NEAR MYTHS: LEGION OF MONSTERS (2011)

 

One positive aspect of having retired from regular reading of Marvel Comics is that long after the comics have come out, one can pick and choose from old projects completed a decade ago and evaluate them, apart from the ongoing continuity. One such project was a revival of the concept "Legion of Monsters." The phrase was first used as an umbrella-title for one issue of a black-and-white collection of unrelated monster-stories. Then one issue of MARVEL PREMIERE in 1976 was devoted to an ad hoc teamup of four Marvel creature features-- Morbius, the Werewolf, the Man-Thing and the Ghost Rider-- though this wasn't meant to be even a pilot for an ongoing series.                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Apparently such an ongoing series was conceived in 2010, resulting in a four-issue LEGION OF MONSTERS series from 2011, written by Dennis Hopeless and penciled by Juan Doe. The concept was that a variety of Marvel monsters took refuge in the Morlock tunnels beneath New York City, and a new Legion arises to protect the "Monster Metropolis," comprised of Morbius, the Werewolf By Night, the Manphibian (a gill-man introduced in the b&w LEGION magazine), and the Living Mummy. These "monster cops" (given a waggish likeness to HILL STREET BLUES, thanks to the first issue is titled "Hell Street Blues") have their existence threatened by a "monster virus." They receive help from a creature-slayer who would normally be their enemy, Elsa Bloodstone (intro'd back in 2001). There's no depth to this romp, but it's a fun monster mash, including short appearances of such characters as the Son of Satan, Satannish (a road company Satan), and Helleyes, an old foe from the MORBIUS feature, who doesn't even cross paths with the Living Vampire.                                                                                       

NULL-MYTHS: THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO (2007)

 I read this collection of stories online and have not been able to find out if the stories made individual appearances except in TPB format. But frankly, it's not something I care much about.

The comic is apparently filmmaker Rob Zombie's goofy salute to monster flicks and Mexican luchador movies. The titular Superbeasto is a brawny ex-wrestler who goes around hitting bars and hitting on bimbos (Santo would be aghast). He keeps getting mixed up in adventures with monsters, Martians and super-villains, amid lots of nudity and bad jokes, nine-tenths of which are pop culture references.

If I wasn't going to do a review of the animated SUPERBEASTO film I probably wouldn't have written this much about this non-comical comic book. But I did like this splash page by artist Kieron Dwyer.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES #24: "NOAH'S ARK FROM SPACE" (BLACKHAWK #162, 1960)

 Largely by accident I chanced upon this forgotten issue from the generally forgettable DC BLACKHAWK title that lasted roughly from 1956 to 1970. "Noah's Ark" features a nuclear family of aliens who come to Earth seeking a new home, and who get aid and comfort from the justice-loving Blackhawks. For no explicit reason the three aliens bring along some alien beasts from their dying world, which of course cause some of the story's conflict. Arguably the story's raconteurs did come up with a menagerie of monsters that was slightly more imaginative than the average. 

Not so much the Dridath Bull:

But rather the Lightning-Lion--

And more importantly for Students of DC Anthropoidology, an "Octi-Ape" on the cover.

But what's curious about this 1960 story is that the three aliens are opposed by hostile, prejudiced Earthlings, who call the ETs "Greenies." 

By story's end, exigent circumstances force the ark-aliens to depart. Still, minor though the story is, I'm not aware of any DC superhero stories between 1955 and 1965 that even address any sort of prejudice. Yes, some war stories and PSAs, but not so much the fantasy-content books.

QUICKIE REVIEWS OF (FAIRLY) NEW STUFF

Probably because of my current fascination with crossovers, I've been seeking out whatever related items I could find in public libraries. None of my readings have been impressive enough for a full review, but I might as well set down a few impressions of 21st-century treatments of crossovers.

First, though, I'll note that prior to these investigations I reread all the WEST COAST AVENGERS issues written by Steve Englehart in the 1980s. I enjoyed these stories much more than the current offerings, for all that I don't have a ton of remarks on this mini-oeuvre. My main takeaway is that in the eighties, the ideal of Marvel continuity was still rigorous enough that a hardcore fan-writer like Englehart could bring together dozens of stories by himself and other raconteurs in order to forge the identity of the WCA super-group. Characters like Tigra, who had flourished neither in solo outings nor in the original, New York-based Avengers acquired much more substance as a result of Englehart's efforts. Not all his decisions were without flaw-- Moon Knight as Avenger was never a good fit-- but it's a solid series, regrettably torpedoed when fan-favorite John Byrne took over the title.

I can't pin down a particular diegetic event that made Marvel less unitary in its approach to continuity, though I imagine the two main factors in the twenty-first century were (a) the emphasis on "celebrity" arists and writers, who would often just do their take on a given character or series and not worry about being "in continuity," and (b) the fact that by the 2000s there was just too much continuity to keep track of. Thus in all of the books I explored, continuity is something of a "catch as catch can" game.

DOCTOR STRANGE DAMNATION-- One of the co-authors of this outing was Nick Spenser, who gained fame (or infamy) for the fake-out story in which Captain America was revealed to be a Hydra agent and thus a kissing cousin to Nazism. DAMNATION spins off a development in some other story, wherein all of Las Vegas is destroyed. The Master of the Mystic Arts arrives and brings the city and all its slain people back into existence (sort of a lesser version of the reveral of "the Thanos snap.") But before being destroyed the Nevada "sin city" went to hell, and now Mephisto controls the strings of the reborn metropolis. Strange then forms a team of mostly oddball choices to beat the devil. Biggest plus is that the concentration on the fate of one city proves more appealing than the usual universe-threat. Biggest minus is that none of Strange's allies play off one another in any interesting ways, so the crossover aspect is wasted.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY Volumes 1-3-- These were all Brian Michael Bendis stories, and as such they're very freeform, with minimal plotting. There are a few good fight-scenes, particularly the one between Gamora and Angela. (I'd never heard that Marvel bought the character off Neil Gaiman. Way to get rid of some dead weight, Gaiman.) But Bendis most reminds me of the dozens of TV writers who tried to write like Joss "BUFFY" Whedon. Those writers missed that each of Whedon's characters had individual voices, and so just gave everyone funny-sardonic lines. Bendis is like these writers, except he's never funny.

