CURIOSITIES #39: "WHO'S AFRAID OF A DUMB BUNNY?"

 Apparently, Dan Jergens was back in 2015, because when he wrote a chapter of his BAT-MITE series, he guest-starred The Inferior Five-- consisting of The Blimp, Awkwardman, White Feather, Merryman, and...

TOUGH BUNNY?????

So Jergens was too politically correct to call her "Dumb Bunny," for fear some noodge would say he was marginalizing women or the like. Yet the character he calls "Tough Bunny" is still as dopey as the original "Dumb Bunny." So he's still willing to tell jokes about dumb women, but he just won't say the WORDS "dumb bunny." 

Plus which, even the corny humor of the original INFERIOR FIVE was funnier than anything Jergens wrote in this dreckfest.

So glad I didn't spend any money on this one.

 

HOW WEAK IS TOO WEAK? PT. 2

This will be one of my least theoretical pieces, since I've pretty much laid down, in the first HOW WEAK IS TOO WEAK, my rationale as to what factors are needed to allow a comparatively low-dynamicity (such as the principal example in that essay, Jonny Quest) to function as part of a high-dynamicity ensemble.

This week I finished reviewing a modestly successful superhero spoof, 1999's MYSTERY MEN. The basic concept is that of six sad-sack superheroes trying to make good in the big city, and most of them don't have much power at their command, unlike the local "golden hero" Captain Amazing. Just as Race Bannon's fighting-prowess somewhat uplifts the juvenile star of JONNY QUEST, those Mystery Men who are at least fairly formidable-- the Shoveler, the Bowler-- more or less transfer some of their mana to other characters, such as the Invisible Boy or the Blue Raja. Of course, the whole point of the film is to take the theme of prizing "the stone the builders rejected," and even the weakest characters get a chance to shine in the course of the film.

The Invisible Boy (Kel Martin), for example, can only turn invisible when no one's looking directly at him.

And the Blue Raja (Hank Azaria) attempts to discomfit villains by throwing forks at them.

If either of these characters appeared as a solo character, I would probably classify him as a "subcombative superhero," one of the exceptions to my general rule that superheroes are defined by the act of combat. (If I ever get around to re-reading all of the issues of FLAMING CARROT-- the absurdist Bob Burden comic from which the Mystery Men were launched-- he too would quite possibly join the ranks of the subcombative type, despite exotic weapons like his "baloney gun.")

By a similar process, I also validated the character of Merryman in THE INFERIOR FIVE in the third SUBCOMBATIVE SUPERHEROES post. Merryman, the leader of the Inferior Five, is consistently characterized as the group's "98-pound weakling," Even on those rare occasions that he wins a fight, it's usually by some contrivance, as when he faces a faux-Hulk who just happens to have the proverbial glass jaw.

However, Merryman does have a function in guiding his scatterbrained gang of super-doers, and this gives him enough mana to be deemed a combative superhero, even though he wouldn't be if everyone in the group was on his microdynamic level. As it happens, though, the Inferior Five also boasts some powerhouses like Awkwardman, a super-clumsy version of Superman--

Or that salute to dumb blondes everywhere, Dumb Bunny.

In a future essay I'll develop further the notion that leadership sometimes engenders the privilege of combative status-- but also, sometimes not.

SUBCOMBATIVE SUPERHEROES PT. 3

In Part 2 I demonstrated proofs as to why the Spirit was a combative hero and his imitator The Masked Man was subcombative.  I did not elaborate on their natures vis-a-vis my concepts of "Reach vs. Grasp" because I felt it implicit that the "reach" of both characters was radically different due to their unequal dynamicities.  The "grasp" concept is a little more complicated, given that The Masked Man in its short run remains always within the mythos of drama, while the long-running Spirit, as I mentioned before, dipped its wick into all four mythoi at one time or another.  However, at this point in my analysis I would say that differences in grasp, a.k.a. "dynamis-stature," do not have any effect on whether or not a given feature does or does not utilize the combative mode.  Even if the majority of the Spirit's adventures had been comedies or adventures rather than dramas, as I've suggested earlier, the different "dynamis-stature" would have no effect on whether or not it was a combative work.  The primary determinants for the combative mode are, as I formulated in MYTHOS VS. MODE PART 2, the interdependent factors of a narrative combative value and a significant combative value.

