ORDERLY DRAFTSMEN, CHAOTIC CARICATURISTS

 Let's see if I can get in one last barnstorming essay for the last day of 2025, building on what I wrote in this essay:

when it comes to strip-artists whose "insanity" allowed them to spawn innumerable grotesques, Capp and Gould are probably roughly equal-- which is a subject worth pursuing in a separate essay.

I'm going to relate twin concepts of "artistic insanity" and "artistic sanity" to a couple of other paired concepts, both alluded to in the title. One of those pairs, "draftsmen and caricaturists," I may have made up out of whole cloth. However, in general "draftsmen" are praised because of their fidelity to visual imagery as normally experienced, and thus they're dominantly associated with representational art. In contrast, it's a given that "caricaturists" deliberately distort commonplace visual reality for the sake of expression, so they can be dominantly associated with non-representational art. I place both Chester Gould and Al Capp in the caricaturist camp, in large part because of their comparable facility with bizarre looking characters.

Now, the second concept-pairing comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, but I'm going to lead off with Camille Paglia's evocative interpretation of Nietzsche:

The Apollonian and the Dionysian, two great western principles, govern sexual personae in life and art. My theory is this: Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification. Dionysus is the empathic, the sympathetic, emotion transporting us into other people, other palaces, other times. Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism — heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism — frigidity and aggression of the eye, petrification of objects. … The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains.

It's also worth noting that in the philosopher's original text, he also aligns the Apollonian with the art of "the dream" and the Dionysian with the art of "intoxication."

To reach a closer understanding of both these tendencies, let us begin by viewing them as the separate art realms of dream and intoxication, two physiological phenomena standing toward one another in much the same relationship as the Apollinian and Dionysian.

Now, both Gould and Capp wrote story-strips, in contrast to the once-and-future dominant form of the gag-strip. But both of them designed their successful features in reaction to the rise of the adventure genre in comic strips of the late 1920s. Hal Foster's TARZAN began in 1929, while in the same year two older gag-strips, Elzie Segar's THIMBLE THEATER and Roy Crane's WASH TUBBS, were successfully reworked to feature tough-guy heroes, respectively Popeye and Captain Easy. While Segar was fundamentally a caricaturist, Crane and Foster were representational draftsmen, and Foster became one of the three most influential artists upon early comic books: Foster for both TARZAN and for his 1937 PRINCE VALIANT, and both Alex Raymond and Milt Caniff, respectively having breakout successes with FLASH GORDON and TERRY AND THE PIRATES. The latter two debuted in 1934, the same year as LI'L ABNER. By contrast, TRACY, debuting in 1931, predated the influence of Raymond and Caniff. However, many testimonies of artists from the time-- for instance, Joe Kubert in ALTER EGO #119 -- indicate that in the late 1930s, Foster, Raymond and Caniff were like master classes in draftmanship to such developing comics-artists as Sheldon Moldoff and the aforementioned Kubert.

What the great draftsmen had in common, despite all their different types of content, was what Nietzsche called "the art of the dream." One should probably specify that Apollonian art-talents guide their fantasies in what might be best termed "waking dreams," dreams guided to a semblance of representational reality. This aesthetic permeates Caniff's 20th-century Oriental adventure, Raymond's space opera, and both the jungle-adventure and Arthurian exploits of Foster.

Now, from the first of Capp's LI'L ABNER strips, comic caricature ruled all of the major characters: the Yokums, the aforeseen General Bullmoose, the jinx Joe Btfsplk, Lena the Hyena, Evil Eye Fleagle, and of course Capp's DICK TRACY spoof Fearless Fosdick. Even the one category of characters who are supposed to be physically desirable-- the many hot girls of ABNER-- tend to be pneumatically stupendous, even Amazonian, in nature.

Now, the earliest TRACY strips, while not as accomplished as the Big Three in terms of actual draftmanship, might be perceived as being fairly representational in nature. However, by the late thirties Gould was investing more energy in developing his rogue's gallery of freakish fiends, as well as upping the *intoxicating* effects of ultraviolence and emphasizing stark use of black and white in the non-Sunday strips. (For that matter the Sunday color strips favored simple, primary colors rather than a graduated color-palette.) Gould didn't share Capp's enthusiasm for busty women-- most of his good-looking women, like Tess Truehart above, are ordinary types-- but he does seem to use a fair number of female grotesques, just like Capp.  

Assuming I've made my case that Gould and Capp were dominantly caricaturists, does it follow that they were "Dionysians" as well? Not necessarily. But in practice, I believe that even though Gould was doing adventure (with barely any humor) while Capp was doing comedy, and usually spoofing adventure-tropes (like death-traps), both of them tapped into The Wellspring of what Paglia calls "energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism — heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice." Capp may seem to be mocking "emotionalism" while Gould is fully invested in his melodramatic tropes. But Capp was never a deep intellectual, or even a pseudo-intellectual. He clearly loved designing grotesques just as much as Gould did and found a way to exploit that penchant through comedy.

I have not read as many works by Foster, Raymond, and Caniff as I have of those by Gould and Capp. Still, from what I have read, I see hardly any grotesques in the Big Three Draftsmen. All three build up the glamorousness of the regular female characters-- with Caniff's "Dragon Lady" becoming a trope for "dangerous female" all by herself. But the glamour-girls of the Big Three were somewhere between Gould's mildly pretty women and Capp's anticipations of the Russ Meyer aesthetic. The draftsmen generally align with Paglia's description of Apollonian creativity harnessed for the delectations of the conscious dream: "Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought." 

Comic books, aimed at children, were not that invested in the distinctions of western personality, as embodied by chivalric knights or spacefaring crusaders. Many of the superhero artists of the early Golden Age emulated the draftmanship approach of the Big Three, though they frequently injected grotesques that were more typical of the caricaturists. In fact, the BATMAN strip began developing its cast of freak-villains a little before Chester Gould had fully committed to giving Dick Tracy more and more bizarre antagonists. 

