MYTHCOMICS: "LAND OF GOLDEN GIANTS" (FLASH #120, 1961)

 

The two Silver Flash stories I've previously analyzed, MASTER OF THE ELEMENTS and PLIGHT OF THE PUPPET-FLASH, showed writer John Broome intentionally articulating mythic aspects of each story's respective villain. In LAND OF GOLDEN GIANTS, however, I believe that his conscious intent was only to craft a boy's adventure involving time-travel to prehistoric times. Yet he subconsciously structured it to reflect myth-images with which he might've only had a nodding acquaintance-- particularly, images relating to the Deluge Myth.

As the story opens, a "scientist explorer," Bill Manners, mounts an expedition to gather evidence of the separation of the continents from one another during prehistory. Manners invites Barry Allen and Iris West, who are his "young friends." Barry and Iris for their part invite along their young friend, Iris' nephew Wally West, who became Kid Flash ten issues previous. In fact, GIANTS is noteworthy in the relationship of the older superhero and his mentee, since Barry reveals his true identity to Wally prior to the trip.

No sooner does the party-- consisting of the three adults, Wally and Manners' granddaughter Gail-- arrive at some location in South America than a nearby volcano, located in the Valley of the Sleeping Giant, erupts. The whole expedition is swept up in a landslide, apparently so unexpectedly that even the two super-speedsters are caught off guard. When they regain their bearings, though, the country around them appears radically altered for all five travelers.

Barry and Wally leave the others behind, don their costumes and scout around. This works out well, since they almost immediately must save a primitive tribesman from an outlandish monster. Eventually it will dawn on the duo that they haven't traveled geographically, but temporally; that the volcano explosion cast them back to an earlier era. The cavemen of the tribe try to tell the heroes about another local menace, a horde of Golden Giants, but Flash and Kid Flash find out the hard way.

Fortunately, the crusaders not only to escape their colossal foe, they manage to obtain cables from the expedition-camp, enabling them to pull a Lilliputian act against the golden "Gulliver." 

But they're still faced with the dilemma of how to get back to their own time. The two Flashes don't immediately come up with an answer, so they make a super-fast exploration around the whole world. They learn that, propitiously enough, the time-warp hurled them back to the very era Manners sought to learn about: the moment in time when the continents of Africa and South America began to separate. This cataclysm unleashes mighty flood-waves, so the heroes rush back to the cavemen and talk the prehumans into running to higher ground. Just as propitiously, the implied foes of the cavemen, the Golden Giants, show up just in time to get engulfed and exterminated by massive waves. Barry, though a scientist first and foremost, remembers Genesis 6:4 well enough to quote the familiar phrase about "giants in the earth," which foregrounds God's decision to send the flood to wipe out most of humankind, except for a select few.

At any rate, the heroes must return their friends to their own time, and they do so by duplicating the temporal vibration from the volcano. Amusingly, Flash concerns himself with the adults, while Kid Flash saves the age-appropriate Gail. However, once the whole expedition is back in modern times, Iris, Gail and Manners never know that they time-traveled at all, nor do they catch sight of the two Flashes, which keeps the heroes' identities from being compromised. Manners finds some of the contemporary evidence he wanted and never knows that he actually visited the era he's researching.

By virtue of the Genesis quote, Broome demonstrably knew the most basic association between giants and the Deluge, even though the King James Bible does not explicitly link the giants with the sinning humans whom God destroys. And he might have been utterly ignorant of the considerable elaboration of Jewish lore about the giants, originally called "Nephilim" in the Old Testament text:

In apocryphal writings of the Second Temple period this fragmentary narrative was elaborated and reinterpreted. The angels were then depicted as rebels against God: lured by the charms of women, they "fell" (Heb, nfl. נפל), defiled their heavenly purity, and introduced all manner of sinfulness to earth. Their giant offspring were wicked and violent; the Flood was occasioned by their sinfulness. (None of these ideas is in the biblical text.) Because of their evil nature, God decreed that the Nephilim should massacre one another, although according to another view most of them perished in the Flood. One version asserts that the evil spirits originally issued from the bodies of the slain giants. These giants, or their offspring, are identified as Nephilim (See I En. 6–10, 15–16; Jub. 7:21ff.)-- Jewish Virtual Library.

Yet Broome was clearly reworking the most basic trope of the Deluge Myth, in which some are saved and others are destroyed. The function of the Flashes is slightly similar to the role played by the "time-travelers" of Conan Doyle's LOST WORLD novel, where the intrepid explorers intervene to make sure that a race of primitive humans is not enslaved by brutal ape-men. There seems to be no particular reason for Broome to have made the giants "golden," although the color is sometimes associated with a formative period. And the period of the continents' separation is clearly one such period, in which a Deluge sorts out the good tribe from the bad one, and makes possible the stable configurations of modern reality.

