MYTHCOMICS: "THE EARTHBOUND" (AXA, 1979?)

In my incomplete reading of the British comic strip AXA (1978-86), I've generally found the feature to be a tolerable but unexceptional "future apocalypse" saga, in which a doughty hero navigates a wildly transformed terrain full of mutant monsters and bizarre societies. AXA's main distinction in comics history is that its hero was a buxom heroine, given to frequent unveilings of her upper chest, though Axa was not any less heroic for her tendency to unveil. Indeed, all of the plots are generated by Axa's mission, which stems from a loose mandate, given her by the city in which she was raised, to explore the ways in which humankind's past mistakes have changed the world.

The strip was created by writer Donne Averell and drawn by Enrique Badia Romero, the latter having made comics-history with a previous femme formidable, Modesty Blaise. Whereas Modesty had a regular partner in her follower Willie Garvin, Axa wandered her future-Earth with a variety of male lovers, including a devoted robot (with whom, so far as I know, Axa did not have sexual relations, unlike the heroine's French predecessor Barbarella). "The Earthbound," however, shows Averell and Romero giving a deeper mythic resonance to the apocalypse-adventure subgenre-- in large part by drawing upon the Biblical scenario that is directly opposed to the scenario of the End of Days: that of the Garden of Eden.

As "The Earthbound" commences, Axa is accompanied by two of her devoted followers from other cities she's visited in past adventures: her human lover Dirk, an ex-gladiator, and Mark, a robot with human feelings who bears an impossible love for the busty heroine. Dirk is Axa's only current lover, but he's a jealous devotee, disliking it whenever Mark comes galumphing around.

Axa comes across a forestland which appears, to her eyes, to have avoided the contamination of past human wars. However, the more cynical Dirk observes that the forest is mostly dead after all.

Nevertheless, Axa continues to explore the forest, dragging Dirk and Mark along with her. A full page before there's any mention of Edenic metaphors, this "Adam and Eve" are attacked by a living tree-creature, albeit with no mention of whether it's a Tree of Life or one of Good-and-Evil. After the couple's robotic servitor drives the monster off with its laser, Axa realizes that Dirk's been wounded and needs care. An extended search leads her to a secluded house which has an uncontaminated garden of food-plants growing within it (though later the reader learns that this area was a particular site for government military experimentation in the pre-apocalyptic era). Within the house Axa meets the house's sole occupant, a blind old woman with the name "Joy Eden." (It's surely no coincidence that "Eden" is sometimes translated as signifying "pleasure," "rapture," or "joy.")

Author Averell was apparently not satisfied with Edenic metaphors alone, for though Joy does tell Axa that her long-vanished family did call their house "Garden of Eden" due to the family's evocative surname, she also calls her domicile "Seventh Heaven." She cites a mundane explanation for this name, though it seems likely that Averell was referencing the most common use of the metaphor: that one's being in "seventh heaven" is also a state of rapture. At the same time, the "seventh heaven" would be the one most removed from Earth, and thus probably as hard of access as the mythical Garden.

Blind Joy has one shadow marring her solitude: the fact that she will die one day, and, with her family gone, she has no one to inherit her domain and her wisdom. Joy's invitation that Axa stay in Seventh Heaven implicitly resonates with the young heroine, given how much she wanted to believe in an untainted paradise. Dirk remains the skeptic, wanting to move on and distrustful of Joy's sanctum.

Dirk's suspicions prove justified. Axa witnesses the blind woman calling out to "spirits of the earth, of fire, of water," and moments later, another bizarre monster, a humanoid made of slime and water, attacks Dirk. Again the robot's laser drives off the creature. Joy claims to know nothing about either of the monsters but suggests that they may be wandering mutants that have been "squatting" in the abandoned laboratory, where human scientists unleashed "the Great Contamination." Mark argues that "mutants don't leave traces" like bits of mud and water, but Axa determines that she will investigation the old lab. There she, Dirk and Mark are attacked by a third monster, a man made of straw, and though the straw-man is driven away, the monster gives Mark an acid-bath. Axa's compassion for the damaged robot is expressed when she cries, "I'm not just rescuing Mark because he's useful! I love him!" Dirk could care less about his potential competition and still wants to leave the forest. A little later Mark becomes one with the horrors of the Garden, for his damage causes him to attack Axa, though the possibility of jealousy frying his circuits is mentioned. Axa repels her former protector with his own laser-gun, after which Mark staggers away into the mists, disappearing from Axa's world, at least for a time.