I'm tempted to theorize that the Dionysian art-method allows creators to tap deeper creative energies than does the Apollonian method, while the reverse is true with respect to organizing material into coherent narratives. And that's a good place to leave this line of thought until next year.
                                   

  

 

 

 

 

THE READING RHEUM: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)

 I'm reasonably sure I never reread Arthur C. Clarke's novelization of the movie he scripted with Stanley Kubrick. I don't even remember noticing the various differences between book and movie, though I imagine that I twigged to the obvious fact that Clarke rendered highly specific explications of all the things that Kubrick left implicit in the cinematic 2001. In fact, I recall that one book reviewer for a SF-magazine back in The Day was so enamored of Clarke's version of the book that he regretted that it hadn't been followed for the movie.                     

I was not so entranced. Frankly, after coming off the high of watching the completed Kubrick film, I was mostly bored out of my skull. Now I say that with the caveat that I've long been a Clarke fan, though I divide his novels into two categories (leaving aside the short stories for separate consideration). One category includes his most ambitious, visionary works, mainly (assuming I haven't forgotten something) CHILDHOOD'S END and THE CITY AND THE STARS. The other group takes in books which are more blandly informational about whatever scientific subject they explore -- the ecology of the sea for THE DEEP RANGE, the lunar surface for A FALL OF MOONDUST. Clarke's ODYSSEY, despite reproducing many of the narrative tropes of the finished movie, proves not visionary in the least. It delivers lots and lots of dry information about the world of ODYSSEY but would have made a very dull movie.                                                                                           

  Divergences between book and movie came about because, even though the book wasn't in circulation until after the finished movie came out, Clarke wrote the novel from a treatment he and Kubrick had completed, as well as from some incomplete rushes from the movie. However, everything I've heard about Kubrick's directorial process indicates that he frequently changed his mind on various elements while still in the process of filming, and there's no way Clarke could have incorporated any of those changes. Yet as a reader I still find Clarke culpable for some of his choices-- for instance, dragging out the cavepeople sequence far beyond its function within the greater whole. The oddest divergence is the ending, after astronaut Dave Bowman has passed through the Stargate and finds himself stuck, for the rest of his life, in a replica of a human hotel room. In one of Kubrick's few commentaries on his enigmatic masterpiece, he admitted that the monolith-making aliens were keeping Bowman in a zoo-like captivity in order to study him. The nature of the replicated room suggests no other feasible purpose, so I tend to reject any idea that some alternate function appeared in the treatment from which Clarke was working. I think it more likely that Clarke simply did not, for whatever reason, like the idea of Bowman passing his whole life in the room until he's transfigured. So in the book, Bowman spends one "evening" in the room, has a meal, goes to bed-- and is immediately transfigured.                                                   

  I hadn't reread the book when I reviewed the movie in January, but I did glance at the book's transfiguration sequence and the subsequent birth of the Star-Child. Clarke doesn't provide any more rationale for the aliens to transform Bowman than the movie did, though in one chapter Clarke asserts that at some point the ETs became fascinated with other life-forms out of an existential loneliness. In that film-review, and in this essay touching on Jack Kirby's comics-adaptation of the story, I raised the question as to whether Kubrick or Kirby reproduced any narrative tropes relating to Nietzsche's concept of "self-mastery," which to him was essential to the formation of the ubermensch. I did find one (possibly accidental) trope in the Kirby work, but I couldn't demonstrate anything definite in Kubrick's movie, and I didn't find (or expect to find) anything of that nature in Clarke. From the smattering of accounts I've read/heard about Kubrick's creative process, I don't think he was all that devoted to Nietzsche's philosophy. I think he intuited some similitudes between that philosophy and the themes of "transhumanism" in certain science-fiction works, though when he first started working with Clarke, it doesn't sound like Kubrick had even read any of the author's works. I don't see the theme of self-mastery in most of the director's other famous movies, so it may be that he only embraced the German thinker for the sake of that one movie, much as Federico Fellini directed a passion for Carl Jung into one film, JULIET OF THE SPIRITS, but did not explore Jungian themes in his later movies.                                                        

CURIOSITIES: KIRBY'S 2001

 In my recent review of the 1968 film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, I wondered about the alleged Nietzschean inspirations of the Kubrick-Clarke script, particularly with respect to the ending, wherein astronaut Bowman is transformed into a sort of superman-- or maybe "super-fetus." Because Kubrick's film utilized so little exposition, though, it's tough to figure out what's going on with Bowman when he transforms. Does he incarnate the Nietzschean idea of "self-overcoming?" I wasn't able to find an online copy of the final 2001 script, which I believe Kubrick changed a lot during the movie's production. The novelization by Kubrick's co-writer Arthur C. Clarke does include a lot of mental exposition by Bowman when he transforms. However, Clarke's description of the process is pretty vague. Novel-Bowman doesn't behold a monolith in his fantasy-bedroom. He goes to sleep and feels like "something invaded his mind," though one can only assume that his alien controllers have triggered this process. He experiences a vision of time flowing backward, and as he re-experiences old memories, he regresses to the super-fetus. Then, as Bowman-Fetus transitions into outer space, he then sees the Jupiter monolith. But Clarke never directly says that the aliens have transformed Bowman, though he may have assumed that all readers would make that assumption.                                                             

  I then gave a quick look to Jack Kirby's 1976 adaptation of 2001. Obviously Kirby had seen the film by then, as he duplicates the scenario of the bedroom-monolith, among many other scenes. Maverick that he was, Kirby diverges from the film in many ways too, sometimes just out of personal preference. According to one online source, Kirby also borrows elements from the Clarke novelization as well, one example being that Kirby has the primeval ape-men hunt Clarke's warthogs, rather than Kubrick's tapirs. But though I doubt Kirby ever read much if any Nietzsche-- it's in the conclusion of the 2001 adaptation that I found the most Nietschean statement about Bowman's transformation. To be sure, the first part of the "explanation" is jumbled, as a Kirby Kaption says, "What is the end or beginning to something that has known neither-- mortally is a condition of man." I can only assume Kirby meant to write "mortality," because the following sentence is, "And he must be taught to surmount it..." That's all the internal monologuing Kirby gives us before the monolith begins its transforming process, but the whole ideal of "surmounting death" bears comparison to Nietzsche's idea of "self-overcoming." Then, in the last few pages, Kirby totally dispenses with the endings of both Kubrick and Clarke, claiming that the Star Child is "the first of many new ones," implying that the monolith is programmed to transform other humans into a race of super-psychics. It's kind of a wacky take on both movie and novelization, but I must admit-- it's Kwintessential Kirby!                                           

SUFFER THE LITTLE MASTERS

I've just finished reading NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND for the first time. I probably have not read any Dostoyevsky in twenty years, despite my admiration for his major novels and my knowledge that he was a major influence on Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy.

