THE READING RHEUM: STAR OF DOOM (1983)

In the early 1980s Ace Books brought out new editions of REH's Conan books, while also publishing two serials of new novels based on REH characters. Andrew J Offut wrote six paperbacks about the adventures of the Gaelic warrior Cormac MacArt, while the team of David C Smith and Richard L Tierney wrote six for Red Sonja. Technically, the Sonja here is not the version Howard created, but the one Marvel reworked into a denizen of Conan's Hyborian world, complete with brief references to the comics-character's origin. I would imagine Ace made some sort of arrangement with Marvel, though that would depend upon the nature of Marvel's contract with the Howard estate.

I recall having read two other books in the SONJA series, and found neither memorable in terms of being very good or very bad. I'd never read STAR OF DOOM, the last in the series. But it may be that Smith and Tierney were on their last legs when they reached their DOOM, for it's an appalling waste of time, even for quickie junk fiction.

It's hard to believe anyone would craft a sword-and-sorcery story with so little action. DOOM is a talkfest that spends most of its time with Sonja discussing strategies with her small cast of characters. The menace is a pale retread of the old "meteor that crashes to Earth holds alien visitor" trope but altered to accord with the magical matrix of Sonja's world. An unnamed entity within a fallen "star" is captured by a mad magician, who finds that he can leech magical power from the visitor, enough to possibly conquer the world. However, it takes the magician over ten years to gain mastery of the ET's power, during which time his sanctum is under siege by enemy soldiers. Sonja and her male comrade-in-arms Daron come up with a possible way to enlist a powerful sorcerer to root out the world-conqueror before he takes whatever fiendish plan he has in mind.

Not surprisingly, since Daron was the creation of the authors, he gets the lion's share of the drama, while Sonja is bland and unmemorable. In their world, Daron is the first man Sonja ever loves, but he's never especially appealing, so DOOM is far from a grand romance, in addition to being light on blood-curdling action. Smith and Tierney suggest that the magical figure that Sonja saw before she became a warrior-woman may have been a manifestation of her own ego, but their execution of this idea-- slightly suggested in the Marvel origin-- is mediocre. The only real point of interest in DOOM is this odd line spoken by Sonja about the futility of making war for a "noble cause."

Self-survival or greed; that's all most noble causes turn out to be.

This relates to my interpretation of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but since I've already done a similar meditation on that subject here, there's no need to repeat my observations here.

NEAR-MYTHS: "THE DAY OF THE SWORD" (KULL AND THE BARBARIANS #3, 1975)

As I noted at the end of my analysis of Red Sonja's first appearance in the CONAN comic, the heroine enjoyed about five stories, either solo or in tandem with Conan, that never explained her strange declaration that no man would ever enjoy her body unless he first conquered her "on the field of battle." Various comics readers found this less than salubrious, since it suggested that the heroine was daring the male sex as a whole to attempt raping her. This is not quite the tenor of the origin story, though one can see why that reading might occur to some readers.

"Day of the Sword" is plotted by Thomas but scripted by Doug Moench, while Howard Chaykin provided the art. And to be sure, rape is foregrounded in the story's first pages. While riding through a forest, Sonja comes across three highwaymen torturing a helpless man whom they've just robbed. The robbers threaten to despoil Sonja of her maidenhead, so the warrior woman kills all three. Then she turns to their trussed-up victim-- only to find that she knows him.

This cues a lengthy flashback, showing that five years ago she was a humble farm-girl in Hyrkania, living with her parents and brothers. The text stresses that she envied the boys for being given swordplay lessons by their father, but that being a girl she couldn't even lift a broadsword.

Then the father's past as a mercenary invades the quiet farm-life, as his old comrades track him down. Apparently the unnamed leader bears some unexplained grudge, for after Sonja's father declines to join the raiders on their next job, the commander gives the order to kill all of Sonja's family. As for Sonja, the commander satisfies his lust with her, and then burns down her house, expecting her to die as well.

