FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2

 I first used the terms "formal postulate" and "informal postulate" here, but I've devoted many earlier posts to sussing out which aspects of  a story appeal to the intellect, which to the imagination, and which to a combination of both abstract "vertical values."

But as I want to try out the new terms on something, it's time to break down some examples in terms of the didactic and/or the mythopoeic potentiality.

The famous EC Comics story "Judgment Day" (WEIRD FANTASY #18, 1953) is my selection of a story that appeals only to the didactic potentiality, and thus is a pure formal postulate. Symbol-hunters like myself would search in vain throughout Al Feldstein's story for any of the symbolic discourses familiar in prose science fiction-- discourses about whether robots can take on a wide variety of human traits, or man's quest to conquer the cosmos. Feldstein subordinates everything in this one-story universe to making one pedagogical point: that even in the far future, the scourge of bigotry will still exist, improbably incarnated in artificial beings-- despite the intimation that actual humans have overcome bigotry, which is the point of showing the galactic inspector to a Black man.

Since this essay-series started with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the reader will notice that it's no coincidence that I'm going to pick particular stories by each to illustrate two other types of vertical value.

I mentioned that some stories combine the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities, and this combination appears in the Stan Lee-John Buscema story "Origin of the Silver Surfer." For this story, Lee-- almost certainly the dominantly creative member of the team-- sought to give the character more humanity than the "science fiction angel" in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR, who was essentially beyond commonplace humanity. Lee's new origin not only posited that the  Surfer had once been a mortal alien humanoid, Norrin Radd, but also that he hailed from Zenn-La, a civilization that had advanced so far that it held no challenges for one as restless as the future hero. This new element had a didactic purpose-- beware of becoming too coddled by advanced technology-- but there's a mythopoeic quality to Norrin's discontent as well. He's seen as a throwback to a more venturesome era, one who would be more suited to Zenn-La's frontier era. In other words, the Silver Surfer was just a "space cowboy."

Then Galactus comes calling, making a mockery of Zenn-La's defenses as the gigantic alien prepares to devour Norrin Radd's homeworld. Here Lee follows through on the loose God the Father/Jesus the Son opposition that arguably appeared in the Galactus Trilogy. But this time the Surfer is not an inhuman angel sacrificing himself for Earth-humanity; he's a mortal sacrificing his freedom to save his own world. So he's a cosmic Christ-cowboy, but significantly, this mythopoeisis still carries a didactic message. As the Surfer bids his beloved farewell before beginning his servitude to Galactus, he tells her. "Let not the spirit of our ancestors be lost a second time! Let not our people grow soft and indolent!" Norrin Radd gets his earlier wish, to emulate the ways of Zenn-La's early explorers, for now he can range the entire universe in his quest to find non-inhabited worlds for his master. Even the Surfer's estrangement from his girlfriend resembles the sacrifice of similar pleasures by heroes in Western films, in order that they may serve a greater cultural cause. So "Origin's" vertical values include a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates, though in this case I find that the mythopoeic postulate predominates.

Lee's story-- which may be the finest single story he ever wrote without input from "The Other Big Two"-- was the beginning of a series, but for my selection from Kirby, I choose a conclusion, the end of the NEW GODS series, issue #11, which bears the curious title, "Darkseid and Sons." Some fans speculate that prior to scripting this story, Kirby had been told the axe was about to fall upon the majority of the Fourth World. Thus he had but one issue to present some rough thematic conclusion to his series, while leaving the door open for a follow-up. An earlier issue had established Kalibak, son of Darkseid, had been captured by humans following Kalibak's inconclusive battle with his frequent rival, the heroic Orion. So Kirby chooses to match the two powerhouses against one another for his NEW GODS finale.

In early NEW GODS issues, Kirby had dropped broad hints that Orion might bear some shadowy relationship to Darkseid, Lord of Apokolips, and then he let fall the other shoe in NEW GODS #7. That story explicitly stated that Orion, Darkseid's son, was raised on New Genesis from perhaps age five onward, while Highfather's son Scott Free was raised on Apokolips, in an exchange one might call "hostage-fosterage." So it's a little anti-climactic when Darkseid makes a reference to Orion and Kalibak having fought as "children," though apparently neither warrior remembers growing up alongside the other. During Orion's battle, he more or less guesses that he and Kalibak are brothers. Kalibak himself has apparently never told of his parentage, but even the basic idea inflames him with nascent sibling rivalry.

The title actually gives the game away: the final revelation is not that either sibling, but that of Darkseid's own history. NEW GODS #7 also introduced the reader to both Heggra, Darkseid's mother, and Tigra his wife, also Orion's mother. There's no didactic point to this revelation, but there's a very big mythopoeic quality evoked by Kirby. Darkseid he complains that his two sons "darken my future as surely as their maternal forbears ruled my past! My mother, Queen Heggra! Orion's mother, Tigra! And the sorceress Suli!" It's not just an instance of misspeaking for him to include Heggra, who was obviously not mother to either of Darkseid's sons. Symbolically, he's including himself alongside his sons as having been "hag-ridden" (or "Heggra-ridden?") by powerful women. He wanted Suli, who possibly complemented Darkseid's own evil by spawning the brutish Kalibak. But Tigra, the choice of Darkseid's mother Heggra, unleashed from the seed of Darkseid's loins a force for good, a son capable of opposing his father rather than serving him. The story strongly suggests that Darkseid comes to admire the son who fights him, even though he retaliated for Heggra's murder of Suli by an act of indirect matricide. 

Kirby got one final chance at a sequel to NEW GODS in the graphic novel HUNGER DOGS in 1985, but he didn't bring up this maternal trope again. Did the artist, who was at least lightly conversant with some of the famous plays of Shakespeare and the Greeks, just happen upon the same trope so frequently evoked by Greek playwrights, in which stalwart heroes are undone by conniving females like Medea, Electra, and Clytemnestra? I think he incorporated the maternal motif into NEW GODS because he understood its dramatic appeal, at least on an instinctive, mythopeoic level. But because he doesn't have a didactic point to make with these revelations, "Darkseid and Sons" can only be what I term an "informal postulate," because there's no attempt to subject the correlation to intellectual cogitation.

