A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 3

The second crossover-category corresponds to the basic pattern of the first one, except that at least one of the stature-bearing characters has been compromised in some manner, making at least one of the characters of LOW STATURE. The most frequent manifestations of the low-stature crossover are usually termed "guest starring roles" or "cameos."

"Guest stars" are often considered to be the same as regular crossovers, but not infrequently guest stars appear in some ancillary role. I mentioned the example of the Golden Age Human Torch-Sub-Mariner crossovers. These took the shape of one of the two heroes appearing in an issue of the other hero's magazine, but the narrative emphasis is clearly on their interaction.

In contrast, the appearance that I'm calling the "guest star" is only moderately important to the plot. One of my favorites of this type appears in the Silver Age DAREDEVIL #30. For some reason, the titular hero decides that he wants to take on Thor's sometime foes Mister Hyde and the Cobra-- which is the main plotline of the narrative. But author Stan Lee, wanting to play the idea to its most absurd lengths, first has DD masquerade as the Thunder God to lure the villains out-- to which deception the real Thor takes exception. What follows is a sublimely silly encounter between the two heroes, which is not strictly necessary to the plot, though it's certainly a lot of fun.

Cameos are even more "throwaway" in nature, usually lasting only a few diegetic "moments." One of the dippiest I've recently encountered was in a 1944 issue of Quality's FEATURE COMICS, in which the almost forgotten comical character "Blimpy" became reduced in (physical) stature and so rang up another Quality character, Doll Man, in order to get some advice about getting small. 

Turning to another manifestation of the low-stature category, I didn't discuss in the previous post the concept of "rotating team" franchises, though I established in this 2019 post my estimation that the characters in each of these temporary teams shared equal stature (although, just to be totally confusing, at that time I was using the term "charisma" in place of what I now call "stature.") However, I made a few exceptions, saying of Batman's co-stars in THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD:

Most of the time, the co-stars either had their own franchises, or had enjoyed such regular berths at some point in DC's history. However, on a few occasions the Bat teamed up with one of his famed enemies, and I would consider all of these to be subordinate rather than coordinate figures, because the villains had not previously enjoyed their own franchises.

 

Even then, I had to further admit that although this was true of two such co-stars, the Riddler and Ra's Al Ghul, but that one other co-star, the Joker, actually had enjoyed a series of nine issues, wherein he usually contended with other Bat-villains. I made the comment that the Joker's series had not done anything to dispel his dominant image as a subordinate character, or Sub, but now I would rephrase that to say that nine issues were not enough to endow the Clown Prince of Crime with the stature one should perceive in a Prime. 

Similarly, a featured hero who only enjoyed a piddling few Prime stories, either as a solo protagonist or as part of an ensemble, would also possess only a very low level of stature. Prior to the Blue Diamond's appearance in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE alongside the Thing, the Diamond could only boast a couple of Golden Age appearances and a couple in Roy Thomas's retcon team-title "The Liberty Legion"-- and so his Prime status is dubious. In fact, TWO-IN-ONE became something of a dumping-ground for short-lived Prime characters such as the Golem, the Living Mummy and Skull the Slayer, none of whom went on to rekindled fame after their TWO-IN-ONE outings. The same applies to the Sub character Jocasta, who got a brief shot at Prime status before returning to intermittent obscurity.

Some obscure characters, however, went on to respectable fame once they'd been inducted into regular teams. Magik had made a few minor Sub appearances before getting a four-issue mini-series. This series made the character a Prime, but had she never been inducted into a group-- be it the one she did join, the New Mutants, or some other team-- she probably would have returned to Sub status. An even more noteworthy example of a lowly Sub rising to superstar Prime status is Wolverine. At the time of the taloned terror's induction into the 1970s X-Men, he had only appeared in one adventure, as an opponent for the Hulk. Not only did Wolverine become a stellar member of the X-Men, he went on to enjoy a wide number of solo adventures. So Magik has only a little stature when she joins the New Mutants, and thus only her first alliance with that team can be called a Low-Stature Crossover at all. Wolverine's induction into the New X-Men does not qualify as a stature crossover, but would possibly qualify for a Low-Charisma type.

 

COMBATIVELY YOURS

                 

In the three-part LOVE OVER WILL (FOR NOW) series, starting here, I listed five of the mythcomics I’d reviewed here because I deemed that they all rated as “accommodation narratives” rather than “confrontation narratives.” In my many observations on the combative mode in confrontation narratives, I’ve continually sought to make clear that although many narratives resolve conflict through violence, said narratives are only combative if the violence has a particular level of organization. I further observed that many other narratives of the accommodation type resolve conflict through romance and/or sexual activity, and that they would follow the same dichotomy. The stories would only be “combative,” so to speak, if two or more characters with *megadynamic * wills are brought into conflict, with that conflict resolved by their romantic interaction. 

That essay-series didn’t look at any of the accommodation narratives through the lens of the four mythoi, as I did with four confrontation narratives in STATURE REQUIREMENTS. I’ve now improved my interpretation of the mythoi through the metaphors of “the four ages of man” in the DYNAMIS essays, starting here, and so I’ll use that approach in comparing and contrasting four accommodation stories, one for each of the four mythoi.