Sonja saves herself, at which point an unnamed deity appears to her. In contrast to some later retellings, the deity is not specified to be either a god or a goddess, but rather "shaped of neither man nor woman, yet embracing all the strength and beauty of both." The deity then makes a confusing declaration: that Sonja, by the act of saving her own life from the fire, has tapped into her hidden strength. The deity doesn't say that he/she is bestowing any special powers on the young woman, in contrast to the 1985 movie. In fact, the deity indulges in some confusing double-talk, suggesting that Sonja can, if she has the will, embrace the destiny of "a wanderer, the equal of any man or woman you meet"-- but only if Sonja vows to the deity that she will never allow herself to be "loved by another man, unless he has defeated you in fair battle-- something no man is like to do after this day!"

The origin, then, changes the implications of "The Song of Red Sonja," where the heroine says "no man" shall get busy with her unless he defeats her, not "another man." The original line implies that Sonja is an Atalanta who won't yield her favors to anyone but a superior male, and that she's implicitly a virgin. "Day" states outright that Sonja has had her virginity stolen by an unworthy man whose only advantage was biological strength. She can't change what has already happened to her, but she can become a new paradigm, that of a woman with unparalleled strength. After the deity disappears, Sonja gets the chance to test her new power, when a straggling mercenary happens across her, and she swiftly kills him.

But is it her strength, or something the deity gave her? Thomas and Moench play it both ways, having Sonja wonder at the ease with which she wields the sword and kills the raider: "A savage thrust-- learned by watching her father-- by long practice under darkness? Or was it, perhaps, a skill granted to her by a vision?" She even has a "Joe Chill" moment, swearing to find her rapist again someday. 

Then the flashback ends, and Sonja briefly exults that she's caught up with her rapist at last. But then she realizes that the man can't understand her, for the robbers' torture has unhinged his mind. (That was some really effective torture; one wouldn't expect someone to lose their mind from pain except from days and days of torment.) Sonja laughs at the cosmic comedy of it all, and then departs, leaving the still bound man to be slain by approaching wolves. I take the closing line about how the rapist's face is no longer "hideous" to her simply connotes that he no longer holds any capacity to haunt her dreams.

It's a strange story, particularly since the mysterious deity gives no reason for demanding that singular vow. (By contrast, the 1985 movie suggests that maybe Sonja comes up with the vow on her own, not through any supernatural inspiration.) But on balance I think Thomas, Moench and maybe even Chaykin meant it to be empowering. The seventies were the first time American culture as a whole seemed to accept the necessity for women to learn martial skills to protect themselves, and Sonja finding her own strength, with or without a deity's help, seems in tune with these sentiments. Other iterations on the origin may improve upon the sketchiness of "Day," but for my money, it's unlikely that anyone has done better, or will do better, than Frank Thorne. Following his much celebrated tenure on the RED SONJA feature, he came up with a rewriting of the Thomas-Moench tale, in the superlative debut story of GHITA OF ALIZARR.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE SHADOW OF THE VULTURE" (1934)

After re-viewing the 1985 RED SONJA film, I became more curious about the possible evolution of the Marvel Comics character from Howard's one-shot character "Red Sonya of Rogatino." She, along with her male compatriot Gottfried Von Kalmbach, appeared only in the above-titled short story in the pulp magazine MAGIC CARPET, which was published by Popular Fiction Publishers. The same publisher brought out WEIRD TALES, the magazine that published the majority of Howard's Conan stories.

Here's my initial writeup from FEMMES FORMIDABLES regarding the story's significance in terms of Red Sonja's evolution:

I mentioned in my first 1934 post that Robert E. Howard had authored at least three significant femmes formidables in the same year, but one of them, "Red Sonya of Rogatino," gained more fame in a derived form, that of Marvel Comics' "Red Sonja."  Since Red Sonja only borrowed a few motifs from Howard's character, as well as appearing in a thoroughly different milieu, it seems sensible to give the earlier Sonya separate consideration.  The French reprint book above, which retitles the Howard story "Shadow of the Vulture" into "Sonya la Rouge," looks as if it's illustrating the Marvel version more than Howard's.

One surprising facet of "Shadow" is that Red Sonya is at best a secondary element of the tale.  The bulk of the story is Howard's rewriting of the history of the 1529 Siege of Vienna, the last attempt made by the Ottoman Empire-- then under the command of Suleiman the Magnificent-- to extend its power into Europe.  Robert E. Howard, being an ardent Celticist, had his own fictional version of "how the Irish saved Europe," often sending Celtic, English, or roughly related racial types into the mysterious East.  This time Howard sends a German hero, Gottfried von Kalmbach, to personally twist the tail of the ruler Suleiman.  Suleiman responds by sending a hitman, the "Vulture" of the title, to bring him Gottfried's head.