MYTHCOMICS: JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE DARKSEID WAR (2015-16)

 

In the thirty-something years since 1986’s CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, DC Comics has published many similar multi-feature crossovers, few of which have possessed any mythic content. But the subject of this essay—henceforth WAR for short—not only achieves such symbolic amplitude but does so through some inventive riffing on many of the myth-tropes of CRISIS. (Note: I’m not reviewing here any tie-ins to this Justice League series.)

The purpose of the 1986 CRISIS was not purely artistic, for its purpose was to merge the many parallel worlds of the diverse DC universe into one cosmos, patently emulating the successful business model of Marvel Comics. As I observed in my CRISIS review, the authors did so by interweaving two loosely related concepts from DC’s Silver Age. The first was the idea of parallel Earths in which the archetypes of DC heroes took on somewhat different configurations—a Flash named Jay Garrick on one Earth but named Barry Allen on another, or a world where all the characters who were heroes in the Justice League became instead a group of criminals called “the Crime Syndicate.” The second was the notion of universes that were made either of “positive matter” or of “negative anti-matter.” The Earths of the Justice League and all their congeners fit into the positive universe, while the negative universe was represented only by the irredeemably warped world of Qward. In CRISIS, the positive universe gave birth to a protective super-being, the Monitor, while the negative continuum spawned the Anti-Monitor, an entity obsessed with annihilating all other realities (and thus serving the purpose of the authors). It’s interesting that DC’s way of getting rid of all the unmanageable doppelgangers from their company’s long history was to spawn a pair of cosmic twins, though both are dead by the end of the series like the other troublesome duplicates. The authors also threw in at least one other new doppelganger: a good version of Lex Luthor, who also gives rise to a son, Alexander Junior, who took on something of a “secular savior” role by story’s end. In addition, the reordering of the DC cosmos gave the company the chance to debut brand new versions of Superman, Wonder Woman and others.

WAR was not such a reboot, but it followed in the wake of a 2011 crossover event in which the DC cosmos was once more re-arranged, this time to allow for the return of many of the alternate worlds, including (most prominently) that of the “Crime Syndicate” Earth. During that reboot, familiar franchises were once more rebooted, but only two are relevant to the WAR storyline. First, Wonder Woman no longer enjoyed an immaculate conception via clay statue, but became the offspring of the deity Zeus with Amazon mother Hippolyta. Second, Cyborg’s artificial body, originally the invention of the hero’s scientist-father, became interfused with the technology of the New Gods from the classic Jack Kirby series. Both the good and bad gods of that franchise—respectively from the worlds of New Genesis and of Apokolips—sat out the events of 1986’s CRISIS. In contrast, the new origin for Cyborg insured that the revised 2011 Justice League would be strongly linked to the New Gods sub-cosmos. To be sure, the New Genesis gods barely figure into WAR, except that one of their kindred becomes the hero Mister Miracle. In WAR most of the authorial attention goes to the mythos of Apokolips, to whose activities Cyborg becomes attuned. Aside from the modifications to Wonder Woman and Cyborg, the rest of the starring characters—Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Hal Jordan Green Lantern, Shazam, and Lex Luthor—are broadly recognizable. The newbie in their ranks is one Jessica Cruz, who bears a complicated relationship to the evil Green Lantern from the Crime Syndicate cosmos, which I’ll forbear to discuss here.

Johns wastes no time in doubling down, so to speak, on the presence of doppelgangers. A flashback reveals that on the night that Hippolyta birthed Princess Diana on the island Themiscyra, another Amazon, Myrina, produced yet another female child, but her father was Darkseid, more or less the obverse of Zeus’s role in the Wonder Woman cosmos. Myrina names her child Grail, referencing the mystic Celtic vessel that restores life, because the Amazon mother believes that Grail will save the universe from the evil of Darkseid. (This idea may owe something to the mythology of Achilles, a child whom oracles claimed would overthrow his father— which prophecy restrained the usually randy Zeus from having sex with Achilles’ mother.)

Just as Grail is deeply implicated in the New Gods mythos, so too is the new version of the Anti-Monitor. In Kirby’s original series, he includes the character Metron, a relentless quester after knowledge, who moves about the cosmos in his “Mobius Chair.” Kirby never implied that anyone but Metron constructed the miraculous mobile throne. In Johns’ world, Mobius is the mortal inventor of the chair, as well as an inhabitant of the Qwardian anti-matter universe. In addition to gifting Metron with the chair, Mobius duplicates the function of the Guardian Krona in CRISIS, being a man obsessed with peering into forbidden secrets. As the result of Mobius’ prying, he beholds the “anti-life equation”—another NEW GODS concept, now tied to the “anti-matter universe”—and is thus transformed into the Anti-Monitor. Some story extrinsic to WAR causes the newborn fiend to annihilate the Crime Syndicate world, and this will eventually lead to the surviving super-criminals of that world making common cause with the Justice League. However, in the early chapters the cosmic colossus doesn’t immediately rush out looking for new worlds to destroy. Grail is the agent who calls him into conflict with both the Justice League and with Darkseid, the father whom Grail wants to murder.

To make things even more complicated, throughout the story most of the heroes undergo assorted transformations into god-like beings—a tacit response to the many superhero fans (like me) who view superheroes as recapitulations of archaic myth-figures. Some transformations are merely functional in nature. Batman becomes bonded to the Mobius Chair because Johns needs one of the good guys to tap into the chair’s ability to endow the sitter with copious knowledge. More promisingly, the Flash becomes bonded to the Black Racer, Kirby’s “New God of death,” which plays into the fact that Flash is one of the heroes who dies during CRISIS. Johns’ best scripting deals with the quarrelsome team of Superman and Lex Luthor, who get teleported to Apokolips and have to work together, but not with very positive results. 

On top of all that, the main subplot with the Crime Syndicate, out to avenge themselves on the Anti-Monitor, involves their one female member giving birth to a sort of anti-savior. Said female, Superwoman, is an alternate-world mashup of both Wonder Woman and Lois Lane, and the father of her demon-kid is a nasty version of Alexander Luthor, who was a good guy in CRISIS.

Whew.

I’ll forbear to discuss the very involved denouement here. I’ve long been aware that Geoff Johns knows his DC history inside and out, but this is the first time I’ve been strongly impressed by his artful repourings of old wine into new bottles. Not everything works, of course. Near the beginning Johns tosses in references to Brainiac and to Aquaman that may relate to some extrinsic stories, but which have nothing to do with WAR. Also, the deific names Johns gives to the transformed characters are lame. Shazam becomes “the God of Gods”—why exactly?