I won't review the book as a whole, since there's far too much to unpack in the space of a blogpost. The wider context of UNDERGROUND is that the book consists of the diary-like ramblings of an unnamed Russian clerical type. He addresses many of Dostoyevsky's own concerns about the pending modernization of Imperial Russia and the project to make the nation able to compete with the great countries of Western Europe. Parts of the narrative are a coded response to another Russian intellectual of the period, who advised a utilitarian, reason-based conception of culture. 

The strangest thing about UNDERGROUND is that Dostoyevsky makes no attempt to make his narrator seem admirable, which is a frequent strategy for authors trying to sell whatever philosophy their characters expouse. Rather, Nameless Man admits that he's perpetually full of spite and given to imagining grand schemes of revenge against those who offend him-- schemes which he has absolutely no real desire to carry out, even if he possessed the will to do so. He seems in many ways the incarnation of Nietzsche's "ressentiment," except that he's aware of his own absurdity, excusing it only in the sense that all of humankind is no less absurd.

Because Nameless Man is something of an unreliable narrator, one can't be entirely sure that everything he advocates is what Dostoyevsky himself advocated, any more than Captain Ahab represents the totality of Herman Melville's beliefs. But the author clearly meant for readers to carefully weigh the opinions set forth by the narrator, and one of the most interesting opinions concerns the rejection of utilitarian "reason" as the defining characteristic of human beings.

You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there's no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man's nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life, that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses. And although our life, in this manifestation of it, is often worthless, yet it is life and not simply extracting square roots. Here I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives. I suspect, gentlemen, that you are looking at me with compassion; you tell me again that an enlightened and developed man, such, in short, as the future man will be, cannot consciously desire anything disadvantageous to himself, that that can be proved mathematically. I thoroughly agree, it can--by mathematics. But I repeat for the hundredth time, there is one case, one only, when man may consciously, purposely, desire what is injurious to himself, what is stupid, very stupid--simply in order to have the right to desire for himself even what is very stupid and not to be bound by an obligation to desire only what is sensible. Of course, this very stupid thing, this caprice of ours, may be in reality, gentlemen, more advantageous for us than anything else on earth, especially in certain cases. And in particular it may be more advantageous than any advantage even when it does us obvious harm and contradicts the soundest conclusions of our reason concerning our advantage--for in any circumstances it preserves for us what is most precious and most important--that is, our personality, our individuality.

The Nameless Man doesn't really define the nature of the "will" that he believes a fuller expression of humanity, so there may be no way to know if he's referencing something akin to Schopenhauer's "universal will." He does seem to have some of the Gloomy Philosopher's attitude toward suffering, however.

And why are you so firmly, so triumphantly, convinced that only the normal and the positive – in other words, only what is conducive to welfare – is for the advantage of man? Is not reason in error as regards advantage? Does not man, perhaps, love something besides well-being? Perhaps he is just as fond of suffering? Perhaps suffering is just as great a benefit to him as well-being? Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering, and that is a fact. There is no need to appeal to universal history to prove that; only ask yourself, if you are a man and have lived at all. As far as my personal opinion is concerned, to care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it's good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things. 

I agree that "will" should be seen as the totality of human thought and expressivity, and that the full expression of will is indeed the key to "our personality, our individuality." It's also universally true that people chafe against living their lives only for "advantage," and that they may rebel against their own interests, seeking to "smash things" to assert their individual will. George Bataille built much of his philosophy upon the opposed ideas of "consumption," all reason-based activities that keep a culture alive and viable, and "expenditure," those activities that have no real rational ends. 

I would part company from Dostoyevsky on the subject of suffering, however. Without doubting that many persons "kick at the slats" of their cultures simply to feel the thrill of defiance-- or else use fictional proxies for the same purpose-- there is a broader context to suffering in world cultures. Here's Nietzsche on the subject:

“The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not been bestowed through suffering?” -- BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL.

This particular Nietzsche quote does not directly cite his concept of uberwinden, "self-overcoming," for which I substitute (for possible greater clarity) the term "self-mastery" in my own philosophical ruminations. But clearly, he has stated that suffering can bring forth all of the "inventiveness and bravery" that humankind has used to mitigate or alleviate misfortune. 

As I am not an expert on Dostoyevsky, I don't know if anything comparable to Nietzsche's concept appears in his other works, but it's not in UNDERGROUND. I believe that the great Russian writer was just as opposed to small-minded utilitarianism as the great German philosopher. But my best guess is that Dostoyevsky was narrowly focused upon the goal of refuting a particular utilitarian writer through this nameless spokesperson, and so he did not make any connections between suffering and self-mastery. Or perhaps Dostoyevsky made some such connection, and thought it contravened his ideal of a "will" that had absolutely no practical applications.  

COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE PT. 2

 ...just as quantum particles would be of no relevance to human Will as discrete particles, narratological particles only assume significance in the form of “molecules.” These molecular assemblages I relate to the idea of “tropes.”-- STALKING TWO PERFECT TERMS.

