MYTHCOMICS: '"THE GURU OF OURS" (MAD #128, 1969)

 Some critics sneer at everything MAD Magazine printed after the departure of Harvey Kurtzman. I'll admit that there were some features that were essentially "get off my lawn" rants from aging artists like Dave Berg, but some writers and artists turned a sharp satirical lens upon the shibboleths of the "now generation." One of the best sendups of the counterculture was the Frank Jacobs-Mort Drucker spoof of 1939's classic WIZARD OF OZ, described in a header as "the story of a teenage girl who loses touch with reality and meets a lot of way-out characters."

So here the heroine-- played by Liza Minelli, daughter of the late WIZARD star Judy Garland-- doesn't seek to escape the dullness of Kansas by visiting foreign lands with her little dog Toto. She wants to escape the "real world" by getting her freak on:

Someday.. with an insane glow...

I'll get high...

And I'll freak out until my 

Brain starts to petrify...

Drucker's caricature skills are excellent here as elsewhere, but for this story his choice of imagery is a lot more free-form than in most of his MAD movie/TV spoofs. At far left we see the entirely predictable figures of Dorothy's Oz-crew, although to one side of Minelli-Dorothy, Drucker crammed in the side-wise head of mature Judy Garland, who passed away the same year this satire appeared on newsstands. As if the artist is seeking to duplicate drug-induced fantasies, Minelli-Dorothy's body has morphed into the head and body of a minatory-looking owl, and a flower-wreathed skull appears next to her, with the legend "Love Me" just beneath. The other images all reflect standard hippie-images of the era, possibly with some Peter Max influence here and there. (The Jimi Hendrix analogue has the name of MAD contributor Al Jaffee on his shirt.)

Minelli-Dorothy sings this, BTW, to an "Auntie Em" that might as well have been called "Auntie Tim," since he's played by novelty singer Tiny Tim. A handy tornado-- the only marvelous phenomenon in the spoof-- whisks up the farmhouse and drops it down in an unspecified city. (Given all the freaks and actors she meets, San Francisco seems like a good nominee.) Incidentally, while the heroine has a dog with her on page one, on page two she addresses a pig by the name "toto." Said porker follows Minelli-Dorothy for the rest of the story without anyone commenting on the discrepancy.

So the house gets dropped on the stereotypical enemy of hippies, the college dean, and the Munchkin-hippies, led by Dustin Hoffman, celebrate the functionary's passing. Minelli-Dorothy expresses her desire to "groove in on that Cosmic High and rap with the Universal Ooom," so the Munchkin-students send her to meet "the Biggest Head of Them All," the Guru of Ours. (The pun, an attempt to associate the Big Head of Oz in the Garland movie with the slang for a doper, as in "hophead," doesn't come off that well.)

In the space of a couple of pages Minelli-Dorothy meets her Three Musketeers: (Pat) Boone-Scarecrow, (George) Hamilton-Tin Man, and (Michael J.) Pollard-Cowardly Lion. They all sing their "I want" songs, and unlike Dorothy they all want some sort of societal satisfaction, not to groove on any Universal Oooms. Nevertheless, the foursome (and Toto the Pig) continue following the Dirty Dark Street in search of the Guru of Ours.

The spoofs of Boone, Hamilton and Pollard for their acting-personas have nothing to do with the Oz spoof. However, the celebrity-identity of the Guru is insightful, for he's played by none other than Ed Sullivan, the presenter who introduced Middle America to such counterculture figures as Elvis, the Beatles and the Stones. The Guru  immediately gives the three schmoes "solutions" to their deficiencies that are as empty as the flapdoodle tossed out by the 1939 Wizard, but the Guru makes a lot of money off these phony cures.

"But what about Dorothy?" Well, she makes a weak request for Nirvana, and the Guru suggests "sensual mysteries" in his bedroom. Called a crook and a fake, he posits that the only "Nirvana" is money and that his fakery extends to both hippie-fantasies and all of avant-garde sixties culture.

