PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4

 Here I'll discuss an "alignment-inversion" like the one primarily addressed in Part 3, where the main topic was the alteration that took place when Lois Lane, a Sub to Superman's Prime in the SUPERMAN titles, assumed the Prime posture in the LOIS LANE feature. I said that despite being in the position of a Prime for some years, Lois Lane's status is dominantly that of a Sub-- just like another subordinate-ensemble member who never had Prime status (Perry White) -- because she owes her existence to Superman.  

A similar situation pertains with the cast of the long-lived ARCHIE franchise. Because the titular character makes his first appearance alongside the equally durable characters of Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones, I gave some consideration as to whether Archie was the series' only Prime, or if he, Betty, Jughead, and the slightly later additions of Veronica and Reggie were all Primes within a superordinate ensemble. But it seems to me that the main focus is upon the simple ordinariness of Archie Andrews, "America's Typical Teenager," and that thus the other four are meant to play off him in one way or another. That makes the other four Archie's primary subordinary ensemble, who are the ones who appear most of the time in any ARCHIE story, while a secondary Sub ensemble is formed by other teens (Dilton Doily, Moose and his girl) and various teachers and parents, whose usage is more occasional. 

Thus when in the late forties-early fifties MLJ bestowed ongoing titles for all four Subs, their situation was the same as that of Lois Lane, for no matter how long their individual titles persisted, they were always determined as Charisma Dominant Subs. For the record, the title devoted only to Jughead (ARCHIE'S PAL JUGHEAD), and the one to both Betty and Veronica (BETTY AND VERONICA), lasted into the 1980s. The first title devoted to the acerbic Reggie only lasted five years, 1949-1954, but the concept was revived under a new name (REGGIE AND ME) in 1966 and then lasted until 1980.    

  

However, the setup changes somewhat for a group of phase-shifted variations on the originary characters. The first full wave of Silver Age superheroes had swelled forth at least by 1958, meaning that in 1966 the wave had persisted in the comics for roughly seven years before people began hearing about ABC'S new BATMAN series. Said news began the second wave, in, which many comics companies joined the spandex parade, and MLJ decided to produce spoofy superheroic versions of four of the firm's five best-known characters. Archie was the first, transforming into the noble Pureheart (who sometimes lost his powers if a girl kissed him, implicitly threatening his super-purity). Jughead became Captain Hero and Betty became Superteen, and all three had separate as well as crossover adventures, though it would take a fan more dogged than I to sort out the "continuity" of these haphazard stories.  Still, not even the naivest fan of the time would have believed that all three super-teens were continuous with their absolutely ordinary identities as middle-class/upper-class adolescents. So the whole "super-Archieverse" can't be judged on the same terms as the originary proposition. In essence, all of these superheroes have phase-shifted away from their models. In these stories, it's possible for Betty and Jughead to be Primes in their superhero personas, as much as Archie.   

But there was also-- EVILHEART, the costumed persona of nasty Reggie Mantle. He didn't tend to have separate adventures as did Super-Betty and Super-Jughead. Usually if not always, Pureheart was in those adventures too, because the whole point of Reggie Mantle was that he existed to rag on Archie Andrews, so that's what Evilheart did to Pureheart. So it might sound like Evilheart might be dominantly a Sub antagonist, and his independent adventures would be in the mold of, say, The Joker having his own feature in which he fought with villains and heroes, triumphing over the former and losing to the latter. Evilheart for his part enjoys his first supervillain team-up with none other than Mad Doctor Doom, who was first introduced in the pages of LITTLE ARCHIE in 1962.      

And yet, the Mad Doctor Doom episode loosely anticipates the pattern of all the later Evilheart stories, where he more often ends up making common cause with Pureheart against some third menace, even if Super-Reggie is primarily motivated by the desire to one-up Super-Archie. So for that reason I do regard Evilheart as being just as much a Prime as the other three, because all four super-spoofs exist in their own cosmos and are, to use my new term again, "discontinuous variations."    

