THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER

I've recently finished two DC ARCHIVES collections of Golden Age Batman comics, and once more I am impressed with the level of quality in comparison with other formula-comics from the period. Yet the nature of this extra quality is hard to define.                                       

Whatever that "je ne se quoi" might be, it has nothing to do with a flouting of formula, that tedious preoccupation of the comic-book elitists. During the Golden Age, the dominant practice of comic-book publishers was to load their magazines with short stories of about eight pages each. This seems to have applied whether or not the magazines featured continuing characters, and the strategy probably evolved from the idea that the kid-readers had short attention spans and were more likely to pick up issues if they offered a lot of varied content. For adventure comics in particular, there evolved the formula that some have called the "three-act structure:"   

   (1) Villain, whether new or recurring, launches his first crime, defying either conventional lawmen or the starring hero, but escapes, (2) The hero crosses paths with the villain again, and the villain either simply escapes or subdues the hero and leaves him in a death-trap, (3) The hero either escapes a trap or finds a new means to track down the villain and defeats him, whether he's captured, dies, or merely seems to perish.                                                                       

 I haven't read every Bill Finger out there, even in comics alone. But I think I'm aware of all of his "career highs," and Rik Worth's book on the early days of Finger and his BATMAN co-creator Bob Kane has helped fill in a lot of blanks on this era of comics-history. Going by this biography, as well as an interview with Finger's grown son in ALTER EGO magazine, it appears that Finger didn't have any pretensions beyond making well-crafted formula adventure-stories for most of his life.                         

 What Finger seemed to have, though, was an inordinate talent for creating characters who transcended the limits of their formulaic stories. Dozens upon dozens of other writers followed the aforementioned "three-act structure" for such characters as Vigilante, Wildcat, Star-Spangled Kid, Tarantula, Human Torch, Black Terror and all the rest. But most other formula-stories in other features never escape the bounds of their own restrictions. Finger seems not only to have possessed the ability to take the formula-elements to their furthest extremes-- far more, I'd argue, than many more critically lauded talents like Jack Cole and C.C. Beck-- he also seemed to have inspired most of the other writers in the Bob Kane "stable," such as Edmond Hamilton and Gardner Fox. I'm not saying that any such imitations came about for abstract artistic reasons, though. If Gardner Fox wrote better stories for BATMAN than he did for RED MASK, it's probably because he recognized that the people writing the checks expected a special level of craft.                 

Finger also holds a special place in forging the trope of "the criminal who makes his crimes follow an artistic pattern." There were "pattern criminals," in the sense I'm using the term, in the pulp prose fiction on which most Golden Age adventure-comics patterned themselves, and a few preceded the rise of Superman and Batman. But what I've encountered in those earlier sources usually fit one of two types. First is the "one-gimmick villain,"-- an evildoer who gains control of one distinctive weapon, like the poison vampire bats of the Spider's 1935 foe "The Bat Man." Second is the "all-purpose villain," who can conjure a lot of weapons from an illimitable arsenal, like the 1938 "Munitions Master" from DOC SAVAGE, or Superman's first two "mad scientist" foes, The Ultra-Humanite and Luthor. Barring any new revelations, though, the Joker appears to be the first exemplar of a third type: the "pattern criminal," who repeatedly keeps using gimmicks that reference some particular fetish or propensity. The Joker only uses one humor-based gimmick in his debut, the famed "Joker venom," but Finger and other Bat-writers kept finding new gimmicks for the Clown Prince of Crime to employ in his war of one-upmanship with the Dynamic Duo. 

Jerry Siegel debuted Luthor a month or so after the first appearance of the Joker, but as stated he was always an all-purpose villain. Siegel didn't tap into the appeal of "pattern criminals" until he launched his own somewhat risible take on Batman and Robin with the duo of "the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy" in October 1941. The Kid and his partner began battling arguable pattern-types like The Needle-- though I imagine Finger's second big antagonist, The Penguin, predated all or most of these by some months, since he popped up just a couple months after the Kid's debut. Superman's first recurring pattern-criminals, The Prankster and The Puzzler, both debuted in 1942.                                                                                   

  I think Finger's power to create good villains-- and, hypothetically, his ability to inspire other creators by his profit-making example-- sprang from his interest in figuring out at least rough psychological motives for his evildoers, just as he may have done for his heroes. This interest in even shallow psychology outstrips most of Finger's contemporaries. Jack Cole had an artistic talent which none of the BATMAN artists could have emulated had they wanted to, and also a taste for the ghoulish that exceeded the best japes of the Joker. But Cole's villains are almost entirely one-dimensional, and his best-known hero Plastic Man is not too much better. Both Rik Worth and Fred Finger suggest that Bill Finger was a dreamer who never quite grew up, so that he was rarely able to manage money or time. But I'd argue that even in his weaker stories-- and Finger did a lot of goofy, poorly conceived stories in addition to his quality fare-- he shows a greater, perhaps childlike ability to take the weirdest ideas seriously, in a spirit of uninhibited play.                  

