SPIDER-FEMME, SPIDER-FEMME PART 1

 Though Spider-Woman is hardly the worst character to debut during the chaos of the early Bronze Age of Comics, her initial origin is certainly one of the least prepossessing.

Most Marvel fans know that Spider-Woman was born from an attempted trademark violation. Sometime in 1976, the year after Modred the Mystic made his two appearances, Filmation Animation Studios contemplated a new set of superheroes for Saturday morning television. One of those superheroes was going to be named Spider-Woman. Marvel Comics, who held the trademark on Spider-Man, may have made some legal protest to Filmation. The upshot of the conflict seems to have been that in order for the company to claim "Spider-Woman" as a Marvel trademark, the company needed to publish a Spider-Woman. Thus, in MARVEL SPOTLIGHT #32-- dated February 1977 and thus actually issued in late 1976-- a Spider-Woman was introduced. Presumably Marvel so informed Filmation, for when the studio debuted its cartoon lineup in late 1978, their arachnid-character had assumed the new name "Web Woman." The lineup failed so quickly that had Filmation done their own Spider-femme, few would have remembered her.

The debut of Marvel's heroine was not much better. Archie Goodwin cobbled together a loose story in which an amnesiac woman named "Arachne" was captured somewhere in Europe when agents of the organization Hydra observed that she had strange powers. Hydra's leader Count Vermis formulated a plan to turn Arachne into an assassin to kill Hydra's foremost enemy, Nick Fury of SHIELD. Hydra apparently makes Arachne's costume for her and gives her the Spider-Woman name (though Arachne never uses that cognomen). Rather than taking time to devise some brainwashing device, the evildoers command a handsome blonde Hydra agent, one Jared, to make love to Arachne. Then the schemers arrange for Jared to be captured by SHIELD's European division while Nick Fury happens to be present.

 Arachne attacks SHIELD, apparently willing to kill Fury even though Jared is still a living prisoner. Arachne herself accidentally wounds Jared fatally, after which Fury reveals how Hydra tricked the heroine, and Jared dies expressing revulsion for having even touched his super-pawn. Arachne then speeds to Hydra's base and decimates it, chasing down Vermis. The master villain then reveals that he knows that Arachne was the creation of the mad scientist The High Evolutionary, who mutated animals to become the demi-human Knights of Wundagore. Arachne was ostracized by the other creatures there, and thanks to Vermis' prodding, she breaks through her memory blocks and remembers that the reason for her outsider status was her heritage of being a mutated spider, given a human body.

Perhaps Arachne would have retained that status had she never been revived. But for whatever reasons, those of good SPOTLIGHT sales or of long-term trademark protection, Marvel decided to launch Spider-Woman in her own title. However, to give her some early exposure, the heroine became entangled in a very messy five-issue arc by Marv Wolfman in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #29-33 (July-November 1977).

Though the spider-femme's origin is only incidentally touched upon, the sequence does end with the revelation that she's actually a human mutated by exposure to a spider-serum, which story would be expanded upon in the series proper. It isn't necessary to go over every beat of Wolfman's five-part story. It's only relevant that Spider-Woman is recaptured by Hydra, that she becomes part of a whole world-conquering scheme, and that, though it's revealed that she's not repugnant because she's a reborn spider, Wolfman loosely repurposes Goodwin's idea that she somehow repulses people for an unknown reason.

The only other interesting point is that all five issues are confined to England-- and I theorize that Wolfman chose that setting so that he could revive Modred the Mystic, in whose creation Wolfman was loosely implicated. True, one of the other guest-stars who teams with the series-star The Thing is also Shang Chi Master of Kung Fu, and his character was based in England. But Shang Chi vanishes from the sequence after issue #29, while other, more important aspects of the story evolve from the release of four elemental demons who are trying to capture Modred, who's still a resident of Old Blighty. At the story's conclusion, Modred is actually the individual who divines that Spider-Woman is a human being. Wolfman would later seek to explicate this facet of the character's nature in the first eight issues of SPIDER-WOMAN.

I don't know if Wolfman cherished some hope that Modred would accrue some strong repute from the story. But what happened was that roughly two years later, Roger Stern made Modred one of the puzzle-pieces of the aforementioned AVENGERS arc, "The Yesterday Quest"-- and for the most part, Modred did not come off looking good in said arc and the character remained a minor figure for several years after.

As for Spider-Woman, neither her SPOTLIGHT debut nor her TWO-IN-ONE appearances cast her in a very strong light. Yet as Modred declined, she advanced-- and the early issues of her own title show that she had more staying-power than the trademark-swipe that led to her creation.