Again, for an accommodation narrative to register as combative, the contending wills must have a high level of dynamicity, expressed in terms of sexual rather than martial conflict. If the tropes of combative energies in battle are embodied by famous myth-stories like Odysseus slaying the suitors (“extroversive”), the tropes of energetic sexual cooperation are embodied by a model like the one in Yeats’ “Solomon and the Witch,” wherein Solomon and Sheba have such great sex together that it seems as if the whole word has been temporarily annihilated (“introversive”). This would be the kind of interaction that Hollywood advertising calls “tempestuous,” so that’s what I sought in the four examples I’ll examine. Three of the examples are taken from the LOVE OVER WILL series, while the fourth is new to these considerations.

In the DYNAMIS essays, I’ve allotted the mythos of comedy to the first age of man, in which the main character, regardless of how old he may be, is placed in the situation of a child seeking to negotiate his way through the arbitrary, often ludicrous rules of society and/or nature. In “She Tried Her Own On,” a self-contained story from the series DOMINA NO DO, the humor proceeds out of nature. Lead female Hikari has been keeping her supposed boyfriend Takeshi in her mansion for some time, subjecting him to her confused sadomasochistic attentions. Then, like the Melancholy Dane, she begins to have “bad dreams.” She imagines that Takeshi menaces her with a titanic phallus, despite the fact that she’s seen his actual joystick and wasn’t consciously impressed. But Hikari begins to feel guilty about having abused Takeshi, so she decides to “walk a mile in his wang” by having her sorcerous grandma give Hikari a temporary penis. The experience doesn’t fill the young woman with anything akin to “penis envy,” but the ordeal does solve Hikari’s nightmare-problem, because now she can imagine “dueling” Takeshi in her dreams.       

Next of the four ages is that of adolescence, when the thoughts of young men and women turn to goals of heroic accomplishment. In the NEW MUTANTS story “To Build a Fire,” one of the titular heroes, Magma, finds herself stranded in the Amazonian rainforest with Empath, a member of the Hellions. Though the New Mutants and the Hellions belong to rival mutant schools, the ongoing continuity had Magma leave her team to sojourn with the “bad” mutants. The reasoning for the “school transfer” always remained murky, but the author’s main purpose was probably just to get Magma and Empath together. As her name suggests, Magma can call streams of lava from the vasty depths of the Earth. In contrast, Empath’s mutant power is entirely mental: he can persuade almost any woman to fall in love with him. When the two teens are stranded in the forest, they quarrel about whether Magma should use her power to call attention to their plight. The young woman gives evidence that she’s attracted to the rather skeevy Hellion even when he’s not using his power on her, and the mere fact that he might try to master her—albeit only mentally—may have a lot to do with her refusal to “give it up.” The story concludes with an accommodation between the two, in that Magma does use her power the way Empath wants, but only after both belting him and kissing him, leaving him confused about whether he influenced her at all.

Like “To Build a Fire,” “Rite of Spring” is a nonviolent story within a series that is dominantly violent (and within the combative mode as well). Like most stories centered upon a monster-protagonist, the SWAMP THING series falls into the dramatic mythos, particularly because Swamp Thing’s experiences as a monster don’t emphasize thrilling physical triumph (as with say, the Thing of the FANTASTIC FOUR), but the tragic dimensions of life, of the limitations that dog every mortal’s tracks when he transitions into the third age of man. The swampy protagonist, however, gets a bit of a new lease on life, when his female companion Abby, after having followed him around for years as a friend-in-need, suddenly confesses feelings of love for the plant-monster. He for his part reciprocates. Since the Swamp Thing is a mass of plant-growths in humanoid form, he doesn’t have the equipment to consummate a romantic relationship after the human fashion. So instead he encourages Abby to “eat of his flesh,” a specific tuber growing from his body. Not only is the tuber psychotropic, it apparently enhances Abby’s psychic senses so that she can behold the spirit-energies of living things that Swamp Thing can normally see. Swamp Thing and Abby then link minds and experience an ecstatic communion with all the surrounding life-forms of the swamp—which is portrayed as being both as intense and as intimate as any human coitus. Yet the advancement of their relationship into a sort of sexual congress signals that they've moved outside the sphere of triumphant adventure; that they've entered the sphere in which men and women have congress in order to create their replacements when they pass on-- even if the exigencies of comic book ensure that neither Abby nor Swamp Thing shall perish from their earth.

The hero of RAT GOD is actually more of a demihero, an upright New England man who finds himself entrapped in a Lovecraftian cosmos, including a degenerate town that I called “an Innsmouth for rats.” Clark Elwood, like many protagonists of such stories, finds himself forced to fend off a cult that worships the titular rat god. But whereas H.P. Lovecraft would have emphasized the brooding terror of the rat god and his followers, Richard Corben focuses on Elwood’s overly flattering view of his own racial heritage, as against, say, the local Indians. The only reason Elwood gets embroiled with the rat-worshippers is out of sexual passion, as he pursues his love-interest Kito. The real cosmic joke on Elwood is that he doesn’t realize that Kito is an Indian girl, meaning that cohabitation with her ought to be verboten for an upright Caucasian. This sort of a joke, in which the protagonist is caught in some ludicrous situation that he has no power to meliorate, is characteristic of the final age of man, as a person loses his health and faculties with increasing age. To Elwood’s credit, he does overcome his prejudices on a basic “but I really want her” level, and though Elwood’s not a real fighter he does show enough determination to outwit the rat-worshippers. Afterward, Elwood settles down to some sort of romantic accomodation with not only Kito, but also with a rather degenerate looking white woman named Gharlena. This is about as close to a happy ending as one ever gets from a predominantly ironic narrative. As seen in the conclusion of Voltaire’s Candide, the protagonist does not so much triumph as escape from the craziness of the madding world.

