HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE PT. 3

 

I started thinking once more about the topic of "story-hosts" after re-reading Batman's visit to "The House of Mystery" in BRAVE AND BOLD #93, courtesy of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams. In a previous installment of this essay-series, I had talked about how certain issues of that rotating team-up title, because those stories paired Batman, a superordinate icon, with such subordinate icons as The Joker, the Riddler and Ra's Al Ghul, none of whom have ever progressed beyond the subordinate level (in contrast, say, to a rare character like The Catwoman, who made her superordinate mark in the 1990s and who has kept that stature thereafter). 

But at least all of the villains so featured were actual icons. In the story "Red Water, Crimson Death," the two "headliners" are Batman and Cain from DC's "House of Mystery" title-- but not only do they not interact with one another, the latter character has, as far as this story is concerned, no power to interact with Batman or anyone else. He might best be termed a "null-icon" here, as he is in most if not all of the horror-stories he hosted. Thus, in contrast to what I wrote in COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 6, in all such narratives Cain would be neither Prime nor Sub. I'm aware that he becomes a Sub in the SANDMAN comic, which parallels what I also wrote in the above essay about the EC story "Horror Beneath the Streets." In that tale the three EC horror-hosts come into "reality" to berate the comic-book makers-- but only to make the humans assign the hosts to their already established venues. Technically they are Primes and the comic-book authors are Subs-- though the categorization is made more difficult in that story-hosts are essentially identical with their authors. They serve the same purpose as omniscient narrators, but as "null-icons," they convey a sense of personality absent in such narrators.

So in my book, "Crimson" is essentially a Batman story, concerning his adventure when he tries to take a vacation from being Batman. He meets a young Irish boy, Sean, during an ocean voyage , and though Bruce Wayne has no idea that Sean is involved in a criminal case, he ends up accompanying the boy back to his small fishing-isle, and thus, getting some necessary exposition-- and an introduction to a supernatural manifestation.          

I won't recount the whole story here, but suffice to say that there's a human agency behind the so-called "red tides" and the never-specified deaths of Sean's parents. However, there's also a superhuman agency that manipulates the Gotham Guardian into intervening to capture the criminals and save Sean's life. And yet, though as scripted this is a Batman story, with no crossover elements, O'Neil and Adams structured the tale as the sort of thing that could have run in HOUSE OF MYSTERY. And suppose that it had been reworked to be just such a story, with Batman ejected and replaced by just some basic one-shot viewpoint character? Then the centricity would have shifted from that POV type to either King Hugh, the ghost that renders aid to the boy's protector-- or even to Sean, since O'Neil's backstory slightly suggests that the boy, still grieving for his lost parents, may have subconsciously summoned the spirit of his dead relative to enact vengeance.

CROSSING GODS PT. 4

 As a quick coda to CROSSING GODS PT. 3, it occurs to me that. although I may find uses for the terms I introduced there, there's a simpler line I might draw in the sands of shifting alignment, at least with respect to modern usages of all types of traditional narratives, be they myths, folktales, or legends. 

If a given modern narrative attempts to substantially represent a traditional story's plot action-- that is, making some attempt to be "canonical"-- but alters the scenario by bringing in extraneous elements, or rearranging elements within the actual canon, then that is a crossover. Thus, of the earlier examples cited, the 1952 QUEEN OF SHEBA would be a "re-arrangement" type, in which the (probably political) marital alliance of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is reworked so that Sheba never marries Solomon but rather hooks up with the king's son Rehoboam, who's in the Solomon narrative but not with that role. The examples with extraneous elements would include the movie NOAH, which imports Tubal Cain from a different Biblical story to serve as the story's villain, and the 1980s CLASH OF THE TITANS, which the story of Perseus is merged with elements from the narratives of Achilles and Bellerophon.

