MYTHCOMICS: "FATHER EARTH" (2000 A.D. #122, 1979)

 

(Note: the Bolland cover seen above did not appear on the cover of the magazine wherein the Judge Dredd story first appeared, It's likely that Bolland was commissioned to create a new cover for this 1983 American reprint, one which played off the narrative of the story "Father Earth." It's an amusing coincidence that Dredd's dialogue anticipates one of the catchphrases of 1986's Robocop character.)

Roughly a year after Judge Dredd attempted to "bring law to the Cursed Earth," the mutated inhabitants of the apocalyptic wasteland returned the favor. Ten thousand "mutielanders," creations of atomic fallout, converge on Mega-City One, given common purpose by the environmental terrorist "Father Earth." The story, written by John Wagner and illustrated by both Brian Bolland and Ron Smith, does not expatiate on the villain's background, though, since the fellow literally has plants growing from his body like a sci-fi version of the Celtic "Green Man," one assumes he's a particular type of mutant. Unlike the Marvel Comics breed of genetic spinoffs, Father Earth displays only a very minor ability-- the creepers on his body can choke people-- but his real power consists of being able to entrance the wasteland rabble with high-flown religious rhetoric: "Today Mother Earth will claim back what is hers! Today her bowels will open and fire and brimstone will spew forth upon the cursed city." The Bad Father, in other words, despises the technological civilization of Mega-City One, holding all technology responsible for the devastation visited upon Earth, and thus postulating a hellish catastrophe spawned not from the skies but from the depths of Mother Earth-- to whom Father Earth may deem himself the consort.

At the same time that the mutie horde advances upon the impregnable walls of the city, most of the Judges within those walls are more concerned with internal politics, for an annual election of Mega-City officials is in progress. All of the electioneering, Wagner tells us, builds up to one massive electronic vote submitted by the citizens, in contrast to contemporary times' extending the voting over a period of days. Our hero Judge Dredd concedes the need to ride herd on criminals amid the crowds, but senses that the mutielanders are the greater threat, even though the wastrels have no weapons capable of breaching the walls. Dredd's suspicions are partly confirmed when it's discovered that some of Father Earth's soldiers, warriors known as "the Doomsday Dogs," have infiltrated the city and have attempted to sabotage a power facility. Dredd and other Judges whip the Dogs, preventing them from triggering a live volcano from the city's use of subterranean lava.

However, even after Father Earth's minions are defeated, the ten thousand followers remain camped outside the city. Dredd attempts to disperse them, but he's not allowed to arrest them without cause under current Mega-City law. The city goes about its business, building up to the massive, all-in-one-minute voting surge-- at which point Dredd intuits Father Earth's backup plan. He discovers that the saboteurs planted a bomb in an unobtrusive auxiliary pipeline, and the bomb goes off in tune with the massive voting surge. This puts such stress upon the energy-system that Father Earth gets his fire and brimstone eruption.

Despite the terrene terrorist's marshaling of chthonic forces against the world of technology, his plans are foiled by three brave Judges, "the Holocaust Squad," who shut off the lava-flow at the cost of their own lives. Once the volcano no longer menaces the populace, the better-armed Judges lay waste to the wastelanders. However, John Wagner-ian irony, not Judge Dredd, gets to pronounce sentence on Father Earth.

Of the many buildings destroyed in the catastrophe, one is Mega-City's Botanical Gardens, whose specimens include a handful of man-eating plants culled from other worlds. One of these, the Bloodplant, lures its human victims into its maw by emitting a siren-call. Father Earth hears the call, decides it's "the Voice of God," and marches with the last of his followers into the plant's gizzard. Muses Dredd, "You can't be more one with nature than that."

While I think Wagner definitely wanted to evoke the myth of "technology over nature" in this story, I'm not as certain as to whether either he or one of the artists conceived the "Doomsday Dogs" with some idea about the role of dogs as mythic death-harbingers. I wondered at one point why Wagner specified that the deadly blooms all came from alien worlds. It's an apocalyptic world; couldn't they be mutant Earth-plants? But it now seems appropriate that the man-eaters aren't born from Planet Earth. Since they've been brought to Earth by the spacefaring technology of the Mega-City, the plants are, like the nuclear missiles, another example of "death from the skies," which once more trumps the forces of "death from beneath the earth."

