not the majority of the books-- which came out in many different editions-- would qualify as uncanny or as naturalistic.

Strangely, Hanna-Barbera produced a 1977 teleseries that had all the makings for a combative series in the SCOOBY mold, in that the show's uncanny spectres were caught by a marvelous being with a good deal more dynamicity than a talking dog.  This series, the incredibly inept CAPTAIN CAVEMAN AND THE TEEN ANGELS, featured a superhero caveman with real if erratic super-powers, who was constantly talked into solving crimes by his three hot-babe partners. However, there was no combat in the series between the goofball caveman and his adversaries. Rather, the villains were usually corralled through some slapstick device, just as in SCOOBY DOO. Thus this series-- which, I will note, wins my award for one of the most mind-numbingly awful American telecartoons of all time-- is no more combative than the series discussed in this essay, TEEN TITANS GO. The latter also substitutes goofy slapstick for even a comic version of martial combat, though happily, with far less excruciating effects.

WHEN FUNNY ANIMALS ATTACK

Technically the words "funny animal" could be used for real-life critters who perform amusing stunts, like the contenders in Dave Letterman's "Stupid Pet Tricks." But it's generally used as it is in this Wiki-page: to signify creatures who are anthropomorphic in some way.

One variety is the fully humanized animal, who regularly walks on two legs, may wear clothes like a human, and who frequently interacts with cartoon versions of human beings.

Another type behaves in some ways like an amimal, and usually walks (or flies, or swims) as its real-world counterpart does. However, at any time such types can "take a break" and do identifiably human things.

They may do nothing more than think coherent thoughts, like the titular star of Disney's 1964 film THE THREE LIVES OF THOMASINA.

They may imitate only a few human actions, like standing on two legs. as Garfield often does. A
related but more outrageous type like Snoopy doesn't regularly wear clothes but can don them whenever he wants to take on another identity.

Some continue to go on all fours but can talk like-- and even to-- human beings, a la Scooby-Doo.

It's clear that in a purely technical sense, all of these types fall into the phenomenal category I call "the marvelous."  And yet it's clear from my studies of other compendia of metaphenomenal films that often this species of marvelous phenomenon is given a "pass." To my knowledge no such compendium has ever included 1972's SNOOPY, COME HOME, in spite of its walking, coherent-thinking "funny animal."  Similarly, in the essay ON FAIRY STORIES, Tolkien's great examination of the nature of fantasy, he excluded animal fables like those of Aesop from his realm of faerie.

I can well understand Tolkien's reticence. Features in which the characters look like humanized animals but essentially act like human beings generally fail to transmit what Tolkien called the "arresting strangeness" of fantasy. Mickey Mouse animated cartoons may at least have the mouse doing impossible things, but the Floyd Gottfredson comic strip was more like a rural comedy-adventure that just happened to star humanized mice, horses, etc. The erotic anthropomorphic comic book OMAHA CAT DANCER only rarely referenced the animal natures of the characters, whose adventures usually fell into the realm of soap-operatic melodrama.

It's as if funny animals have a certain "invisibility" in certain contexts: they're so obviously stand-ins for human beings that one doesn't think of them as "marvels" at all. I'm tempted to regard some of them, like the casts of OMAHA and  the MICKEY MOUSE comic strip as belonging to the naturalistic version of my narrative trope "delirious dreams and fallacious fantasies." However, to qualify as a "fallacious fantasy," the fantasy would have to be a phenomenon that was simply a departure from the work's diegetic "reality" that the audience was not expected to take seriously. An example of this would be the animated "Pink Panther" from the live-action PINK PANTHER films, who may comments upon, but is not involved in, the "reality" of those movie narratives.

In conclusion, I can only note that although many funny-animal works technically belong to the category of the marvelous, they often evoke so little of the affects of wonder and strangeness that they almost constitute an "attack" on their own domain.