NEAR-MYTHS: "THREAT OF THE HIGH-RISE BUILDINGS" (FLASH #185, 1969)

 While in one of my meditations the other day, I happened to think about the Silver Age FLASH series, and the image of this cover popped into my mind. This was unusual because I usually conjure with "peak experiences" in comics-reading, and this was kind of a "null-experience." Though I've usually a very retentive memory, I had no memory of this issue's story, written by Frank Robbins and drawn by Ross Andru, though I knew that I had read and still possessed the issue.

So is the cornily-titled tale all about the Flash, that sterling defender of law and order, being assailed by lawless hippies (who hypocritically advocate "make peace not war" while whaling on the hero)? Not in the least. What the story's mainly about is the trope much beloved in Silver Age (by editor Julie Schwartz if not so much by fans): extreme dislocations of Planet Earth and familiar monuments of Earth. Hence "high-rise buildings" around the world, among them the Eiffel Tower, all start getting pulled into the sky by forces unknown.

Barry "Flash" Allen just happens to be in Gay Paree on a second honeymoon with wife Iris when the catastrophe hits the entire world. In addition to the loss of the world's tallest buildings, radio and TV communication, then dependent on radio towers, goes down the "tubes," so to speak. Fortunately Barry seems to have reached out, in his police-scientist capacity, to Surete Inspector Martell, for in spite of the chaos, Barry's immediately able to become Martell's aide-de-camp in investigating the perplexing matter. I commend author Robbins for providing a soupcon of logic to Barry's easy egress to the Surete. However, it's really a little too easy that Barry and Martell are provided with the royal road to the solution, when a call from the local "radio-telescope space station" catches Martell's attention, not too long after Barry has theorized that the calamity may have its origins in outer space.

By the power of the omniscient narrator, we're introduced to the Titanians, aliens who seem to think that Earth has attacked them with "disruptive radio emissions." Despite living on the Saturnian moon Tttan, the Titanians don't seem to have even been aware of life on the third rock from the sun, and despite Barry's odd comment about an "irrational" intelligence, the aliens only become aware of Earth thanks to the space station's attempt to reach extraterrestrials via radio broadcasts. (Why these emissions were so much more powerful than, say, broadcasts of the LONE RANGER show is anyone's guess.) But AFTER stealing all the tall monuments on "that mad planet Solar-3," THEN the aliens decide to send a vessel to suss out the natives.

So we're thirteen pages in, and the advent of the ship FINALLY makes it possible for Barry to become the costumed Flash. But he can't penetrate the ship (in which the aliens have also accidentally abducted Iris), and the emissaries from Titan also show that the French military can't hurt them either.

To their credit, the Titanians attempt to communicate with the Earthlings, but their translators transmit only goobledygook. The Flash manages to speed on board the vessel, and he gets the sense that the Titanians are peaceful, but can't talk to them. This situation is eventually leads to the only mythic kernel in the story, for it turns out that the mechanical translators have tried to collate all the multifarious languages of Earth. This is actually a pretty good take on the usual "instant translation" trope, though I can't swear Robbins was the first to come up with this novel interpretation. In due time Flash and Iris are able to download almost the whole human language into the Titanian computers just by, well, talking and talking and talking. So everyone makes nice and the aliens return all the monuments, which, as Robbins belatedly mentions, were unoccupied because the Titanians scheduled their retaliation on a Sunday.

But, wait-- where were the hippies?

Well, since the Golden Age it was standard that when aliens came calling on Earth, they often met gangsters seeking to abscond with their technology for the imaginative purpose of robbing banks. And that's the sole motivation on the mind of Parisian gangster Le Loup, who, in the midst of incredible societal chaos, can only think of killing the aliens to get their magnetic tech for robbing banks.

And this wolfish fellow does so by marshaling a few dozen young people-- only a few of whom look like hippies-- to sucker the Titanians with an overture of peace. Slightly in keeping with the cover, this is pure hypocrisy, covering an attempt at assassination, which the Flash handily prevents.

I don't know precisely why Robbins chose to set the adventure in Paris. From the standpoint of building-stealing, the story could have happened in New York, and Barry and Iris could have witnessed the swiping of the Empire State. But putting it the whole thing in Paris does remind the American reader that there are numerous other non-English languages on the planet, and this would set up the big reveal of the mystery. By an odd coincidence, the cover-date of "High-Rise" is February 1969, which almost certainly means that the raconteurs began the story sometime in late 1968. Counterculture protests were much on the public mind in the U.S., of course, which explains the American look of the bad hippies on the cover. But as it happens, that year was also the year when Paris came to a standstill thanks to concerted protests and labor-strikes throughout the city. Was this event, which still has strong associations in French culture today, on Frank Robbins' radar back in the day? Possibly, and if so, then Le Loup might be the author's re-imagining of Alain Gesmar, reworked into a ruthless petty thief.