But I do like other playful recastings of continuity points. Luthor, abandoned on Apokolips by an evil-ized Superman, is taken in by a group of anti-Darkseid rebels, and they’re led by a woman named Ardora. In the Silver Age this was the name of an alien woman who fell in love with Luthor, and it’s through contact with the new Ardora that Luthor usurps the destiny of his enemy Superman and becomes the potential savior of Apokolips. Johns even has the Crime Syndicate version of Superman mention a woman named Luma Lynai, who in the Silver Age was a potential lover for Superman, for all that she looked like an age-appropriate version of Supergirl, as well as not being in any way related to the Man of Steel.

I freely admit that only a continuity-hound would get much mythic impact out of this highly referential opus. But for those so invested, the game is definitely worth the candle.

MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2

                               

To my knowledge, no written work of fiction provides a mythopepic discourse denser than that of Herman Melville’s MOBY DICK. This sprawling tale is replete with many threads of mythopoeic vertical meaning, ranging from the relationship of white men to colored men (which theme preoccupied Leslie Fiedler) to the nature of fate (Fedallah’s MACBETH-like prophecies). But all of these meaning-threads are subordinate to the master thread, which, if removed, would unravel the whole kit and kaboodle. The master thread for MOBY DICK consists of the myth of the Hunter and the Hunted—with the additional fillip that the Hunted is either God or the agent of God’s inscrutable will, so that the Hunt itself is inevitably doomed.

All of the subordinate vertical threads of MOBY DICK are so well developed that the author could have made stand-alone stories out of any of them. This is not generally the case, however. Of the thousands of other narratives that possess strong mythopoeic meaning, most of them possess no more than a single strong master thread.

Case in point: CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. When I wrote my mythcomicsreview of CRISIS, I was more than a little aware of the serial’s numerous flaws, from the bland scripting of Marv Wolfman to the drably functional manner in which the story tossed together nearly every famous or semi-famous character in DC Comics history. Those subplots that even came close to vertical meaning were frequently botched, as with a maudlin encounter between Kamandi—Jack Kirby’s “Planet of the Apes” swipe—and Solovar, one of DC’s seemingly endless supply of intelligent gorillas. However—there was one master thread I discerned, one in which Wolfman built upon the “devilish” character of Krona, and contrasted this character’s impiety with a “holy trinity” of characters implicated in the death of the old cosmos and the birth of the new.

On the more positive side, some master-threads receive support in unpredictable ways. Jack Kirby’s NEW GODS saga, reviewed here, has one obvious master-thread: the prophecy of an eventual confrontation between the tyrant Darkseid and the hero Orion. I wasn’t entirely pleased with Kirby’s years-later wrap-up of his epic series. But even though the author went down a somewhat unsatisfying path, HUNGER DOGS wasn’t without mythopoeic meaning in itself.

But I’ve recently noticed one particular subordinate thread, one so subtle that one could barely even assign a didactic meaning. In my review I had no space to examine the curious relationship between Darkseid and his mother Heggra.

The reader only three things about the wizened queen: (1) that she rules Apokolips before Darkseid ascends to the throne, (2) that her influence obliges Darkseid, against his will, to wed a noblewoman named Tigra, who ends up being the mother of Orion, and (3) at some time, Darkseid has his mother killed, probably because she blocked his rise to power.

But in recent months, I noticed that the given names of Heggra and Tigra are not dissimilar, suggesting a symbolic identity between them. Visually, they’re opposites, for Tigra is lean and given to overt violence, while Heggra is sedate, like a brooding hen sitting on her “hegg.” But despite these differences they collude to create Orion, whom Darkseid will make the mistake of casting out. The result is that Orion becomes dedicated to his father’s defeat, and though Orion’s primary mission is to keep Darkseid from gaining the Anti-Life Equation, it would not be incorrect to say that the conflict of father and son ends up avenging the maltreatment of two maternal figures. It’s a subordinate vertical thread that in no way diminishes the master thread of the father-son conflict, but because of this mini-discourse, the master thread is made yet denser and richer.

THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS PT. 2

A careful analysis of the text of this myth, which in one version alone takes up thirteen pages of Dorsey's work, discloses that it is built on a long series of oppositions: (1) initiated shaman versus non-initiated shaman, that is, the opposition between acquired power and innate power; (2) child versus old man, since the myth insists on the youth of one protagonist and the old age of the other; (3) confusion of sexes versus differentiation of sexes; all of Pawnee metaphysical thought is actually based on the idea that at the time of the creation of the world antagonistic elements were intermingled and that the first work of the gods consisted in sorting them out. […] (7) magic which proceeds by introduction versus magic which proceeds by extraction.-- Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthology

In STRONG AND WEAK PROPOSITIONS PT. 1, I drew certain comparisons between Aristotle's concept of the unity of action with Claude Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage. Levi-Strauss is far better known, though, for his concept of binary oppositions,  a few of which he cites in the quote above. Many of Levi-Strauss's analyses are much like the one above, citing an assortment of binary oppositions between abstract representations, such as "confusion of sexes versus differentiation of sexes." This would seem, on the face of things, to contradict Aristotle's dictum, which I last cited in THE UNITY OF OVERTHOUGHTS AND UNDERTHOUGHTS in February 2016.

The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some suppose, in its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions of one man which cannot be made to form one action. . . . The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.

For the purpose of literary criticism, however, I think that these two insights can prove complementary, and once more I turn to the mediating influence of Jung, whose views of "sovereignty" I surveyed in JUNG AND CENTRICITY:

This “absolute sovereignty always belongs, empirically, to one function alone, and can belong only to one function, because the equally independent intervention of another function would necessarily produce a different orientation which, partially at least, would contradict the first. But since it is a vital condition for the conscious process of adaptation always to have clear and unambiguous aims, the presence of a second function of equal power is naturally ruled out. This other function, therefore, can have only a secondary importance.”

Jung, who devotes PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES to analyzing the many mental functions revealed by his depth psychology, ascribes "secondary importance" to any and all other functions as against the primary one, just as Aristotle says that the poet must confine his attention to "several incidents...so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole."

