A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 2

My first crossover-category is that is THE HIGH STATURE CROSSOVER. This is usually a crossover of two or more characters/presences that have embodied PRIME stature in earlier narratives, though there are some exceptions to this rule.

An early example of a literary crossover is that of Rider Haggard's SHE AND ALLAN, in which Haggard's two most famous characters encountered one another for the course of one novel.

In comics, of course, Timely Comics provided a major model for the future when its editors crossed over two of its continuing features, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. However, the character's intermittent encounters were not limited to one interaction, but went on for much of both characters' original runs.

These characters also briefly crossed over in the very short-lived team title, ALL WINNERS SQUAD-- which factoid leads me to mention that I've reversed the position I expressed in THE LOGIC AND APPEAL OF CROSSOVERS, where I said that I did not deem "hero-teams" to be crossovers. Now I tend to say that they definitely are when the majority of the team-members maintain their own separate features. The principle may even extend to characters who had moderately substantial features of their own before being revived by other publishers. Thus the Golden Age character "Miss Victory," who lasted for about five years as a backup feature in an anthology comic, was "ret-conned" to stand alongside a bunch of newbie characters in the Americomics title FEMFORCE (which would later pursue many other similar public-domain revivals).

All of these characters are incidents of two Primes interacting. However, in some cases a Prime may appear in another Prime's series in such a way that the former becomes a Sub-- but without a concomitant loss of charisma. For instance, Donald Duck was conceived as a 1931 animated cartoon character long before Uncle Scrooge appeared in a 1947 comic book. Yet whenever Donald and his three nephews appeared in the UNCLE SCROOGE stories, Scrooge was the Prime, as the stories were primarily about him. Yet in a sense Donald and the nephews were an integral part of the Scrooge mythos, in part because regular readers always had some knowledge that Donald existed in his own cosmos alongside that of Scrooge.

To conclude this post, I'll add that on occasion an iconic character will be partly revised for the needs of a later crossover. The original King Kong has but one story, at the end of which he perishes, never to return, at least not at the hands of his creators. However, when the company that owned Kong leased him out to Toho Studios, Kong was revised in many respects-- most significantly, making him large enough that he could stand toe to toe with the Big G. This Kong is not really the original Kong, but there exists a sort of "crypto-continuity" between the two, so that I regard this crossover as a crossover of two Primes, simply because Kong II is meant to be a strong echo of the original icon.

More to come.

MYTHCOMICS: "DESIGN FOR DEATH" (CAPT AMERICA #67, 1948)

In the late forties, the crime and horror genres rose as the superhero books fell out of favor. As a reaction to this trend, the last dozen or so issues of CAPTAIN AMERICA COMICS largely eschewed stories of hard-hitting pulp action in favor of moralistic stories of youths gone wrong or peculiar terror-tales. (One of the last Golden Age "Captain America" stories featured the Red Skull, who's died and gone to hell, trying to suck his star-spangled enemy down into perdition with him.) Most of these stories are not memorable. Yet "Design for Death," nominally a Human Torch story. shows some anonymous scripter (and an artist whose GCD provisionally identifies as Bob Oskner) playing out a "funny crime" story owing something to Thorne Smith.

The Torch and his flaming partner Toro get to play a part akin to Eisner's "The Spirit," in that the two heroes play a rather minimal role in someone else's story. For some reason, the crusaders pay crime-writer Ted Sparks a visit, and find that he's left a weird note on his door about blood being all over the floors. Apparently the note was just the writer's way of getting the heroes in the door with a modicum of suspense, for Sparks is present in his apartment, using a fishing-pole to haul in his mail and rambling about "a beautiful woman's blood." Then this bookish, bespectacled fellow starts talking about how he thinks he's been thrown over by Peggy, "the woman who captured my gentle heart," because he committed the sin of asking her to darn his socks. Somehow, Sparks turns his rage against Peggy onto himself in a classic statement of negative compensation: "What she needs is a brute! A powerful, ruthless and clever brute is the only kind of man a woman should have!"

Though on page two Sparks said that he "can't write" because of his mental turmoil, his rant inspires him to try putting his "masterful brute of crime fiction on paper." The heroes leave, remarking on his "negative inspiration" and considering the possibility of seeking out Peggy, since they've nothing better to do but play Miss Lonelyhearts. An hour passes, and the irate writer falls asleep, apparently conjuring "civilization's most ruthless male," a handsome, semi-clad figure who takes the devilish name of "Mephisto." This Mephisto proceeds to act on Sparks' submerged desires by conquering the heart of a society beauty attending some sort of charity benefit. The Torch and Toro happen to be there, but Mephisto douses both of them with water. However, the handsome "brute" meets defeat anyway, for the society-woman, though initially thrilled by Mephisto's caveman approach, spurns him for not being in the social register.

