VARIATIONS STRONG AND WEAK

 Though I've used the terms "strong" and "weak" at times to denote the way later authors render their variations on originary fictional propositions, a better pair of terms would be "continuous" and "discontinuous."

The continuous variation, usually (though not always) produced by a succeeding author dealing with an earlier author's originary proposition, makes some effort to make it seem as if what he the secondary author writes is largely "in continuity" with most or all of what has gone before.

The author of the discontinuous variation, however, makes little effort to assert continuity with the originary proposition, and may even call attention to the lack of continuity.

To illustrate this, I will mostly concentrate on the examples I used in the two VARIANT REVISIONS essays from last July.

One example cited was the intertwined propositions of DC's first two Green Lanterns. The Hal Jordan Green Lantern was initially "out of continuity" with the Alan Scott Lantern, because the Jordan-creators had only borrowed a few tropes from the Scott version, be the tropes visual (hero wears a ring he can use to conjure up weapons) or explanatory (hero has one specific weakness to his powers). However, DC editor Julie Schwartz decided that since he and John Broome had introduced a spiritual connection between the then-contemporary Flash and his Golden Age ancestor, there should be a similar association between Scott and Jordan. I'd say this never panned out because the rationales for each hero's powers were too different, making it harder to play one off the other. However, from then on the two characters shared an intertwined continuity that most if not all subsequent authors respected. 

 

Not much later, though, Bob Haney attempted to bring back a character he created, The Gargoyle, for a second appearance. But although this second story only took place a few years after the first one, Haney either forgot aspects of the originary proposition or just ignored those elements in order to churn out a quickie filler-tale. This second story was discontinuous with the first proposition, and yet became accepted as the reigning continuity, on which at least one other author based his variation.  

   

In contrast to both, though, when Grant Morrison concocted his new version of Animal-Man, he intended from the start to play up the fact that he was producing a variation on another author's concept. Thus, when he has the current Animal-Man encounter the previous avatar, there are no attempts to paper over the discontinuities. Indeed, putting said discontinuities on display is the whole point, and arguably the entire "Deus Ex Machina" arc in that title is meant to question the validity of an overly niggling continuity-consciousness.

I also pointed out the example of HEKYLL AND JEKYLL. There's no way to imagine a "retcon" that would resolve the differences between the first magpie pair, a married couple, and the second, a pair of mischievous males-- unless one wanted to follow the multiversal path, and claim that they existed in separate universes, having parallel sets of adventures-- though who would want to bother?  

Yet even when there is no direct benefit to observing continuity, it's interesting to see that some franchises generate an expectation of continuous variations. Sherlock Holmes is a public domain character and has been for some time. Yet most authors, like Cay Van Ash in the above pastiche, seek to keep some continuity with the Doyle canon-- and this seems to be the case even with the more preposterous propositions, in which Doyle encounters vampires and Martians and so on. There are a few examples where an author seeks to upend the usual setup, as with the 1988 movie WITHOUT A CLUE, in which Watson is the brains behind the mystery-solving and Holmes is just an actor hired by the doctor.

In contrast, Dracula is just as much in public domain as Holmes, but only a minority of authors seek to abide by the Stoker canon, the most obvious being FRANCIS COPPOLA'S DRACULA. Possibly the early success of the stage play and movie variations, which did not closely follow the original story, encouraged the majority of authors to riff on the bare bones of the vampire, so to speak. Hundreds of discontinuous variations of Dracula have been produced over the last century, often making Dracula a member of a monster-mash and nothing more. Dracula too often gets crossed over with assorted icons, ranging from Billy the Kid to the Filmation Ghostbusters, but in these crossovers, unlike the ones for Holmes, Drac is little more than a shadow of his original self. Marvel's TOMB OF DRACULA falls somewhere in the middle. The comic book's plots don't abandon all the backstories from the Stoker novel, but the emphasis is upon all the new characters devised for the Marvel version of the vampire lord. Similarly, Marvel-Dracula's character is only loosely similar to the one in the Stoker proposition, the better to make him blend somewhat with the multitudinous icons of Marvel, like Doctor Strange and the Silver Surfer.      

VARIANT REVISIONS PT. 2

 Some of my current terminology re: "originary and variant propositions" was preceded by the two essay-series CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS, starting here. In those essays I more or less used "template" to stand in for the current "originary proposition," "template deviation" to stand in for "variant propositions," and "total deviation" to stand in for "null-variant propositions." All of these terms, though, are predicated on analyzing the propositions "from outside," seen from the POV of the "real" reader.

However, it's not impossible to see many if not all such variations "from inside," as if all of the propositions weren't just created by isolated raconteurs but were instead variations on archetypal tropes that precede even the first "originary proposition." 

It's true thar often the originary proposition is the strongest one in terms of evoking one or more of the four potentialities, which is why I previously compared such propositions to the sort of template used, say, in early printing technology. I mentioned in the CRYPTO series major icons like KING KONG and DRACULA, and it would be hard to argue that any of the variations on these figures, however entertaining, exceeded the originals in any way. 

      

  However, there are times that the originary proposition is not the most compelling, even on simpler levels. The durable Terrytoons stars "Heckle and Jeckle" are known by most viewers as a pair of wisecracking male magpies. However, the first cartoon in the series, 1946's "The Talking Magpies," posited them as a married male-and-female couple that caused no end of trouble for Farmer Al Falfa. Paul Terry then chose to issue a "rebooted" Heckle and Jeckle that same year with "The Uninvited Pests," and as two identical males with differing accents, the characters enjoyed another 51 theatrical cartoons. So in terms of popular success, the variant proposition was the more successful, not least because two obnoxious males could be used in many more slapstick situations than a married magpie pair.

Now, if one wanted to take the archetypal perspective I suggested above, one could imagine two parallel worlds, one in which Heckle and Jeckle were both male, and one in which they were a married couple. Most fictional propositions regarding parallel worlds are not much less chimerical. The parallel-world explanation for duplicate versions of DC characters such as Flash and Green Lantern sometimes verged on expressions of archetypal realities, though usually in fairly clumsy terms. The first Green Lantern begins very poorly-- I read the first volume of Golden Age reprints and could barely see any reasons for the success of the character beyond the base idea of a hero with a wonder-working "magic ring." Later in the series writers conceived a few subordinate characters-- Solomon Grundy, Vandal Savage-- evocative enough that DC Comics made them major figures in the company's later cosmology. But I'm not sure that, taken just on their Golden Age appearances, Grundy or Savage were as good IN THEIR TIME as the better villains of that era, from serials like Batman, Wonder Woman, or even Airboy and The Hangman. In contrast, the Silver Age Green Lantern, which crossbred the rudimentary Alan Scott concept with the "space ranger" ideas of the prose "Lensmen" series, displayed excellence in the kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities within a few years.