NEAR-MYTHS: THE NOCTURNA LEITMOTIF (1983-85)

 The early 1980s was an odd transitional time for Batman. Though the character had gained some cachet in the 1970s, the crusader was not even close to being the financial juggernaut he became later, partly though not solely thanks to the 1986 DARK KNIGHT RETURNS and the 1989 Tim Burton opus. At some point in the 1980s, either before or during the hiring of Doug Moench as sole scripter of Batman in both his titular book and in DETECTIVE COMICS, DC Comics attempted to goose the sales of both titles by having the stories interconnected. That is, if one story with a villain (say, the subject of my essay, Nocturna) began in BATMAN #363, that story's conclusion would appear in the subsequent issue of DETECTIVE COMICS, and the next story in BATMAN might begin a new narrative. This editorial ploy was spectacularly unsuccessful, for most regular consumers resented being forced to buy two titles a month to make sense of the stories. Sales went down and the idea was dropped, though not before Moench left the series in 1985.

At the time he accepted the DC assignment, Moench's last major opus had been on Marvel Comics' MASTER OF KUNG FU. That series had garnered high praise from fans, particularly for Moench's ability to weave a diverse group of characters, male and female, into a bracing melodrama, and one far more intricate than most Marvel comics of the early eighties. Given that Moench had been given the chance to be the main arbiter of the mainstream Batman continuity, he may have approached the assignment with the idea of repeating some of his fan-pleasing tropes from MASTER OF KUNG FU. That series had focused upon a group of heroic individuals bound by a common code rather than by family bonds, while the only familial relation of the series was the inimical one between Shang-Chi and his father Fu Manchu.

In contrast, prior to Moench's assignment, DC had just taken the first steps to introduce Second Robin Jason Todd to take the place of Dick Grayson, who was in the process of transitioning away from the Robin identity. Thus Batman had just gained a new surrogate son to share his adventures. In addition, during the pre-Moench period an old Bruce Wayne girlfriend, Vicky Vale, had been re-introduced, and another potential romantic interest for Wayne, Julia Pennyworth, had debuted. However, Moench injected two new characters, first seen to share a loose sibling-like history: Nocturna and the Night-Thief (a.k.a. "Night Slayer.") Whereas there were no mothers of significance in the MASTER OF KUNG FU series, Nocturna was soon defined by her taking the place of Jason Todd's recently deceased mother, just as Batman had taken the place of the orphan's late father.

Nocturna comes very close to rivaling Catwoman in the BATMAN mythos as the essence of a "dangerous yet desirable femme fatale," but in my estimation she never rises above the level of a near-myth. Possibly the character's many poetic ramblings about the beauties of darkness (she's an albino who avoids the sun) are meant to sell her as the embodiment of feminine mystery, of the principle of "Yin" perhaps. However, Moench rides the metaphor like a hobby horse, thus diluting its effect. However, where Catwoman had little or nothing to do with Dick Gayson, Nocturna inserts herself into Jason Todd's life in the second part of her first story, in DETECTIVE #530. Moench is a little vague about the sequence of events, but in the first part, Batman catches the Night-Thief but fails to capture Nocturna. She then apparently just happens to use a high-powered telescope to check out stately Wayne Manor, which eventually leads to her discovery of Bruce Wayne's double identity. At this point Jason has not yet donned a Robin costume, and he's decided to desert Wayne's charity because Batman won't let him become a junior birdman yet. For no rational reason, Nocturna sees Jason leave the manor, seeks him out, and talks him into returning to Wayne's tutelage, despite the fact that she should know nothing about him at this time. 

Moench then allows Nocturna and Night-Thief to recede from the picture for several issues, until DETECTIVE #543. She then appears to Jason again, acting very mysterioso, and laying some vague maternal claim upon him. By issue's end, she files a suit to legally adopt Jason, which Wayne has neglected to do. Presumably she knows that Wayne is Batman by this time, though she does not say so until a later issue. But the reader may well assume that knowledge, for when she first meets Wayne, she proposes solving their rival claims on the boy by getting married. 

Jason's reaction to the lawsuit makes Wayne's case harder, for he claims he wants Nocturna to be his new mother. His motive, though, is loyalty to Batman, for by this time he does know that the mysterioso woman is a thief, and he abets her adoption with the idea of getting the goods on her crimes. This leads to the strangest scene in the entire Moench run, in BATMAN #379. I should note here that Jason is drawn to look about fifteen, even though some sources claim he was supposed to be twelve. Yet, on one of his first nights under Nocturna's roof, she comes to his room to tell him a "bedtime story," an activity one associates with much smaller children. I'm sure Moench's main motive was to provide yet another poetic reflection on darkness, but the "bedtime story" ends with some puzzling dialogue about whether or not Jason would be susceptible to Nocturna's charms if he were just a little older. Moench doesn't pursue the concept of hebephilic sexuality in later issues, so I assume he was just playing around with Oedipal imagery as a side-issue to his main theme, the blossoming romance between Batman and yet another "forbidden femme fatale."