RAPT IN PLASTIC PT. 3

So when I started collecting comics in the mid-sixties, I knew nothing about Plastic Man's history. Aside from the old comics, which I did not encounter, the only other item I might have seen would have Mad Magazine's parody, "Plastic Sam," but I probably did not see the paperback reprint of that tale until I'd already become acquainted with DC Comics first Silver Age adaptation of the former Quality property. There were references to the Golden Age version in DC's title. But even when Woozy Winks made a guest appearance, that didn't really give me a sense of what made Golden Age readers respond to the concept. Only the scattered reprints of the seventies gave me a degree of insight.

So, in a sense, the PLASTIC MAN written by Arnold Drake and drawn by three different DC regulars was "my" Plastic Man. I knew it wasn't anything great, but it was mildly entertaining, so I liked it. So, even though I know that the Drake PLAS is not excellent in any department, I'm devoting a post to each of its ten issues.

Issue #1 is the only one to be drawn by Gil Kane, who seemed to be emulating Will Elder's MAD contributions more than the example of Jack Cole. The three individuals with whom he shares space on the cover are, from right to left, (1) a one-shot foe named Professor X, (2) the manic Doctor Dome, whose name spoofs you-know-who, and (3) Lynx, the Doctor's curvaceous daughter.

After Drake's script devotes a couple of pages to Plas doing something heroic, the readers meet his associate, Gordon Trueblood. Whereas Cole partnered his straight-arrow shapeshifter with the reprobate Woozy Winks, Drake makes the straight-arrow the sidekick and the hero a guy whose heroic qualities are leavened by a goofy sense of humor.

Meanwhile Plas's recurring foe (appearing here for the first time) enlists his associate Professor X to make a major assault on Plastic Man with a series of super weapons.

Plas repels X's first attack, but the villain escapes. Then the reader learns that unlike the Cole Plas, who lived a nearly monastic existence (strange, given his creator's penchant for girlie cartoons), this ductile do-gooder has a regular girlfriend, jet-setting Micheline DeLute III. Their discussion of the word "gauche" is one of Drake's cuter bits of verbal humor.

After assorted hijinks, Professor X makes a second assault with a second super weapon. However, Dome's daughter deals herself in, and she actually comes closer to knocking off the hero than the main villains.

Plas survives and again faces off against Professor X. The evil scientist unleashes his third super-weapon, but of course the hero defeats his foe, and the adventure ends with Plas jauntily referring to all of the people who'd like to destroy him, both villains and simple dipsticks. 

In the first RAPT IN PLASTIC essay, I called Cole's hero "Sadean," albeit with some qualifications. Drake's Plastic Man has no real grotesquerie in his background, but Lynx's last line merits some attention. At first glance, one might assume she's one among hundreds of similar temptresses, always attracted to the manly hero even when she's forced to plot his death. Yet, while most shady ladies become too besotted with the hero's charms to really turn the hero into worm food, Lynx's dialogue establishes that (a) she's genuinely turned on by Plas, and (b) she takes an erotic pleasure at the prospect of killing him. Hence Lynx's final line "I'll beat him to death with my eyelashes" is really quite good in capturing the Sadean equivalence of love and death. (And that's without my even referencing the villainess's penchant for cracking a whip every once in a while.) The line, though, is just another vaudeville-style joke, so its Sadean potential is pretty much wasted. 

MYTHCOMICS: '["THE AMAZON QUEEN OF FEMALIA"] (SMASH COMICS #76, 1948)

 

Most Golden Age comics stories achieve high mythicity in an erratic fashion. All raconteurs, well or poorly educated, were required to turn out a high volume of material in order to make a living. Thus, even though the writer of WONDER WOMAN had attended Harvard, and though he'd constructed one of the more elaborate superhero concepts of the period, he didn't necessarily turn out more myth-stories than did raconteurs who never got past high school. All comics-creators had to generate ideas very quickly, and only on rare occasions did any of them bring all the symbolic elements together to create something like a discourse, intentionally or not.

Golden Age mythcomics about the topic of sexuality are even rarer, given the audience associations-- though it should be said that most media of the period weren't much more complex on that subject. There were plenty of narratives about "the war of the sexes," and a fair number dealt with fictional versions of the Greek Amazons. But often such Amazonian societies were conjured up just to banish the demonic forces they suggested. Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1924 novel TARZAN AND THE ANT MEN doesn't deal per se with an Amazon society, but does introduce a savage tribe in which the women are physically larger than the men. Tarzan influences the males to take control and return women to a subordinate position.

Various comics-creators used societies of strong women for analogous reasons, as did Jack Cole in a couple of PLASTIC MAN stories. Cole also created the character under discussion here, though by 1948 his only contribution to the feature was that raconteurs like Alex Kotzky-- the creator to whom I assign this story-- sometimes sought to draw like Cole.

The character Midnight was essentially what Will Eisner's SPIRIT would have been, had Eisner concentrated only on adventure with lots of goofy comedic content. Midnight is a guy in street clothes who dons a domino mask and uses a few gimmicks to fight crime. However, his support-cast is designed to be dominantly humorous. First, Midnight gained a sidekick, name of Gabby, who was a literal "monkey-boy:" a simian endowed with the ability to talk (not, as some references have claimed, a little Black kid). Then an aptly named mad scientist, Doc Wackey, joined the entourage. Later additions included a baby polar bear (apparently just a pet) and a bumbling detective, Sniffer. All of them are on display in the splash page above, decked out in feminine harem garments and dancing before the titular "amazon queen."