With the greed of a vulture, 

I keep cashing in on culture, 

'Cause I'm nothing but a fraud...

And in the final panels, Minelli-Dorothy, her musketeers and Toto the Pig all get with the commercialization program and sing about how "merrily off to the bank we'll go."

The full spoof is here.

MYTHCOMICS: "EYE EYE SIR" (WITCHES' TALES #24, 1954)

Though the word "mythic" is sometimes used as shorthand for seriousness and importance, there's no reason mythic works can't be humorous. Indeed, Northrop Frye's four "mythoi" cover both two "serious" forms and two "unserious" forms, and I've already included a number of comedic or ironic works in my attempt at a canon of mythcomics.

However, the stories selected for this canon do have to sustain a level of symbolic complexity, and even many of the classic MAD stories of the early 1950s don't reach that level. An exception is "Mickey Rodent," which sustains a sociological myth relating to the human use of language and custom. 

This week's mythcomic falls more into the psychological department. EC influenced more than a few comics-companies of the early 1950s, and according to this Bhob Stewart essay, Harvey Comics was one of the main disciples. In fact, by 1954 each Harvey title became oriented on a particular theme, with that of WITCHES' TALES being (as Stewart puts it) "funny horror." The story "Eye Eye Sir" could have appeared in any of the many imitators of MAD, and in its five short pages it outdoes a lot of MAD tales in giving the reader a winsome spoof of both horror and hardboiled detective fiction a la Mickey Spillane. As the only creator-attribution in GCD is that of artist Sid Check, I have to refer to him here as if he was the sole author.

I imagine many modern readers would find it difficult to understand how much the Mickey Spillane books changed 1940s pop culture. His work would probably be excoriated by the sort of ideological critics who worship at the feet of Laura Mulvey, who liked to conflate "the male gaze" with both sadism and scopophilia. Sadly, even a broken clock will be right a couple of times each day, and there's not much doubt that Spillane's work is all about males gazing at hot women-- to whom the Spillane heroes seek to make love, even if they must kill the women later-- and killing lots of male criminals along the way, often in explicitly sadistic fashion.

The image of the tough private dick cleaning his gun at his desk is immediately spoofed by Check in a very MAD-esque sequence; catching his finger in the cartridge. But more than the gag, I like the backstory provided by the voiceover of narrator/hero Rudy Crane, who mentions first that he got kicked out of college for trying show his female teacher "a couple of laughs-- after school." He's also established to be, not a street-smart guy living by his wits, but a counterfeit shamus who's been set up in the private dick business by a rich daddy.

No less archetypal is the entrance of the gorgeous female client into the detective's seedy office, but Check puts a spin on it: the lady doth wear heavy blue-lensed glasses. Every male in the story will remark upon the glasses, offering un-subtle confirmation that "guys don't make passes at girls that wear glasses." Even if one had never seen this sort of humorous repetition in a MAD comic, a reader could hardly fail to draw the conclusion that there's something special about these glasses.

Client "Lucy Latour" hires Crane to find her husband, who left her three years ago when he went out for a loaf of bread. Crane then escorts her to various places to interview witnesses about her husband, and when Crane isn't pawing at Latour-- apparently not much dissuaded by her married status-- he's roughing up the interviewees with barely concealed sadistic glee ("I grabbed him by the collar. I wished it was his throat.") 

Then on page five, we finally see what's behind the glasses.

Though "Eye Eye Sir" is a jape, I strongly suspect that the author(s) knew about the notorious ending of Spillane's 1952 KISS ME DEADLY. In this essay I examined some of the symbolic complexities of both the book and, to a lesser extent, the 1955 film adaptation. In the novel, Mike Hammer's femme fatale projects the illusion of beauty through her face alone, and conceals what Spillane calls "a picture of gruesome freakishness" beneath her clothes, "from her knees to her neck." Given that "Eye" must conclude with a joke, albeit a very creepy one, there's no explanation of why Latour has, in place of eyes, "two big sockets with candles inside them," as if she were some sort of humanoid jack-o-lantern. But like the ending of KISS ME DEADLY, it's a great joke on a concupiscent male. Here's Rudy Crane, whose only reason for wanting to see the gorgeous dame's eyes is to imagine them shining with love for him, and all he gets-- assuming, by the narration, that he survives-- is a look of utter and complete emptiness.