However, if there is no substantial attempt to be canonical, then what one has is an "open canon" created of whatever elements appear in an aligned set of traditional stories. Thus Marvel-Thor can meet any character from Norse mythology or folktales, and there is no crossover-tension. Even though the Thor of Myth may never have encountered the Surtur of Myth (so far as we know from surviving texts), Marvel-Thor can meet any Nordic traditional figure, from any time period, and it won't be a crossover. However, when he meets Hercules or Shiva, traditional figures from other myth-cosmoses, that's a crossover.

The "open canon" principle would also hold for my example of THE IRON DRUID CHRONICLES from the first CROSSING GODS. The entirely fictional hero of this series, Atticus, is a master of Celtic magic, so any purely Celtic myth-figure he encounters is a null-crossover. But when he meets the pale horseman of Christian Revelation, that's a crossover of the innominate kind. Ditto Marvel's Daimon Hellstrom meeting any entity purely native to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Null-crossovers would include Satan and all traditional figures from that cosmos, probably including even icons from other pantheons who were demonized by early Jews and Christians (Baal, Astarte), but would NOT include icons from completely different traditions, such as the Egyptian Anubis and the Celtic Morgaine LeFay.         

         

THE READING RHEUM: AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS (1931/1936)

 

This is my third reading of Lovecraft's AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS, though it's my first time checking out Leslie Klinger's annotated version. Klinger also specifies that the text was taken from HPL's manuscript, whereas my earlier readings were probably based on the altered text from the ASTOUNDING publication. However, none of the corrections or annotations changed my view of MOUNTAINS: that it's an extremely important example of Mythos world-building, but that as a story MOUNTAINS feels rather inert.             

 In earlier reviews I've commented on the extraordinary power HPL could convey through his meticulous descriptions of landscapes, most often those of his native New England. He definitely moved out of his comfort zone to describe the barren wastelands of the Antarctic terrain, and since I'm sure he never traveled to either that continent or to any comparable terrain, he must have depended heavily upon travel writers' descriptions. Many of his descriptions of Antarctica rate among his best. However, despite this level of excellence, these frozen wastes have the disadvantage that they host no human tribes or settlements. This was ideal for painting a picture of all the various extraterrestrial beings that once inhabited Earth. But Antarctica doesn't carry the same associations in human culture, so HPL wasn't able to play to that particular strength in this story.               

 It occurred to me that structurally MOUNTAINS is not that different from 1920's STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER. In that short story, two dilettantes, making "terrible researches into the unknown," descend into a forbidding sepulcher, with the result that one man disappears and the other lives to tell the tale. In MOUNTAINS, a whole scientific research team ventures into the antipodean wastes and stumbles across a labyrinthine city. They find preserved alien corpses that are originally called "Elder Things," which is what I will continue to call them. (HPL most frequently calls them "the Old Ones," but I deem that confusing given his use elsewhere of "Great Old Ones" for another species of foreign entity.) Despite the other researchers in the party, only two humans survive the expedition's encounter with the horrors left behind by the Elder Things, and one of the two goes insane. Aside from the narrator Dyer, at least two named characters have strong familiarity with the rudiments of the Mythos, which made it a lot easier for HPL to lay out his large-scale worldbuilding project.                                             

I think my somewhat negative reaction to MOUNTAINS stems from HPL's approach to the Elder Things. These aliens are not godlike entities like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, but a race of scientific investigators not totally like the modern-day humans examining their remains. HPL's "Outer Ones," the stars of THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS, were also simply ETs with advanced science. However, in WHISPERER the aliens are still very mysterious in terms of their aims and motives. Dyer and others are able to decipher much of the far-removed history of the Elder Things, and the result is that the Things lose any semblance of mystery. One of the last horrors Dyer witnesses is a "shoggoth," a leftover slave-entity once mastered by the deceased Things, and many readers have liked this particular menace. But for me the effect of telling me pretty much everything about the vanished scientists and their living tools dispersed any potential for what HPL himself called "cosmic horror." So, while I appreciate the author having laid out a grand scheme of various creatures whose powers dwarf those of pitiful humans, MOUNTAINS didn't resonate with me.                                                 