Of these three academics-- anthropologist, philosopher (and proto-literary critic), and psychologist-- the anthropologist is not especially interested in seeing a "unity of action" in his narratives (and here I'm considering Jung's analyses of the internal goings-on of his hypothetical patients as "narratives.") Levi-Strauss's orientation stems, I believe, from his having focused his studies primarily on the sort of often-fragmentary tales that he encountered in tribal peoples. This led him to view myths as fundamentally fragmentary, rather than being capable of forming "wholes" as Aristotle believes that stories should.

Anyone dealing with modern stories, of course, is not dealing with products of a tribal aesthetic. Such stories are usually informed by Aristotle's idea of *dianoia,* which I've loosely translated as "theme statement" elsewhere. In literature the "unity of action," the unity that arises from a given work's theme, does not preclude that other "imitations of action" that complement the main action. This concept of unity parallels Jung's concept of sovereignty, that a given personality-- or at least, Jung's abstraction of a personality-- will have other functions, but that a central function will be "in charge."

Now, often in my own myth-critical analyses of films and comic book stories, I've found that the most mythic works I've surveyed possess a strong underthought, one that often can be expressed as one of Levi-Strauss's binary oppositions.  In this essay, I summarized the potential (yet inadequately expressed) theme statement of a particular Jack Kirby-Dave Wood story:

Boiled down, the potential underthought-- for Kirby and Wood probably would never have become didactic enough to produce a complementary overthought-- might read something like, "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." 

Kirby's NEW GODS series, which I also touched on the same essay, received a fuller examination in this mythcomics essay, and there too I summarized the implied theme of the short-lived series:

...where NEW GODS excels is in Kirby’s take on a theme that Tolkien himself had evoked. In a world where mythic good and mythic evil have palpable existence, and where their battle is the proper working-out of their joint destiny, how does good keep from becoming corrupted by the power of evil?

There are patently other binary underthoughts expressed in Kirby's saga, notably that of "father vs. son," but I would regard all of these are, as Jung says, "of secondary importance." 

More in Part 3.

AUTHORITIES, PLEROTIC AND KENOTIC PART 2

In Part 1 I said, "I'd been giving more thought to the categorization of different types of presences, focal or non-focal, that appear in fiction." To be more specific, while most of my writings here about persona-types have concerned focal presences-- i.e., the stars of whatever stories I'm discussing-- the idea of personas applies just as much to any support-characters. I've touched on these classifications on occasion, though it's occurred to me that it might be enlightening to explore a particular type of supporting-character: the authority-figure who either empowers or initiates the central protagonist (what Vladimir Propp might call the *donor.*)

I did touch on an example of a powerful figure who was not the star of his show in PALE KINGS AND DEMIHEROES:

Gaiman's work in THE SANDMAN generally rejects the heroism expoused by earlier DC characters who shared the "Sandman" name. Nor is Morpheus alone in being a great ruler who exists largely to police his domain: this principle also applies to the character Lord Emma in LOVE IN HELL, though admittedly he (she?) is a support-character to the starring demiheroes of the series.

As I said in my review of the manga-collection, the two stars of the series are Rintaro, a minor sinner consigned after his death to a lesser form of Hell, and Koyori, the female demon assigned to levy punishment on him. However, Hell itself is a "character" in the story, for most of the narrative deals with Rintaro learning the ropes of an afterlife that looks suspiciously like the life of a living wage-slave. Both Hell and its usually-unseen ruler mirror the quality I've termed elsewhere "positive persistence," and so they, like the protagonists, are also demiheroic.

"Negative persistence," however, dominates the persona of the monster. The monster desires the ordinary life which the demihero usually obtains as a matter of course, but for whatever reason the monster cannot fit into that matrix, and usually either parodies its nature (the vampire, who seeks a new aristocracy of the undead ruling the living) or tears the matrix to pieces in fits of unreasoning rage (Godzilla, the Frankenstein Monster). The persona of the monster can even be attached to entire races of sentient beings who function as monsters to human protagonists: the Martians of H.G. Wells' WAR OF THE WORLDS are a familiar type, and in the same line are Buck Rogers' nonhuman adversaries, The Tiger Men of Mars.

Villains, however, have a quality of "negative glory" that makes them more pro-active than monsters. I touched on two authority-type villains, both of whom were coterminous with their environments, in ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2:

In the SON OF SATAN story "Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," the soul of Daimon Hellstrom is apparently drawn down into Hell, with whose denizens he must battle. Only by story's end does the reader learn that this particular version of Hell is not one that exists independently of its satanic master, for it's actually Satan's own dream.

In a less direct manner, some environments can be seen as being more metaphorical expressions of a character's good or evil: thus in Kirby's NEW GODS saga, New Genesis embodies the creative empathy of its patriarch Highfather and Apokolips is the expression of the corruption of its master Darkseid-- though admittedly both worlds already show those predilections, long before either of the respective "New Gods" comes into existence.

As for heroes, it's fairly easy to see the heroic virtue of "positive glory" in support-characters like Odin, Lord of Asgard, or Doctor Strange's perceptor The Ancient One. It's perhaps a little harder to conger the mantle of heroism on donor-figures who merely gets the ball rolling, such as the mysterious "Voice" that gives powers to the Hawk and the Dove, or the goddess Rama Kushna in the original DEADMAN story. Still, even if these presences don't do anything more than place the heroes on the path of heroism, they too align with the plerotic value of positive glory.

The same formula applies with respect to donor-figures who initiate heroes but are not sources of numinous authority. This would include types like Mr. Miracle's teacher from the story "Himon," who seems relatively human even though technically he, like the aforementioned Highfather, is a "good New God." Another parallel example is the character of Io from the 2010 film CLASH OF THE TITANS. A new creation with no parallel in the original 1981 film. Io doesn't precisely set Perseus on his heroic path, but she does watch over him from his childhood onward, and she gives him a certain modicum of martial training that aligns her with the figure of the authoritative donor.

MYTHCOMICS: "HIMON" (MR. MIRACLE #9, 1972)

As I said in this essay, the "strongest mythic discourse" in Jack Kirby's "Fourth World" tetralogy was the title NEW GODS, while the other three titles followed more episodic patterns, akin to the majority of mainstream comics of the period. One can find mythic content in the other three features, however, and, not surprisingly, it appeared to best effect in MISTER MIRACLE #9, which was something of a conceptual bookend to issue #7 of THE NEW GODS. Both are "backstory issues" that fill in many of the blank spaces in Kirby's multi-issue epic.