MYTHCOMICS" THE MAD COMPUTER" (2000 A.D. #144, 1979)

There’s a special kind of irony that the most mythic Xmas-comic I’ve found thus far doesn’t actually take place in the holiday season.

From the near-totalitarian philosophical stance of ultimate lawman Judge Dredd, holidays are just one more potential wrench in the gears of a smooth-running Mega-City: one more sybaritic excuse for citizens to misbehave and thus incur judicial wrath. This week’s mythcomic, spawned by John Wagner and Mike McMahon, shows that such “libelous displays” (to quote from Lerner and Loewe) are so infectious that they can even spread their cheery poison to days that are not holy, and to beings that are not human, like the titular “Mad Computer.”

“Everyone loved Barney, and Barney loved everyone—until the day that Barney went haywire, and Christmas came a little early to the Des O’Connor Block!” It would be interesting to know why Wagner chose the name of “Barney” for Mega-City’s master computer. The famed Purple Dinosaur, the “Barney” best known for cloying affection, did not come into being until 1992, and earlier Barneys from THE FLINTSTONES and ANDY GRIFFITH don’t seem like probable inspirations. Computer-Barney, a vital instrument in the running of the city, is given a human face by his creators—two tape-reels that look like eyes and a big red-lipped, toothy grin pasted on the machine’s front. The story, being only six pages long, doesn’t state outright that Barney has gone “haywire” because humans make the mistake of humanizing a mechanical intelligence, but the “everyone loved Barney” line implies that this is the proximate origin of the chaos.

One day, Barney decides that the Christmas spirit shouldn’t be confined to one day of Mega-City’s year. The inhabitants of “Des O’Connor Block” are the only residents who get expensive gifts from the computer, possibly because these are the people the computer most often sees day-to-day. Further, the local school is damaged by Barney so that all of the kids will be out of school, and the computer sends special announcements to some residents, which notes give unto them false “good news,” like a widow being told that her husband is still alive. Barney tells all of the residents, “I want you to be happy, folks—an’ I’ve got the power to do it! Before long, I’m gonna make it Christmas in every cityblock! Christmas every day of the year!”

The Bard memorably wrote, “If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.” Judge Dredd isn’t worried so much about tedium as the insupportability of eternal good cheer. Since he can’t immediately attack the computer, which threatens to cripple all of Mega-City, Dredd tries to reason with the runamuck mechanism. When Barney proclaims his gospel-- “The law’s no good if it don’t make folks happy”-- Dredd responds with the Voice of Experience:

It’s false happiness, Barney! You don’t understand people! Pretty soon the bubble is going to burst—then the Judges will have to clean up the mess!

And Dredd’s gospel is borne out. Given a false god who promises that all one’s wishes can be fulfilled, the residents of Des O’Connor Block begin to fight amongst themselves, and even to commit murder, despite Barney’s confused, futile protests: “You should be happy!” Finally the Judges charge in to restore order, and by then, Barney’s circuits have become scrambled by seeing the results of his irresponsible largesse. Faced with a mother whose little girl was trampled by crazed residents, Barney commits suicide by switching himself off, making it possible for the Judges to control the city once more. The story’s final dialogue conveys the ironical gospel of Dredd, which counters that of the Pale Galilean by stating that essentially “man WAS made for the Sabbath:”

JUDGE TELFER: We can’t give people happiness. The best we can do is good old law and order.

JUDGE DREDD: As far as I’m concerned, Telfer, happiness IS law and order.

NEAR MYTHS: STOCKING STUFFER #2

This Xmas season’s second and last near-myth comes from the same series as the forthcoming mythcomic: the venerable series British series Judge Dredd.

In the first “stocking stuffer,” I opined that good sentimentality doesn’t always make good mythicity. However, sardonic irony doesn’t always provide the Keys to the Kingdom of Myth, either.

