MYTHCOMICS: THE MEDUSA CHAIN (1983)

 

It’s now over forty years since the debut of Ridley Scott’s seminal film ALIEN, but to date there have been few attempts to follow up on the movie’s ironic transformation of the space opera. Most stories about galactic empires pursued the swashbuckling model of STAR WARS, to say nothing of distant ancestors from the prose pages of Hamilton, Brackett and Anderson. Ernie Colon’s one-shot graphic novel THE MEDUSA CHAIN appeared four years after ALIEN, but by design or accident, Colon emulated one major aspect of Scott’s work, that of using the space opera not for high adventure but to evoke tedium and tragedy.

The “chain” of the title refers to a cargo-chain, comprised of a ship, designated Medusa, that takes a full six years to trek from the colony world Homeland to the penal planet Annanda-Tor. By this trope alone, Colon establishes that this is not a universe where the heroes zoom through the immensities of outer space without any regard for physical limits. No one in the story comments as to why the ship sports the name “Medusa,” though it might have something to do with the origin of the mythic maiden, transformed against her will from a beauty to a monster—much as the genre of the space opera gets turned into a monstrous form by Colon. It may be just a coincidence that the ship, named for a being with snakes for hair, is voyaging to a world whose name slightly resembles that of the Hinda “Ananta Sesha,” a serpentine deity.

As we meet the story’s hero, he’s about to be sent to Annanda-Tor to serve a year-long sentence for “conspiracy and murder.” This doesn’t sound like a very severe penalty, except that the hero has to labor on the ship for six years to get to the penal planet, and then another six years in space when he returns to Homeland. But then, the crime of Chon Adams isn’t an ordinary murder case.

The hero’s name seems to be a slight exoticization of the mundane modern cognomen “John Adams,” and so is probably not a reference to anything along the lines of the second U.S. President. We know nothing of Chon’s background beyond the fact that he’s a skilled technician— “tec” for short. When cops bring him aboard the Medusa to begin his sentence, he sees a crew made up of grotesque mutants. (In MEDUSA mutants take the place of aliens, since this particular galactic empire doesn’t seem to include anyone but human beings and variations thereon.) As soon as Chon meets his new captain, the sinuous Commander Kilg-9, he makes a belated attempt to escape. Kilg-9 uses her special power (also a mutant skill?) to stun Chon, and then tells him to get to his berth for takeoff. Reaching his quarters, Chon takes out his ire on his new roomie, slugging the heavyset, unspeaking fellow designated Sixty-Six. Immediately afterward, Chon is obliged to demonstrate his buried good-guy nature by keeping his unconscious crewmate from being killed during the takeoff.

Chon’s essential heroism is then explicated by a long flashback. He and some friends sign on to a cargo run sponsored by an oily-looking rich guy named Messberg. While out in space, Chon and his buddies learn that they’ve been set up. The ship has been given inadequate rations so that everyone will starve in space and so that the ship will be lost, thus allowing Messberg to collect a hefty insurance payout. Chon immediately reverses the ship’s course, but the rations are still inadequate for everyone on board. The only solution to get around the “cold equations” of space is to dump all of the “unessential personnel,” allowing Chon and his friends to survive on their paltry rations long enough to reach Homeland and to expose Messberg’s perfidy. Chon shows himself to be the only kind of hero that can exist in this ironic existence: he takes sole responsibility for wiping out the other crewmembers, and he personally hunts down and kills Messberg to make certain the plutocrat can’t buy his way out of the charges. This may be the reason that Chon only gets a year-long sentence for his crime, though Colon does not say so.

Back in real time, Chon then endeavors to resign himself to his fate. The other crewmen, particularly the hulking Basenga, take a dislike to him and plan a dastardly fate for him. In addition, Chon finds out that the Medusa has a unique cargo: a chemical substance called TNC-00, which once destroyed the planet on which it was invented. Chon confronts Kilg-9, who admits that her real mission is to not to deliver him to Annanta-Tor, but to destroy their ancestral planet Earth. His response: “It’s about goddamn time, Madam.”