I mentioned in QUANTUMS OF SOLIPSISM PT. 2 that the master tropes governing the organization of the violent combative mode were either “univectoral” or “multivectoral.” The first three of these “combative love-attacks” emphasize the back-and-forth exchanges of Hikari and Takeshi, of Swamp Thing and Abby, and of Empath and Magma, so all three would be multivectoral in nature. Only RAT GOD would be univectoral, since the story’s main emphasis is upon Elwood, with Kito, despite her erotic charms, taking the position of a support character.  

MYTHCOMICS: “WHY DO WE DO THESE THINGS WE DO” (NEW MUTANTS ANNUAL #2, 1986)

 

In this story—hitherto abbreviated as “Things”—the roster for the New Mutants included Mirage, Cannonball, Magma, Sunspot, Wolfsbane, Magik, Warlock and Cipher—though to be sure, the narrative strongly emphasizes the actions of the last two. A three-page prologue sets up the action when two of the villains of the LONGSHOT universe, Mojo and Spiral, capture Betsy Braddock, the blind-but-psychically-endowed sister of Captain Britain. (Mojo, by the way, is the first to bestow the name of “Psylocke” upon Betsy, foreshadowing the intent of either Claremont or his editors to bring the character into the Marvel mainstream.) “Things” then shifts to the New Mutants’ training academy. Doug Ramsey, a.k.a. Cipher, complains to his team-leader Mirage about the problem that most assails Marvel heroes: a discontent with their existential status. In Cipher’s case, he feels alienated not only by virtue of being a mutant, but also for being unable to talk to anyone about his experiences but his fellow mutants. Mirage counsels him to avoid self-pity and “make the best of things.”

Ironically, though the other mutants on the team have much more power than Doug, they appear to be more vulnerable than he to a psychic seduction via that most insidious seducer: the idiot box. Most of the New Mutants, as well as the younger siblings of Karma (who’s not in the story proper), are caught up in a TV-show called Wildways, starring Mojo, Spiral, and a brainwashed Betsy, now given the name of Psylocke. Over in England, though, Captain Britain recognizes his missing sister in the program and jets over to the former colonies to investigate, though he’s quickly nullified by an unseen foe.

For the New Mutants, life seems normal, though only the reader sees it when Mojo and Spiral manifest to young Sunspot and seduce him to enter Wildways, like a couple of extra-dimensional Pied Pipers.Then, in the midst of a mundane task, Cipher—who has learned how to wear the metamorphic Warlock as a suit if armor—accidentally kills Sunspot. Almost all of the young heroes mourn their loss, but Warlock points out to Cipher that the body is a fake, a “changeling” of sorts.

A shift to Mojo’s dimension shows that he’s also managed to kidnap Wolfsbane, three kids from the LONGSHOT series, and the two grade-school siblings of Karma. All were lured into the Mojoverse by the seductive Wildways program, and Mojo remakes all of them into hyper-sexualized adults, implicitly unleashing their own latent fantasies to serve the madman’s purpose. The two siblings, despite coming from Vietnam, take on a sort of “Siamese twin” image—albeit without being literally bound to each other—and are given the shared name of Template. When the New Mutants show up at the same site that Britain explored earlier, Mojo causes Psylocke to make the heroes quarrel with one another. The brainwashed pawns appear and rough up the good guys, after which Template, acting the part of a disappointed father and mother, also mindwipe most of the heroes into thinking they’re naughty children. Magma alone proves able to resist Template’s power, so Template regresses Magma into a literal child,

Warlock spirits his best friend Cipher away from the villains before the two of them can be suborned. Moments later they come across Captain Britain, also regressed to childhood, and half-brainwashed into thinking that he really is a rebellious child. Cipher has to give Britain the same “buck up and hang tough” speech that Mirage gave him earlier. Britain then rushes forth to rescue the fugitive Magma, and Cipher/Warliock invade Mojo’s sanctum to nullify Psylocke’s influence. Psylocke retaliates, drawing the two heroes into her psychc matrix. There Cipher must fight not only the mental defenss of Psylocke, but also the influence of Spiral, who has somehow bonded herself with Psylocke’s inner self. Cipher’s heroism gives Psylocke the power to disassociate herself from Spiral, though once again Spiral speaks the language of the seducer:

The Wildway offers wonders beyond comprehension, adventures beyond imagining, eternal youth and beauty, the fulfillment of every heart’s desire.

Not surprisingly, Psylocke, being a hero, rejects Spiral’s offer and brings all the good guys back to the real world. As a nice touch, though, Betsy still retains one of the bounties given her by the devilish Mojo—a pair of bionic eyes-- and she can’t quite give up this particular gift—which for all I know may have presaged a later plot-thread. Cipher gets to wind it all up, reflecting that all the things that happened to the heroes and their allies could have happened to “the souls of innocent kids.” Claremont’s trope of Faustian seduction applies particularly well to teenagers, discontent with their lot by virtue of burgeoning hormones, but even better to real children. Indeed, one of Alan Davis’s outstanding images in the Psylocke-world is that of artificially grinning New Mutants riding a Wildways carousel. I don’t think the majority of journeymen artists could have pulled off the seductive horror of the Wildways world, so “Things” is one story which absolutely required both artist and writer to be giving their utmost to the project.

