THOUGHTS ON JIM SHOOTER

Jim Shooter passed on the last day of June this year. I won't be writing a general overview of his work, given that I only knew his Marvel and DC accomplishments, and almost nothing about his efforts for companies like Valiant. Defiant and Broadway. But I'll cover a few career highlights (and lowlights) here.

 

I'm sure almost every Shooter-obit will mention that he sold his first scripts to DC Comics, via mail, at the age of 14. Shooter became well known for improving the often staid adventures of DC's team of futuristic super-teens, the Legion of Super-Heroes, by crafting more engaging melodramatics and a greater use of action. By the middle 1960s, some long-time DC artists had started using greater dynamism in their stories, such as Gil Kane in GREEN LANTERN and Mike Sekowsky in JUSTICE LEAGUE, probably as a response to the increased popularity of Marvel's action-heavy product. But Shooter brought the sensibilities of a fan-reader to these early scripts: he wrote the sort of things that he, as a teen, liked reading. That included a greater emphasis on battle-scenarios, and even the often stodgy SUPERMAN books under editor Mort Weisinger were improved on that score. I'm sure many obits will mention that Shooter created a new recurring foe for the Man of Steel: the Parasite, who could drain off Superman's powers and then use those powers to beat the snot out of the hero. But I have a nostalgic preference for his script for SUPERMAN #191. In it, the Kryptonian must fight against DEMON, an evil cabal with fantastic weaponry, to keep the agents from obtaining a forbidden artifact. This issue might be the only time long-time Super-artist Al Plastino even came close to rendering the sort of hyperkinetic action one expects from American comic books. 

  Shooter left DC for a few years, and then came back and wrote a few more stories. But he would prove more important as an editor at Marvel, particularly when he rose to the position of the company's chief editor in 1978. All reminiscences of the period seem to agree that Shooter came into Marvel when there was something of a power vacuum, and that the company was losing a lot of money on ventures with dubious commercial potential-- some fan-favorites like the McGregor KILLRAVEN, some unlikely "throw-stuff-against-the-wall" creations like THE GOLEM and GABRIEL DEVIL HUNTER. Shooter imposed a greater editorial authority over Marvel raconteurs for the next nine years, and although he made the trains run on time, many long-time employees, among them Doug Moench, complained of micro-management that limited creativity. Back in the day, I protested the regimentation of the Shooter regime by writing a negative JOURNAL review of the 1984-85 SECRET WARS. Not that my review, or anyone else's. made any difference to the success of that maxi-series. The sweet deal that Shooter or his reps negotiated with Mattel Toys got the comic book promoted on TV alongside Mattel's SECRET WARS toy line-- and so WARS was a big hit for Shooter. (I never knew why afterward Marvel kept adapting toy lines that DIDN'T promote the comics on TV. With the exception of G.I. JOE and maybe TRANSFORMERS, most of the toy-adaptations went down the tubes.)

  Now, in those days, Shooter represented the apogee of mediocre commercial comics to the JOURNAL and its readers. I can't claim I didn't channel some of this virulent anti-Shooterism at the time, but I think I was at least aware that some creators, such as Frank Miller and Walt Simonson, produced good-to-great works under Shooter's editorial aegis. Gary Groth's take was more adversarial-- if a company wasn't producing what he deemed "great art," it was worthless. (Note how, on the JOURNAL cover above. Shooter is getting dubious looks from many characters from "alternative comics:" Rorschach, Mister X, Mister Monster, Zippy the Pinhead, and Ed the Happy Clown, for five.) By the early 1990s, the JOURNAL's devaluing of all commercial comics was so complete I for one quit submitting to the editors, since I believed that a critic had to be able to appreciate excellence in any form.       

    I don't remember finding any excellence in any of the stories Shooter wrote during his nine years at Marvel: not even the excellence of good formula comics, like LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES . However, as an editor he helped deliver the balls-to-the-wall, super-melodramatic conclusion of the "Dark Phoenix Saga " in X-MEN 137. As many fans know today, originally the X-MEN creators Claremont and Byrne had meant to deliver a fairly low-impact, cop-out (IMO) conclusion to the story. Shooter insisted that Dark Phoenix had to pay a price for succumbing to her cosmic killing-rage, and whatever one might think of imposing moral judgments on ficitonal characters, in this case Shooter's instincts were better, for that particular story, than those of Byrne and Claremont. It didn't matter to me then, and doesn't matter to me now, that Phoenix and Jean Grey would be revived many more times, in many more permutations. All that matters now was that the original story delivered a good finish to its dramatic action. Without Shooter, X-MEN fans might not have had that.

And for that accomplishment, I can even forgive SECRET WARS.

              

MYTHCOMICS: "THE CURSE OF THE SUPERBOY MUMMY" (SUPERBOY #123, 1965)

By 1965, many of the Mort Weisinger-edited comics of the SUPERMAN line had gone beyond the fustiness of their Golden Age precursors. If one goes beyond my specific connotations of "mythicity," and speaks only of how each of the titles nurtured its own mythology, then both of the SUPERMAN books, the SUPERGIRL backup, LOIS LANE and JIMMY OLSEN all showed unprecedented inventiveness in creating new characters and concepts, or in causing old ones to interact. (I'm leaving the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES feature outside these considerations because it sported a very different conceptual format.) But of the features set in the 20th century, SUPERBOY was the least distinguished in sheer creativity. 