The entire story can be read here.

MYTHCOMICS: "SUPERDUPERMAN" (MAD #4, 1953)

Looking through the seminal early MAD issues, one often finds a lot of clever puns and inversions of pop-culture tropes. However, the famous "Superduperman" story goes a little further into the realm of psychological myth than its contemporaneous fellows, like "Plastic Sam" and "Batboy and Rubin." At a time when the superhero genre was at its arguably at its lowest ebb in the history of American comic books-- when said genre certainly was nowhere near dominating the medium as would be the case from the 1980s onward-- Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood crafted a story that embodied the anti-mainstream arguments of Adorno and Wertham: the argument that I summarized thusly:

In elitist criticism, it's a given that all escapist fiction is by its nature a "negative compensation" that insulates the audience from reality, as I've noted with respect to Theodor Adorno in particular. "Positive compensation," if one could put the elitists' convictions into Adler's terms, would presumably be the sort of "high literature" that validates the intellectual's struggle for personal meaning.

Kurtman and Wood, being concerned with gonzo slapstick and puns, don't put forth any grand schemes of meaning in "Superduperman," but by making their spoof-hero a real nebbish instead of a pretend-one, they cast a critical eye upon the idea of superheroes as compensation for one's failures in life-- a fair enough subject for satire, given that creator Jerry Siegel himself framed Superman's appeal in such terms:

Clark Kent grew not only out of my private life, but also out of Joe Shuster's. As a high school student, I thought that someday I might become a reporter, and I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn't know I existed or didn't care I existed.-- Jerry Siegel.

In addition, over ten years before Julies Feiffer suggested that Superman might be a "secret masochist," Kurtzman and Wood present their nebbishy ne'er-do-well "Clark Bent" as the helpless thrall of "Lois Pain's" charms.

Shortly after this encounter, Bent changes into Superduperman and goes looking for the story's mystery thief, "the unknown monster."  The heist artist obligingly reveals himself to be a fellow superhero, Captain Marbles, who has decided to quit fighting crime and to begin looking out for number one. Countless critics have mentioned that the year of this story's publication was the same year Fawcett Comics quit publishing Captain Marvel features as well as discontinuing their comics-line, largely in response to the expensive plagiarism suit DC Comics had filed against Fawcett. It's hard to tell whether or not the outcome of the super-dudes' battle is a comment upon the legal battle, but it's at least significant that Superduperman must resort to a dirty trick in order to win.

Lastly, Kurtzman and Wood undermine the wish-fantasy implicit in the Superman mythos, and in many-- though certainly not all-- superhero narratives. Instead of responding to Superduperman's bulging muscles, Lois rejects the hero and knocks him on his ass just as she did when he was Clark Bent, averring that his super-bod doesn't obviate him still being "a creep."

 I might argue that no single comics-story of the period-- not Kurtzman's war-stories, not Barks' duck-stories-- had more effect on the intellectual development of comics-fandom than "Superduperman." I can't say that it was always the *best* effect. But "genre politics" aside, it's no less a masterful story of its kind.

MYTHCOMICS #13: MAD #19 (1955)

...though we are repelled by the sight of man turned beast... we revel to see beast turned man!"