NEW MUTANT ROUNDUP

 

I’m halfway through a reread of Marvel’s first NEW MUTANTS series, and I want to sum up the series at the point where my forthcoming mythcomics review becomes relevant. I’ll probably try to reread the whole series, though I may or may not blog about everything.

Since NEW MUTANTS was not a favorite of mine, aside from the one mythcomic I reviewed years ago, I hadn’t read most of them for thirty years. Further, I probably collected all of them from the quarter-bin and read them out of order. Originally my only motive for the re-read was to ground myself in the “Demon Bear” sequence, since this narrative plays a role in the 2020 NEW MUTANTS movie. Yet because writer Chris Claremont scripts most of his features with multiple soap-operatic plotlines, I thought I had better chart the feature’s course from the beginning. I did find that Claremont foregrounded the heroes’ encounter with the Bear as early as NEW MUTANTS #1, so my approach proved justified. As it happened, while the Bear-story was visually memorable thanks to the art of Bill Sienkiewicz, it didn’t meet my standards as a mythcomic.

In the course of the re-read, though, I found I was more forgiving of the series’ formulaic stories, if only I’ve seen so many later Marvel comics unable to master even the rudiments of good formula. The New Mutants debuted in 1984, as a spin-off from the enormously successful X-Men, most of whom were full adults and did not precisely need Professor Xavier’s “school for mutants.” Four of the fledgling heroes—Cannonball, Wolfsbane, Sunspot, and Psyche (later renamed Mirage)—were created by Claremont and Bob McLeod, while the fifth, Karma, had already appeared in an issue of MARVEL TEAM-UP. Karma was for whatever reason quickly shuttled out of the series, making only minor appearances up to the point of my current re-read. Claremont devoted much more space to such new members as Magma (a lady able to command volcanic phenomena), Magik (a mutant sorceress), Warlock (a techno-organic teenaged alien), and Cipher (a young mutant with no abilities beyond being able to decipher any language of man or machine).

Having been a strong X-Fan since the relaunch of that title in the 1970s, I found the New Mutants to be weak sauce, with stilted characterization by Claremont and poor decision-making with respect to the heroes’ powers, which did not complement one another in battles as did the powers of the X-Men. The New Mutants did not have colorful individual costumes as did the X-Men, but rather wore rough imitations of the dull yellow-and-black school uniforms worn by the first X-Men in the 1960s. However, with one exception (that of Iceman) all the 1960s uniforms came equipped with masks, the better to guard their identities when they went out crusading for justice. The New Mutants, who almost never wore masks (much like the majority of the New X-Men), weren't supposed to be running around playing superheroes like their elders. But of course they did. Thus it would seem the "school uniform" notion was counter-intuitive in terms of the logistics of identity protection, and probably didn't elicit all that much nostalgia from Marvel Comics readers.

The most interesting aspect of the early issues is Claremont’s use of the “Faustian seduction” trope.Not a few fans noticed that Claremont’s X-Men, despite having been born as mutants, frequently underwent further changes, sometimes aimed at making them into physical travesties of themselves, and sometimes oriented on their giving in to the forces of evil in their own souls. I haven’t counted how many times the X-Men experienced such melodrama-filled alterations, but the New Mutants’ quantity of such shifts must at least come a close second.

As with any trope that gets overused, many, of Claremont's Faustian seductions were contrived, even chintzy. However, he did do better in the NEW MUTANTS/X-MEN crossover, reviewed here, wherein the evil Loki becomes a stand-in for the Christian “lord of lies.” And around the same time, Claremont and Alan Davis wove a memorable nightmare from another crossover: NEW MUTANTS ANNUAL #2, which not only brought some of the continuity of Ann Nocenti’s LONGSHOT concept into “mainstream Marvel,” but also imported two characters from Marvel’s British comics-line, Captain Britain and his sister Betsy Braddock, later to go though her own tumultuous changes under the name of Psylocke.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 3

In this essay I'll explore the application of my concept of megadynamicity to a selection of comics-narratives that I've more fully analyzed in my mythcomics essays. The common ground for all five stories is that they are all "love-narratives." As I noted in ACCOMODATING ACCOMODATION, such narratives are a subset of the total set of "accomodation narratives," so I've already specified that I'm not claiming that these are the only form in which the accomodation patterns appears. However, since I've put forth the proposal that "love-narratives" are "female" while "war-narratives" are male, this point will be brought forth better by focusing only on examples that concern the theme of heterosexual love (and not, say, homosocial affection, as one can find in Dave Sim's "Guys" arc.)

To reframe my question: my first premise is that in real life, sex, like violence, is an activity that often (though not always) involves at least two subjects. In literature both activities can be portrayed as being exactly as the reader perceives them in real life, or they can be exaggerated or enhanced by tropes of what the reader considers "fantasy." I've stipulated in previous essays, such as SUBLIMITY VS. MYTHICITY PART 3,  that phenomenality makes no difference to dynamicity. In that essay all of my examples were "confrontation narratives," but the principle holds true for "accomodation narratives" as well, as well as for any potential portmanteau combinations of the two patterns (such as one might find in an anthology-film).

Here are my examples of accomodation-narratives with a theme of heterosexual love:

THE FALL (2001)

RITE OF SPRING (1985)

SHE TRIED HER OWN ON (2008)

TO BUILD A FIRE (1988)

SISTER SYNDROME (2001)

At the end of Part 2 of LOVE OVER WILL (FOR NOW),  I remarked that the end of Yeats's poem "Solomon and the Witch," it is suggested-- though not made definite-- that Solomon and Sheba have such great sex that the world seems to have come to an end. Even if this is just Solomon's metaphorical reading, this is still a representation of sex that goes beyond the limits of what real-life sex can do, and thus aligns itself with metaphenomenal narratives. Isophenomenal narratives can only portray the real base action of sexual activity, and so it follows that all such narratives can only be "sexually megadynamic" if they portray two or more sexual participants who are really, really good at shtupping, even though they can't cause the world to end. 