MYTHCOMICS: "THREAT OF THE WITCH-WOMAN" (STRANGE ADVENTURES #156, 1963)

 Throughout the 15 installments of the John Broome-Murphy Anderson series THE ATOMIC KNIGHTS, the stories expoused an ethical stance re: science and culture most like John Campbell's ANALOG in the same era, a stance could be summed up as "pro-science no matter what."  In ATOMIC KNIGHTS, humanity misuses technology so as to bring about a nuclear holocaust, returning humans to a predominantly agrarian level, though they're still menaced by tinpot dictators, mutated creatures and lingering radioactivity. Yet despite all these calamities, the primary duty of the heroes is to recover all the benefits of science and technology in order to return humankind to its high estate. These particular heroes may fight for justice while wearing the armor of archaic European knights, but they only do so because the armor has been permeated with a unique power that protects the wearers from radiation poisoning. "Set a thief to catch a thief" in the world of apocalyptic SF, if you like.

Many SF-narratives can be fairly accused of "scientism," defined as "excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques," and one of the most frequently used strategies of validating science is to downgrade the influence of religion upon human subjects. One can find a lot of anti-religious rhetoric in prose SF, but comic books of the Silver Age tended to avoid the topic. Broome's script "Threat of the Witch-Woman" shows clear influence from the many stories that deal with the witch-hunting craze of 17th-century New England, but nowhere in "Threat" does Broome speak of religion as such. Instead, the idea of "superstition" is substituted for that more controversial topic.

The witch-hunting trials are usually seen as hysteria arising from the isolation of Christian settlers in the raw domain of colonial America, where devils were seen in every incident of bad fortune, to say nothing of red-skinned natives and darksome forests. Since the KNIGHTS feature had hurled humanity back to the status of rustic life, it must have seemed logical to Broome to use witch-hysteria for a story, albeit not in New England as such. The Knights' home base, the fictional town of Durvale, is said to be located in the Midwest, six years after the nuclear apocalypse, but they nevertheless find that one of the neighboring towns has become infected with witch-hysteria-- though at base the problem stems not from religion but from a new radiation-malady: "hallucination-sickness." 

The dialogue shown above-- in which the five Knights and their female comrade discuss the sickness-- is an excruciatingly earnest infodump, complete with the infamous "as you know" phrase when one Knight relates things that the other characters know but the reader does not. The character Herald, a schoolteacher, informs his friends that he beheld one of the "two-dimensional creatures" spawned by hallucination-sickness while he was checking on a student from the neighboring town of Harrow. The denizens of this town are antithetical to the pro-science beliefs of the Knights: "It seems the rest of the town doesn't believe in schools or science, or any progress! They fear progress, because they claim it led to the War!"

This critique of the misuses of science is patently ignored by the Knights, who are more concerned that someone in Harrow has been infected with the sickness. Though the malady hasn't been observed for very long, it just so happens that the Knights already have a potential cure available, so off they go to Harrow to minister to the afflicted. On their way they encounter Herald's student Fred Dromer, who reveals that one of the hallucination-creatures attacked the home of Harrow's leader Mister Fallow. It's not clear as to why Fallow and the other Harrow-ites figured out that the creature had been spawned by Fred's mother Henrietta, but in their superstitious fear they consider her to be that scourge of the seventeenth century, a witch. The Knights arrive just as the crowd prepares to execute Henrietta Dromer and stop the attempted murder. (In deference to the Comics Code, Anderson's art does not even suggest whatever method the townsfolk mean to use in killing the youthful young mother, just as Broome does not even wonder what might have befallen young Fred's father.)

However, despite having revived the archetype of the witch in superstitious fear, the Harrow-ites are correct: Henrietta is indeed responsible for calling up the vaguely devilish energy-beings. It's interesting that Broome titled the story "Threat of the Witch-Woman," since the whole point of the story is to prove that she is not a sorceress. Broome may have been in sympathy with the idea that some of the New England women who confessed to witchcraft were simply seduced by the psychological fantasias of having been seduced by Satan, but in place of psychosexual impulses, Henrietta is merely a vessel who accidentally empowers science-fictional "demons." The Knights observe that the hallucinations have a rudimentary intelligence, and that they seek to remain alive by keeping Henrietta locked in her trance. 

Ultimately the Knights free Henrietta from the energy-creatures, who fade away when deprived of their summoner, and the heroes take the woman and her son back to Durvale to be cured. In a last minute turnabout, Fallow and the other townsfolk show up, duly chastened and ready to accept the ways of science over superstition.