Nothing daunted, the would-be seducer dashes off to the opera, where he comes on two separate hotties. One repulses him because he sings like a  foghorn, and another one refuses him because he admits to being penniless. Then the Torch and Toro show up and encircle Mephisto with flames-- at which point it's revealed that Mephisto never existed except in Ted Sparks' dream-- which ends when he realizes that his sleeve has caught fire from a nearby candle.

To cap things off, the Torch and Toro return with Peggy in tow. Peggy reveals that the only reason she didn't have time for Sparks was because she realized that his old socks weren't worth darning, and that she proceeded to knit him some new ones. Sparks is deeply impressed with her feminine devotion and contrasts this with his own male aggression: "She knits while I kill and kidnap!" The tale ends on a comfy reconciliation, though it's rather different from dozens of other comic-book tales in which men who doubt their manhood get to prove themselves. Instead, "Design" shows a neurotic crime-story writer becomes tortured by his lack of masculinity, and by story's end he never really proves anything. Indeed, given that even in his imagination fantasy-women won't yield to him, it seems possible that Peggy's submissive nature may just be a matter of her "stooping to conquer." So, even if Sparks does keep his devilish imagination under control, he may find that she has her own "designs" about who'll wear the pants in the family.

NEAR-MYTHS: ["HUMAN TORCH'S ORIGIN"] (MARVEL COMICS #1. 1939)

In a couple of essays like this one, I've established that I don't think Carl Burgos' Human Torch feature ever lived up to its potential. While no one would expect an early Golden Age superhero to excel into didactic or dramatic terms, some of them are quite good in the mythopoeic department. The Torch, unfortunately, generates more heat than light.

There was a lot of potential for mythic "light" in Burgos' reworking of Mary Shelley's novel FRANKENSTEIN. Was Burgos aware of the book's subtitle, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, and that the subtitle referenced a Roman modification of the Greek Titan's history, one that gave Prometheus the ability to make men out of clay? If so, that might have provided the association between Prometheus the fire-thief and Prometheus the maker of artificial men-- resulting in the idea of a fiery android.

Or maybe the inspiration came from Universal's Frankenstein films, three of which had come to the big screen by the time of the Torch's first appearance (cover dated October 1939, meaning that it came out a few months previous). The cinematic monster had a legendary fear of fire, and so its possible that this eventuated in the idea of an artificial man who incarnated fire-- though personally, this seems to me more of a leap than the previous associational chain.

In any case, the first half of the origin is a masterpiece of potential myth. For no well defined reason, Professor Horton creates his flammable android, and is almost immediately convinced to seal him away, not unlike a guilty mind concealing a forbidden sin.

For a moment, Burgos gets some of the emotional sense of what it might be like, to be a man whose very body caused conspicuous destruction. 

However, the moment Burgos injects a common crook for the Torch's first real enemy, the story devolves into mediocrity.

I've read only a smattering of the original Human Torch's adventures, and though they display some interesting moments of grotesquerie, the feature never developed beyond a very basic pulp-action concept. Its strength depended almost entirely on the kinetic appeal of a man made of fire, flying through the air, tossing fireballs, and absorbing the flames of random fires. Even in his crossovers with the Sub-Mariner, the android comes off like a penny-ante hero, with no strong character of his own.

Given that the second Human Torch also didn't do too well in his own feature, it may be that the true myth of this "Promethean Frankenstein" has yet to be told.

REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE, PT. 1

For once I'm going to link to a UTILITARIAN post without dumping on its author. I'll still disagree with him, but this time I can see the difficulty of his position.