This is certainly not the case with the ambivalent romantic pair of THE FALL, Kirk and June. In a probable emulation of a "film noir" trope, June plays the femme fatale and manipulates good-hearted schmuck Kirk, not for any grand design but just to enjoy a sense of power. They don't ever get it on within the space of the narrative, though the possibility of romance is suggested at the conclusion. Thus they provide a sort of "negative example," in that one has no reason to think that the universe would have stopped, even if they had made it.

SHE TRIED HER OWN ON (with the words "Balls and All" in a subtitle), is my best illustration of a nearly naturalistic situation, although the particular story has metaphenomenal content. The basic situation is certainly bizarre even for a comedy: high-school boy Takeshi is more or less forced to live in the home of an eccentric Japanese family, the Dominas, because their daughter Hikari lied to her parents and claimed that Takeshi was her boyfriend. Hikari only did so to get out of an arranged marriage, but the longer she's forced to remain in Takeshi's company, the more she becomes intrigued with him as a potential consort. The self-contained story deals with Hikari dreaming an erotic fantasy about Takeshi's balls, imagining them as enormous, even though her waking mind knows better. Hikari's witchy grandmother enspells her so that the girl temporarily obtains male equipment, enabling Hikari to see how the other half lives. After this trial ends and the young girl goes back to normal, she apologizes to Takeshi for having injured him in his sensitive spot. But her dreams still play havoc with her conceptions of human genitalia, for her next dream is an absurd megadynamic exaggeration of real sex, as Hikari imagines that she again meets Takeshi and engages in a contest of "dueling phalluses." Though the magic spell is real within the story's confines, the overall implication is one that could have been enacted within an entirely naturalistic phenomenality, using dreams to portray Hikari's weird projections about sex.

(Note: though Takeshi's prowess in this particular story is only imagined, some of the DOMINA stories suggest that he forms an uncanny erotic devotion to Hikari, and to Hikari alone, so that the entire corpus of stories implies an eventual sexy culmination for their wack-a-doodle romance.)

RITE OF SPRING is a more explicit exaggeration of sex, given that the act is dominantly mental, taking place between human woman Abigail Arcane and the penis-less Swamp Thing. Alan Moore's script and Steve Bissette's art are at their best, as Swamp Thing gives Abigail a unique form of communion, by having her devour one of the hallucinogenic tubers growing from his body. Their shared mental experience has megadynamic potential, but I hesitate to include this one, simply because the idea of the combative focuses on two extraordinary willing subjects joining together, either in combat or in cooperation, and unfortunately, there's nothing extraordinary about the human participant in this "hieros swampos."

RITE is an accomodaton narrative within a series that is dominantly confrontational, and the same is true for TO BUILD A FIRE. Amara, one of the New Mutants, is stranded in the Amazon jungle with a sometime enemy, Manuel. As they forge through the jungle, trying to reach civilization, the two of them never precisely fight, but they are in conflict due to their mutual attraction-- though some of Amara's erotic feeling toward Manuel may stem from his mind-control powers. As I point out in the main essay, Amara, who knows the jungle better than city-boy Manuel, often assumes the "male" role in their travails, and Manuel is relegated to "feminine persuasion," as he argues that she should use her mutant fire-powers to signal a rescue-party. Ironically, the moment when Amara more or less gives in to Manuel's demand may or may not be a response he has coerced-- even Manuel is not sure-- and yet Amara's surrender is marked by a note of defiance rather than acquiescence.

SISTER SYNDROME is a few chapters away from the romantic finale of the LOVE HINA series, but the arc is crucial to the accomodation of main characters Keitaro and Naru. For many stories previous, the most-reused joke in the series is one in which (1) Keitaro somehow offends Naru, usually by catching her half-naked, and (2) Naru punches him. Though technically neither one is "super-powered," comic exaggeration allows Naru to hit Keitaro so hard that he flies into the air, and also allows Keitaro to survive incredible falls and huge objects striking him. Though there are minor metaphenomenal entities in the stories, Naru and Keitaro are only supernormal in being "slapstick gods." SISTER SYNDROME has a confrontation-element, in that Keitaro's adoptive sister Kanako arrives and nearly undermines Naru's relationship with Keitaro. However, toward the end, even Kanako gives way to their romantic mystique, which culminates in the elusive Naru finally deciding to commit to her persistent boyfriend. The coda implies that the violence between them has become eroticized, and that their eventual nuptials will be preceded by a bout of erotic violence-- with the female on top, of course.

The three narratives that qualify as examples of megadynamic sex-- the ones in DOMINA NO DO, NEW MUTANTS, and LOVE HINA-- all depend on channeling the sexual nature of their principal characters through exaggerations of real human abilities, iu much the same way that examples of megadynamic combat deal with powers not commonly within the sphere of human ability.

Section Four will focus more on the question raised in Part One. 