I've only read bits and pieces of the late forties/early fifties SUPERBOY, I've found them extremely jejune compared to the SUPERMAN scripts of the same period, even allowing for SUPERBOY's simpler, kid-focused plots. Only one event in the feature's late Golden Age era is still remembered by fans today, the creation of Lana Lang, which as I argued here began as a recapitulation of Lois Lane's character. Then two more "myth-events" followed in the first five years of the Silver Age. First came the introduction of Krypto in 1955. Then in 1960 came one of the feature's few mythic stories, "How Luthor Met Superboy," which debuted the appealing idea that Luthor and Superboy grew up together in Smallville long before they became implacable foes in adulthood. The "retcon" of Luthor was followed other tales which borrowed from the SUPERMAN comic books (or, in one case, from the SUPERMAN comic strip), so that the Boy of Steel began meeting Phantom Zone villains and the like. But even by 1965, his writers showed little sign of evolving any new myth-material original to Superboy's universe-- again, not counting the Legion.

I suspect that the premise of "The Curse of the Superboy Mummy" might have begun from an idea for an arresting cover image-- Lana Lang and Superboy finding archaic doppelgangers of themselves in an Egyptian tomb. Given that idea, writer Leo Dorfman and artist Curt Swan then probably had to "work backward" to find some way to justify the image. But this time Dorfman rooted his makework story in one of the key myths of the Superman cosmos-- the War Between Men and Women.

The three-way relationship of heroic Superboy, admiring Lana Lang, and apparently-timid Clark Kent had of course been borrowed from the SUPERMAN comics, but a few interesting divergences arose. For one thing, Lana became at some point the daughter of an esteemed archaeologist, so she could sometimes be tied to arcane or unusual discoveries. 

Now, the cover does not specify the nature of the "curse," but the opening caption does, implying that somehow Lana's presence is going to bring doom to the hero-- even though she doesn't show any of her more annoying traits here or in the issue's other two stories. Nevertheless, when Dorfman takes us back to 3,000 B.C. in Egypt, the writer changes the Smallville setup-- "young girl only thinks the guy she knows is weak"-- to a literal reality. Seth, weakling son of royal magician Ahton, is humiliated when the taunting Neferti demonstrates that even she's stronger than he is. Doting father that Ahton is, he goes for the quick fix, asking Isis for help.

Isis shows Ahton the futuristic feats of Superboy-- proving that even archaic gods are big fans of the Kryptonian franchise-- and Ahton learns how to duplicate Superboy's powers with a magic potion. There is of course no internal reason for Ahton or Seth to duplicate the Superboy costume too, except to make the cover-image work out. But I give Dorfman extra points for coming up with a rationale for the insignia, since the Egyptians didn't have the European letter "S."

During Seth's short super-career, his major accomplishment is really to blow off Neferti when she tries womanly wiles to attract his attention. But Neferti shares the snoopiness of her later doppelganger, so she not only learns Seth's true identity, she even sees images of Superboy and Lana in Ahton's magic oracle-shield.

Then, just as the nosiness of Lois and Lana sometimes put their romantic idol in one kind of peril or another, Neferti has a "Deianeira moment," where she trusts in an unscrupulous adviser to give her a love-charm. The jade scarab she wears to attract Seth kills him, and her as well, when she tries to rescue him from the sea. (The story has an unusual amount of death for a mid-sixties SUPERBOY tale.) 

This half of the story is the most resonant for its use of a trope one might call, "Hero Killed by Woman's Egotism." Astute readers are expected to notice that Lana appropriates the very jade scarab that killed Seth, and so there's no great mystery to those readers when modern-day Superboy begins experiencing non-romantic heartaches when he gets near Lana. The Big Reveal of the next three pages is pretty routine and not worth recapitulating here; those interested in the denouement may read it here. The only mythic element of the modern-day section of the narrative is that, even though Lana isn't intentionally endangering Superboy, the hero's dimestore self-analysis is never actually invalidated. According to the way Lana normatively functions in the SUPERBOY canon, she does at least endanger the hero's peace of mind with her frequent identity-hunting. And if one chooses to amplify the potential feelings of these purely fictional characters, Lana also could incur a lot of resentment by her frequent complaints about Clark Kent's meekness-- though to my knowledge she never went so far as to embarrass Clark in a contest of strength/skill. So if Superboy does harbor secret resentments of his potential girlfriend, it's not because he's swayed by any ancient superstition. He just resents nosy, nagging women.

PARADIGM SCHIFF

 

On occasion I’ve found fault with the kind of criticism that concentrates only on the “firsts” or the “big events” in comic book history (or in any arena of fiction, genre or otherwise). While no one can read everything— sometimes, not even all the stories centered around an evergreen serial character like Batman—it should be kept in mind, as I mentioned here, that the first Joker story is not necessarily the best Joker story.

When I picked up a cheap copy of 2018’s DC COMICS SUPER HEROINES: 100 GREATEST MOMENTS, I knew that “firsts” and “big events” would be the main concern of the book’s author, Robert Greenberger. All of the “100 Greatest Moments” tomes are big, heavily illustrated coffee-table books, spotlighting various aspects of DC comics history. Usually the book touch only adequately upon the history of the company’s first forty years while giving heavier coverage to the developments of the last four decades. I don’t especially begrudge this editorial decision. Every generation has its own preferences in popular culture, and if you’re selling a coffee table book to readers in the 2010s, it probably ought to concentrate on subject matter of interest to readers in the 2010s.

For that reason, I won’t cavil at the choices made by Greenberger and/or his editors. I could complain, say, that a major Silver Age heroine like Elasti-Girl gets only two pages, and that she’s only given a couple of panels fighting (or just starting to fight) a giant robot. But I can appreciate that the comics-reading paradigm has shifted: that, from the eighties onward, super heroines became a lot more important to hardcore comics-fans than they ever were to the more casual readers who used to pick up funnybooks at the corner store. So it’s all but inevitable that Harley Quinn gets a lot more coverage than Elasti-Girl, and I don’t take issue with Greenberger’s choices in any serious way.

