MYTHCOMICS: "MASTER OF THE PLANT WORLD" (THE ATOM #1, 1962)

                   

 

In many ways "Master of the Plant World" is a better example of a cosmological myth than my other entry for the Silver Age Atom, seen here. But for now I'll just dilate upon "Master's" introduction of the character who is arguably the hero's best known villain, certainly more so than "The Bug-Eyed Bandit."                         

 

 

An ordinary guy happens to be on the street at night when he alone witnesses the robbery of a bank by a flying wood dryad and a couple of improbable plants, both of which disappear by the time the cops show up. John Q is arrested and he hires lady lawyer Jean Loring to represent him. Jean, having passed the bar at Perry Mason U, plays gumshoe and seeks info from a horticulturalist to find if there's any chance of real plants being able to display aspects like the ones John Q described. Jean's opinion of her client's story about the flying wood dryad is not recorded for posterity, but she does put off her ardent, proposal-happy suitor Ray Palmer by telling him a little about her case. Palmer, in his secret ID of The Atom, watches as Jean stakes out the horticulturalist's greenhouse, on the flimsy theory that because someone stole something from the greenhouse, the thief may return that very evening and provide material evidence for the case of Jean's client. 

 

The culprit's henchpersons, this time two flying wood dryads, do indeed return to the scene of the crime. Jean gets gassed and does not see them, but the Atom trails the miniature ripoff artists to the laboratory of their master Jason Woodrue. Woodrue overcomes Atom with a combination of touch-me-nots and a Venus flytrap, but the villain doesn't check to see that his adversary is really truly dead.         

 

As the hero reconnoiters, he comes across the captive queen of the wood dryads, Maya, who provides some much needed, if confusing, exposition. Maya is under Woodrue's control, and she in turn compels her dryad subjects to do Woodrue's bidding. When Gardner Fox reveals that both Maya and Woodrue are extra-dimensional beings, the author seems to be setting the reader up for the old trope "exiled criminal comes back to the kingdom that exiled him and takes over." Instead, for some reason that must've made sense to Fox at the time, he claims that Maya and Woodrue came from two separate dimensions where people have lots of knowledge about plants in terms of both scientific and mystical lore. Artist Gil Kane either didn't follow Fox's train of thought or didn't care. In panel 5 of page 12, Kane simply draws "Faery-Woodrue" being exiled by a bunch of small spirits who look just like Maya and her dryads. In later iterations of the villain, everyone pretty much forgot that Woodrue had such origins and just treated him like an Earthman mad scientist.  

       
The long game behind Woodrue's criminal activities is that he unleashes what one assumes to be a plant-conqust of the world. Of motives he has none: Woodrue just wants temporal power over the whole world because he's "wicked," as one text-box calls him.  The Atom scores the deciding victory when he turns one of Woodrue's plant-weapons against him. Woodrue is imprisoned, the dryads go back home and Jean's client is liberated.                                   

The main virtue of "Master" is almost entirely all the clever plant-weapons the evildoer comes up with, though arguably Fox mixes in a little plant-metaphysics by bringing in dryads, even other-dimensional ones. On one page Woodrue even chants a sleep-spell to put out Maya's lights, so the writer's definitely mixing his mad scientist and evil sorcerer tropes here. Fox distinguishes himself by trying to find real-world analogues for his fantasy-plants, and I give him a pass on the more far-fetched conceptions. (Touch-me-nots don't shoot missiles, but they have some sort of pseudo-muscular apparatus that allows them to close their petals when someone tries to touch them.) Speaking of touching, the Palmer-Loring relationship might seem a bit dysfunctional to modern readers. Jean wants to be Ray's wife some day, but first she wants to make her mark as a lady lawyer, though it's not clear what her endgame will be when she gets there. Ray helps her in cases like this one not because he's altruistic-- although he's that in a general sense-- but because he figures that if Jean chalks up enough wins, she'll eventually feel validated and quit her profession to become a housewife. But this was set up as a sitcom problem with no real solution, not a negotiation between two adults, so by the end of the sixties the relationship sputtered out in the hands of other raconteurs, and finally was trashed by the superficial IDENTITY CRISIS. But the original relationship wasn't that much better and doesn't rise to the level of a psychological myth.  

MYTHCOMICS: "TRIUMPH OF THE TORNADO TYRANT" (JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #17, 1963)

This Gardner Fox JLA tale, while not as well-thought-out as the classic "Justice League's Impossible Adventure," nevertheless possesses a good myth-discourse which upgrades the standard "problem" of heroes overcoming villains to a "conundrum" about how that scenario can be validated.

The first page of the narrative proper begins with the heroes of the JLA celebrating their triumph over some stony-faced aliens. Batman opines that evildoers ought to realize that they have no chance against the forces of justice. J'onn J'onzz counters by saying that it's because such menaces exist that "they make us heroes." Just then, all of the heroes' bodies dissolve. An attack by one of those menaces?

No, all the heroes seen here are proxies for an alien being, the Tornado Champion-- who in some ways is using the Justice League of his comic-book universe much as the readers of the title do: to celebrate the virtues of goodness. The Champion had one exploit as "The Tornado Tyrant," menacing the planet Rann until being defeated by Adam Strange (also written by Fox in MYSTERY IN SPACE #61). He comes to admire the Justice League so much that he wants to emulate them exactly, and so he creates an exact duplicate of Planet Earth, except that he himself embodies the Justice Leaguers so that he can experience the inevitable triumph of good over evil.