FEARLESS DEFENDERS-- Don't think I ever read Cullen Bunn before, though I'd heard his name. This six-issue tale, titled DOOM MAIDENS, teams up one actual Defender, The Valkyie, with a motley crew of unattached Marvel femmes: Misty Knight, the New Mutant once called Mirage, and "Warrior Woman," which is a new name for the Amazon Hippolyta. Oh, and there's a lesbian scientist who tries to get it on with Valkyrie, so that helped Bunn get a GLAAD nomination, but she's pretty forgettable. The "doom maidens" of the story are a bunch of dead Valkyries brought back to life to menace the world, but Bunn can't get the vibe of Norse mythology to save his life. After being routed by the undead warriors, these dim Defenders debate bringing in other superheroes, even some male ones. But for fuzzy reasons, the Bad Valkyries can only be repelled by female heroes, which allows Bunn to work in eleven other heroines. Though this sounds like a potential Great Moment in Comics Pulchritude, the fights in FEARLESS are poorly choreographed and all the heroines sound like one another.

DEADMAN-- This was one of Neal Adams's swan songs, as he returned to the DC character that brought him to fans' attention, This godawful series might prove that a lot of old-school artists lost their discipline in the 21st century, except that I think Adams' early successes were largely contingent on his collaborators. DEADMAN makes all the other offerings look coherent by comparison, as the Ghoulish Guardian once more tries to figure who really, really killed him way back in the sixties. At least Bendis made some efforts, however limited, to distinguish his characters from one another, but here you've got characters as different as Deadman, the Spectre and the Phantom Stranger all speaking in one voice: The Last Angry Spook. In the sixties Adams' heavy melodrama was a breath of fresh air compared to the overemphasis on exposition, Now it's a stone drag, man.

SUPERMAN: AMERICAN ALIEN-- Another revisionist retelling of Superman's origins, emphasizing his identity as Clark Kent of Kansas. I don't know writer Max Landry, but he has better control of melodrama than anyone else being reviewed here. His Kryptonian hero does seem to get drunk on Earth-booze pretty damn easily, though. ALIEN contains yet another contentious first meeting between Batman and the hero who's not yet Superman, and I don't care for Superman getting the idea of his costume from the Gotham Guardian. Nice fight with Lobo at the end. Not likely to become a dominant paradigm for Superman's early years.

HOWLING COMMANDOS OF SHIELD-- I'd seen reference to this "SHIELD Monster Squad" in some SPIDER-MAN cartoon, so I had to check this out. Apparently most of the monster-themed characters had appeared in other Marvel titles, though I was only familiar with Man-Thing, Orrgo (one of those giant Kirby Kreatures from the early sixties), the short-lived Manphibian (whom I actually don't remember, though I think I have his first appearance), and SHIELD agents Jasper Sitwell and Dum Dum Dugan. Or rather, simulacra of the two agents, since Sitwell is a nearly brain-dead zombie and Dugan is an artificial version of the deceased original "Howler." The oldies and the relative "newbies" don't play off one another's powers very well, and some, like Man-Thing, just don't belong in the "spy game." However, artist Brent Schoonover provides some appealing action and emotional scenes, and writer Frank Barbiere does the best job of any writer here at giving each character a particular voice. I don't think these "Creature Commandos" went on to further adventures in the comics, but at least their one series was diverting.

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE GOOL STRIKES" (MARVEL TALES #93, 1949)

The cover of MARVEL TALES #93-- which was the first issue of that title, taking over its numbering from MARVEL MYSTERY COMICS, one of Timely Comics' major superhero mags-- seems to introduce a standard horror story. But the story inside anticipates the vogue for titanic monsters mutated in some way by radiation, which for most pop culture mavens started with 1953's THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. That film in turn spawned the far more consequential figure of Godzilla within the next year. I'm not sure how unique the Gool was in 1949. It's quite possible that there were many titan-sized critters bustling around horror comics prior to 1953, since so few stories from this period have been collected. I'm aware of a story from the 1950s incarnation of Timely's Human Torch (not published by Marvel until 1968) in which the hero encountered a colossal alien called "the Un-Human." But this beastie was not said to be the result of an atomic mutation. 

Though the titular creature's name on the cover bears the familiar spelling "ghoul," all through the story inside the monster is called "the Gool." No writer is billed, and GCD theorizes that the pencil artist may have been Ed Winiarski.

The story opens on a conversation between an American scientist, Professor Clark Dane, and the commander of a detachment of soldiers on a Pacific island, apparently assisting the doctor in some unnamed research project. The light-orange humanoid figure of the Gool-- so named by the caption-maker-- steps onto the beach, and is immediately attacked by army gunfire, with no effect on the monster. Dane then belatedly reveals to his confidante that his whole purpose in being here was to investigate consequences of the atomic bomb tests on Bikini Atoll, beginning in 1946. On barely any evidence, Dane insists that the spongy-looking being must have emerged from "the inner core of the earth," and then he takes time out for a long flashback. This segue mixes Dane's reminiscences with the narrator's observations as to how the Gool was awakened by the atomic testing. However, it's suggested that the Gool may be intelligent, or else that he had intelligence and lost it, for he doesn't just push his way to the surface like Godzilla and his fellow beasties. Instead, the Gool has a drill-machine with which he ascends to the surface, despite the fact that the captions just told us that the being "possessed no sense or intelligence." Possibly the idea was that the Gool was, like his possible model the 1933 King Kong, the last survivor of a species.

As it happens, the subterranean denizen, dimly thirsting for some sort of "conquest," emerges just in time to be struck by an atom bomb test on the Atoll. Dane makes the scene afterward and remarks that if anything survived blast, it would be "supercharged with electro-rays"-- a gobbledygook way of saying that the radiation would mutate said survivor. 

Then, the story jumps back to the present, showing again that no modern arms can stop the juggernaut. But the writer, realizing that he has no more pages to spare, delivers a deus ex machina by having the Gool encounter Professor Dane. The Gool sends a telepathic message to Dane, but all he communicates is, "I am the Gool" (making him only slightly more locquatious than Groot of the Galaxy Guardians). The Gool makes no demands and issues no explanations, and then just wanders back into the sea (again, like Godzilla), though a final caption warns that he will re-appear "in the next issue of Marvel Mystery." (Guess the editors didn't inform the writer of the title-change in advance.) However, there were no sequels to the Gool's rampage. The story definitely fits the pattern of "atomic hubris" stories of the time and actually catches that doomsday mood better than BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS.