What does give me pause, though, is a passage in which he puts forth an inaccurate paradigm with respect to the history of DC’s treatment of its super villains. I think it’s more a mistake than anything, based on inaccurate recollections. Still, the way in which DC changed its practice of using bizarre villains in the Silver Age made a difference to the way they told superhero stories for all future decades. Today, almost every superhero published by every publisher has a “rogue’s gallery.” It’s hard to remember that even a hero like Batman, renowned for a memorable cast of villains since the 1940s, spent his first fifteen years fighting ordinary crooks rather than super-criminals. A shift in this paradigm did occur after the establishment of the Comics Code in 1954, but it’s not quite the same as what Greenberger reports on page 156, where he’s trying to sum up the involved history of how Catwoman, absent from DC titles for twelve years, was returned to “active service” in a 1966 issue of LOIS LANE. Greenberger writes:

In the 1950s, DC Comics decided to retire its costumed criminals in reaction to congressional scrutiny of the comic book field. That all changed in the 1960s as the New Look Batman titles began to reintroduce the villains, fueled by the January 1966 debut of the ABC BATMAN series.

The short version of my disagreement with Greenberger is this: if anything, it was the non-costumed criminals who started appearing less, while in the post-1954 BATMAN comics, long-time editor Jack Schiff continued to add to the rogues in the gallery of the Caped Crusader.

To begin the long version, though, Greenberger’s sweeping statement, applied not just to Batman but to the whole DC line of the 1950s (by which I think the writer really means 1954-1959), makes no sense. Throughout the decade the company published the Superman and Wonder Woman features, and though neither feature boasted a huge rogues’ gallery in the fifties, I see no evidence of a moratorium in those stories, given that Brainiac appeared in 1958 and Angle Man in 1954. Further, in the late 1950s, some time after the institution of the Comics Code, the company launched titles for three key superhero titles: the Flash, Green Lantern, and the Justice League. True, not until the 1960s proper did these three features soon generating large quantities of rogues. But when these respective features got going, those heroes’ opponents were usually either alien menaces or costumed crooks, with a steadily diminishing presence of non-costumed lawbreakers.

I should mention that before the publication of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern and Justice League features, and before the Barry Allen Flash’s official series began—all in 1959-- editor Jack Schiff was also giving Batman a combination of both costumed crooks and alien menaces. It’s for the “aliens in BATMAN” that Schiff became reviled by early fans, partly because most of the stories were pretty bad. Editors Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz—the one known respectively for most of the Superman features, while the other was renowned for those three fledgling series of the late fifties (among others)—had been SF-fans in youth, and so they understood how to use SF-tropes in kids’ comics books. Jack Schiff was not a SF-fan, and so he accepted a lot of bad space-opera stories that clashed with the basic concept of the Caped Crusader.

But Batman’s ET-encounters didn’t crowd out the super-villain tales, though they might have helped edge out the mundane crime stories. (It’s worth remembering that when Frederic Wertham launched the public jeremiad that led to the Comics Code’s formation, the psychiatrist ranted far more against crime comics than those featuring long-underwear heroes.) Between 1954 and 1959 the Joker appeared four times, and that’s without counting an appearance in the Superman-Batman feature in WORLD’S FINEST. The Penguin may have had a mild moratorium on his adventures, since he only appeared once in 1956 and didn’t show his beak again until 1963, though that second appearance is still way in advance of the 1966 TV show. Two-Face was revived in 1954 and never appeared for the rest of the decade, but he hadn’t been used that often even in the Golden Age.

Of the classic Golden Age villains still extant, only Catwoman—who had appeared in three 1954 stories—seemed to get completely mothballed for the next twelve years, until, as Greenberger notes, she re-appears in LOIS LANE (as does the Penguin, for his second Silver Age appearance). No one has ever proved that DC had an anti-Catwoman policy, though it may be significant that the Princess of Plunder is the only costumed villain specifically mentioned in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, where Doctor Wertham complains about the nasty influence of her whip on young minds.

But Schiff, as stated, continued to build up the Bat-gallery, even if none of these super-crooks were quite on the level with the best Golden Age malefactors.

The Mirror-Man appears right in the cutoff year, 1954, though he doesn’t show up again until 1963.

The Mad Hatter, who borrows the name of a 1948 villain but who is essentially a new character, appears first in 1956 and then again in 1964.

The Signalman appears both in 1957 and 1959 before making one more appearance in 1961 as “the Blue Bowman.”

The Terrible Trio, aka the Fox, the Shark, and the Vulture, make a 1958 debut and then pop up once more in 1963.

And two one-shot villains, False Face and Mister Zero (later Mister Freeze), made their respective debuts in 1958 and 1959, after which both were adapted to the 1966 show, even though only Freeze became ensconced as a Bat-rogue from then on.

And of course, for the remainder of Schiff’s four-year custodianship in the sixties, he also introduced such familiar characters as a new Clayface and the Cat-Man, explicitly introduced to compensate for the lack of a cat-crime crook. Schiff also introduced a lot of lesser foes—Mister Polka Dot, anyone? —but even those examples prove that he bought a lot of stories with fancy-dressed felons.