Moments after Mark leaves, Axa is drawn back to Seventh Heaven by Joy Eden, and when Dirk tries to stop Axa, she lays him out with a deft karate-chop. However, Axa comes back to herself once she confronts Joy, and she finally realizes that the attacking creatures aren't mutants, but supernatural forces conjured up by the old woman. Joy Eden has become demented by her long solitude, being unable to see that the "old gods" she's summoned up bear nothing but resentment for all humans, judging all to be equally guilty of having ruined the cycles of nature.

Joy Eden can't bear the notion that the old gods now hate all of humanity, including her, and the very idea causes her heart to fail. The vengeful spirits fade away once their summoner is dead, so Axa and Dirk leave the old woman in her burning domicile-- "the pagan shrine her funeral pyre." Despite this doleful conclusion to the adventure, Axa closes the story with a protestation of her own hopes: "perhaps there's another Seventh Heaven-- another Garden of Eden-- pure and unspoilt, beyond the horizon."

(Note: the whole story can be read here.)

Though other SF-flavored mythcomics have referenced the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for humanity's "fall" away from a paradise-world-- notably 1955's "The Inferiors" and 1980's "Planet Story"--  "The Earthbound" is the first I've found that concentrates upon the Garden-myth with respect to its feminine characters, with Axa roughly standing in for the "great mother" Eve while Joy Eden bears more similarity to Lilith, Eve's sorcerous predecessor (in the Talmud at least). Joy wants Axa to inherit her maintenance of an already corrupted garden, but this "Eve" escapes the enclosure not by eating an apple but by causing the blind old woman to 'see" her own folly.

MYTHCOMICS: "PLANET STORY" (MARVEL PREMIERE #61, 1980)

The Bronze Age of Comics-- which I would peg as the period from 1970-1986-- was the last era in which Marvel and DC published a significant number of new characters in their own features but not derived from earlier features. Year 1986 seems like a good cut-off point, given that the profitability of two works then published-- WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT RETURNS-- encouraged many creators to quit automatically contributing to "the Big Two."

To be sure, many of these characters proved no more than minor players, and Marvel's Star-Lord-- despite an impressive translation to the cinema in recent years-- couldn't even be said to be one of the sales-failures that remained a fan-favorite for years later, such as Killraven and the Man-Thing.

The base-concept of Star-Lord was essentially "Green Lantern without the Green Lantern Corps." His origin involved an alien giving Earthman Peter Quill cosmic powers, with an eye to creating more space-supermen later. But Quill/Star-Lord was the only one created, and despite his ties to Earth, his few adventures didn't involve his home planet, also in contradistinction to DC's Green Lantern. Given an "element-gun" for self-defense and an intelligent ship named "Ship" for transport, Star-Lord tooled around various galaxies for about a half dozen stories, before disappearing for the remainder of the Bronze Age.

The title "Planet Story" does concern a planet, though it's likely that either writer Doug Moench or artist Tom Sutton also had in mind the famous pulp-magazine PLANET STORIES, which specialized in adventurous space-opera. If so, it's an ironic title, because the script bears less resemblance to space opera than to more involved science fiction meditations on quasi-sentient planets, like Harry Harrison's DEATHWORLD. Moench does not give the planet in his story a name, but for convenience I will call it "the Sharing World."