Oddly, the only other named person in the story is an older scientist who exists merely for Dane to talk with, and by an amusing bit of luck, the older fellow is named "Doctor Kirby." Since Jack Kirby had been absent from proto-Marvel for about seven years prior to this story's publication, the use of the name is probably coincidence. But it's amusing because the first popular works Kirby produced for almost-but-not-quite Marvel in the late 1950s were numerous giant monster-stories, most strongly indebted to the Godzilla template. 

Oh, and just because I looked it up, here's the Torch's slightly later foe The Un-Human, who unlike The Gool gets the chance to tear up some city-property, possibly written (though not published) a little before Godzilla got to ravage Japanese real estate.

ADDENDUM: And as long as I'm mentioning gigantic comic-book characters who tear up real estate, I would be remiss not to mention Jack Cole's size-shifting villain The Claw from the late thirties and early forties, discussed here.

A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 3

 At the end of A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PART 2 I said I would next discuss "non-distinct replacements," but a better term would be "non-differentiated replacements."

In Part 2 I mentioned two examples of differentiated replacements from comic books: the forties hero The Black Owl and the Marvel villain The Molecule Man. I paid particular attention to the latter, noting that even though the first and second versions of The Molecule Man had no personal names in their debuts, and barely any personal history, they are nevertheless differentiated in that the reader assumes that they are living human beings with distinct backgrounds. Such differentiations are harder to make, though, with respect to non-human entities, because their non-human nature confers an aura of otherness that obscures differentiation. 

The most visible example of such a non-differentiated replacement is that of Godzilla, King of the Monsters. The first monster to go by this name perished at the end of his debut film, presumably because his creators had no idea that he was going to be bigger and more sequel-worthy than any other giant monster from any country. When the 1954 GODZILLA scored big, Toho Studios quickly followed up with GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN. Instead of finding some way to reconstitute the dissolved body of the original King, the producers simply had another "Godzilla-saurus" emerge from the bowels of the Earth, and for the remainder of the original series, this pinch-hitter became, to all intents and purposes, the only Godzilla whose adventures anyone followed, even though hardcore viewers were entirely aware that the first rough beast had long passed on. A much later film purported to revive the first Godzilla, but for a couple of decades, no one cared about the debut creature.

Aliens are even more susceptible to becoming non-differentiated characters. The Martians of H.G. Wells, the archetypal alien invaders, are not differentiated from one another in either the original novel or in latter-day creations like Marvel's KILLRAVEN serial. Thus if Killraven fights a horde of Martians in New York, and then travels down to Tallahassee to fight a separate horde, both sets of Martians are essentially coterminous. The same principle applies from the ETs from the ALIEN film franchise, even though there are some morphological differences between particular representatives of the species, such as the male warrior from the first film and the Alien Queen from the second. 

The ETs of the PREDATOR series have the potential to be more individualized, though the hunters in the first and second films are not significantly differentiated from one another. I recall one comic-book story which made a minor attempt to distinguish two Predators within the context of that story, making one a "hero" and the other a "villain." But from what I can judge, the Predators' appeal lies in the fact that they're cookie-cutter menaces, whose raison d'etre stays the same regardless of any particular movie, even when played off against another "swarm" type of ET in the ALIEN VS. PREDATOR films.

Other examples include the various sharks in the JAWS franchise, at least two loosely related "killer bee" movies, and assorted fantasy-creatures like Al Capp's Shmoos.

Of course, it's not impossible for one film to coast on another's rep, using the name of a somewhat-established monster but substituting a beast with a different origin. The producers of the 2000 DTV film PYTHON in 2000 came out with another giant snake film, BOA, in 2002. Then the filmmakers engineered what looked like a crossover of the two serpentine beasties in 2004's BOA VS. PYTHON. However, though the Python used was essentially coterminous with the one from the 2000 film, the modern Boa had no connection to the prehistoric giant from the 2002 film. However, the two Boas are still the same species, and so it's arguable that the second one is a non-differentiated replacement of the original.  

NEAR MYTHS: "DAWN OF THE DARK" (2014)

"Dawn of the Dark" is the final volume of the "harem adventure" manga ROSARIO + VAMPIRE, wrapping up, in rather rushed fashion, multiple storylines and character arcs established during the serial's ten-year run. I say "harem adventure" because even though author Akihisa Ikeda starts out the story with a typical "harem comedy" setup-- which is mirrored by the two seasons of the goofy anime adaptation--  the story is soon dominated by the mythos of adventure. Vampire Moka Akashiya and mortal-turned-monster Tsukune Aono, the main romantic duo of the series, are joined by several other adolescent yokai (Japanese for "monsters") to thwart a plot to cause a major conflict between the human race and the race of monsters, who have been concealing their existence from humans for centuries.

Since I've chosen to rate the concluding arc of ROSARIO as a near-myth, I'm not going to devote a lot of time to detailing the fine points of said arc. Suffice to say that Ikeda never totally exploits the mythic power of his original conception. At the series' opening, the reader meets Moka, a thoroughly winsome girl vamp when mortal Tsukune accidentally gets enrolled in a "school for monsters." Moka, though she projects an aura of sweet innocence, actually has a "Miss  Hyde" side, which is restrained by the "rosario" (a cross-pendant hung around her neck). Tsukune is the only one who can remove this talisman from Moka, and whenever he does, it's the equivalent of unleashing the demon within the innocent girl. Tsukune, in addition to being chased around the school by four other hot monster-babes, is frequently confused by his relation to "the two Mokas": the "outer" one that wears the rosario and is usually cute and rather shy, and the "inner" one without the cross-pendant, who's a powerful badass who often regards the weak Tsukune with contempt. Even when one plotline obliges Moka to infuse Tsukune with her own blood, making him into an "instant monster," the male character is still nowhere the equal of "inner-Moka" in terms of power.

Since the series starts out wiith, and is named for, the mystic seal that inhibits Moka's formidable powers, the concluding story-arc also involves the necessity for binding a far more dangerous demon. This is Alucard, who appears as a crossover between Godzilla and one of the Aliens--

--though, to be sure, he was originally a more human-like monster, when he was known as (big surprise) the 15th-century lord Dracula. Ikeda eventually pits Tsukune and his fighting harem-girls against a monster-organization called "Fairy Tale," who are responsible for a plot to unleash this titanic monster on humankind. Alucard, though technically not related to Moka, serves as a kind of "evil father-figure," particularly because his first wife, the vampire Akasha, binds him into a deep sleep by infusing him with her energies.