However, Tornado-Fanboy doesn't overcome the evil in his own nature quite that easily. From "the ocean depths" (or maybe from the collective subconscious of the tornado-species), a duplicate Tornado-Being manifests, and this new Tyrant masters all of the Champion's ersatz Leaguers, mostly by either undermining their powers or turning them against one another. But before the Tyrant can eradicate the heroes, the Champion re-absorbs its component parts (using a "tornado-ship" like the one seen in the ADAM STRANGE story). He then decides that the only way he can formulate a counter strategy is by traveling to Earth to find out how the real heroes would cope. This means that he must, in essence, take the part of his villainous self, splitting off a part of his Champion-self to create a phony Tornado Tyrant to bedevil the real heroes.

Now, simplistic though all these complications may sound, Fox set himself a conundrum: to come up with a rationale as to WHY good should always be able to conquer evil. Six years later, a STAR TREK episode, "The Savage Curtain," tries to do something similar, though the conundrum there was to explain the difference between good and evil to an alien being. But how does one provide an answer for a foregone conclusion dictated by nothing but a literary trope?

And Fox's answer to his own conundrum-- is continuity.

So the Real Leaguers are defeated by the Fake Tyrant, just as the Fake heroes were defeated by the Real Tyrant. But unlike the imitation heroes, who only enjoy the simulacra of real lives, the real crusaders have gained a wealth of experience contending with menaces-- rather than, say, conjuring up faux enemies that can be vanquished easily. 

Thus, while the heroes collect their thoughts, they apply a certain amount of ratiocinative deduction. They debate as to whether the Tyrant's proxies might have been seeking to eradicate centers of atomic power to cover some vulnerability, but then dismiss the idea as untenable. However, the reason Author Fox included that blind alley-clue was to lead the heroes to a correct conclusion, even though only the real-world readers know why it's correct. The Tornado Being is not created by radiation, but it does have a dual personality-- and Green Lantern, drawing on one of his previous adventures (actually written by Fox's colleague John Broome), chooses to use "anti-energy" on the Tyrant as he did on a previous enemy that was a split-personality resulting from an atomic mishap. This strategy works for the Earth-heroes and destroys the Fake Tyrant. Yet the same process can't work for the observing Tornado Champion. If he tries to create anti-energy to destroy his evil self, he'll destroy himself as well.

But the Champion still prevails, by using another form of continuity. Since his proxies can't create anti-energy, they transport the Real Tyrant into the universe from which anti-energy came: "the anti-matter universe"-- which I assume is also a bit of continuity Fox also derived from Broome's GREEN LANTERN, though Fox doesn't explicitly reference Broome's "world of Qward."

If this was Fox's intention-- omitted to save space or reduce confusion in his young audience-- this would be doubly impressive, because in Broome the anti-matter world is also one dominated by evil-- and thus sending the Tyrant there is like consigning the "devil" in one's own nature back to perdition. 

I should note that in his Silver Age career Fox showed a penchant for stories in which he presented secondary scenarios in which characters "re-wrote" whatever initial scenarios Fox placed them in. I see this penchant as contributory to the way this Fox story solves the conundrum of "how can good always conquer evil:" by recognizing that this question itself is a literary trope, and that it can only be "solved" by invoking other tropes.

"CHALLENGE OF THE GIANT FIREFLIES," MYSTERY IN SPACE #67, 1961)

 

"Challenge of the Giant Fireflies" is not one of writer Gardner Fox's better titles, though he might have emphasized the incredible insects just because big fireflies looked neat on a comic-book cover. The true challenge for hero Adam Strange is a race of fire-creatures who supposedly live in the sun of Adam's solar system, and the big bugs are just the champion's means of "fighting fire with fire."

Adam's regularly scheduled sojourn to the alien world of Rann (and to his beloved Alanna) gets delayed when the means of his cosmic traversal, the Zeta-beam hits a solar prominence and temporarily carries a fire-creature from the sun to Rann. Parenthetically, Alanna mentions that for once, Rann's scientists solved another crisis without input from the Earthman, as a plague of big fireflies presented a danger but were largely quelled by weapons that extinguish the insects' fiery tails. Fortunately for the Rannians, this doesn't kill the bugs, but only eliminates their ability to create conflagrations. Fox skirts the fact that the bioluminescence of the real insects doesn't give off heat, though maybe the mutation of the little bugs into big ones changes that biological aspect.

One of the more interesting aspects of the "Sun-Beings" is that they don't have any desire to conquer or destroy Rann. They're utterly unaware of other worlds until the Zeta-beam snatched one of their number and temporarily deposits him on Rann. The effect wears off and the first Sun-Being goes back where he came from, but because he gained the power of sight on Rann, he talks his kindred into traversing the gulfs of space back to that world. (Bloody lucky they don't just decide to visit the third planet from their domain.) The Sun-Beings' only motive seems to be curiosity, and they presumably don't even understand that they're a danger to the residents. 