MYTHCOMICS: "THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME" (NEW MUTANTS SPECIAL EDITION/X-MEN ANNUAL #9, 1985)

The original run of Silver Age X-MEN stuck close to the concept of "mutants" as articulated in prose SF: that mutants represented a step forward in evolution, implicitly governed by random materialistic factors. Chris Claremont's tenure on "the New X-Men" since 1975 opened up new terrain in the realm of metaphysical considerations. GOD LOVES, MAN KILLS subjects the heroes to a religions controversy in which a fanatic views all mutants as unclean tools of the devil. Claremont also displayed a taste for wreaking transformations on his protagonists, akin to sending them through funhouse mirrors. The best-known transformation is that of Jean Grey, who in the Silver Age was the humbly-powered Marvel Girl, and who under Claremont's handling changed into the goddess-like Phoenix. The heroine followed a trope common to both Faustian deal-makers and science-fictional overreachers, in which the characters succumb to the allure of unlimited power and liberty, which inevitably leads to some tragic downfall. Still, unlike Faust, Phoenix had no devil whispering in her ear.

Long after the climax of the Phoenix saga, this 1985 tale from Claremont and artist Art Adams goes full-bore Faustian, using one of Silver Age Marvel's favorite villains in the role of Mephistopheles (no relation to that other Silver Age Marvel villain).

The plot of "There's No Place Like Home" is as straightforward as the title's evocation of the theme from the 1939 "Wizard of Oz." The trickster-god Loki, having suffered an earlier defeat by the X-Men, strikes not at the first generation of superhero-mutants but at the next in line: the New Mutants. By chance all the New Mutants-- and their no-longer teen-aged teacher Storm-- are all feeling the blues about their travails in the world. Storm regrets the long-term loss of her weather-witch powers (eventually restored, of course), Sunspot hates the fact that mutant-hating mankind won't esteem him as a hero, and so on. And so, just as Doiothy Gale escapes mundane Kansas for the fantasy-land of Oz, Storm and the New Mutants get lured to the gleaming realm of Asgard. One New Mutant member, Magma, explicitly compares Asgard to the faerie-realms known to her Neo-Roman culture, though what Claremont probably has in mind is the Celtic version of faerie, in which everything is a deception. This is probably the first, if not the only, time that Marvel's realm of brawling Viking-gods has ever been cast in the role of a Celtic faerie-land-- while in turn, Loki, for his part, is explicitly called not just a trickster, as he is in the Nordic myths, but "the Lord of Lies," a name usually ascribed to the Judeo-Christian Satan.

This story, incidentally, roughly lines up with contemporaneous developments in the THOR comic, courtesy of Walt Simonson. Odin has died one of his many deaths, and Thor is absent, which apparently gives Loki the idea to dethrone his half-brother from his role as God of Thunder, by remolding Storm as a new thunder-mistress.

Soon after showing up in Asgard, many of the young heroes learn that the grass isn't greener on the far side. Sunspot is one of the few youths who enjoys the Viking life. But Magma, who has a thing for "the faery-folk," undergoes an unwanted transformation into a Nordic elf, Mirage somehow becomes a Valkyrie allied to the forces of Death, and of course Storm's recovery of her powers threatens to place her under Loki's control.

Fortunately the older generation of mutants, the X-Men, invade Asgard looking for the younger heroes This combination of two ensembles from two mutant-hero features means that no single character, not even cover-featured Storm, gets a lot of attention. All that's possible is that Claremont gives each of the seventeen protagonists at least one defining "character moment." That said, like "The Wizard of Oz," "Home" is coherent enough in showing how the very vivacity of youth opens young people to be seduced, both by feelings of marginalization and the desire to feel more important. Page eight has a cute moment wherein Storm and the New Mutants all voice their secret dreams, like so many Disneyesque Little Mermaids. The X-Men succeed in rescuing their young charges, and in one scene, Wolverine, the oldest hero on deck, chastises Sunspot for his boyish desire for accolades, as against fulfilling the duties of a full-grown man.

Not surprisingly, Sunspot gets on board with the program, while Storm finally rebels against Loki's control and relinquishes the facsimile Mjolnir. Everyone goes home and Loki remains in Asgard, determined to keep scheming.

Naturally, Claremont's story has its share of toss-off dramatics, like a subplot in which Wolverine is apparently going to die, and does not...

...but Art Adams contributes such a fine-lined rendering of the glories of Asgard, no less vital than those of Kirby and Simonson, that even the weaker aspects of the story have a mythic grandeur.

ADDENDUM: At the time I reviewed this, I didn't have a copy of the story's first part, "Home is Where the Heart Is" in NEW MUTANTS SPECIAL EDITION, in which the same collaborators, Claremont and Adams, detail how the New Mutants were beguiled into visiting Asgard. "Heart" shares the same mythic discourse as "Home" and so I include the two parts under the same rubric, even though I didn't analyze "Heart" in detail.

SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE PART 4

To sum up the arguments for the previous three installments, with an eye toward concluding this line of thought:

In Part 1, I asserted that one might view the manifestations of sex and violence within fiction as sources of 'violence" that served to propel and thus create the narrative. This extra-diegetical "violence" is the one referenced in the title of the essay-series, and I probably should have given it another name, to distinguish it from diegetical violence-- perhaps "disruption," in line with the Frank Cioffi quote cited in Part 1.

In Part 2, I chose to explore the real-world alignment of sex and violence with the proclivities of, respectively, the females and males of the human species, as dictated by biological development.  Yet I specified that biology did not entirely define destiny; that it was possible for either real-world sex to perform a bouleversement with regard to dominant proclivities, a turnabout which would be the subject of Part 3.

