CLASSIC-LIBERAL TREK PT 3

 Season the third, but without the Great Bird.

SPOCK'S BRAIN-- The argument: "Brain and brain-- males are only good for one thing; having their brains sucked out of their heads." "Sorry, my dear, we're going to KEEP our brains where they are. But as a consolation prize, we'll do away with your gynocentric dominatrix culture and restore equity between the sexes-- see later episode TURNABOUT INTRUDER for details."

THE ENTERPRISE INCIDENT-- Now it's time for the Trekkers to play "KEEPING up with the Romulans" by stealing their tech. The only "sharing" is interrupted between Spock and the sexy Romulan Commander.

AND THE CHILDREN SHALL LEAD-- Well, no. Contrary to the Isaiah quote, even godlike powers don't make a bunch of little kids into leaders, any more than it worked for big kid Charlie X. So they have to KEEP to their own lane.

IS THERE IN TRUTH NO BEAUTY? -- The Trekkers think their emissary Spock ought to be able to SHARE the privilege of communing with an alien ambassador. But his "keeper" doesn't like SHARING, though in the end she's forced to do so.

DAY OF THE DOVE-- Not all energy-beings are as saintly as the Organians; here's one that wants to "keep" hostilities between Trekkers and Klingons going at fever pitch. And this time both groups make the existential decision to SHARE a common interest, if only in survival.

FOR THE WORLD IS HOLLOW AND I HAVE TOUCHED THE SKY-- Once again we have a stratified civilization that must be taught to SHARE a common destiny with the rest of the universe.

PLATO'S STEPCHILDREN-- Hey, Trekkers, you can't confine your attacks to Greek gods, but you gotta go after their philosophers too? Still, nobody's going to cry for the Platonians when they're forced to SHARE parity with other sentients.

WINK OF AN EYE-- "No, thank you; we'd rather KEEP clear of your breeding-pens."

THE EMPATH-- Certain aliens demand that Gem SHARE her very life to prove herself. The Trekkers show the ETs that, "Love means never having to SHARE so much that it kills you."

ELAAN OF TROYIUS-- Unlike "Plato's Stepchildren," this time the Trekkers must teach just one arrogant aristocrat how to SHARE for the sake of her people. However, this time the Trekker captain suffers a bit for Elaan having overSHARED with him.

LET THAT BE YOUR LAST BATTLEFIELD-- "No, thank you, KEEP both your revolutionaries and reactionaries to your dead planet."

REQUIEM FOR METHUSELAH-- Neither father nor potential son-in-law get to "keep" the lady fair. All they SHARE is mutual tragedy, though Spock has a different form of SHARING-moment.

THE WAY TO EDEN-- Didn't we already do two episodes about "KEEPING off the Eden-grass?" Oh well, space hippies make everything better.

THE CLOUD MINDERS-- Now let's have the Trekkers teach the haves to SHARE with the have-nots-- and with zero mentions of socialism, to boot.

THE SAVAGE CURTAIN-- Wel, you Trekkers *said* you wanted to SHARE the glory of your Liberal perfection with everyone and everyone's dog. So why would you object to dramatizing your beliefs by acting them out?

TURNABOUT INTRUDER-- If there's one person with whom you don't want to "share" your body and soul, it's your vengeful, possibly hormonal ex. Kirk has to figure out how to KEEP his sunny side up long enough to convince his fellow Trekkers that he's not a victim of gender dysphoria and that he really wants to KEEP his male soul in his male body. 

THIRD SEASON EXCLUSIONS-- THE PARADISE SYNDROME, SPECTRE OF THE GUN, THE THOLIAN WEB, WHOM GODS DESTROY, THE MARK OF GIDEON, THAT WHICH SURVIVES, THE LIGHTS OF ZETAR, ALL OUR YESTERDAYS. 

       

 

 

CLASSIC-LIBERAL TREK PT 2

 Second season, for the same reason.

AMOK TIME-- Kirk is told to "keep" his place. But if he did that, how would everyone have found out that even for a Vulcan, a mere mating-drive can't compete with the bonds forged by mutual SHARING of dangers and adventures. ("Slash" interpretations not considered.)

WHO MOURNS FOR ADONAIS? -- If earlier episodes told the Trekkers to KEEP clear of "men like gods," what chance does a mere ET-god have in the Roddenverse?

THE CHANGELING-- These mergers between mechanical devices of different power-levels rarely work out, and the Trekkers have to teach Nomad that he should have KEPT within his own lane. 

MIRROR, MIRROR-- Lurking beneath every sincere devotee of the Trekkers' humanism lies the mirror-reversed image of a Machiavellian, questing for pure power. And yet despite this fact, the world of naked power-politics must and will SHARE the same destiny of the world of squishy Liberals. 

THE APPLE-- What's the point of living in a world where you "share" everything but sex? Once again, it's necessary to KEEP all those officious gods out of the way in order to realize mankind's (almost) atheist destiny.

CATSPAW-- And while you're at it, make sure you also tell all witches and warlocks to KEEP off the Trekkers' lawns.     

  

I, MUDD-- At the same time, the Trekkers must remain ever alert to KEEP down all those upstart A.I. who can't appreciate the logic of the wreath of pretty birds that smell bad-- or was that the logic of the tweeting flowers?