By this point in the story it’s obvious that the narrative isn’t going to follow the Medusa’s course for the next six years. Chon sorts out his nasty crewmen—only to find himself sympathizing with Basenga after the latter suffers an insidious punishment—and then Chon relates the story of Earth’s utter corruption. Though the planet was once the cradle of human evolution, an element called a “dioxinate” mutates into a virulent poison. The humans who escape to other worlds are the lucky ones. All who remain on Earth mutate into neotenous, sexless creatures called “Earthians,” encased in carapaces and wielding formidable psychic powers.

Kilg-9 hopes to get close enough to Earth to destroy the planet and its inhabitants with her cargo, but she has no more luck than anyone else in the story. The Earthians fly out into deep space to attack the Medusa, and it’s soon obvious that the crewmen have no chance. Kilg-9 is wounded, so that Chon is forced to take command, at which point he learns that the Earthians aren’t just defending themselves. Having been nurtured on one poison, the creatures desire to take possession of the TNC-00, believing that they can assimilate the element’s power in some way. Once again Chon, despite having a heroic mentality, is forced to act expediently: he lets the monsters have what they want. “What of those,” Kilg asks, “who will have to face that power in future?” Chon replies, “I don’t give a shit.” But he does know duty to the people in his own life. Kilg gets him to continue captaining the ship to its original destination, the penal planet. Chon’s last words in the story are “It’s a long, long way to Annanda-Tor.”

Colon mentioned in an AMAZING HEROES interview that he had plans for a sequel, but DC declined to contract for that work. In all likelihood, Chon would not have simply gone meekly to serve out his prison-term. Rather, Colon almost certainly would have had his hero butting heads with more assholes. Still, the notion that he honors his commitment to his captain (and romantic interest) even though it might mean imprisonment is a fitting ironic capper to Chon’s saga. The author does introduce one possible subplot in the last pages of MEDUSA CHAIN, when Sixty-Six reveals that he was always capable of speech but remained silent because he’s a priest who had been observing a “vow of silence” during a “pilgrimage.” Perhaps the nature of Sixty-Six’s pilgrimage would have been integral to Chon’s never-to-be-chronicled second adventure, and it’s intriguing to wonder how Colon would have portrayed any form of religion in a universe apparently dominated by ruthless contingency.

GRAPHICALLY ROMANTIC PT. 2

So, for ease of reference, here's a boiled down version of my conclusions last essay:

(1) The literary genre called "the romance" roughly descends from that of the verse epic. Either one can manifest examples that are tightly plotted, but they tend to take "the long view," allowing for a cosmic scope of things. Both possess what Northrop Frye termed a "subjective intensity" (though he was speaking only of literary romances of the post-industrial age).

(2) The idea of "the novel," which *may* have originally connoted a short prose work, expanded to include any sort of prose work. Thus even long, rambling works of great scope-- I'd cite as examples MOBY DICK and LES MISERABLES-- were termed novels.

(3) As literary novels became increasingly associated with verisimilitude, arguably the so-called "subliterary" works of popular culture began to explore much of the material that once dominated the literary genre of the romance. Enthusiasts of one emerging genre of popular fiction, which  we now call science fiction, even co-opted the term "romance," referring to many works of Verne and Wells as "scientific romances."

(4) Just as genre fiction began to expand its horizons in the early 20th century, new media, such as the comic-strip medium, followed suit. Thus the gag strips that dominated most of the early 20th century gave way to "story-strips," many of which were dominated by one kind of melodrama or another, be it the social melodrama of 1924's LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE or the freewheeling adventures of WASH TUBBS (which began in 1924 as a gag-strip but altered its course to that of adventure in 1929).

More tomorrow.

GRAPHICALLY ROMANTIC

As a prelude to this week's mythcomic  I have to comment somewhat on the ideas behind the so-called "graphic novel."

The term was coined by Richard Kyle in a 1964 contribution to the apa-zine Capa-Alpha (of which I, by coincidence, am a current member). However, the term didn't catch fire until after the 1978 publication of Will Eisner's A CONTRACT WITH GOD.  Clearly, given that the word "novel" carried far more gravitas than "comic book," the use of the term was an attempt to separate ambitious graphic narratives from pamphlets aimed dominantly at a juvenile audience.