Even "soft reboots" within the same cosmos-- which make no use of "parallel worlds" as such-- are often treated as constituting variant propositions in, say, fandom-wikis like the DC Database. The 1988 ANIMAL MAN, reviewed here, dispenses with any idea that two separate Animal-Men co-exist in two distinct worlds. Rather, the first one knows that he was created by one author and rejected in favor of an updated hero with the same name by another author. Yet at the same time, Grant Morrison suggests that there's some loosely archetypal limbo where even the lamest characters ever created (hello, Ultra the Multi-Alien) continue to exist. And some soft reboots are performed not through intention but through error. In the first VARIANT REVISIONS, I took pains to analyze how Bob Haney first created a reasonably evocative mystery villain in one TEEN TITANS story. Yet when Haney later needed a make-work villain to plug into a hastily conceived scenario, the writer simply rewrote the established character's motivations to suit his current needs. As if to compound the error, George Perez constructed yet another ramshackle artifice on top of Haney's blunder and, to the extent that DC fans think of The Gargoyle at all, they probably defer to the Perez interpretation.

Some soft reboots even occur simply in response to changing tastes or priorities. Jerry Siegel's original Superman, while always devoted to justice, sometimes played fast and loose with legalities. DC editors didn't like that, possibly fearing a profitable character would get targeted by moral watchdogs-- which eventually happened anyway-- and so Silver Age Superman became an absolute stickler for obeying the law, even the law of made-up planets. Here too I would probably argue that Silver Age Superman surpassed the originary proposition in many though not all respects-- though the more creative Golden Age concepts of Siegel and his collaborators became the essential foundation for the Silver Age proposition.  

More to come.

        

NULL-MYTHS: DAY OF JUDGMENT (1999)

 

Though I have never tried to follow the vast majority of the DC and Marvel multi-character crossovers, I think I actually bought and read DAY OF JUDGMENT'S five issues back in The Day. I remembered nothing about the story 25 years later, except that it spotlighted the hare-brained (and quickly reversed) idea of following up Hal Jordan's crimes as a mind-controlled mass-murderer by turning the Silver Age Green Lantern into a new incarnation of The Spectre. Rereading it now, I'm ready to pronounce it not only an egregious example of a null-myth, but one even worse than the one I usually cited as the worst such multi-feature crossover, Jim Shooter's 1984 SECRET WARS. I think that even had I not reread WARS for that 2016 review, I would probably have at least remembered some of the story's events, clunky as they were. DAY is nothing but writer Geoff Johns and artist Matt Smith setting up the lame Green Spectre concept.                                  

Of course, WARS had 12 issues and DAY has only five, but that in my mind just more fully indicts the editors and creators who stuffed the story with Too Many Damn Characters. It doesn't help that artist Smith and writer Johns are just not suited to depicting a big cosmic cataclysm-story, so there are a lot of scenes with colorful figures standing around exchanging dull snatches of dialogue. Unleashing all the demons of Hell upon Earth was a plot that had been done before this by both DC and Marvel many times. But this one may be the least hellraising raisings of hell ever.     

Given that the Green Spectre idea turned into a whole lot of nothing, the only significance this DAY can be judged to possess would be that it was one of the first 1990s attempts of DC to exploit its "Weirdoverse," as discussed here. So at most DAY might have provided a stepping-stone to better things. But then, it's so bad, it would almost have to.      

MYTHCOMICS: "RANDOM CHOICE" (SECRET ORIGINS OF SUPER-VILLAINS #1, 1999)

Psychological myths, as I've mentioned, are not the same as just as any functioning psychological aspect of this or that fictional character. As with the other three myth-categories, myths about human psychology depend on revealing a deep, symbolically-rich structure to the phenomenon under consideration. There are any number of non-mythic works which may suggest such a structure in a superficial manner, but in order to formulate a literary myth, the structure must possess symbolic density. Psychological myths are also independent of what I've termed the "dramatic potentiality," which is principally about the interactions of fictional characters rather than their deeper aspects/


The GREEN LANTERN villain Sinestro, from his debut in GREEN LANTERN #7 (1961), has always been regarded as the hero's arch-enemy. That said, writer John Broome only provides a sketchy account as to how the red-skinned alien-- whom Green Lantern once calls "my Satanic-faced foe"-- becomes the universe's only renegade Green Lantern. The readers are only told that, through an unknown process, the Guardians of the Universe selected Sinestro to serve as galactic cop to his star-sector, including his birth-planet Korugar. After a period of serving nobly in the Corps, Sinestro fell victim to "the virus of power" and established himself as a despot over his people, after which the Guardians stripped him of his ring and his station, and then exiled him to the anti-matter universe Qward, where evil and destructive impulses are the norm. The Qwardians had already appeared about half a year earlier in GREEN LANTERN #2, but they had no leader as such. Broome presumably decided that a world of evil needed a ruler, and what better ruler than a "rebel angel" cast out by his heavenly bosses?

Sinestro's background remained sketchy for the next thirty-plus years, until Ron Marz and Scott Kolins put forth a "secret origin" in 1999.

The story is structured as a tale being narrated by a  Guardian named Ganthet to a cloaked figure who, by the end of the framing device, proves to be Hal Jordan during his brief tenure as the Spectre. No reason iks given as to why Jordan, who was Sinestro's greatest enemy when the former was a Green Lantern, is belatedly hearing this secret origin at this late date.

Prior to this origin-tale, there had been dozens if not hundreds of villains who started out as non-entities who choose to rebel against society by becoming evildoers. Marz, having been a comics-fan, had almost certainly seen many, many origins in which the villain's motivation was resentment, and it's possible that for that reason Marz decided not to follow that bif of cliched psychologizing.

