MYTHCOMICS: "PYRRHIC VICTORY" (INCREDIBLE HULK #344, 1988)

 

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The first panel of the story "Pyrrhic Victory" explains the well-known phrase via the Plutarch quote that gave rise to the idea of a pointless triumph. Later in the story, the phrase comes up again in the reflections of a military base commander. The commander's forces are getting wiped out by the pawns of the insidious super-villain The Leader, and so "pyrrhic victory" doesn't really apply to the military man's situation. Arguably the phrase might have applicability elsewhere in the story, but the Leader's vile plot is not the main subject of the story. Nor are the actions of his super-powered henchmen, Rock and Redeemer, who apparently take their names from an old Christian hymn. Most of the Leader's actions in "Victory" amount to Peter David and Todd MacFarlane wrapping up the various plot-threads they inherited from former writer Al Milgrom, as I covered in more depth here. Within two more issues for INCREDIBLE HULK, the first phase of David's long tenure on the feature would end-- a phase I might more accurately call the "D/M" collaboration, since I'm convinced that David and MacFarlane were equally important in the history of the Gray Hulk. The two of them weren't the first to create a Gray Hulk, who appeared only in the first issue of the Hulk's debut, nor were they the first to revive that iteration of the character. But together they created the first Gray Hulk anyone in fandom cared about-- and it was because of issues like HULK #344.

But to make the New Gray Hulk interesting, the D/M team borrowed a lot more from the Lee/Kirby creation than just the monster-hero's coloring. The two panels above from INCREDIBLE HULK #1 (1962) show Lee and Kirby trying to cobble together their new myth from many old ones-- the Frankenstein Monster, the moon-cursed Wolf Man, Mister Hyde, and-- purely in terms of the sexual politics of the character-- both King Kong and Beauty and the Beast. Betty Ross is never the least bit attracted to the Hulk as Beauty is to Beast, nor does he want her, since to him she's just a constant reminder of his weakling alter ego. Betty fears Hulk the way Ann Darrow fears the illimitable brute force of Kong, a mythic exaggeration of the discrepancy between male and female power. Betty is more attracted to Banner, a man whose character seems a complete opposite to her gung-ho military father, and a man who breaks down weeping in front of her. Yet even before she's even met the Hulk, who's initially just a presence she's heard described by her father's soldiers, she's seen above intuiting the connection between Banner and the Hulk, and yet also sensing "sadness" in the gruesome gray creature.            

Betty Ross remained in the Hulk's orbit for most of the character's existence up to 1988, and whatever mythic potential she might've possessed quickly devolved as she became just "the girl." But one thing the D/M team evolved independently of any predecessors: the idea of having Betty become pregnant by Bruce Banner. I'm not sure how much David might have borrowed from others regarding the idea that Banner was emotionally stunted thanks to childhood abuse. However, the idea that Betty can't bring herself to share the momentous news of her condition with Banner seems novel.

And so, although Betty doesn't intend to tell the Hulk her news any more than she plans to tell Banner, she feels the need to connect with the emotion-filled brute within the repressed Banner. Such psychodrama would have been impossible with Dumb Green Hulk, but it works perfectly with Cruel Gray Hulk. Again, his main attitude toward Betty Ross is much the same as it is toward his alter ego: both of them have tried to erase him from existence. At her insistence he takes far away from the other support-characters for a private talk, and he chooses to take her to the wintry peak of a mountain, letting her suffer for the sake of the connection she wants. And yet, in the above page, he brings up an incident that Betty did not; that in a previous story, Betty was injured by being in Banner's arms when he made his change to his monster-self. Clearly Hulk doesn't just despise Banner for physical weakness, but also for all the human failings to which his other self is vulnerable. And then there's this extraordinary conclusion...

   

       
   

David may have orchestrated most of this interlude, in which Betty demands that Hulk reveal "Bruce's real love and passion," despite all of the man-monster's blustering. Still, this sequence also shows a quality for which MacFarlane was almost never celebrated: the soulfulness of a brute "tamed" by the one power that even the mightiest man cannot conquer: the woman's power to bring forth new life. 