As I also noted in the above essay, Orion, the featured hero of THE NEW GODS, shared a common heritage with and the title character of MISTER MIRACLE. During the childhoods of the two heroes, a devastating war between the worlds of Apokolips and of New Genesis comes to a conclusion. The truce is cemented by an exchange of "war hostages," with Darkseid's child Orion being raised on New Genesis, while Highfather's son is raised on Apokolips. Darkseid confides in his aide Granny Goodness that his long game is to force HIghfather's child to endure such torments in his upbringing that he will eventually flee Apokolips, thus ending the truce at a time that proves convenient for Darkseid. Thus Granny dubs the child of New Genesis "Scott Free" with a note of sarcasm, though Jack Kirby has his own idea on the nature of freedom.

Young Scott Free is raised to be just one more pawn in Darkseid's planetary tyranny, where all inhabitants swear to "live and die for Darkseid." Darkseid even conceives himself as being something of an authoritarian parental figure to Scott, though he's perfectly willing to kill Scott in order to launch the war. However, Scott fortunately receives a better parental figure in the form of the character introduced in the story's title, Himon.

Purportedly the character was named for a real-world acquaintance of Jack Kirby's, name of "Hyman," but Himon is designed to be a great thinker after the fashion of scientific heroes like Edison and Einstein. Given a grandfatherly appearance, he claims credit for many of the crucial inventions in the history of Apokolips, such as "the Boom Tube" and "the Mother Box," a mini-computer able to draw upon the power of the supernatural "Source." He admits, in conversation with Metron of New Genesis, that his discoveries "fostered Darkseid's power," and so he operates as a rebel on Apokolips, constantly seeking to undermiine Darkseid's totalitarian power. He doesn't use the standard guerrilla tactics of the rebel, though in one case he does take vengeance on one of Darkseid's evil servitors. Instead, because Darkseid's power is founded on convincing his subjects to efface their own lives in his name, Himon seeks to inspire the beaten-down natives of Apokolips to find themselves. This includes not only Scott Free, who has been raised to be one of Darkseid's obedient troopers, but also a "kid-gang" like some of those who appeared in Simon-and-Kirby features of the 1940s.

In contrast to Darkseid's "world of conflict," Himon seeks to inspire natives, like gentle Auralie, to express themselves. This leads to Scott's first encounter with his later lover, Big Bards of Apokolips, who liberates Auralie from Himon's company yet seeks to keep the innocent girl's transgression secret.

However, Himon's attempt to recruit disciples for a "kinder, gentler Apokolips" is foredoomed. Kirby undercuts his own use of a cute kid-gang by presenting them as the victims of an (admittedly bloodless) execution. (The one exception is the complainer seen two panels above, one Kreetin, who seeks to save himself but ends up perishing in an ignominious fashion.)

Of course, from the creator's point of view, the execution of the kid-gang merely exists to give Scott Free a foretaste of what it really means to "live and die for Darkseid." Finally, he bolts:

Barda helps Scott elude his pursuers, but, in keeping with the continuity established by previous issues, she doesn't succeed in escaping Apokolips with him. Just as Himon and Metron show Scott the way to reach sanctuary on Earth, Darkseid appears.

Darkseid's plan is served whether Scott leaves Apokolips alive or dead. But though the evil overlord was surely willing to let Scott be executed by any of Darkseid's underlings, he isn't willing to kill Scott himself. Being a Machiavellian type, Darkseid apparently would rather have Scott surrender himself to death, so that he will "live with the majesty that is the power of Darkseid." Scott doesn't buy the villain's sophistry, and escapes to "find himself."

Prior to this issue, the basic concept of "Mister Miracle, Escape Artist and Superhero"-- allegedly based on Kirby's acquaintance with Jim Steranko, an amateur magician/escape artist-- didn't succeed in reaching this high level of symbolic density. That said, it seems that Kirby always had in mind some association between the broad concept of freedom and the specific motif of the superhero's "daredevil escapes from the villain's death-traps." In "Himon" at least, the artist succeeds in making the art of escape a metaphor for eluding the temptation to let one's individuality become subsumed by the tyrant's aura of power.

There are other motifs in the story worthy of comment, not least the self-serving character of Kreetin, who might be seen as Kirby's version of such Shakespearean self-servers as Thersites and "wind-changing Warwick." But any consideration of such motifs will have to wait for separate examination.

JUST ANOTHER TOSS-OFF KIRBY KOMMENT

Fourth World is a good, if regrettably cut-off-too-soon,, body of work, but I don’t think of it as being “similar.” to the Marvel works. I think FW shows Kirby returning to the tropes he preferred in both his pre-Marvel and post-Marvel work: mostly balls-out pulp-action with occasional sentimental moments– nothing quite like the “epic soap opera” he worked on when collaborating with Stan Lee.

Yes, yes, Stan was no great shakes before JK and SD– although I don’t think anyone’s really fully evaluated all of his 50s work with Joe Maneely– but he was an editor first and a writer second, and Kirby’s talents were such that he needed some reining-in. I think the S&K studio provided some reins in the more realistic work– particularly the S&K romance stories, which might be the closest to Lee-Kirby Marvel in structure– but I’m just not seeing that JK could do it all alone, genius though he was.

THE LINE BETWEEN '"FAIR' AND "GOOD" PART II

In Part 1 I proposed that the narrative element that most made the difference between works of "fair mythicity" and "good mythicity" was that the latter sustained more of a "unity of action," so for Part 2, I decided to provide some examples based largely upon the work of one artist, Jack Kirby, either by himself or in collaborations.

To this date one of my preferred examples for an inconsummate null-myth is the debut tale of the Jack Kirby/Dave Wood collaboration, "The Sorcerer's Box" from 1957's SHOWCASE #6. I won't repeat the arguments presented here as to why the Kirby/Wood story proved inconsummate, but here's the closest I found to a "theme statement" for the story, which in turn would have provided it with any unity of action:

....the "villain" of the story, whose name so obviously references "Merlin," is a rather half-assed version of the Faustian over-reacher.  I noted earlier that the story does touch upon the nature of masculinity, and it does, in the sense of evoking pleasure in the heroic acts of the Challengers.  But the story doesn't work well as far as positing Morelian as the obverse of the heroes, simply because he pays them to do a dangerous job.  Is Morelian in some sense "anti-masculine" for having done so?  This is a possibility, but Kirby's story (and Dave Wood's dialogue) offer little to explain why the heroes suddenly take a dislike to Morelian at the end.  