Akasha is then rescued from her bondage to Alucard for a time, apparently so that she can sire Moka by another vampire, one Issa. However, because Alucard remains a threat to Moka, Akasha designs the rosario-charm as a means of protecting Moka from the Big Bad-- though to be sure, the nature of the charm is re-interpreted in the finale a few times as the protagonists learn new information.

The most interesting psychological myth of the series is that Akasha doesn't just make the rosario, but also imposes a clone of herself over the natural personality of Moka when she's still a child. Thus, "angry Moka" is closer to the real nature of the heroine, while "sweet Moka's" personality is modeled on that of Akasha-- though, to be sure, Akasha always comes off as being no less of a badass than "angry Moka."

Does this mean that, throughout the early arcs of the series, young Tsukune is actually falling in love with Akasha, not with "inner Moka?" Ikeda tries to provide his readers with reasons as to why this is not the case: that the Akasha-persona is essentially a clone, a nearly blank slate, and that once Akasha completely departs the series for good, the two Moka-personas become interfused, and she's more like a combination of her Jekyll aspect and her Hyde aspect. I suppose Ikeda's basic idea here is that of a mother shielding her daughter from the depredations of an evil father-figure, but the symbolic discourse never really gells.

Still, though "Dawn" and its preceding arcs are decent reads, I never felt that Ikeda had a good handle on the symbolic aspects of his vampire mythology, or any of the other monsters, whether they were derived from the stories of Japan (the "snow maiden" Mizore) or Europe (the "succubus" Kurumu). They're all very amusing, but never intrinsically fascinating, in contrast, say, to the much more rigorous vamp-mythos of DANCE IN THE VAMPIRE BUND.

NULL-MYTHS: "BUT BLOOD IS REDDER," "DOORWAY TO HELL" (WEIRD WAR, 1982)

I've stated that I didn't intend to write often about null-myths simply if they were imaginatively undistinguished, but I chose to do so in my general review of CREATURE COMMANDOS here so as to provide some background for the characters. In this essay, I'll look at two particular Robert Kanigher stories that show a little more mythic potential than the rest of the COMMANDOS oeuvre, though that potential is sabotaged by the writer's "underthinking of the underthought."

Kanigher, in addition to his long history with DC Comics, proves atypical among comics-creators in that he long displayed a determination to use female characters prominently, even in the unlikely venue of war-comics. To be sure, Kanigher was a formula writer, and he turned out so much work that it's almost inevitable that a lot of it is "underthought." Still, the two stories I'll examine here show some fascinating motifs, for all that they don't get developed.

In Kanigher's first script for the COMMANDOS feature, he chose to add a female member to the all-male monster-team.This two-part story, appearing in WEIRD WAR #109-110, used the same lengthy title "Roses are Red, But Blood is Redder" (with subtitles for each segment, no less). The first story is for the most part a standard commando-mission, in which Kanigher introduces his more acerbic version of the group-leader Matthew Shrieve, where he continuously calls his men "freaks." However, that mission ends with all of the commandos being swept into a raging river.

At the start of the second part, the three monsters emerge from the river more or less intact, though they briefly imagine that they see themselves as normal-looking in the river-waters. Then they scout around and find Shrieve, whose face has been severely injured by the torrent. The Commandos take their fallen leader to a medical convoy. There they conveniently find a doctor of plastic surgery, Myrna Rhodes, and turn Shrieve over to her. Griffith remarks that "he'll be a perfect partner for us now! We've heard the last of him callin' us stand-ins for monsters!" However, Rhodes has worked a miracle, returning Shrieve to his usual handsome self. Shrieve mocks them, and they leave. Rhodes tries to reach out to the embittered soldiers, but the enraged monsters stampede over a table full of chemicals. The result is that the woman who saved Shrieve's looks loses her own, as she grows a headful of Medusa-snakes. She doesn't have the Gorgon's traditional power to turn people to stone-- perhaps because Kanigher felt this would prove hard to work with-- and in fact, the only thing she can do is shock people with her looks, and (if she gets close enough) let her hair-snakes bite her enemies. Despite this limited formidability, she takes the name of "Doctor Medusa" and more or less forces her way onto the team. From then on she serves as Kanigher's vehicle for soulful femininity.

Medusa's addition to the stories doesn't really make them much better, but "Doorway to Hell" is a weird combination of banal war-action and archaic mythology. It starts by referencing the Graeco-Roman myth of Persephone, in which the hell-lord Pluto abducts the mortal maiden to force her into marriage. Then, in contrast to the classics, Kanigher invents a daughter from this union. Inferna is a fire-goddess, playing not to Greek ideas about the afterlife but Christian associations of hell and fire. Inferna makes many fruitless attempts to find mortal bridegrooms, but since she's made of fire, they all end badly.

The Commandos never interact with Inferna until the final three pages of the story, most of which is spent with them seeking out a weapons-cache in Italy. Then Inferna shows up, sans fanfare, and grabs hold of handsome Shrieve, intending to take him down with her into Hades.

For some reason, Shrieve doesn't burn up when Inferna picks him up, though it's implied that eventually he would. However, Doctor Medusa-- who apparently knows all about this made-up goddess-- talks Inferna out of her plans with some feminine sympathizing. Inferna goes away, bemoaning her solitary fate, much as Medusa does. Had this story been longer or better organized, it might've touched on the role of beauty in the female of the species. But in all likelihood, Kanigher was just trying to bang out another quick tale, using some of his favorite tropes.

THE HORRIFIC TRIO

Despite my love for the classic monsters of literature and film, I must admit I've been a very dilatory votary in terms of making posts along a Halloween theme. But I happened to pick up a TPB that collected the DC war/horror hybrid THE CREATURE COMMANDOS, and to comment on that, I need to devote a little time to "the Horrific Trio" (a term I've coined for three particular monsters, in loose imitation of the "Terrific Trio" cognomen from the 1966 BATMAN series).

There are, as I've pointed out in serial essays like RALLY ROUND THE ROGUES' GALLERY, many permutations of the "monster rally" concept. However, for whatever reason, one particular permutation has become arguably the most popular one in the United States: an ensemble-act consisting of a Dracula-like vampire, a werewolf, and a Frankenstein-like monster. Universal Studios unquestionably began this meme with a trio of forties "monster rallies:" HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN,  HOUSE OF DRACULA, and-- perhaps most widely seen-- ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN.  There have been numerous works in all media that only teamed up two of the three, or that added a mummy here and a black-lagoon creature there. But no monster-meme has been more durable than that of the "Horrific Trio," as seen by works as far apart as 1980s's DRAK PACK and 2000's MONSTER MASH.