  It is interesting that the Elder Things have two major prehistorical encounters with other inhabitants of the Mythos. One of those groups are WHISPERER's Outer Ones, who I tend to call "the Fungi from Yuggoth," again because "Outer Ones" sounds too much like "Great Old Ones." I absolutely refuse to call them "Mi-Go" as Klinger does, just because Dyer idly uses that Tibetan word to allege that the Fungi were once mistaken from Tibet's "abominable snowmen." Sorry, HPL, no way do I believe that any human ever saw your crab-like creatures, whether winged or wingless, and imagined them to resemble the hairy men of the Himalayas. The other major opponents of the Things are "the spawn of Cthulhu," whom the Things manage to drive out of Antarctica. All this condensed history is very useful for fans of the Mythos, but since these encounters are only being written about long after they occurred, they only register in my system as "null-crossovers." I suppose if a big-screen movie version of MOUNTAINS had come to pass, such a film would have had to show these cosmic wars on screen, and THOSE would have counted as crossovers, as they became part of the ongoing narrative. A point that concerns only me, to be sure.                 
          

THE READING RHEUM: "THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS" (1930/1931)

 

Now this is more like it; cosmic horror the way HPL fans like it!

WHISPERER is one of the first six HPL stories I encountered in a particular collection back in The Day, and as I noted in my previous essay it eschews the dodgy dialect of HPL's immediately previous Mythos-tale DUNWICH HORROR. I'll note briefly that this time the reader also doesn't know the significance of the novella's title until the very end of the story. 

WHISPERER also resembles THE COLOUR OUF OF SPACE because it shows HPL's skill at describing the natural backdrops of the story, which in this case are the desolate woodlands of Vermont. The flooding of a local river causes the local townsfolk to circulate rumors about the corpses of mysterious beings in the waters. Albert Wilmarth, a literature teacher at Miskatonic University in Arkham, launches an amateur investigation of the rumors, writing newspaper articles on the local mythology of the aboriginal Indians. These essays cause a local farmer, Henry Akeley, to contact Wilmarth about his own experiences.

Though most of the exchanges between Wilmarth and Akeley are in the form of letters, this epistolary method of storytelling never sacrifices any tension. Akeley tells Wilmarth that for months his secluded farm has been besieged by mysterious beings which, when glimpsed at all, look like winged, claw-handed humanoids. The two humans eventually learn that these beings, "the Outer Ones," are visitors from the planet Yuggoth (Pluto), and they've set up a clandestine mining-operation in the vicinity of Akeley's farm. Only Akeley's supply of guns and guard-dogs has preserved him from being killed or abducted by these alien intruders. Eventually Wilmarth hears enough to convince him of the farmer's veracity, but by the time he physically arrives at the farm, he encounters what he thinks is Akeley, but is in truth "the whisperer in darkness."

Before I began this review-project, I mentioned here that I wondered if any of HPL's Mythos stories registered as crossovers. After all, the cosmic horror of WHISPERER is enhanced by two major sequences in which the human protagonists are exposed to an overwhelming variety of references to dozens of alien beings, domains, and deities, some original with HPL, some invented by authors with whom the writer was friendly, like Robert E Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark Ashton Smith. (Smith had apparently shown HPL his story "The Story of Satamptra Zeros," because that tale, which was the debut of Smith's toadlike god Tsatthoggua, didn't see print until after WHISPERER did.) 

All these arcane references built up HPL's vision of a bizarre universe beyond the ken of human reason-- but references, in my system, count only as "null-crossovers." However, though the main monsters of WHISPERER are the Outer Ones-- who had previously appeared in an HPL poem, "Fungi from Yuggoth"-- they do apparently enlist one of the "Great Old Ones" to deceive Wilmarth. HPL subtly mentions that the "mighty messenger" Nyarlathotep-- who was the narrative focus of a 1920 tale-- "shall put on the semblance of men." And this imposture proves necessary because, unlike the Outer Ones with their wings and claws, Nyarlathotep had already been established as being able to pass for human. So, in addition to THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. WHISPERER is a bonafide crossover story.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE NAMELESS CITY" (1921)

 

"The Nameless  City," while not a great story, is a key breakthrough for HPL with respect to "archaeological horror." From some of the story's allusions to his literary idol Lord Dunsany, I think it's likely that HPL realized that Dunsany had utilized tropes involving big, imposing buildings, and even though Dunsany wasn't dominantly writing horror, HPL probably made some connection between Dunsany's fantasy-use of the trope and its use in the domain of Gothic fiction, as per THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO.