I wrote COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE partly because I knew I was about to re-screen and evaluate the Zach Snyder WATCHMEN after having re-read the Moore-Gibbons source novel. I wanted to forge a methodology regarding how an adaptation of a work generates its own "molecular assemblages" in response to those of the original work. 

I imagine that other narratologists have made the same attempt, at least amid the capacious ranks of film theorists. But as I've commented elsewhere on this blog, many modern analysts tend to speak of the meaning of the work in purely intellectual terms, because educational systems taught many if not all of them to use an intellectual approach in assessing what I term "vertical values." I've followed Jung in separating these values into a didactic potentiality, which is focused on proving a work-oriented theoretical point, and a mythopoeic potentiality, which allows a playful flow between symbolic representations, just to see what comes of their interactions. 

In FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2, I put forth three works that contrasted in terms of those potentialities-- one wherein the didactic was functionally the only value, one wherein the mythopoeic was the only value, and one in which the didactic and mythopoeic intertwined. But even in the last of the three, I stressed that in "Origin of the Silver Surfer" the mythopoeic potentiality predominated over the didactic one:

 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.

I addressed a similar dichotomy in my 2015 review of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN. I started out saying--

I said here that I planned to comment upon Alan Moore's tendency to let his didactic tendencies overwhelm his symbolic discourse. However, when I did the same with Dave Sim and Steve Ditko, I first gave examples of works in which they managed to keep their didacticism under control. So I'll do the same with respect to Alan Moore.

 In my conclusion I admitted that WATCHMEN possessed strong didactic tendencies--

Moore, as a modernist author, wants to use his art as a bully pulpit, to warn others of the limitations of their real lives. That's why it's so ironic that he should be assailed for "rapey comics," since he's clearly calling attention to rape's moral consequences. 

But I also concluded that WATCHMEN was dominated by a multi-level symbolic discourse, exemplified in part by Moore's use of syzygy-patterns throughout the art and text. So, even though Alan Moore would abominate any work of his being placed on the same level as a Stan Lee work, WATCHMEN and the Surfer origin are both excellent works dominated by the mythopoeic potentiality.

Now, in the first part of COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE, I gave an example of a secondary work that adapted a mythopoeically complex primary work. I allowed that Rider Haggard's novel SHE was of such complexity that no feature film of standard length could adapt Haggard's interwoven tropes. All adaptations of SHE have to compress the novel into a cinematic narrative, but the 1925 movie was able to choose a "molecular assemblage" from the novel that conveyed at least some of the symbolic discourse of Haggard.

Zach Snyder's WATCHMEN probably intended to do so with respect to the original graphic novel. However, most of Snyder's renderings of Moore's symbolic representations, be they syzygies or other abstractions, are extremely mediocre. So I ended up grading the movie as only "fair" in mythicity because I felt that it ended up stressing all the didactic and political tropes from Moore's script, all of which boil down to "Nasty Conservatives Ruin Everything For All Humanity." This may be why Snyder adumbrates Rorschach's origin story. I mentioned in the review that Moore's portrait of Rorschach is a mixed one, but the one in the WATCHMEN movie is not. Snyder captures none of the Nietzschean ambiguities of the chapter "The Abyss Gazes Also," which might disprove the view of at least one critic who judged Snyder a disciple of Nietzsche.

So in my view Snyder did the exact opposite in his WATCHMEN adaptation than did the writer (and maybe the two directors) of the 1925 SHE. When Snyder compressed the WATCHMEN graphic novel, he gave prominence to all the didactic narrative tropes, minimizing whatever the presence of the mythopoeic ones. The closest he got to myth was in his reworking of the story's conclusion, in that Snyder jettisoned Moore's "alien menace" concept and made Doctor Manhattan the great enemy against whom the world unites. But there weren't enough reinforcing tropes to give that myth-kernel any deep resonance, and so the WATCHMEN movie feels as preachy as one of the preachier Moore stories. 

Now, all of the above assumes the situation that the primary work is superior in some discourse to the adaptation. The opposite is also possible. But that would require further discussion in a separate essay.

MYTHCOMICS: ELEKTRA BLOODLINES (ELEKTRA #1-5, 2014)

Though Frank Miller's Elektra had a somewhat rocky beginning in the pages of DAREDEVIL, he and his collaborators produced two outstanding works centered upon her spiritual growth out of darkness, the RESURRECTION arc and ELEKTRA ASSASSIN. However, the story goes that someone at Marvel promised Miller that they wouldn't use the character without his permission, and that, when they reneged on that promise, Miller ceased to work for the company. And for a time it seemed like Marvel had reaped the consequences of this disagreement. None of Marvel's post-Miller features starring Elektra seems to have sold particularly well, despite her high level of recognizability, and neither of the live-action movies in which she appeared earned much approbation. But though the 2014 ELEKTRA was no more successful than other iterations, the BLOODLINES arc from the first five issues is at least in line with some of the symbolic discourse used in the Miller mythcomics.

To be sure, while writer W. Haden Blackman and artist Michael Del Mundo agree that Elektra came back from the dead as she did in the RESURRECTION arc, they ignore Miller's idea that Daredevil purged her of the spiritual pollution she'd suffered since the death of her father, and the activation of her eternally unsatisfied "Electra complex." This Elektra begins her story by focusing on her utter lack of identity, ticking off all the things she is not-- not dancer, nor artist, nor hero, but only "somebody's assassin." The dominant suggestion is that her lack of identity has allowed her to be molded into whatever shapes others wished her to take.

So for this arc, Blackman and Del Mundo gave Elektra two new adversaries-- and when I read their names on the back cover, I thought, "These guys have no talent for naming super-villains. 'Bloody Lips?' 'Cape Crow?' Even Bill Mantlo came up with better names, and he made up a character called Razorback." Well, Bloody Lips grew on me, but Cape Crow is still a lame name and not much better as a character. In fact, the part of the story involving Cape Crow and his son Kento is meant to play on Elektra's anomie about not having had a proper familial upbringing, and so bears a resemblance to the 2005 ELEKTRA film. Blackman's BLOODLINES script is not as stickily sentimental as the movie, but the resemblance does the writer no credit. Lest you wonder, he doesn't even try to come up with some justification for the guy to use the weird cognomen "Cape Crow."