This time I'll again deal with features within the same mythos, that of comedy, but will give reasons as to why only the first one is combative, while the other two are subcombative due to their lacking either a narrative or significant value.

DC Comics' original version of INFERIOR FIVE appeared in a total of thirteen full-length stories, which I'll analyze as a unit, factoring no revivals-- if any-- into my equations.  Not all of these stories had both a narrative and significant value; some had neither.  But only four of the issues were subcombative for either reason, and the other nine were clearly combative.  To be sure, since INFERIOR FIVE was an extremely broad comedy, most of the goofy heroes' triumphs were comically constructed.

In addition to their winning by accident, they also won by the intervention of guest-stars, as when Superman himself drops in to save the day. But, as I've established in this essay, the narrative combative value is not disrupted if some character other than the featured hero(es) is responsible for the final blow, so this issue remains combative. Statistically speaking, this series satisfies the "narrrative value" of the mode because the overall adventurers are dominantly combative in accordance with my "51 percent rule." Additionally, because the heroes demonstrate high dynamicity-- even if it is altered by its manifestation within a comic mythos-- the INFERIOR FIVE satisfies the "significant value" of the mode.


The significant mode is entirely lacking in Don Martin's equally broad comic take on superheroes, in the handful of adventures he devoted to his 1960s creation Captain Klutz.

Like the Inferior Five, Captain Klutz escaped perils from his equally silly group of supervillains through comic maneuvers.  In one adventure his enemy "Sissyman" traps him in a giant pile of ice cream.

Naturally, he eats his way out.  But Klutz not only had no super-powers, he had no discernible physical skills and only occasionally used mundane weapons.  Facing off the villainous "Granny," he admits that he dares not strike a woman, but that he has no problem shooting one.  In any case, though one might argue that the Klutz adventures satisfy the narrative value, in that there is a clear opposition between the hero and his enemies, there is no significant value because Klutz himself possesses no dynamicity.  He wins-- if he does at all-- through luck and/or trickery.

Finally, the current animated teleseries TEEN TITANS GO! looks for all the world like it's simply going to be a comic take on the 2003-06 adventure-series.  Being humorous, as I've showed with THE INFERIOR FIVE, does not mean that a work cannot be combative. 

In truth, the more direct influence on the teleseries was a comic book series of the same name, which I have not read.  The teleseries, however, though it features characters with roughly the same set of powers and abilities, does not often center its stories about the plot-element of combat.  The model for the teleseries seems to borrow more from the model of the American TV sitcom, in which there is some problem to be solved but not necessarily a battle to be won, as had been the case with most episodes of the 2003-06 show.  The earlier TITANS show made heavy use of humor, roughly following the example of some of the more raucous anime TV cartoons, but comedy was always subdominant to adventure.  Here, comedy is the main attraction, and the mode of the combative is often at best a side-attraction.  A recent episode, "Colors of Raven," begins with the Titans defeating frequent opponent Doctor Light, but Light's defeat is only important because it brings the heroes into contact with a magical prism.  The prism then splits heroine Raven into color-themed duplicates of herself. The remaining Titans must then corral the disparate Ravens in order to re-combine them into one entity, but little of their activities are focused on combat, even in the spoofy manner of INFERIOR FIVE.  Thus TITANS GO has the significant value of the mode, but not the narrative one.

On a non-related note, I'll add that one TITANS GO episode-- entitled "Books"-- does satisfy the narrative combative value.  However, the episode's primary focus is to make fun of the sort of thing critics like me do all the time: taking the primal experience of fictive enjoyment and making it "boring" through analysis and commentary.  It's a fair point, though it's not one that will dissuade me in any way.

AT LAST LOST BOYS

Just as I read THE CORSICAN BROTHERS (covered in my previous post) in order to understand the origins of the later "uncanny" films made from it, I recently re-read J.M. Barrie's 1911 PETER PAN in order to justify the comment I made in a review of the 2011 telefilm NEVERLAND:

NEVERLAND, though it was financed by the Syfy Channel as was the two-part ALICE, shows Willing warming to his material to better effect. Possibly this was because J.M. Barrie's PETER PAN has stronger adventure-currents than the source material of either Alice or Oz. To be sure, were I classifying the Barrie novel, I'd tend to consider it a "combative comedy," in that I think the comic tones of the book overpower the adventurous tones. Likewise the Disney version of PETER PAN. However, Nick Willing's version falls more completely into the category of the pure adventure-work.