The story's structure feels like a reworking of "The Statement of Randolph Carter," but one in which a single character, this time unnamed, makes a descent into a forbidding underground domain. The narrator is an archaeologist investigating an isolated "nameless city" that seems outside the bounds of human history. He eventually finds evidence of alien beings who may have built the city, and then he narrowly escapes some barely seen horror within the darkness. In fact, the ending is a little vague about whether the narrator does survive.

Not only does Dunsany have one of his works quoted in the text, the narrator also speaks of a domain from one of HPL's Dunsanian tales, "The Doom That Came to Sarnath," as if Sarnath is a real place in human history. "City" also includes HPL's first mentions of Abdul Alhazred and the famous "strange aeons" quote that will appear again in "Call of Cthulhu," though not until his next published story does HPL mention the book Abdul authored.

THE LOVECRAFT CONUNDRUM

The works of H.P. Lovecraft present a challenge to the newly born science of crossover-ology. Though there were assorted crossover stories in prose fiction prior to HPL, the Providence author, along with Cross Plains scribe Robert E. Howard, was among the first to tie together several fictional narratives with a common mythology.

But are all of those references true crossovers? I've formulated the theory that such crossovers require "agency" between at least two distinct icons or icon-groupings. A simple reference to the activity of a given icon in one narrative within a second icon's narrative is not sufficient, as per my reading of Dennis Wheatley's 1953 novel TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER.

Many Lovecraft stories don't directly show the horrific beings invoked in the narrative. THE DUNWICH HORROR is about the half-human spawn of a human woman and the extradimensional demon Yog-Sothoth, so the spawn is an icon, but Yog-Sothoth is never seen, and so has no agency in the story. "The Whisperer in Darkness" references most of the Great Old Ones of the so-called "Cthulhu mythos," but they're not actually in the story, and so that too may not be any sort of true crossover, but only a "null-crossover."

I've fantasized about doing a massive re-read of HPL, but that doesn't seem likely at present, However, a tome called THE NEW ANNOTATED H.P. LOVECRAFT has gathered together all the stories that editor Leslie Klinger thought most relevant to the Mythos, which, as Klinger helpfully notes, HPL only called "the Arkham Cycle" in his correspondence. Klinger does not include every story with a "Cycle" reference, for he omits the short novel DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. But the 22 stories selected probably comprise the better part of the Cycle, and so may be useful for my purposes here.

Just to bring up a minor comics-context, the annotated collection sports an introduction by Alan Moore, but IMO he doesn't say anything of importance about Lovecraft, much less crossovers (though Moore did work various HPL references into his LOEG works, including a "true crossover" appearance for Nyarlathotep in BLACK DOSSIER.

LEGENDS OF YESTERYEAR

In COSMIC ALIGNMENT I addressed the way certain real-life historical figures generated innominative characters based on them, but I didn't try to address what if any limits I might place on the simple appearance of historical figures of any kind within a fictional context. In the essay I spoke of four Old West figures in terms of the enduring "folk-legends" they had engendered in addition to their appearances in nominative fictional works.

... these [four characters] would all be high-charisma crossovers, since all of the folk-legends attached to these westerns would be *innominate* by nature.