Most of the ensuing issues are more concerned with the triangular romantic conflict between Batman, Nocturna and Night-Thief, but the alluring albino makes a conquest in Jason Todd, who toward the end of Moench's run goes so far as to forget legal impropriety and to refer to the enchantress as "Mom." By this time Moench may have planned to leave the series, for he arranges a send-off for Nocturna in the form of an ambivalent death. But unlike so many other comics-characters, Nocturna did not get revived in continuity with her original form-- for in the last Nocturna-arc, the Earth is suffering the first signs of the Crisis on Infinite Earths. Thus once DC-reality was rewritten by the Crisis, any version of Nocturna that returned would exist out of continuity with the original-- and indeed, another Nocturna did pop up somewhere later, though I've not endeavored to check out this later character. I should also note that in the last arc Catwoman returns to challenge Nocturna for Batman's affections, and Catwoman more or less "wins" the bout. I imagine Moench had Catwoman somewhat in mind when he created his seductive lady crook, and maybe he was gratified that no other author would ever "lay hands" on his character, thanks to the exigencies of DC Comics' total reboot of their cosmos.

MYTHCOMICS: "CYCLONE AT THE CENTER OF A MADMAN'S CROWN" (MASTER OF KUNG FU #33-35, 1975)

 [NOTE: The summary title I chose for this three-part MOKF adventure is taken from the title of issue #34, because I felt it summed up the psychological theme of the narrative.)

When composing my reviews for serial comic books, I never attempt to read the series as I originally did when I followed it in real time (if I was able to do so). In this case, however, I had decided to attempt re-reading the whole MOKF series from beginning to end. I wasn't sure that I would post on the individual comics when I started the project, and now I know that most of the issues I've reread so far don't merit much "cyber-ink." 

I noted that the first issue of the series provided a potentially great opposition between two racial myths: that of Mandarin China as represented by Fu Manchu, and that of the cinema-manufactured image of the Asian martial artist, exemplified by the devil-doctor's son Shang-Chi. Unfortunately, most of the later stories with Fu Manchu, whether by Steve Englehart, Doug Moench, or anyone else, proved unimaginative and underwhelming. Paul Gulacy began working on the title frequently during this early era, but his vivid pencils did not make an impact on the series until MOKF #29 (May 1975), when Gulacy and Moench decided to transform the series into something like a James Bond comic book as drawn by sixties luminary Jim Steranko. (The tableau above is a typical example of Gulacy emulating a Steranko visual trope.) Though Fu Manchu would continue to make periodic appearances, Fu's old antagonist Nayland Smith became both a regular support-character and a symbolic father-figure to Shang-Chi. Additionally, the rather flat character of Black Jack Tarr was given a more dynamic personality, while Moench and Gulacy introduced a younger agent, Clive Reston, who would be able to engage with the main hero on a more personal basis. "Cyclone" also introduces Leiko Wu, the first regular female support-character, and Shang-Chi's first full-fledged romantic pairing. (The youth had enjoyed a first brush with love in an earlier story, but the woman practically had "Red Shirt" written on her forehead.)

In this quest for modernization, the creators had to discard the main template for Shang-Chi's character: that of Kwai Chang Caine from the 1972-75 KUNG FU teleseries. For many issues writers had kept the hero as a sort of "earth angel" who was too good to be true. But Leiko, the former lover of Reston, functioned in part to bring the angel back to his earthly origins.

Issue #33 starts off with a literal bang, as a killer robot attempts to assassinate Reston, only to be stymied by Shang-Chi. Nayland Smith then briefs his agents about similar assassinations of MI-6 operatives. The similar killing-methods, which have the capriciousness of "a child's game," prompts Smith to attribute the murders to a never-identified master killer known only as Mordillo. Further, Mordillo's long game is to take control of "Project Ultraviolet," an English invention that makes it possible to channel the power of the sun into a selective super-weapon. (To himself, Shang-Chi is deeply repelled by using the sun, "the source of all life," for purposes of murder.) An additional complication is that one MI-6 man, Simon Bretnor (whose surname even sounds like "Britain"), has simply gone missing, and Bretnor had a checkered past in that he seduced Leiko away from Reston some months before Bretnor's disappearance. However, Moench doesn't wait long before dropping the other shoe, revealing that Bretnor is the assassin Mordillo, and that he's captured Leiko, believing that she is the key to his possessing command of the solar death weapon (which the villain renames "the Solar-Chute").

Now, though Part One of this narrative might've been seen as something out of Ian Fleming, the next two parts veer into the loony-tunes terrain of the British spy-series THE AVENGERS. Mordillo, despite being a master of spycraft, has an obsession with children's toys, and the "madman's crown" of the title is an island surrounded by mountain peaks that resemble the encircling spikes of a crown.