The story unwinds quickly, with a lot of use of coincidence. (I tend to think no comics-people loved overheard conversations more than did the Quality Comics crew.) Midnight, in his regular ID as a radio host, lets "the illustrious Professor Zogar" lecture Middle America about the archaic custom of matriarchal rule. The three sidekicks and their pet go for a walk, during which Doc is particularly voluble, claiming that "the dame doesn't live who can push me around." Quick as a bunny, two Amazonian females in archaic bikinis seize him, clobber his friends, and drag Doc off to their land of Femalia, under the belief that Doc is their long absent king.

Heroic Midnight then interviews Zogar about the society of Amazons in Femalia, and drags the reluctant scientist along for the ride when he and his crew mount a rescue mission. However, if any juvenile readers were expecting these brave males to put the matriarchy back in its place, those expectations get dashed when a single woman floors Midnight with an uppercut.

The captives are dragged through a city full of huge women and shrimpy men, not a little reminiscent of one of Al Capp's "Sadie Hawkins" celebrations. Queen Menna (seen in the splash with a big stogie in her mouth) sits her throne besides her crowned king Doc Wackey. Menna is just as convinced as her servants that Doc is her long lost husband, and she takes no backtalk from uppity males.

Midnight does manage to escape the palace with Doc, and as the group rushes back to the plane the hero makes a half-hearted effort to inspire the local males to rebellion. Then comes the "big reveal" that probably didn't fool all that many kid-readers in the day. Menna calls out to the man she thinks is her consort Ragoz, and Zogar (spell it backwards) responds with a beaten-down "Yes, dear." This prompts Midnight to make the amazing correlation that the expert on matriarchal societies is actually the guy who escaped Femalia, and this in turn causes Menna to admit that yes, this other shrimpy guy is her real hubby. She lets the Americans leave-- and heroic Midnight is only too glad to leave Zogar in the lurch so that he and his friends can return to the land where women aren't quite so dominant.

It would be silly to think that Kotzky sought to say anything profound here by leaving a gynocracy in charge of their own domain, as was *sometimes* the case when Marston wrote analogous stories. Kotzky's main purpose was probably the same as in any other MIDNIGHT story: to come up with a wild tale diverting enough to get kids to part with their coins. Nor can one place any deeper complexion on the kinky sounding dialogue in the next to last panel:

MENNA: Go easy on him, indeed! Well, perhaps I will, AFTER I've given him a daily beating for about three months!

ZOGAR: You are very kind to let me off so lightly, your majesty!

Actually, it might be a light sentence, if Zogar was away from Femalia for the years it would require for him to become an "illustrious professor." And he would've gotten away from the modern Amazons, if he'd just kept his mouth shut about them! Not that I'm claiming this fictional character had anything like an actual psychology, but his creator might have appreciated the irony that Zogar's big mouth led him back to the subservient fate he'd escaped-- and it's by no means certain that he's not okay with it.

I also don't want to make too much of the final exchange between the heroes as they run back to the U.S., tails between their legs, but I'll note it to wrap up.

GABBY: Poor Zogar! What a life he must lead!

DOC: Are you TELLING me or ASKING me?

It's an interesting exchange only because Doc has been in the custody of the Femaliens for what one must assume is only a few hours. Certainly he doesn't have the chance to get initiated into Femalian society, whatever that might entail. So why was he wondering if Gabby was "asking" him about the "life" Zogar now leads, the "life" Doc would've been forced to lead had his buddies abandoned him like they abandoned Zogar? Doc only had time to learn the same lesson the others did: that when men lose the advantage of sexual dimorphism, they can be easily changed from "men" into "mice."

ADDENDUM: The only element that moves "Queen" into the domain of the marvelous is Gabby the Talking Monkey.

NEAR-MYTHS: ["VILLAGE OF THE DOOMED"], PEP COMICS #4 (1940)

(NOTE: the title is an arbitrary one assigned by Grand Comics Database.)

"Village" is a rarity in several ways. One is that unlike the vast majority of Golden Age comics-stories, this one is part of an ongoing storyline, for as the copy explains, in the last issue villains hypnotized the hero into committing numerous crimes. The Comet threw off the spell and killed his manipulators, which didn't prove to be the best idea since that deprived Comet of anyone who could testify as to his fundamental innocence. It's also a rarity in that it's a "social problem" type of story. Jack Cole, who wrote and drew the early COMET tales, didn't attempt this type of story often, but this one's much better than the ones offered by Siegel and Shuster in SUPERMAN.

The Comet, tired of running, turns himself in. However, he gets a fine taste of lynch-justice and has to flee once again.

The wounded hero flies out to some rural area and collapses, but a kindly old man takes him in and believes his story. The old guy then shows Comet how the local mining-community is being exploited by cruel businessmen who refuse to provide safety measures. (Note the gut-punch when Comet can't destroy a boulder pressing down on a miner and has to amputate the man's limb to get him free-- which isn't the most logical course of action, but is surely meant to make readers hate the corrupt owners.) The mine owners claim that the safety measures would bankrupt them, but Comet proves that to be a lie, and in fighting the corrupt main guy Comet's "bouyancy" enables him to bounce off walls "like a rubber ball." (Plastic Man was about a year down the road for Cole.)