Sonya becomes embroiled in this conflict only because she comes to have some regard for Gottfried as a fellow warrior, and possibly (though it is not stressed) as a man.  Sonya saves Gottfried twice from his enemies, and displays fearless prowess on the battlefield, but her own character-arc is dubious.  She claims to be the sister of Roxelana, a historical Polish woman who became the real Suleiman's primary wife.  Howard devotes nearly no space to describing how this state of affairs came to be, though there's a mention that Roxelana was abducted in a Muslim slave-raid. To modern ears, this sounds pretty exculpatory for most sins that Roxelana would have committed in order to survive.  Yet Sonya refers to her sister as a "slut," apparently for not having chosen death over bedding a Muslim potentate.  It's possible Howard had some notion of pursuing this plot-thread in a separate story, but "Shadow of the Vulture" remains the only story about the woman from Rogatino.

Naturally, given Howard's great talent, there are other mythic aspects of "Vulture" aside from its introduction of the Polish femme formidable. MAGIC CARPET was probably interested in the story only because it offered readers some violent, exotic adventure, but as I noted above, Howard was a history-buff who believed in what a later author called "the clash of civilizations." He quite clearly took pleasure in the failure of the Ottoman Empire to secure a foothold in 1529 Austria, which would have put Islamic rule within the perceived boundaries of Europe proper, and Howard explicitly took it as the good favor of fate that the Muslims had been thwarted by "the yellow haired Aryan barbarian." (I'm not sure what Howard made of Islam's domination of the Iberian Peninsula for several centuries.) I should not need to point out that Howard 's mention of "Aryan" is not covalent with formal Nazism. Within the context of the story, which is not a racist story as such, the term only means that the author advocated the fading of the East's power as the West came to prominence.

The Ottoman failure to take Austria loosely parallels the failure of Suleiman I to take the head of German mercenary Von Kalmbach, even though Suleiman sends one of his foremost warriors, Mikhal "The Vulture" Oglu, to accomplish the deed. In a broad sense, Suleiman does Von Kalmbach a favor by persecuting him, for the German, though prodigious in battle, is something of a rebel without a cause, sneering at both the Ottomans and his own "Frankish" allies. Von Kalmbach seems content to spend his whole life fighting and then drinking like a sot.

While fleeing from Oglu's forces, Von Kalmbach takes refuge in an Austrian siege-city. One of the city's foremost defenders is Red Sonya, and though the German is fascinated with the red-haired fury, she seems initially scornful towards him. However, it eventually comes out that she does hold high regard for Von Kalmbach's battle prowess, and she ends up saving the mercenary's hide twice. Howard shows no literal romance between the two of them, but it's likely he meant to suggest that they were both alpha-types who sublimated their sexual feelings through constant quarreling. That said, the story ends without depicting even a symbolic union, such as a partnership, between the mercenary and the Polish warrior-woman.

In the first CONAN story that births Red Sonja, the heroine voiced her determination never to yield her favors to anyone save "him who has defeated me on the field of battle." There's nothing remotely like this declaration in "Vulture." The only remotely similar statement comes from a bit-player who tells Von Kalmbach that Sonya "marches and fights like a man," but is "no man's light o'love." Howard probably only included this observation to make sure readers understood that Sonya was not a camp-follower. If anything, Sonya is an antitype to her sister Roxalana, who, though never "on stage," allowed Suleiman I to take her maidenhead. (Possible pun-alert here: the Ottoman ruler can take a woman's "head," but not the head of a superior warrior.) I won't say categorically that Howard never wrote any character who might have challenged one or more males after the fashion of Marvel's Sonja. But Red Sonya of Rogatino is wholly defined by her mission to take the role of a male warrior in order to defy the Turkish ruler who despoiled her sister, so there's a loose opposition between the worlds of war and of sexual conquest. In later years Red Sonja would sometimes become a symbol of feminist liberation, yet the lady from Rogatino says nothing against the dominion of the male of the species. For such protests, one would have to seek out a character Howard created around the same time, Dark Agnes de Chastillon, whose first of two adventures deals with her escaping an arranged marriage and imprisonment in a brothel. 