I never saw PETER PAN performed as a play.  This was the medium in which Barrie premiered his most famous creation in its best known form, though a somewhat non-continuous version of Peter appeared first in Barrie's 1902 novel THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD.  I knew only the Disney film, which didn't impress me all that much.  I don't know when I read the novel except that it was not as a child: it could have been ten or twenty years ago. 

Without question in my mind, the book PETER PAN qualifies not only as a "combative comedy" but as a "combative comedy-adventure" after the fashion mentioned in this essay. However, the example I used in that essay, DC's INFERIOR FIVE, represents a very different form of "comedy" than the one evoked by James Barrie.

In my essay FUNNY BONERS I contrasted Freud's "relief theory of humor" with that of Schopenhauer's "incongruity theory."  However, to be honest I have not read anything but excerpts from Freud's JOKES AND THEIR RELATION TO THE UNCONSCIOUS.  When I recently came across a reference to Freud's having made a distinction between two types of humor-- one "tendentious" and the other "non-tendentious"-- I realized that I had not give Freud his due, having depended too much on secondary sources.  Though I still believe that Schopenhauer's theory encompasses more psychic territory than does Freud's, this Wikipedia entry establishes that Freud was aware of the type of humor that Heinlein called "the gentle smile:"

Freud made a key distinction between tendentious and non-tendentious humor. Tendentious humor involves a “victim,” someone at whose expense we laugh. Non-tendentious humor does not require a victim. This innocuous humor typically depends on wordplay, and Freud believed it has only modest power to evoke amusement. Tendentious humor, then, is the only kind that can evoke big laughs. However, Freud believed a mixture of both tendentious and non-tendentious humor is required to keep the tendentious humor from becoming too offensive or demeaning to its victim. The innocent jokework of the innocuous humor would mask the otherwise hostile joke and therefore “bribe” our senses, allowing us to laugh at what would otherwise be socially unacceptable. Therefore, we often think we are laughing at innocuous jokes, but what really makes them funny is their socially unacceptable nature hidden below the surface.

While I can't say that INFERIOR FIVE ever produced "big laughs," it was intended to do so, in that the feature was meant to "victimize" the standard straight version of the superhero with parodies of clumsy superheroes, dumb superheroes, etc. 

In contrast, Barrie's PETER PAN seems more focused on a low-key, homey type of comedy, tinged with a modest irony.  The opening chapters set the tone with their emphasis on what I've called "the small-scale world of home and neighborhood," and even the Darling children's voyage into a land of unbridled adventure never completely escapes that tone.  The same tone undercuts much of the potential nastiness of the conflict between Peter and his allies vs. Hook and his pirates.  There can be no doubt that the play and the book are combative works (though THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD does not seem to be), but the excitement is subordinate to the tone of incongruity.

Barrie's sense of irony rarely if ever translates to later film or television adaptations.  I can think of none that have communicated the frank but knowing estimation of children Barrie repeats throughout the book, one that most if not all children will instantly recognize:

and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

CHALLENGE OF THE SUPER-IDIOM LIST

Having arrived at a deductive conclusion as to the progression of the affect of identificatory conviction throughout the four mythoi, I should add that the same degrees of conviction apply to the *dynamis* of the characters typical of these mythoi.

I've seen a fair number of superhero lists over the years.  Mikel Midnight  still maintains a page that correlates many of them, though unfortunately the most inclusive known to me, THE COMICS INTERNATIONAL WEBSITE, seems to have gone the way of the dodo.  Jess Nevins still maintains a list called the GOLDEN AGE HERO DIRECTORY, but this list aims at collating all adventure-heroes in Golden Age comic books.  But the most problematic aspect of most such lists is that they're generally focused purely on external points of similarity.  I'm aware of no list that seeks to list any protagonists, superheroic or otherwise, according to the Fryean mythos to which they belong.

