MYTHCOMICS: "SANTA'S LITTLE HELLION" (JINGLE BELLE #1-2, 1999)

I didn't find but one concrescent Christmas-myth this year. (Grant Morrison, the last two issues of your KLAUS project let me down.) For several years, I had been familiar with the comical character of Jingle Belle, impish daughter of Santa Claus, but I hadn't read her earliest appearances from Oni Press. The two-part story I feature here, whose second part sported the title I'm using for both, was only the second time Paul Dini's character had appeared in a story, though an artist named Lynne Naylor is credited on Wikipedia for having made early concept drawings. Stephen DeStefano penciled the first story as well as this second outing.

One interesting aspect of this tale is that it draws upon a motif I've identified once or twice before: the trope of Santa Claus being "the master of the frozen North."  In the backstory to the main heroine's birth, a frost-creature, the Blizzard Wizard, controls the North Pole and uses his icy foot-soldiers (made of rancid ice-cream) to enslave the Northern elves. When the elves' queen Mirabelle seeks to free her people, the evil Wizard threatens to imprison her.

Enter Kris Kringle, which here is another name Dini uses for Santa, and one I'll use here just for variety's sake. Kris has mastered many of the animals of the arctic or has at least made common cause with them against the Wizard's tyranny, and with their help he invades the frosty fiend's sanctuary and defeats him. The liberated elves swear fealty to Kris by vowing to help him make toys for children, while Queen Mirabelle marries the hulking old fellow.

A century or so later, the only offspring of Kris and Mirabelle has reached her teenaged years, and she's a daddy's girl in reverse, alternately seeking to impress him and to put him down. In the story's first part, Jingle (whose technical full name would be Jingle Kringle) makes a combat-toy to impress her sire, but she fills it with live ammunition-- suggesting at very least a lack of ability to think critically. Then, knowing that Kris is supposed to make an appearance at a department store, she reroutes him to a Hanukah celebration and tries to fill in for him-- though again, in a half-hearted, distracted-teenager manner. However, before she reaches her goal, the Blizzard Wizard makes his move. He creates an ice-storm to sidetrack Jingle, feeding her a line that the bad weather proves that Santa's weather-subduing snow-globe must be malfunctioning. The villain rather easily talks Jingle into bringing him the globe, and while she's on her little jaunt, he uses the device to initiate his re-conquest of the North Pole.

Dini doesn't mean for the reader to think that Jingle is dumb, even though she does dumb things. Rather, a flashback at the start of issue #2 establishes that as a small child (presumably only a few decades old) she has considerable ambivalence about sharing her father with thousands of other children, so she always remains similarly ambivalent about Kris Kringle's mission in life-- meaning that she screws things up because she secretly wants her father to devote all of his attention to her. Conversely, when Kris and Mirabelle discuss their wild child, they conclude that they were too indulgent with her when she was young, so that now, when they attempt to instill discipline in Jingle, she merely resents it and keeps yearning for the happy days when she alone was the center of her parents' world.

And that ends the psychological myth, which I imagine Dini will never alter because it's the source of his comical conflict. But after her father and mother are captured by the Wizard, Jingle gets the chance to emulate her father's feat of defeating the tyrant. This means enlisting the arctic animals as Kris did, although, since Jingle is not as powerful, she ends using more scatterbrained methods...               

 Like dueling with the mammoth king of the narwhals, and winning the duel only because she comes up with the improbable strategy of plugging up the creature's blowhole...

And sending an incompetent assistant to enlist the polar bears, only to gripe when the elf comes back with a bevy of lemmings-- which manage to save the day anyway (not unlike Jingle herself).

The Wizard is defeated, but not surprisingly, she's still in the doghouse for her carelessness. So her "imitatio Santa" fails, but it's questionable as to whether she really wanted to make herself over into her father's image. Indeed, in all the subsequent JINGLE BELLE stories I've read, she just keeps rebelling against Kris's authority in one way or another-- which seems to be the perfect way to keep drawing his attention away from all those other kids. I don't think Dini had any desire to "solve" Jingle's psychological problems, since she's not meant to mature any more than Dennis the Menace. But "Hellion" is one of the few times Dini brought her psychological quirks into line with a metaphysical myth about Santa of the North Pole.    