Though not a scientist himself, Adam knows his high school science and determines that they can put out the fire-aliens with carbon dioxide. And then the survival of the giant fireflies proves fortunate, so that the Rannians can ride the heat-resistant critters into battle and spray the Sun-Beings into extinction-- except for one, whom Adam allows to escape to make sure its brethren stay in their own solar courtyard. (Again, nothing about Fox's scenario keeps the Sun-Beings from visiting other worlds in the DC Universe.)

Naive as the story may be in some particulars, I find that Fox and artist Carmine Infantino are having some good myth-making fun with the phenomenon of fire, not unlike the way Windsor McCay did with cold phenomena in LITTLE NEMO IN THE PALACE OF ICE. The deviations from actual science don't lessen the mythic discourse, for as I've frequently written, the truths of myth are strong precisely because they are "half-truths."

NEAR-MYTHS: THE TOWER OF BABEL:THE DELUXE EDITION (2021)

This is not my standard review of a "near myth" work, since I'm not going to dissect in detail the stories collected here, which appeared in a couple of JUSTICE LEAGUE titles in or around the period when Grant Morrison transformed the title. Most stories in the collection were written by Mark Waid, who in my view has always been a sort of dull version of whoever he chose to emulate, be it Kurt Busiek with KINGDOM COME or Morrison with his follow-up JLA stories. Thus Waid is significant only as a negative reflection of Morrison, and, for that matter, the JLA writer whom Morrison most challenged during his run: original Silver Age scribe Gardner Fox.

In this mythcomics post I recapitulated the history of the dominant writing-strategies of Silver Age DC Comics vs. Silver Age Marvel Comics thusly:

The JUSTICE LEAGUE comics title of the 1960s has never received a lot of respect even among Silver Age comics-fandom, and one reason may be that the early comic, for several years written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Mike Sekowsky, is perceived as being too "old school." Most team-features in both the Golden and the Silver Ages followed what I'll call a "plot-based model," in which "character moments" are kept to a minimum, as the author concentrates on the events of the plot, usually showing how the members of the team work to overcome some common enemy. The plot-model seems like an easy row to hoe, as indicated by countless spoofs of the model, but DC Comics pursued it almost exclusively, even when Marvel Comics in the 1960s advanced a "character-based model" that over time become the dominant paradigm.

Calling those strategies "the plot-based model" and "the character-based model" was a bit of an oversimplification, though many fans over the years have used similar terminology. Certainly the raconteurs who wrote superhero comics in the early Silver Age did not intend to follow such rigorous models; they were in large part "riffing," trying to find profitable ways to re-invent superheroes for a post-Comics Code readership. DC Comics started its efforts with re-imagined revivals of its most successful costumed characters from the 1940s. But Marvel, the rebranded version of the entity variously called "Timely" and "Atlas," had fewer such major successes, so that the key Marvel creative personnel had to create more original characters. DC initiated the Silver Age with single-character features like The Flash, Green Lantern, and (arguably) the Martian Manhunter, and then launched a team of said heroes in the Justice League. Marvel's superhero line was not initiated until roughly five years after DC's example, and it began with a quasi-emulation of JUSTICE LEAGUE, a team book made up of all-original characters, and only within the next year did the company launch such single-character superhero features as Hulk, Ant-Man and Thor. 

While no reader's experience of the elusive "sense of wonder" in SF/fantasy is paradigmatic, team-books arguably oblige the creators to increase the quantity of SF/fantasy concepts in order to provide multiple threats for multiple protagonists. Thus it's my experience that the first Silver Age team-books, the JUSTICE LEAGUE of Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky and the FANTASTIC FOUR of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, offered the greatest opportunities for stimulating the readers' sense of wonder. Lee and Kirby certainly did not neglect the "plot-based model" of superhero scripting in conceiving of their menaces, whether they were strong concepts like Galactus or weak ones like the Enfant Terrible. Fox, for his part, concentrated on plot more when he conceived of foes for the Justice League, but there are interesting if minor character-moments even in the earliest JLA stories.                                 

I've sometimes expressed to other fans that in terms of raw creativity I deemed Fox's JUSTICE LEAGUE the equal of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, and the reaction I got was usually a negative one. What I believe those fans were favoring in the Marvel team-title was the fact that Stan Lee perfected a strategy of building on his concepts so that they began to seem like part of a larger tapestry of interconnected wonders. Most of Fox's concepts were confined to whatever story they first appeared in, and so they had less cumulative effect than, say, the recurring concepts appearing in DC's single-character features (Green Lantern's "Guardians of the Universe," for example).

Raw creativity, of course, is just one element in communicating the sense of wonder from author to reader; an element that gives the reader the impression of "richness and profusion of images," as referenced in this essay. Based on my formulations there, said profusion provides the potential for the development of fantastic content into the even richer forms of myth, but the actuality of mythicity stems from articulating the raw material into organized patterns of conceptual thought. 

As noted above, Lee and Kirby had their share of so-so concepts, but FANTASTIC FOUR became a testing-ground for all of their best"sense of wonder" ideas. In contrast, what keeps Fox's JLA concepts from attaining their greatest possible development is the fact that each of them was largely isolated from all the others.