MYTHCOMICS: "A THING IS BORN" ( BROTHER POWER #1-2, 1968)

What a difference an issue makes.

Back in February, I devoted two essays-- here and here-- to stories in which DC raconteurs revived Joe Simon's 1968 character "Brother Power the Geek." I preceded these formal analyses with the essay SIMON SESSION, which provided an informal overview of Simon's post-Kirby career. I stated that I'd only read the first of BROTHER POWER's two issues, and that, though I found "a few interesting mythopoeic touches" in the first issue, I didn't think I was missing much in not having read the second one.

However, I recently acquired the second and last issue of BROTHER POWER, and upon giving both issues a more intensive reading, I've decided that, inconclusive though the story is, it sustains enough complication to rank as a mythically satisfying story-arc. In a similar vein, I rated Wally Wood's THE KING OF THE WORLD as a mythcomic, even though the second part of Wood's serial didn't provide the same quality.

Nothing can be said about Simon's "Geek-out" project without stating that it was one of various attempts by DC Comics to court the so-called "youth culture" of the late Silver Age. Earlier I summed up these attempts by saying, 'I did not read BROTHER POWER back in the day, and what little I initially heard about it made it sound like another misguided attempt by way-over-30 comics-makers to appeal to young readers by trying to sound “hip.”'

There's no question that Joe Simon was a middle-aged man at the time he created Brother Power, and moreover, since he identified himself as a Republican, it might seem incongruous for him to attempt a heartfelt evocation of the hippie ethos. Indeed, the cover-copy for issue #1 tries to suggest that the story will give the readers a titillating look at the "dangers in hippie-land." This ballyhoo was an outright lie, but it sort of fits the serial's often carnivalesque mood. Though I've never read any of the issues of SICK that Simon edited during the 1960s, I'd hypothesize that by 1968 he'd already touched on counterculture topics in his "magazine of sick humor," and that in BROTHER POWER he was trying to meld his taste for such humor with the requirements of a superhero title.  At the same time, BROTHER POWER labored under a lot of restrictions, for the Comics Code couldn't allow depictions of the sex and drugs associated with the hippie movement. Yet it seems unlikely that Simon would have taken advantage of the freedom of the "underground comics movement" had he been given it. Indeed, whereas most DC raconteurs merely pasted a few "hip" phrases or motifs over completely traditional stories, Simon's GEEK is interesting in that he understood at least a few aspects of the counterculture, but chose, for the most part, to subvert that ethos with his own conservative outlook.

Here's a bullet-point breakdown of events in the two issues, which I've conflated under the first chapter-heading in issue 1, "A Thing is Born:"

(1) In 1968 San Francisco, a small community of "peace and love" hippies find themselves continually bullied by a gang of nasty bikers. (Cops, who probably persecuted hippies far more than bikers, are at most an incidental threat in "Thing.") The battered longhairs retreat to an abandoned tailor shop-- specifically abandoned because of the hippies' "unkempt" presence-- and try to clean their blood-soiled garments. One hippie, Brother Max. has soaked his clothes so much that he's afraid they'll shrink, so he puts them on a life-size tailor's dummy. Then, for the next three seasons, all of the hippies apparently forget about both the clothes and the dummy, which just sits in the tailor shop, soaking up various substances-- blood, dust, rain and machine oil. (This bit of forgetfulness, as well as some of the other things the youths do, might suggest that there was indeed some drug-consumption going on, and that Simon just didn't show it.) Once three seasons have gone by, a providential lightning bolt strikes the dummy, and brings it to life. 

Moments later, the bikers conveniently decide-- a whole nine months later-- to take over the hippies' "pad." Brother Power, converted by the lightning into a super-strong golem (my term), routs the mean motorcyclists. The hippies, who call one another "brother" (no sisters are around at the time), dub the living dummy "Brother Power." One of the less generous youths also calls him a "geek," though this was probably meant to follow from an earlier line in which a biker calls the dummy a "freak." But the connection was lost when editors forbade Simon from using the term "freak" for his protagonist, forcing the less logical substitution of "geek."

(2) Brother Power, initially mute, learns to talk, and though he's not very attractive at the start, the hippies accept him as one of their own. However, the Geek's presence amid the hippies attracts the attention of a group of evil circus-people, who run "the Psychedelic Circus."