In the first CREATURE COMMANDOS story, writer J.M. DeMatteis puts forth his premise. During America's involvement in World War Two, American scientists create a commando unit able to strike terror in Nazi hearts by patterning three elite commandos on "the subconscious archetypes-- the symbols of fright and horror that all men seem to share, regardless of social and cultural conditioning." I believe DeMatteis oversimplifies Jung by a country mile, for the Americans choose "symbols" that seem more patterned on Universal monsters than on Jungian archetypes. What the Americans produce are three superhumans that have more in common with Deathlok than with Captain America, and like Deathlok, the Commandos equivocate between loyally fighting for their country and perpetually cursing the government that made them into inhuman monsters. DeMatteis wrote five stories, starting off in WEIRD WAR TALES #93, and Mike Barr wrote one. Then veteran scribe Robert Kanigher took over, writing the final eleven stories, which ended the series in issue #121, except for a one-page farewell when the title WEIRD WAR itself ended with issue #124. 

No matter who wrote the original three Commandos, they were always very crude renditions of the mythologies of the "Horrific Trio." Nor for the most part did the writers manage to give any of the sinister-looking soldiers any viable characterization. Two of the soldiers-- Vincent Velcro and Warren Griffith-- reluctantly submitted to genetic tinkering that turned them into a vampire and a werewolf, respectively. The third member-- not counting their human commander, Matthew Shrieve-- worked a little better, in that he was blown apart by an explosive, which prompted American scientists to experiment by giving him a super-strong "patchwork body." I found it risible when the comic showed me a fanged, widow's-peak-wearing vampire and a wolf-man running around in green army fatigues. However, the green-fleshed "Lucky" Taylor had a certain Hulk-like appeal, given that he was a loyal soldier who found himself into a patched-up monster who couldn't even speak coherently. In place of real characterization, the heroes merely indulged in Marvel-style whinging, and their human leader Shrieve was no better. He was pretty vanilla under deMatteis and Barr, while Kanigher's "solution" was simply to turn Shrieve into a jerk who continually disparaged his own troops as "freaks." Kanigher had a lot more generosity toward his original creation for the commando-team, Doctor Medusa, more on whom in the next essay. For good measure, the venerable DC "war weirdie" G.I. Robot (whose basic concept appeared back in 1962) pulled a couple of guest shots in the Commandos feature, before he too lost his berth with the end of WEIRD WAR.

Though I consider all of the Commandos' adventures to be null-myths due to their lack of imagination, it's interesting to speculate as to why the creative talents behind it had so little understanding of the Horrific Trio's appeal. DeMatteis gives his readers pretty much what one would expect of the Universal critters: Griffith the wolf man is a savage berserker, Velcro (hate that name!) is also bloodthirsty but has a more worldly, ironic manner of speaking, and Taylor the patchwork man is mute and sensitive despite being the "heavy lifter" of the group. Yet, while the 1940s "monster mashes" are much less mythically resonant than the individual Universals featuring Dracula, the Monster and the Wolf Man, there's some modest attention to how each of them develops as a symbolic creation. DeMatteis, though, signals an indifference to expanding on the symbolism of the three Commandos. Despite using Marvel-style dialogue, the co-creator (with artists Broderick and Celardo) of the feature apparently patterned his plotting after that of most DC war features, in which characters tend to remain static. 

Somehow, the combination of savage werewolf, urbane yet manipulative vampire, and brutal yet sensitive hulk works in many combinations, even when they don't work together, or even they're played for comedy. But THE CREATURE COMMANDOS never catches any of that combinatory fire.

WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS PT. 3

I discussed another type of "weaklings with weapons" in 2013's OUR ARMIES AT WAR, WITH MONSTERS. Though a lot of "giant monster" films are combative primarily in pitting two or more behemoths against one another, there are also those in which the primary conflict is between one behemoth and the amassed armed forces of a particular country.

KING KONG, the first major "giant monster" film, concentrates the early part of its narrative on showing how Kong is "king" over all the rival creatures in his own domain, but then concludes by having him shot down by American biplanes. 1953's BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, whose filming might have been encouraged by the successful 1952 re-release of KONG, came up with a giant reptile. But the filmmakers knew that the amassed power of the U.S. military could've blown away any old dinosaur, so they had to come up with a reason for the military to avoid attacking the critter directly. 1954's GOJIRA reversed that conceit. Whereas an atomic bomb simply woke up the Fathom-Beast, it both awakened and empowered Godzilla, making it possible for the giant monster to stride fearlessly through cannonfire, airplane missiles, and electrical fences. In my review I mentioned that Godzilla was, on one level, the symbol of any martial enemy of Japan, so that in a strange way, this most Japanese of monsters bears some resemblance to the forces of the Allied invaders, whose might is represented by the atom bomb itself.

Later Godzilla films always followed Kong's trope of pitting the Big G against other colossi, but the 1950s and 1960s included a smattering of giant-monster films in which the monster's only opponent was humanity's armed forces-- American in THE GIANT CLAW and IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, British in GORGO and THE GIANT BEHEMOTH, Danish in REPTILICUS, and Japanese in such non-Godzilla films as RODAN and MOTHRA, and THE X FROM OUTER SPACE and GAPPA THE TRIPHIBIAN MONSTER.  In addition, DC Comics made a major contribution to the "soldiers vs. dinosaurs" trope in its "War That Time Forgot" series, which ran for eight years in STAR-SPANGLED WAR STORIES.

I've read none of these stories, so it may be that none of them muster the necessary "spectacular violence" necessary for the combative mode, the same way BEAST WITH 20,000 FATHOMS fails the test. The 1950s flicks TARANTULA and THE DEADLY MANTIS also fall short for one reason or the other.

Now, on occasions, human soldiers are aided by some weapon that's just as metaphenomenal as the monster. The original Godzilla is vanquished by the "oxygen destroyer," and the Giant Claw, one of the few American monsters immune to military weapons-fire, is undone when scientists reverse the protective "meson-field" about the creature. But the use of an "achilles heel" weapon may not give rise to the combative mode, either.