EMINENT ICONS AND PROPOSITIONS PT. 2

 Before preceding to the discussion of the new category "eminence," which will connote "the organizational power of centric icons," I'll touch on another line of thought about centricity, though one that, unlike the resonance formulation, won't need to be discarded.

The 2020 essay EQUAL AND UNEQUAL VECTORS OF AUTHORIAL WILL, PART 1 was my first attempt to apply Whitehead's concept of vectors to my Schopenhauer-influenced concept of authorial will, going back to 2009's SEVEN WAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER. The definition I cited for "vectors" is worth repeating.

A quantity that has magnitude and direction and that is commonly represented by a directional line segment whose length represents the magnitude and whose orientation in space represents the direction.

"Magnitude and direction" are still applicable in my system, but it's worth reiterating that, in contrast to the discrete forces we know from physics, these are vectors of the author's intentionality-- often conscious intention, sometimes subconscious as well. The author gives his centric icon or icons the magnitude and direction that makes its/their vector superordinate to those qualities in other icons. But he does so because the proposition he most wants to advance can best be organized around one icon rather than any of the others.  

I use the phrase "the proposition he most wants to advance" in keeping with my previous observations that a given work may advance many propositions as easily as one. In short narratives, there's usually only room for one proposition. However, longer works can incorporate a wide variety of propositions. In MYSTERY OF THE MASTER THREAD PART 2, my main example was Melville's monolithic MOBY DICK, and I argued that the organizing proposition of the book-- what I called the "master thread," and later rechristened "the master trope"-- was that of the "myth of the Hunter and the Hunted." 

I'm not sure that, prior to this essay-series, I'd ever noticed that over the course of my investigations, I had attributed an organizing principle both to the abstract propositions put forth by a fictional narrative AND to the icons within that narrative, the icons which (as I mentioned here) make possible audience-identification. However, after discarding the unhelpful concept of resonance as a metaphor for the organizing principle, I found myself turning back to the thoughts expressed in the 2013 essay JUNG AND SOVEREIGNTY.

Wherever Jung derived the term "sovereignty" from, he used in a manner apposite to my own: to suggest an organizing factor within the multiplicities of the human mind. His argument doesn't have any great relevance to literary criticism, but I did consider using his term for my principle of organization. However, the word "sovereign" suggests an uncompromising rulership, which is not quite in line with some of my literary concepts. Yet a trip to the synonym dictionary gave me "eminence," and that birthed my new term birthed my new term for all of a narrative's organizing factors, whether related to icons, propositions, or some combination thereof. It also didn't hurt the new term's appeal that Philip Wheelwright had used the term "eminent instances" in his book THE BURNING FOUNTAIN. Wheelwright's use of the phrase, appropriately derived from Melville's BILLY BUDD, is not identical to my evocation of the word here, but the base meaning still seems roughly parallel.

Lastly-- and there must be an ending, for the time being-- I prefer "eminence" to "sovereignty" because the former seems more malleable. In PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 3, I asserted that when Lois Lane stars in her own series, a "phase shift" occurs in which she and Superman reverse their respective subordinate/superordinate positions. This alteration in their respective centricities is elucidated by my formulation that Lois, a charisma-figure within SUPERMAN stories, shifts into a position of eminence while Superman's eminence recedes. This takes place for the purpose of relating propositions not possible in the SUPERMAN features-- propositions about what it might mean to be "Superman's girlfriend," which are also the sort of stories might have held particular appeal for young female readers. I added that Lois will probably always be considered "charisma-dominant" because Superman is, culturally speaking, a much more "eminent instance." But she does still have a low degree of stature thanks to having been in a position of organizational eminence.          

ADDENDUM: I must admit that the word "eminence" doesn't automatically connote the idea of an organizational principle. But a person who is "eminent" is, like a sovereign, often the person whose authority serves to organizes others into action, and thus the word works for me to denote how authors organize the elements of their stories/propositions to have a desired effect. An interesting coincidence: the day after writing this, I encountered the word "eminence" in its little-used geographical sense-- that of "a natural elevation"-- in a re-read of Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH.      