The bad guy tries to rub out Comet with poison gas, but again the hero escapes and ends up "unintentionally" executing the evildoer. Comet makes sure that the next guy in line makes the safety alterations, and he's off to the next adventure, despite still being hunted by the law (another element that Cole, reputedly a stickler for law and order, seemed to work into many of his stories).

NEAR MYTHS: THE CLAW (1939-1944)

"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay!" declared Lord Tennyson in the 1842 poem "Locksley Hall," crystallizing his people's belief that China, aka "Cathay," was the antithesis of European progress. Almost a hundred years later, American funnybook-makers distilled a vision of the claw-fingered Oriental beyond even the most fevered dreams of Sax Rohmer-- though of course comic book creators like Jack Cole thought of American democracy as the perfect counterpoint to Eastern tyranny.

In A PAUSE FOR CLAWS I addressed some of the cultural reasons as to why Western people may have started picturing evil Orientals with long, bony, taloned fingers. I plan to investigate the Marvel character "The Yellow Claw" more in future, but no comic-book character has concentrated the archetypal image as well as The Claw, a villain starring in his own series from the company Lev-Gleason. 

I mentioned Jack Cole, but though he did create The Claw in SILVER STREAK #1, he didn't create the villain's most well-remembered opponent, the original Daredevil (from SILVER STREAK #6). But according to Don Markstein, Cole was the one who conceived of making the mocking, super-acrobatic mystery man into the Claw's nemesis for the space of a five-issue continuity (though other hands than Cole's finished the crossover). 

If Daredevil was to some extent a typical hero of the period, the Claw was like nothing else. Asian evildoers had haunted the pages of pulp magazines and popular books long before comic books were viable, but not only did the Claw exaggerate other racial motifs-- pointed ears and fangs for teeth-- he also brought in the fairy-tale appeal of the Evil Ogre. The Claw could be a man of ordinary size, but he had the power to grow to Godzilla-like heights. Throughout his five-year run, the tyrannical villain frequently maltreated his own henchmen, gorily crushing them in his taloned fist or stomping them beneath his sandaled foot. Even after Cole left the series, the Claw was unremitting evil, devoted to subjugating America to his will.

The last part of the five-part tale strongly implied that The Claw was in the service of Satanic powers, though strangely, he calls on the powers of "Lucifer the genii" rather than the standard Judeo-Christian tempter. Lucifer sends monsters and flaming meteors to help the Claw against Daredevil, and yet the hero perserveres. The Claw is defeated, but generously, Lucifer only confines him to Asia, which was as good as saying that he wouldn't be allowed to cross Daredevil's path in America again. 

However, the two did encounter one another one more time, the injunction clearly forgotten. The crossover made Daredevil popular enough to get his own title, and to start the new book with a bang, Daredevil enlisted the protagonists from SILVER STREAK in a running battle with the worst real-life villain possible: Adolf Hitler. So Daredevil brought together such disparate characters as the speedster Silver Streak, Dickie Dean Boy Inventor, the pilot Cloud Curtis, and jungle-man Lance Hale to fight the Nazi menace. 

The one partial exception was The Claw: he collaborated with Hitler, but only while planning to eventually to betray the dictator. The two fall out thanks to Daredevil's maneuvers, and the Asian villain even does "his bit" for the Allies by allowing Hitler to deplete his resources to ransom his life. 

Following that stellar issue, The Claw remained one of the features in DAREDEVIL, which was filled with a variety of other crusaders (my favorite being the blind hero "Nightro," whose name was a pun on "nitro.") The Claw then continued trying to conquer America, being most often opposed by a new costumed athlete, The Ghost, who never managed to escape the Claw's gargantuan shadow. For the next thirty issues, the villain tried many different schemes, the most inventive being one in which he transformed several of his Asian henchmen into winged monsters called "clawites." The splash above shows the giant malefactor astride an equally huge unicorn; it's nowhere in the actual story, but it sure does make The Claw look like a Oriental version of an apocalyptic horseman.

He even got an origin: he was fathered by a Tibetan brute and a woman named Zola, who by some freak of nature possessed huge fangs. Shortly after being born, The Claw somehow forces both of his parents to commit suicide, and he grows into the scourge of Asia, though his ability to become a giant is never really explained. By 1944, though, some of the villain's ogre-ish appeal had worn off, and in DAREDEVIL #31 he was given a very anti-climactic execution by a scientist's "electric ray."

 He made one more Golden Age appearance in a 1953 four-part story within the continuity of a Lev Gleason space-hero, "Rocky X," in which it was posited that the inhuman looking villain was really of alien origin. After a few more decades, The Claw was revived by Americomics as a peripatetic opponent for the super-ladies of FEMFORCE. But to the best of my knowledge, The Claw has not surfaced again.

In conclusion, while I would concede that Lev Gleason's Claw did appeal to certain racial myths, particularly with respect to the source of his name, the very thing that made him unique among Asian villains-- his ability to turn into a skyscraper-sized colossus-- distances himself somewhat from more mortal representatives of the species, thus making him a little harder to see as a purely sociological construct.