Instead, the future villain-- whose real Korugarian name has, Ganthet says, long been forgotten-- begins as a nonentity who nurtures no obvious resentment of anyone. Sinestro begins as a low-ranking anthropologist on his homeworld, described by Ganthet as a "relatively unremarkable man." His only passion revolves around his project of reconstructing an ancient Korugarian city from its ruined condition, and his passion stems, Ganthet says, from his need for symmetry and order. Marz does not enlarge on how Sinestro reconstructs a whole city by himself, but at the opening of the narration, he's all alone amid the dead dwelling-places-- just as an alien Green Lantern crashes into one of the reconstructed buildings.

Sinestro, showing none of his future remorselessness, strives to help the alien. The creature, knowing that he's being pursued by the enemy who defeated him, passes his ring to Sinestro in what it obviously a mirror-image of Hal Jordan's ascension to ring-bearing status.

Seconds after Sinestro receives the mystic jewelry, the alien's enemy, one of the Weaponers of Qward descends to the site and begins attacking Sinestro. Though the Korugarian has no time to learn how to work the ring, he uses his knowledge of the archaic city, and the Qwardian is "crushed by the clockwork structure of Sinestro's mind" when the neo-Lantern drops a building on the warrior's head.

However, the destruction of the only thing Sinestro cares about pushes him toward the path of ruthlessness. Since he has been harmed by the city's demolition, he turns a deaf ear when the alien Lantern begs for the return of the ring in order to heal his fatal wounds.

The Guardians, unaware of Sinestro's complicity in this death, allow the Korugarian to assume the status of guardian of his star-sector-- after which the rest of Sinestro's career follows its designated course. The only other interesting detail Marz supplies is that when it comes time for the Guardians to punish the renegade, they choose to send Sinestro to Qward "because the irony of it appealed to us." Since there's no such irony as such in the original Broome backstory, Marz presumably means that said irony proceeds from Sinestro's revised history. Since the renegade first distinguished himself by defeating a Qwardian warrior, giving him over to the Qwardians would be not unlike a U.S. cavalry officer surrendering a rebellious Indian scout to a tribe that wants to kill him. But the Guardians' sense of poetic justice trips them up, because Sinestro harnesses the great resources of the anti-matter world against the world of goodness.

The frame-story wraps up with some nattering about correcting old mistakes, but the meat of the story is Marz's idea of giving evil a more mundane origin than Broome's notion of the seductiveness of power. Marz purposely does not give Sinestro any sort of personal life, and a writer more wedded to cliche would have probably harped on the character's inability to make interpersonal connections, as indicated by his passion to resurrect a dead city. Rather, Marz is interested in showing evil arise from "random choice." Sinestro's stated passion for order is presented as if it came about by fiat, rather than from his pedagogical history, and so his decision not to return the power ring to its original owner also comes about from a random choice, the choice to find a new orderliness in the career of a Green Lantern. In accordance with his established history, he distinguishes himself for a time, but since Sinestro has made his choice in response to a new passion, itself coming about from a random encounter, he's easily seduced to the "virus of power."

THREE FORMS OF ANTI-TRANSGRESSION, PT. 2

The terminology of "types" that I introduced in this preface can now be brought into line with the terminology of "forms" that I introduced in Part 1.

My main reason for bothering with all of these highly specific terms relates to my fascination with the idea of thresholds as they relate to both real and fictional experience. Earlier I've quoted Philip Wheelwright with respect to his assertions about "the intrinsically threshold character of experience." For me this means that there are certain crucial points, at least in fiction, where one phenomenality shades into another-- as with the naturalistic into the uncanny-- or where a subcombative level of violence can, with just a little extra *amplitude,* be transformed into the level of the combative. The same dynamic also applies to the shadings in between age-related clansgressions.

I gave one example of this subtle shading in this section of CROSSING THE LAWLINES PART 2:

However, even in real-life culture the spectre of clansgression can appear with respect to age-appropriate pairings, even when the subjects involved are not physically related, nor are they raised in circumstances of regular propinquity (cf. "neighbor-kids who grow up together.") In fiction this motif is most frequently seen in the trope "high school girl dates college boy," or (more rarely) the reverse situation with respect to gender assignment. Typically no more than four years separates the collegian from the high-schooler, so it isn't feasible for such pairings to carry the "May-September" vibe. Yet the sense of boundaries traversed is clansgressive, usually because it's assumed that one member of the couple has already had sex and will be initiating the other. 

Looking at this observation through the lens of the "chronophilia" article referenced in the preface, one might assume that even though there's not a large span of years separating "high school girl" from "college boy," the former aligns with what I've called the "E-type," the late adolescent usually aged from 15-19 years of age, while the latter often (though not always) aligns with the "M-type," the functional adult, even though the average collegian would not usually be all that much older than the high-schooler. Still, a sense of transgression, and of clansgression, pertains because there's the sense of mixing "clans" that ought to be separate.

For instance, in Rumiko Takahashi's long-running MAISON IKKOKU, the principal relationship is that of Godai, a college-age young man and a slightly older woman, Kyoko, whose age is cited as 22 on one wiki. However, one barrier to the relationship is the fact that Kyoko, who married her first husband when she herself was in high school, is a widow, and so the potential romance between her and the college student seems slightly out of balance, even if the age-discrepancy is not a great one. However, Takahashi erects other barriers as well.One of these is the above-pictured high-school student Ibuki, who sets her sights on the twenty-something Godai. Ibuki is never successful in her romantic campaign. But since Godai registers as an "M-type," any association with a "E-type" seems massively inappropriate, and Godai always gets in trouble with Kyoko whenever she suspects him of pursuing a high-schooler.

Yet age doesn't always confer the semblance of maturity. In the same LAWLINES essay I wrote this of the manga-series LOVE HINA:

The set-up for LOVE HINA is that nebbishy loser Keitaro Urashima finds himself managing a girls' dormitory for middle school and college-bound high-school students. Naturally, in the long-running tradition of harem comedies, the girls are winsomely cute, and eventually all of them become enamored on some level with Keitaro, the only male living with them. A modicum of adult supervision is provided by Keitaro's aunt Haruka... but most of the time the girls are free to tease and torment Keitaro, who gets no points for being a little older than the oldest of them, since he's failed his college-entrance exams three times at the series' beginning.  The clansgressive vibe generated by the series eventually develops along the lines of an older "brother" being forced to put up with the hijinks of a band of capricious "sisters," all of whom take on a sibling-vibe partly because they share a house...

So even though the Keitaro character is in the same age-range as Takahashi's Godai, Keitaro is often treated as being an "E-type." so that there's no sense of age-based clansgression when he tries to make time with high-schooler Naru. However, I mentioned above that the "clan" in LOVE HINA included middle schoolers.