I won't pause at this time for a rigorous definition of what I mean by "legends," but I think it important to stress that though there are hundreds of famous historical figures who have been committed to fiction, very few of them have taken on the quasi-unreal status of legends. Billy the Kid is such a legend. A later author can imagine him doing all sorts of unhistorical things-- becoming a vampire who fights Bloodrayne, or being taught gunmanship by the Two-Gun Kid, but each fictionalized Billy has that legendary quality. Thus even a story in which the Kid is a superordinate character, Billy sustains only a "crossover-charisma" when he appears alongside a stature-bearing character like Bloodrayne or Two-Gun.The vast majority of historical figures, even when they're shown doing unhistorical things, are still no greater than what the reader/audience knows of the originals. Winston Churchill is just Winston Churchill even if he's seen consulting with The Invaders. Adolf Hitler is just Hitler, even if he's depicted as the secret creator of The Red Skull.

This idea of "legendary stature/charisma" came to mind as I considered a pair of early seventies films by junk-auteur Jesus Franco. The first of the two, DRACULA PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN, was indubitably a crossover of two nominative icons from particular fictional works.

However, the quasi-sequel THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN depends on mixing the nominative figures of Frankenstein and his Monster with a brand-new character given the name Cagliostro. The movie uses the same pair of actors who played Frankenstein and Dracula in the earlier film, and a version of a character from the Stoker novel DRACULA also appears in both films. Franco's Frankenstein has a qualitative level of stature, but Cagliostro-- who isn't even explicitly compared to the 18th-century occultist-- lacks either stature or charisma capable of sustaining a crossover. Even if there had been some explicit connection to the historical figure, though, I would say, "Cagliostro is no Billy the Kid." 

The occultist only gets a few popular-fiction incarnations. He appears in a 1970s DOCTOR STRANGE continuity, for example. Wikipedia mentions several usages of Cagliostro's historical personage in various works, but  the only book I'd heard of was Alexander Dumas's 1846 BALSAMO-- and this was used as a partial basis for the oddball Orson Welles swashbuckler BLACK MAGIC. The latter two works may be the closest the historical character came to having "stature" in particular nominative texts, but they aren't sufficient for me to think of him as a figure of "legendary" status. Ergo, in Franco's RITES the intersection of Doctor Frankenstein with a man who might be the 18th-century occultist is at best a mashup, not a crossover.

The same would apply to any number of interactions between stature-icons and whatever historical figures they cross paths with-- Doctor Strange and Ben Franklin, Superboy and George Washington, or any time-traveling icon meeting any number of famous historical people-- on which I may expound further later on.

ADDENDUM: Of course when Adolf Hitler becomes a super-villain, as when a version of Der Fuhrer got turned into Marvel's "Hate-Monger," then the real historical figure has become totally subsumed by a fictional character. This type of fictionalized character becomes nominative, not innominate, and said character can be a "charisma-crossover" with another repeat-villain, as he is in SUPER VILLAIN TEAM UP. Also, if Hate-Fuhrer had been the star of his own villain-centric series, or part of an ensemble, for an impressive amount of time, he would obtain stature and would qualify as a stature-crossover with any other character with stature, much as Deadshot acquired stature and keeps it after his respectable run in the SUICIDE SQUAD ensemble.

GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 2

As I indicated at the end of GOLDEN AGENCY PT. 1. "vectors of agency" are what determine whether or not to judge a given crossover as being either high or low in terms of stature or charisma, or effectively null in terms of either.

Without re-examining all of my posts on the subject, I sense that I may have occasionally intimated that a given crossover might be "null" just because one of the icons involved doesn't do very much in the story. At least I see why one could come to that conclusion from reading my meditations on the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel FIGHTING MAN OF MARS, in which the one-shot main character interacts in very minor ways with two stature-icons (John Carter, Ulysses Paxton) and with one charisma-icon (Jason Gridley). But if I misspoke, I'm now clarifying that even a low agency-vector-- like simply being physically present while the story's Prime icon gets all the action-- still counts as a crossover. 