The Circus-People kidnap Power so that they can exhibit him in a full-fledged freakshow. The addled hippies want Power back, but somehow get sidetracked when they decide that their enemies, the bikers, must be the real culprits behind the kidnapping. This inspires one of the daffier scenes in the story, in which the hippies dress up in superhero costumes and confront the bikers with a "comic book hero happening." Of course the bikers again beat up the hippies, after which they protest that they're innocent of this particular crime. Only by pure chance do two hippies stumble across the current location of the Psychedelic Circus. Then, by dint of uncharacteristic bravery, they save Brother Power from a freakshow that looks strongly influenced by the artwork of "Big Daddy' Roth.

(3) Cindy, the first hippie-girl with an actual name-- as well as the only female character of consequence--  stitches the somewhat damaged dummy together, and also pretties him up a little. This inspires romantic inclinations in Power. However, instead of trying for some of that "free love," Brother Power seeks to impress his lady-love the old-fashioned way: by Getting Ahead in Life. With some support from his fellow freaks, Power runs for president, on a platform of "love, peace... flower power." Unfortunately, the only thing the campaign accomplishes is that it makes the Circus-People aware of Power's whereabouts. The poor losers trump up charges against Power and set the cops on his tail. The distressed dummy goes on the run, and then does a "King Kong" off the Golden Gate Bridge, disappearing into the bay-- for the time being.

(4) Issue #2 picks up with Power, temporarily "dead" from his immersion, being fished from the bay and set up in what seems a patently Christ-like posture. Power's rescuers are a bunch of "urchins" called "the Clinkers," who look somewhat like a gang from a 1950s "jay-dee" film. The Clinkers, like the hippies before them, are oppressed by another group of goofballs: "the Berlin Airplanes," young guys who dress like World War One fighter-pilots and even pilot their own glider. During an Airplane-attack, Power comes back to life and trounces the intruders with a none-too-peaceful outburst of violence. However, despite being made part of the Clinker community, the dummy doesn't care for their do-nothing ways any more than he did for the hippies' inactivity. Power seeks employment at a grocery store, sounding like a character out of Horatio Alger when he states that he doesn't "mind starting at the bottom." Predictably, he doesn't remain in the position of a simple grocery stock-boy for long. 

(5) Diligence at the grocery-store leads Power to a new job at a plant that makes missiles for space exploration, but, as will later be established, has no connection with munitions. At the same time that the Geek goes to work on the factory's assembly-line, the owners are worried that they may soon go bankrupt if they don't solve their current production problems. They've opted to bring in a supposed mathematical genius, Lord Sliderule, who dresses in Renaissance clothes and is accompanied by tumbling dwarfs (!)  Sliderule only accepts the job so that he can eventually sell the factory's secrets to foreign powers, but before he can even make a phony pronouncement, Brother Power figures out a solution to the problem. Power is promoted to plant foreman but he naively allows the dethroned Sliderule and his flunkies to remain employed on the assembly-line.

(6) Though he's forbidden from using sex or drugs, Simon does manage to work in a hippie-protest. Power's old longhaired chums show up, under the impression that the factory is making missiles for wartime use. (This is as close as the stories dare come to a countercultural take on the conflict in Vietnam.) Power soon sets them straight, and even gets them to give up their lotus-eater lives and become productive citizens.

However, vengeful Sliderule sabotages a test-missile and makes it look like the Geek done it. It comes out that Power is still wanted from last issue, so the Governor of California-- an unnamed but very recognizable Ronald Reagan-- calls for Power's arrest. Again the misunderstood mannequin flees, this time hiding in one of the factory's missiles. Sliderule sets off the missile, and Brother Power is sent into orbit. The villains are arrested, and the story ends as the hippies wonder if they'll ever see their Geek again.

It's probably just as well that Simon never let the completed third issue be seen, for the two-issue arc, though very episodic, probably represents everything Simon had to say about the counterculture. I don't for a moment think that he was as personally fascinated with the subject as he claims in a promotional text-piece. I believe he saw, as much as any artist of the time could, that the counterculture represented a potential shift in values. As a professional creator, he wanted to see if he could make a living from his take on it-- even though, as I said, he frequently undercuts most of the most cherished images of the ethos. His hippies are good-hearted but generally foolish, and even their rejection of what Simon calls the "grey flannel, split-level world" is cast aside when their charismatic leader convinces them of the value of good hard work. Brother Power talks a lot about peace, but both of his stories display roughly the same amount of fighting as a Captain America tale. Only in one area does Simon hold something in common with the hippie ethos. A lot of male hippies were accused of being no less chauvinistic than the majority culture, and in the short-lived world of Brother Power, females exist only as sources of "romantic inspiration"-- making quite a marked contrast to the gynocentric bias of Rachel Pollak's above-mentioned GEEK reboot.