Boiled down, the potential underthought-- for Kirby and Wood probably would never have become didactic enough to produce a complementary overthought-- might read something like, "The ways of manly daredevils are better than the ways of unmanly mystics." The story doesn't succeed in evoking even that simple a theme statement, though as I pointed out in the essay, Kirby had probably completed more unitary works prior to his CHALLENGERS outings.

Now, I did not label this THOR story a "near-myth" when I examined it in COMBAT PLAY PT. 2, but it does attain a clearer theme statement than the CHALLENGERS story, even though the Lee/Kirby collaboration is no more truly didactic in its main purpose.

What does keep #152 from being just another big battle-tale, though, is that Thor and Ulik are arranged to represent philosophical postures. Thor, son of Odin and scion of Asgard, is heir to a philosophy of noblesse oblige, while Ulik describes himself as "lowly-born-- with naught to lose-- and a world to gain."

Though the sociological myth here is much clearer and more deeply resonant, though, it's still just what I've called a "myth-kernel" in the midst of a "very rambling arc" that involved, not just Thor and Ulik, but also Balder, the Norn Queen, Loki, and various other Asgardian personnel, all with arcs that don't complement one another. So it's a near-myth possessed of only "fair" mythicity. It's sort of like a disorganized essay with a strong theme statement, while the CHALLENGERS story is disorganized all the way through.

Sociological myth once more takes the fore in another Lee/Kirby collaboration, this one from a few years previous to the Thor tale. The FANTASTIC FOUR tale titled "The Red Ghost" is included as one of my mythcomics,which should suggest to readers that I give it at least some level of good mythicity. My current line of thought about the necessity of a "unity of action" within the story, which in turn supports the creators' symbolic discourse, is borne out by my observations about the balance between what could have been flat elements in a purely didactic argument:

...in contrast to other, less complex allegories-- whether from Marvel Comics or elsewhere-- Lee and Kirby devote an inordinate amount of effort to contrast the exemplary behavior of the four American heroes versus the selfish and controlling behavior of Ivan Kragoff.  This elevates the argument beyond merely "good democracy vs. evil Communism," for it speaks to what is good in humankind generally as well as to what is evil in humankind generally.  I note, just for one possible example, a scene in which Reed announces his plan to fly to the moon alone.  His comrades set him straight with a little horseplay, which nevertheless underscores that though Reed Richards leads the group, he does so with "the consent of the governed."

At the same time, I'm moved to ask whether or not this "unity of action" can also apply to longer works. I find that one of Kirby's solo achievements, the original NEW GODS epic, resonates with Aristotle's pronouncement that Homer had managed to provide unity to THE ILIAD by focusing upon "the anger of Achilles," no matter how many other separate war-related plot-lines might have spun off from that.

Kirby's abbreviated epic, reviewed here, garnered some complaints for having gone in too many directions at once, but despite some admitted flaws, the artist does always keep a unity of action in the NEW GODS comic proper. Whatever particular plot Kirby might have followed in a given issue, the concern of the title was always about the relationship of heroic Orion to his devious father Darkseid-- a relationship that Orion only suspects at the start, and which reaches a thematic culmination in the 1984 graphic novel THE HUNGER DOGS.

I concluded Part 1 with this hypothesis:

I may use this line of thought to a lead-in to another question, regarding whether it's most beneficial to have a "unity" of idea between a work's overthought and underthought, or whether the two exist on essentially separate but intersecting mental planes, not unlike the interdependence of harmony and melody in music.

I think at least the two examples of "good" mythicity in this essay demonstrate that the mythopoeic underthought does intersect with the more didactic overthought: that the former supports the latter but that neither is defined by the other.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS PT. 2

This is not so much a follow-up to the first ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS essay as to my recent myth-analysis of LOVE IN HELL-- reason being that this is the first mythcomic I've examined in which one might argue that the locale is just as important to the story as the two principal characters.

Environment varies in its amplitude throughout the mythcomics, just as that of any presence, even a focal character. In one of my earliest essays on focal presences, I mentioned that in Arthur Conan Doyle's original novel THE LOST WORLD, Doyle's heroes were the focal presences, but that the Lost World itself became the focus in the 1925 film.

There's great precedence for this sort of "man vs. nature" opposition, but this formula has never been nearly as popular as "man vs. man." It's not uncommon, even in the most strongly mythic narratives, for the environment to fade into the background, even if that environment is sometimes a major generator of mythic content. Thus, even though many THOR stories describe the power of the Lee-Kirby Asgard to generate all manner of Nordic strangeness, in "The Mangog Saga" Asgard might as well be the Pyrenees for all the impact that the locale has upon the struggle between main character Thor, his various allies, and the seemingly invulnerable Mangog.

In some situations, the environment retains its mythic nature within a given narrative, but its myth-power stems from a particular character. In the SON OF SATAN story "Dance with the Devil, My Red-Eyed Son," the soul of Daimon Hellstrom is apparently drawn down into Hell, with whose denizens he must battle. Only by story's end does the reader learn that this particular version of Hell is not one that exists independently of its satanic master, for it's actually Satan's own dream.

In a less direct manner, some environments can be seen as being more metaphorical expressions of a character's good or evil: thus in Kirby's NEW GODS saga, New Genesis embodies the creative empathy of its patriarch Highfather and Apokolips is the expression of the corruption of its master Darkseid-- though admittedly both worlds already show those predilections, long before either of the respective "New Gods" comes into existence.

 There's also a sort of ambiguous middle ground. as seen with"the Palace of Ice," In this extended dream, Nemo experiences what I termed "a child's version of the metaphysics of ice and snow, taking in from juvenile pleasures like toboggan-riding and snowball-fights as well as the more profound wonders of the Northern Lights and the mysterious North Pole." McCay probably does not mean to assert that either Jack Frost or his realm possess any reality independent of Little Nemo's imagination. Nevertheless, this ice-world possesses far more amplitude than most real dreams.