This cover, first appearing for a 1987 American reprint., seems to sum up one of the primary themes of JUDGE DREDD: no free rides for the pleasure-principle while Dredd, the incarnation of the displeasurable reality-principle, is on duty. 

However, most of the stories collected in this Quality Comics reprint, JUDGE DREDD v. 2, #6, make only niggling use of Xmas elements. The only tale that even deserves the status of a near-myth is 1985's “A Merry Tale of the Chiistmas Angel.”

That said, “merry mix-up” would be a better title, since scripter John Wagner and artist Steve Dillon simply tossed together four loosely-related plot-threads involving the terminally addled citizens of the futuristic Mega-City. One, the least memorable, involves a performance of the Nativity by a troupe of actors with bad Italian accents. In the second, Dredd’s perpetual sparring-partner, the manic Mean Angel, is lobotomized in order to make him into a model citizen, and in the third, a Christmas-hating terrorist named Flymo takes the Nativity-performers hostage. Lastly, there’s a frame story that starts out by suggesting that the Judges of Mega-City are extending the hand of charity to the grotty mutants outside the city’s borders.

Regarding the first and third plots, Wagner doesn’t even bother developing them past functional status, with Dredd commenting, after Flymo’s demise, that they (and the readers) will never know why the terrorist had a mad-on against the holiday season. Mean Angel is always fairly amusing with her berserker-rages against the incarnation of law and order. However, in symbolic terms the best part of this thread doesn’t involve the battle of hero and villain, but a comical bit where Mean receives a Christmas package containing a “Dredd-in-the-box”—which gift inadvertently helps break down the savage thug’s conditioning. As for the frame story, I’ll just say that it’s sort of plot that insures that JUDGE DREDD, despite its adventurous aspects, always keeps one foot planed in the realm of irony. Wagner’s Judges take no holidays from dispensing justice, and the Mutants—who are, very conveniently, all “known murderers”—find that the hand of charity is actually concealing the sword of Old Testament justice.

NEAR MYTHS: STOCKING STUFFER #1

Not to be a Grinch about it, but though there's a lot of mythicity in the actual rituals and customs of Christmas, to say nothing of the intersection of pagan myth and Christian worship, not that much mythicity appears in pop-cultural Christmas entertainment. I like sentiment as much as the next fan, but with a few exceptions, like possibly Seuss's original Grinch-fable, holiday cheer doesn't seem to translate into what I've called (in my windy way) "hyperconcrescent symbolic discourse."

Case in point: TEEN TITANS #13, Bob Haney and Nick Cardy's winsomely corny reprise of Dickens' CHRISTMAS CAROL, blended with faux-hip teenaged superheroes. Haney probably guessed that most if not all of his readers had "grooved" on various adaptations of Dickens, and so what better grist for the story-mill than to have the Teen Titans experience almost the same story in "real life," with only minor changes of names and situations:

First the teen heroes sit around reading comic books, while Robin loftily recommends a more portentous author:

And then they start to experience almost the same events of the CAROL.

At no point, surprisingly, do any of the heroes start worrying, a la Will Farrell, that they may be helpless pawns of some capricious author. They just go about solving a crime that involves the skinflint "Mister Scrounge," his employee "Ratchet" and Ratcher's crippled son "Tiny Tom." I'd be lying if I said I hadn't enjoyed the pants off this cornball version of metatextuality back in the day, and that I still enjoyed Cardy's masterful mise-en-scene upon recently rereading same.