 Reston and Shang-Chi mount a two-man mission (albeit one later joined by Tarr) to rescue Leiko and take down Mordillo, and when they first land on the island, they meet assorted constructs-- a cartoonish train, mechanical soldiers, and Mordillo's main confidante, a robotic yes-man named Brynocki. Given that Moench and Gulacy labored to center MOKF in a slightly more naturalistic cosmos than one found in most Marvel comic books, Mordillo's recapitulations of childhood images is clearly meant to suggest the depths of madness into which he's sunk-- even if, as Shang-Chi opines, "all thoughts are madness to him who is not the thinker."

Mordillo displays his credentials as a super-villain by trapping Shang and Reston and forcing them to watch as Leiko gets suffocated in a giant hourglass. However, it's at this propitious point that Black Jack Tarr makes his appearance by masquerading as one of the villain's mechanical men-- and the rebellion of one of his creations offends him more than physical peril ("You can't attack me-- not me!") He then escapes, and calls upon a resource more affiliated with the adult side of his personality: his lover Pavane, who had appeared in MOKF #29-31, and who was forced to tolerate his romance with Leiko-- much as Reston will soon be forced to tolerate a budding relationship between Leiko and Shang-Chi.

Pavane does not cross the path of Shang, though she does get a brief catfight with Leiko, while Shang gets the honor of pursuing Mordillo and Brynocki as the Solar-Chute ascends to begin its reign (rain) of solar death. Mordillo isn't able to score any physical points on the Master of Kung Fu, but he does seed some doubts about what Nayland Smith and MI-6 were going to do with the solar-chute, particularly against enemies of Chinese ethnicity. And when Mordillo claims that of spycraft that "it's all a game," this gives a new intonation to his taking refuge into a childhood-themed madness, and the idea reinforces Shang's early assertion that madness is relative to the thoughts of the individual thinker.

Shang-Chi of course destroys the solar-chute so that no one can use it again, while Mordillo's insanity precipitates his death. However, upon reuniting with his allies, Shang is embraced by Leiko, and it's obvious that she's become fascinated with him, and he with her. This is the crux of the new, non-angelic vision of the martial hero, as he himself meditates, "I should refuse her embrace-- But it is not within me to do so-- Rather, it is within me... to return her embrace, to concede that I am not perfect, that I am only a man-- capable of hurting another man." And this love affair, though often rocky, lasted the entire length of the MOKF original run-- though it was never quite as "strange" as the love between the late Mordillo and his faithful cartoon-creation.

A PAUSE FOR CLAWS

At the end of my YELLOW CLAW review, I said:

...in a separate essay I'll explore some possible reasons why the name might have retained some resonance, less because of the book than because of the racial myth Rohmer was indirectly invoking.

What "racial myth?" The one I suggested in my 2016 review of the first story that introduced "Shang-Chi, son of Fu Manchu." In part I focused upon not one but two racial myths represented by the debut cover.

Of the depiction of Fu Manchu I said:

Looming over Shang-Chi on the cover is the gigantic figure of Fu Manchu, though his name does not appear until the first page of the interior story. Most viewers would automatically call Fu Manchu's image-- given both pointed ears and clawlike fingers-- to be unreservedly racist. I will write no apologias for the pointed ears, but I think it worth pointing out that the widespread icon of the Asian with Clawlike Fingers may have come about as a Western response to the Chinese custom of incredibly long fingernails. For the Chinese long fingernails signified an aristocrat's freedom from the necessities of manual labor, but many Westerners, whether actively racist or not, plainly found the image off-putting and so evolved their own reading of this image. To be sure, as the story reveals, Fu Manchu is an aristocrat in the sense that he hopes to restore the prominence of the Manchu dynasty-- though one cannot necessarily render the same reading for every Asian villain who had "claw" in his name.

Now, though I reviewed all of Rohmer's Fu Manchu books in recent years, I wasn't specifically checking to see when if at all the early books showed the devil-doctor with either pointed ears or claw-fingers, nor have I checked to see whether or not the early covers for the books utilize such iconography. But there's not much question that the 1915 YELLOW CLAW does use the latter image to signify its barely-seen villain "Mister King."

Straight at the bare throat leapt the yellow hands; a gurgling cry rose—fell—and died away.

 

And later in the same novel:

A yellow hand and arm—a hand and arm of great nervous strength and of the hue of old ivory, directed a pistol through the opening above him.

So whether Rohmer or any other predecessor used the "Asian claw" motif, it's definitely there in the 1915 CLAW novel. Rohmer's "Mister King" is not that memorable a villain, being nothing but a mundane drug-dealer, and so he cannot be said to share the "aristocratic" background attributed to Fu Manchu. But since he doesn't have a background of any kind, readers also can't see him as anything but a vague spectre of evil. In the second King section, Gaston Max thinks of King in this way:

WHO had escaped? Someone—man or woman; rather some THING, which, yellow handed, had sought to murder him!