I don't think John Broome was a feminist as such, and therefore he probably didn't have much to say about the status of women in patriarchal society, which has often been a theme on which witch-hunt stories have expatiated. Yet it's worth remembering that he did create DC Comics's second version of Star Sapphire, analyzed here as a Jekyll-Hyde figure caught between a desire to be traditionally feminine and a coequal pleasure in being "the boss." The apparent widow-woman Henrietta Dromer has far less depth than Star Sapphire, and the reader knows nothing of her position in the Harrow community, but it's at least possible that when one hallucination attacks the domicile of town leader Fallow, that event may express some feminine resentment of Harrow's patriarchal leader. It's also of passing interest that in the Dutch language-- a language that would have been spoken in some New England colonies-- "dromer" means "dreamer." 

Of even greater mythopoeic interest are Broome's uses of the names "Harrow" and "Fallow." Harrowing is the process by which a farmer readies the land for planting seed, but over time the word has also taken on some emotional resonances: a fearful experience is said to be "harrowing," and the Messiah's descent into hell is typically called a "harrowing." Calling the town "Harrow" taps into some of these meanings as well as just evoking the idea of a farming-community. Of equal interest is Fallow's name, for when a farmer wants to allow overused land to "lie fallow" in order to replenish its nutrients, he does indeed harrow the land once more, but without introducing seeds. In the context of the story, the town of Harrow has allowed itself to "lie fallow" for too long by not accepting progress and scientific advancement-- and the Knights, by venturing into the staid town to purge it of an alien illness, have introduced the "seed" of rebirth.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE ORIGIN OF CAPTAIN COMET" (STRANGE ADVENTURES #9-10, 1951)

(NOTE: The first appearance of Captain Comet is a two-part story, concluded by a tale entitled "The Air Bandits of Space" in STRANGE ADVENTURES #10.)

Though the fan-recognized "Silver Age" would not commence for another five years-- or three years, if you date it from the first year the Comics Code came into effect-- the first "Captain Comet" tale reads less like other SF-heroes of the time than like those of the 1960s, when the Silver Age was in full sway. I'd speculate that editor Julius Schwartz, a long-time devotee of science fiction, was hoping to come up with a successful "sci-fi superhero" for the recently debuted STRANGE ADVENTURES title. However, despite getting cover-featured for most of his 38-issue run, Comet was not especially successful, and was largely forgotten until his revival in the DC mainstream in the seventies.

Teamed with artist Carmine Infantino, writer John Broome creates what may be the first "mutant superhero." At the time of the story's publication, Broome could well have been aware of speculations that the Star of Bethlehem might've been a comet, since a brand-new comet appears in the sky on the day of the future hero's birth. Naturally, the script doesn't reference something as sacrosanct as the birth of the Judeo-Christian Messiah in a comic book. Thus when Adam Blake is born "in humble surroundings," the hero's parents-- almost humorously given the standard names of "John" and "Martha"-- discuss in general terms the folkloric belief that a comet foretells the birth of a "great man."

John and Martha then recede from the narrative, which focuses thereafter only upon Adam, who gets his name from a never-seen grandfather, though the real association is more like a deflection of "the Last Adam" (e.g. Jesus Christ) into "the First Adam" (1 CORINTHIANS 15:45) Like many "miracle heroes" before him, Adam possesses preterhuman powers from childhood, and though he experiences a brief alienation from the rest of humankind (for just one panel), the story is far more concerned with explicating Adam's status as the opposite of a "throwback," a "future man" born long before his time. He possesses great facility with almost every human skill, and develops the power of "mind over matter," to the extent that he even uses the power to defend himself from a gang of thugs. One of Adam's college professors suggests that Adam ought to adopt some "new secret identity" to deal with "evil men."

However, it's not a mundane threat that propels Adam to adopt a spacesuit-costume and to name himself after the comet that heralded his birth. Instead, Earth is suddenly besieged by an alien race, who attack the planet with a gigantic version of a child's toy (presaging Broome's use of toy-tropes in his later FLASH stories). The origin-story is then continued into the next issue, whose cover features a cute girl in a short space-skirt, though no such female appears in the story proper.

By the story's opening, the Earth is being attacked by several giant tops, which are methodically draining away the atmosphere. Atom bombs cannot harm the mechanisms, but a reporter somehow learns that the newly minted hero "Captain Comet" is on the case. Interestingly, Broome recapitulates the "comet" imagery by having the hero leave Earth in a spacecraft that bystanders compare to a comet-shape, but rising from the Earth.

Comet tracks down the source of the malefic machines, a giant spaceship parked on the dark side of the moon. Inside the ship are countless aliens in cold storage, denizens from the world of Astur (in Greek "aster" connotes "star'). One alien, name of Harun, revives from coldsleep, and explains that the purpose of the tops is to make Earth an airless one, like the one from which the Asturians hail. Thus, while Comet represents a futuristic order of evolution, the Asturians represent the inversion of the natural (a topsy-turvy order, as it were), in that they flourish in an airlessness that would kill humans.