Sadly, after "Victory" Betty takes a back seat to the D/M team finishing up the Old Order of Things, before MacFarlane left for greener pastures and David orchestrated the second phase of his HULK tenure. There's one interesting moment where Betty tells another perennial support-character, Rick Jones, that she might not have the baby. The A-word is not spoken, and she does not justify her sentiments, though any reader would probably conclude that she had qualms about birthing a child with gamma-genes. But due to the events of #346, the Gray Hulk disappears and later resurfaces in a new life, and much later the pregnancy is terminated, so to speak, so that there was no clear line between the original plot of "Betty is Enciente" and its later developments.

As for the story's title, as I said, it barely if at all applies to the military battle for which it's invoked. But one might say that Betty Ross achieves a "victory" of sorts in that she wins the psychodrama-conflict between her and the Hulk. But that was just one engagement, and since the war proved inconclusive, maybe like the legions of Pyrrhus, she lost almost as much as she won. 

THOUGHTS ON PETER DAVID

 I wasn't sure I'd write anything about Peter David following his passing on May 25 of this year. Though I once saw a fan fulsomely compare David's comics work to that of Steve Gerber, I'd probably see more comparison to Len Wein. With both writers, I read a fair amount of work that I liked, but probably more than I wasn't crazy about. But then, Steve Gerber himself said (and I paraphrase from his JOURNAL interview) that everyone who makes writing his career inevitably turns out some dreck in addition to some good stuff. Every invested reader makes his own estimation as to whether the good stuff outweighs the dreck or vice versa.

This principle inheres even with specialized criticism like mine. A writer who follows certain formulas in order to keep the checks coming may or may not be able to keep up an interesting flow of either correlations, cogitations, or both together. Said writer is more likely to concentrate on the lateral virtues, since those are the factors that draw in committed buyers. From what I know of David's comics-work, he almost always devoted his efforts to what I called "the basic serial," defined thusly here:

The basic serial in most iterations is not meant to possess an overriding structure. Rather only its constituent parts, be they short stories, long arcs, or other forms, usually display the sort of patterns that can be judged in terms of concrescence.     

Yet I must admit that I probably didn't have as thorough a knowledge of David's work as with others who worked on long-term serials. During the 1980s, when David rose to comic-book prominence, I bought none of his long-term serials-- HULK, AQUAMAN or SUPERGIRL-- as they appeared for purchase. I only picked up odd issues from quarter-boxes and later re-read them in correct sequence. So this week I decided to read through the first twenty-something issues of David's famous 12-year run on INCREDIBLE HULK, to gather a better sense of what he'd accomplished and how it differed from what others had been doing, that had resulted in HULK being a low-selling Marvel title.

Before David became the regular scripter, he was preceded by Al Milgrom, who set up two ongoing plot-threads which would also dominate David's first creative phase on the title. One was that Bruce Banner became associated with a SHIELD-sponsored project, The Hulkbusters, as  did his girlfriend Betty Ross and his perpetual foe General Ross-- all devoted to finding ways to counteract the Hulk's outbursts of violence. Another was that during one experiment to cancel the Hulk's power over Banner, a new "Gray Hulk" was born in HULK #324 (1986), somewhat smaller and less strong than Green Hulk. Milgrom clearly meant this Hulk as a callback to the very first issues of the character's debut, where the heroic monster had some brief moments of potential villainy and seemed more werewolf-like, transforming only at night. David collaborated with artist Dwayne Turner on one issue, HULK #327, but Milgrom remained the main writer until issue #330, which concluded with the death of General Ross. That issue debuted the work of the artist who would remain teamed with David during the aforementioned "first phase:" Todd MacFarlane, who had yet to become a top Marvel artist via his tenure on SPIDER-MAN, much less becoming even more generally famous for Image Comics and his feature SPAWN. 