One is a wacky "foreign" girl. Kaolla, who likes to torment Keitaro both physically and quasi-sexually.

The other is a serious but shy Japanese girl, Shinobu, who's honestly attracted to the older male but becomes easily embarrassed in his presence.

Predictably, though Keitaro doesn't make any moves on either "H-type" girl, he's constantly placed in situations where it seems like he's guilty of this particular age-transgression.

In the Preface I also mentioned that age-based clansgressions might occur even when a particular character only "appeared to be" within a particular span of years. There are quite a few of these in Japanese entertainment, but for variety's sake, I'll give as example the American DC Comics character Arisia Rrab.

When first introduced, the character-- an alien Green Lantern, and a member of the same Corps as Hal Jordan, the titular DC hero-- looked very much an "H-type." She had a schoolgirl crush on M-Type Jordan, and that was all there was to that.

One online reference puts her age at 13 in this introduction, though in a later comic, Arisia argues that even though she looks like an immature Earth female, she's actually much older than her looks because of the longer span of time that her planet revolves around its sun. Jordan still rejected her as a potential lover, urging her to seek out boys "her own age." However, Arisia's inner torment caused her to subconsciously advance her own body in age, so that she became, in effect, an "M-Type" like Hal Jordan.  And at that point, Jordan acquiesced to her logic.

The story in GREEN LANTERN CORPS #206-- in which Arisia became "a woman" in more than one sense-- was entitled "In Deep," and writer Steve Englehart may have chosen this title knowing that he was going to get "in deep" with fan-reaction. He even anticipates the general reaction in the following dialogue:

It's hard to say whether or not the writer had any notion of breaking down this particular clansgressive stereotype, but the story had no such effect. Instead, the trope of "Green Lantern, Child Molester" has become an ongoing joke. Arisia did not last long as Hal Jordan's inamorata, and later continuity seemed to have papered over Englehart's scenario.

To bring the analysis back to the three forms--

The Primary Form would be best represented by Keitaro's romance with high-schooler Naru. Though she's part of the "sorority" in the hotel, and she actually knew Keitaro briefly when the two of them were pre-schoolers, she's the least 'sisterly" of the cast-members.

The Secondary Form is represented by the romance of Godai and Kyoko, whose transgressive association is filtered through, and somewhat inverted by, the interaction with Ibuki. One reason Ibuki becomes obsessed with Godai results from his having been a substitute-teacher at her high school. This institution happens to be the same one where Kyoko, in her high-school years, fell in love with the older man whom she married. Thus, even though Kyoko is older and more experienced than Godai, Godai's apparent flirtation with a high-school girl resonates as a reverse-recapitulation of Kyoko's history with an older man.

The Tertiary Form is represented by the "brief candle" of love between Hal Jordan and Arisia, who attempt to use sci-fi rationalizations to justify the clangression between an "M-Type" and a character who had at most been a "E-Type" before she wrought the Change of Womanhood upon herself.

ADDENDUM: I'll note that one reason Keitaro doesn't seem an "M-Type" despite his age is because he's failed his college entrance exams so often, thus consigning him to a sort of "immaturity limbo."

MYTHCOMICS: "FIVE BILLION YEARS" (GREEN LANTERN #200, 1986)

I noted in my mythcomics analysis of "The God Killer" that it was only a part of a greater saga, but that I didn't find the entire story to have the necessary symbolic density necessary for a mythcomic.

"Panther's Rage" is rambling and episodic, and though it's never boring, its myth-themes are not integrated enough to make me list the entire arc...

"Five Billion Years" is a similar case. It's the culmination of a long arc involving DC's space-opera superhero and many of his fellow Green Lanterns from assorted planets. If that wasn't complicated enough, the greater arc is tied into DC's multi-feature epic, CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, and works in a lot of DC history seen in stories like THE SECRET ORIGIN OF THE GUARDIANS and THE SECRET LIFE OF STAR SAPPHIRE. (Below is a quick contemporaneous recap of Star Sapphire's origin.)

 In addition, this arc proved notable for building up the character of Guy Gardner, the Bad Boy of the Lantern Corps:

Most of these developments, however, relate purely to lateral meaning as I described it in RETHINKING THE UNDERTHOUGHT. The symbolic density of myth comes into being through the mythopoeic potentiality, which aligns itself with a narrative's "underthought" and frequently, though not invariably, is granted greater profundity by its interaction with the "overthoughts" of the didactic potentiality. Lateral meaning describes what the characters experience physically and what readers should understand of its emotional meaning, and so the lateral elements of this story-- things that relate purely to Hal Jordan's romantic problems or his duels with old and new enemies-- are irrelevant to the matter of myth.

The underthought of "Five Billion Years" reveals yet another "secret origin" for the Guardians of the Universe. Although Green Lantern's mentors spend most of their career looking like sexless, hyper-intellectual dwarfs, "Five Billion" hearkens back to their origins as gendered entities-- which begs the intellectual question, "what happened to the other gender?" In short, the Zamarons-- who, since their introduction in John Broome's Star Sapphire origin, were always depicted as all-female-- are called upon to be the missing "other half" of the mortal race that gave rise to the Guardians.

The confrontation of the Guardians and the Zamarons has one extrinsic purpose, to link the events of the GREEN LANTERN comic to upcoming, post-Crisis events like the MILLENNIUM mini-series. However, Englehart is skillful enough to give this "big event" a strong intrinsic meaning, in that the reunion of the two sexes is touted as an evolutionary necessity. One Guardian says:

The race born on Malthus and and developed on Oa and Zamaron must be regenerated to create a new breed of immortal...

But before this can happen, the most prominent Guardian must duel the most prominent Zamaron to prove the former's fitness to mate with the latter. Since the duel takes place in terms of energy-blasts, the event shouldn't convey any anti-feminine sentiments except to those determined to find that sort of thing.

After the head Guardian proves, at least by implication, that he and his fellows still have the Stuff, they and the Zamarons fly off to some celestial plane, telling the Green Lanterns that they too must evolve, so as to be their own masters. Their own personal "devil" Sinestro attempts to tag along in the guise of a Guardian, but he's caught, and confesses, in very Earth-centric terms, that his intention was to become "a lurking serpent in your new and secret haven."

From what memories I have of MILLENNIUM and the somewhat related NEW GUARDIANS title, I don't think the Guardians succeeded in coming up with their "new breed." In any case the little blue men didn't stay away very long, but returned to the GREEN LANTERN within the next twenty issues, prior to its cancellation.