In closing I should address Simon's claim to sole authorship. He receives sole credit on the title-pages of both issues, but it was eventually revealed that the pencils were actually provided by Al Bare, a Golden Age comics-artist who had worked with Simon at SICK MAGAZINE. However, since Simon made assorted claims about having stage-managed many of the artists with whom he worked-- including Jack Kirby-- it doesn't seem unlikely that Bare may have worked from breakdowns or even just thumbnails provided by Simon, so that in essence Bare may have been drawing things exactly as Simon wanted them, even right down to the "Big Daddy" Roth visual quote. Originally I didn't care for Bare's mix of frivolity and sombre freakishness. However, now I find that at times the art communicates a lyrical charm, one not entirely at odds with the counterculture's emphasis on visual intensity. 

ONE NULL, ONE NEAR: SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5 (1989)

            

Since Neil Gaiman was never the regular writer on the SWAMP THING title, it may be that his stories for 1989’s SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5 were just fill-in works, or possibly audition-tales. Though I’ve labeled one story a “null-myth” and the other a “near myth,” both languish under the long shadow of Alan Moore’s tenure on the feature.

“Brothers” is the null-myth here: a good idea that never quite works, despite Neil Gaiman’s considerable talents. The living dummy known as Brother Power the Geek has remained out in space for roughly twenty years, only to suddenly crash to Earth. Brother Power not only survives, he has no understanding that any time has passed, and still speaks in hippie-talk. He has apparently gained a new power, though, in that he can now assemble new bodies for himself out of random junk, and expand said bodies to giant-size, so that he becomes an unwitting peril to the citizens of Tampa, Florida.

The “monster-menacing-city” structure of the story is strongly indebted to a two-part Alan Moore story in SWAMP THING #52-53, and Gaiman more or less admits the indebtedness by having two of Swamp Thing’s support-characters called in to consult on the matter of "The Flower-Child That Time Forgot." Swamp Thing himself is not present in either of the annual’s stories, due to events in the regular title. Still, Gaiman picks up on the character’s basic concept—at least as it was re-imagined by Moore, that of making the muck-monster into a plant-elemental—and declares that Brother Power was created by a process analogous to the one that created Swamp Thing. Abby Arcane, the Swamp Thing’s wife, receives an oracle that says Brother Power is “a doll god—a puppet elemental—like others before it.”

Gaiman does not choose to say more than this, however, and so the idea of what a “puppet elemental” might be is dropped. (Was Pinocchio one of the “Parliament of Puppets?”) Eventually the problem is solved when the other support-character, belated hippie Chester, gets Brother Power’s attention, talks with him a little, and then sends him on his way. Given that most of Gaiman’s observations on the generation of the Flower People are trite, it may be that the story’s main point was to bring Joe Simon’s most peculiar creation out of mothballs—though Gaiman does a decent job with his characterizations of Chester and Abby.

“Shaggy God Stories” might sound like a myth-nerd’s dream, though the tale fails to be more than the sum of its parts. The story focuses upon a character whom Moore adapted early in his run: Jason Woodrue, a super-villain so obsessed with plants that he mutated himself into a plant-human hybrid. Woodrue, more than a little crazy, wanders into the domain of the Parliament of Trees, the largely immobile plant-elementals who preceded Swamp Thing. For most of the tale, Woodrue meditates on the many ways in which trees and other plants have been intertwined with the lives of holy men and deities. He seeks out the Parliament, rambling about gods and trees, and finally reveals that, “I want to be a god too.” The representative of the Parliament gives Woodrue no satisfaction, though he gives the former super-villain a warning about a future danger. The deranged plant-man pays no attention and wanders away, and the story ends on the suggestion of a future menace, which eventually manifests in the Doug Wheeler SWAMP THING run.

Still, limited as the story’s scope is, it does toss out a few good myth-kernels, particularly at the opening, when Woodrue mediates on the “two trees” of the Bible’s Eden narrative. I find it particularly interesting that Gaiman has Woodrue harp on the existence of the “two trees” at the story’s  opening, because “two trees” also figure in the next and last major appearance (as of this writing) of Brother Power, the Geek.   

ADDENDA: On this forum a poster shared a part of a Gaiman interview from an online source that no longer seems extant. In the spirit of knowledge I share Gaiman's statement on the Annual here:

"I was going to bring [Woodrue] back as a villain. He was getting back to being Woodrue, the Rue of the Wood, and probably on a much bigger scale, a much nastier scale. It would have been fun, but again it didn't happen.
I probably would have brought back Black Orchid in there. I don't know, because as I said, it never got that far. Rick still had a few issues. I talked to Rick, we sort of co-plotted Rick's last few episodes, which never saw print."