However, the closest the comic comes to mythicity is the weird, eye-catching cover:

The idea of having a bunch of good guys pinned to a Christmas tree like living ornaments is by itself nothing special. However, the idea of the faux-tree being  made out of a collection of junk is inspired, since Xmas presents usually connote the promise of The New, while Junk connotes the Old and the Unpromising. Further, seeing the heroes are bound by old tires and radiators and bedposts makes it seem as if the junk is alive, preying on the energies of youth. However, even Haney's lunatic imagination couldn't figure out how to justify "junk-that-eats-teens-as-food" (in contradistinction to the more familiar "teens-eat-junk-food"). So in the story proper it's not a tree of junk, just a big conical pile of trash that somehow has the power to magnetically attract the good guys, though not any of the bad guys they're fighting at the time. An added, almost Old-World touch is that the two figures in the foreground-- the "Scrooge" doppelganger and modern-day crook "Mister Big"-- are making deep, flourishing bows to one another as if emulating those turn-of-the-century personifications of politeness, Alphonse and Gaston.

MYTHCOMICS: "JUDGE DREDD BRINGS LAW TO THE CURSED EARTH" (2000 A.D, 1978)

For modern readers the Greek word “apccalypse” has become synonymous with the idea of a great cataclysm, usually one that lays waste to the advanced civilization of humankind and hurls humans into the clutches of a hardscrabble existence. But formally the word means “uncovering,” with the connotation of casting aside false illusions and revealing truth.

The British comic-book series JUDGE DREDD takes its inspiration from the SF-gente of post-apocalyptic literature. This subgenre doesn’t exclusively deal with a post-nuclear cataclysm, but DREDD, conceived in 1977, follows the well-worn path of an atomic aftermath. Although DREDD is British in origin, most of the character's stories take place in a futuristic version of the United States. The American “land of plenty” has been reduced to a radioactive wasteland, inhabited by scrounging human tribes and mutated lifeforms. Amid the wasteland known as the Cursed Earth, only three mega-cities abide, protected from radioactive menaces by great domes, and in all three teeming metropolis the citizens are controlled by armed lawgivers called  “Judges.” The titular Judge Dredd is one of the toughest of this tough breed, and his adventures in Mega-City One—a science-fictional version of New York City—are often tinged with  irony and satire. While some of Dredd’s antagonists include monsters and career criminals, often he’s in the position of a gun-toting babysitter, constantly curbing the irrational behavior of the citizens.

The five-part serial “Judge Dredd brings Law to the Cursed Earth” takes Dredd out of his city, where he’s so often employed in enforcing draconian rules, and into the land of no law. Though Dredd himself believes in the law as an absolute—and even speaks of himself as an incarnation of it, as in his catchphrase “I am the Law”—his mission “uncovers” some interesting aspects of humanity, at once ape and angel.

Dredd learns that Mega-City Two on the West Coast desperately needs a vaccine in order to stave off a plague that transforms its human victims into cannibal zombies who cry out for “forbidden fruit,” i..e., human flesh. Lacking flight-machines, Dredd and his fellow Judges can only traverse the distance overland, using in part a huge armored transport-vehicle called the Killdozer. Yet technology isn’t all the hero needs for his quest; he needs to fight chaos with one of its own lawless agents.

With his usual “gentle persuasion,” Dredd coerces a long-time petty criminal, Spikes Harvey Rotten, to go along on the mission-- reason being that Spikes is “the best biker in the business,” having honed his skills running guns to mutant tribes. Spikes’s last name is implicitly a tip of the hat to Britain’s punk movement, exemplified by singer Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, and the artists on the Dredd serial draw Spikes to reflect the familiar image of the disrespectful punk. But even though Spikes hates judges as much as Dredd hates criminals, the two of them prove to be a good team as they cross the perilous badlands.

Religious tropes are a familiar aspect of post-apocalyptic stories.The name "Cursed Earth" may have been conceived with a mind to the Bible's association between the earth and the curse placed by God upon the murderer Cain, familiar from the King James translation of Genesis 4:10:

10 The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. 11 Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. 12 When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