Grant Morrison's JUSTICE LEAGUE is a vision of what the Fox-cosmos might have looked like if many of the one-off concepts had been given the same inter-referentiality seen in the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR comics. In contrast, Mark Waid's JLA feels like a regression to Fox's least inspired concepts. Waid trundles out abstruse concepts with potential, all right. In the titular story of the collection TOWER OF BABEL, the Leaguers are put through a series of transformations just as weird as any Fox ever devised. Said transformations are brought about when Batman's enemy Ra's Al Ghul implements strategies Batman himself devised to nullify the abilities of his fellow heroes in case any of them were suborned by evildoers. But even though Waid devotes considerable space to the character-conflicts that evolve as a result of this predicament, he doesn't really invest the proceedings with an independent "sense of wonder," as Morrison did with comparable concepts. In many ways Waid resembles Fox at his least inspired, when he simply churned out this or that concept to meet a deadline, and so failed to make those particular concepts emotionally resonant. Thus "Tower of Babel" is not much better, in terms of evoking the sense of wonder, than an inferior Fox-tale like the 1966 weird transformation tale "The Plague That Struck the Justice League."

Ironically, even though in his JUSTICE LEAGUE stories Morrison eschewed the soap opera dramatics that one often associated with the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR, he came closer to the emotional resonance Gardner Fox successfully executed in stories like "The Justice league's Impossible Adventure." Thus Waid fails both the tests of good drama and sense-of-wonder in his lack of inspired work.

COMICS HISTORY, STILL SECRET

I suppose I'm late to dinner on this one, given that Robert Kirkman's SECRET HISTORY OF THE COMICS showed up in 2017. I probably heard about the AMC series but just didn't get round to it, but I've now seen all six, roughly hour-long episodes.

The six episodes are replete with a lot of information, sometimes from creators involved in a given era's products, sometimes from their descendants, and sometimes from celebrities who simply want to voice an opinion (Famke Janssen, Michelle Rodriguez). A lot of this information is fairly common knowledge in fan circles, so calling it "secret" is a stretch. To the non-fan community, all this info is not so much "secret" as "obscure," but I surmise that THE OBSCURE HISTORY OF COMICS would prove a non-starter.

I found three of the six-- dealing respectively with Superman, Milestone and Image-- to be efficient but unremarkable, while one dealing with the image of New York City in comics before and after the 9-11 event to be somewhat overblown and a little too uncritical of the Christopher Nolan Bat-films. The other two documentary episodes, though, were much more interesting, albeit for different reasons.

Episode One, "The Mighty Misfits Who Made Marvel," proved fascinating in that it was a thoroughly even-handed treatment of the creative/business relationships of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.  Frankly, a lot of fan-critics could learn how to produce a balanced argument from this episode. Having been a fan/critic for over forty years, I thought I knew pretty much all the publicly available info about those relationships.  

But "Misfits" surprised me, by excerpting actual dialogue from a 1986 radio call-in program, wherein Stan Lee spoke at length with Jack Kirby about both their differences and their undeniable creative harmony. This section alone makes the whole Kirkman documentary-series worth watching.

However, with every bit of good, there's a little bit of bad, and that's what we get with the much more ideologically skewed "Truth About Wonder Woman." There are some decent tidbits of info here, though not much one could not find in the same-year biofilm PROFESSOR MARSTON AND THE WONDER WOMEN, which can't be termed a documentary record in any case.

But like many other commentators, many of the so-called "comics historians" in this segment can't resist scoring ideological points. After a quick-and-dirty survey as to how William Moulton Marston got "in" with DC Comics and originated the successful franchise of Wonder Woman, the segment then makes claims that DC was getting a lot of criticism about the bondage elements in the WONDER WOMAN comics, without really saying much about the nature of the criticism itself. Since the majority culture of the 1940s paid nearly no attention to comic books, I would assume that the documentary is talking about irate letters from parents, since even Doctor Wertham wasn't critiquing comics in the very early forties. A little more specificity in this department would've been preferable. 

The outside criticism, according to the documentary, caused publisher Max Gaines to attempt to rein in Marston. This did happen, according to some of DC memos that have survived today. But "Truth" doesn't elucidate how much control Marston had over the franchise, due to the unique contract he had negotiated with the company. Rather, according to the voice-over of narrator Keri Russell (who also voiced Wonder Woman in a direct-to-DVD production), Max Gaines tried to vitiate Marston's control of the character but putting Wonder Woman in the Justice Society. 

The documentary conveniently leaps over the fact that a short 9-page introduction of Wonder Woman, by regular creators Marston and Harry Peter, had appeared separately from the main Justice Society story in ALL-STAR COMICS #8 (late 1941). Interestingly, this short debut, meant to function as a lead-in to the release of the Amazon's regular berth in SENSATION COMICS (January 1942), takes place in the same month as the attack on Pearl Harbor. Clearly, this "advance sample" was taken in the spirit of publicizing Marston's creation.

When Wonder Woman made a literal appearance in a Justice Society story, it took place in ALL-STAR COMICS #11, released the following summer. The adventure shows all of the featured members of the JSA, plus "honorary member" Wonder Woman, engaged in battling Japanese troops in the Pacific Theater. This, according to the documentary, was part of Gaines' insidious plan to wrest control of the Amazon from Marston, because Wonder Woman's segment was scripted by JSA regular Gardner Fox. "Historian" Tim Hanley says:

In one of [Wonder Woman's] early appearances as part of the Justice Society, writer Gardner Fox doesn't quite know what to do with her, so he decides to make her the secretary of the team. All the other male heroes go out to save the day, and she stays behind to keep the notes.