PLOT-SYNOPSIS FOR "Mickey Rodent!" (writing: Kurtzman; art: Elder): As Mickey Rodent walks down a typical "Walt Dizzy" street, looking for Darnold Duck, passersby watch as cops cart away Horace Horseneck for the offense of not wearing white gloves. Meanwhile, Darnold Duck gets repeatedly beaned by projectiles because when people yell at him to "duck," he doesn't know if they're denoting his name or an action. When told that Mickey's looking for him, Darnold tells the readers that Mickey is only fit for "the old actor's home" and that Mickey never gets featured roles any more. Mickey finds Darnold but instead of saying why he wanted him, simply offers to drive Darnold into town. They pass a swimming-hole, and Mickey suggests that they take a swim to cool off. While they cavort, someone steals their clothes (except for Mickey's white gloves, which are "tattooed" on). The beasts-turned-men follow the thief's trail, but it's all a setup so that Mickey, who hates the duck for outperforming him, can lock Darnold in a duck-pen. Since Darnold is naked, the regular (non-"Walt Dizzy") humans who own the pen decide that Darnold must be a "mutated freak" and speculate about having him stuffed.


MYTH-ANALYSIS: Most of the classic MAD satires remain at the monosignative level in that they simply reverse the game plan of whatever's being satirized. Thus, if Superman is a noble hero, Superduperman is a superficial, sex-obsessed creep. But "Mickey Rodent" shows the authors playing a bit more liberally with the theme set forth in the introductory caption: that of "beasts turned men."

(Actually I really DON'T think readers are all that repelled at seeing human beings act like beasts. But that's another essay.)

The modus operandi of satire is to reveal the base reality beneath the figments and fantasies in which human beings immerse themselves. The first one we encounter is that the creator of the animated animals, "Walt Dizzy," decrees that all his creations must wear white gloves (four-fingered, in keeping with the way most characters have been drawn in the history of animated cartoons). Thus Kurtzman and Elder quickly communicate that the fun-loving cartoon characters of the Disney world are actually just as much under the thumb of a controlling Big Brother as any wage-slave.

The story doesn't waste any time letting the readers see the arbitrariness of this social sign. Moments after Darnold gets beaned by a baseball from "Goony," Goony points out that Darnold is walking around with no pants, causing the duck to rush home and don trousers, which he wears for most of the rest of the tale. Thus clothing, one element traditionally used by cartoons to transform "beasts" into "men," is shown by Kurtzman and Elder to be an arbitrary social construct. Aside from Darnold wearing pants, almost all the other characters-- versions of Goofy, Pluto, and Minnie Mouse-- comport themselves just as the originals do in terms of garments, though Darnold stands in for Kurtzman's ideal reader in that Darnold gets nauseated at the thought of Minnie, a giant rat, wearing eyelashes and high heels. Mickey Rodent is the only other exception: he dresses normally enough but throughout the story artist Elder draws Mickey with unsightly beard-stubble. (He also seems to be missing some teeth in a later scene.) But in Kurtzman's world a dissolute-looking Mickey is fit to take a clever revenge on his rival.

The other arbitrary social construct Kurtzman tears apart here seems more vital to the history of "beasts turning men" than clothing was: the construct of language. I won't over-analyze the running gag of Darnold constantly being unsure whether people are calling his name or telling him to duck. But I'll note that it's just one element in Kurtzman's script that points out the absurd nature of language. Perhaps more telling is that Darnold is first seen talking in the incomprehensible quacking voice of the animated cartoons. Then the editors inform the readers that they will translate the duck's voice into readable text, paralleling the transformation that Disney's duck had to pass through when he was adapted to comic strips and books. But it's important to Kurtzman's plot-- as it isn't for the legit Donald Duck comics-- that Darnold should "quack like a duck" at the story's end, so that the regular humans will mistake him for a freakish version of a real duck.







Clothing and language, then, are the twin pillars of the arbitrary civilization Kurtzman gives his Disney characters, and like Samson Kurtzman is more than happy to pull down both pillars. But even when Kurtzman seems to be protesting the injustice of such civilized forms-- "Pluted Pup" has a Shylock-moment where he protests, via signboards, the injustice that he of all the animals isn't allowed to talk-- Kurtzman also implies that without those arbitrary signs of civilization, one's only option is--

To get stuffed.