For some time a writer named Robert Stanley Martin has providing HU with an abbreviated look at the chronological publication of key North American comic books. He focuses only on what he calls "the aesthetic cream of the crop," an elitist position with which I disagree, as did a poster who replied:

Apparently, the “history of North American comic-book publishing” includes almost nothing other than Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, and Plastic Man books, with a bit of Disney thrown in. Seriously??? -

Martin defends his concentration on the cream of the crop, stating that he doesn't plan to include anything from, say, the Batman title except things like "the first appearances of Batman and Robin" and "the debuts of the better known villains."  By so doing, it goes without saying that Martin is deferring to the community of comics-critics who tend to marginalize Batman in favor of, say, Plastic Man. I might advance the counter-argument that even though Cole's Plastic Man may boast superior design-work than the best of the Batman artists, the former is not necessarily better written than the latter. Indeed, many of the Cole issues Martin cites are bland tales from the standpoint of the writing, and would never have earned their place amid the "aesthetic cream" if they had been drawn by a less heralded artist-- even if it was by one who was arguably Cole's equal in formal talent, like Paul Gustavson or Lou Fine.

Still, though I disagree with Martin's emphasis on artists who have been validated above their peers for dubious reasons, one of his points is unassailable. Neither he nor anyone else could or should try to include everything. If I attempted such a list, I'm sure that on first consideration I would default to the fannish tendency seen in comic book price guides: to focus on events in DC or Timely Comics that affected the later avatars of those companies-- the first battle between the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch, or the first appearance of the Injustice Gang of the World in the JUSTICE SOCIETY feature. Yet on second consideration, I think I'd realize that these events shouldn't be any more important than events that influenced comics whose publishers did not survive into the Silver Age.

Companies like Hillman, whose big seller was AIRBOY, seen here encountering the ghoulish villain Misery...

Or Lev-Gleason, which gave us the memorable multi-issue crossover of the villainous Claw and the original Daredevil-- part of which was drawn by Jack Cole.

As a pluralist I would maintain that these are as good examples of their genre as Plastic Man is, so I wouldn't concur with the elitist POV that puts them beyond consideration. (The reasons for that superficial opinion I'll detail elsewhere.) However, these examples raise another point: are only the "big events" worth considering in a pluralist "best of" list? Further, to extrapolate from a point Martin makes: are the first appearances of Batman's iconic villains their best "aesthetic" moments? Is the first Joker story the one every comics-fan ought to read? Will it tell the non-hardcore reader everything he wants to know about the Joker? Or would the reader be better off reading a less Gothic but arguably more "aesthetically pleasing' story like "The Joker's Millions" from DETECTIVE COMICS #180 (1952)?

Yet even with the most pluralist will in the world, something has to be left out, and one has to form some criteria for disinclusion. As a reader I feel less fondness for Carl Burgos' seminal "Human Torch" character than for his earlier, much goofier hero "the Iron Skull," shown below (with art by Sam Gilman) bouncing bullets off his indestructible noggin--

--yet I know that if push came to shove, my Golden-Age list would have to include some notation on Burgos' Human Torch, even if I thought it was a great concept that Burgos totally muffed. Old Iron Skull would have to be left behind in the annals of obscurity, because the Torch had one thing going for him that the Skull did not: a superior design, albeit by a less than superior artist.

I can't speak to Martin's aesthetic priorities, but I'll take a wild guess: like many critics influenced by the COMICS JOURNAL-- an influence he cites in another of his posts-- his choices are informed by a vision of comics becoming something other than what they were in the Golden Age. Cole's "Plastic Man" feature didn't really escape the genre-boundaries of the superhero, but a lot of critics, not least Art Spiegelman, pleased themselves to think that it did. That gave Cole's stretchy dogooder a luster that lifted it above the majority of Golden Age work-- not to mention the majority of Jack Cole's other comics work.

But, then, the question arises: how does one form standards for formula-work that was meant to be standard-less? I'm certainly not speaking only of the superhero genre, for which comics became famous, but all of the genres that were meant to be read quickly and tossed away. Is there anything in the first twenty years of ARCHIE that merits celebration, and if so, what makes those ARCHIE stories better than other comics in that genre, like Harry Lucey's GINGER and Morris Weiss' MARGIE?

My "mythcomics" feature was instituted to explore one of the four "potentialities" around which creators organize their narratives, and through which audiences experience them. This is an entirely feasible approach to assigning merit to formulaic material that sought to meet "aesthetic standards" only insofar as they promoted good sales, and thereby put money in the creators' pockets. However, though I consider myth-analysis to be a heuristic device to that of aesthetic criticism-- whose failings I pointed out here-- I must admit that the myth-criticism methodology must be firmly grounded in a sound understanding of the way popular art works-- which I'll cover in Part 2.