As it happens, Wonder Woman, though she is a "honorary member" due to the convoluted rules of the JSA (which was primarily about promoting characters without their own title), gets just as much action as any male hero in "The Justice Society Joins the War on Japan." Wonder Woman gets to beat up a lot of Nipponese soldiers, and is justly celebrated by American soldiers.

The changeover came next issue, ALL-STAR #12, in which Wonder Woman takes the secretarial role for the first time, with little explanation.

However, given that the use of Wonder Woman in the feature was under the control of the feature's editor, not the writer, Hanley is clearly wrong to blame this development on Fox. There is also no reason to think that Gaines, who did have such control (though he probably would've executed his will through Sheldon Mayer), was trying to seize control. I think it's more likely that Marston objected to having Wonder Woman written by someone else, even though he was already writing the characters in her title feature, as well as in SENSATION COMICS and COMIC CAVALCADE. It's more likely that Gaines, who could not have altered Marston's binding contract, was simply trying to use the Amazon's appeal to help boost the sales of his title.

ALL-STAR COMICS #13, however, took a departure from this "secretary" status, when all of the then-active heroes, including Wonder Woman, were booby-trapped by Nazi spies, who sent all of them soaring into space, where they would presumably be doomed. Instead, all of the heroes had separate adventures on exotic planets, after which they returned to Earth and kicked ass on the fifth columnists.

Roy Thomas's TwoMorrows publication, ALL-STAR COMPANION, examined all of the Justice Society issues in detail, and devoted a sidebar to Wonder Woman's role in issue #13. The sidebar chronicles how regular writer Fox wrote an adventure for Wonder Woman on the planet Venus. Marston wasn't pleased by the script, and wanted the chance to rewrite the story. Gaines apparently okayed the rewrite, thus leading to the only Marston-Peter collaboration to appear in ALL-STAR.

The story, in which the Amazon helps winged female Venusians overcome brutal male invaders, is enjoyable if a bit on the typical side. The existence of this second and last WONDER WOMAN solo JSA-adventure is also not mentioned in "Truth," and so there is no consideration that maybe a harried editor like Max Gaines may have imposed the "secretary solution" simply because he was tired of fighting with Marston over stories. Did this solution appear in issue #12 as an implied warning to Marston, who may have complained too much over the Amazon's depiction in #11? I offer this as speculation only, but if it bears any resemblance to the historical truth-- which is really a genuine "secret" by this time-- then it would seem that Marston ignored the "warning," kept up the complaints, and so had to watch his character relegated to "guest appearances" in the JSA. I would further assume that there was nothing in Marston's contract that prevented such guest appearances, and thus from one standpoint Wonder Woman's secretary status came about simply to "punish" an upstart author, not to reduce her importance as a feminist icon.

Oddly, the documentary's over-ideological interpretation of Max Gaines and Gardner Fox is entirely at odds with its treatment of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as "messy" human beings, who should not be judged in terms of being heroes or villains. Perhaps the somewhat polarizing nature of Marston's WONDER WOMAN mythology invites such over-political readings.

INDIVIDUAL VS. COLLECTIVE AMPLITUDE PT. 2

In my first essay on this subject, written three years ago, I pointed out the way a given group of characters might accue mythic amplitude even though said mythicity inhered only in the character's membership in the group, my first example being the Injustice Society of the World. Then I cited another example, the portrayal of the X-Men in the graphic novel GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS, and noted that all of the mutant heroes had a collective form of amplitude even though individually they were less than distinctive.

This week's mythcomic, "A Dream of Monsters," follows the latter pattern. Four of the six heroes-- Quantum Queen, Elvar, Dartalon, and Aviax-- have no mythic identities individually, but only collectively, insofar as they are part of Clonus's brood of mutated "children." Re-Animage has a little more individual mythicity, simply because his creators had to devote some cosmological thought to the process by which his body regenerates. The mental mistress Psyche, however, plays a more central role in the tale insofar as she is "the good mother" against Velissa's "bad mother," though even so, "Monsters" seems to be much more about the Frankensteinian story of Clonus-Prime, his wife Velissa, and the Hatchlings. Later stories in the short-lived WANDERERS series made some attempts to give the heroes some myth-status, as when Aviax, a fellow who can turn into various types of birds, fights an evil scheme that involves the extermination of birds, but all of these stories failed to imbue the sketchy characters with any symbolic stature.

In THE INJUSTICE SOCIETY OF THE WORLD, the starring heroes of the Justice Society don't have much mythicity compared to the villain-group. In the earlier tale A CURE FOR THE WORLD, the Society-members have more mythicity, but only in the collective sense. None of the heroes' particular skills or potentialities are emphasized, bur rather, all of them are made into vessels for the story's message regarding the liberating effects of democracy. If the same story had been told with six different DC heroes, it probably would have read about the same.

It is, however, not impossible for a narrative to sustain both individual and collective myth-amplitude, at least better than "Dream of Monsters" does. In THE JUSTICE LEAGUE'S IMPOSSIBLE ADVENTURE, five League-members are transported to an alien world by a group of judgmental beings named "the Impossibles."  The Impossibles remove the powers of Superman, the Flash, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and J'onn J'onzz simply because all five received their abilities without working to earn them. The powerless heroes are then obligated to defend the cosmic judges against a group of predacious aliens. During the battle, most of the heroes find that the removal of their powers turns out to be a Good Thing, because it either removes their weaknesses or prevents them from having their former powers turned against them. (For instance, Aquaman is attacked by mental waves from a brain-creature, but he realizes, somehow, that the waves could've slain him had he still had his telepathic powers.) So collectively, all the members share the amplitude of "earning what was not earned," but since the script exploits each of their individual myth-identities, each hero also has an individual myth-amplitude.