So the paradigm is this: Schiff, far from cutting down on costumed antagonists, started beefing up Batman’s rogues’ gallery long before the revised versions of Flash and Green Lantern even had regular foes. I’m not surprised that this minor aspect of comic-book history got lost in the shuffle, though I am a little surprised that Greenberger, born in 1958 and thus a guy raised in the Silver Age, allowed himself to make such an erroneous statement. I can only assume it was done in haste, trying to simplify an involved subject for modern comics-fans, who have no particular reason to care about the policies of DC Comics in the 1950s, much less the accomplishments, good and bad, of comics-editor Jack Schiff.

ADDENDUM: Just after completing this essay, I read ALTER EGO #26 (2003) for the first time, and I came across a snippet in which Julie Schwartz sort-of promoted one aspect of the Schiff falsehood. Schwartz says, "fortunately, the one thing I did was to bring back the villains that Jack Schiff had neglected."

That's not quite the same as the assertion that Schiff didn't use villains at all. But Schiff did revive two Golden Age villains, essentially remaking them into new characters (Mad Hatter and Clayface). How many old villains did Schwartz revive? I only remember three during the sixties-- the period when Schwartz was editing the Bat-books to his preferences-- namely Riddler, Scarecrow and Killer Moth. And not that many new Schwartz villains of the sixties grabbed the fans. Blockbuster maybe-- but Eraser? Cluemaster? Spellbinder? His editorship in the seventies seems more like him kicking back and letting the writers do what they wanted, We did get the revivals of Deadshot and Hugo Strange then, but I don't know how much to credit Schwartz with those. I guess Schwartz made more use of Joker, Penguin and Catwoman, but some of that was due to the TV show.

I welcome other fans' input, since I'm not sure if I'm forgetting some important Bat-foes.

MYTHCOMICS: “EYES OF THE SERPENT” (SUPERMAN FAMILY #174, 1975-76)

 

In one reminiscence Roy Thomas recalled that his one-time DC editor Mort Weisinger was the first person he Thomas heard use the term “mythology” for a corpus of comic-book stories, in particular the “Superman Family” titles over which Weisinger held sway for the entirety of the Silver Age. I would guess that this was just a convenient tag for the editor, that he probably cared little or not at all about what comprised a genuine archaic mythology, or what status if any modern-day stories might have as “myths.” Still, in the late 1950s Weisinger made some concerted effort to have his writers utilize far more fantasy/SF tropes in the Super-books than had previously been the norm. Not all such metaphenomenal tropes are automatically mythic in nature. Yet as it happened, many writers in Weisinger’s stable—Otto Binder, Leo Dorfman and of course Jerry Siegel—did manage to use these tropes to tell a handful of stories with a high level of mythic concrescence.

However, Weisinger was edged out of DC just in time for the debut of the Bronze Age in 1970, and the Super-books were parceled out to assorted editors. Julie Schwartz took custody of the two titles starring the Big Blue Cheese, SUPERMAN and ACTION COMICS. But though Schwartz’s Silver Age writers had also produced a respectable number of myth-stories, in the Bronze Age the editor favored in large part two writers given to penning very gimmicky, superficial tales: Cary Bates and Elliot Maggin. When three of the ancillary Super-features—SUPERGIRL, JIMMY OLSEN and LOIS LANE—failed to sell well, DC cancelled the individual titles and transferred their features to a portmanteau book, THE SUPERMAN FAMILY. As it happens, it was in this title that editor Schwartz and writer Maggin produced one of the few stories that can stand alongside the best myth-outings of Siegel, Binder and Dorfman.

The first page of Kurt Schaffenberger’s art for “Eyes of the Serpent” is a splash-page portraying a scene that does not literally occur in the story: Supergirl flying into combat against a giant winged dragon, while on the dragon’s back rides a green-scaled humanoid. The humanoid looks a bit like a frog-man, but Maggin’s caption makes clear that this fellow so viridian is also ophidian: “At the dawn of time, it was the acid tongue of a serpent that brought evil into the world—a serpent much like the one that now challenges Supergirl!” In this introductory sentence, Maggin establishes that in this world, he validates as real the story of the Garden of Eden, including Eve’s temptation by a serpent later identified with Satan. However, the story Maggin tells is about a serpent who is only “much like” the Biblical tempter, the better to avoid any accusations of mixing serious religious figures with the “let’s pretend” of a comic book.

As the story proper begins, the same serpent-man from the splash, Lord Beriak, stands in an indeterminate location (full of rocks and smoky vapors) along with other serpent-men, who give Beriak his assignment. He must journey from wherever the serpent-people make their home to a college in Florida, where the Kryptonian heroine works as a guidance counselor in her Linda Danvers identity. Beriak's purpose is that of “reasserting our dominance over the human race.” (Some influence from Robert E. Howard’s “serpent-men” stories seems likely, given that the snake-people are never identified as either aliens or supernatural demons.)

Once Beriak arrives in the fictitious Florida town of New Athens—where, for once, the locale plays a role in a Super-story—he takes on the appearance of a good-looking human male and contrives to meet Linda Danvers. Linda/Supergirl is somewhat attracted to the false flesh of Beriak, but she doesn’t immediately agree to date him. Since Beriak’s as-yet-unrevealed master plan requires him to gain mental dominance over Supergirl, he decides that she may become more pliable if he wears her down a little. To that end he summons a dragon from the vasty deep of the neighboring ocean and makes it run amuck in New Athens, so that the heroine will appear and bring the beast to heel. (Though dragons have some status in Bible lore, this critter is just another of DC’s countless convenient prehistoric survivals.)