Next up: Red Sonja Risin'.

MYTHCOMICS: GHITA OF ALIZARR (1979)

The most famous sword-and-sorcery heroine was launched in the pages of Marvel Comics' CONAN THE BARBARIAN in 1973, but for the next three years no one at the company managed to find a proper venue to exploit her popularity with fans. She received an origin in 1975, one whose approach to the subject matter of rape has long been a bane to feminists, and later that year she finally received a berth in the second volume of MARVEL FEATURE, followed by her own comic. During this period artist Frank Thorne became inextricably associated with the character, not only drawing her adventures but also appearing at conventions in "wizard's garb" alongside models in Sonja-costume.

Thorne's tenure with Marvel's "she-devil with a sword" ended in 1978. Roughly a year later, the artist began a new swordswoman series, GHITA OF ALIZARR,  in the pages of Warren's 1984 black-and-white magazine, producing enough material that in the 1980s Catalan published two albums of the character's adventures. The first collected adventure is the only one I'll address here.

Ghita exists in the same sort of feudal fantasy-world as that of Red Sonja; one where the author has built his universe out of an assortment of archaic cognomens and/or nonsense-words. Ghita's name, as the artist cheerfully admits in his afterword to the first volume, is taken from the Hindu religious tome "The Bhagavad-Gita," the name of her city Alizarr appears to be a random nonsense-word, and the city's principal deity is named Tammuz, but has no resemblance to the Mesopotamian god. An additional Mesopotamian name, Nergal, appears as well, but again Thorne's version of this myth-figure is in no way beholden to the archaic myth.

Though Alizarr, the city of Tammuz, is currently beseiged by savage, Nergal-worshiping trolls, Ghita-- a dead-ringer for Sonja, aside from being blonde-- has no interest in participating in the war. She's been a whore for many years, and is currently the favorite of Alizarr's king, Khalia, though she seems to sleep with whoever she pleases. At the start of the adventure, she's just finished doing the two-backed beast with her old friend Thenef, who's drawn to look like Frank Thorne's wizard-persona. Thenef, sixteen years the senior to Ghita, has been something of a mentor to the young woman, which has apparently led to his becoming the court magician, even though Thenef is a fake with barely any real grasp of magic. Ghita's only comment on the impending invasion is to wonder if the leather-skinned trolls might prove tolerable lovers.

Then Ghita and Thenef are ordered to attend the bedside of King Khalia, severely wounded in a battle with the trolls. Khalia anticipates that he will soon die of his wounds, but he's come up with a solution to the troll problem. Khalia orders his favorite, his court wizard and some courtiers to descend into the royal mausoleum, where Thenef is expected to use the mystic "Eye of Tammuz" to revive Alizarr's long-dead warrior-king, the mummified Khan-Dagon. (In Philistine mythology, Dagon was sometimes given fertility-associations.) Thenef has no clue as to how to revive a dead man, and so he stands in danger of being revealed as a fraud. To save Thenef's life, Ghita takes hold of the Eye of Tammuz and crams into the gut of the dead mummy.

The gem works. Khan-Dagon returns to life, all signs of physical corruption erased. However, as soon as he sees Ghita, the former king has no ear for Khalia's purpose. The revenant kills Khalia, whose courtiers flee. Khan-Dagon throws Ghita down and proceeds to rape her. Only Thenef remains, but though he's not courageous enough to fight the rapist, he passes Ghita a dagger. She stabs Khan-Dagon back to death, possibly by dislodging the magical jewel in his gut, which Ghita keeps thereafter.

It's not clear from the narrative whether or not Ghita's been raped before, though one assumes that her profession forced her to deal with intemperate male attentions. She is, not as ultraliberal critics would wish, traumatized by the experience, but she is changed, for it appears that some of Khan-Dagon's personality has been transferred into Ghita's soul. As she and Thenef seek to flee not only the mausoleum but the beseiged city, Ghita takes along Khan-Dagon's sword and tries to wear his armor as well. The duo encounter Dahib, a half-troll conceived from the union of a human and a troll, and he uses his trollish talents to alter the armor so that Ghita can wear it (though, as with Red Sonja, not a lot of the swordswoman's charms get concealed). Then Ghita undergoes her heroic baptism of fire, when the trio encounter a small party of trolls. Ghita slaughters them all with Khan-Dagon's sword, and she escapes the city in the company of the false wizard and the devoted half-troll (who thinks the former whore to be the incarnation of the goddess Tammuz).