Harun, disdaining the idea of physical combat, challenges Comet to a game of chance, but Comet's superior talents-- including the improbable ability to sense the color of an object through the skin of his fingers-- prevail. Harun tries to revive his fellow Asturians, but conveniently for the story's brief length, the alien finds that all of his fellows have died while in suspended animation. Harun, despite Comet's efforts, commits suicide, after which the "robot-mechanisms" of the Asturian space-ark propel it back into space, and Comet ends his initial adventure with a meditation on life and death.

The entire story can be found at ReadComicOnline.

MYTHCOMICS: "WHEN THE EARTH BLACKED OUT" (STRANGE ADVENTURES #144, 1962)

DC Comics' ATOMIC KNIGHTS series-- a short-lived one, lasting only 15 installments from 1960 to 1964-- was a little more sophisticated than many of the one-shot stories that usually made up the contents of STRANGE ADVENTURES, a DC anthology mag that had been running since 1950. Celebrated editor Julius Schwartz edited the bulk of the issues, and they probably represented his own taste for gimmick-oriented science fiction.

In this series, atomic war broke out in 1986, obliterating the majority of human, animal, and plant life. Nevertheless, Old Earth made a pretty quick recovery, for by 1992 small enclaves of humanity have begun eking out a living from the rare farmlands not poisoned by radiation. Later critics complained that ATOMIC KNIGHTS trivialized the damage that a real atomic war would wreak upon the planet, but writer John Broome and artist Murphy Anderson were just following a fairly standard SF-scenario, wherein some cataclysm forces a new generation to remake civilization after the Apocalypse.

For the task of restoring order, Broome created a character named "Gardner Grayle." Half of his name was taken from that of Broome's writer friend Gardner Fox, while the other half was a play upon the "Holy Grail" of Arthurian legend. However, this particular knight wasn't seeking any holy object, but rather a return to relative normalcy. In fact, Broome advances the rather peculiar notion that Grayle is "exactly average:"

Since Grayle's supposed "average" status never influences any of the stories, I tend to see it as emblematic of the normalcy the hero and his friends sought-- although only in an intrinsic sense. In an extrinsic sense, the series was designed to be novel and exciting, rather than "normal." Grayle, seeking a way to protect humanity from the perils of fascist bosses and mutant species, joins with four other men (and eventually a young woman) to become a fighting-force. They chance across a handful of archaic armor-suits, which have become super-hard thanks to nuclear radiation, and so they become the Atomic Knights. For their "noble steeds," the Knights acquire mutated dalmatians that are now as big as horses. (If there's any element of ATOMIC KNIGHTS I've heard Silver Age enthusiasts enthuse about, it's those big spotted fire-dogs.

In the early issues of the series, neither Grayle nor anyone else knows which of the eight nuclear countries brought about the chaos. In "When the Earth Blacked Out," the Knights learn that none of them deliberately caused nuclear war. Rather, long before the war, a race of mole-people-- whose origins are never explained-- used their advanced technology to trigger the war. The mole-men, who have been around "for decades," waited a few years for the radiation to die down, and then made their move.

Having existed under the earth so long that they have only vestigial vision, the mole-men plant a strange plant, presumably of their own cultivation, which is capable of exuding so much black vapor  that, given time, the vapor will form a perpetual cloud to block out the sun's rays. Once the Earth falls into total darkness, the mole-men will conquer Earth.

The Knights seek to destroy the darkness-plant, but the mole-men have formidable weapons, and though they can't see, they can sense the approach of other living things through their heat-signatures. One of the knights comes up with the salient solution: defeat them with cold light-- the light of fireflies-- which will hurt the mole-men's eyes but not give them any advance warning. Appropriately, the Knights choose to use a familiar Halloween talisman to banish creatures of darkness: jack-o-lanterns with fireflies inside. (Not sure what keeps the insects from simply flying out.)

Naturally, the gambit works. The Knights defeat the mole-people and send them back to their underworld domain.

An interesting moral point is advanced at story's end. Though the mole-people caused the destruction of Earth, one Knight, Douglas Herald, stipulates that humans "cannot escape responsibility," for "we made the surface of the earth an armed camp-- a global tinder box. The mole-creatures provided only the spark that set off the dreadful holocaust."

This was one of the few ethical statements in what was ultimately a lightweight adventure-series. But Broome's mythopoeic talents are far more interesting than his moralizing, and the idea of using jack-o-lantern's to drive off creatures of darkness is one of his best concepts.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE PLIGHT OF THE PUPPET-FLASH" (THE FLASH #133, 1962)

In this post I agreed with Grant Morrison that the majority of villains in the Silver Age FLASH were personifications of natural forces. However, one character, the futuristic magician Abra Kadabra, embodied not cosmological factors but those related to psychology and sociology.