Like Elektra, CC-- which abbreviation I'm adopting to avoid that awful name-- is a bounty hunter, but he's pissed off a whole guild devoted to the profession, and they've sent a passel of other hired guns after him. He kills or half-kills all of them, including Elektra's onetime murderer Bullseye. Elektra accepts the commission to seek out CC, but so does a metahuman assassin, "Bloody Lips."

Bloody Lips is not given a straight origin as such, but it's implied that he's an Australian aborigine who can absorb the memories and skills of adversaries after eating their flesh. Blackman and Del Mundo work in a lot of references and imagery suggestive of aboriginal religion (these are the "metaphysical myths" of the narrative), but Bloody Lips' main attraction is that he revels in the lack of identity that distresses Elektra. He doesn't care that his identity is compromised by absorbing the strengths and skills of other beings, just so long as he can kill people. 

In a long sequence, both Bloody Lips and Elektra are plunged into mental psychodramas in which shadows of their pasts seek to task them with their foul deeds. Elektra feels but rejects her guilt. Bloody Lips, who slaughtered his family for whatever reasons, realizes that even if he hadn't done the deed in that way, he would have committed some other version of the crime. He's practically the incarnation of Nietzsche's eternal recurrence:

What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness, and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence" ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."

Elektra, however, remains haunted by the possibility that things might have been different, If Only. But her ninja training leads her to a conclusion similar to that of Bloody Lips, but without any false self-aggrandizement. When a psychic image of her mother tries to guilt her for the scores of deaths she's caused, Elektra rejects the notion of feeling guilt for her carnage. "You want me to see victims," she tells the false mother-image, "when all I see are murderers, terrorists, sadists, despots." She slays the image of the mother she never knew in life.

Later, Elektra later learns that all the psychic specters experienced by her and by Bloody Lips were conjured up by the mental powers of Kento, who wanted to protect his father against both bounty hunters. She doesn't know this when she saves Kento's life or when she battles CC, though her lust for battle is sufficient that it overrides any "rational" attempt to reason with the rival bounty hunter. She spares CC, only to figure out what Kento did to her. Yet because he did it for his father, she essentially forgives him that trespass.

But the CC battle is just a prelude to the heroic assassin's duel with her opposite number. All through the story, Bloody Lips has gone on and on about how much he likes incorporating the experiences of his victims as well as their skills, and he hungers to take in "everything you've felt, everything you've seen," to which Elektra responds, "See if you can survive being me."

There's nothing blazingly original about the villain who realizes he just can't measure up to the hero he wants to overwhelm, but it's an appropriate punishment, however temporary, for the omophagic evildoer. But once again, Elektra is tempted by the "If Only" lure of becoming someone other than who she is-- and again she rejects it, accepting eternal recurrence with far more self-awareness than her erstwhile opponent.

RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS PT. 2

The subject's fundamental nature is to overturn all external constraints, and then to realize that this is a futile and irrational activity.-- HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT: AN INTRODUCTION, Larry Krasnoff, p. 65.

At base the ressentiment ethic is one that continually says, "It was unjust for this terrible thing happened to us or to our ancestors, and so everything in our conceptual universe reflects that injustice." In Part 1 I noted that in theory the fantasy of the despicable overclass is no better or worse than the fantasy of the despicable underclass, in practice it's become much more difficult to assail the former fantasy without some detractor resorting to the usual attack: "Oh, so you're against the advancement of Black people/Asians/women/transexuals etc." 

Rather, I reject the application of fantasies, that have their aesthetic use within fiction, as direct analogues of reality. Within the past twenty years the Liberal subculture has embraced its addiction to eternal victimage, which is a ploy they use to minimize contrary voices and to gain cultural hegemony. Ironically, they don't appreciate the irony that this is precisely the strategy that was often (though not always) followed by their hypothetical overclass in maintaining their hegemony. There is also no appreciation that the standard Liberal-Conservative opposition duplicates Hegel's slave-master dichotomy, but without any of Hegel's insight that the "slave" may replace the "master" and so become come to realize that doing so is "futile and irrational." On this theme, Hegel said:

...although the fear of the lord is indeed the beginning of wisdom, consciousness is not therein aware that it is a being-for-self.  Through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.

Without troubling about Hegel's exact meaning of "being-for-self," this excerpt makes clear that "fear of the lord" plays a role in the bondsman's journey to consciousness. In my experience, the usual Liberal response to this concept comes down to claiming that the speaker is trying to excuse the lord's activities/tyrannies. This reaction is at least comprehensible when talking about hegemonies based in race or religion, for these inequalities arise from one ingroup seeking to control another. But the reaction is stupid when dealing with hegemonies based in gender. The Left's attempt to impose an identical condemnation upon such disparate forms of inequality is characteristic of the lack of discrimination found in Nietzsche's "man of ressentiment."

For this reason, I'm often frustrated with the mediocrity of much fiction that endorses simplistic Ultraliberal (or Progressive) ideals in order to indulge the fantasy of the despicable overclass. Some examples I've railed against include (1) Jordan Peele's film US, (2) N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, and (3) almost anything by Spike Lee, though particularly THE BLACKKLANSMAN.

All of these works share the trait of not being able to evince self-mastery in their quest for an illusory mastery of external hegemony. However, as I said in Part 1, I did find an example of a superior work that did combine self-mastery with the fantasy of the despised overclass-- which I hope to address soon.

RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS

Because free variation is paramount in art, any observations that artists make about empirical contingencies prove secondary. Eugene O’Neill may think that if he emulates Freudian theories of psychology in a play like MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the play has tapped into “reality,” and indeed many critics would agree with him. William Butler Yeats may feel the same way if he conceives a metaphysical magnum opus like A VISION. But non-fiction is the place where pure reportage of allegedly empirical contingencies is the primary value. In the worlds of art, with special emphasis upon narrative fiction, such contingencies become transformed into epistemological patterns, and they exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination. In this, the canonical artist is in no way superior to the toiler in popular fiction; at most, the canonical artist is just better about making his chosen flights of fancy seem grounded in reality. But for a myth-critic like myself, Eugene O’Neill has no greater imagination than Frank Miller, and Yeats has nothing on Steve Ditko.-- FUN WITH PHENOMENOLOGY.

I considered making a continued use of the title RESSENTIMENT OF THE NERDS after reviving it here. Yet I soon realized that I would be talking about a lot of cultural manifestations that weren't exclusively "nerdy," and so I switched to RESSENTIMENTAL JOURNEYS.

In the NERDS essay, I provided a lengthy Nietzsche quote in which he contrasted the "noble man" with "the man of ressentiment." Nietzsche's definition of ressentiment served his philosophical purposes, but I'm more interested in the application of the concept to literary theory. Over the years I've devoted no small attention to Frank Fukuyama's adaptation of Nietzsche's distinctions into the concepts of *megalothymia* and *isothymia," and how these concepts in turn can be applied to fiction, as in (for example) my October 2011 essay THE MYSTERY OF MASTERY PT. 4.

Nietzsche scorns the "man of ressentiment" for many reasons, and only faults the "noble man" for being "naive," at least in the excerpt I'm considering. But of course the history of Classic liberalism has been rife with criticisms of the *megalothymotic* type, who rules by strength, and the earliest extensive critique of popular comic books was that of Frederic Wertham, who complained of super-characters "how did Nietzsche get into the nursery?" 

Most of these critiques were simplistic in the extreme, but it's at least fair to state that the noble man can dehumanize those he conquers, reducing them into an underclass. The man of ressentiment pursues the opposite course: the "overclass" is the class of "pale kings and princes," and that is meant to be despised and rejected in every way. 

Both of these rhetorical stances influence literature, but as I noted in my quote from FUN FROM PHENOMENOLOGY, they're both reducible to epistemological patterns. These patterns 'exist not to portray a world of “fact” but to add deeper context to the phantasms of the imagination.' 

That doesn't mean, of course, that artists don't create works which advocate one political stance or the other. In MYSTERY OF MASTERY 4 I loosely associated Frank Miller with the *megalothymotic* tendency, which often got him tarred with the fascist brush, while Alan Moore got a pass for his "alleged anarchism," which I find to be identical with *isothymia's* tendency to break down hierarchical structures. Both authors have created a wealth of genuinely mythic works, but neither has been able to avoid taking ideological positions that usually result in inferior works, such as Miller's HOLY TERROR and Moore's KILLING JOKE.

"Non-nerd literature" boasts its own ideological tendencies, which come down to "things would be great if we could control/destroy that damned overclass/underclass." Two authors who produced their best known works within the same literary period would be underclass-despiser Thomas Dixon Jr (THE CLANSMAN, 1905) and overclass-despiser Upton Sinclair (THE JUNGLE, 1906). Both novels are fantasies of mastery, but they lack what Nietzsche termed "self-overcoming," and which I have renamed "self-mastery"-- and which I have associated with the artist's capacity for "free variation."

Nietzsche argued that the noble man is more capable of self-mastery than the man of ressentiment, which argument I explored more fully in COURAGE OVER FEAR. Whether or not this is true in real culture, I tend to think that the "noble man fantasy" tends to favor self-mastery/free variation more than the "man of ressentiment fantasy," because the former is more overtly a product of artifice than the latter, while the latter often appears to be a response to the need for verisimilitude in fiction. I noted in SENSE AND SYMMETRY (AND ARTIFICE):

The tropes belonging to "artifice" are infinite in terms of their potential content and in terms of their ability to combine with other artifice-tropes. In contrast, the tropes that signal “verisimilitude” to the audience are finite in that they always depend on reproducing some sense of “life as it is..."

Since I have defined fiction and general literature more in terms of artifice than of verisimilitude, I find myself unreceptive to a lot of literature devoted to ressentiment: to the fantasies of overthrowing some tyrannical overclass seen in, say, Marxist lectures like Sinclair's JUNGLE or racial ideologies like the oeuvre of Spike Lee. However, I hope to find time in the near future to review one of the few novels I've encountered that manages to portray the ressentiment fantasy through the lens of free variation, which allowed the author to imbue self-mastery upon the standard fantasy. 

SELF MASTERY MEDITATIONS PT. 1

GIVE-AND-TAKE VS. THE KILLING STROKE proposed that these two tropes provided the principal narrative strategies through which authors have created the combative mode. In my earliest mediations upon the subject, I tended toward the view that the key manifestations of the mode were those narratives in which some clash of equal dynamicities transpired, usually at the story’s climax (as noted in PASSION FOR THE CLIMAX). But to some extent this view was a consequence of my over-emphasis on the mode of dynamicity, since it was 2013 that I formulated the complementary combinatory mode. That said, I still devoted considerable space on my blogs to narratives in which a concluding conflict failed to convey the dynamic-sublime, ranging from canonical artworks like MACBETH to pop-art creations like WORLD WITHOUT END.

I did allow for a major exception to the “combat-climax” proposition, and this was what I originally called the use of strategy. For instance, I viewed FORBIDDEN PLANET as a combative film even though its major dynamicity-clash takes place in the film’s middle. Rather, the Id Monster is defeated by a strategic move on the part of the heroic space-soldiers. I hadn’t coined the term “self-mastery” in this period, but it seems clear to me that this is what I was aiming for, in valuing this movie’s conclusion as combative even though the soldiers use “brain” more than “brawn.” That said, I would not have deemed comparable characters, like those of THE ANGRY RED PLANET, to be combative figures, given that they didn’t show any real penchant for “brawn.” And within the same period, I viewed that the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS film was not in the combative mode. There’s a major clash of dynamicities in the middle of that film as there is in FORBIDDEN PLANET. But the Martians aren’t defeated by either the brain or brawn of the Earthpeople, but by sheer dumb luck.