In the end, the reason that the nameless soldier-hordes can qualify as combative entities is because there is a necessary connection between the warriors and their weapons, whose use the soldiers have implicitly mastered. But there must be diegetic evidence of such mastery, which I find in REPTILICUS but not in DEADLY MANTIS, as discussed here.

STORMING THE THRESHOLD PT. 2

In Part 1 I referenced a trio of scenarios that I'll henceforth call the "Anti-heroic Trio," with reference to this 1992 Hong Kong superhero film. The Anti-Heroic Trio lists the three most common scenarios by which a given work might appear to be combative when it is not, using as examples plays from the pen of the Bard of Violence.

If I belabor these matters, it's because I myself have so frequently found myself re-thinking my categorizations. I chronicled here some of the difficulties I've had in isolating the special character of the combative mode from other modes that are proved conflictive in nature. Aside from the difficulties mentioned in this essay and its links, I'll note that sometimes I've looked back at certain reviews on my film-blog and realized that I incorrectly categorized them. When I originally typed my 2011 review for DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS and my 2012 review for DOCTOR GOLDFOOT AND THE GIRL BOMBS, I classed both of them as combative simply because there was some sort of "fight-scene" at the conclusion. I amended both reviews later on, but the lesson is clear. If I, the person attempting to promote the concept of the combative mode, could get misled by the presence of a fight-scene, then it would be all the harder for anyone else to see the difference between a subcombative fight and a combative one. This is a concern to me not so much for what I write on this blog, which as I've said is principally pure theory, but for what I might write in future. I'm meditating how I might,  if I so chose, approach these subjects in the form of a book, but without invoking the heavy-duty philosophical thinkers that would scare away not only the average reader of superhero comics, but also the critics, so many of whom flatter themselves as educated but are content to dismiss thinkers like Nietzsche as irrelevant.

My November essay ACTIVE SHARE, PASSIVE SHARE contributed to my recent attempt to imagine domains as having thresholds, principally as a way of characterizing the different ways that megadynamicity can manifest in the "dynamic-sublime domains." I said in STORMING PART 1 that "HAMLET does not cross [the threshold] at all, while TITUS and CORIOLANUS do" -- reason being the way in which the latter two create at least one megadynamic presence of a naturalistic nature. An example of a Shakespeare work that "storms" across the threshold because it does possess all the aspects of the combative mode would be HENRY IV PART 1, given that the playwright fudges with history in order to give the audience a stimulating confrontation between Henry IV and his rival Hotspur.

Without resorting to this sort of conceptual illustration, I can see why even a fair-minded skeptic might have a difficulty with my reasons for saying that the 1976 KING KONG is subcombative even though it utilizes some though not all of the narrative tropes that make the 1933 classic combative. I could well understand such a skeptic saying, "So what if the later film only uses copters to attack Kong, while the earlier one uses biplanes? So what if '76 Kong doesn't fight as many big beasties as the '33 original? It still has roughly the same type of fights, so why isn't it 'combative?'"

Similarly, the same skeptical argument could be raised with regard to the giant-monster films of Eugene Lourie, both his BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS and THE GIANT BEHEMOTH. As much as their cinematic progenitor, the 1933 King Kong, both depend on giant critters wreaking havoc in big cities and then being defeated by whatever forces human beings can muster against them. In the end, no matter what specific arguments I put forth, they boil down to the subjective feeling that BEAST only tromps its way over the megadynamicity threshold, while BEHEMOTH "storms" across, in part because it shows a greater propensity toward the "dynamic-sublime."

On a less monumental level, most of the "invisible man" films I've reviewed merely step across the threshhold, such as the 1933 INVISIBLE MAN, its first sequel, and the franchise's one distaff iteration.  Only one film in the Universal series, INVISIBLE AGENT, conveys a sense that the invisible individual is truly challenged by the "might" of his adversaries, and so I can only picture that film as making the threshold-passage a "stormy" one.

Only time will tell if this tempestuous line of thought proves useful in my attempts at simplifying my formulations for a more general audience.

OUR ARMIES AT WAR, WITH MONSTERS

Part 1 and Part 2 of DYNAMICITY DUOS I discussed some of the ways in which individual characters, or small groups of characters, might pass from a lower level of dynamicity to a higher one.  With respect to such characters as Ellen Ripley of the ALIEN franchise, I demonstrated how such a character could begin at the "middle" level of dynamicity and then, in the course of the narrative, pull herself up by the proverbial bootstraps to the "high" level.  Even so, in the film ALIENS Ripley remained remained on the low end of that level, that of the "exemplary" as opposed to the "exceptional" level of her alien opponent. Later, ALIEN: RESURRECTION would transform the heroine into something more than human.

I also want to touch on the question of military might, which is often seen employed by large rather than small groups of characters, a might often pitted against the focal presences of giant monster-films.  I also touched on this principle with respect to small character-groups in TWICE THE MIGHT PT. 2, noting:

...whereas the sense of escalation to a final confrontation is absent from ANGRY RED PLANET, FORBIDDEN PLANET builds this sense by virtue of the baffled astronauts as they attempt to learn the nature of their invincible enemy.

To be sure, when the Id Monster is defeated, it isn't because of the clash between the weapons of Earth-science and the power of the Krell machines. The Monster is defeated by undermining the source of its power in Morbius, who is in essence the Monster's Achilles heel.

Nevertheless, without the clash of energies that establishes how potent the Id Monster is, there would be no narrative perception of the need to seek such a vulnerable point.

Prior to FORBIDDEN PLANET, another 1950s SF-spectacle followed essentially the same pattern.  In Ishiro Honda's 1954 GODZILLA, the audience witnesses the incomparable power of the focal monster.  Though the armies of this film are contemporary ones, as opposed to the far-future forces considered in TWICE THE MIGHT 2, the level of force unleashed by the Japanese military is functionally covalent with the forces unleashed by the heroes of FORBIDDEN PLANET.  The monster is at least affected by the intensity of these forces, though on the whole Godzilla is able to overcome everything humanity throws at him, including a huge electrified fence.

However, one genius-scientist, the war-weary Doctor Serizawa, is able to redeem mankind by unleashing a technological weapon which even Godzilla cannot resist: the deadly "oxygen destroyer," which reduces the giant creature to a skeleton-- though the resilient reptile manages to come back for further rampages in the many sequels.  Serizawa's invention is a tangible expression of the force that mankind as a whole can bring to bear.  So the 1954 GODZILLA qualifies as a combative film, since it both centers upon the results of the combat (the narrative value) as well as evoking the sense of sublime power (the significant value).