The villain was one of the more unusual figures to spring from the Broome-Infantino collaboration, in that he was not oriented on crime for the sake of profit or even to thumb his nose at the law. Abra, a citizen born in the 64th century, conceived a passion for the long-dead art of stage magic. Since none of his people shared his passion, Abra travelled back to the 20th century, and began performing for the public in Central City, home town of the Flash. However, the magician proved such an attention-hog that he used his future-science to manipulate his audiences. The Flash overtook Abra and sent him to prison.

Abra didn't get a cover when he debuted in issue #128, but he does for his second appearance, and it's become an iconic example of DC's penchant for "weird transformation" illustrations. As the story commences, Abra is able to use his super-science to manipulate the governor of the state, who promptly pardons the magician even though he's only been in prison a few months.

Once he's been pardoned, Abra thinks to himself that he plans to go straight, since as before his main desire is to receive adulation from an audience.

However, since a completely reformed villain would make for a dull story, Abra can't quite resist coming up with an act designed to humiliate the superhero who imprisoned him. He puts on a puppet show for the denizens of Central City, and his main act consists of seeing a puppet of the Flash subjected to slapstick indignities by another puppet, "Captain Creampuff."

Even before seeing the puppet show, policeman Barry Allen (aka the Flash) already suspects that the magician secured his early release through chicanery. Most of the audience laughs at the puppet-antics, but not Barry, who rationalizes that the square citizens are merely chortling at the puppet-scenario because it's so rare for them to see the Flash lose a fight. Barry is also frustrated because he knows that Abra's mockery is entirely legal. "Yet I must prevent [Abra] from turning the Flash into a laughing-stock," Barry soliloquizes, "or the power of Flash against crime will be seriously weakened."

Therefore, rather than simply waiting for the audience to lose interest in Abra's act, the Flash turns proactive and steps up his war against crime. He's so successful at displaying his heroic prowess-- showing that he's no creampuff, in other words-- that people stop coming to the shows.

 Abra can't stand being ignored and resorts to a direct attack on the superhero, using his future-magic to turn Flash into a real puppet, but leaving him his consciousness so that Flash must endure the abuse of his pie-tossing puppet adversary.

Flash gets out of it by resorting to the usual pseudo-science. At story's end, Broome seems to realize that it might be a little difficult to try a villain for turning a hero into a puppet. Thus there's a quick rationalization that somehow the police will manage to make Abra confess to having brainwashed the governor, which is a pretty weak resolution even for a 1960s comic book.

What isn't weak, though, is that the story examines the "war of wills" between hero and villain, showing how much of it depends upon the acclaim of the public. I'm not claiming that this realization is some sort of "deconstruction" of the superhero genre, as lazy elitists might assert. Rather, it's merely an attempt to ground the Flash's wild antics with a little psychological analysis. It's also interesting that even though Broome appears to be something of a conservative according to certain stories in his oeuvre, he's set up his story so that the villain is the more appealing figure. Abra's modus operandi is also much like the occupation of a real writer or artist; i.e., someone who depends on audience reception to earn his daily bread. And in contrast to his first story, Abra does manage to impress his audience by a legitimate appeal to their tastes. This puts the Flash in a position akin to the guardians of Plato's Republic: stomping out an artistic performance that threatens the commonweal. Which, now that I think of it, does carry a rather conservative vibe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MYTHCOMICS: "MASTER OF THE ELEMENTS" (SHOWCASE #13, 1958)

Votaries of Silver Age Comics almost always pay particular respect to THE FLASH feature. In part this is because many fans consider that the introduction of this hero also served as the starting-point for the Silver Age itself. Certainly, even though one can see a certain amount of carry-over from the "previous age" that ran from 1938-1956, the FLASH displayed elegant illustration from Carmine Infantino and intelligent scripts from John Broome, in such a combination that fans of the period began to expect this level of quality on a regular basis, as opposed to the hit-and-miss approach of the Golden Age.

Though Flash's first few appearances in the SHOWCASE try-out title are enjoyable tales, only in "Master of the Elements"-- Broome's third story with the character-- do all the mythic "elements" come together. There had certainly been dozens of "theme villains" in comic books before Mister Element, but Broome was especially good about conferring a "sense of wonder" upon the various science-factoids associated with a given villain.

The villain makes a standard enough first appearance, though it's amusing that he works in a reference to an obscure element while he robs the Palladium Jewelry Store, presumably named not for the obscure element but for this classic mythological reference.