The critical difference between "really low stature or charisma" vs. "null stature or charisma" was best described in A CROSSOVER MISCELLANY PT. 1. In that essay, I contrasted two works' usage of the Dracula icon. In one, 1972's BLACULA, Dracula appears only to initiate Prince Mamuwalde into vampirism. This is a low-stature crossover because of the qualitative significance of the Dracula icon, and if for some reason the character used had been some comparatively minor figure who never enjoyed stature, then it would only be a charisma-crossover. But even very minor agency is still different from no agency at all, which is what one gets from my other example, 1935's DRACULA'S DAUGHTER, in which Dracula has been staked into oblivion, the Count has no agency, and so this is at best a null-crossover (though one in which the character of Countess Zaleska is stature-dependent upon her absent father).

Even a simple cameo in which a given character, whether possessed of stature or charisma from another work, stands and does nothing counts as having crossover status. For instance, as I recall the majority of videogame characters who cameo in WRECK-IT RALPH don't even say anything. But as long as such characters are "on stage" and capable of doing something, even just reciting a line of dialogue or showing a reaction, they have "potential agency." However, "repeat flashbacks," in which one text simply reproduces a scene that appeared in another text, do not possess any vectors of agency. If DRACULA'S DAUGHTER had included a scene from the 1931 film with one or more of the main characters, or had filmed a totally new scene purporting to represent action from that film, those "repeat flashbacks" would possess no vectors of agency, no matter what they showed the characters doing. A "non-repeat flashback," though, would be one which repeated part of the action but with new information added. The most famous examples of such a flashback are seen in movie serials, when a given chapter repeats an earlier chapter's scene in which the hero goes over the cliff, but adds a new scene with the hero managing to catch a handhold rather than being dashed on the ground below. Such a scene could possess a vector of agency, though it might or might not have any relevance to the second work's crossover status.

STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS ON STATURE

 In my essay PROTO CROSSOVERS AND SUCH PT. 2, I reversed myself on the determination as to whether "spinoff" characters who didn't get their own features in a timely fashion could be deemed "proto crossovers." In the case of Marvel's Black Panther, I decided that the period separating the Panther's introduction in 1965 and his joining an ensemble-team in 1968 did not invalidate either his first appearance or all appearances in between from proto crossover status. Since all of the Panther's appearances indicate that editor Stan Lee was trying to find some way to work the character into a regular berth, through the Panther's guest-shots in FANTASTIC FOUR and CAPTAIN AMERICA, that counts as an "intent toward centricity" in a major way.

However, it's a little harder to draw as straight a line with many other characters. Also spawned in the pages of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR was the character called "Him." This artificially created man-god disappeared after two 1967 issues of the FF comic, with no suggestion that he had any special destiny to work out (unlike the Panther in FF). Him didn't show up again until two years later, in THOR #165-166, wherein the character battled the Thunder God for the hand of Lady Sif. The end of that story, too, did not suggest that he was going on to any feature-status, either alone or in an ensemble.

So there's no clear indication that either Lee or Kirby had any particular intent to give Him starring-status. Kirby's main focus was on using his original story to dispute a philosophical point, but having done that, there's no strong sense in the THOR story that the King saw Him as anything but a convenient menace for a one-off tale. Since it was editor Stan Lee's job to keep his eyes peeled for promising franchises, and since he'd already made a few efforts to conceive of a spin-off series for the not dissimilar FF-character The Silver Surfer, Lee might have mulled over the possibility of using Him somewhere, but never really pursued it. Yet as Marvel fandom knows, Him was duly given a face-lift by Roy Thomas and Gil Kane, and rechristened with the more marketable name of Warlock, in 1972.

So five years expired before Him graduated from a Sub to a Prime, with no real evidence in between that anyone meant to spin the Original Orange Man off into his own feature. On the basis of that apparent lack of intent, I would tend to say that those five years are enough to invalidate Him's original appearances as "proto-crossovers." He's just a Sub character who's eventually given Prime stature long after his debut, simply because someone conceived of a way to rework the original concept. One may see a parallel to the television character Frasier Crane. In all the years that Frasier was a support-character on the series CHEERS, I saw no effort by the writers to suggest that they might want to spin him off until CHEERS came to an end, and the writers realized that the character of Frasier could sustain his own series. So neither Warlock nor Frasier Crane, within the period of their subordinate status, are proto-crossovers just by virtue of graduating to featured status.