While all this is going on, a mysterious young fellow named “Davy” appears at the college, and he like the serpent-man shows some ability with exerting persuasive mojo. The Davy character, created by Maggin for a three-part Green Arrow story in ACTION COMICS, is given no precise origin, but he’s clearly meant to be identified with the youthful David of the Bible, since Davy carries a lyre on which he can play enchanting music, and a sling with which he can cast stones, like the one David used to defeat Goliath. Maggin does not ever say that Davy is identical with Bible-David, who after all aged, sinned and died in the course of his narrative. But since the House of David was associated (in a roundabout way) with the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth, Davy is as associated with the powers of Heaven as the serpent-men are with the Devil.

In addition, in what may be the shortest foreshadowing in a comic book, an orange-picker falls unconscious after eating an orange in a local grove. The man is never seen again, though by customary expectations the reader would assume he’s okay once the threat of the serpent-men has been vanquished.

The disguised Beriak once more encounters Linda Danvers after her heroic other-self has driven off the winged dragon. This time, he places her under his mental thrall, at least enough that she accepts a date with him. As Beriak leads his victim to the slaughter, Davy follows along, sometimes playing the music on his lyre, though for reasons undisclosed the serpent-man can’t hear it. (Perhaps Maggin believed the legend that snakes can’t hear or thought that his audience would believe as much.)

Beriak takes his date to an orange orchard—possibly the same one where the unnamed man collapsed—and ramps up the Eden-references by getting Linda to eat one of the tree’s “forbidden fruits.” Whjen Linda eats the orange, it apparently puts her under Beriak’s total control. Beriak then reveals his scaly other self and makes the Girl of Steel perform a few super-feats for his amusement. Then he finally reveals his master plan. Beneath one of the orange-trees in the orchard—presumably the one from which Linda ate, just to keep up the parallel with the Biblical Tree of Knowledge—lies a “golden stone” called the Eden Rock. Once Beriak compels Supergirl to surrender her life-energy to the stone, this maneuver will give the serpent-race total dominion over humanity and all of its superheroic defenders.

However, Supergirl has been shamming: she caught on to his imposture early on. The two super-beings fight, and though Beriak gets the upper hand once, Davy is on hand to distract him with a handily-hurled sling-stone. Beriak finally recognizes Davy as an old foe of his Satanic species, and Davy uses his magic to keep Beriak restrained while Supergirl tunnels beneath the earth and destroys the Eden Rock, so that no one can use it again. Then, as the enemies square off again, Beriak’s fellow serpents, who are watching from afar, decide to call back their agent, commenting that he was stymied by “our old nemesis, the immortal singer David.” Supergirl and Davy converse briefly and the story ends with a minor coda at Linda’s workplace.

It would appear that the serial’s Florida setting was the only reason for Maggin to substitute an orange for the forbidden food, though to be sure some scholars don’t believe the Biblical fruit was an apple, either. Maggin doesn’t say why this particular delicacy is forbidden, or who forbade it, or why eating it doesn’t really affect Supergirl at all. Presumably the only parallel is an inverted one: unlike Eve, Supergirl resists the blandishments of the serpent, and so preserves her world in contrast to Eve losing Eden for herself and Adam.

As noted, since the Biblical David was not “immortal” like Davy, there can only be a symbolic connection between the two. Davy is what Carl Jung might have called a “puer eternus,” an eternal child—which is, to an extent, an archetype to which Youthful David subscribes as well. Bible-David has no connection with the mythology of Eden except in the sense that David provides a link between Adam and Jesus of Nazareth. In a larger sense, of course, the expulsion of the first Man and Woman from Eden leads to Christ’s sacrifice to redeem humanity, so the Fall foreshadows the Redemption, and the general defeat of Satanic evil. In addition, in Maggin’s scenario Davy is meant to be something of a destined warrior like David: able to overcome evildoers who seem far more powerful than he.

There is nothing paralleling the Eden Rock in Genesis. However, there are a few foundation-stones in the Bible and in later Judeo-Christian commentary. In the Zohar, God is said to have unleashed the flood—the instrument by which the Divinity eradicates almost all the sinning spawn of Adam and Eve—by moving a foundation-stone called the Eben Shetiyah. There is no firm evidence in the story that Maggin knew of this trope. But given that he was already juggling the myths of Eden, it’s not improbable to think he might work in one from the Flood-Myth, even if he does turn it into a standard comic-book gimmick, “the thing that makes all humanity bow down.”

Lastly and leastly, Beriak’s name doesn’t seem to have any strong forbears, Biblical or otherwise. There is a Canaanite deity named Berith or Baal-Berith, who later becomes a Christian demon, but in this case it’s just as possible that “Beriak” took no influence from this figure, that the serpent-man just has a nonsense-name. It’s of passing interest that “Berith” means “covenant,” which reference could take us back to Flood-mythology—but that’s not a holy hill on which I’d choose to make my stand.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE SUPER STEED OF STEEL" (ACTION COMICS #292, 1962)

This week's mythcomic will be a Silver Age Supergirl story in which the heroine's ass gets saved by supporting character Comet the Super-Horse. So I decided that before printing that one, I would touch on this quirky, unique 1960s character.

During the period when Mort Weisinger edited the "Superman Family" titles, no writer had any exclusive hold on the characters they created for DC Comics. Still, Leo Dorfman wrote all or most of the stories in which "Super-Horse" is involved with the main action, rather than being a supporting figure. From the beginning, Dorfman seems to have had a rough arc regarding where he wanted the Super-Horse stories to go, even if there was not really a proper conclusion to Comet's story. Dorfman probably never planned an end as such-- I feel sure Comet was mainly a story-device to keep food on the table, and when tastes moved away from the Weisinger-type story in the 1970s, the ultra-equine effectively went into comic-book limbo.

The opening image of the first Super-Horse story shows Supergirl happily astride her Super-Horse as they flee kryptonite rays from alien ships. In the story proper, this occurs only in one of the heroine's dreams, though the real event takes place one issue later.