The Flash shows up during the robbery but is stymied because the far-sighted villain has strung up a series of gold wires to block the hero. On a subsequent occasion, he stuns Flash with the use of sodium;

I won't detail every "element" of the super-criminal's first outing, but suffice to say that Broome manages to work in all the references to the properties of elements in such a way as to invoke a juvenile "sense of wonder." Interestingly enough, this puts the reader in the position of identifying with the villain, since when he narrates his backstory, Element merely says that he became fascinated with the nature of the chemical elements as a young boy.

To be sure, at the story's end Broome wants a spectacular death-trap for Flash, so he magicks up an element that never existed in the real world, and which I strongly doubt ever made a second appearance in Flash's fictional world.

But as I said in the previous essay, this falls into the realm of an extrapolation that is permissible within the boundaries of a story-- even though even I don't know how a "form of magnetic light" could be deemed a chemical element. But since it's the first FLASH story to consistently evoke the cosmological sense of wonder, I've give Broome a pass in that respect.

THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY PT. 3

Regarding the first three ages that I assigned to the Batman franchise here, modern fandom knows little or nothing about what concerns attended the transitions from one phase to the other, be it on the part of the producers or the readers. Since the BATMAN titles did not start carrying regular letters-pages until 1959, fans today cannot know what was on the mind of the fans in the 1940s as they saw Batman's adventures change from the weird horror of the first period to the Gould-like sophistication of the second one. Nor did the producers of the Batman comics call attention to the changes when they started having Batman encounter more aliens and magic imps in the hero's "Warm and Fuzzy Age," though a few fan-writers recorded their (generally negative) impressions in the burgeoning world of fanzines.

In the letters-page of the BATMAN features, we do have some clues as to how both comics makers sought to portray the transition from "Warm and Fuzzy" to "the New Look," as well as contemporary reactions by readers. It's a subject that might reward an exhaustive study, were I writing an essay on the topic for academic publication. But I'm only writing this blog largely for my own amusement, I'll confine myself to just a few representative quotes.

The first "New Look" Batman comic to appear on U.S. news-stands was DETECTIVE COMICS #327 (May 1964).  The letters-page does not print any responses to the preceding issue by Jack Schiff, substituting instead half a page to the plans Julie Schwartz (who is, however, not mentioned in the text) has for the title. The page's other half is allotted to a letter from Big Name Fan Tom Fagan talking about the fourth annual Halloween parade in Rutland, Vermont, in which he mentions that the parade included several members of the Batman Family-- including newly dumped semi-regular characters Batwoman and Bat-Mite. Schwartz, or whoever may have written his copy for him, does not precisely denigrate the works of the previous era, but the copy does extol the "New Look" over its predecessor in subtle ways.

There's a "new look" about the BATMAN art (the handiwork of the peerless pencil-and-pen pair, Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella)-- and there's a slicker, more dramatic style of storytelling (from the "talented" typewriter of John Broome).

The ensuing paragraph further informs the readers that a new backup feature, that of the Elongated Man, has ousted the Martian Manhunter from the pages of DETECTIVE COMICS; this section does not specifically champion the qualities of the new feature except to mention-- evidently playing to the hardcore fans in the audience-- that its writer and artist, Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino, are both winners of awards from the Academy of Comic Books Arts and Sciences. Schwartz's announcements conclude with obliquely informing the readers of the "big event" to come in the next issue of DETECTIVE-- which, as all good Bat-fans should know, was the death of Alfred, a "big event" subsequently reversed when the producers of the teleseries wanted to keep the Bat-cave's butler around on the show.

The art of the "New Look" Batman is not compared to that of the previous raconteurs, largely Dick Sprang and Sheldon Moldoff, because all of this art was billed as having been produced by Bat-creator Bob Kane. Some fans were certainly deceived: a letter from BATMAN #172 credits the improvements on the art to the inking of artists like Giella and Sid Greene on "Kane."  But the letters-page's comment on the writing of John Broome is without a doubt an attempt to persuade readers that the "New Look" would offer improvements on the previous period's writing, calling Broome's style "slicker" and "more dramatic."

One cannot always be sure that all the letters in Silver Age lettercols were genuine, save those that were written by "Big Name Fans" whose frequent appearances insure that the editors were not likely to have used their names flagrantly.  The letters-page of BATMAN #168 leads off with a representative comment by a known letter-hack of the period, Leonard Tirado, and this reader makes no bones about unfavorable comparisons to the previous Schiff regime as he comments on a story from BATMAN #165:

"As all of us in fandom know, the new look policy in BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS will mean newer and better stories like those featured in the current BATMAN. All previous attempts at faked-up science-fiction have been wiped off the somewhat depreciated slate of the dynamic duo. "The Man Who Quit the Human Race" was different than all others in that the science element was just used for what it was intended... to make the tale plausible, and not serve as a cover-up for "A monster is on the loose, boys" type plot."