Since Santa Claus is a legendary figure who possesses charisma rather than stature, the attempt to "spin off" Jingle from his "cosmos" only constitutes a charisma-crossover. However, when a later story featured the bratty elf-girl meeting with the characters of BLUE MONDAY, that tale stands as a stature-crossover. 

"MAD LOVE" (BATMAN ADVENTURES, 1994)

I've already done a short review of the animated adaptation of this one-shot comic here and gave that episode a strong mythicity rating. While a number of beat-for-beat adaptations don't necessarily duplicate the myth-discourse of their originals, both original and derivation are equally good at depicting the psychological morass in the mind of Harley Quinn.

Harley's co-creator Paul Dini has stated that he had no notion that the girl in the jester outfit was going to become one of the most enduring characters of nineties comics. Originally Dini only meant to give Joker a female henchwoman loosely akin to the molls who accompanied many male villains on the 1966 BATMAN teleseries. However, even the few molls who patterned their attire after that of their male leader were usually just there to look pretty. Even though Harley was not intended to appear more than once, Dini had her voiced by his college buddy Arleen Sorkin, and even in that one episode there was more back-and-forth between Harley and Joker than one ever found in a 1966 Bat-episode.

Since Harley's character evolved organically, it's possible that Dini never really thought about the Harley-Joker relationship changing in early episodes. However, MAD LOVE shows the writer, teamed with artist/co-creator Bruce Timm, finally decided to portray that interaction as fundamentally toxic. Joker was, after all, a manic killer, and it may not be coincidence that in her animated episodes Dini didn't actually show Harley callously killing anyone, however often she fought with Batman and his allies.

So LOVE starts out showing Joker and Harley trying to knock off Commissioner Gordon. Batman prevents this, but Harley is instrumental in stunning the crusader so that the two criminals escape. (Note: the cartoon improves on the Joker's farewell line, having the villain say, "may the floss be with you.") On the same page, though, Joker is seen to be completely ungrateful for Harley's help.

Batman then converses with Alfred, musing on Harley's origins. Two details that were omitted from the cartoon: that Harley got into college on a gymnastics scholarship, and that she apparently used sex to pad her college resume.

Meanwhile, Joker is taking it hard about getting defeated again, and he's so desperate for a new Batman-slaying scheme that he starts reviewing old schemes he already discarded. After being maltreated by her "puddin'" once again, Harley almost has a moment of clarity about her rotten love-life. 

This leads to an extended flashback, in which she goes to work at Joker's perennial prison, Arkham Asylum. She's secretly hoping to garner big-time secrets from some of the celebrity inmates in order to write a best-selling tell-all book, But Joker sees in Doctor Harleen Quinzell a mark to be played, and he plays her so well that she abandons all her small-time ambitions, making her into what she believes to be the perfect "Clown Princess of Crime."

But at the end of her flashback, Harley ends up blaming Batman for all of her troubles. She uses Joker's discarded piranha-fish death-trap and traps Batman in it. Batman's only hope is to play on her psychological vulnerabilities, in a more honest manner than Joker did, by convincing her to call Joker in to witness his eternal foe's demise.

Joker comes. Joker is not pleased that his girlfriend trumped him.

So Harley's reward for patterning herself after a clown-themed stone killer is almost getting killed. Batman escapes thanks to having brought Joker into the mix, and Joker seems to "die" in his own big fall. At story's end, Harley returns to Arkham but as an inmate. This time, she almost comes to terms with her own egotistical follies. But Dini wasn't quite ready for Harley's reform, and LOVE ends with her re-descent into the best known "amour fou" of the superhero genre.

But she didn't stay lost in that delusion, and over time Harley became the poster girl for women working their way out of toxic relationships with men, as seen in the 2016 SUICIDE SQUAD. (No one seems interested in whether her girl-on-girl friendship with Poison Ivy might prove equally-- or even literally-- just as toxic, but -- baby steps, baby steps.)