I've never seen either David or MacFarlane go into detail about their pivotal collaboration. Given how the two of them feuded when David started negatively reviewing MacFarlane's Image works in the fan press around 1993, I doubt either of them would have yielded a balanced account of that interaction. But my critical impression is that both of them, though thrown together by circumstance, shared a desire to use Milgrom's Gray Hulk concept to give Banner's alter ego a meaner, more visceral edge. Milgrom may have intended to do something similar himself, but together David and MacFarlane managed to give the HULK title a more unpredictable, horror-movie mood, lasting from #331 to #346, with only one issue drawn by another artist. Throughout the first phase, Gray Hulk continued to contend against the Hulkbusters and grisly villains like Half-Life, but in this sequence of stories the dominant evildoer was a new incarnation of The Leader-- who, in keeping with the increased use of violence in 1980s commercial comics, was also no longer playing with kid gloves. Indeed, the first phase culminates with The Leader putting his old enemy through an emotional wringer by threatening to blow up a small town-- which he does, killing five thousand inhabitants just to produce a few gamma-mutants. This end sequence showed some decent myth-content-- not least the way the Leader's private endeavors mirror those of the government's plan to stockpile gamma bombs-- but it didn't meet my criteria for a mythcomic. 

I did find one mythcomic within the David-MacFarlane run, which I'll analyze in a separate essay. All of the Hulkbusters storylines were wrapped up in #346, except for the little matter of Betty Ross's revelation that she was pregnant with Banner's child. Yet, instead of following that plot-thread, David launched a new chapter in Gray Hulk's life. The character walked away from his old rampaging existence and took on the identity of "Mister Fixit," a bodyguard for a Las Vegas casino-owner. This was arguably the most famous development in David's long HULK run, and though I don't remember getting much out of this new phase, I'd have to give the series a re-read for further consideration.  I'm not sure what David had in mind for Betty's pregnancy, but as Wikipedia notes, David's editor dictated that Bruce and Betty would not have a child, and so she lost the infant by miscarriage. Ironically, David had Betty consider abortion of her child, who might or might not have carried gamma-genes, though the "A" word was never directly spoken. I mention this just to spotlight one of many aspects of commercial comics that changed once they were directed not at children but at older hardcore fans.

For whatever it might be worth, though I'm not David's biggest fan, I did assign to him one other mythcomic, discussed here. But that was something of a one-off. I appreciate that David vastly improved the reputation of the Incredible Hulk, albeit in what I'm curently calling "ontocosmic" rather than "epicosmic" terms, so I'm glad he did at one good Hulk-myth that ranks with the Lee-and-Kirby origin.                                  

DEATHBIRD DESCENDS

On the passing of Harlan Ellison this week, I wrote:

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I never met Ellison, though I saw him when he spoke at a local convention, maybe in the 1980s. He worked the crowd really well, saying that everyone in our city was "bug***k*, which got great applause, though I'm sure he said the same damn thing anywhere else he spoke. He read his story "All the Lies That Were My Life," which I didn't care for, but his reading was riveting. I saw him a couple more times at San Diego Comicon, usually teamed with Peter David, with whom he had worked out a cute routine of pretend animosity.

DAVID: "I'm just being puckish."

ELLISON: "Well, puck you."

His sixties classic tales made a big impression on me, particularly "Deathbird" and "Repent, Harlequin." I was still writing occasional reviews for COMICS JOURNAL when he and Gary Groth were sued by Michael Fleischer because of remarks Ellison had made about Fleischer in a JOURNAL interview. Personally, I think Fleischer was less offended by what Ellison had said than by the fact that a JOURNAL reviewer had just torpedoed Fleischer's prose book CHASING HAIRY around the same time. I felt like I had a ringside seat as Groth and Ellison became deadly enemies after Fleischer's suit was dismissed. The feud was incredibly convoluted, involving other players like Peter David and Charles Platt, and the magazine GAUNTLET devoted a long, well-researched essay to the mutual bad behavior of both parties, though all that took place before Ellison sued Groth to block the publication of a book touching on their involvement.