Since one of the more vocal fan-complaints in later years concerned the inappropriate injection of science-fiction motifs into the Batman stories, Tirado's 1964 comment suggests that some readers didn't mind such motifs in Batman; they just didn't approve of seeing these elements dumbed down for the purpose of simplistic monster-stories, as Tirado implies was the case during the Schiff regime. For Tirado at least, Schwartz and his stable of raconteurs succeeded in bringing a "slicker, more dramatic" feel to the Batman franchise. Modern fans might not see that much difference between the Gardner Fox story in BATMAN #165 and previous alien-happy offerings from the Warm and Fuzzy Era. But there can be little question that some readers not only found Schwartz's editorship more pleasing, and that they found his version of Batman more "legitimate" even though Schiff's version, having been authorized by DC Comics, was just as legitimate. For many years, most fans echoed Tirado's verdict in respect to "Schiff vs. Schwartz," though in recent years Schiff's legacy has received a bit more critical attention.

The issue of legitimacy, however, was raised with far greater force with the debut of the BATMAN teleseries in 1966. Again, while one cannot be 100% sure of the authenticity of Silver Age letters-pages, I tend to consider genuine letters expressing grievances about how the teleseries was adversely affecting the comic books. My representative example is from another BNF, Peter Sanderson. from BATMAN #194:

"... it seems to me that you [editors] think, 'If the readers want campiness, let's give some to them-- if we don't, we won't sell as many mags,' Now, look. Your magazine will NOT drop in sales if you get rid of the 'batbrellas,' the 'holy ____.' If you think that your sales will be crippled without campiness, remove the camp stuff from BATMAN and DETECTIVE and have those two mags for people like me, and for the Camp-ers, put Batman in another mag wherein he teams up with the Inferior Five, because to readers who won't read an 'Uncamp Batman,' he's just a bundle of laughs."

I see one implied element held in common by all three of the quotes cited. Schwartz (or his spokesman) emphasizes "slickness" in a non-pejorative manner, meaning something like "streamlined," and claims that the work will be "more dramatic," which connotes a better appreciation of how to make stories work in dramatic terms. Many fans of the period would agree that the stories from Jack Schiff's editorship had become too ritualized, too formulaic, with rare exceptions like the fan-favorite story "Robin Dies at Dawn." Schwartz was no less invested in delivering formulaic stories-- certainly, in later comments the editor cantankerously disparaged his Silver Age readership.  At the time, though, Schwartz understood that one way to boost the readership of the Bat-books might be to appeal to the hardcore fans, who didn't want to see their favored genre as routine and repetitive, and enjoyed seeing genre-works that paid closer attention to matters of drama and verisimilitude.

Oddly, what the BATMAN teleseries delivered was closer in spirit to Schiff than to Schwartz. Whereas Schiff invoked formulaic elements simply in the belief that this was what the readers ought to want, the TV producers invoked those elements for purposes of spoofing and/or satirizing. Both were, for very different reasons, invoking the Langerian concept of *the gesture,* but in a very ostentatious manner, calling attention to the gestural nature of the fantasy so much that I'm tempted to consider it a sub-division of the gesture, which I will provisionally label "artifice." Thus Sanderson dismisses the camp teleseries as irrelevant to what he wants, since it's just "a bundle of laughs."

In conclusion, this brief overview shows that the original statements of Noah Berlatsky, cited here, were flawed in presuming that all comics-fans ought to have embraced the teleseries if they wanted legitimacy. I don't think most fans of any period wanted legitimacy if it meant trashing the original stories that they enjoyed; it's my impression that fans wanted Batman to be loved for the very escapism he incarnated, not as an ironic commentary on some in human society or psychology. And even the considerations of legitimacy were secondary, just to wanting better Batman stories.

MYTHCOMICS #7: GREEN LANTERN #16 (1962)

PLOT-SUMMARY for “The Secret Life of Star Sapphire” (Broome/Kane): Carol Ferris, boss of the aircraft company for which Hal Jordan (aka Green Lantern) works, is flying solo for sport. Her plane is brought down in a desert by a group of aliens, all females dressed in Greek-looking armor, calling themselves the “Zamarons.” The aliens explain that although they have an advanced civilization, made up entirely of immortal women, their tradition requires them to seek a mortal queen. They want Carol to become that queen, who takes on the hereditary name “Star Sapphire.”

However, Carol doesn’t want to leave Earth, and her greatest tie to it is her love for Green Lantern. To make Carol realize that all men are weaklings in comparison to Zamarons, the aliens transform Carol into Star Sapphire, who can use the sapphire in her tiara to summon formidable energies. The Zamarons use mind-control to force Star Sapphire to fight Green Lantern. She wins the first contest, but loses the second. The Zamarons then consider Carol unworthy to be their queen, so they take away her power and her memory. However, when Green Lantern finds Carol and her plane in the desert, she still has the star sapphire with her (an inconsistency explained in a later story) and the hero wonders whether some connection exists between the two women.