The remainder of Ghita's first adventure then focuses on her masculine desire to force the trolls out of Alizarr, rather than simply fleeing to the nearest possible refuge. This isn't to say that the former concubine accepts her unwanted transformation. Shortly after killing the trolls, Ghita muses, "Khan-Dagon. You are within me, and I loathe your presence." If an ultraliberal encountered this line out of context, he might assume that it was an automatic condemnation of "toxic masculinity." But in time it becomes clear that Thorne doesn't view Ghita as a victim. In his afterword he ventures that he would like to think of Ghita as being kin with the works of Rabelais. Be that as it may, Thorne's softcore sword-and-sorcery also has much in common with George Bataille's concept of the interpenetration of sex and violence./ On page 64 of the 1983 Catalan edition, there's a scene in which Ghita and Thenef have riotous intercourse after taking refuge with Dahib's tribe of fellow half-trolls. The caption, which seems to combine the POVs of both Thenef and Thorne, reads in part:

The seedy delirium of bordello life would mold Ghita. The implicit violence of whorish sex would breed explicit violence in the sword of Khan-Dagon. 

But despite the implied equivalence of To be sure, Ghita does not forget her old nature easily. At first she lays plans to re-take Alizarr with the help of the half-trolls and a giant monster right out of a Japanese "tentacle porn" comic.

But later she has her own monologue, renouncing Khan-Dagon's "mad schemes"-- even though he doesn't seem to be literally possessing her-- and swears that she will again become a true woman. A strange child appears to Ghita, as if to reflect back on an earlier statement that Ghita is infertile, but the child turns out to be none other than the goddess Tammuz, claiming that she somehow stage-managed Ghita's destiny. Ghita and her forces succeed in driving the trolls and killing their leader, but afterward she returns Khan-Dagon's sword to the sepulcher, in order to forswear the dead man's influence upon her feminine nature. However, since this story ends

with Ghita swearing to rule Alizarr with Dahib and Thenef-- and since there was at least one more adventure in her future-- it seems axiomatic that Ghita probably picked up that sword again.

Thorne's surging lines are true to the Rabelaisian spirit he invokes, but I must note that he doesn't delve as deeply into fantasy-imagery as he did in the RED SONJA title, one of which I analyzed here. As if to acknowledge the absence of wild fantasy, an incident in GHITA shows a forest-unicorn seeking out the swordswoman in the belief that she's a virgin fitting of his attention. It's probably not complete coincidence that RED SONJA #1 dilates on the same theme, portraying a more fulfilling-- and less explicit-- union between a girl and her horse.

NULL-MYTHS: RIBIT 1-4 (1989)

In GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT.3, I summed up the "null-myth" thusly:

Nowadays, I would not associate my idea of the "null-myth" with this base denotative functionality: over time it's come to mean a work that had "super-functional" potential coded into the narrative but which became denatured by authorial confusion or misjudgment. 

In most of the examples I've analyzed so far, most of the time the "authorial confusion" stems from the author using mythopeoic symbols in a desultory manner, as if they were mere functionalities, or allowed the symbols to be reined in by didactic considerations. However, there's also the possibility that the author may allow himself to be overwhelmed by his own symbolic prolificity. Like the monarch who complained that Mozart had "two many notes," an author can produce "too many symbols" for his narrative to support. Case in point: Frank Thorne's four-issue Comico title, RIBIT.

RIBIT is almost impossible to summarize. It takes place in some vague future in which there abound references to 20th-century culture, but there's no physical resemblance to any 20th-century settings. Thorne's world is a phantasmagoria out of Bosch, in which both magic and science are hopelessly intermingled. In essence, it's a one-shot feature that allowed Thorne to draw any damn thing he felt like drawing, whether it worked within the context of a narrative or not.