I've compiled a provisional list for my own use, but I admit that when I first began it, I focused, as most comics-fans do, upon external resemblances.  Thus I would list, say, THE INFERIOR FIVE within the superheroic idiom simply because the characters did their thing in costumes. 

Now, as a result of investigations such as this one, however, I've determined that the Inferior Five would be appropriate only in a list of superhero-idiom types within the comedy-mythos.  Considered in terms of the level of conviction aroused by the Inferior Five, they have more in common with "non-costumed" types like Johnny Thunder or Ranma Saotome than with even the most tongue-in-cheek version of Batman or Plastic Man.

This formulation doesn't merely help distinguish between types of superheroes, of course.  Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are both magically-powered teen heroes, which would move some critics to dump them both in a vague category called "young adult fantasy."  But, if I can judge Percy Jackson by his one film adaptation, that character is far more oriented toward adventure than toward the *purgative* aspect of drama seen in J.K. Rowling's famous character.

I will note in passing that it is possible for different iterations to change a given character in terms of his mythic alignment.  An example appears here on You Tube, a 5-minute Wonder Woman pilot commissioned by producer William Dozier after the success of the BATMAN teleseries.  IMDB describes it thusly:

'At the height of the popularity of "Batman" (1966), producer William Dozier produced this short film in hopes of getting approval from Warner Brothers to produce a pilot episode for a "Wonder Woman" series, based on the comic book. Unlike "Batman," which was campy adventure, "Wonder Woman" was going to be a straight comedy series, along the lines of "Captain Nice." The resulting short written by several writers on the Batman series failed to win Dozier that approval.'

It's interesting that the synopsis-writer makes the same distinction I did above, to the effect that an adventure with comedic touches is not the same as a "straight comedy," oxymoronic though that phrase may sound.

There are perhaps more impressive examples of mythos-shifting than this unsold pilot, of course.  The late Don Markstein's TOONOPEDIA chronicles one example in Dick Briefer's Golden Age FRANKENSTEIN feature, noting how Briefer's version of the famous monsters started out with serious undertones (what I'd probably label "drama"), then shifted to comedy for a time, and then back to a serious theme before the feature perished.  This degree of change might encourage some critics to scoff at any attempts to schematize such a character, precisely because he and his author could shift in approach that much from year to year.  But I reject that as a know-nothing approach to the problems of categorization.

I term my solution to this problem the "51 Per Cent Solution."  In business dealings we're accustomed to hearing that a stockholder with 51% of a company's stocks has the greatest advantage, though not an unqualified dominion.  Thus, if one wished to determine the dominant mythos of the Briefer work, one would count up the total number of stories and determine which mythos-type was statistically dominant.  Only an unqualified 50/50 split between mythoi would make such a determination useless, but the paucity of these exceptions proves the rule: most creators start with a given mythos, make only token shifts to other mythoi, usually proving "loyal" to a particular emotional *dynamis.*

The same rule can be adapted for use in determination of the more limited categorizations that we call "genre," and my next essay will explore such genre-divisions in response to another online fan's genre-dicing endeavors.

CORRECTION TO EARLIER STATEMENT: Apparently it was only the link I tried that was bad:
AN INTERNATIONAL CATALOGUE OF SUPERHEROES is still extant after all.

ADVENTURE/COMEDY VS. COMEDY/ADVENTURE, PART 1

Riddle me this:

Q: When is a superhero not a superhero?

A: When the *dynamis* expressed by either the plot-functions or character-functions within the corpus of a given superhero's exploits is not commensurate with those characteristic of the pure adventure mythos, aligning rather with another mythos, such as that of irony, drama or comedy.

So the riddle's answer isn't funny. Maybe it would sound better if one imagines Burt Ward reading it from a Batcomputer printout, though.

Back in this essay I stressed the problematic status of two similarly-themed television serials, DOCTOR WHO and STARGATE. Both serials made strong use of the *dynamis* typical of the adventure mythos, which in large part stresses the radical of the *agon,* a seriously-toned battle between good and evil whose outcome symbolically re-invigorates the society within the diegesis as well as the reader's simulated experience of that invigoration.