Consider in contrast, however, the 1953 adaptation of H.G, Wells' novel THE WAR OF THE WORLDS.  There's no question that the film evokes the grandeur of clashing powers as the American military strives in vain to bombard the near-invulnerable vessels of the Martian invaders.

However, though this would be another example of a work in which the X-level of dynamicity was expressed by both contestants in the significant sense-- exemplary for the military, exceptional for the Martians-- it would not be combative in the narrative sense.  In the film as in the Wells novel, what saves the human race is not some last-minute strategy or new weapon, but a lucky break having nothing to do with Earth's defenders.  In the book, Wells stresses only irony in the fact that the Martians perish from Earth-bacteria, while the 1953 film reverses this ideological interpretation, regarding the bacteria's presence as an expression of divine providence.  But regardless of which interpretation is favored, in neither case can Earth's defenders take any credit for the Martian defeat.

A very different rewriting of this Wells-conclusion appears in the last part of the Moore-O'Neill LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN VOLUME 2.  The starring characters are all involved in the battle against the Martians' second invasion, though neither Nemo's submarine nor Hyde's supernormal strength are able to do more than to give pause to the aliens.  What defeats the Martians in this second encounter is a mutant strain of bacteria developed by the army and dispenses by the League's government contact Campion Bond.  As in the examples of FORBIDDEN PLANET and GODZILLA, this germ-warfare is yet another last-minute "new weapon" which should be racked up to the account of Earth's defenders, even though Moore typically has his characters express horror at its utilization.  Two of the League-members, Quatermain and Murray, are even implicated in this dubious triumpth in that the two of them unknowingly convey the germ-weapon to their commander.
Admittedly the British army in this story is not as central an opponent to the monsters as the armies seen in the 1954 GODZILLA and the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS; the members of the League are the central opponents.  Nevertheless, the combative mode is not dispelled simply because the particular triumph comes about because of the actions of supporting characters.  As long as those supporting characters are strongly allied to the central protagonists, they can be viewed as an extension of the central protagonists' unified will.

One sees this "triumph of the supporting ally" in many venues, so I'll confine myself to one from Marvel's IRON MAN #5, where Iron Man's battle against the computer-villain "Cerebrus" (no relation to the Dave Sim character) is concluded by one such support-character.

CUTEY FUNNY PART 2

“The opposite of laughter and joking is seriousness. This, accordingly, consists in the consciousness of the perfect agreement and congruity of the concept, or the idea, with what is perceptive, with reality. The serious person is convinced that he conceives things as they are, and that they are as he conceives them. This is just why the transition from profound seriousness to laughter is particularly easy, and can be brought about by trifles.”—Arthur Schopenhauer, WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION (trans. Payne), p. 99.

For some time I’ve been meaning to explore certain relations of the humorous impulse to “serious” affects as the thrill of the agon and the agony of the pathos. I mentioned in the essay SATIRE-RIASIS that in interviews Harvey Kurtzman subscribed to the idea that satire was a literal corrective to what he considered false beliefs. This idea may have some truth for sociopolitical affairs, but from a pluralistic POV it has no applicability to art.

A similarly deluded attempt to impose upon art a Freudian “reality principle” is seen in this essay by Noah Berlatsky, in which he claims that superheroes are intrinsically comic:

The desire to be so strong and fast and smart and wonderful that you can save the world with one hand while winning at backgammon with the other — it’s cute when kids imagine it, embarrassing when adults do, and silly at all times and in all seasons.

Berlatsky conveniently overlooks the potential of every aspect of human reality-- real-life or literary-- can be made silly. The fact that the 1966 BATMAN film does a good job of spoofing superheroes does not prove logically that superheroes are silly, any more than ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN proves HAMLET silly. As Schopenhauer says, "serious" works privilege congruity over any possible incongruity, and "comic" works do the opposite. Each mode depends on a process I have called "dynamization," which in essence comes down to a superiority dance. No dance is wrong on its own terms, but one ought to know more than one.

Now, "cute monsters" are not always used for outright comedy. However, again going on the assumption that a given child knows that the model for his "soft lion" or "soft monster" could be dangerous to him in its original form, most "cute horrors" fall under Schopenhauer's concept of incongruity, where "the apprehension of the incongruity between what is conceived and what is perceived, i.e. reality, gives us pleasure."

An interesting contrast to the Kurtzman-Berlatsky "reality principle" appears in some of the remarks of Curt Purcell’s respondents, which he collates here. Two of these horror-bloggers view these cutesy transformations of serious horrors as a compromise of what John of MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD tellingly terms “deeper complexities.” He concludes:

Maybe we are only simply trying to reduce our fears with the vanquishing of the element that makes the monster fearful, leaving nothing more than a sanitized version, a parody to laugh at and cuddle.

Similarly, the VAULT OF HORROR essay, "Monster Cereals: Eating What Scares You," views this cereal-murdering of monstrous icons as an attempt to “take away [monstrous] power by turning it into a parody,” while Doctor Gangrene's prognosis is that softer versions of monsters arise because adults wish to share their own favorable horrific experiences with children, albeit in dampened form.

Though in terms of personal inclinations I’m more in tune with the horror-bloggers than with the advocates of Really Real Reality Principles, I have to point out that in keeping with Schopenhauer’s above remarks, humor is a natural consequence of seriousness in any human endeavor. Thus it’s possible that a humorous or parodic transformation can possess its own “complexities.”

Admittedly, monster-toys and monster-cereals are not the best source of symbolic complexity. They do appeal to the human love of the incongruous, but only in simple, though not insignificant, ways. But some works manage to be, as CLASSIC HORROR avers, “merry and scary” at the same time without compromising either spirit.

In this essay I looked at how Charles Addams’ ghoulish-goofy ADDAMS FAMILY cartoons derived from such vital horror-texts as THE OLD DARK HOUSE and MARK OF THE VAMPIRE. One could probably reel off a good-sized list of works that create their own symbolic universes rather than being nothing more than straight parodies, but that's a project best left for some future post.