ADDENDA: Since, going by Google, I seem to be alone in appreciating JLA #59, I'll add that although Gardner Fox works into the story the weaknesses of Superman and J'onn J'onzz readily enough, he couldn't really do this with the other three. The Flash has no specific vulnerabilities, Aquaman's weakness of needing immersion in water only takes place after a full hour, and Fox probably didn't even know that the Amazon, as written by her creator, lost her strength (sometimes) if a man chained her-- or welded her bracelets together-- or whatever Marston wanted to write at the time. That's probably just as well, as we spared a scene in which Wonder Woman had to say, "The Crystal Man welded my bracelets together, but since I don't have my Amazon strength, I-- uh-- well, I'm still chained up!" (Oddly, the story does give Wonder Woman a psychological block, which is slightly appropriate, just because her creator was of the psychological profession.)

NULL-MYTHS: "VAMPIRES OF THE VOID" (ALL-STAR COMICS #26, 1945)

For this week's mythcomic, I selected the second of two "Bug-Eyed Bandit" stories scripted for the Silver Age ATOM comic by Gardner Fox. In the essay I stated that I didn't rate the first "Bug-Eyed" story to be a mythcomic, but I suppose that had I examined it in depth I would have rated it a "near myth."

Over twenty years previous, Fox scripted "Vampires of the Void," in which the Justice Society contended with "metal men" from space. Apparently these aliens were not robots but had evolved as entities with a penchant for nourishing themselves by eating solid metals. Each of the segments of the story sends an individual Justice Society hero up against a small cadre of metal men, all intent upon eating up whatever metals they find. None of the heroes can beat the aliens in one-on-one confrontations, but in each segment, a given group of aliens become obsessed with consuming just one metallic element, be it copper, gold, silver, etc. Once the aliens have filled themselves with Earth-metals-- Fox calls the process "imbibition"-- the heroes are able to defeat each separate group of metal men by exploiting some weakness inherent in the Earth-metal.

For instance, Hawkman fights robots who have "imbibed" silver, so he charges them with electricity, so that he can short-circuit them.

Doctor Mid-Nite, perhaps as a contrast to his status as a healing physician, gives his group of opponents "lead poisoning." 

And the Atom exposes a bunch of iron-eating metalloids to oxygen, causing them to rust themselves to death.

Now, I mentioned in this week's ATOM-analysis that I didn't consider the first "Bug-Eyed Bandit" story by Fox to incarnate a cosmological myth even though the author inserted a bunch of factoids about insect life at the beginning. In "Void," Fox has at least spread out his factoids, so that they're are a functioning part of the story.

But do they function as cosmological myths? I would still that they still do not, more because of presentation than content. Every single episode in the story is practically a duplicate of every other, except for the supposed humor of the "Johnny Thunder" segment. Thus none of the "epistemological patterns" possible for a juvenile superhero story about metallic elements really develop. I would also say that this story fails in terms of "underthinking the underthought."

In contrast, I did validate Robert Kanigher's 1967 "Plastic Perils" METAL MEN story as a mythcomic. Despite all of the indications that Kanigher was far from serious in his attitude toward the story, he did a little more than simply research the properties of a bunch of plastics. He gave a little thought as to how to exploit those properties in terms of their potential in a fantasy-combat situation, and so each of the heroes' encounters with this or that form of plastic carried a quality of active, rather than passive, imagination. 

MYTHCOMICS: "AMAZING ARSENAL OF THE ATOM-ASSASSIN" (1967)

In the first section of AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE, I dovetailed my concept of "concrescence" with my current penchant for addressing the things being "concresced" as "epistemological patterns:"

...the term "patterns" aligns better with the process by which all forms of concrescence-- whether belonging to the mythopoeic potentiality or one of the other three-- in that I at least can picture how various motifs coalesce to reinforce one another and thus become a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

But as I've consistently emphasized, this "greater whole" only comes into effect when the various *quanta* belonging to a given potentiality reinforce one another. For instance, an author doesn't create a cosmological myth just by trotting out a handful of cosmological factoids in a given story.

Gardner Fox does just this at the opening of the story that introduces DC-comics readers to the awkwardly-named villain, "the Bug-Eyed Bandit." (To be sure, in THE ATOM #26 the felon isn't given this name in Gardner Fox's script, but only on the cover-- though Fox falls into line by using the "bug-eyed" name in the character's second and last Silver Age appearance.) Long before Ray (The Atom) Palmer has any inkling that he's about to meet an insect-themed villain, the scientist holds forth to his fiancee's nephew about the wonderful aspects of our buggy friends, like the aphid and the atlas moth. Afterward, the scientist stumbles across a burglary, and changes into the Atom just in time to fight the burglar's aide, a mechanical flying insect.