Star-Lord and "Ship" have no particular agenda, save curiosity, when they happen across the Sharing-World. Their survey indicates that the world is replete with lush vegetation but no "higher fauna." Yet Star-Lord also observes a ruined city, indicating that at some point intelligent beings occupied the planet. Under his own flight-power, Star-Lord leaves his vehicle in orbit and descends. As soon as he does, various phenomena-- a volcano, an earthquake, and a bunch of tentacled plants-- assail the hero. He makes his way to the ruined city but finds no clue to explain the absence of the city's makers, though Star-Lord suspects that the populace may have been exterminated by the hostile environment.

Once Star-Lord leaves the city, again he's attacked by planetary phenomena, such as wind and lightning, but this time, the phenomena are driving him toward a destination. The hero is precipitated into the "organic cavern" of a huge tree, and the entrance seals up when Star-Lord tries to leave. The only thing inside the tree are various honeycombed chambers, which Star-Lord mentally compares to "cadaver-drawers" with no contents. Then he learns that they do have contents: groping plant-tendrils that try to grab him, though he's able to keep his distance from them.

Suddenly, the planet itself communicates with Star-Lord through the medium of dust that arranges itself into holograms (no, there's no explanation of how this could be accomplished). Through these images the Sharing-World informs its guest of its history with its sentient inhabitants, through the vehicle of the giant tree (and possibly other trees elsewhere on the planet).

Long ago, an intelligent race of parrot-headed creatures existed alongside the glories of the sentient planet, living as "noble savages in an alien Garden of Eden" (which is implicitly Star-Lord's interpretation of things). However, the parrot-people, whom the planet calls "the Sharers of Old," begin to dislike the planet's tendency to interact with them through the tree-tendrils. (Moench's script is unclear on some points: at first it sounds like some of the Sharers are killed by having their energies drained by the "vampire tendrils," but later it sounds like a symbiotic relationship that injures no one.)

In any case, the relationship is in later sections deemed as important by the Sharing-World, because intelligent beings, unlike lower animals, can choose whether or not to participate in the sharing-ritual. However, the parrot-people choose to leave this 'garden" and build their own cities. Then they follow the usual course of tool-using sentients, exploiting the planet and giving nothing back. In response the planet begins to die, and finally the Sharers give up and desert the Sharing-World via spaceship.

Then, as soon as Star-Lord has been given a Cook's Tour of the world's history, the feeding-tendrils latch onto him. At this point Moench and Sutton shift the narrative viewpoint to that of the Sharing-World, which describes its quasi-erotic attachment to the long vanished Sharers, and its desire to have Star-Lord take up the same role. The planet's attacks were caused by its eagerness to take on a new "lover," but though the reader learns these facts, but Star-Lord isn't tapped into the planet's ruminations. He breaks free of the tendrils and returns to his orbiting vessel. Once there, he confers with his intelligent ship, wondering if he ought to use the ship's weapons to destroy this menacing world. However, "Ship" talks the hero out of doing so, and the two of them leave-- which proves a final irony, since by that point the Sharing-World wants to die for its lack of loving symbiosis.

(The entire story can be read here.)


Even without Moench's early Eden-reference, one could hardly miss the tale's indebtedness to the Old Testament narrative of Adam and Eve. In said story, God gave the first humans the choice of whether or not to obey God's commandment not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. Moench neatly inverts this myth, for here it's a tree, through which the planet manifests its will, that's more or less "feeding" on the inhabitants of the "garden." There's no tempter that moves the parrot-people to leave; they do so of their own volition, and Moench largely implies that their motives are more selfish than self-protective, and they're rejecting their quasi-sexual union with the planet rather than coming to a new knowledge of male-female sexuality. Christian philosophers have opined that humankind's exile from Eden was a "fortunate fall," but in Moench's story, strongly suggestive of ecological ideals like the "Gaea theory," the Fall is unfortunate for both the world and its intelligent denizens.