CREATIVE DIFFERENTIATIONS

“I interviewed Stan Lee three or four years ago for a magazine, and Stan’s like my hero. I was interviewing him, and he just brought up in the middle of it, he said, “What is wrong with you guys?” And I was like, “What do you mean?” He said, “Why do you want to do my characters instead of creating your own?” I was like, “That’s quite an interesting point, and I hadn’t really thought about it. I didn’t get into comics to create characters; I got into comics to write Superman or Spider-Man and all that kind of stuff.” And he says, “I grew up reading Tarzan and Superman and Batman, but I went off and created Spider-Man and the Hulk. Why do you want to play with the old toys?” It was a real moment for me. I just thought, “Shit. In pop-culture terms, how weird would it be if I was to reject all the characters?” That’s a gap in the market, essentially. ”--Mark Millar quoting Stan Lee in this interview.

I discovered this quote through a secondary source, this BEAT post, It's certainly conceivable that Stan said something like this, as he's not exactly known for his overall consistency.  I remember seeing him speak at a local convention from either the late 1970s or early 1980s, when the Claremont X-Men had just started to get popular with fans. When Lee was asked some question about the New X-Men, I recall him saying something like, "I don't know what was wrong with the original characters, but I guess these new ones are OK."  It was one of the few times I ever saw him express some feeling that he might have been in some way disappointed to see the new creators not follow the original setups of the Marvel Universe. Usually when fans asked Stan about current developments at Marvel, or about film/TV translations, he would plead ignorance of what was going on. This was probably true for the most part, though this posture also allowed him to avoid antagonizing the Marvel establishment with possibly unflattering remarks.

The quote from the Millar interview takes the opposite tack, expressing incredulity that anyone would want to "play with the old toys." On two levels, this statement strikes me as somewhat disingenuous, going by the definition, "pretending that one knows less about something than one really does."

First, I doubt that Stan wasn't flattered, back in the day, by meeting young fans who liked his characters enough to want to continue their adventures. From a pure business standpoint, it certainly worked out for him that Roy Thomas got even more deeply into Marvel continuity than Lee himself was, since Thomas indubitably had a knack for what Lee was doing and could produce material that furthered the sense of an ongoing "universe" of loosely connected events. But I'd imagine that it was stimulating on a personal level as well, in contrast to his encounters with professionals who could learn the Marvel style and reproduce it, but had no outstanding passion for the continuity-- as I would judge to be the case with other 1960s Marvel-scripters like O'Neil, Skeates and Goodwin.

Second, Stan is certainly enough of a businessman to know that one of the principal reasons for creators to continue other peoples' characters is because they have been proven to sell, at least under certain circumstances. Lee certainly made the editorial decision to revive the 1940s Captain America in the 1960s, even though an earlier revival in the early 1950s had failed to be lucrative.  Still, Lee may have remembered that failure, for although the Captain made his first Marvel appearances as a member of the Avengers, his first Marvel feature didn't regularly take place in the 1960s milieu, but frequently sported "flashback" adventures taking place during WWII. True, this could have come about simply because Jack Kirby wanted to do more WWII stories, but IMO it's more likely that Lee wasn't entirely confident about the power of a WWII hero to enthrall 1960s audiences.

The 1960s version of the Human Torch was not a direct revival as Captain America was. Still, though the Silver Age Human Torch appears as part of the Fantastic Four ensemble, there's not much question that his creators hoped to tap into the current audience by invoking the same fiery thrills that had sold to audiences of the Golden Age. No one ever saw Stan Lee reviving flop characters like the Red Raven; that would become the raison d'etre of Roy Thomas, who never met a Golden Age character he didn't want to revive. Further, it's certainly no coincidence that the Silver Age Torch was the first Fantastic Four character to be spun off into his own feature, suggesting that Lee was hoping that the character could grab a supportive audience on his own, even though the Golden Age Torch had also failed in his early 1950s revival.

So "playing with old toys" has distinct advantages in a financial sense, and in some cases, it can even be rewarding in an aesthetic sense for the fans. Much as I enjoy the classic Captain America tales of the war years, most of them are just fair entertainment, and though there have been many bad Cap tales following the Silver Age revival, on the whole "revived Cap" has yielded a fair share of above-average stories.

On a tangential note, in the BEAT post cited above Heidi McDonald gets a little static from Tony Isabella for her light remarks on Stan's possible lack of creative influence. I've critiqued a buttload of Heidi comments here, but I found her remarks pretty harmless, compared to the know-nothing fans who would ambush Stan at conventions asking him if he'd tell the "truth," as these fans conceived it, about Jack Kirby's contributions.  Not unlike the guy in the BEAT comments-section who claims that "Jack created it all!"