To be sure, the Bandit (real name "Bertram Larvan," which sounds a bit like the name of comic Bert Lahr) has created his robot insect as a model designed to kill real insects, but he resorts to robbery to make said model. Once he starts stealing things and fighting superheroes, though, Larvan's project of mechanized mini-exterminators is pretty much forgotten, and he becomes just another super-villain. However, though the Bug-Eyed Bandit is the same sort of "theme villain" that I described in this essay, Larvan doesn't incarnate a cosmological myth, because he doesn't pattern his mecha-insect after the capacities of real insects, aside from the thing being able to fly.

The Bandit's second appearance, though, shows Fox exploiting the cosmological appeal of the "theme villain" for all it's worth. It starts out with Larvan in prison for his crimes, though he's forgotten his experiences with the Atom due to an amnesia-gas. (If he doesn't remember his crimes, couldn't his lawyer have pleaded temporary insanity?) Amnesiac-Larvan actually seems to be a nice guy, making toy insects for kids.

However, Larvan's memory comes back, and the first thing he does is to use the robot-insects' powers to break him free, (Why toys for kids can bite through prison-bars is not enlarged upon.) Then he does everything a good theme villain should do, unleashing a tide of crimes with other robot insects who also imitate the properties of real insects, like a robot centipede (which carries a lot of "cents," ha ha) and a robot grasshopper.

Inevitably the Atom tracks down his insect-happy adversary, and once again the major part of his battle takes place against the same size-changing robot he met before, This time the robot even has a buggy application, entangling the hero in a spider-web. It also has the ability to make the Atom sneeze, but this is just an unhappy accident, having nothing to do with any particular insect-power.

Toward the climax Larvan captures the Atom and accidentally reverts him to his Palmer form. He works in one last insect-themed weapon, threatening to crush Palmer in a contracting "cocoon." The hero escapes, of course, and both defeats the villain and returns him to his amnesiac state, so that he can't reveal the Atom's secret ID.

I should note in passing that, just as the first Bandit story contained a dramatic subplot about Larvan's former girlfriend-- who just happened to be a Jean Loring lookalike-- "Atom Assassin" has a subplot in which the hero gets some minor aid from a little girl, "a Korean war orphan." I suppose there were still orphans from Korea emigrating to America for adoption in 1967. But that was over ten years after the Korean War, so I can't help but wonder if Fox had some idea of making the kid a survivor of the then-current Vietnam War, only to be overruled by the editor.

MYTHCOMICS: "A CURE FOR THE WORLD" (ALL-STAR COMICS #22, 1944)

Just as I've occasionally expressed disappointment that Jerry Siegel's earliest SUPERMAN stories were underwhelming even for pulp-action fodder, I'm usually just as underwhelmed with Gardner Fox's stories for the Justice Society, even though by 1944 Fox had already produced a fair quantity of mythically interesting Batman and Hawkman stories.

"A Cure for the World" appeared on stands about a year before the end of World War Two, but does not, unlike a lot of wartime stories, concentrate on anti-Axis propaganda. It is a "message" story, though it provides a fascinating example of a story in which its subconscious *underthought* is somewhat out of sync with its conscious *overthought.* The latter, the overt message of the story, is the quest for understanding between individuals and groups of different backgrounds. However, the former, the underthought, emphasizes a slightly different theme: that understanding comes about better when the apparent alien offers some good or service useful to the greater culture.

The adventure begins as Doctor Mid-Nite sees a young boy being whaled on by two other boys. When the hero breaks things up, he's told that the one kid doesn't attend the same church as the other two, and they wanted to assert that their allegiance to their church made them better. (No difference between the creeds is mentioned: such explicitness would probably have been against DC company policy at the time.) Mid-Nite reminds the bullies what their country is supposed to be fighting for.

However, Mid-Nite is troubled enough by the incident to take the unnamed victim to visit the other members of the Justice Society. He seems to want his fellow heroes to explain-- to him as well as to the kid-- how persecution, a "crime of humanity," can still exist today. The other heroes don't seem to have any answers, and Starman particularly finds the conundrum "hopeless."

Then an ethereal winged woman, looking much like the Blue Fairy in 1940's PINOCCHIO, appears in the group's meeting-room. She offers the heroes the chance to travel back to critical points in history, so that they can see how, as Johnny Thunder puts it, "folks would learn to like each other." The winged woman agrees with this overt statement of the story's purpose, though the actual experiences of the heroes doesn't exactly bear this moral out. The woman tells the heroes that although they will keep all their costumes and powers, they will forget who they were in the 20th century, so that they'll have to dope out the problems of tolerance as if they were real inhabitants of these past worlds.

So with this setup in mind, a reader would be justified in expecting some bromide in which all of the heroes would encounter alienated people who would just want to live ordinary lives like everyone else, if only people would "like" them. However, that's not precisely what the various segments of the story illustrate.

Hawkman rather fittingly finds himself in the "early Stone Age, when man was a hunter and a fighter, and looked on anything different from himself as something to kill immediately, lest it kill him first." Compared to other bromide-stories of the period, this is a pretty bold formulation, to assert that xenophobia is rooted in the centuries-old desire to protect oneself from "nature red in tooth and claw." Hawkman believes himself to be a caveman named Ga, and after fighting off some unruly Stone Agers, he's invited to their community. There "Ga" meets "Tow," the prototype of all future nerds, and of comic-artists as well. Because Tow is "thin and weak," he tends to stay home with "the women and children" while the bigger men are out hunting. As a result he uses his leisure time to become the world's first artist, painting the image of a mastodon he's seen on a cave-wall. However, since the other members of his tribe have never seen a mastodon as Tow has, they think he's made some real monster that can kill them. Hawkman saves the youth and flies him away, at which point they observe that a real throng of mastodons is about to stampede over the cave-community. Tow and Hawkman return to warn the people, and once again, Hawkman has to punch out a bigoted caveman to make everyone listen. The cavepeople clear out and avoid the stampede, after which the group begins valuing the proto-artist's ability to capture nature in his images, and Hawkman's visit ends.