Did Rohmer really mean to suggest that King was "a Thing," like something out of Lovecraft (or even a Robert E. Howard rewriting of HPL?) Nothing in Rohmer would support such a thesis. But his visual focus on King as a pair of nearly disembodied yellow hands has a certain mythic appeal. It suggests that King's "hold" over London's criminal demimonde also constitutes a "stranglehold" upon the daylight world of London, inhabited by sensible Brits. 

Though Rohmer gives King a racial connotation, the image of "evil hands" is certainly not CONFINED to Asian characters. One year before the publication of YELLOW CLAW, the American serial THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE debuted a character that some scholars consider to be "cinema's first mystery-villain"-- and this character, The Clutching Hand, was dramatized in the advertisements by making him seem to be a disembodied pair of evil hands. But since the villain here was played by a flesh and blood actor, the actual Clutching Hand is a guy in a bandanna, who holds one hand up in a clawlike rictus most likely to make moderns think he's arthritic.

Now, I mentioned in the YELLOW CLAW review that most Marvel Comics fan only know one character named "Yellow Claw"-- though even that reference is qualified by the fact that this 1956 character wasn't the first of his comic-book kind. Instead, in 1942 we see the company's first Yellow Claw, who battles Captain America and Bucky with his "petals of doom." Neither the original story nor GCD attributes a name to the writer, though it's possible that editor Stan Lee wrote it. (Lee served in the Army Signal Corps from 1942 to 1945 but stated that he continued mailing scripts to his company during that period.) 

The second page definitely utilizes the "clutching yellow claw" image:

Lee certainly could have derived the name of this villain from having read or even just seen Rohmer's novel. However, nowhere in the story is it explicitly stated that the Claw is any sort of Asian. Here's his first clear depiction from page ten:

The Claw is mostly colored Caucasian, and he doesn't have slanted eyes, though the fanglike teeth were typical for negative Asian depictions. Only his hands are yellow, but no one in the story comments on this anomaly. The villain is given no solid motive for sending poisonous flowers to members of the U.S. military. Why not make him Japanese, since the country was at war with that Asian country? But this would have conflicted with the big reveal: that the blonde-haired villain is actually a previously introduced Caucasian, one "Captain Elliott." Maybe his hands only turned yellow from working with poisons? It's worth remembering that Fu Manchu, unlike Mister King, makes frequent reference to using flowers to produce sedatives.

I doubt Stan Lee, even if he scripted this weird story, consciously remembered the character when he greenlighted the 1956 YELLOW CLAW comic book. Still, maybe he suggested to the book's scripter the use of the name for the title villain, recalling less the Captain America tale than the Rohmer title. And throughout the first issue, Yellow Claw, unlike Mister King, emulates the established iconography of Fu Manchu, who I believe did have in some depictions excessively long (and hence aristocratic) fingernails. None of the other Asians in the first issue are given any exaggerated features, so Yellow Claw is also imposing, as the cover copy says, because he's something hard to identify: "who-- or what-- is he?"

I had planned to work in a reference to the Yellow Claw's quasi-revival in the 1960s, but now I think I may give that revival separate attention in a future essay. 

A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 1

My currently definitive statement on the factors that distinguish superordinate from subordinate characters, formulated in EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL PART 2, comes down to this: only the superordinate presences, or Primes, can possess *stature,* which indicates their role as the organizing factors of the given narrative. Subordinate presences, or Subs, possess only *charisma,* which term I evolved in response to, and in disagreement with, Nancy Springer's tendency to locate centricity in the most charismatic characters of a narrative, her example being Scott's IVANHOE. To reiterate the "vector" argument, the Primes possess *stature* solely possess the unique vectors of the type of authorial will relating to centricity, while the Subs possess *charisma* simply because they exist to play off the activities of the Primes. 

Now, I have not devoted more than a handful of ARCHIVE posts to crossovers, even though that literary phenomenon has some interesting applications to my many posts on the concept of centricity-- not least because when a character created for one narrative crosses over into another narrative mythos, the character may either retain the same stature, have slightly less stature, or may simply have variable degrees of charisma but no stature at all. 

Take as a quick example the character of Fu Manchu. Within all of the Sax Rohmer stories, the "devil doctor" is without question the superordinate character. Rohmer often brings in other heroes to assist the doctor's implacable foe Sir Denis Nayland Smith, mostly in order to pursue new romantic arcs for the younger men, but even Smith, who appears in all of the stories, cannot surpass Fu Manchu in either stature or charisma. So in the original stories, the doctor is a Prime.

However, when the character was licensed to Marvel in the 1970s, he became a Sub, a subordinate presence, to his son Shang-Chi in the comics series MASTER OF KUNG FU. Some stories pitting son against father were quite good while many were inferior, though it's arguable that even in the worst stories, Fu still displayed a greater vector of charisma than your average toss-off villain. 