On a minor side-note, Englehart tries to extend his evolution-metaphor into one of Green Lantern's battles, as the hero bests the mentally endowed super-villain Hector Hammond, telling Hammond, "You've reached the far end of your evolution, while I'm still going." But it's at best a forced metaphor at that point. Whatever the long-term execution of the "Guardians have sex" concept, "Five Billion Years" does manage to impart a sense of space-opera grandeur to the proceedings.

QUICK NON-POLITICS POST

Posted this on a recent comics-forum about politics and superheroes:

____________________________

Before one says that everything is of a political nature, I think one must say, "Is politics the fundamental root of human society, or is it a secondary manifestation of that society?"

Maybe you can guess from my phrasing my own take, but I'd say that any political system comes about in order to manage human conflicts relating to what Americans generally call "life, liberty & pursuit of happiness." I'd simplify that to "Life." So politics is about the proper governance of life. There's a nice line in GAME OF THRONES in which one noble tells another that the "smallfolk" don't really care that much about who's on the throne; they just want a good crop and freedom from disease, and whatever ruler helps them to that end is the one they like.

Now, one can believe that, in the real world, nothing is free from political associations. However, in fiction that freedom does exist, even if it's only a freedom of the imagination. One poster brought up the famous example of GREEN LANTERN #76, in which Green Lantern's countless world-saving endeavors are viewed as nugatory next to his failure to address a particular social issue.

I've certainly encountered over-ideological critics who've made the claim that saving the universe doesn't amount to any positive political act; that it amounts, incredibly, to preserving the status quo. I view this as an absurd overstatement of the function of political rectitude; the equivalent of saying, in Judeo-Christian terms, that Man really is made for the Sabbath, not the other way round.

Whether it's saving the universe or catching a serial killer, the hero's deed is meant to signify the continuance, rather than the frustration, of life as it is lived. For some readers, "political life" takes the place of actual life, and so purely most political interpretations of heroic acts come off not as genuine inquiry but as "sentence first, evidence afterwards."

THE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE

Back in 2009, I wrote one of my earliest essays on the nature of functionality in symbolic discourse, DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE (and an addendum, Part 2). These distinctions about "simple and complex variables," an idea developed from one of Frye's definitions, eventually became subsumed by the language-terms introduced by Philip Wheelwright's THE BURNING FOUNTAIN, last cited here.  While I don't dismiss the algebraic metaphors of Frye. Wheelwright's physics-influenced metaphor has proven more useful in trying to map out just what literary process separates the simple from the complex.

As a roundabout way of refining this question through example, let me say that while I still view all of the "mythcomics" I've cited as worthy of being called "symbolically complex," I've observed that sometimes even characters who possess that potential, that amplitude, have been treated like furniture: i.e., as merely functional.

"Secret of the Sinister Sorcerers," analyzed here, shows this tendency.

All of the heroic characters on display in this page have sustained, at one time or another, strong symbolic discourses in their own features. One might argue, in line with Wheelwright, that at that time Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter weren't "eminent instances" on the same level of the other heroes, perhaps because the two heroes had spent so much of their respective careers as short back-up strips. But in "Sorcerers," they're all on the same plane, for author Fox isn't mining any of the heroes' myths to any great extent. In terms of symbolic complexity, the three villains have the greatest amplitude of associations, while the heroes simply run through their functional paces: Green Lantern's ring can't battle a yellow manticore directly, so he has to defeat the creature indirectly, etc.

More often than not, though, mythcomics tend to imbue super-functional characteristics to both protagonist and antagonist. This is certainly the case in GREEN LANTERN #40, where the titular hero, the mentors he represents, and the villain Krona get a great deal of myth-attention-- though one might argue that the Green Lantern of Earth-II isn't much more interesting than your average piece of used furniture.

This is a general tendency evinced by many "sidekick" figures. Lightray of THE NEW GODS is not without some symbolic associations of his own, but he's primarily important as the friend of the book's hero Orion. Because Orion likes Lightray, so does the reader, and thus does the reader become more invested in the hero's struggle on behalf of New Genesis.  Lightray isn't as "eminent" an "instance" as Orion, but he's eminent enough for Kirby's overall purpose.

As I observed back in the FURNITURE essays, story-elements that are merely functional-- like the "stairhead" allows "stately, plump Buck Mulligan" to enter a room in ULYSSES's first line-- are both inevitable and desirable. The same principle applies to characters whose complexity varies from story to story, according to the needs of the author. It's especially interesting, at least for a project like mine, when the mythic complexity inheres more in the opponents of the hero than in the heroes who are the putative stars of the story, as in "Sinister Sorcerers."

MYTHCOMICS: "SECRET ORIGIN OF THE GUARDIANS" (GREEN LANTERN #40, 1965)

In my discussion of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, I observed that the series was greatly indebted to the use of parallel universes in the Silver Age DC titles FLASH and GREEN LANTERN, both written by John Broome and edited by Julie Schwartz. I didn't note that CRISIS also derived much of its continuity-shaping concepts to a single Broome/Schwartz issue of GREEN LANTERN-- illustrated by Gil Kane-- which not only gave, as the title suggests, an origin to the title hero's Guardian mentors, but also touched on the origins of the DC Universe and the provenance of evil in that universe.

Though this sounds like the stuff of comic-book epics, "Secret Origin of the Guardians" is wrapped up in one issue, and for good measure throws in the first meeting of the Golden and Silver Age Lanterns, outside the pages of their initial Justice League encounter. A bare summation of the plot also sounds like par-for-the-course with DC story-lines:

"An evil alien, imprisoned as an energy-form inside a meteor for his crimes, enters Earth's atmosphere and suborns one of Earth's heroes to carry out new crimes. The alien even makes one Earth-hero fight another one until they join forces and overcome the evildoer." True, in "Origin" the two heroes come from different versions of the Earth, but the parallel applies nonetheless. The cover seen above is also extremely familiar, as even by 1965 DC Comics had published innumerable covers in which a featured hero found himself about to be marginalized or replaced by a rival. However, the quality of the mythopoeic is much like the saying about the Devil: "it's in the details."