First, however, Linda "Supergirl" Danvers suddenly gets horse-crazy while watching a western movie. Notice that though she's in high school at this time, she's supposedly more interested in the horse than in the cowboy.

Anna Freud, writing in 1926, carried on Big Sigmund's tradition by claiming that young girls liked horses due to "penis envy." There's no telling what Freudianisms were known to Leo Dorfman, but at the least I suspect he knew that juvenile books about horses-- BLACK BEAUTY, NATIONAL VELVET-- had proved enormously popular with young girls. He seems to have concluded that there was something erotic at the base of it, to judge from Linda's bedtime thoughts about getting "goose flesh" at the idea of sharing adventures with her own horse.

In the space of the story, Supergirl has three dreams about a super-horse helping her in some way. She names him Comet because he has a comet-like birthmark, though as a story-motif the birthmark won't become important until a few issues later. Then Supergirl encounters an identical horse at a real-life dude ranch, and the first story ends on an enigmatic note.

In the next story, Supergirl finds out that Comet is not just a horse, but a telepath, who proceeds to relate his origin via a mental voice. His lineage goes back to ancient Greece, when he was a centaur named Biron. (This seems to be a reference to one of the most famous centaurs in Greek mythology, Chiron.)

It's later revealed that Maldor, the sorcerer who tried to poison Circe, caused Biron to drink the wrong potion. Circe tries to make up for the blunder by using a magic potion that turns Biron the ordinary horse into a super-being. But Maldor has another scheme, using his magic to cause the super-horse to become imprisoned on an asteroid in (appropriately) the constellation Sagittarius. Biron languishes on the desolate asteroid for centuries, until 1959, when a rocket from Argo City happens by with its precious cargo.

Thus Biron becomes fascinated with the teenager aboard the rocket, and follows it to Earth. It's not clear why Biron waits a few years to contact the heroine, but he tells Supergirl that he read the minds of the alien scouts that were preparing for invasion. It's not clear why that would prompt Biron to invade Supergirl's dreams and construct an exact replica of what was going to happen when she attacked the aliens and the newly christened Comet came to her rescue. In this same issue, the aliens invade for real and things play out in reality just as they did in the dream, suggesting that Dorfman's Super-Horse had a little clairvoyance going for him, when it was convenient for the writer.


The rest of the Dorfman stories featuring the relationship of the heroine and her horse focus on the "romance with a secret identity" that had been DC's bread-and-butter since the debut of Superman. A couple of times Comet is temporarily transformed into a human being, in keeping with the original boon he wanted from Circe, and in one story, the transformation happens in werewolf-fashion, whenever a comet passes in the heavens. Because of this development, I hazard that Dorfman had always planned to have his super-equine transform in this fashion, but had to work his way up to that point. Otherwise, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason for the writer to presage the transformation with the comet-birthmark.

Whenever Comet does get the chance to become human, however temporarily, he immediately finds some reason to get into a lip-lock with Supergirl and/or Linda. I don't find this as transgressive as many comics-fans do, because he really isn't a horse, but a liminal being between human and horse.

However, I'll admit it's more than a little peculiar when Supergirl becomes jealous of Comet's attentions to another female. Granted, by this time she knows that he's not a real horse, but a transformed centaur. Yet in all the stories post-dating the big revelation, she doesn't really think of Comet as "a guy." So maybe what she's really jealous about is that another woman is getting the jollies that Supergirl usually gets.

As to the origin of those jollies, deponent saith not, except to observe that at no point in his career do you see cousin Superman fantasizing about riding a horse, regardless of gender.

ADDENDUM: I noted above that at fifteen, Linda/Supergirl seems a little old to form a crush on a horse rather than on a boy. However, I should also note that no one would have thought that the girl-readers of the feature would be that old, and THEY might indeed be of an age to have horse-crushes-- not that it's automatic with every young XX, but middle-school seems to be a little more likely for the crush to form.

NEAR MYTHS: "THE MAN WHO DESTROYED KRYPTON" (SUPERMAN #205, 1968)

In recent weeks SYFY has debuted a teleseries devoted to Superman's homeworld, so it seems a good time to descant on the subject of Krypton.

Though "Man Who Destroyed Krypton" is executed by Otto Binder and Al Plastino, two regulars in editor Mort Weisinger's stable, the story's also an early example of a comic-book "retcon." Usually in the Weisinger-verse, newer stories rewrote older ones with no concern as to what had been established before. However, this time there seems to be a marked attempt to play to fannish ideas of "continuity" by proposing a new paradigm-- though it was one that largely renounced by both fans and later professionals.

Oddly, the tale begins with Superman learning of an extraterrestrial menace from mundane law enforcement authorities. Through their sources, the top cops have established that an alien operative, Black Zero, plots to destroy the Earth. Superman locates the alien, who has a bit of news for the Kryptonian. Years ago, Zero was sent to destroy Krypton because his bosses, a planetary combine called "the Pirate Empire," feared the planet's culture could prove a threat to their conquering aims. Before he even tried to eradicate the world, though, Zero encountered the warnings of Jor-El, to the effect that the world was already on the brink of destruction. Zero checked things out, and found that Jor-El was wrong, but that the nuclear reaction inside the planet could be re-started. Thus, Black Zero, rather than cruel fate, was responsible for billions of dead Kryptonians.