SIMON SESSION

     

As I’m going to be devoting some essays to a Joe Simon creation—though not in a review per se—I decided to devote some space to Simon's career.

In this essay I argued that it’s hard to assess the authorship of anything Jack Kirby “wrote” in his two long-term collaborations with, respectively, Joe Simon and Stan Lee. But at least with Kirby, he was solely responsible for both art and script on a assortment of later works, and a critic can examine said works to garner some idea of Kirby’s creative tendencies. And though Lee never drew any of his comics-work, one can also gain some idea of his creative propensities from those works in which the artists largely followed his scripts without much personal input.

Following the dissolution of Joe Simon’s partnership with Kirby, though, almost nothing Simon authored has accrued a fan-base. I’ve argued that he may have provided “quality control” for Jack Kirby, whose wild creativity sometimes resulted in incoherent narratives. However, very little of the material Simon authored without Kirby shows even modest creativity.

I confess that I’ve no personal acquaintance with Simon’s work on SICK MAGAZINE in the 1960s—and I’ve the impression that few fans from the period paid close attention to what seemed like just another MAD imitator. The most one can say is that it must have had something going for it to have lasted as long as it did.

Considerably less successful was the superhero line Simon engineered for Harvey Comics in the mid-1960s. Most if not all of the features edited, and sometimes written, by Simon have a tedious, gimmicky quality to them. Some fans have speculated that the line only came out because someone at Harvey knew about ABC-TV’s impending adaptation of the Batman franchise. Most of the Harvey superheroes have a constipated 1950s look to them, and even the most formulaic of Jack Kirby’s DC work, during the actual 1950s, looks good by comparison.

Discounting the last collaboration of Simon and Kirby on DC’s 1970s SANDMAN title—which indirectly gave birth to the franchise associated with Neil Gaiman—only the two-issue wonder BROTHER POWER—THE GEEK seems to have earned a modest following in fandom.

I did not read BROTHER POWER back in the day, and what little I initially heard about it made it sound like another misguided attempt by way-over-30 comics-makers to appeal to young readers by trying to sound “hip.” Moreover, the covers of the two issues were both unusually dark and suggestive of horrific interiors. In actuality, the interior art, drawn by Simon’s SICK collaborator Al Bare, reflected more in the way of antic humor than of ghastly grue.

To this date, I have not read the second BROTHER POWER issue, and don’t have the first one close to hand. I recall a few interesting mythopoeic touches in the first issue, though. One is the protagonist’s origin. He—or rather, it-- starts out as a tailor’s dummy. A bolt of lightning brings the dummy to life in the tradition of the cinematic creation of the Frankenstein Monster, and upon gaining sentience the dummy acts much like the movie-monster: perpetually baffled by the customs and contrivances of humankind. The now-living dummy is adopted by a handful of lovably goofy hippies, who give him clothes and face-painting to make him one of them.

They also give him a name with a certain mythic resonance: Brother Power. Simon was certainly exposed to the catchphrase most often associated with hippie culture: that of “flower power.” The idea was slightly oxymoronic in that the hippies knew that flowers had no power as such: that they could only seduce people away from the paths of militancy and violence by inculcating a love of beauty and fellowship. Simon may have concocted the name “Brother Power” out of a partial understanding of this ideal, for the hippie-hero—never a superhero in the accepted sense of the word—tended to use his ill-defined powers mostly in a defensive manner.

Finally, in his initial outing Brother Power is called a “geek” by someone or other; hence the additional name in the comic book’s title. Originally Simon had wanted the character to be addressed as a “freak,” because he apparently realized that this was an early instance of insult-reclamation. Squares called hippies “freaks,” and the hippies reclaimed the epithet to connote their ingroup’s specialness, as seen in Gilbert Shelton’s FABULOUS FURRY FREAK BROTHERS. The story goes that DC was afraid that the word “freak” would suggest the drug-culture to readers, even though drugs are not even referenced in the initial issue. Thus Simon was obliged to substitute the sound-alike “geek,” simply because it too could be used as a term of opprobrium. 

Simon completed a third issue of the comic book before the DC hierarchy shut the magazine down, but that issue remains inaccessible to most fans. The second issue ended with Brother Power being trapped inside a space-rocket and launched away from Earth by Ronald Reagan himself, who at the time had become a conservative icon during his stint as the governor of California.  

 And that is the point from which Neil Gaiman started, when he briefly brought the Geek back into the hallowed halls of DC.