ICONS AND IDENTIFICATION

In MY SHORTEST POST YET I sated that what I term "icons" are the parts of narrative through which readers identify with various presences in fictional narrative, and without such identificatory figures, no one would ever invest any thought or feeling into the broad plot-scenarios called "tropes." This assertion brings me back to an elaboration of my "law of identification," which I gave its first full elaboration in the 2011 essay HERE COMES DAREDEVIL, THE MAN WITHOUT IDENTITY.                                                                                                                                                                                   Briefly, the essay addressed a speaker's failure to define fictional characters as vessels of identification, choosing to simply deem them "unreal" by a positivist philosophy. I responded by contrasting my law of identification with the "law of identity" attributed to philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, to wit:                                                           

"Daredevil is not a phenomenon with a real existence (at least not in materialistic/positivistic terms), but a fictional construct.

Ergo, neither Daredevil nor any other PURELY fictional character is subject to the "law of identity."

Rather, the Man Without Fear is, like all other purely fictional characters, is governed by "the law of identification."

Now, there is a "law of identification" out there in the Googleverse that has been coined in respect to religious matters. However, my current usage applies principally to literature. It can be *applied* to religion with some alteration, which may make for some future essay.

My law goes like this: Because Daredevil is a construct whose sole purpose is to be identified with, whenever anyone does so, that person brings into being the only reality (or "truth" if one prefers that term) that Daredevil can possibly have.

Therefore, neither a foolish child nor a discriminating adult is in any way wrong to say "I'm Daredevil," as long as either of them has actually identified with the character. Both would be wrong to apply that identificatory process to the world of real phenomena, as the poster points out in his tut-tutting manner. But if the act of identification is real, one can say with complete accuracy, "I am Daredevil-- or David Copperfield-- or Captain Ahab-- or Freewheelin' Franklin Freekowski."                                                                   

I have sometimes wondered if, before Plato wrote down a sentence or two that Socrates may (or may not) have spoken, these respective philosophers were aware of pre-Socratic traditions, or even religious concepts, that asserted that two unalike things could be the same in some quasi-mystical fashion, and that the later philosophers were reacting against that idea in forming the rudiments of the "law of identity." Be that as it may, art, particularly in the form of literature, was already devoted to forging identification between fictional characters who did not exist and non-fictional readers/audiences who enjoyed at least a temporally fixed existence. In any event, it should be further noted that no individual's identification with a fictional character is completely identical with another reader's identification. It's only the broad process of bringing a character "to life" that is identical in all "real readers." The reader takes his cue from the expectations that the author sets up as to the "reality" of the text. But that reality can fluctuate, as noted in this essay: '"phase shift" is my term for the process by which a function in literature-- which parallels my term "icon"-- shifts from one state of being (within the "horizontal" world of its purely fictional existence) to another state of being.' By extension, this means that although in the real world, Old Gene Phillips sustains "the law of identity" with Young Gene Phillips, there is no such law governing Superboy and Superman, or Dick Grayson Robin with Dick Grayson Nightwing. The latter pairings have different end-results for their identificatory processes, even if the overall process remains the same, and so Superman can be "phase shifted" into the different identity of Superboy-- even though anyone reading the stories of either character knows that they are the same character at different age-ranges.         

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 6

In Part 4 I discussed a couple of modern pop-fiction films that used phase shifts to re-arrange the position of Biblical figures so that a given superordinate character became subordinate, etc.

I found myself recently applying the same logic to the traditional story of Little Red Riding Hood, or, as the story is named by Charles Perrault in the first recorded written version, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Various authorities aver that Perrault built up the element of the red cape, for reasons one can only imagine. I suspect that when the story opens, he also provided a touch of verisimilitude that oral stories usually don't bother with:

As she was going through the wood, she met with a wolf, who had a very great mind to eat her up, but he dared not, because of some woodcutters working nearby in the forest.