CUTEY FUNNY, PART 1

My response to Curt Purcell’s recent question-- "What do cute versions of monsters tell us about horror?"-- will be considerably more circuitous than the responses of other horror-bloggers who’ve thus far responded to the question, and who are listed in CP’s original blog-essay. This is perhaps inevitable given my recent ruminations re: Kantian formulations about beauty and the sublime, as seen here and here.

This essay won’t answer the question per se, but will attempt to place the idea of “cuteness” in line with Kantian concepts of “types of liking.”

Kant’s CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT gives an excellent logical estimation of beauty but doesn’t provide adequate concrete examples. Edmund Burke, who preceded Kant in formulating a general theory of aesthetics, defines beauty in such terms as “delicacy” and “weakness,” in contrast to the awesomeness of “the sublime.” According to James T. Boulton, even in Burke’s time his detractors found Burke’s criteria too predicated on his personal tastes and not representative of broader notions of “the beautiful,” an opinion with which I concur. I’d venture that Burke may also have been attempting to theorize beauty as the opposite of the sublime in every way, which was too extreme an opposition.

It’s true that beauty is not dominantly associated with the same sort of awe-filled experience one may gain from one’s experience of what Kant calls “the unbounded.” But beauty, the experience of that which is bounded, is often associated with a lesser form of awe, or at least one more associated with “order” than with “chaos.”
However, the qualities Burke assigned to beauty, such as “weakness,” apply quite well to the idea of “cuteness,” as long as one predicates that some forms of this weakness are cognitive while others are affective.

Baby animals possess weakness in the cognitive sense, in that they are helpless either to escape or defend themselves from danger. It’s been speculated that in humans the instinct to protect and care for one’s offspring is at the root of the ability to find nonhuman beings or even objects “cute.” But even if this evo-psych explanation could be decisively validated, the impulse has clearly branched out to include many affects that have nothing to do with infant care.

In affects relating to sexual attractiveness, “weakness” translates into something closer to “that which is appealing,” overlapping with Kantian “agreeability.” For a “cute hat,” the question of weakness doesn’t apply, except in the roundabout sense that its appeal may “weaken” an onlooker to its owner’s charms. If a teenage girl considers a bulky football player “cute,” she certainly doesn’t cognize him as “weak” the way a baby is, but rather that he is, in her mind, both agreeable and approachable. By contrast beauty, as a sexually related affect, connotes “difficulty of approach,” along the lines of Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian.

For children, the principle audience for Curt’s “cute critter-creations,” agreeability manifests in terms of empathic bonding. Dolls may be most often used to allow the child to simulate caring for an infant, but they can, as much as other toys, assume other roles: siblings, playmates, parental substitutes, guardian spirits. But it’s important to note that many toys with no “monstrous” associations may represent creatures that are not helpless in nature. Thus a doll that looks like an animal that either is dangerous or is usually perceived so --a lion, a snake-- can as easily become a child’s agreeable companion as a doll based on a creature that looks innocuous. And the process by which a lion or serpent has its less agreeable aspects softened or purged is functionally identical with the process by which Great Cthulhu’s fearsome face-tentacles turn into “bunny ears," as noted in Curt's essay.





Now, unless a child is not raised knowing that lions are dangerous, the “Soft Lion,” like the “Soft Monster,” is a study in contrast, so it carries a different affect from the more purely agreeable “teddy bear.” And as studies in contrast, they are best understood in tune with Schopenhauer’s concept of “the incongruous,” which I’ll explore further in Part 2.

MONSTER MUSH

As a professed lover of crossovers, monstrous and otherwise, I suppose it's a comedown to admit that I haven't yet viewed 2003's FREDDY VS. JASON, particularly as I like both monsters and view them as good sturdy death-dealing cultural icons.

Nevertheless, when my library got a copy of the 2008 tpk of FREDDY VS. JASON VS. ASH, which is a comic-book sequel to that film-crossover, I read it anyway, counting on the book's raconteurs to bring me up to speed. As it happens, that may be all they did right.

I will say that I'm not as fond of the EVIL DEAD mythos invoked by the presence of the "Ash" character, as I regard those flicks as decent timekillers but not quite as interesting as the mythoi of Kruger and Voorhees. As it happens, the script for FVJVA-- based on a never-produced movie script that would have teamed these "titans of terror"-- pretty much centralizes the EVIL DEAD mythos, as heroic Ash gets involved while searching for a mystical book seen in those movies. The script suggests that the book's power created the unstoppable Jason, but the primary opponents here are Freddy, who wants the book in order to use its power to make himself a god, and Ash, who wants to use it to banish both Freddy and Jason to the dimension of evil deadness.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the shortcomings of the tpb's art and script, considerable though they are. Artist Craig's compositions have the usual slickified look of an Image comic, and are able to render neither tension nor balls-out grossness with any conviction. Scripter Kuhoric, apparently hoping for a shot at a BUFFY comic, pours on the wry humor with a ladle-- no, make that a tureen. Anyone hoping to see so much as a good stupid pun coming out of Freddy Kruger's mouth will probably be disappointed.

What is interesting to me about reading this compilation of the six-issue Dynamite series is that (a) though I found it very dull, (b) I could imagine its being much more entertaining had it been rendered as a film.

As a film the script wouldn't have been anything more than it is now: a repetitive game of "Evil book, evil book, who's got the evil book." But films have a long history of playing that game, and of getting a helluva lot of kinetic mileage out of the simplest of plots, such as the 2006 Jason Statham flick CRANK.

Now, the reader may object that comic books, too, have their rich history of mindless action. But it occurs to me that this may signify one of many differences between the comic book medium and the film medium: comics are better at potraying action in far shorter bursts, but not so good at sustaining really long intervals. The average American comic is designed to read actively for a few minutes, while the average film holds its willing audience in thrall for at least 90 minutes.

Now, it's true that part of the reason FVJVA was boring was due to deficiencies in the art and script, but off the top of my head I can't think of any crossover books of equal length (six or more issues) that have impressed me in the kinetic action department. Part of the reason may be that comics are in part a medium of words, and that written words exert their own narrative restrictions, far more than words spoken by a filmed actor. Even the reigning master of action comics, Jack Kirby, had to rest up in his longer storylines with far greater frequency than one sees in a balls-out action film like CRANK-- or any number of ACF ("almost constant fighting") flicks.

In conclusion, while I still plan to see the battle of Freddy and Jason at some future time, I can wait till half past Armageddon before I'll feel I need to see another threeway between the two of them and the EVIL DEAD guy.