Thus, Superman's mission becomes twofold: he must both save the Earth and capture the destroyer of Krypton. (Preumably Zero has destroyed other worlds for the Empire as well, though somehow these other worlds are never mentioned.) Zero eludes the Man of Steel, but the hero receives help from one of the Phantom Zone prisoners: Jax-Ur, who was in Silver Age SUPERMAN stories was usually framed as the brains behind the other Kryptonian criminals. Jax-Ur and the other Zone crooks are genuinely desirous of vengeance for their homeworld, and they persuade Superman to release Jax-Ur alone, after he swears a criminal's oath not to double-cross the hero.

Naturally, Superman succeeds in thwarting Zero's plans for Earth, and Jax-Ur gets the chance to take the vengeance that Superman won't take: turning Black Zero into a stone statue and then smashing it to bits.

The story's most interesting myth-moment is not so much the rewriting of Jor-El's doomsaying-- which, as I said, most fans did not like and which most pros ignored-- but the fact that the theme seems to be "set a genocidal madman to catch a genocidal madman." For Jax-Ur is sent to the Phantom Zone for a sort of "accidental genocide," in that he's testing a missile and unintentionally destroys a Kryptonian moon inhabited by 500 people. Binder's story does not reflect on Jax-Ur's past history, but since Binder created the story in which Jax-Ur first appeared, it's at least feasible that he remembered that bit of continuity-trivia when he chose Jax-Ur to be Superman's ally.

MYTHCOMICS: "LOIS LANE'S SUPER-DAUGHTER" (LOIS LANE #20, 1960)

This story was actually the second in a series of two imaginary "what if Lois married Superman" stories, which ran back to back in issues 19 and 20 of the LOIS LANE magazine. I presume from this that editor Mort Weisinger accepted an initial pitch for both stories, instead of choosing-- as he sometimes did-- to wait awhile to gauge audience interest. There may have been a sequel or two that followed, but these two were produced so as to be read back-to-back.

The first story from #19, "Mr. and Mrs. Clark (Superman) Kent," however, is not as symbolically resonant as the second one from #20, though both stories were written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger. "Mr. and Mrs" is not much more than a "beware what you wish for" homily. Superman marries Lois Lane, thus supposedly fulfilling the dream she's cherished since she first met him (at least in Weisinger's universe), finds out her dream isn't all it's cracked up to be, for in public she's simply the wife of the hero's alter ego Clark Kent. The fact that he's Superman is of course kept secret from the populace, so that no one-- especially Lois' longtime rival Lana Lang-- knows that the superhero is off the romantic market. It's a pleasant enough story, but "Lois Lane's Super-Daughter" strikes a deeper chord.

About three years after this story appeared on newstands, Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE was published. Building on material the author had gathered during the late 1950s, Friedan sought to make clear that modern American women had become desperately, symtomatically unahppy due to the imposition of a "mystique" upon their lives; one that kept them from fulfilling themselves as rounded human beings. MYSTIQUE was a major influence upon Second-Wave feninism from that time on. But Jerry Siegel's "Super-Daughter" presciently taps into some of the same discontents, though obviously it does so within a juvenile context, and within the context of a continuing superhero melodrama.

A few fans of Silver Age Superman have wondered why, after Superman's cousin Supergirl appeared on Earth in 1958, he didn't "man up" and adopt her in his identity of Clark Kent. I don't think the question was formally addressed in the actual continuity, and I'm sure that the proximate reason the character did not do so was that his editor and writers didn't want him playing Adoptive Daddy in every story. But there was still a kernel of logic in Clark's reticence, for during this time-period social services personnel generally took a dim view of single men or women adopting children of any age. Given this state of affairs, having the teenaged Kryptonian placed in an orphanage to seek adoption by a bonafide married couple-- which eventually does transpire-- doesn't strain my credulity.

What's interesting from the story's beginning is that the moment Clark and Lois are married, Clark springs it upon her that he'd like them to adopt this teenaged cousin that he's never mentioned before.

Lois looks a little bit poleaxed by this revelation, but she's married "for better or worse," and when the adoption agency complains that she might not be able to handle a new child and a job, Lois does what anyone in the period would deem The Right Thing.

Keep in mind that this Lois is not the fire-eater from the Golden Age. Though it would be absurd to assert that the Lois character was thoroughly consistent, since her moods could fluctuate according to the needs of a given story, it is at least part of Weisinger's conception of Lois that she has an irreducible domestic side to her personality. Mort Weisinger may well have been the sort of man whom Betty Friedan criticized for wanting women to become wholly domestic once they became wives. Nevertheless, for the time, the demands of the adoption agency seems not unusual, and the strength of Siegel's story is that one does see certain disadvantages to the world of domestic bliss.

True, there's almost no trace of mother-daughter bonding in the story, except for minor scenes like this one:

But it probably would have been a little beyond Siegel's skill-set to be THAT attuned to the ways of modern women, and besides, the main thrust of the story is all about Lois's discomfort with this perky intruder who's been thrust into her domestic world before the former lady reporter has even had a chance to get used to her new husband. The problem is only aggravated by the fact that both Lois' husband and her de facto daughter belong to a world of super-powered endeavors to which Lois cannot aspire. Here's one of the tandem "super-feats" to which Supergirl alludes on the cover of #20:

Worse by far, though, is that Supergirl's powers make Lois's function in the household irrelevant.

There's an exquisite irony in this setup that I wonder if Betty Friedan could have appreciated, even without the fantasy-content. Lois sacrifices the "exciting life" she enjoyed as a girl reporter, but her reward is to be marginalized within the household that is supposedly her domain. Yet through it all, Lois masks her pain, a veritable Stella Dallas of the comic books, an icon of maternal martrydom. Yet, where Olive Prouty's character accepts her marginalization, Siegel's Lois manages to manifest her hidden hostility in one of the most roundabout ways ever conceived, even in a Mort Weisinger comic book.