This is probably an implicit answer to any skeptic who might wonder why the wolf didn't just eat Little Red on the spot. An oral taleteller probably would not have bothered to provide a reason for the wolf's motives but instead would have simply emphasized the ritual nature of the setup and the resolution. Such storytellers also might not have bothered with the moral Perrault applies to the story's conclusion, which ends with the wolf simply devouring Red after having eaten her grandma.

Moral: Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say "wolf," but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.

Moral or no moral, I think most of the traditional versions emphasize Little Red as the superordinate icon, while the Wolf is a subordinate one. Little Red is meant to be the sacrificial innocent, whether she's slain or saved, and the whole setup of the Wolf-in-Grandma's clothing argues against the story originally being very responsive to verisimilitude. If we were dealing with a tale where things made sense-- even allowing for a world where beasts can talk and put on clothes when they please-- then Little Red ought to run out of the door of Grandma's house the moment she sees the Wolf dressed as an old woman. But she doesn't run: she puts forth one question after another, and the Wolf responds with a repetitive litany. The litany is certainly meant to build suspense at the very least, but it also creates the sense of Red being an innocent who's powerless against the forces of evil-- possibly masculine evil, if one reads the story in those terms.

Popular retellings, many of which are comedies, can go either way. In one of the Jay Ward FRACTURED FAIRY TALES, Red is still the star, but she's a conniving jezebel who's seeking to skin an innocent wolf. 

However, the 1947 Terrytoons short "The Wolf's Pardon" focuses purely on the Wolf. He gets out of prison for his persecutions of both the Three Little Pigs and Little Red. He quickly finds that things have changed, for the Pigs kick the Wolf's ass and he learns that Red, though mature now, is a man-hungry "uggo."

An ever weirder phase shift appears in both of the HOODWINKED animated comedies. The original Riding Hood narrative gets tossed out the window, and in both films Red, Grandma and the Wolf all end up as allies against a common foe.

 

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 5

In the second part of PHASED AND INTERFUSED, in which I discussed how the icon of "Dick Grayson Robin" phase shifted his way into the separate identity of Nightwing. Here I'll deal with the retconned origins of the "First Wonder Girl," who was declared to have had a substantial existence in the annals of the WONDER WOMAN continuity, starting in WONDER WOMAN #105 (1959).

(Side note: was this the first time a DC story used the exact words "Secret Origin" in a title?)

Writer Robert Kanigher then continued to alternate between grown Wonder Woman and her teen self in the comic, and some fans have speculated that even in 1959, Kanigher might've been trying to reach kids who were tantalized by all the emphasis on "teens" in pop culture, in order to give WONDER WOMAN's sales a boost.

At first Kanigher kept the teen and adult Wonder Women separate, though issue #120 (1961), he found a way to cross over the respective icons by having each of them encounter the same peril, "the Mercurian Menace," but at different times in the Amazon's heroic career. Then in #122 he began to play with time, showing Princess Diana getting de-aged to her younger selves, including not just "Wonder Girl" but also "Wonder Tot."

Then in WW #124 Kanigher introduced the idea that through Amazon technology all three versions of the heroine could co-exist and participate in mutual adventures. Thus, for roughly the next three years, Wonder Woman and her teenaged self both existed in what I've termed a "semi-bonded ensemble" in these stories, though both icons continued to enjoy independent stories. Wonder Tot occasionally got her own stories as well, though there were so few of these that it would fair to call her "charisma-dominant," since her main function was to appear as part of the ensemble. In contrast, the Kanigher version of Wonder Girl did sustain a minor mythology of her own, however derivative, just as Superboy did in his starring feature. Given that both Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl were designed to generate their own separate cosmoses, every story with both characters after WW #124 would constitute a stature-crossover, just as much Thor and Iron Man are in every co-starring appearance in THE AVENGERS, which is also a semi-bonded ensemble, but only for those characters whose own features reached a certain level of escalation (as opposed to the earlier example of Giant-Man and the Wasp, explained here).