The first four pages of the story proper deal with Alan Scott, the Green Lantern of Earth-Two, coming into contact with the meteor. The object's radiation temporarily nullifies the weakness of Scott's power-ring-- a vulnerability to wood. Immediately thereafter, rather than testing the meteor's properties, Scott decides to go to Earth-One and see what the Hal Jordan Green Lantern thinks about it, in case the meteor might be able to banish the weakness of Jordan's Guardian-given ring. 

As soon as the two Lanterns meet, Jordan reminds Scott (in a totally nice way) that Scott could have verbally asked his ring to analyze the meteor, since the ring can do almost anything, including communicating info like a miniature computer. The ring then informs the crusaders that within the meteor was the imprisoned villain Krona, who hails from a time from the race of Oa, the race that later involved into the Guardians-- thus allowing author Broome a quick way to communicate said history. 

"Ten billion years" ago, the Oans were a race of blue-skinned super-scientists, who were immortal and did not need food or rest. They lived an untroubled, pre-lapsarian existence, not yet evolved into a coterie of aged blue dwarves (they even have women and childbirth at this point, which would lead to a complicated set of retcons in later GREEN LANTERN stories). But one among them, Krona, aspires to "probe the beginning of all things," despite a legend that claims that the universe will end if the Guardians learn their origins. 

As the excerpt shows, Krona does get a peek at the cosmic beginnings, and sees what one must presume to be the Hand of God Himself, shaping the cosmos. However, this peek isn't enough to wipe out the whole universe; it unleashes "cosmic lightnings" that zap Krona but don't kill him. The non-immortals of the cosmos pay the real price, for "evil was loosed on the universe," which presumably had existed in some sort of Edenic state up to that point. Because the Oans feel guilty over Krona's actions, they imprison in the aforesaid meteor and hurl him into outer space-- after which they decide to organize the Green Lanterns in order to quell the evil in the universe. 

Scott's ring also informs him that the only reason that it gained immunity to wood was because Krona wanted Scott to have a reason to cross into the Earth-One universe, because only in that universe can Krona continue his forbidden researches once more. Once the ring finishes its story, one of Jordan's Guardian-mentors shows up on Earth-One, informing the two heroes that Krona's activities will soon cause an outbreak of disasters, even before he finds out the Big Secret. The Lanterns spend a few pages fighting natural cataclysms, and are then summoned to the base the Guardians have made on Earth-- where the Guardians suddenly justify the cover and announce Alan Scott to be Hal Jordan's replacement.

The solution of the cover-conundrum is weak at best: for some reason Krona decided to steal a march on the heroes before they came after him, by possessing the body of Scott and mentally manipulating the Guardians. This questionable strategy leads to a battle of the Lanterns, which Krona easily wins. Krona then transports the paralyzed Guardians to his hidden lair, boasting that he will make them watch their own "secret origins" on a viewscreen, and then use "a duplicate of Alan Scott's power ring" to flee to Earth-Two with his forbidden knowledge, while the Earth-One universe is annihilated. However, the two Green Lanterns team up and defeat Krona, who is once more consigned to the outer depths of space.

As noted earlier, the base plot is nothing special; what's impressive is the way Broome had merged several myth-motifs into one cohesive story. 

At the time of the story's publication, Broome surely knew that most of his readers would stem from a Judeo-Christian tradition, so that he also knew that he would not rock any boats by suggesting that the Hand of God had shaped the universe. To my knowledge there are no canonical stories in that tradition in which God punishes mortals for looking upon him or his works, though a few stories, particularly that of Noah, loosely suggest such transgressive tropes. In the other myth-tradition best known to American audiences-- the interwoven threads of Greek and Roman mythology-- mortals are also never in a position to look upon the creation of the universe. However, since the Greco-Roman gods are anthropomorphic, mortals are able to invade the gods' privacy in other ways; not least being the tale in which the mortal Actaeon intrudes upon Artemis while the goddess is bathing.

However, the one relevant myth shared by both traditions is the origin of evil, and in both cases, a female did the dirty deed. I've already referenced mankind's fall from Edenic peace, which was laid upon Eve, but the Greek myth of Pandora is morphologically closer to the Green Lantern story, in that evil is actually released as a miasma that infects the cosmos, if not as specific demons. And yet, the first metaphor Broome uses to typify the polluted universe resonates with one of the prime narratives that befalls Adam and Eve; that of "brother killing brother" (page 8). 

No less mythologically intriguing is the name Broome confers upon his villain. Krona is almost certainly derived from the Greek god Cronus, whom the Romans later conflated with their deity Saturn. 

In Greek myth, Cronus can be compared in some particulars with God-the-Creator. Cronus doesn't spawn the cosmos, but he makes the ordered cosmos possible through the slaying of his father Uranus, who refuses to let Cronus and the other Titans come forth from their mother Gaea (at least in one version of the myth). After Uranus is deposed, Cronus and his sister Rhea rule the world of the Titans and maintain a Golden Age for a while-- another pre-lapsarian period, which appears in Broome's story as the "ten billion years ago" era of the Oan people, who apparently start out as immortals and live in a universe free of evil. Broome even furthers the comparison to the Greek Titans by saying on page 7 that "[The Oans] strode [their] planet like giants," though there's no suggestion that any of them are literal colossi.

The end of Cronus' Golden Age comes when he hears a prophecy that one of his offspring will overcome him, at which point he more or less emulates his father-- this time, not confining his offspring to their womb but devouring them as soon as they come out. Thanks to some trickery by Cronus' wife Rhea, Cronus' destined usurper, his son Zeus, survives, kills Cronus, and frees his siblings from Cronus' stomach.

So Cronus' transgression against the orderly cosmos is that he, like his father, tries to cut off the next generation. In one sense, this seems a very "male" thing to do, on a par with alpha-male gorillas who take over a tribe and slay any children born by alphas other than him. Certainly it seems to be opposite to the sins of Eve and Pandora, which both boil down to feminine over-curiosity. And yet, though Broome's Krona has no interest in spawning children, or even ruling anything, he does seek to destroy the entire cosmos in a manner analogous to Cronus' suppression of the newborn gods-- and he does it for the same sin evinced by Eve and Pandora: that of curiosity. Yet in many ways Krona is also in the tradition of the curious male-- not so much bumbling swains like Actaeon, but more along the lines of Victor Frankenstein, whose name has become synonymous with that of a science that trespasses on the precincts of God.