All that said, it's certainly not impossible for someone to use Fu Manchu-- or any other narrative presence-- as a figure with a very small vector of both stature AND charisma. In the 1938 theater-cartoon HAVE YOU GOT ANY CASTLES, four "literary monsters"-- Fu, Mister Hyde, Frankenstein and the Phantom of the Opera-- appear in one small vignette where they start out roaring at the audience, and then perform a foofy minuet to undercut their own fierceness.

Yet in 1984, Fu finally received at least co-starring Prime status in a crossover novel, Cay Van Ash's TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET, in which the doctor crosses swords with an aging Sherlock Holmes.

Most of my posts on crossovers appeared on what I like to call my "junk-drawer" blog, OUROBOROS DREAMS. I pursued a "best crossovers" project for a time, but the essay that concretized my earliest thoughts on the subject appeared in a 2014 post. The relevant insights are as follows:

Some Marxist critics will view such character-crossovers as one of many strategies by which the evil Masters of Mass Culture manipulate their audiences. While such explanations may seem to answer all questions as to the motives of the stories' producers, they don't say anything substantive about why the audiences choose to patronize not just works of mass culture in general, but works in which characters or concepts from different storylines happen to intersect. The usual Marxist explanation is that these audiences want nothing more than mindless divertissement. However, the overlapping of distinct storylines would seem to intensify the degree of mental effort an audience-member must exert in order to participate in the crossover's intersecting universes.  For instance, when Rider Haggard takes a character who exists in a moderately realistic universe, i.e., Allan Quatermain, and causes him to encounter a character whose nature is overtly supernatural, Haggard must find some way to treat both characters with integrity, even though the ground rules of their universes are in conflict.  I'll discuss this particular example in more depth in an essay devoted to this novel.

It's something of a given in literary criticism to state that audiences, literary or sub-literary, maintain interest in fictional characters by identifying with them.  This commonplace observation is not so much wrong as overly simple. As I am what has been called a "myth-critic," I assert that the process of identification comes about as a reader (or viewer) realizes what kind of role the character plays in the story, and what that fictional role means to the reader. This does not mean "identification" in the simple-minded sense of "I want to be like this person," for identification can take place with any number of villains (the Joker, Freddy Krueger), monsters (Godzilla) or even mysterious locales (the subterranean domain of Jules Verne's "Center of the Earth.")  It is more properly an appreciation of what I will call the "mana" appropriate to the character or concept's role in the story. 

A crossover features at least two characters who have established-- or will establish-- the "mana" that has or might make them popular. In the above example, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed has one type of "mana," while Quatermain has a different type.  It is this "clash of energies" that I believe readers enjoy in crossovers, a clash that is radically different from the normative encounters of a hero and his villains.

I would say that what I called "mana" in this post is essentially the same as what I'm now calling "charisma." However, not all crossovers maintain the same levels of stature or charisma. For that reason, I find myself making a major distinction about whether or not the narrative presences within a crossover are HIGH in stature, LOW in stature, HIGH in charisma or LOW in charisma. One of the main determinants of a character's "high" scores in either stature or charisma is that of sheer *durability." Whether he's a character with just one narrative, like Ivanhoe, or with several, like Fu Manchu, the character may have greater stature or charisma due to his, her, or its role in popular culture.

I will devote the next four posts to various examples of each of the four constellations.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE DARK ANGEL'S KISS" (MASTER OF KUNG FU #109, 1982)

The long tenure of Doug Moench on Marvel's MASTER OF KUNG FU series-- favored with above-average art from the likes of Paul Gulacy and Gene Day-- in many ways outshines the early pattern of the kung-fu hero's adventures, as exemplified by the origin tale.  There can be little doubt that the idea of tying Shang-Chi to the world of superspy-espionage instilled new life in the original premise of "New Asia vs. Old Asia" (I.e., Fu Manchu's high-kicking son vs, his father, the embodiment of the Yellow Peril).

The years of Moench tenure were marked by exceptional use of kinetic and dramatic qualities. Further, Moench's writing, rather than aping the prosaic style of Roy Thomas and Steve Englehart, often displayed a poetic appreciation for resonant symbolism. That said, like most writers sustaining a regular feature, Moench didn't always have the luxury of crafting mythopoeic scenarios. This 1982 adventure is one of those that succeeds in this department.

"Dark Angel's Kiss" is constructed as a stand-alone story, though a reader can hardly understand it unless he is familiar with the rather expansive cast of characters. Central character Shang-Chi is relatively easy to comprehend, as he is the image of the lover of peace forced to take violent actions, much after the example of Kwai Chang Caine of television fame. His relationship with girlfriend Leiko Wu is of minor importance to the story, as seen in an opening sequence, where she and Shang make interesting use of a tennis-ball cannon.