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4

While I guess I could follow up my meditations on the phase shifts of Lois Lane with an essay on, say, Jimmy Olsen, I'll take a 180-degree turn here (however brief) into a similar dynamic I found in a pop-fiction take on a venerable myth from the Hebrew Old Testament.

I won't go into the plot of the 1952 QUEEN OF SHEBA, since I adequately summarized the movie in my review. What makes it relevant to the phase shift I described is that the original texts from the Old Testament, principally "Kings," Solomon is the Prime while the Queen of Sheba-- later given the proper name "Balkis" by Islamic commentary-- is a Sub. So is Rehoboam, son of Solomon. But in the 1952 movie, both of them are Primes, while Solomon becomes a Sub who barely impacts the narrative. But there is no crossover-vibe at all in the movie. Even though Balkis and Rehoboam have absolutely no interaction in the Old Testament, they are both aligned to the "Solomon cosmos." Thus, when the movie centers upon these two characters and relegates Solomon to Sub status, the phase shift involved follows the same pattern as Lois Lane assuming Prime status and demoting Superman.

In contrast, the 2004 film NOAH is a valid crossover of two disparate figures in the Old Testament. There are no associations there between Noah and Tubal-Cain in scripture, except in the generic sense that both are incredibly long-lived figures. For that reason, the movie supposes that Tubal-Cain slew Noah's father Lamech, despite the fact that scripture does not reference Lamech's death in any way. Since Tubal-Cain does not sustain his own narrative, I suppose I would deem him a Sub within the story of his progenitor Cain, so making him a Sub within a pop-fiction version of Noah's narrative is only a minor shift in his Sub-alignment. 

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 3

Successful spinoffs, in contrast, usually take a path opposed to that of funneling charisma-characters into ensembles, where they have collective stature. Usually a given icon is introduced in a Subordinate relationship to a Prime icon or icons, and then the Sub icon gets a separate serial, thus accruing some degree of stature, depending on how the serial fares in terms of either quantitative or qualitative escalation. -- INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 2.

In PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 2, I described how a particular stature-bearing icon, Robin the Boy Wonder, completed a phrase shift away from being an icon within a superordinate ensemble to being (in the identity of Nightwing) a stand-alone superordinate icon. Here I want to deal with a phase shift related to a subordinate icon graduating to a qualified superordinate status-- qualified, because the icon remains stature-dependent upon the icon from which she was derived.

For most of her existence, Lois Lane was a part of Superman's subordinate ensemble. Starting in SUPERMAN #28 (1944), the girl reporter got a backup series in that title for about a year. Now, for the length of time that said series existed, Lois Lane was the superordinate icon, while Clark Kent/Superman, whenever he appeared, became a subordinate icon. But for Superman that was a very qualified status, since Lois's popularity was contingent upon that of Superman. 

Now, in the essay referenced in the quote above, I went on to describe how the "spin-off" Batgirl functioned as a subordinate icon within the Batman serials up until the point that she graduated to her own serial. However, BECAUSE Batgirl appeared to be fast-tracked to getting her own series within about five years of her debut, she was also a proto-crossover. Lois by contrast was a pure subordinate icon, and neither her 1944 serial nor the Silver Age one that lasted for about thirteen years-- SUPERMAN'S GIRLFRIEND LOIS LANE-- really did anything to lesson her standing as what I've labeled a "Charisma Dominant Sub." My same verdict holds even given the existence of a couple of television shows in which Lois and Superman were arguably equal Prime types, those being LOIS AND CLARK and SUPERMAN AND LOIS.   