The element of "choice" is also less metaphysical and more sensual: the planet wants to share only with those who have the power to choose. Tom Sutton's art emphasizes the chaotic curves of natural life as against the hard lines of sentient dwelling-laces, and Star-Lord's brief captivity by the tendrils suggests a sort of human-alien sex along the lines of Philip Jose Farmer's 1953 story THE LOVERS, though Sutton's imagery suggests rape, as does one of Moench's lines:

"...the exit irised shut with a sloppy, wet sound that made me think of ripeness and guilt."

MYTHCOMICS: "THE INFERIORS" (WEIRD SCIENCE FANTASY #28, 1955)

Possibly the most iconic story to spring from EC's science fiction line was the 1953 "Judgment Day." "Day" was one of publisher Gaines' many "social message" stories, and has remained celebrated today, partly because of the behind-the-scenes drama about publisher Gaines's conflicts with the Code regarding the story. However, though Joe Orlando's art is impressive, Al Feldstein's script is a routine allegory about race-relations, using two differently-hued robots to perpetuate the conflicts of Earth ethnicities.

I've been surprised, however, to see very little online criticism of "The Inferiors," a Feldstein-Wally Wood story which conveys a similar club-the-reader-over-the-head message, yet actually grounds the morality in a deeper level of symbolism.

On the first page, the story's title seems to apply to a mysterious race of vanished aliens. Exploratory forces from planet Earth have found the ruins of the unnamed aliens' culture on many planets, but there remain no clues as to why these beings committed what one authority calls "race suicide." 

Functionally there are only two characters in the story: "spit-and-polish" young lieutenant Robert Saunders and his unnamed captain, whose baldness connotes greater age and experience. Both serve on a spaceship that has discovered another Earth-type world, but the monotony of the frequent discoveries causes one low-ranking space-navy soldier to remark, "Who cares why a bunch of hairy goons with tails committed suicide, anyway?" Lt. Saunders upbraids the underling, but in his conversation with his commander, it's evident that Saunders shares the opinion that the scientific advancement of the "hairy goons" doesn't matter, for they clearly were cowards who couldn't face life's demands, as Earth-people can. The captain is not quite as sure about things as his junior officer, and even admits to a little fear himself, when their expedition comes across one edifice that seems undamaged by the forces unleashed by the mass suicides.

Since "Inferiors" is only an eight-page story, it will surprise no reader to find that the Earthmen uncover the answer to their mystery on this planet, thanks to a recording in the form of a "three dimensional projection," wherein one of the aliens gives a lecture about the fate his people plan to undergo. Thanks to the use of an "automatic translator," the humans can listen to one of the "hairy goons" explain things-- though the captain first listens to the recording alone.

Later, having built the requisite suspense, the captain allows Saunders to hear the translated recording as well. Saunders, a confirmed xenophone, remarks on how "nauseating" the image of the alien is, though Wood draws it as a bipedal lizard-creature with a tail and none of the hair Feldstein's script specifies. Saunders also can't help expressing contempt once again for the aliens' cowardice: "and these are the things some people thought were superior to man!"

Naturally, this being an EC story, "Inferiors" has a "gotcha" ending. The recording reveals that the widespread lizard-people, having endured in peace for centuries, suddenly became aware that some of their people were using violence against one another. The aliens concluded that their race has evolved as much as was possible, and that now it is doomed to devolving into mere beasts. Almost all of the aliens choose mass suicide through the use of their advanced technology, except for a small contingent of creatures who don't care about their "moral decay," wanting only to live at all costs. The aliens use brain-draining machines to erase the mentalities of the decayed lizard-people, and allow them to survive as "brainless hulks" on an obscure planet. Saunders continues to heap scorn on the "hairy goons" until the alien lecturer just happens to add a warning to any listeners: showing what they think their decayed relations will turn out like. Surprise, surprise, the hairy goons with tails are the fathers of Man.