In contrast, the Hell of LOVE IN HELL does not seem to be an expression of any character's imagination or personality. Hell does have its ruler, Japan's traditional hell-lord King Enma (who according to some references is actually female), but Enma only makes one appearance in the narrative, and then only toward the very end, where the ruler's gigantic foot intrudes upon the inferno to mete out justice. Rintaro, the "new fish-soul" in Hell, is not especially mythic in himself, any more than any other "everyman" character, given that most such characters are meant to heighten the significance of other characters by their ordinariness. The demoness Koyori serves to explain the ways of Hell to Rintaro, but she's new to the job of being a soul-torturing demon, so she's not a pure representative of Hell, in the same way Darkseid is a pure representative of the ethos of Apokolips.

All this said, though much of LOVE IN HELL's narrative is devoted to describing the infernal domain, I would not go so far as to say that Hell is the"main character" of the story, in the manner that I've said that Wonderland is the "main character" of Carroll's Alice books. In this essay I said that the Alice books were *exothelic,* meaning that 'the narrative is focused upon the will of "the other," something outside the interests of the viewpoint character, though not necessarily opposed to them.' LOVE IN HELL comes very close to this, but in the final analysis it's still more focused upon the evolving relationship of Rintaro and Koyori as they interact both with each other and the strange requirements of their domain-- so that LOVE IN HELL is as *endothelic,* wherein "the narrative is focused upon the will of the viewpoint character or of someone or something that shares that character's interests."


Note: since writing the above I've changed my mind: Rintaro and his sins comprise the series' focal presence, with Koyori qualifying only as a support character.

THE AMPLITUDE ATTITUDE

Back in 2009, I wrote one of my earliest essays on the nature of functionality in symbolic discourse, DON'T FEAR THE FURNITURE (and an addendum, Part 2). These distinctions about "simple and complex variables," an idea developed from one of Frye's definitions, eventually became subsumed by the language-terms introduced by Philip Wheelwright's THE BURNING FOUNTAIN, last cited here.  While I don't dismiss the algebraic metaphors of Frye. Wheelwright's physics-influenced metaphor has proven more useful in trying to map out just what literary process separates the simple from the complex.

As a roundabout way of refining this question through example, let me say that while I still view all of the "mythcomics" I've cited as worthy of being called "symbolically complex," I've observed that sometimes even characters who possess that potential, that amplitude, have been treated like furniture: i.e., as merely functional.

"Secret of the Sinister Sorcerers," analyzed here, shows this tendency.

All of the heroic characters on display in this page have sustained, at one time or another, strong symbolic discourses in their own features. One might argue, in line with Wheelwright, that at that time Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter weren't "eminent instances" on the same level of the other heroes, perhaps because the two heroes had spent so much of their respective careers as short back-up strips. But in "Sorcerers," they're all on the same plane, for author Fox isn't mining any of the heroes' myths to any great extent. In terms of symbolic complexity, the three villains have the greatest amplitude of associations, while the heroes simply run through their functional paces: Green Lantern's ring can't battle a yellow manticore directly, so he has to defeat the creature indirectly, etc.

More often than not, though, mythcomics tend to imbue super-functional characteristics to both protagonist and antagonist. This is certainly the case in GREEN LANTERN #40, where the titular hero, the mentors he represents, and the villain Krona get a great deal of myth-attention-- though one might argue that the Green Lantern of Earth-II isn't much more interesting than your average piece of used furniture.

This is a general tendency evinced by many "sidekick" figures. Lightray of THE NEW GODS is not without some symbolic associations of his own, but he's primarily important as the friend of the book's hero Orion. Because Orion likes Lightray, so does the reader, and thus does the reader become more invested in the hero's struggle on behalf of New Genesis.  Lightray isn't as "eminent" an "instance" as Orion, but he's eminent enough for Kirby's overall purpose.

As I observed back in the FURNITURE essays, story-elements that are merely functional-- like the "stairhead" allows "stately, plump Buck Mulligan" to enter a room in ULYSSES's first line-- are both inevitable and desirable. The same principle applies to characters whose complexity varies from story to story, according to the needs of the author. It's especially interesting, at least for a project like mine, when the mythic complexity inheres more in the opponents of the hero than in the heroes who are the putative stars of the story, as in "Sinister Sorcerers."

MYTHCOMICS: THE NEW GODS SAGA (1971-72 / 1984)

…the gods are ever near—a part of men’s lives!! Giant reflections of the good and evil that men generate within themselves! —Orion, NEW GODS #10, 1972.

In my attempt to create a serious novel for our medium, I have chosen that most basic of experiences, one we have all shared at one time or another—survival! I have taken this innate response to danger, and have portrayed it in mythological terms.—Jack Kirby, “Kirby on Survival,” NEW GODS (vol. 2?), #6 (1984).

A handful of comics-artists working during the 1960s took special notice of the success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Middle-Earth” works-- not least among them Jack Kirby, one of the founding talents of the medium. Though the most famous work in Tolkien's fantasy-cycle was published in the 1950s, THE LORD OF THE RINGS did not achieve best-seller status in America until the mid-1960s, when the trilogy was re-packaged into paperback-book format by Ballantine Books.

 American comic books had been mining the themes of mythic good vs. mythic evil for many years prior to Tolkien's rise to international fame. So even though comics-professionals—including Kirby—might not have specifically pursued Tolkien’s themes, some comics-pros sought to find out if comic books could also follow in Tolkien's successful footsteps by creating a “secondary world” with a mythology-derived basis.

I cannot, in one blogpost, cover the complexity of Jack Kirby’s “Fourth World” concept—a tetralogy of sorts, which extended over four regularly published comics-titles—nor the business-based complications attending the epic’s cancellation in 1972 and its resumption in 1984. I also won't touch on three of the books that contributed to the epic tale: FOREVER PEOPLE, MISTER MIRACLE, and JIMMY OLSEN. The strongest mythic discourse of Kirby’s tetralogy appeared in the title NEW GODS, so that is my subject here. This comic-book epic is comprised of eleven stories published in the early 1970s, and two stories published in 1984: a new 48-page story that appeared as part of a reprint collection and a softbound graphic novel, THE HUNGER DOGS.