The character from the title, an agent code-named "the Dark Angel," doesn't do much in the story either in terms of the main action. Her importance is that of a temptress, who draws the interest of Shang's fellow agent Reston, who breaks up with his old girlfriend in order to taste the Angel's kisses.

Shang and the other agents are somewhat taken aback by Reston's coldness toward his old girl, though there's the generally mature understanding that it's not really any of their business. However, Dark Angel, as a defector to England, falls under the sway of MI-6's new boss. Fah Lo Suee, the daughter of Fu Manchu. She happens to mention her current business with Dark Angel when she visits with her current lover, Zaran the Weapons Master, for the purpose of breaking up with him. Zaran, a hunter of beasts and men, does not take the breakup as well as Reston's girlfriend, so that Fah Lo Suee has to anesthetize him.

Zaran then decides to put a hit on the Dark Angel, which brings him into conflict with Shang-Chi at the same time the whole freelance agency decides to undertake an old-timey "fox hunt." Perhaps needless to specify, Shang-Chi keeps Zaran from killing Dark Angel.

In terms of its plot, "Kiss" is an undistinguished "stop-the-assassin" story. But it is one of the richer Moench stories in terms of giving its characters symbolically dense personas. Zaran the master hunter is contrasted with Shang-Chi, who explicitly rejects the passions of the hunting ritual (Shang even helps the fox-hunt's quarry escape). The two warriors battle in a Scottish graveyard, and when Zaran confronts the unarmed martial artist with knives, Shang-Chi arms himself with the thighbones of exhumed skeletons. Says Zaran: "That suits me fine, Shang-Chi-- a primitive, club-wielding savage against an advanced, tool-making warrior!" This opposition between the hero's basic style of fighting and the superior technology of his enemies is a frequent leitmotif of the Moench tenure, and it almost always signals a victory for the Master of Kung Fu. (Arguably, the teleseries KUNG FU initiated this leitmotif as well, though admittedly not within a superspy aesthetic.)

There's no subtlety to Moench's obvious parallels between Shang-Chi's sister throwing over her lover and his friend Reston choosing a new love over an old one. Yet these amours confer on the simple plot a sense of love as an unpredictable force of nature, one always subject to the vagaries of change. This provided a relatively mature attitude toward romance for a mainstream comic book of the period.

Gene Day's marvelous art poeticizes the violence of the encounter, but never more than the splash panel of page one, where Shang, Zaran and the other characters are imagined as playing-cards, implicitly set to 'trump" one another.

ADDENDUM: I originally denoted the phenomenality of this story as "uncanny,"  but revised it once I recalled that even though the narrative does not mention it, Fah Lo Suee is a woman who by this time is chronologically about sixty but looks twenty, because she like her famous father has partaken of a youth-enhancing elisir, which by itself makes the whole story marvelous.

MYTHCOMICS: 'SHANG-CHI, MASTER OF KUNG FU" (SPECIAL MARVEL ED. #15, 1973)

Both of the previous examples in "Racial Other Mythcomics Month" reflected both positive and negative aspects to racial heritage. In "The God Killer" the hero, the Black Panther, incarnates the good aspects, while Killmonger and his henchman Sombre incarnate the bad aspects. In contrast, in the "Black Talon" story Strangler Burns, the black murderer whose legacy empowers the Caucasian villain, was shown to embody both negative and positive traits, though Burns himself must be deemed more of a plot-device than a substantial character. The "origin story" for the feature MASTER OF KUNG FU roughly follows the pattern of the Black Panther story, but makes the connection between protagonist and antagonist more intimate, as well as centering their heroic and villainous natures in terms of time.

The cover for "Shang-Chi" is a small masterpiece of design, not just in terms of kinetic effects but also in terms of conjuring with Asian representations from differing eras. Even though this was the hero's first appearance, most if not all comics-purchasers in 1973 would have quickly recognized the iconography of the young Asian kung-fu fighter. This racial icon had by 1973 been popularized in part through English-dubbed martial arts films made in Hong Kong and distributed to the U.S. According to this site and to Wikipedia, the film known in the U.S. as THE CHINESE CONNECTION, released to the States in November 1972, jump-started the brief American kung-fu craze, though the TV pilot for ABC's KUNG FU teleseries contributed as well, airing in February of that year. Both of Shang-Chi's co-creators, Steve Englehart and Jim Starlin, have asserted in online interviews that the David Carradine TV show was their main source of inspiration, and this is reflected in the characterization of Shang-Chi as an earnest seeker of truth. Even the cover's design uses Chinese iconography to communicate this via the yin-yang symbol on the floor. Note that Shang-Chi's foot stands upon the white, "good" section and his bad sumo-opponent stands in the black, "evil" section-- although some colorist goofed and failed to darken the spot inside the "yang" section.