For most of the story, the title character looks like a three-foot-tall version of Thorne's most famous comics-character, Red Sonja. Ribit starts out as the lizard-like familiar of a sorceress named Sahtee, and though Ribit is not human, she nurtures a devotion for Thog, a big ox of a human who works for Sahtee, Sahtee, like a lot of fantasy-sorcerers, has rivals, and she tries to create a formidable warrior-woman as a servant. The creation goes awry with Sahtee's magic combines with little Ribit, who then turns into slightly bigger Ribit. Ribit has no real loyalty to Sahtee, though, being totally devoted to Thog. Nevertheless, events transpire to get Ribit, Thog and Sahtee-- who gets transformed into a furry little homunculus-- involved in a lot of crazy fantasy-world shenanigans. 

I note with amusement that in the Grand Comics Database entry for this series, the contributor didn't list any character except Ribit-- which may indicate that he simply threw up his hands at Frank Thorne's tendency to whip out a new character every few pages. The result is definitely an "embarrassment of riches," in the sense that the art always looks impressive and imaginative, but there's not much context to any of it, except that one can be sure that whatever Thorne drew amused the heck out of him. 

(Incidentally, from the angle of the combative mode, Ribit occasionally demonstrates some fighting-talent, but the stories are so shapeless that Thorne clearly had no intention in creating a warrior-woman to rival Red Sonja. Indeed, by series' end Ribit goes back to being a lizard-- which makes one wonder what kind of lizard Thorne ever heard, that made the sort of sound associated with frogs?)

In my review of PRINCESS KNIGHT, I said that the "problematic structure" of certain works by Tezuka might 'stem from the same "problem" one finds in the works of Jack Kirby: both artists were just so damn creative they sometimes overwhelmed their own narratives with "new stuff."' Yet I felt that PRINCESS KNIGHT still had some structure, enough that I termed it a "near myth." RIBIT reminds me of the later issues of the RED SONJA. Supposedly Thorne worked on these with two writers, the very wordy Roy Thomas and comics-newcomer Clair Noto, but these issues-- aside from issue #1, reviewed here-- look like Thorne just drew whatever struck him as fun to draw. This was a sad state of affairs, because Thorne's artwork was at its best depicting Sonja's world of fantasy-- but the stories wandered and made no sense.

To sum up, RIBIT is an example of "underthinking" rather than "overthinking." Or as I put it in AFFECTIVE FREEDOM, COGNITIVE RESTRAINT:

...freedom without a complementary form of internal restraint is, as Janis Joplin sang, “just another word for nothing left to lose.”  Even in fiction, where the boundaries of affective freedom *may * sometimes exceed those of religious mythology, cognitive restraint is necessary to make the essentially mythic ideas relevant to living human beings.

SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE PART 4

To sum up the arguments for the previous three installments, with an eye toward concluding this line of thought:

In Part 1, I asserted that one might view the manifestations of sex and violence within fiction as sources of 'violence" that served to propel and thus create the narrative. This extra-diegetical "violence" is the one referenced in the title of the essay-series, and I probably should have given it another name, to distinguish it from diegetical violence-- perhaps "disruption," in line with the Frank Cioffi quote cited in Part 1.

In Part 2, I chose to explore the real-world alignment of sex and violence with the proclivities of, respectively, the females and males of the human species, as dictated by biological development.  Yet I specified that biology did not entirely define destiny; that it was possible for either real-world sex to perform a bouleversement with regard to dominant proclivities, a turnabout which would be the subject of Part 3.

In Part 3, I referenced an earlier essay-series in which I had investigated a similar bouleversement in the works of two of the philosophers who have influenced me. I did this in order to keep this line of thought distinct from my own meditations on a parallel turnabout, formulated by me alone, though other critics have certainly discussed similar archetypal figures, notably Camille Paglia. I termed these archetypes after a couple of their appearances in Greek myth: "Adonis, the Loving Man" and "Athena, the Fighting Woman." I then digressed to the subject of assigning merit to these-- or any-- archetypes when they appeared in fiction. This was the point at which I attempted to elucidate a meaning for the "sacred and profane" in my title, which, when extended from its Durkheimian definition into the realm of fiction, translates to something more like "widely significant and not very significant." This line of thought will be expanded on in a separate essay. I concluded the essay by stating that I would explore the "two turnabout archetypes" in terms of the ways they enhance the Bataillean concept of "narrative violence," henceforth "disruption," the specific source of the narrative's conflict, which as specified here may manifest in the mode of the dynamic or the mode of the combinatory. Since I've already critiqued several individual comics-stories for my "1001 myths"series, I'll draw upon two of those for my examples.