"RACIAL OTHER" MYTHCOMICS MONTH

Noticing that Black History Month has begun once more, I wondered if I had enough material to do my own very loose version thereof. The short two-part answer is (a) I have plenty of "racial myth" material to do mythcomics on this theme for this week as well as the next three, and (b) I don't think I have nearly enough corresponding material for null-myths on the same theme.

Dealing with (b) first:

There have been a lot of mediocre and/or offensive racial images throughout the history of comic strips and books, but I'm not interested in following the lead of knee-jerk ideological criticism. The mythcomics project  is focused upon studying the many ways in which comics narratives use symbolic discourse, both in consummate and inconsummate ways. I've called to mind many bad stories that use racial images of one kind or another, but they're usually bad in a way that doesn't involve any complex symbolic discourse. The one major exception is the PLASTIC MAN story analyzed here. Building on my knowledge of what little political content manifests in Jack Cole's published work, I think that the "Great Warrior" story shows Cole conflicted about the marginalization of Native Americans while seeking to validate the U.S. power structure, and that mixed message led me to classify it as inconsummate.

But most racial images in the comics are too simplistic to bear analyzing. I couldn't even find any complex racial images in my review of the SUPER GREEN BERET comics; these stories were inconsummate largely because of the creators' misguided attempt to meld the wacky whimsy of Golden Age Captain Marvel with a homage to a Green Beret who went around fighting not only modern wars but also wars in other eras. So I will either (a) not bother to analyze any null-myths this month, or (b) choose to expatiate on themes having nothing to do with racial myths.

On to (a):

There are a fair number of consummate myth-comics on this topic that would fill the four weeks. Yet I rather like the idea of being more general in my approach, by dealing with an assortment of "racial others" as they have been defined by contrast to Caucasian Americans. And no, not just Caucasian American males: the considerable quantity of women who venerated Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND ought to be enough to implicate white women as having participated in all manifestations of racial myth in American culture. I would say that in many cases American Jews have been subsumed within the sphere of American Christians and have responded to the "racial other" in largely covalent ways.

Since I'm writing about art rather than history here, I'm primarily interested in the way that creative minds have chosen to play with the images of race. This means that even some images may have a mythic complexity even if they are not viewed as empowering by real-world members of various ingroups. But offending people has never stopped me before.

NULL-MYTHS: PLASTIC MAN story (POLICE COMICS #16, 1943)

I’ve commented here that for all the plaudits given to Jack Cole’s PLASTIC MAN, it’s rarely acknowledged that in a formal sense, many of the stories are not well-written.

This isn’t entirely a disadvantage from a pluralist creative vantage point. Some creators are at their best when they’re channeling the random associations of what Jung termed “fantasy thinking,” rather than constructing the sort of “well-wrought urns” generally prized by elitist criticism. Much if not all of Cole’s best work is characterized by a delirious pleasure in transgressivism, often, as noted here, in a passion for scenarios of sadism and murder. In the earliest adventures of Cole’s stretchable sleuth, the hero battles such demented menaces as a gigantic, city-destroying eight-ball, a cripple-legged giant who walks on his hands, and a mad scientist named “Hairy Arms,” whose torso is so shriveled that he appears to be all head, legs, and (of course) arms.

Viewed as mythic texts, most Plastic Man stories are like free-floating archetypes that have no firm associations linked to them. On occasion, as with the story I analyzed here, he used his symbolic constructions to produce a consummate psychological myth. But Cole's PM story for POLICE COMICS#16—incidentally, the fourth story in which Cole partnered Plastic Man with comedy-relief Woozy Winks—rates as inconsummate for the way it raises symbolic questions but doesn’t answer them.

The splash page is quite in keeping with my quasi-Sadean reading of Cole: the reader sees a head-shot of Plastic Man, sweating profusely as he’s besieged by tiny green devils telling him to “kill” and “murder.” This is a foregrounding of how the hero will go berserk at the story’s end.

When the story proper opens, Plastic Man is first seen in disguise, having used his shape-changing power to become the image of a Native American. Woozy is telling him that it seems “silly” for the hero to investigate rumors of a modern Indian uprising. Plastic Man demurs, claiming that he won’t countenance “revolt against the U.S.A.”—though he thinks that he can break up the possible rebellion if he can undermine the Indians’ chief, known as “Great Warrior.”

Obviously, even for the time, this is not a particularly progressive view of White America’s checkered history with the country’s aboriginal peoples. But I’m not inquiring into Cole’s political mentality, which I suspect was conservative. Rather, I’m investigating the way his symbolic discourse slip-slides all over the place.

That night the “powwow” commences, and Chief Great Warrior is indeed trying to incite the other tribesmen to make war upon “the accursed whites” at a time when “the nation is busy with foreign wars.” The hero-- sort of an “Indian Rubber Man” (heh)—shows up to denounce the chief. The chief wants to know why those assembled should listen to a total stranger. Plastic Man promptly morphs himself into a totem pole, and almost all of the Indians—except for Great Warrior—instantly believe that “the Great Spirit” has come into their midst to denounce their chief. Great Warrior even correctly figures out that the impostor is really the modern-day crusader Plastic Man, but his people act as if he’s “mad” to consider the possibility that their talking totem pole is just a well-documented superhero playing on their superstitions. Because his own people don’t believe him, Great Warrior jumps into a quicksand bog and dies while promising to curse his enemies from the grave. Plastic Man, who has resumed his Indian disguise, lets Great Warrior perish, while marveling that the dying chief doesn’t cast any reflection in the bog. (Ordinarily one wouldn’t expect to see a reflection in a bog, though Cole renders the mire as if it was clear water.)