No one living knows how Kirby might have concluded NEW GODS in 1972 had he been given the chance to do so, or whether that conclusion would have strongly resembled the one he wrote and drew for the 1984 resumption. But the delay may have been fortunate. In the days of newsstand comics, it was rare to see any series conclude on a definite and coherent end-point. American comic books were designed to be indefinitely open-ended, and when a comic proved unsuccessful, the feature simply ended, usually with no effort at a send-off, much less a resolution. Many critics have sneered at the open-ended approach on aesthetic grounds, but it engendered a creative response that had its own peculiar power. Comics-professionals had to be peripatetic creators, constantly shifting from one bizarre image or motif to another, always with the aim of capturing the short attention span of juvenile readers. Jack Kirby was an early master of the peripatetic mode, possibly the most accomplished of his generation, in that he excelled in almost every genre popular in newsstand comics: war, crime, superheroes, science fiction, and even romantic tales.

But though the peripatetic mode allowed for great fluidity of myth-concepts, it didn’t allow for much coherence, except for what one could expect from a self-contained short story. I’ve cited examples of Kirby co-creations that managed to consummate their mythic discourses, here and here for example, while others, like this one and this one, were not so successful. In Kirby’s mind, he may have been creating a “serious novel,” but he had to frame it in terms that the market would recognize. 

Because of these market considerations, most of the stories in the NEW GODS mythos, the ones published in 1971-72, have been accurately critiqued for its rambling plots and problematic characterizations. Both of these circumstances were the result of long-standing creative habits Kirby had developed in his thirty years as a professional.

But where NEW GODS excels is in Kirby’s take on a theme that Tolkien himself had evoked. In a world where mythic good and mythic evil have palpable existence, and where their battle is the proper working-out of their joint destiny, how does good keep from becoming corrupted by the power of evil?

The book’s hero Orion embodies this conflict. Long before his birth, a major war erupts between the gods of good, who live on the vernal planet New Genesis...

...and the gods of evil, who dwell within the dark Satanic mills of Apokolips. 

Darkseid, a Machiavellian plotter who eventually becomes supreme ruler of Apokolips, engineers his world’s war with New Genesis—and then belatedly realizes that he stands to lose as much as his opposite number, Highfather of New Genesis. Highfather comes up with a way to end the conflict: the two leaders exchange their children as what Kirby calls “war hostages.” 

Thus Scott Free, the genial son of Highfather, is brought up in the infernal domain of Darkseid, while Orion, who inherits a savage disposition from his father and mother, is raised among beings who strive to rise about hate and violence. Scott Free eventually flees Apokolips and takes refuige on Earth, where he becomes the costumed hero Mister Miracle. However, the plotlines of his feature have only an indirect influence upon the NEW GODS continuity. NEW GODS focuses upon Orion, who suspects from childhood that he is the spawn of evil, though only during the renewed god-war does he learn that he is the spawn of Apokolips’ ruler.

On top of all that, the new war descends to the mortal world of Earth, for Darkseid has discovered a new means to exert his dominion: “the anti-life equation,” a quasi-mystical mental power that dwells within the brains of certain Earthpeople. Darkseid pursues a variety of strategies to detect the hidden power, and Orion seeks to stop him.

Yet, though the anti-life equation is a strong parallel to that of Tolkien’s One Ring, Kirby’s conclusion is quite different. The equation is something of a “McGuffin” sought by both good and evil powers, and it does not influence the struggle between Orion and his father. Indeed the equation is barely mentioned in Kirby’s long-delayed conclusion of his epic. Significantly, the evil of Apokolips is unable to conquer the good within Scott Free, in contrast to the way the Ring overmasters Frodo at the conclusion of LORD OF THE RINGS. Yet though Orion is tormented by his alienation from the pacific gentleness of New Genesis, he becomes the right hand of his new father and repeatedly renounces the old. Ironically, though Darkseid spawns Orion upon a wife forced on him by political considerations, and another son, the brutal Kalibak, upon a woman he Darkseid actually cherishes, Darkseid regards Kalibak as no more than a useful tool, and in issue #11 he flies into a fatherly rage when one of his aides, without his permission, almost kills Orion.

The 1984 story from NEW GODS #6 concludes in an anti-climactic manner compared to most good/evil battles in comic books. The final battle between Orion and Darkseid is foregrounded from the very first, but instead of Orion obtaining a martial victory, Darkseid springs a trap and apparently slays Orion. Yet the hero’s body disappears from sight, and the story concludes with a caption observing: “Who among us can convince the evil? Unmoved by guilt, they forever live with doubt!” Kirby’s phraseology is awkward, but it communicates a salient message: that the evil are not blessed by their lack of guilt, but that doubt, the perpetual fear of external retribution, takes the place of guilt’s internal monitoring.

HUNGER DOGS, though it suffers from various narrative problems, follows through on the theme of good finding a way to survive evil’s depredations. Some time after Orion’s apparent death, Darkseid manages to infect New Genesis with a species of “toxic rot.” Apokolips’ technology enters the computer age, and even Darkseid himself is flummoxed by the innovations of the artificial intelligence “Micro-Mark” (not one of Kirby’s better cognomens). Darkseid feels misgivings at the over-mechanization of his infernal domain, and he fears being superseded by “the voice of a pygmy—too small for the eye to see.” 

Orion storms Darkseid’s redoubt and destroys the Micro-Mark before it can discover the anti-life equation, but it’s Highfather on New Genesis who most decisively checkmates Darkseid’s technological superiority. Instead of assailing Apokolips itself, Highfather and all of his godly kindred flee their world in a flying city, just before the planet of New Genesis blows up. The planet’s detonation sparks a revolt from the underclass of Apokolips—the “Hunger Dogs” of the title-- and in the confusion, Orion is able to free his mother from Darkseid’s prison, and to escape Apokolips with both his mother and his newly introduced girlfriend Bekka. It’s stated that Darkseid will eventually quell the revolution, but that now, without the “sister planet” of New Genesis to bedevil, the overlord has become confined to his own “self-made prison of suspicion, hate and murder.” In contrast, the denizens of New Genesis survive on their own terms, pursuing a new destiny free of their evil mirror-image.

This summary does not by any means exhaust the many myth-motifs containing in the NEW GODS continuity. But it should be evident that even if Jack Kirby did not create anything like a “serious novel,” he nonetheless articulated a masterpiece of modern myth.