Yes, that's right: not only does Lois "just happen" to whale on the backside of a robot who looks just like Supergirl in her secret ID, a snoopy women from the adoption agency literally invades Lois's private home just in time to catch Lois in the act of unleashing her fury at the (first) unwanted intruder. I particularly enjoy how tearful Lois is in the story's final panel, perhaps revealing just a touch of the schadenfreude she may be experiencing from Supergirl's "unhappy ending." Will Lois ever make things up to Superman? Well, maybe or maybe not, but either way, she won't have a fifth wheel getting in the way.

I should note that though a fair number of stories from this time-period contain hints at some sexual stirrings between the two super-cousins-- particularly "Superman's Super-Courtship"-- "Super-Daughter" actually works just as well without any such elements of sexual transgression as it would with it. I could see the story entering new terrain if it were ALSO about a nubile young adoptive daughter nudging out an older wife from the affections of the adoptive father. But mythically speaking, the story works quite as well as a melodramatic-- as well as comical-- look at the marital disadvantages of a former working woman in the era of the Comic-Book Silver Age.

LOIS, MANSPLAINED

Since I remarked in the previous essay that I thought Lois Lane was a more intrinsically "mythic" figure than Jimmy Olsen, I'll provide a little justification of that statement here.

In the first official "mythcomics" post here, I only touched upon the significance of Lois Lane in passing, but I've noted elsewhere that she's highly significant as the "chosen bride" of Jerry Siegel's "Christ with Muscles," no matter how far in the future their unison might take place. This 2014 essay provides a refutation to Noah Berlatsky's rhetoric of victimization-- i.e., that Lois was always being maltreated by the main hero-- and shows that, even though she had her share of faults, she was on the whole an admirable character, and something of a "tough cookie" for her time.

In the next day or so, I'll devote a mythcomic essay to one particular Lois tale, and it comes from DC's long-running LOIS LANE comic book, which presented a somewhat different version of the character. Whereas the comic-book Jimmy Olsen was strongly modeled on the radio/television character-- even if comics-Olsen showed some significant departures-- Lois seems to have been remodeled less with reference to the "Adventures of Superman" TV show and more in line with what editor Mort Weisinger thought would sell to his readers. There's a fair amount of anecdotal evidence to the effect that SUPERMAN'S GIRL FRIEND LOIS LANE was more oriented toward female juvenile readers, and even though all of the raconteurs on the title were male, it seems a safe bet to say that they re-modeled Lois in line with their perceptions regarding feminine soap-opera, albeit adjusted for a juvenile audience. If Lois had held on to any of her streetwise toughness and courage during the period when Jerry Siegel was drummed out of the DC ranks, that last remnant of that previous characterization was well and truly gone by 1958, when the magazine was launched (following a tryout in the SHOWCASE magazine, by the bye). Lois wasn't seen to slug anyone, as in the panel above, until about 1966.

Perhaps because Lois, unlike Jimmy, was viewed as a full adult, there are more adult concerns in the stories, albeit filtered through a juvenile lens. Many of the stories are just as silly as the ones in the JIMMY OLSEN title, but there is a greater propensity to allude to Lois as a mythic concatenation of womanly traits. This often reflected negative characterizations typical of men's humor, like accusations of overweening feminine curiosity-- but even these retain a certain larger-than-life quality. In the remainder of this essay, I'll briefly touch on some of these myth-kernels, though with the caveat that nearly none of them qualify as mythcomics.

Though the character of the Weisinger Lois was a little too hard-nosed to go in for occult matters, I find it symbolically significant that the first issue of her series attributes to her a "witchy" power. Note Superman's apparent fear of having his powers surpassed.

Here's the first of many issues in which Lois is "body-shamed" in some way. Some find these sort of tropes to be representative of the whole series, which is certainly throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Though Lois isn't really any sort of tough jungle-babe in this story, it's amusing to see her take a leaf from the book of Sheena. Some will recall that Sheena preceded Superman in being the first major comic-book character published, even though the jungle-queen's sales didn't take off until after the Man of Steel became a superstar.

One of the first stories really condemning Lois for the sin of curiosity. The big giveaway? Lois has the head of a cat, or rather, she thinks she does, having been given a post-hypnotic suggestion to punish her for an act of intrusive curiosity. It's interesting that the hypnotist in this case is female, though.

Weisinger recycles a trope used by Siegel in an earlier story, in which Lois was supposed to get powers from a super-blood transfusion.

Jimmy Olsen's relationship with Superman never lent itself to stories like this one.

Second of a two-part story in which Lois marries Luthor and spawns an evil son. However, he later marries into the family of Superman and Lana. Ah, if only Weisinger had edited Greek plays!

"The Snoopiest Girl in History" reveals that Lois traveled in time and gave rise to the legend of Pandora.

Lois again travels in time, gets stuck on Krypton, and decides it's a good idea to steal Superman's father from Superman's mother. Only at the end of the story does she realize that she might have ended up becoming the mother of the man she always wanted to marry. Writer Otto Binder must have been digging into his Freud the day he scripted this one.

Lois has the distinction of re-introducing Catwoman to the DC universe after the villainess had been exiled for eight years, probably because of her being mentioned in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT. Sadly, no actual catfight takes place between the two Golden Age icons, though Lois does get to take a walk on the wildcat side by assuming Catwoman's identity.

"Shock story of the year," indeed. It's hard to believe no one at DC knew that Joe Shuster had done not entirely dissimilar work for a 1954 skin magazine.

Aside from a reprint issue, here's the last issue edited by Weisinger. Appropriate, since she starts off as a witch and ends up as the bride of Satan.