Looming over Shang-Chi on the cover is the gigantic figure of Fu Manchu, though his name does not appear until the first page of the interior story. Most viewers would automatically call Fu Manchu's image-- given both pointed ears and clawlike fingers-- to be unreservedly racist. I will write no apologias for the pointed ears, but I think it worth pointing out that the widespread icon of the Asian with Clawlike Fingers may have come about as a Western response to the Chinese custom of incredibly long fingernails. For the Chinese long fingernails signified an aristocrat's freedom from the necessities of manual labor, but many Westerners, whether actively racist or not, plainly found the image off-putting and so evolved their own reading of this image. To be sure, as the story reveals, Fu Manchu is an aristocrat in the sense that he hopes to restore the prominence of the Manchu dynasty-- though one cannot necessarily render the same reading for every Asian villain who had "claw" in his name.

Following a stunning action-scene by Starlin-- from back in the days when he could do stunning action-scenes-- Shang-Chi reveals his relationship to the "most infamous villain of all time:"

Having supplied a modicum of action for the impatient reader, Englehart and Starlin then produce in their hero's mind a flashback far longer than any seen on the KUNG FU series. Through dialogue between the son and his sire, it's established that from childhood Shang-Chi has been trained in the martial arts to become a "living weapon." Fu Manchu asserts that he labors ceaselessly for the betterment of the world, and that Shang-Chi's first mission on his father's behalf will be to go to London and assassinate an evildoer named Doctor Petrie. Shang-Chi goes where his father bids him, and though he vacillates when he stands by the bed of an ailing old man, he does slay Petrie with a single blow. However, the unwilling assassin is caught leaving by a gun-wielding old man in a wheelchair: Fu Manchu's long-time adversary Denis Nayland Smith. Shang-Chi disarms Smith, but the older man-- who will in later stories become a new father-figure to the martial artist-- reveals to Shang the truth about Fu Manchu's villainous nature-- in imagery, I should note, that reflects all of the prejudices of the era when both Fu and Nayland Smith were conceived. 

Today it might be almost impossible for audiences to credence this association of the Chinese villain and "spiders, rats, reptiles, and other loathsome vermin," much less extend their sympathies to a character, even an older one, who spoke of his Asian enemy as a "yellow devil."  Nevertheless, Englehart and Starlin are more careful than Fu Manchu's creator sometimes was, to keep the villain from being a representative of the Chinese people. 

The flashback ends with Shang-Chi's tortured realization of his father's duplicity, so he returns to Fu Manchu's stronghold for answers. He battles the gigantic sumo Tak, who was his father's tool in putting Nayland Smith in a wheelchair, and defeats him. He finds proof of Nayland Smith's accusations in his father's laboratory, where he is attacked by a huge gorilla. This battle lasts only two pages, but is less consequential for its action than for what the reader is told via captions about the gorilla: that Fu Manchu endowed the beast with a brain "capable of elementary reasoning," and then tormented the beast so that it would become savage enough to attack anyone trespassing on the laboratory. Though Shang-Chi is not privy to the information in the captions, he's horrified to see that his father's cruelty has resulted in "demons like this [creature]."

After the death of the guard-gorilla, Fu Manchu appears before his son, attempting to cajole his offspring back to the fold. However, Fu only reveals his own monomania by boasting of "an invisible, world-wide empire opposed to all governments." Shang-Chi, a peaceful pluralist at heart, renounces his father as a madman and swears to dedicate his life to preventing his evil schemes.

The series was so successful, albeit briefly, that the title in which the feature premiered, SPECIAL MARVEL EDITION, was quickly revised to MASTER OF KUNG FU, and remained under that title for the duration of its run. However, neither co-creator remained with their creation long: Starlin left with MOKF #17, and Englehart departed with #19. Curiously, neither man had planned to use Fu Manchu in their concept: this addition came about because Marvel had already licensed the "devil-doctor" but had been unable to find a way to make him salable.  Editor Roy Thomas reputedly injected Fu Manchu into the mix, but though his main motivation may have been economic-- that of justifying the license-- the combination proved more felicitous than might have been expected. Though Fu Manchu was not as popular in the second half of the 20th century as he'd been in the first half, his presence in the MOKF book forced creators to continually play the old, negative image of the Asian against the newer, positive one for as long as Marvel retained the license to Sax Rohmer's character.

To be sure, although writer Doug Moench and his many artist-collaborators produced some good mythcomics with Shang-Chi, none of them succeeded in portraying the Asian villain with as much dimension as did Englehart and Starlin. It's conceivable that their lack of enthusiasm was rooted in the dominant political view that Fu Manchu was only a racist artifact and nothing more-- or worse, that the prevalence of the many stereotypical Asian villains in pop culture signified that the most archetypal Asian villain should not be used by conscientious persons. It's a view with which I do not concur, as I will address in a future essay.