Cain is not specifically invoked in the saga, but the Cursed Earth is without question a land overrun by wandering tribes of malefactors, though to be sure the judge does encounter a few pockets of human goodness. References to Biblical and other mythic materials appear throughout this serial, Dredd and Spikes contend with  (1) a fanatical, Moses-like lawgiver who condemns transgressors in his tribe to be eaten by rats, (2) robots who suck blood from human victims in order to keep alive the last President of the United States, (3) a tribe of killer mutants, one of whom is significantly named “Brother Gomorrah,” and (4) a genetically engineered tyrannosaurus named Satanus. The malevolent dinosaur, in fact, proved so popular with readers that he became a recurring foe for the righteous judge. Arguably Satanus might have better named “Grendel,” for in his backstory the predacious dinosaurwas spawned by a “hag-mother” rather reminscent of the nameless mother of Beowulf's monstrous enemy. However, Satanus went further than Grendel, for in his original incarnation the tyrannosaurus attempts to murder his dam. She kills him instead, and he's only revived in his genetically engineered form by the folly of futuristic scientists.

As I said before, Spikes actually proves a decent partner to Dredd, choosing to support the judge at times when the punk might've run off and left Dredd to his own devices. There's never a sense that Spikes does so because his baser instincts have been ennobled by his mission, and his criminal nature comes forth when he and Dredd find themselves taking on a new ally, an anteater-like alien creature named “Tweak.” Tweak is an intelligent creature who sacrificed himself for his people, pretending to be a dumb animal in order to deceive space-faring humans and to prevent them from plundering his homeworld. Spikes hears Tweak relate his earns at least some of the Tweak’s tragic story, but when the punk learns of the riches of the alien’s world, he cares about nothing but finding some way to harvest those riches for himself. 

Tweak, both telepathic and precognitive, foresees that Spikes is doomed to die during the voyage, and allows the punk to think that he gains access to the planet’s mineral rights. As a result, Spikes dies in defense of the mission, though his true motivation is pecuniary, so he can prove that he’s “not just a punk.” It's a mark of the ambivalence of the Pat Mills/John Wagner that Spikes' death takes on a heroic aura, even though his ambition is to exploit a planet full of innocent creatures.

Only Dredd and Tweak make it all the way to Mega-City Two with the life-saving vaccine. Yet in the last stretch of the arduous journey, the Judge undergoes hallucinations in which he thinks he’s being attacked by all the denizens of the wasteland. He shoots at the mirage-figures, declaring that, “I’ve beaten all of you! I’ve beaten the Cursed Earth!” Still, though he succeeds in his mission, and even manages to send Tweak back to his planet, Dredd’s concluding thought is:

Return to Mega-City One and maybe a little peace and quiet. But whatever’s waiting for me there, it can’t be as bad as—the Cursed Earth!

It’s something of a reluctant salute to a worthy enemy, and perhaps an acknowledgement that the forces of law and order can never totally defeat the forces of chaos—much less, as the title declares, “bring law”  into the wasteland that mirrors the lawlessness of human ambition.

DIAL D FOR DEMIHERO PT. 3

Returning now to the hitherto-sketchy idea of “intellectual will” vs. “instinctive will” expressed in this essay.

 

I’ll reiterate that of the four persona-types outlined in HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 1, any of them can be “protagonist” or “antagonist” as delineated in AGAIN SUPERHEROIC IDIOMS PART 4. 

 

As a general rule two of the four, the “hero” and the newly christened “demihero,” are the life-affirming forces, while the “villain” and the “monster” exist to thwart the forces of life.  However, experienced readers will be familiar with other permutations. 

 

 

A comics-series like MAN-THING portrays its monstrous protagonist doing good not as a conscious act but in response to instinctive tendencies. 

 

 

 

In the short-lived JOKER series of the 1970s, the titular villain still performed many of the same evil deeds he performed as a Batman antagonist, but in the majority of Joker-stories his efforts had the effect of putting other felons back in the pokey.

 

For simplicity’s sake I choose to define the story’s protagonist not as the person or presence most emphasized in the story—“the focal presence,” the “imaginative center”—but as the character with whom the audience principally identifies, while the antagonist represents whatever forces the protagonist struggles against.  Yet identification and imaginative focus are not the same.  I’ve frequently cited Lewis Carroll here.  One identifies with Alice, but Wonderland provides the audience’s imaginative focal point.