The trope of “the killing stroke,” as exemplified by Odysseus’ blinding of the Cyclops, still depends on a clash of dynamicities, but it’s one characterized less by an exchange of powerful blows than by one principal thrust, often at a more powerful opponent’s weak point. Arguably self-mastery, with the attendant idea of “digging deep,” takes a more concentrated form in this trope. In the GIVE-AND-TAKE essay, I pursued a similar logical path in my comparison of the protagonists of two works: the 1940 THIEF OF BAGDAD and Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE. The denouements of both works involve the protagonist using a magical weapon to strike down a more powerful menace: Abu shoots the wizard Jaffar with a magic arrow and Mayhew stabs a big monster with a magic sword. But Mayhew exhibits no self-mastery, while Abu does so prior to shooting Jaffar, particularly in the young thief’s battle with a giant spider.

However, such distinctions become a little harder to make when the “star of the show” is the monster. For a monster-centric film to be combative, the monster’s opponents, while often forgettable as characters, must evince the quality of self-mastery in order for the work to qualify as combative. Two such examples, from very different periods of filmmaking, are 1955’s IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA and 2010’s SHARKTOPUS. Yet it’s difficult to quantify what separates the climaxes of these films from those of, say, 1975’s JAWS and 1994’s TREMORS. It’s my conviction that even though these films have very violent climaxes, I don’t find either the trope of contending dynamicities or strategy informed by self-mastery. The triumphs of the monster-slayers in the latter two films are impressive—but just not “super-impressive.” And I make this judgment in spite of all the other literary factors that make TREMORS a better film than IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, and JAWS (pretty much without question) a better film than any latter-day shark-opus.

Next up: considerations of self-mastery’s effects on the patterns of exteriorization and interiorization.

MYTHCOMICS: DEADMAN WONDERLAND (2007-2013)

SPOILERS  SPOILERS SPOILERS

The word “apocalypse” originally connoted an unveiling of the reality underlying the illusion of ordinary life. For several generations, the Japanese people lived in the shadow of a real-life catastrophe, that of nuclear devastation brought on when scientific research uncovered the titanic powers hiding beneath physical phenomena. With the cessation of war, the nation eventually returned to the lesser rigors of daily existence. Still, in Japanese cinema  normalcy was periodically menaced by an incarnation of chaos in the form of a dragon breathing atomic fire.

DEADMAN WONDERLAND takes place in a fictional future, though for the most part the world looks almost indistinguishable from that of modern-day Japan. However, the world of viewpoint character Ganta Igarashi does have its own apocalyptic shadow: that of the patently fictional Great Tokyo Earthquake. Ganta, like most of his middle-school peers, knows nothing about the cause of the cataclysm, which occurred when he was a small child. In his innocent existence—going to school in a rebuilt Tokyo and enjoying a mild home life with a father who’s barely seen during the entire series—Ganta doesn’t know of the link between the disaster ten years ago and Deadman Wonderland. Like most Tokyo citizens, Ganta doesn’t know anything about the Wonderlannd, except that it’s a private prison that broadcasts gladiatorial contests between its incarcerated residents. Certainly Ganta doesn’t know that the bizarre edifice just happens to exist at the former epicenter of the quake.

Innocent Ganta soon gets an education in hard knocks. One fine day, all of the students in his class are slaughtered by a weird, super-powered being whom Ganta describes as “the Red Man.”  Ganta alone survives the massacre, and since no one else beholds the spectre of the true killer, the authorities find it expedient to condemn Ganta as a mass murderer.  In no time, the young man is sentenced to the life of a prisoner in Deadman Wonderland, the first step in his journey to knowledge—not only with regard to the prison’s relevance to Tokyo’s apocalyptic history, but also to the youth's own familial background. As is often the case, children suffer for the sins of the previous generation.

On Ganta’s first day “in stir,” head guard Makina tells him, “Absurdity is your new reality.” To the reader, one patent absurdity is the way the prison operates. Though Ganta and his fellow inmates wear collars that can stun them if they rebel, the Wonderland doesn’t otherwise restrict their movements. Though some areas of the prison are off limits, inmates are allowed to wander from cell to cell, much as if they occupied a college dormitory. But this freedom is perhaps explained by the fact that though not every prison is termed a “deadman,” all of them receive periodical doses of poison from their collars, and so will perish if they don’t labor to earn an antidote called “candy.”  The gladiatorial games, which citizens on the outside believe to be fake spectacles, exist to make money for corrupt warden Tamaki, though even his strings are being pulled by a darker mastermind.

The real meaning of “deadman?”  For reasons relating to the cataclysm ten years ago, many inmates have mutated, acquiring a weird super-power called “the branch of sin.” In essence, the deadmen (and deadwomen) have the ability to make weapons out of blood from their opened veins.  Spikes, whips, flames—deadman-blood seems as malleable as the energies of a Green Lantern’s ring. Ganta himself proves to be a deadman, and finds that he can shoot blood-projectiles from his fingers like bullets from a gun. Ganta must use this new talent to preserve his life in various contests, even while trying not to become corrupted by the perverse indifference of both convicts and officials.

But the prison’s greatest absurdity is Shiro, who seems to come out of nowhere and doesn’t occupy a cell like the other convicts. Shiro, a teenaged albino girl with white hair and red eyes, displays immense strength and agility, though she doesn’t initially show deadman-abilities. She acts as if she knows Ganta, though he does not reoognize her, at least initially.  Shiro usually talks like a small child, though she can sometimes speak in more adult tones, and not surprisingly it’s eventually disclosed that the two of them did know each other as children. Warden Tamaki and his overseer know all of Shiro’s secrets, though, and these villains aspire to use the convicts of Deadman Wonderland for insidious purposes.