Now, all the serials in which Lois is a stature-dependent Prime and Superman is her Sub do not count as crossovers, the way all of Batgirl's appearances in BATMAN serials do hold that status, simply because Batgirl became a "Stature Dominant Prime." By the same token, Superman does not have any crossover-status with Lois in her own serials, in the way that he does when he teams with Batman in the WORLD'S FINEST feature. The "phase shift" associated with a support-icon being spun off in a separate feature, but a feature that does NOT alter the overall status of the feature's star, is distinct from the one in which such an alteration of status does take place. For this, the example of Robin-turned-Nightwing is instructive, because once Nightwing is independent of Batman he's no longer automatically aligned with the Bat-universe. One example I cited was that because Batman meets Ra's Al Ghul after discontinuing his partnership with Dick Grayson, Ra's Al Ghul does not belong to the Grayson-verse. Thus, whenever Nightwing and Ra's Al Ghul cross paths in any story, that's a charisma-crossover, because Ra's is exclusively Solo Batman's foe. If Ra's has a later encounter with one of Batman's later Robins-- Jason Todd, Tim Drake-- then there's no crossover, because those Robins at that time are aligned with Batman. If one of those Robins phase-shifts his way into a new identity, as "Jason Todd Robin" did to become The Red Hood, then any encounter between Ra's and Red Hood would be a charisma-crossover.

Now, in the Silver Age LOIS LANE feature, unlike the short-lived Golden Age one, the Prime star sometimes met other icons who belonged to Superman's Sub-cosmos, such as Lex Luthor. Everything in Superman's cosmos is also in the dependent cosmos of the girl reporter, so Luthor and other Super-villains have no crossover value, as they would if they interacted with Batman under the WOR LD'S FINEST umbrella. 

Lana Lang presents a slight anomaly, because, by the rules I set up in Part 2 of this series, Lana belongs to the SUPERBOY cosmos, not to that of SUPERMAN, because the personas are different even though they belong to the same person at different ages. Further, at the time that Lana made adult appearances in LOIS LANE, she also continued to appear as her juvenile self in the SUPERBOY title. Lana Lang remains a "Charisma Dominant Sub" in the SUPERBOY feature, but Mature Lana Lang's status is not identical with that of Juvenile Lana Lang (who, incidentally, had only debuted two years previous). 

The former first appears in a 1952 story, "The Girls in Superman's Life," in SUPERMAN #78, but this story is just a one-off. Mature Lana does not show up again until the first Silver Age LOIS LANE comics, 1957's SHOWCASE #9. The two stories don't blend, because the SHOWCASE story ignores Lois having previously met Mature Lana in 1952. Mature Lana is a Sub to Superman in 1952 and a Sub to Lois in 1957, and she continues in that capacity whenever she appears in either feature from then on. She's arguably more strongly aligned to the LOIS feature than the SUPERMAN one despite having probably made more total appearances in the latter. This superior alignment to the LOIS feature s qualitative in nature, because Lana as a competitor to Lois for the hero's heart proved much more significant in that feature than any function(s) she served in assorted SUPERMAN stories. Since "phase-shifted Lana" makes two separate but not congruent debuts in both 1952 and 1957. I would regard that both debuts are crossovers, whether between Superman and Mature Lana in 1952 and between Lois and Mature Lana in 1957. 

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 2

 In Part 1 of this essay-series, I cited my definition for "phase shift:"

"phase shift" is my term for the process by which a function in literature-- which parallels my term "icon"-- shifts from one state of being (within the "horizontal" world of its purely fictional existence) to another state of being.

 Simply as a random choice I cited one of the phase shifts I had identified in a recent essay, but as I said at the essay's conclusion, I could have chosen many others.

My first *sustained* investigations into "crossover-ology" began with Part 1 of the series A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS. The examples in the essay concerned how icons with stature, such as Robin Hood and Fu Manchu shifted into icons of charisma when they were "demoted" into subordinate icons, which was the opposite type of shift discussed in PHASED PART 1. In this essay, I'll deal with a different type of phase shift.

GLAD TO MEET YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME AGAIN in June 2023 introduced the overall concept of iconic bonding. For my example of this literary process, I drew distinctions between the status of Batman and Robin during the thirty years that they were a bonded ensemble, and all the years afterward, when Robin ceased to be Batman's partner. According to some critical evaluations, DC ended the partnership for purely pecuniary reasons. Following the cancellation of the BATMAN teleseries in 1968, sales for BATMAN comics fell precipitously, and DC decided that the presence of Robin in the series reinforced the feature's association with the now unpopular concept of camp. For the first time Robin had solo adventures of his own that were not implicated with the Batman-and-Robin series, as well as entering into ensembles with both Batgirl and the 1970s incarnation of the Teen Titans. (The character had also been with the 1960s incarnation of that super-group, but that iconic bond had been qualitatively secondary to the better-known Batman-and-Robin ensemble.) 