For the next six pages, the curse takes effect through Will Hawes, a random white man in Plastic Man’s home city. Cole gives the reader no clue as to why Great Warrior’s dead spirit—now seeming more like that of a shaman than of a chief—shows up in Hawes’ mirror and hypnotizes “ordinary, inconspicuous Will Hawes.” Perhaps the mere fact that he’s an ordinary white guy makes him the ideal pawn to carry out a reign of terror: setting bombs and other traps (most sadistically, a box that shoots poison needles into its victim). Hawes kills two persons in authority—the mayor and the police commissioner—and tries to blow up Plastic Man and Woozy Winks as well, though they both survive thanks to their respective powers. Hawes finally confesses to the cops, who don’t believe his story of an “Indian in the mirror.”  However, Great Warrior belatedly decides to pick on the man who arguably brought about his death. He appears, once more in reflection-form, to both Woozy and Plastic Man. Great Warrior promptly hypnotizes Plastic Man into becoming a one-man army, attacking the city (though unlike Hawes, the hero isn’t seen causing any deaths). The cops don’t believe Woozy’s story about the ghostly Indian chief, but they do manage to corral Plastic Man.

Cole left himself less than a full page to return his hero to his status quo, and he does so with one of the worst “cheats” in the history of comics. Woozy shows up at the police station with the son of Great Warrior, who has not been mentioned, any more than there’s any clue about how Woozy found him. With all the cops watching, the son summons the spirit of Great Warrior to appear in a mirror, vowing to live “a life of shame” (whatever that is) if his father does not clear “the innocent name of Plastic Man.” Great Warrior is so vexed by the threat of shame to his family that he shows up, makes a verbal confession of all crimes to the dumbfounded cops, and then disappears forever (presumably exculpating Will Hawes as well, though he isn’t mentioned).

What we’re left with is a extremely mixed message. On one hand, the Indians are kept on the reservation, thus keeping them from having an effect on the American power structure. On the other, though Cole evinces absolutely no sympathy for the Indians’ complaints, he does show that same power structure being assailed by the supernatural power of Great Warrior, even though the ghost chooses to act through white “sleeper agents.”  During the U.S.A’s involvement in World War II, pop fiction often displayed narrative tropes in which foreign agents successfully masqueraded as “real Americans”—a trope taken to its most demented limits in the 1942 film BLACK DRAGONS, which involved Japanese spies being surgically transformed into Caucasians. Unlike many of Cole’s crazy-ass tales, this story feels as though the author might be trying to work out some personal demons about American political history—but if so, the story of Great Warrior fails in that respect. 

MYTHCOMICS: "A MATCH FOR SATAN" (TRUE CRIME COMICS #2, 1947)

In this essay, I established that because I define the quality of mythicity in terms of its capacity for combinations, there will always greater potential for mythicity in metaphenomenal narratives than in those of the isophenomenal. That said, the following Jack Cole crime comic-- which appeared in the only comic book to be issued by a publisher named "Magazine Village"-- is one of the more mythically complex isophenomenal works. The entire story appears at this location.




Many crime-comics of the Golden Age, like the gangster-films that preceded them, followed a set “rise-and-fall” pattern. A gangster rises to power amid a welter of gore, and finally perishes as the law catches up with him at last. Jack Cole’s “A Match for Satan”is not an exception to this rule.   What sets this tale apart from the herd is Cole’s extraordinary gift for black humor.




Neil  Bowman is the quintessential image of the 1940s hick: tall (6’4”), gangling, wearing a straw hat and ill-fitting clothes. As an additional touch to further indicate uncouthness, Bowman continuously chews on matches, though he never smokes cigarettes or anything comparable. The artist himself had one major similarity to Bowman: his height and build, for Cole is described by Jim Steranko as having “a tall, lanky 6’3” frame. Yet in another respect the artist appears to be have been very unlike the character of Bowman-- for while Cole’s self-portrait in POLICE COMICS #10 shows the artist constantly stuttering, Neil Bowman has “the gift of gab.”  

Throughout the story, Bowman often (though not always) gets out of assorted scrapes with fast talk, often using his ‘dumb yokel’ appearance to deceive others.   Admittedly, crafty Bowman bungles as many crimes as he pulls off. But the story's opening caption tells us that “it seemed so long as one [match] dangled from [Bowman’s] twisted lips, his luck was invincible.” The story will show that whatever "luck" Bowman's match-fetish might bring him is highly variable, as is the title. Does it mean that Bowman himself is "a match for Satan," or that the near-brainless, acquisitive evil represented by a single match is the thing that will bring Bowman to a hellish fate?


A Freudian would surely suspect oral issues in a man who  continually sucks on matches. On page 3 of the story, Bowman goes a step further by eating his matches to make the guards think he’s crazy-- all for the purpose of breaking out of jail.  

In Cole’s tale, then, the human mouth is both a means for brute sustenance (eating: that is, devouring other life) and for higher communication (talking).   But because Bowman’s only mode of communication is deception for the purpose of “devouring” others’ lives, he remains a brute in man’s clothing, and like many such brutes, he ends up deceiving himself at times.  