Like "Judgment Day," "The Inferiors" is all about shattering any illusions the readership may have about the innate superiority of their culture. However, even though the "Inferiors" ending was hoary even back in the 1950s-- "And the name of the planet was EARTH!"-- Feldstein's story is grounded in the twentieth century's intellectual debates over evolution. Since the Earthmen never say anything about their own evolution from lower creatures, the broad implication is that a terminally upright type like Saunders sees his entire race as having been given the Keys to Creation from the get-go, which approximates the position of the religonists who viewed human beings as separate from Darwin's apes. Or perhaps one should say "monkeys," since Darwin's theory was so often parodied by association not with the tail-less apes, but with the various tailed species of monkeys-- hence, the "Scopes Monkey Trial," not "Ape Trial." Artist Wally Wood didn't really translate Feldstein's scripted image of the Great Wise Race as "hairy goons with tails," but this is probably fortunate, since making them look in any way like primates would have given the game away too early. By using reptilian aliens, Wood and Feldstein also conjure, however briefly, with the associations of serpents and wisdom. This proves more than a little appropriate to the story, which rewrites the Garden of Eden, the foundation of man's special destiny, into a bucolic forest where a bunch of brainless, bipedal rejects got dumped.

YOUNGFUL TRANSGRESSIONS

At the end of JOINED AT THE TRIP PT. 5 I tangentially touched on a concept I've not addressed before on the blog. The concept is that of "lawlines," introduced in Dudley Young's 1991 meditation on anthropology and mythology, ORIGINS OF THE SACRED: THE ECSTASIES OF LOVE AND WAR.


Young's project-- his only purely philosophical work, so far as I can tell-- is an attempt to analyze the ways in which ancient societies formulated their laws, taboos, and other codes of behavior. The author's express purpose in exploring the dynamics of archaic myths is to throw some light upon the ways that we as moderns have fallen away from our own heritage, with catastrophic consequences for our ability to know right from wrong. Though Young invokes many philosophers,poets and pundits of the past two centuries-- Sigmund Freud, William Wordsworth, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Buber, Mary Douglas, and Northrop Frye-- the bulk of the book deals with the ancient world, beginning with what we moderns know of paleolithic man and moving into the mythic universes of the Egyptians, Sumerians, and Greeks. Myths for Young are pre-eminently about defining the strictures of law and the powers that support it:

The myths that compose the religious and political structure of every culture are tales of power, how it is to be found and where it is to be used.-- Young, p. 22.

Young contends that there exist meaningful parallels between our own de-sacralized concepts of cultural authority with:

the measures taken by paleolithic man to live with the loss of his innocence, the cultural moves he made to protect himself from further exposure to that sacred monster that had originally tempted him ecstatically into cannibalism and worse. The word I use for these measures is 'lawlines,' and in the beginning this is literally what they are, lines drawn in the mind and on the dancing ground to regulate the flow of energies no longer governed by the codes of primate instinct.-- p. xx. 

Given these abstruse references to "the dancing ground" of hypothetical cave-dweller tribes and to a tempting "sacred monster" who is apparently both the serpent of Eden and Dionysus infecting his Maenads with murderous blood-lust, it should be evident that ORIGINS is not a simple read. I don't propose to review the book in full here, as I've not recently re-read it, though I have given it more than one reading in the past. I could just appropriate his term "lawlines" for my own use, but I felt it would be instructive to meditate on the some of the differences between Young's account of myth and my own.

First and foremost, though Young mentions Jung a few times in the book, his primary influence is Freud's  1913 TOTEM AND TABOO.  Young is not much concerned with the rest of Freud's theory, and he expressly distances himself from the Viennese psychologist's reductive tendencies, but he feels it is important to see Freud's concept within the greater sphere of current anthropological and mythographic knowledge.  Citing Robin Fox's book THE RED LAMP OF INCEST as well as Freud, Young argues that in prehistoric times bands of hominids followed the structural lead of certain anthropoids in that each tribe was dominated by the strongest alpha-male, who kept all the desirable females for himself. At some point a particular tribe (in Young's view, a number of tribes responding to the same internal conflicts) was rocked when the young men ganged up on the older alpha-male-- implicitly the father to at least some of them-- and killed him in order to have access to the women. Freud also asserts that the rebels cannibalized their victim, which is one manifestation of the "sacred monster" mentioned in the quote above. Since then, totemism continued to dominate humankind's development, and countless humans expiated their guilt over the killing of a father-figure, reinforced by the internal dynamic of the Oedipus Complex.