I should note also that Zeus does not slay Cronus right away as Cronus implicitly slays Uranus: once the other gods are freed from Cronus' gullet, Zeus leads them against the Titans. This results in the cataclysmic war of the Titanomachy, from which the gods emerge as the new rulers while the Titans are consigned to Tartarus-- once again, imprisoned within a womblike Earth. The cataclysmic battle between "the favored gods" and "the gods no longer in favor" is arguably translated into an ongoing battle of "good" and "evil" in popular fiction, not least the "Lensmen" novels of E.E. Smith, alleged to have been a strong influence on the Hal Jordan corner of the DC cosmos. It's almost surprising that Broome, who had created Qward, a "universe of evil" in GREEN LANTERN #2, did not reference that universe in "Origins." And yet it's not truly surprising, given that comic-book creators avoided overly complicated scenarios, since they were writing so as to catch the vagrant attention of kid-readers. Later writers would inflate the opposition of the Oans and the Qwardians to the point that the two groups became the structural kindred of E.E. Smith's warring alien races. But to his credit, Broome, unlike many later comics-writers, had some intrinsic understanding of the myths he evoked. A lot of comics-writers have conjured up disasters for their heroes to fight, but few, aside from Broome and maybe Stan Lee, have been able to give them mythic resonance:

"Wracked by invisible waves of evil, spreading from Krona's presence on Earth-One, the planet itself goes berserk, seeking in fury and hatred to destroy the humanity that has spawned on its surface."

And this line of thought takes us back to tales of world-wide cataclysm, whether spawned by God or by Zeus-- but that's probably enough myth for now.

NULL-MYTHS: "HOW DO YOU FIGHT A NIGHTMARE?" (GREEN LANTERN #82. 1971)

My choice for a null-myth mirrors the theme of the week's mythcomic: the theme of feminine sovereignty.

As written by Denny O'Neil and pencilled by Neal Adams, the last fourteen issues of the Silver Age GREEN LANTERN feature-- which changed its masthead title to GREEN LANTERN/ GREEN ARROW during that period-- remains one of the touchstones of the early Bronze Age. I won't attempt to critique the entire rum here, which has both its fans and its detractors. It's enough to say that the revised feature followed the lead of the "relevance craze" in popular fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This meant that the GL/GA stories dealt with social problems in a compartmentalized, one-social-topic-per-story fashion, whether the problem was drugs, Native American problems, censorship, Black American problems, and so on.

I don't know whether or not advance advertising on "Nightmare" positioned the story as an examination of the "problem" of feminist concerns. I recall that at least some of the lettercol mail attacked the story as a travesty of those concerns, but the text of O'Neil's story doesn't foreground the narrative as a "cause of the month." Mythologems about femininity make their appearance in the story, but it's hard to see what value O'Neil meant them to have. Hence, "Nightmare" qualifies not as just a mere bad story, but also an inconsummate one, in terms of its symbolic discourse.

Long before the beginning of the Silver Age, the writers of DC comics became notorious for the use of heavily plotted stories which often depended on the contrivances of villains seeking to trap or hoodwink the stories' heroes. "Nightmare" is first and foremost a "trap" story, beginning with an absurd but eye-catching opening. Green Arrow, somewhat on the outs with his girlfriend Black Canary, decides to buy her a box of roses. He shows up at her house, greets her (in her civilian ID as Dinah Lance), gives her the box-- and out of the box spring a pair of creatures that resemble the harpies of Greek myth. Arrow and Canary try to fight the monsters, then flee the house-- only to find that the harpies disappear a moment or two later. The archer calls on his power-ring partner to help him investigate the attack-- and therein lies the trap. Without dwelling too much on the particulars of the ramshackle plot, Green Lantern's old foe Sinestro and his previously-unseen sister are behind the whole thing: they contrive to menace the Lantern's friends in order to draw him out of hiding, so that they can lay their trap.

It's useless to critique O'Neil's story in terms of verisimilitude-- to object that a villain as resourceful as Sinestro surely could have found a more efficacious way to draw out the Emerald Guardian; one less dependent on anticipating Green Arrow's wooing habits. In all likelihood O'Neil contrived this wild, thoroughly improbable opening primarily to sell the issue to young readers and for no other reason. A secondary benefit is that the flower-store gimmick gives Arrow and Canary something to investigate after the Lantern has been trapped, and the same gimmick makes it possible for them to save their friend after having accidentally put him in danger. But more importantly, such a critique is ultimately irrelevant, since I'm concerning myself not with consistency of character, but the way the symbols are utilized.

The substance of Sinestro's trap is that he tricks an entire civilization-- one made up of the harpies, a group of huge Amazon women, and a ruler who calls herself Medusa-- into doing his dirty work in trying to kill his enemy. Green Lantern, upon encountering these leftovers from the mythic past, gets a quick-and-dirty explanation for their animus toward men. Their entire city was hurled into a dimensional other-world by an ancient wizard, who was pissed because Medusa laughed at his marriage-proposal. Apparently this is the only "feminist" issue in the story-- essentially, that some men do some shitty things to women-- although once or twice Black Canary gives Green Arrow a hard time for his overbearing masculinity.

Even for comic books, dumping together harpies, Amazons, and snake-haired Medusa makes for a pretty motley myth-crew (further complicated by Adams dropping the motif of Medusa's scary petrifying face, and instead giving her a headful of snakes that can strangle their victims). I must admit that some mythographers, notably Robert Graves, have argued that the legendary Amazons of Libya worshipped Medusa as a more horrific version of the martial goddess Athena. I suppose it's possible that Denny O'Neil happened across this factoid and wrote it into his story, but I've read many of O'Neil's comics-tales and he doesn't impress me as a mythophile. It could just as easily be true that O'Neil was unaware of the mythographers' connection between Medusa and the Amazons, and that he just associated these figures because in their traditional stories they are opposed to normative Greek patriarchy-- the Amazons, because they maintain a role-reversed female-centric society, and Medusa because she's raped by Poseidon but goes on to menace mortals as a monstrous gorgon. Still, harpies don't really have a place in the equation. They've been variously interpreted as wind spirits and spirits who torment the dead, so they really don't fit in with the theme of women treated badly by patriarchal males. It may be that they're only there because Neal Adams felt like drawing harpies.

O'Neil's script states that Sinestro stumbled across the exiled Amazons by accident, somehow figured out that they were man-haters, and so enlisted his sister, the so-called "Witch Queen" to approach the Amazons. One of the martial maidens sums up their program: "to make all men pay for the crime of the wizard." But, even granting comics' penchant for absurd premises, it's hard to see how Sinestro's sister could convince the Amazons and harpies that any particular man should be pulled into their world and executed, as they attempt to do to Green Lantern.