Never is this more the case when Bowman’s heedlessness turns his talisman against him. Though he's entirely guiltless for his heinous actions, he starts leaving his matches at crime-scenes. Thus Bowman's compulsive habits give the police a means to convict him, through the saliva he leaves on the matches.   Even to the last, Bowman continues to use his mouth to attempt deception, but the match—the only time in the story a match gets lighted—shows us the true reward of the brute: the fires of the electric chair, doubtless to be followed by the more satanic fires of the title.          

REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PT. 2

In Part 1 I grappled with the problem of establishing "standards" for Golden Age comics, even with the knowledge that most of them were produced without formal standards in mind. Many creators simply cranked out features as quickly as they could, of course. And even artists and writers who showed conscious care in their work-- Reed Crandall and Fred Guardineer for the first, William Woolkfolk and Bill Finger for the second-- may have been primarily motivated by creating a reputation for being able to produce quality work so as to earn sustained employment.

Yet even with this in mind, I still disagree with the tendency of the bloody comic book elitists to value only the Golden Age work that simply suggests greater sophistication; i.e., the sophistication found in "good literature." This leads to a tendency to lionize, say, PLASTIC MAN, as a sophisticated satire-- which it is not-- and to ignore talents who were formally Jack Cole's equal, but simply didn't come up with a famous character like Plastic Man.

Using Jung's "four functions" as a guide, it's possible to validate Golden Age comics along any of the axes Jung provides: sensation, feeling, thinking, or intuition. Comic book elitists are usually impressed only by works that show evidence of rational activity: hence their general enthusiasm for EC comics, which is strong in both the thinking and feeling departments. In Part 1 I mentioned in passing two Golden Age stories that I found noteworthy from a historical crossover-standpoint: an AIRBOY issue from Hillman and a DAREDEVIL story from Lev-Gleason. No reader could accuse either story of being heavy in terms of thinking or feeling, but both are extremely strong in producing sensational effects. However, though they both boast some interesting myth-motifs, neither one would quite come up to my personal standards for a really complex symbolic discourse, unlike this recent Golden Age selection.

Even with the most pluralistic will in the world, it's likely that one could find within the corpus of Golden Age comics a cornucopia of works that emphasize either the didactic, dramatic or mythopoeic potentialities. So if I were to attempt a list of "the hundred best Golden Age comics," and wanted to keep faith with my system of four potentialities, I'd probably have to list 25 comics that provided the best sensations, the best thoughts, and so on-- much as I did back in 2009, when I decided to list a series of "best movies derived from comics," but wanted to arrange it in line with Frye's theory of the four mythoi, the better to test out that particular line of thought.

However, the fact that I might have search pretty hard through the Golden Age for examples of good symbolic discourse-- far more than I would in the Silver Age-- suggests to me a reigning principle about the priorities of comics-readers in that period-- and perhaps those of all readers of popular fiction in general-- more on which in Part 3.

On a side-note: I'm tempted to mention the high quality of Quality's early BLACKHAWK title to the fellow doing the survey of important Golden Age comics. I will predict here that if I do so, the fellow will either be non-committal on the subject of that Quality title, since so few elitists have investigated it, or disdainful for some non-aesthetic reason-- like, say, because the Blackhawks' uniforms are reminiscent of certain Nazi outfits.

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.

MYTHCOMICS #16: POLICE COMICS #20 (1943)

PLOT-SUMMARY for [“Woozy Winks Detective Agency”]: Plastic Man, battling two criminal magicians named Abba and Dabba, is knocked for a loop when they trigger a TNT explosion. While the hero recovers in the hospital, his sidekick Woozy Winks begins a bumbling search for the crooks. Given their description, Woozy enlists Jack Cole (famed artist of the PLASTIC MAN comics) to sketch the malefactors. Cole ends up following Woozy as the sidekick chases after Abba and Dabba, who seem to possess real magical powers, conjuring a wall out of nothing to frustrate Woozy. Woozy is even more frustrated when Cole postpones the search by knocking off for the day. The next morning Woozy and Cole somehow find the crooks, but Abba and Dabba subdue the would-be detectives. The crooks allow Woozy and Cole a last meal while explaining that their powers aren’t real; that they only manipulate their subjects’ imaginations. Woozy refuses to believe that the imagination is that powerful, at which Dabba tells Woozy and Cole that their meal included human meat. Sidekick and artist faint dead away, after which Dabba says he was just joking to prove a point. The villains leave their hideout with Woozy and Cole tied up. Cole’s publisher pops up out of nowhere and drags Cole back to his drawing-board. Woozy, still tied up, finds a magician’s wand and uses it to burst his bonds. Woozy overtakes Abba and Dabba and tries to use the wand against them. Abba performs a counterspell and Woozy’s magic goes berserk. Inanimate objects like cars and buildings come alive and pursue Woozy. Woozy screams for Plastic Man and runs to the hospital. Plastic Man wakes up, and realizes that he dreamed “Woozy’s” adventure himself, for the real Woozy is at his side, telling him that Abba and Dabba were apprehended after the explosion. Plastic Man laughs uproariously.