MYTH-ANALYSIS: In a general sense the relationship of Hal and Carol follows the seminal Clark-and-Lois pattern, in which a woman prefers the hero to his humbler, more normal alter ego. Now, since Green Lantern’s secret identity is that of a daring test pilot, Carol doesn’t reject Hal for being cowardly, as Lois originally does Clark. But though Carol does have strong feelings for Hal, they’re overshadowed by the powerful image of the hero. Also, where Lois and Clark are equals in the workplace, Carol is Hal’s boss. This may not reflect feminist proclivities on the part of scripter John Broome. Since Carol is “minding” the company for her parents while they’re vacationing, she may be more comparable to the lady ranch-owner of B-westerns, who inherits land from her father and then must be protected from evil by a young hero.


However, the “evil” here springs from conflicting emotions in the heroine’s own soul. “I seem to be two people,” she muses during her first combat with the hero, “one wanting to conquer Green Lantern—the other at the same time wanting him to defeat me!” The first “person” is the part of Carol that likes being a woman in charge of a corporation, which may be the closest one gets to being a “queen” in American society, and clearly likes taking chances as a man would. (Green Lantern thinks of Carol as “pretty nervy” for taking a plane out on a solo flight.) The second “person” in the equation, however, wants the hero to defeat her so that she can be a normal woman who can be married, whether she chooses Hal or Green Lantern. In the future appearances of Star Sapphire in the Silver Age, this Jekyll-Hyde disparity takes on its own life without further tampering by the Zamarons.


John Broome’s concept of the Zamarons illustrates how easily a purely functional narrative device can accrue enough symbolic resonance so as to become what I have termed “super-functional.” Broome does not relate what event caused the Zamarons to regard all men as “a distinctly inferior species,” but their history is presumably a SF-take on the Greek legend of the Amazons, even as the Zamarons’ name plays on “amazons.” Artist Gil Kane, whether acting on his own or on editorial instruction, followed through on the association by garbing the technologically-advanced aliens in anachronistic Greek armor.


Some influence from William Moulton Marston’s WONDER WOMAN is likely. Both Marston and Broome make their female warriors immortal as a means of explaining how they can perpetuate their single-gender societies over time without recourse to sexual reproduction. However, the Zamarons are thoroughgoing “female chauvinists,” and their low opinion of men inverts the “male chauvinism” of the real world’s two-sexed society. It’s a chauvinism that the character of Carol Ferris has apparently internalized, since she’s more attracted to Green Lantern than to Hal Jordan precisely because the former is more powerful, and therefore more manly. Following Star Sapphire’s first victory over Green Lantern, Carol argues with the Zamarons for a second battle: “I feel sure Green Lantern can defeat me!” And her faith in her hero is justified in the second fight, where he does indeed overcome her. Were the two characters fighting with hands and feet rather than abstract energy-forces, Carol’s desire to be defeated would seem overtly masochistic.


The Zamaron “tradition” in which the immortals must have a mortal queen is also another functional device that takes on deeper symbolic complexity. Since the character of Carol is mortal, Broome’s script has to give the Zamarons some reason to want a mortal queen. In addition, they must have some reason to pick Carol over all the other women on Earth. Broome chooses to say that the Zamarons search throughout the galaxy to find “a perfect replica of their former queen,” a story-motif that resembles the reincarnation-scenarios of works ranging from Rider Haggard’s SHE to Gardner Fox’s original HAWKMAN. One might make something of the notation that the name of the aliens’ planet, “Zamaron,” means “Land of Lovely Women”—connoting perhaps that even among warrior-women, looks count for a lot. Notably, this process of selection inverts the way Hal Jordan is chosen to be Green Lantern, in that Jordan is affirmed for his intestinal fortitude.


One must note that Star Sapphire is meant to mirror Green Lantern in that both summon their power through similar devices: a ring housing a jewel and a jewel set in a tiara. For Star Sapphire, though, the jewel becomes a token of her double identity, one that can and does re-activate her alternate persona. At times Green Lantern may seem a little schizophrenic in his desire that Carol should want his alter ego more than his heroic identity, but essentially he is in control. But exposure to power does Carol Ferris no good, and over time Star Sapphire does become the “Hyde” to Carol’s “Jekyll.” It’s ironic that the SUPERMAN franchise eventually foreswears the gender-triangle of Clark-Lois-Superman, GREEN LANTERN—which appears more progressive at first glance—ends up turning the triangle into a quadrangle, one that eventually breaks into pieces.