In that essay I concluded that neither DOCTOR WHO nor STARGATE fit the adventure-mythos, the one because it lacked the *dynamis* appropriate to the typical adventure-mythos character, and the other because it lacked the *dynamis*
appropriate to the typical adventure-mythos plot. As such they are outside the superhero idiom as such, one best filed under the portmanteau category "comedy-adventure" and the other under "drama-adventure."

Having said that, though, how much comedy can infiltrate an adventure-story before it ceases being an adventure?

It's true that DOCTOR WHO is not a comedy in the sense of constantly making viewers laugh. At times the situations in many episodes can seem extremely grim. However, I do find that dominantly WHO tends to present its audience with the incongruity of massive alien legions and monsters being undone by the waspish Doctor. Thus, I find WHO closer to the mythos of comedy, which stresses incongruity rather than the serious results of combat, in keeping with Northrop Frye's pronouncement that not every comedy need be funny. (I've noted some of my disagreements with Frye on this subject elsewhere, and I do think that comedies are dominantly defined by their humor, even though not every comedy approaches humor as intensively as the dominant type.)

Now, what should one make of the two 1960s artifacts above?

Clearly the specific images used above were meant to make audiences laugh. But did both share the *dynamis* of both plot and character characteristic of the pure comedy?

In the case of THE INFERIOR FIVE, E. Nelson Bridwell's borscht-belt paean to silly superheroes, I would say yes. Even though the five goofy heroes have power, and even sometimes manage to win battles, the characters are all defined by traits incongruous to the typical notion of the hero. The Blimp is slow, White Feather is cowardly, Merryman is weak, Awkwardman is awkward, and Dumb Bunny is so dumb (HOW DUMB IS SHE?) that she thinks a polar cap is something to keep her head warm.

(Joke stolen from Gardner Fox just for sake of variety)

The plots of INFERIOR FIVE, too, are clearly meant to stress incongruity over agonic action. I noted above that the heroes sometimes do win battles, but generally it's out of sheer dumb luck rather than through skill. At the end of one representative issue of INFERIOR FIVE, a villain hooks the captured heroes up to a machine designed to siphon off their powers and give them to one of the villain's henchmen. Instead the machine works in reverse, siphoning off the heroes' weaknesses so that, for two pages, they become super-capable at kicking the hell out of the villain and his henchmen. This scene pretty much defines how the elements of adventure are subordinated to those of comedy.

But can one make the same claim about the 1966-68 BATMAN teleseries?

Adam West once defended the series against the attacks of comics-fans by claiming that the absurdities the show depicted weren't substantially different from those of the current comic-book adventures of Batman (who, in case anyone's wondering, DOES fit the criterion of pure adventure no matter how many times he had adventures with Bat-Mite).

West was both wrong and right. He was wrong in equating the two serials in that the camp-flavored teleseries couldn't switch gears as the comic book series could. There was no place in the teleseries for a story of ratiocinative detection or a "Robin Dies at Dawn."

However, West was right in a way I doubt he suspected. That is, no matter how many absurdities the BATMAN TV-series presented, the characters believed in them, as if being threatened by a giant Frostee-Freezee death-trap were the height of high seriousness. Indeed, the "Batusi" scene from the serial's first episode, while amusing, is one of the few times West's Batman broke character. In his biography West stated that at first he wanted to do the scene in a clownish manner, but that he was persuaded that he should affect a "straight" approach to the Batusi scene in keeping with the "camp" aesthetic. However, though the scene does avoid the level of the pure pratfall, it doesn't quite succeed, as did most later episodes, of keeping Batman serious while all about him was absurdity.

For this reason I consider the BATMAN teleseries, if not "pure adventure," to be a hybrid form in which the *dynamis* of adventure dominates over that of comedy, though clearly comedy's elements are in fuller play here than in most other iterations of BATMAN.

Because the heroes seem genuinely threatened by bizarre villains and death-traps, both plot and character validate the power of the adventure-mythos even while managing to keep the comic elements in play. This is why, even for later generations of kids not yet jaded enough to laugh at Batman, the series can still excite and fascinate them, precisely because even with the giant OOFS and WHAPS, the invigorating thrill of the agon still predominates.