In Part 3, I referenced an earlier essay-series in which I had investigated a similar bouleversement in the works of two of the philosophers who have influenced me. I did this in order to keep this line of thought distinct from my own meditations on a parallel turnabout, formulated by me alone, though other critics have certainly discussed similar archetypal figures, notably Camille Paglia. I termed these archetypes after a couple of their appearances in Greek myth: "Adonis, the Loving Man" and "Athena, the Fighting Woman." I then digressed to the subject of assigning merit to these-- or any-- archetypes when they appeared in fiction. This was the point at which I attempted to elucidate a meaning for the "sacred and profane" in my title, which, when extended from its Durkheimian definition into the realm of fiction, translates to something more like "widely significant and not very significant." This line of thought will be expanded on in a separate essay. I concluded the essay by stating that I would explore the "two turnabout archetypes" in terms of the ways they enhance the Bataillean concept of "narrative violence," henceforth "disruption," the specific source of the narrative's conflict, which as specified here may manifest in the mode of the dynamic or the mode of the combinatory. Since I've already critiqued several individual comics-stories for my "1001 myths"series, I'll draw upon two of those for my examples.

This essay on NEW MUTANTS #62 is one of the few occasions on which I dealt with a figure that conforms to the Adonis archetype. This character is the semi-villainous character of Manuel, who in this story forms a romantic connection of sorts with the character of Amara, one of the featured members of the titular group. "To Build a Fire" is a two-character story, dealing with the way in which Amara and Manuel attempt to survive in the Amazon rainforest. I noted in my analysis that Manuel's psychic persuasion-powers were "stereotypically female," while Amara's power-- the ability to manifest volcanic flames-- is far more potent. There is a conflict of dynamicity present, in that both teens are in danger from the jungle's denizens-- a signal irony, since Amara wants to preserve the jungle, refusing to use her power to create a signal-fire (hence the title). However, the primary conflict is of a combinatory nature, in that it deals with the "war between men and women," and the suspense is not so much "will the two teens survive" as it is "will they make sense of their feelings about one another?" In contrast to Amara, who possesses a kick-ass "male" power, Manuel's only influence over Amara is his male charm, enhanced by his mutant power-- though Manuel fits the Adonis mold in that he's strikingly handsome. He verges away from the male superhero mold in that he frequently evinces cowardice and selfishness, but this reversal is precisely what the story needs to bring forth Amara's own growth of consciousness.

For the archetype of the Fighting Woman, I cite this essay on RED SONJA #1 from-1977. This story takes particular interest for its inversion of the folkloric opposition of "the virgin and the unicorn," which in its usual telling claims that a wild unicorn will lose its wildness in the presence of a true virgin, and will lay its horned head in the virgin's lap. The SONJA story deals with a deep soul-bond between a unicorn and the titular swordswoman Red Sonja, who is not a virgin but has chosen to preserve her sexuality as if she were. She's also a swordswoman specifically because she was raped by men, which is an action that the story's villain Andar wishes to commit, in a figurative sense, upon her friend the unicorn. In this narrative the elements of the combinatory are certainly present, given that it belongs to the freewheeling genre of sword-and-sorcery fantasy. However, the archetype of this version of "Athena, Fighting Woman" is dominantly involved in a conflict of dynamicity: Sonja and her magical horse-friend against the depredations of a character whose name suggests a Greek word for "male."

Obviously, since I defined both stories as possessing a high mythicity, both of these stories would meet my criteria for being "consummate." I have not yet decided whether or not I'll try to come up with similar stories which would show these archetypes in an "inconsummate" form. Such stories would be by definition forgettable, and the only good reason to describe them would be to rail at their faults. So I may elect to allow this early CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN story to remain my go-to example of the inconsummate.

MYTHCOMICS #14: NEW MUTANTS #62 (1988)

PLOT-SUMMARY of "To Build a Fire" (story: Louise Simonson; art: Jon J. Muth) : The team known as "the New Mutants" is only seen for a few panels before the beginning of the story proper, essentially a tale of two characters playing off one another. One is Amara (super-name "Magma"), a refugee from said group who has recently joined forces with the Hellions, another collection of superpowered teens who are rivals to the New Mutants. The other main character is one of the Hellions, Manuel (super-name "Empath"), whose importance in the story is highlighted by an opening fight-scene. In a battle-training session all six Hellions pit their powers against those of Amara. Her volcanic-fire powers prove superior to all of them, until Manuel enters the fight, using his empathic powers to make Amara profess love for him. She breaks his spell and starts to flee the room, only to be stopped by the White Queen, leader of the Hellions. White Queen gives Amara a letter from her father, which states that Amara must return to her home in Nova Roma, a Roman colony situated in the Amazon rainforests. Since White Queen wants Amara to return to the States, she sends along Manuel, instructing the empath to use his powers on Amara's father so that he'll allow Amara to return. A storm forces the plane carrying Amara and Manuel to crash in the rainforest, where they must make their way to civilization. Manuel encourages Amara to create a volcanic fire to serve as a beacon to rescue-parties; Amara refuses (ostensibly) because the fire might devastate the jungle. The vicissitudes of jungle survival and the teenagers' passionate feelings toward each other eventually lead Amara to unleash her power. Her father's search-party finds the two of them, but not before a bond has formed between the super-teens.