MYTH-ANALYSIS: In A.B. Cook’s ZEUS the mythographer observes that the archaic Greeks often conceived certain deities in terms of a dyad in which one figure is “stronger” and the other “weaker.” Such dyads might link immortality with mortality (Castor and Polyxenes) or even male and female (Apollo and Artemis).


Whatever this dyadic archetype signified to the Greeks, in popular entertainment such pairings originated in part as a method to enhance melodramatic tension. Thus a tough hero like Batman or Hawkman is paired with a weaker sidekick, such as a boy (Robin) or a woman (Hawkgirl). The sidekick may be above-average given his or her physical limitations, but nevertheless he or she is usually the first hero to get captured by the bad guys: ergo, tension. A comic sidekick such as Woozy Winks dwells on an even lower level of competence, and usually only aids the hero out of sheer dumb luck.


In “Agency” (my faux-title for an untitled Plastic Man story), creator Jack Cole (as opposed to the story-character Jack Cole) upends the usual pattern of the typical Plastic Man adventure, in which the stretchable sleuth battles nefarious villains and usually triumphs in spite of Woozy’s help. The initial splash-page--not a part of the main story-- suggests that the usual dynamic will obtain, since the panel shows Plastic Man laughing uproariously at Woozy, standing in front of a sign labeled “Woozy Winks Detective Agency,” while Woozy demands to know what’s so funny.


In the actual story, Woozy and Plastic Man change places through the device of dream, which extends the familiar axiom that every creator of fiction *is* all of his characters. Underlining this axiom is the fact that “Agency” is the first Plastic Man story in which artist Cole literally puts himself in the story, descending to the same downgraded level as any other character. In fact, the most competent characters in the story are Plastic Man’s re-imagined versions of his foes Abba and Dabba, who oscillate between being portrayed as clever fakers and as supreme magical adepts. Plastic Man himself, who is usually the super-competent one in typical stories, begins the story by making an atypical blunder, allowing the TNT to hit the ground. It’s the sort of blunder one would expect of Woozy Winks, so it’s no small wonder that for the length of the dream the hero imagines himself as the blundering sidekick.


It’s also significant that the Jack Cole in the story seems even more downgraded than Woozy. In his first appearance Cole is bragging about earning millions as a comics-artist, but when Woozy offers him “a buck-- cash” to do the sketching, Cole rushes to do Woozy’s bidding. However, even though the sketch is the exact image of Abba and Dabba, Woozy is too dim to recognize them and refuses to pay Cole. Thus Cole ends up following Woozy around in the hope of getting a good comics-story out of Woozy’s shenanigans. Cole’s only moment of backbone appears when he delays the action because it’s the end of the “eight-hour day.” But Cole can’t fight crooks the way his hero can, and ends up being tyrannized by his publisher, a figure whose face is never seen.


It’s also interesting that Cole (the artist) pitted the team of “dream-Woozy” and “dream-Cole” against a pair of magicians, since there’s no intrinsic reason that the story couldn’t have been about one villain rather than two. Abba and Dabba, like Plastic Man and Woozy, are a physical mismatch, for Dabba is a big lantern-jawed oaf while Abba is a scrawny guy in a tuxedo (after the fashion of a stage magician, one assumes). Their names plainly derive from the twentieth-century slang-expression “abbadabba.” I've seen various arguments as to the origins of this phrase, meaning "a person or thing of no importance," but it seems likely that Cole is also punning on the use of the much older phrase "abracadabra," which has associations with both archaic ritual magic and modern stage magic.


Whether they practice real or fake magic, though, Abba and Dabba correctly boast to Woozy that they’re “a team you can’t beat,” and by the time the dream ends they’ve definitely thrown Woozy into a tizzy. One suspects, though, that the real versions of Abba and Dabba are far from capable of bringing about even the illusion that an entire city has gone berserk. The real Abba and Dabba are seen for five panels on the story’s second page, and artist Cole significantly avoids letting the reader see their faces. It seems that not showing the face of the publisher within Plastic Man’s dream conveys a sense of potency to that character, while the villains’ lack of faces in the “real world” suggests that Plastic Man’s dreamed versions of the villains are much more formidable than the real ones.


Perhaps the oddest moment in “Agency” is its flirtation with the taboo of cannibalism. Many of Cole’s PLASTIC MAN stories employ sadism and grisly violence, but “Agency” only depicts simple slapstick, except for the weird moment when Plastic Man dreams that his powerful enemies sucker Woozy and Cole into thinking they’ve eaten human flesh. This is certainly a grotesque way to go about proving the power of the imagination, and probably says less about the mental processes of Cole’s character than of Cole himself. Cannibalism, the act of incorporating someone else’s flesh into one’s own flesh, may be the ultimate act of sadism possible, since one has to annihilate another being to do so. Critics should be wary of over-allegorizing such visual stunts, but there’s a loose parallel in “Agency,” since as noted before Plastic Man has made a Woozy-like error and so stands in danger, throughout his dream, of being “absorbed” by the identity of a bumbling sidekick. It’s surely no coincidence that at the conclusion of this identity-bending adventure, the narrator (a talking microphone) steps in to reassure readers that “Plastic Man will be back on his feet next month with a serious story"--or at very least, a story that doesn’t threaten the hero’s own identity so greatly.