This essay on NEW MUTANTS #62 is one of the few occasions on which I dealt with a figure that conforms to the Adonis archetype. This character is the semi-villainous character of Manuel, who in this story forms a romantic connection of sorts with the character of Amara, one of the featured members of the titular group. "To Build a Fire" is a two-character story, dealing with the way in which Amara and Manuel attempt to survive in the Amazon rainforest. I noted in my analysis that Manuel's psychic persuasion-powers were "stereotypically female," while Amara's power-- the ability to manifest volcanic flames-- is far more potent. There is a conflict of dynamicity present, in that both teens are in danger from the jungle's denizens-- a signal irony, since Amara wants to preserve the jungle, refusing to use her power to create a signal-fire (hence the title). However, the primary conflict is of a combinatory nature, in that it deals with the "war between men and women," and the suspense is not so much "will the two teens survive" as it is "will they make sense of their feelings about one another?" In contrast to Amara, who possesses a kick-ass "male" power, Manuel's only influence over Amara is his male charm, enhanced by his mutant power-- though Manuel fits the Adonis mold in that he's strikingly handsome. He verges away from the male superhero mold in that he frequently evinces cowardice and selfishness, but this reversal is precisely what the story needs to bring forth Amara's own growth of consciousness.

For the archetype of the Fighting Woman, I cite this essay on RED SONJA #1 from-1977. This story takes particular interest for its inversion of the folkloric opposition of "the virgin and the unicorn," which in its usual telling claims that a wild unicorn will lose its wildness in the presence of a true virgin, and will lay its horned head in the virgin's lap. The SONJA story deals with a deep soul-bond between a unicorn and the titular swordswoman Red Sonja, who is not a virgin but has chosen to preserve her sexuality as if she were. She's also a swordswoman specifically because she was raped by men, which is an action that the story's villain Andar wishes to commit, in a figurative sense, upon her friend the unicorn. In this narrative the elements of the combinatory are certainly present, given that it belongs to the freewheeling genre of sword-and-sorcery fantasy. However, the archetype of this version of "Athena, Fighting Woman" is dominantly involved in a conflict of dynamicity: Sonja and her magical horse-friend against the depredations of a character whose name suggests a Greek word for "male."

Obviously, since I defined both stories as possessing a high mythicity, both of these stories would meet my criteria for being "consummate." I have not yet decided whether or not I'll try to come up with similar stories which would show these archetypes in an "inconsummate" form. Such stories would be by definition forgettable, and the only good reason to describe them would be to rail at their faults. So I may elect to allow this early CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN story to remain my go-to example of the inconsummate.

MYTHCOMICS #18: RED SONJA #1

PLOT-SUMMARY for "The Blood of the Unicorn" (script Thomas & Noto; art Thorne): As a mounted Red Sonja approaches a forested area her horse stumbles in a hole and breaks its leg, so that she's forced to stab the animal to death with her sword. On foot, she comes across a band of men attempting to capture a wild unicorn. The unicorn tries to bolt but collides with a tree and breaks off its horn, which falls into the hands of the band's leader, a sorcerer named Andar. Sonja fights off the hunters and mounts the unicorn, which carries her away. Together the warrior-maid and the unicorn wander the forest, enjoying one another's company in a "nigh-mystic tie" while the unicorn's horn slowly grows back. Meanwhile Andar, who has returned to the village he rules with his men, uses the broken horn to compound an immortality serum, which he drinks (though it's not clear whether he thinks it makes him immune to being killed or simply able to live forever as long as he's not fatally attacked). Despite having accomplished his goal, Andar does not want anyone else to share his immortality, and is irate to hear that Sonja still travels in the company of the horned beast. He and his men attack Sonja and the beast, and Andar almost manages to kill Sonja, only to be killed instead when the unicorn impales the sorcerer on its horn. The other men scatter, but soon Sonja realizes that she cannot stay in the unicorn's forest forever and the two of them part, so that she can follow her "warrior's destiny" while the beast remains "riderless and free."