Are there exceptions to my five-year "statute of stature limitations?" Probably, and I'll record them as I think of them. I tend to think that charisma of support-characters is even more limited. I've mentioned that in the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN the teamup of The Enforcers and The Green Goblin counts as a proto-crossover, because the Goblin was clearly intended to be a major continuing villain. Yet the later interaction of competing villains Green Goblin and Crime-Master was a null-crossover, because in his one and only story, the Crime-Master is killed and never comes back, meaning that he was never intended to be a regular recurring Spider-foe. But it's not necessary to kill off a character to show that the author doesn't mean to keep doing things with the support-character. 

A minor villain-mashup appears in BATMAN #62 (1950), wherein established villain Catwoman interacts with new crook-on-the-block Mister X. Had Mister X made even one more appearance in the BATMAN series, his appearance with Catwoman might be deemed a "proto"-- but since he never appeared again, X comes up "null." Note: any Bat-mavens reading this will remember that this 1950 opus is the one where Catwoman temporarily reforms. However, this has little effect on her overall persona, since she starts out the story in villain-mode and in future stories drops her uninteresting pose of "good girl" pretty quickly.

However, I wouldn't set any statute of limitations on charisma-crossovers resulting from the cross-alignment of Sub characters showing up in the "universes" of Primes wherein those Subs did not originally appear. A particularly nugatory character is the 1962 ANT MAN villain, The Hijacker, who was so lame that no one bothered to even reference his existence for the next fifteen years. Then it appears that Bill Mantlo, desiring a forgettable villain for a toss-off issue of MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE, revived Hijacker to fight The Thing and Black Goliath in 1977. Lame though The Hijacker was, he still counts as an Ant-Man villain, and whatever little charisma he had does get somewhat enhanced by his meeting with one major Marvel hero and one bush-leaguer (who at least had his own short-lived series).

PROTO CROSSOVERS AND SUCH

 As long as I've just devoted this post to picking apart one of my side observations in ONCE AND FUTURE STATURE (AND CHARISMA), I might as well rework almost the whole thing.

This part is still okay:

--a CROSSOVER depends on the association of two or more characters (or other focal entities) from established properties. The prospective reader may be familiar with all of the crossover figures, only one, or none at all, but the appeal is to pull in the reader who wants to see the association of established characters.

This part is fairly accurate except that it needs a term-change:

 --a SPINOFF depends on the association of one or more completely new characters (or focal entities) who "tailgate" on the back of one or more established characters/entities. The usual intent is to create a new franchise, usually one in serial form, that then stands for the most part independent of the established franchise. At best, then, a SPINOFF is a DEMI-CROSSOVER, using "demi" less in the exactly proportional sense of "half" than with the equally valid connotation of "lesser."

I've decided that "demi-crossover" does not capture the sense of what I'm talking about as the new term ***"proto-crossover." *** And on top of that, I've decided that I want to toss in a term for the "failed spinoff," which I will call the ***null-crossover,"*** because the intent was to use an established icon to promote the cosmos of a new icon, but said universe never comes into being, and from the POV of the audience, the icons who would have been the center of that universe just become Subs in the universe of the established Prime icon.

Now, occasionally there are some mashups that resemble proto-crossovers in the way the figures align. According to my current thought, the first Green Goblin appearance is a "proto-crossover," but only because the new villains teams up with a group of established villain-icons, the Enforcers. I also discussed in ONCE AND FUTURE a later Goblin in which the villain had an encounter  with a new villain, the Crime Master. I called this a "demi-crossover" at the time, but now I would not call it either that or "proto-crossover," because the Crime Master is slain at the conclusion of that two-part story. Since the story's authors do not intend for this villain to generate a cosmos of his own, within the sphere of Spider-Man's adventures or anywhere else, it is homologous with an "null-crossover," where the Sub icon will never be anything else.

And that's enough crossover-chopping for today.