MYTH-ANALYSIS: It would be easy to mistake "To Build a Fire" (a title beholden to that of a Jack London short story about survival) as no more than one among dozens of Tortured Teen Romance stories produced for Marvel Comics' prolific line of mutant-superhero features. What elevates the Simonson-Muth story from simple melodrama to myth is its emphasis upon the psychological power-plays that make up "the war between men and women."

Some of the traditional roles of men and women in this kind of survival-story are reversed. Often in stories dealing with a man and woman striving to survive against nature, the man possesses both raw power and experience in dealing with the elements, while the woman, usually an overcivilized female, must be educated in the ways of savage nature-- often prefiguring her initiation into sexuality as well.

Here, Amara's mutant power is far more forceful than that of Manuel, whose persuasive power over emotions is stereotypically "female." In addition, Manuel is a city-boy who is revulsed by the dangers of the jungle, while Amara has had ample experience with the jungle's ways. She is even identified with the Amazon jungle, saying that at one point she lived in the wild "as an Amazon," apart from her residence in civilized Nova Roma. During their trek toward civilization, she's the one who finds edible food and fights off two wild beasts that attack Manuel, so that she assumes the "male" role in the relationship.

Nonetheless, the possibility that Manuel might dominate Amara psychically-- even if he cannot do so physically-- remains an ever-present threat, even if it's ambiguous as to whether he ever does really try to do so. After the initial battle-scene, White Queen tells Manuel that she's aware that Amara broke Manuel's spell because he didn't go "all out." At the same time, the Queen also tells Manuel that she's detected him exerting some "subtle influence" over Amara, though Manuel never admits doing so, nor states his reasons for so doing.

Later, in the scene when the plane is about to crash, Amara starts to panic. Manuel threatens her with domination: "Will I have to take you over, to make you calm?" She screams "no" even as the plane crashes into a lake, but despite her moment of defiance Manuel then takes on the role of the male rescuer, hauling her out of the lake to safe ground.

However, after that Manuel's male ego takes a beating. He proposes that she create a fiery volcano in the earth to serve as a beacon, but she refuses, wary of starting a runaway fire. He disparages the "trackless wastes" of the jungle and its "screaming monkeys," and Amara defends the jungle as her home. He threatens for a second time to dominate her to make her do his bidding, and her response is perversely fascinating:

"Go on! Try! Coward! Afraid of little monkeys! I should let you do it-- and leave you to burn up in the conflagration!"

By 1988 it has become a common Marvel-Comics trope-- perhaps pioneered by Chris Claremont-- to equate psychic-power dominance with the act of physical rape. Thus we have Amara apparently goading Manuel to commit an act of psychic rape on her, for which he would then be punished by the unleashing of her power. Not surprisingly, Manuel doesn't accept the challenge.

They bed down in the jungle, and "several silent, angry hours later," Amara again gets to assume a male role. While thinking angry thoughts about Manuel, she hears him moan, thinks him a coward again, and then chastises herself for forgetting that he rescued her from the plane. She turns to see a vampire bat sucking Manuel's blood and chases it away. He resents her superiority over him but she does use her power to make a bigger campfire to keep away other animals-- a partial concession to his earlier demand.

She gathers fruit for his breakfast the next day and tells him to watch out for animals when he goes to use the jungle john. Manuel sees a flower and fantasizes himself in the more traditional male role: "Tarzan pay for breakfast! Bring Jane pretty flower for her pretty hair!" But he arouses a jaguar, and again Amara comes to rescue, driving it away with a spear (and curiously declining to use her fire-powers against the beast). However, Amara takes a deep leg-wound from the creature.

At this point the psychological power-plays come out in full force. Manuel, though clearly worried about Amara's wound, tries again to manipulate her into doing his will, first indirectly, by observing that "it's almost as if you don't want us to be rescued." Amara drops the bomb that she really doesn't want to go home because her father plans to marry her to a stranger. Manuel naturally doesn't accept that as a good reason for hanging out in the jungle. Again the threat of mind-rape arises, complete with Manuel looming over Amara in the attitude of a genuine rapist: "Signal our need willingly... or I'll make you!" She responds with a backhand punch, but he tackles her and this time seems to exert his full power over her. However, she not only does create a mini-volcano, but also does something he doesn't demand: kissing him full on the mouth. Amusingly, he shouts "No" when she kisses him, mirroring the "No" she cries out in earlier scenes. The volcano does set the forest ablaze and the two teens flee to the river, Amara apparently forgetting her earlier threat to let him burn. A short time later Amara's father and his soldiers, responding to the earth-tremors, find the castaways.

Simonson and Muth never spell out Amara's motives for the Big Smooch. That the two teenagers have some passion for one another, perhaps encouraged by Manuel's mental influence, goes without saying. But the significance of the kiss goes beond that, for Amara's osculatory addition suggests that her apparent submission may actually be an empowering act. Possibly she makes the volcano not because he forces her, but because he's genuinely concerned for her welfare, not just his own, as he was when he made the threat earlier.

In addition, Amara's self-identification with the rainforest, though not stressed, follows the mythic motif by which femininity is equated with the earth and growing things. If Amara's character and the forest are one, then Manuel's casual demand that she should risk burning down her home, her other self, would be closer to an act of rape than any of his often faltering attempts at psychic dominance. And certainly there's more than a little female empowerment in the exchange they have just before the smooch:

MANUEL: "I want to save you! I can feel how afraid you are!"

AMARA: "How I feel is my business! How I handle what I feel-- is my responsibility."

It's not exactly as ringing as "with great power there comes great responsibility," but it's pretty damn resonant just the same.