From this germ-idea Young spins a fascinating tapestry of mythic interrelationships that I cannot explore here, but he never strays from the idea that all myths are about forming the "lawlines" that separate order from chaos.  I esteemed ORIGINS OF THE SACRED highly when I first read it, and on a slight personal note, at an early 90s convention I recommended it to Dave Sim-- who had not yet gone public with his doctrinaire Christianity. I imagine that Sim, had he read the book, would have been repulsed by any suggestion that all religions might be traced back to primitive rituals of dance and exorcism.  Yet, Jungian that I am, I was more than a little iffy about that hypothesis from another angle. Though Young is not attempting to reduce all religion to base physical processes as Freud was, even locating the origins of religion exclusively within tribal exogamy-conflicts does have its reductive side.  Once again I cite a favorite Kant passage:

...though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.

Thus, as much as I admire Young's book, I reject the notion that all religion arises from totemism, or that totemism, however one defines it, arises explicitly from the sexual competition of males for females, even if this "primal scene" was one that occured in many parallel situations rather than out of one originary event. At base, I think Young used and transformed Freud in much the same way Bataille used and transformed Marx; extending and improving the mythic kernels within the ideological narratives, and then discarding the ideology.  (Parenthetically, Young only mentions Marx twice in ORIGINS.) Where Young focuses on an opposition between order and chaos, Bataille focuses on one between practical work and sensuous play. Here's Bataille's take, hopefully just One More Time:

In the domain of our life [the principle of] excess manifests in so far as violence wins over reason. Work demands the sort of conduct where effort is in a constant ratio with productive efficiency. It demands rational behavior where the wild impulses worked out on feast days and usually in games are frowned upon. If we were unable to repress these impulses we should not be able to work, but work introduces the very reason for repressing them. These impulses confer an immediate satisfaction on those who yield to them. Work, on the other hand, promises to those who overcome [these impulses] a reward later on whose value cannot be disputed except from the point of view of the present moment.

Bataille was neither Kantian nor Jungian. However, his schema allows for a much broader, much more pluralistic vision of religion's genesis than Young's does-- though I might critique Bataille for also seeing religion as dominantly repressive.  In primitive societies as in modern ones, religion has a double power, to liberate or to enslave-- as much as do any political systems, or artistic credos, or pretty much anything human beings can devise. As a quick example, what if early religions evolved not at attempts at societal control, but out of shamans' claims to be able to heal people and guide the tribes toward good game? One would not necessarily have to believe that such shamans had supernormal powers, but even the illusion of being able to manipulate good fortune might have proved more persuasive to hard-living, practical-minded primitives than an appeal to primeval guilt complexes.

Young's term "lawlines," though, works as an image that mediates between Bataille's concepts of "the taboo" and "the transgression." The Judeo-Christian mind tends to think of the "taboo thing" as something that must not be violated, but the primitive mind, Bataille claimed, knows that only through its violation does the taboo become significant for us.  Thus, one can imagine a "lawline" that is drawn from the initial presentation of a static, taboo situation, to the dynamic status that ensues after the taboo has been broken. Thus, the violation of the Tree in Eden results in the world of toil and labor, but also of the whole history of the Jewish people. Admittedly, some dynamic situations are more horrific than heroic. In THE BACCHAE King Pentheus tries to protect his kingdom from the ecstasies of Dionysus, and his hubris only leads him to be reduced to the status of a hunted animal, albeit not one consumed for his flesh, at least in the play.

I propose that any kind of literature, escapist or realistic, requires conflict, and that conflict springs from violating "lawlines" of one kind or another, though they may deal more with expectation than with matters of cultural jurisprudence.  In the next essay on this topic, I'll demonstrate this theory with reference to the same examples used in THE WORK AND PLAY MIX-A-LOT.