MYTH-ANALYSIS: One of the easiest type of stories to write-- and thus a type that rarely rises above the monosignative-- is one in which an obsessive personality pursues some idée fixe. Admittedly this may lead to something as plurisignative as MOBY DICK. However, in the sword-and-sorcery genre to which RED SONJA belongs, the story-type usually takes a simple form. Some tyrant wants the sexual favors of a maiden; the hero protects the maiden and kills the tyrant; the hero often if not always gets the sexual favors denied the tyrant.

"Blood" is interesting in that it seems more about an obsession over a rather abstract form of *libido.* The backstory for Andar specifies that as a boy he saw a "white colt" and that he became "enflamed" with the desire to touch it, but the creature frustrated his attempt by fleeing. The backstory does not precisely say that Andar saw a real unicorn, but he evidently thought that he did, for he later researched the creature's history and thus learned the story that its horn would grant one eternal life. However, even though Andar doesn't want to have sex with the unicorn, he's just as jealous as any rejected lover, becoming angry at "the mere thought of the warrior-woman and the unicorn together." Similarly, he wants the creature dead so that no one else can partake of its bounty of eternal life; he even kills one of his aides when the man tries unsuccessfully to take a sip of the immortality serum.

Sonja's role parallels that of the hero who does enjoy the freely-given favors of the "maiden," though here too, what passes between her and the unicorn is a communion that transcends and yet encompasses sexuality. Clearly her sojourn with the creature draws on medieval stories in which virgin maidens alone can draw unicorns out of hiding. Yet the medieval myth is somewhat overturned by the fact that Sonja is not a virgin, though "Blood" makes no reference to her standard backstory. Red Sonja's first appears as a Marvel character-- one very loosely patterned after a Robert E. Howard warrior-woman-- in CONAN THE BARBARIAN #23(1973). Here she suggests something of the "iron virgin" in that she swears no man will sleep with her unless he conquers her in battle. However, roughly two years later, a story in the KULL black-and-white magazine discloses that as a young woman Sonja suffered rape by a bandit-chieftain, and that she was empowered by a goddess who required Sonja never to sleep with anyone save a conqueror.

It's interesting, then, that the unicorn might also be viewed as something of a "rape survivor" in the most metaphorical sense, in that Andar wants to plunder the unicorn of its horn as a bandit took away Sonja's virginity. The unicorn is often referred to as an "it" but there are two or three telling moments when the script specifies that the beast is male, which is why the relationship between the girl and the stallion does seem quasi-sexual. In the first panel in which Sonja beholds the unicorn's horn, the Thomas-Noto caption reads that "His [the unicorn's] eyes move, as though aware of Sonja's presence." And in keeping with dozens of girl-and-horse stories from BLACK BEAUTY to Silver Age SUPERGIRL, Sonja is most impressed with the unicorn when she rides him. "Tarim's blood; what power!" she exclaims.

One could easily read Andar's fate as that of the biter bit, or, more specifically, the rapist raped-- and to be sure, just before the unicorn stabs Andar to death, Andar is about to plunge into "the supple flesh" of Red Sonja. But while the horn-as-penis motif is probably there in some sense-- Andar's name certainly references the Greek "andro-", meaning "man"-- both script and art place more emphasis on the irony of Andar's fate. Because Andar is killed by the very thing that was supposed to confer on him immortality, one cannot know whether he actually had immortality and lost it, or whether the legend of the serum was false from the start. But the script does confer on the fallen villain a dubious "immortality:"

"For we mortals will chase and dream of life eternal till both stars and unicorns are scattered dust...and Andar's ghostly voice will whisper for all time to bid others follow him down the doomed path where he led."

As for Sonja, the setup of her continuing adventures dictated that her idyll with her equine friend had to end. Nevertheless, the parting is given its own mythic resonance, suggesting that even mortals who respect magical critters can't remain long in their company, precisely because they are mortal. All of which would certainly put a different philosophical spin on the cover-copy of RED SONJA #1, where the heroine, flanked by various beasties as well as Andar and the unicorn, shouts at the reader:

"To the death!"