All of the 1970s alterations to Robin's status should be viewed as a minor phase shift, akin to any other time a character in an ongoing partnership gets a "spin-off." However, a different flavor of phase shift transpires in TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS #44 (1984), which I previously reviewed here as part of the JUDAS CONTRACT continuity. For four years Robin had remained in the ensemble of the successful 1980s TITANS franchise, which had become his dominant source of ongoing stature.

 During that time DC also reversed its course on having a Robin in the BATMAN franchise, and since Dick Grayson already had a successful berth in TITANS, the company chose to bring forth a new Robin, Jason Todd, introduced about a year before in BATMAN #357. For whatever reasons, it took roughly a year for DC staff to decide that Dick Grayson would divest himself of the Robin identity for good, and take on a new superhero name, Nightwing.

This is a phase shift of a different nature than the spin-off status of Solo-Robin. Over time DC raconteurs had to evolve a new literary identity for Dick Grayson As Nightwing, even though textually he was the exact same person as Dick Grayson As Robin. This type of phase shift relates not to stature or charisma, but to what I will call the "narrative texture" of a character; of the set of expectations that the audience brings to a given text, separating one persona assumed by Character A from another persona assumed by Character A. By this same logic, I deem DC's Superboy to be a distinct persona from DC's Superman-- but that's a discussion for another time.

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 1

 In algebra, the phrase "phase shift" is defined thusly:

The phase shift of a function is when a function moves to the left or right a certain number of units. It can also be called a horizontal shift.

As I haven't worked with algebra since high school, I don't know if I encountered the phrase back then, picked up the phrase from some secondary source (like a science fiction novel), or if I only recently whipped up the phrase myself for my literary project and only accidentally paralleled a bit of existing mathematical jargon.

Regardless, "phase shift" is my term for the process by which a function in literature-- which parallels my term "icon"-- shifts from one state of being (within the "horizontal" world of its purely fictional existence) to another state of being.

I have undoubtedly described phase shifts many times without having formulated a term for the process, though for now I'll confine the application to one department of my lit-crit project: that of crossover-ology. For instance, here's a passage in which I described a phase shift without using the term, from the 2023 essay INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE:

AVENGERS #16 changed its [Inclusive] template to that of the Semi-Inclusive when the new lineup consisted of one Prime with strong stature, Captain America, and three that had only been charismatic Subs within the universes of other featured heroes. Since Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch only accrued stature once they'd been in one AVENGERS story, the first appearance *alone* was a charisma-crossover. From then on, they all possessed "collective stature" due to their continued membership in the team, and the more they appeared in the team, by the principle of escalation they quickly progressed from being Charisma Dominant Primes to Stature Dominant Primes.

In the same essay I touched upon a different type of phase shift, that of Primes whose stature arises from being the sole stars of a continuing feature-- the example being Ant-Man/Giant-Man and his partner The Wasp-- to having a stature arising from being members of an ongoing team in a continuing feature. I elaborated on this type of phase shift last month thusly:

Therefore, Henry Pym and Janet Van Dyne benefit from their association with the better stories of AVENGERS, as opposed to those of their own feature, and "qualitatively" their Collective Stature supervenes their Individual Stature. And of course, this is also true given that these two icons made many more appearances in AVENGERS in the ensuing decades and so they remain best known to comics-fans as members of that team, not as solo acts. Even stories that may be dramatically bad, like "Henry Pym, Wife Beater," have become inextricable to the cosmos now designated as "Earth-616" in a limited mythopoeic sense. 

There are many other phase shifts I've described, sans the special term, in other earlier essays. However, my next post on the subject will pick up on a new subject for the time being, one that makes the above shifts seem pellucid by comparison.