KIRBY'S CHOICE PT. 2

Before coming to a conclusion on the nature of freedom, I should elaborate on the remark with which I closed KIRBY'S CHOICE:

...Kirby, in doing what his inner nature bade him, rather than simply adjusting himself to fit the contingent circumstances, showed a "will to freedom" that remains exemplary for its time.

In making this statement, I do not want to give the misleading impression that free will is signified only by Kirby making "the right choice."  Free will must be seen as a spectrum of possible choices, which would include not only choosing to exert oneself to the fullest, but also the possibilities of "sluffing off" or even doing nothing whatsoever, at least in terms of continuing to write/draw comics.


I also stated that Kirby's 1950s work for DC Comics looked more like hackwork to me than his work for 1960s Marvel. I said this with full awareness that at DC Kirby was hemmed in by conservative editors and that he was not free to do his best.  But the DC work still represents the kind of work produced when a given artist is ruled by contingency.

It may also be asserted that Kirby might not be the best example of "free will" given that he was a genius, and most toilers in the comics field-- or in any medium, whether "popular" or "artistic"-- are not geniuses.

Consider then the example of Carl Burgos.

Failing some revelation that Burgos had some great Golden Age work that has escaped fannish notice, Burgos' stellar moment in the history of comic books remains his creation of the Golden Age Human Torch.  The early Torch adventures are raucous, unpolished work, and it could be argued that Burgos never fully exploits the fantasy-potential of a man who can turn into flames.  Nevertheless, there are strong mythic moments in the Torch's oeuvre, worthy to stand with anything created by Jack Kirby.

In contrast, here's a Burgos work from late in his career, where it would appear that he had no intention of exerting himself unduly.

 

"Human thing-a-ma-jig," indeed. Even apart from the use of the name of Fawcett's Captain Marvel-- which may have been the idea of the publisher or any other collaborator-- the art and scripts for the "M.F. Enterprises" CAPTAIN MARVEL are the very definition of hackwork.  The most one can say for this short-lived series is that some modern fans enjoy seeing such a silly-ass character take form.  This is of course an enjoyment popularized by the celebrated "so bad it's good" meme, but this is a pleasure one takes in viewing a demonstrable lack of competence.  In contrast, as rough and unpolished as the Human Torch work is, the appeal of the character and his raison d'etre show a fundamental inspiration. 

Again, this formalist analysis does not erase the possibility that some readers might enjoy CAPTAIN MARVEL more than HUMAN TORCH.  In the first part of KIRBY'S CHOICE I made it clear that there are some fans who prefer "pure Kirby" at all times, over "Kirby in collaboration." And there is no accounting for tastes:

... I pointed out that there was no objective means by which one could prove any group of comics, superhero or otherwise, to be universally "better." The only objective fact is that if many people like a thing, that liking is objective purely in an *intersubjective* sense, as an agreement of tastes between discrete individuals. 

Every expression of personal taste, I suggest, is informed by what I will now dub "proto-propositions."  In attempting to justify my liking of FANTASTIC FOUR over CHALLENGERS, my mind might initially formulate the proto-proposition, "I like The FANTASTIC FOUR better than CHALLENGERS for the emotions in FF."  With conscious thought I can expand this statement into a full-fledged proposition, one phrased so as to show how the FANTASTIC FOUR characters show many dimensions while those of the CHALLENGERS do not, complete with examples and counter-examples to support my propositional logic.  Equally valid is the proto-proposition of a fan who might not like superheroes of any kind: "I like CAPTAIN MARVEL better than HUMAN TORCH because the first one shows superheroes as silly."  This can be expanded into a formal propostion as well, and buttressed with quotes about "masculine incoherence."  But no matter how good or bad the formal proposition, it remains rooted in a "proto-proposition" that expresses whatever validates the individual subject-- a validation I relate to the concept of "constant tastes," elucidated here.


In short, this is about as far as one can get from Kant's notion that valid judgments of taste can be derived from a "disinterested" state of contemplation.  Contemplation is one means by which the viewing subject seeks to bring a new work into his mental compass of things liked and things not liked, and then to decide whether or not the new thing fits better in one category or the other.  But it is not, in itself, a path to any sort of universal truth-- and even *intersubjective* agreements are significant only to the degree one finds their statistical dominance important.