One fan complained that the O'Neil/Adams story trivialized the subject of feminism by simply using a bunch of female monsters as the hero's adversaries. I might have validated a story that was simply out-and-out gynophobic, like certain EC horror-stories that I'll be addressing in future. But O'Neil and Adams maintain the butt-kicking Black Canary as an icon of formidable femininity, so the creators certainly aren't downgrading women as a whole. Perhaps the key to this awkward, inconsistent tale is that of male melodrama, for when Green Lantern is hauled before Medusa, he's condemned to death simply for "being like he who banished us" Black Canary shows up and talks Medusa out of killing the hero by revealing that they've been manipulated by another man, rather than being helped by a fellow female. So the moral, such as it is, is not to assume that shared sex organs mean shared interests.

It's also interesting that although the Amazons don't like being in the dimensional otherverse, nothing whatever is said in the story's hurry-up-and-finish conclusion about Green Lantern or his fellow superheroes freeing them from their exile. Granted, such a motley crew wouldn't fit in on modern Earth, but it seems like even the narrative's author wanted to get rid of these female foes as soon as he'd conceived them-- an interesting contrast to the more incisive treatment of feminine concerns in the earlier "Star Sapphire" stories in this title.

BRONZE AGE THOUGHTS

I recently came across this Roy Thomas observation from DRACULA LIVES #1 (1973):

"It's our firm conviction that at least a sizable portion of the future of comics lies in a larger, more expensive, even more mature product than today's color-comics market is structured to allow. In a day when Playboy and other magazines sell for a buck (and more, on such gala holidays as Christmas, New Year, and Hugh Hefner's birthday)--in a day when a forty- or fifty cent cover price is possible only to a magazine of tremendous initial circulation--in short, in a time of creeping inflation, rampant overcrowding of the newsstands--we felt that, even though Marvel's popularity is at an all-time high, we'd be fools and klutzes not to experiment with other prices, other sizes, other formats."

It's my theory that what Thomas was saying in '73 was by then common wisdom for Marvel since about 1970-71. I've always considered the Bronze Age-- which I place in 1970-- to be a new era because that's when the Big Two took their first faltering steps toward "adult entertainment," as represented by Marvel's CONAN and DC's GREEN LANTERN. I must admit that there's a big marketing difference in the two, since the former was aiming for success based on the popularity of the paperback Howard reprints while the latter was a gamble aimed at keeping a failing book alive.  Still, both are predicated on appealing to non-juvenile interests.

That Thomas was thinking in this wise long before 1973 is evinced in the 1971 premiere of SAVAGE TALES, for which Roy is billed as "associate editor." The idea of appealing to an older market would be a logical step since it's commonly asserted that sales in the late 1960s went way down, as the superhero bubble, prompted in part by the BATMAN teleseries, went kerblooey.

Marvel-- which also attempted to corner the underground market with the 1974-76 COMIX BOOK-- seems to have been more heavily invested in developing this market than DC, or even Warren. I've read very little of Silver Age Warren, so I don't know if its horror and war stories were on a par with the more mature stories of EC Comics, nor do I know whether or not the Warren audience skewed older than that of Marvel and DC. Warren did begin VAMPIRELLA in 1969, so that would seem to be a more overt courting of an adult audience by Warren, using sex-and-violence in much the same way Marvel used Conan. 

On a side-note, I'd opine that the Marvel guys never seemed to get a handle on adult horror: most of the b&w horror stuff had the same tone as the color comics.  

In 1973 it probably made all the sense in the world to assume that magazines would be a secure foundation on which a comics-company could build. For one thing, the company could expect to raise prices when other magazines did, and not lose out, as DC allegedly did when they tried to maintain 25-cent comics against Marvel's 20-centers.  But then, who could have predicted that the digital revolution would come close to making all magazine entertainment irrelevant?

ABJECTION APOLOGIA, PT. 1

In a recently closed thread on THE BEAT, Heidi offered some photos depicting her opinion of "what it actually looks like when men are sexualized."

Not surprisingly, I find this a very problematic definition of sexualization-- even more problematic than that of Kelly Thompson.  This visual definition certainly leaves no room for viewing sexual display as something positive, as A. Sherman Barros writes in this essay:

Female body and female power are not and need not be separate realms, something that has not yet been realized by infantile feminists that keep crying out not only for total de-eroticization of art (including its modern popular expression in comics and films), but for its de-sexualization by the erasure of representation of all secondary sexual characteristics. When sex is viewed as a threat, mental disturbance is not very far away.  


I suggest that Heidi's principal rhetorical point in displaying these NSFW photos is not properly an illustration of sexualization in all its multifarious forms, but to portray a particular state of sexual abjection. This state is more or less identical with Ms. McDonald's estimation of the status of all or most sexualization for female comics-characters, who are not infrequently the victims of "boob-windows, brokebacks, etc."  Abjection is, I submit, just one aspect of sexualization as it has been depicted in art and literature.

There are many dimensions to the matter of sexual abjection which I'll address in a future essay. In this post, however, I only want to throw out a few examples of cover-featured male abjection, sometimes in relation to female characters, sometimes not. As I've written before on the subject of equity, I am not asserting that there are necessarily more depictions of male abjection than female abjection. But I do assert that if one does not take into account how this visual trope is used for both genders, one cannot come to any meaningful conclusions on the subject.

I've already cited the first example with respect to the rather jejune assertion that any sort of "assault with a long object" should be automatically viewed as a form of rape.

Then there's the time that the Flash went the bondage-guy one better, and hired himself out to the foot-fetish community.

As a young fan, I remember writing DC Comics, claiming that I was tired of seeing Superman "dead, dying, or scared to death." Here's "dead:"

Here's "dying:"

And finally, "scared to death."

One may argue that not all of these depict sexual abjection. I have little doubt that I could find other covers more in line with the GREEN LANTERN "rape" cover. Yet it's a given that no matter how many such illustrations of male abjection I might display, the answer of those who advocate total and unstinting equity would always be, "But there's MORE covers showing Wonder Woman about to have a missile slam her in the lady parts!"  And this MAY be true, though I submit that it may not mean as much as some critics think it does.

More on the topic of abjection later. For now, I must address one of the responses made to my comments on the aforementioned closed thread.