 

Admittedly, the focus is not always so easy to sort out.  In most Batman-Joker stories, it’s a given that Batman is both the identificatory character and the imaginative center.  The Moore-Bolland KILLING JOKE provides a rare exception in that the narrative shifts the imaginative focus to the Joker as it relates a possible origin for the Clown Prince of Crime.  Batman is still predominantly the identificatory character through whom the reader is lessoned in lunacy.  Arguably the hero loses some of his heroic status as he becomes the “Alice” lost in the demented “Wonderland” of the Joker’s madness.

 

I’m aware of a slight tendency on my part to categorize characters as “victims/demiheroes” if they are lacking in dynamicity (Carl Kolchak, Doctor Who) or centricity (Jonathan Harker of the DRACULA novel).

 

Yet that’s not what I meant to communicate when I formulated this schema.  The demihero can be resourceful, can be powerful, can be central to the narrative.  But he must embody “instinctive will” in its life-affirming guise, even as the monster does in its (generally) life-denying guise.

 

In my current analysis, both Doctor Who and Kolchak are heroes of the subcombative type.  Though they lack the *dynamicity* that would make them combative heroes, they do exercise “intellectual will” in order to stymie the forces of disorder.  Bram Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, on the other hand, is a *mesodynamic* type of protagonist who nevertheless ups his game enough to become a key player in the fight against the monstrous focal presence/antagonist Dracula.  Yet I judge that his type of heroism is governed less by a heroic ideal than by the instinct to protect himself, his home and his ingroup against all aggressors.  Thus, he provides a mirror to Dracula, the monster whose main focus is also self-preservation.

 

The instinct of self-preservation, though, does not rule either Batman or the Joker.  Their respective devotions to “order” and to “chaos” are often—though not invariably—framed as intellectual propositions.  The Moore-Bolland KILLING JOKE devotes its narrative to the Gospel According to the Joker, depicting the Joker’s madness as an insight into the true nature of the world.  Frank Miller’s DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, in contrast, depicts the Batman’s vigilante quest as one in which the protagonist breaks man’s law in order to protect a higher law—admittedly one perceived through Batman’s particular blend of ruthlessness and compassion.

 

 

 

By chance I stumbled across a quote that may illuminate some of the differences between these different yet complementary forms of human will.  Following the spinal trauma Christopher Reeve suffered in 1995, the actor wrote in his autobiography STILL ME:

 

“What is a hero?  I remember how easily I’d talk about it, the glib response I repeated so many times.  My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous act without considering the consequences… Now my definition is completely different.  I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to perservere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.”

 

Reeve, though he was an actor whose job was to play fictional characters, speaks here of normative, real-world definitions of heroism, making no comment upon the depictions of heroes in fiction.  But his remarks do have application to the archetypes of heroes as we find them expressed in fiction.  Endurance, more than courage, is the hallmark of demiheroes like Alice and Jonathan Harker.  It also underlies the “raison d’etre” for the majority of monsters, though one cannot generally call their acts “heroic.”  Dracula seeks to survive by finding new feeding-grounds. The Man-Thing is psychically sensitive to the emotion of fear, and attacks anyone who broadcasts that emotion in his presence, which may include innocents as readily as malefactors.

 

Heroes and villains are more focused on “grand gestures,” made in defiance of consequences.  Not all villains are larger-than-life like the Joker: Batman often fights criminals who are no more than *mesodynamic,* though on occasion a sufficient number of ordinary crooks present an extraordinary threat. 

 Even the mundane crooks as portrayed in these stories want more than simple survivial.  Typically they desire wealth, which may be seen as establishing a form of willed control over their environment.  This will to control often manifests in the crooks forming their own society counter to that of honest citizens.  Unlike monsters, who are most often seen as forces gone out of control, villains seek to exercise total control, be it of city-neighborhoods or the entire world.  The hero responds in turn with his own counter-efforts to control the pernicious counter-society of crime.  Those efforts—whether they stem from a vigilante like Batman or a constituted legal authority like Judge Dredd—also go beyond the criteria of simple survival, emphasizing the power of the law to curtail the will of the lawbreakers.