I'm going from memory here for the time being, but as I recall Dave Sim was one of those who took issue with using the term "novel" in this sense, arguing that most of the candidates for the term simply lacked the scope to justify the term-- as opposed to his then-ongoing work on CEREBUS, which when finished in 2004 displayed an impressive length (6000+ pages) and covered more than a fair share of intellectual topics.

This raises the question, though, of whether scope is the proper way to define the novel. Wikipedia mentions that in the 17th century "romance" was sometimes used to denote a narrative of epic length, while "novel" was applied to shorter works. Nevertheless, though the term "romance" had a venerable history, having been applied to prose works from the Hellenistic period, the term "novel" superseded "romance" in the 20th century. In the mid-1950s Northrop Frye made a perhaps futile effort to restore the term "romance" to respectability, asserting that it was a better description for those 19th-century works, such as MOBY DICK and WUTHERING HEIGHTS, that included a "subjective intensity" not present in more down-to-earth works. But to date the culture as a whole still deems these works "novels" no less than much shorter works, such as John Barth's END OF THE ROAD.

A further complication is that "romance" as a literary term also has ties with the rambling type of stories from medieval and Renaissance times, the so-called "chivalric romance." Arguably these romances replicated the scope of the verse epics in which much of our current knowledge of archaic myths is preserved. Some verse epics are as thematically coherent as many modern novels, such as the EPIC OF GILGAMESH. In contrast, although Aristotle praises Homer for centering the ILIAD upon the retreat of Achilles, this particular verse epic is not nearly as unified as the Sumerian epic, given that many chapters are devoted to spinning forth numerous traditional tales of the Trojan War that don't technically have much to do with Achilles. By the late 19th century verse epics had perished-- one of the last, THE SONG OF HIAWATHA, showing some rather "superheroic" aspects-- and the epic poem's killer was none other than the prose novel.

Many of the best-known novels of this century-- DAVID COPPERFIELD, LES MISERABLES-- tended toward an "epic" scope, and authors like Trollope and Balzac sometimes wrote interrelated novels set in the same fictional "universes." The early 20th century continued in the use of the term "novel" for both relatively short works, like the books of London and Hemingway, and very long works like Dos Passos' "USA trilogy. But though there were some minor experiments in the "graphic novel" during this period, none of them set any trends, and for the first thirty-eight years of the twentieth century, Americans largely experienced the comics-medium only through the newspaper comic strip.

In my essay-series THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, I came to the conclusion that gag-oriented comic strips were as a rule too short to allow for Aristotelian "complication." I further asserted that narratives had their greatest capacity for mythicity when they possessed the traditional "beginning, middle and end," which worked to maximize a given story's potential for "connotative associations." However, in this essay-series I did not deal with the "long form" of the comic strip, the "story-strip," which usually focused on one dominant narrative arc, usually with no more than one subplot, usually a setup for a future main plot.

Some forgotten comics-critic once opined that Dave Sim's scope-oriented definition of the novel was his means of giving CEREBUS a unique position in the history of comic books. The same critic suggested that many manga artists had already produced works that were at least as long as CEREBUS, though one may doubt that these stories were quite as intellectually provocative as Sim's massive work. Still, that critic might have mentioned a precursor "closer to home" than any manga-epic, and that is the type of "long melodrama" that flourished in newspaper comics from the late 1920s until roughly the 1950s-- which is about the time when "story-strips" faded from prominence in newspapers.

I want to be very careful in evaluating what if any ways that the "long melodrama" strips of the classic comic-strip era-- PRINCE VALIANT, TARZAN, FLASH GORDON, WASH TUBBS-- have to being any sort of "graphic novels." While the individual story-lines of these strips do have greater potential for complication in the sense of being mythic, they don't have much of the "scope" often applied to the general idea of the novel. Since each of these storylines is just one narrative arc, without a lot of complementary development, such arcs might be better compared to the novella than the novel proper.

However, I have come across one anomaly among the comics strips of the classic period-- one in which the author managed to combine an "epic" quantity of plot-developments over a period much longer than the usual three months assigned to most narrative arcs in this medium. More on this anomaly tomorrow.