I disagreed with a lot of what both Groth and Ellison wrote, though I sympathize with Ellison's love of popular fiction. He was also an unapologetic "comic book guy" at a time when his compeers in fantastic fiction would not dream of being associated with that tawdry medium. 

I'm tempted to sum up his career with the words, "Not always deep, but never dull."

MYTHCOMICS: "CRACKS" (SHOWCASE 94 #7, 1996)

I didn't follow much of the KNIGHTFALL continuity in the 1990s Batman titles. I knew at least generalities: that, after the original Batman had his back broken by the villain Bane, a substitute for the Caped Crusader had to be found. One Jean-Paul Valley took over the mantle, albeit wearing a high-tech suit-- possibly an editorial comment on the then-popular vogue for Image-style heroes-- and passing himself off as the authentic crimefighter.

I've usually found Peter David's writing, however entertaining, to be antithetical to the notion of symbolic discourse. However, David succeeds in this "imitation Batman" story due to two other overriding factors: that the art is supplied by Craig Russell and Michael Gilbert (both credited for both penciling and inking chores), and that here David is able to work with the rich mythology of the Bat-universe.

As the Jae Lee cover makes clear, this is a story devoted to Batman's frequent foe, the Penguin. In contrast to the Golden Age version reviewed here, the nineties version of the criminal no longer involve him committing clever, bird-based robberies. "Cracks" is structured like a crime story, focused on the Penguin-- whose criminal status is concealed under the veneer of respectable
activity-- being interrogated by Commissioner Gordon at police headquarters. At the time the story opens, "Armored Batman" has been operating for some time, though many persons-- including both Gordon and Penguin-- suspect that Valley is not the real deal.

The wordless first page establishes that the Bat-signal-- artfully reflected in the Penguin's monocle-- is shining in the sky, and the dialogue on the next relays that the signal has gone unanswered for half an hour. Gordon needs Batman because Penguin has boasted of having kidnapped the Commissioner's wife, and that she's doomed to perish in a giant egg about to fill with poison gas. What does Penguin want, to reveal her location?

Of course, Penguin isn't going to reveal his desire right away. He masks it by blathering about the evolution of birds from dinosaurs, and states that both he and Gordon are dinosaurs because they came from a time that valued "style and finesse." (Implicitly another shot at the banality of Image Comics, which David was wont to criticize more than a few times in that decade.) Then the villain challenges the cop to figure out what he Penguin wants in exchange for the information.

Eventually, after much cat-and-mouse dialogue, Penguin does reveal what he wants-- to affirm his suspicion that New Batman is a "decoy"-- but Gordon takes it further. Forced to play psychologist, the cop baits the villain by asserting that he suffers from "the most massive inferiority complex in all of Gotham," and that the real reason he wants so badly to know about Batman's fate is because he wants "to be treated by Batman as if he's important." There was nothing startlingly new in this observation. Penguin's first appearance played upon the scorn he received for his birdlike appearance, and later iterations, especially one by Denny O'Neil, made his complex explicit. But David does add, in counterpoint to the evocative art, a leitmotif in which Penguin constantly throws bird-metaphors in the Commissioner's face, and then finishes by claiming, "We both worship winged creatures, but I can still function without mine. Can you?"

Gordon's final strategy is one which Batman himself has been known to employ: dragging an unrepentant villain to a rooftop, and asking him if he wants to learn how to fly.

However, to the cop's good fortune, Valley-Batman then appears on the same rooftop, revealing the reason for his absence: that he'd already ferreted out the location of the Commissioner's wife, and didn't want to waste time answering the signal. And though the reader knows it's not the real Batman, the hero makes clear that, as far as crooks like Penguin are concerned, he'll always "be there" to stop them. Then the final page once more echoes the image of the Bat-signal reflected in Penguin's monocle-- only this time as an symbol of the "cracks" in his pose of superiority: his existential fate, insofar as a comic-book villain can have one, to suffer eternal defeat at the hands of a hero.