Like many “new fish” sentenced to prison, Ganta is an uncorrupted innocent who seems doomed to be overwhelmed by the evil of both the prison and its prisoners. Most of the support-characters whom Ganta encounters have manifested their deadman-powers in line with suffering various personal traumas, and they essentially embrace the Wonderland’s horrors rather than confront their own demons. But Ganta, despite his apparent “everyman” nature and comparative weakness, becomes a rallying-point for his fellow trauma-victims. Minatsuki, a vicious, foul-mouthed patricide, initially scorns Ganta for his bleeding-heart empathy. But after she’s been exposed to his relentless purity, she finds herself seduced by the prospect of hope. Ganta’s loyalty to one friend even leads his temporary inmate-allies to reject him for a time. Yet Shiro, in one of her rare moments of eloquence, brings the lost sheep back to the fold by telling them, “If bad memories are stronger than you are, don’t blame it on Ganta.”

This and other lines evince the common theme of WONDERLAND: the uniquely Japanese take on Nietzchean self-overcoming. I’m tempted to the belief that no one but a Japanese author could have a hero rage, “I want to become strong enough to beat the crap out of my weaker self.” Ordinary life is seen to be an illusion, and yet a necessary illusion for all that. Ganta and Shiro are linked by the sins of the older generation—in particular, of Ganta’s deceased mother, one of the scientists who unleashed both the earthquake and the “branch of sin” mutation.Yet through the efforts of her children, real and adopted—through Ganta’s persistence and in spite of the the monster hiding behind Shiro’s seeming looniness-- it turns out that even deadmen can resurrect themselves. WONDERLAND’s many wonders cannot be explicated in a single blogpost. However, in contrast to many of the narratives that pretend to evoke the lunatic spirit of Lewis Carroll, authors Jinsei Kataoka and Kazuma Kondou succeed in creating a world no less governed by insanity. Yet they also manage to show how, in the vein of Dante, one must descend to the deepest circles of hell before one has any hope of returning to the world of light and comparative sanity.    

ON MASTERING SELF-MASTERY

I've recently hunted through past posts and added the tag "self-mastery" to any post where I used the Nietzschean term "self-overcoming." I find Nietzsche's term a little too obscure for my own use, but "self-mastery" serves to express the ways in which fictional combative characters illustrate humankind's ability to do more with their "might" than to dominate others. I wrote in 2015's NIETZSCHE VS. THE NEOPURITAN NANNIES:

Nietzsche is interested in war and violence only as forces within humankind that must be overcome by the overman-- not indulged in, like the Nazis to whom Frederic Wertham compared the philosopher. The overman was Nietzsche's solution to the vagaries of rule by the mob or by the tyrant:

Now, in fiction combative characters embody a plethora of philosophical attitudes, and Nietzsche's idea of self-mastery diverges even from that of, say, Frank Miller. (Interesting side-note: in ZARATHUSTRA Nietzsche castigates a "Spirit of Gravity," which is a value Miller and his co-writer Azzarello champion in THE DARK KNIGHT MASTER RACE. ) But I would still argue that the semantic manner in which both the philosopher and the comics-writers express the idea of self-mastery is essentially the same.

Now, in COMBAT PLAY PT. 4, I  used the ideal of "fair play" as an example of what I then called "self-limitation" and considered essentially identical with "self-overcoming:"

In my own lit-critic cosmos, the ideal of "fair play" assumes the role of "self-limitation" that is, in Nietzsche's philosophy, occupied by "self-overcoming."

And yet, I find that I've used it not in terms of limiting oneself but also in terms of exceeding limits. In WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS PT. 1, I compared two protagonists whose dynamicity was certainly not at the highest level, but who both utilized particular weapons to overcome obstacles. I argued in part that although Richard Mayhew of NEVERWHERE gained possession of a super-sword and used it to kill a monster, he lacked the quality of "self-mastery," since the weapon's power did all the work. In contrast, Jack Burton of BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA didn't command a lot of power with his one weapon, a simple throwing-knife, but like Aristotle's hedgehog he mastered one good trick. Thus his triumph over the villain Lo-Pan is entirely the result of Burton's self-mastery.

In my philosophical cosmos, the acquisition of a skill or power comes about through a process of self-monitoring, a subject's attempt to understand his or her natural limits at a given time, after which the subject seeks to exceed said limits, to gain greater self-mastery. The appeal of fair play is affective rather than cognitive; the subject believes, for instance, that he shouldn't use a weapon if his opponent does not have one. Thus, in THOR #152, the thunder-god "sheathes" his hammer after destroying his foe's mace.

However, this "noblesse oblige" gesture can have an objective effect, in that it forces a given character to "dig deeper" in order to defeat a worthy opponent. Of course, one doesn't need the gesture, since combative narratives are replete with dozens of situations wherein combatants seek out worthy opponents purely to improve themselves. DRAGONBALL frequently uses this scenario, in that the Seiyans Goku and Vegeta repeatedly challenge one another, even when on relatively friendly terms:

Having dovetailed these two related concepts, my next consideration is: what are the most familiar story-tropes through which fictional characters may demonstrate self-mastery?

Both of the two previous examples fall into the most elementary category, that of the hand-to-hand battle. This is also the easiest trope with which an author can express self-mastery.

The trope of weapons-use, however, becomes more complicated, as seen in the WEAKLINGS WITH WEAPONS analysis, wherein I found that Mayhew did not display self-mastery even though he had a bigger, badder weapon than did Jack Burton. An even greater complication is that any form of "super-power" not intimately tied to the human body becomes similarly problematic. If Nightcrawler's ability to teleport demonstrates self-mastery, can one necessarily say the same of a comical type of teleporter like Ambush Bug?

The third major trope of self-mastery is that of the indirect commander: a figure whose main role is often to order others into battle. In this essay I said that I discounted the "Adama" character of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA in terms of "combative status" because he functioned largely as a figurehead. Yet there are millions of villains who are basically "master planner" types who get henchmen to do their fighting for them. However, the difference between Adama and, say, Fu Manchu is that the latter's genius for evil infuses every errand his servants perform in his name.

More on these matters later, perhaps.