NEAR-MYTHS: HUSH (2003), HEART OF HUSH (2008)

 

HUSH, the 2003 work by Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee, is a work I would have liked to rate as a mythcomic. It’s definitely one of the best Batman stories to have appeared within the rather limited period of the twenty-first century. Even if the story had been crap, I imagine I still would have got a buzz at seeing how Jim Lee—by no means a favorite of mine—rendered the Bat-characters with his lush, photo-realistic art. Yet Lee’s contribution is matched by that of Jeph Loeb, who spins a cool mystery involving many of Batman’s famous foes, as well as introducing a new one, the titular Hush, who may go on to classic status eventually. HUSH is certainly a much better story than Loeb’s LONG HALLOWEEN, another Bat-villain rally from about five years previous. But try though I did, I didn’t find enough of a symbolic discourse to make this a mythcomic—though there’s at least an interesting bachelor-thread relating to Batman’s alienation from all the other characters who comprise his Bat-family.

Hush makes his first appearance in the collected work’s second chapter, entitled “The Friend.” The first words of the master villain—largely responsible for the assemblage of eight Bat-villains as part of a grand anti-Batman plot—are also on the subject of friendship, quoting Aristotle: “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.” Hush’s true identity is a big deal in the narrative, but it’s old news now, so—

USUAL SPOILERS

Hush is actually Bruce Wayne’s childhood friend, one Thomas Elliott, a character whom Loeb created from whole cloth. I’ve seen one review that scorned the new character’s introduction as a transparent setup, but I’m more interested in whether or not Loeb succeeded in painting a good psychological picture of Elliott as more than just “a dark version of Bruce Wayne.” For the most part, Loeb succeeds in giving Elliott some psychological heft. Given that content, the mystery angle didn’t matter as much to me, not even when the character’s appearance—that of a man in a trench coat with bandages over his face-- is meant to suggest that of a more established evildoer.

Loeb and Lee model Hush’s general appearance not upon the iconic visuals of Two-Face, but upon that character’s appearance in Frank Miller’s THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. In that work, Two-Face’s disfigurement has been cured and he appears for the most part only a man in a coat, wearing surgical bandages over his face. Since HUSH also features an appearance of Two-Face's alter ego, attorney Harvey Dent, it seems clear that Loeb sought to trick the reader into thinking that Hush was simply a new incarnation of an old foe. Of course, had that been the case, then the writer would’ve had no reason to devote so much space to Thomas Elliott—who is apparently killed late in a late chapter, some time prior to the Big Reveal. As for Dent, he ends up being almost the only former Bat-foe who’s on Batman’s side, aside from the always mercurial Catwoman. Hush’s reasons for warring on Batman and Bruce Wayne are reasonably consistent, though they never become more interesting than the high-octane fights between the heroes—Batman, Nightwing, Tim Drake-Robin, and Huntress—and such opponents as Joker, Harley Quinn, Riddler, Poison Ivy, Killer Croc, Scarecrow, Lady Shiva, and Ra’s Al Ghul. On top of all this, Superman is also unwillingly dragooned to fight on the side of the devils, and Catwoman, despite being on the side of the angels this time, gets an intense battle with another goodguy, Huntress. To be sure, without a penciller as skilled as Lee, most of these punch-ups would have been no better than those of the average comic book.

Hush’s plan to destroy Batman fails of course, and he appears to “die” at the hands of his doppelganger Harvey Dent. Another five years later, Hush, who had made one or two intervening appearances, commanded the spotlight once more in HEART OF HUSH by writer Paul Dini and penciler Dustin Nguyen. There’s far more detail about Elliot’s background and his relationship with childhood friend Bruce Wayne, and while Catwoman once again plays a romantic role in the hero’s life, there aren’t nearly enough other villains here to qualify as a rally. Nguyen’s art is more attenuated and stylized than that of Lee, emphasizing mood rather than action, but this matches Dini’s attempt to flesh out the central villain, even expanding on the character’s repeated citations of Aristotle. Still, though HEART OF HUSH provides a literal “loss of heart” for one character, Dini doesn’t extend Hush’s potential into the realm of the mythic any more than Loeb did. Still, I certainly think the character has more potential than many other latter-day additions to the mythos.