Note: the "Tow" adventure is an example of an individual being persecuted for being different, not for his membership in an alien group. This trope will show up again.

Part Two focuses upon Starman, who finds himself incarnated in the body of Theodoratus, a noble slave-owner/military commander in Athens in the opening years of the Persian War. Although in real life Athens used slaves more than any other Hellenic nation-state, Starman's modern consciousness apparently impinges upon the Athenian commander, for he instantly tries to convince his fellows that "slaves are men, even as you and I." (Note: all of the slaves depicted are white despite supposedly coming from "Africa," which presumably means that they are captives from Greek-dominated areas of North Africa.) When the first assaults of the Persians cause the Greeks to retreat, Starman and his trained slaves usurp the position of Leonidas at Thermopylae. True, at one point Starman is able to repel the invaders with his gravity rod:

But the hero's real weapon is shame: the noble actions of the slave-soldiers, whom Athenians deem animals, force the Spartan king Leonidas to return and assume his historical (and doomed) role at Thermopylae. Starman vanishes, having insured that Greece, the cradle of democracy, will begin emancipating its slaves, now that they're proven their manliness and worth to the greater culture.

The next segment also deals with the liberation of an underclass, as comedy-relief hero Johnny Thunder visits medieval England. Unlike Starman, who gets to become an aristocrat, Johnny joins the mass of English serfs whom the local lords tyrannize. Plucky Johnny seeks out the local lord and wins him over by becoming his jester (albeit with a lot of help from Johnny's magical Thunderbolt-genie). Having found an "in," Johnny claims that serfs can defend the country as well as knights can, and he proves his point with a lance, albeit very comically (and with more help from Thunderbolt).

The Atom actually may meld with his own ancestor in 17th-century America, since "Nathaniel Pratt" bears the same surname as the hero. This time it's another individual who's being persecuted, an old woman unfairly accused of being a witch in the town of Salem. Perhaps because of Salem's notoriety, this is the only story in which the hero doesn't manage to convince anyone of the individual's rightness, that she's only an old woman who knows some home-grown medical tricks. But he does get to beat up a lot of Puritans.

Doctor Mid-Nite journeys to an even more tempestuous crucible of future democracy, Revolutionary France. becoming another theoretical ancestor, a "Doctor DeNider." Although Mid-Nite agrees with the basic principles of the Revolution and its overthrow of crowned heads, he succors a French noble who rendered aid to the rebels but has now been stigmatized for his aristocratic birth.

The Spectre, for his part, appears in the last story, in which he appears in 19th-century America at the time of Robert Fulton's invention of the steamboat. The hero-- who, unlike most of the others, doesn't attempt to cover up his bizarre appearance-- comes to the aid of a fictional inventor, Stephen Hare, against thugs who think he's either (as Spectre says below) crazy or a threat to the status quo.

This one ends on a peculiar anti-climax, in that after the hero beats off the hoods, he introduces Hare to Robert Fulton, though apparently for no reason but to give Hare the courage to persist.

Oddly, during this final story Spectre thinks to himself as to "how futile force is," because he can't make the people of this time accept Hare, any more than Atom can make the witch-haters accept the old woman. But the real purpose of the heroes' temporal battles with intolerance, successful or not, is to make readers invest themselves in the heroes's symbolic struggles. The story ends as they affirm the American principles of tolerance to a crowd of "boys and girls" who are patently their target audience.

The fairy-woman, incidentally, reveals that she is "the Conscience of Man," and it's of slight interest that said conscience is supposed to be female, given that all of the other heroes are men (except Wonder Woman, exiled to the status of secretary thanks to ongoing battles between her creator and the DC editors). Still, all of the villains are men as well, so that's something.

The common thread of all of the time-voyages is that the objects of persecution, whether individuals or groups, are outsiders who can show their greater-than-average worth to those who discriminate against them. This illustrates a point I extrapolated from Frank Fukuyama in this essay:

In "megalothymia" one worships a superior force which extends its power vertically downward.  In "isothymia" one worships a commonality of interlinked and interdependent forces.

So what is the "cure for the world?" Oddly, it seems to be the recognition not simply of the "commonality" of people who all want to be "liked," but of the ability of special persons or groups to excel in some way, to come up with inventions that no one else has, or to perform well in battle. I doubt that Fox conceived this theme consciously, but it may be that, since the story appeared during wartime, it's possible that someone didn't care for the implicit criticism of failings in America and some of its current allies. Two issues later, in ALL-STAR #24, the Conscience of Man appears for the second and last time, so that the heroes of that story can illustrate the evils of Germany's martial spirit. Perhaps Fox himself thought he might be misunderstood, and wanted to make clear that whatever sins the incipient democracies had committed, those of Germany were far, far worse.