METAMORPHOSIS-- You can't overSHARE more than to learn that your nice, clean first contact with an ET was actually her idea of Boogie Nights. And yet this time, the prospects for this mixed marriage look positive.

JOURNEY TO BABEL-- The SHARING of common goals by civilized races is all very well, but father and son SHARING in the (light) mockery of the wife/mother is the real standout ethic here.

OBSESSION-- Kirk as Ahab? Or once again, is he saved by SHARING the eminently sane priorities of all faithful Trekkers?

THE TROUBLE WITH TRIBBLES-- See what happens when you "share" too much? You learn you to KEEP your decks clear of those verminous critters that'll eat you out of house and home if you let them. You know. Progressives.

THE GAMESTERS OF TRISKELION-- Just like the Mirror Universe, all big-brained aliens must learn to SHARE in the glories of representative democracy.

A PIECE OF THE ACTION-- On the other hand, "sharing" scientific innovations with gangsta ETs might make you wish you'd just KEPT traveling past that particular planet.

A PRIVATE LITTLE WAR-- Call this one "KEEPING up with the Klingons," not in terms of conspicuous consumption but rather military escalation. "Sharing" a disease isn't altogether ethical.

BY ANY OTHER NAME-- As in "Arena" and "Mirror, Mirror," the very process of "keeping" your borders can lead to mutual respect and the SHARING of common humanity.

THE OMEGA GLORY-- Nothing says SHARING like worlds so parallel they even have the natives mangling their Latin.

BREAD AND CIRCUSES-- Only some minor SHARING of parallel evolution-- regarding, of all things, revealed religion.

ASSGNMENT EARTH-- The Trekkers learn that they're not the only cosmic busybodies seeking to SHARE beneficent ethics with lesser worlds-- even such primitive frontier-planets as 1960s Earth.

(Second season episodes excluded: THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE, FRIDAY'S CHILD, THE DEADLY YEARS, WOLF IN THE FOLD, THE IMMUNITY SYNDROME, RETURN TO TOMORROW, PATTERNS OF FORCE, THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER.)

               

CLASSIC-LIBERAL TREK PT 1

In my original essay-series KEEPING VS SHARING, starting here, I provided an overview of the ways in which Liberal ethics prioritized "Sharing" while Conservative ethics prioritized "Keeping." The nature of that overview, though, meant that I could not address certain fine points.  

One personal point is that for most of my life, I considered myself a Liberal. However, I belonged to that now almost extinct subspecies known as the "Classical Liberal," a species almost been crowded out of existence by a toxic form of Liberal known as "the Progressive." Though the Classical Liberals were never perfect, they had a definite ethical compass validated by many (though not all) historical events. I am proud to say that I was never sucked into the barren pseudo-ethics of the Progressive, who has nothing to say but "Share what we tell you to Share, even if we, the movement's leaders, often don't practice what we preach." Still, rather than flipping completely to the ethics of Conservatism, I consider myself a Centrist, seeking to chart a course between the extreme virtues and vices of both systems.

Classical Liberalism may never return to the political sphere, but its distinctions from Toxic Progressivism can be well illustrated by sussing out the ethical stances depicted, episode by episode, in STAR TREK THE ORIGINAL SERIES. Under the aegis of both Gene Roddenberry and his successor Fred Freiberger, the series demonstrates that the Liberalism of that era was not manically fixated only upon the Sharing-ethic. The makers of Classic-Liberal Trek knew that sometimes even the generous had to watch their borders.

Not every episode shows a strong ethical orientation toward one system or another. Some stories are just life-and-death conflicts for the starring characters, who of course engage the sympathies of the audience on a visceral level. But the majority of the TREK tales seek to align the sympathetic characters with either Liberal ("Sharing") or Conservative ("Keeping") ethical attitudes. Taking each relevant episode in broadcast order, I will sum which attitude the narratives seek to represent. To keep the story-summaries concise, I want to avoid breaking down specific actions by specific characters, speaking of the totality of the sympathetic characters as "The Trekkers." It's not the best of all possible cognomens, but the writers never supplied a usable substitute.

And so we begin with THE MAN TRAP, in which the Trekkers face "The Salt Vampire," a genderfluid alien that devours humans. Even though the beast is the last of its kind, the Trekkers must KEEP loyalty to their own kind and exterminate the brute.

In CHARLIE X, the Trekkers seek to "share" human culture with a shipwrecked human. But Charlie's been given god-like powers, and the Trekkers must KEEP clear of all teen deities with anger issues.

Going WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE-- if you don't count Adam and Eve, right after they ate of the fruit of knowledge--the Trekkers learn the same lesson seen in CHARLIE X: KEEP away from "men (and women) like gods."

THE NAKED TIME is the time in which everyone casts off the chains of the social contract and begins "sharing" whatever they feel like sharing. The Trekkers use time-travel to beat devolution and to KEEP their psyches in good working order.

THE ENEMY WITHIN-- Through the example of one Kirk too many, the Trekkers learn that every man must SHARE the good and evil in his soul to be able to function in the world. 

MUDD'S WOMEN-- Though feminists probably don't like the idea of women being both goddesses and queens of the kitchen, at base the Trekkers recapitulate the old saw that men and women must SHARE the burdens of existence (and without even getting into the topic of progeny).

WHAT ARE LITTLE GIRLS MADE OF? is the question, but the answer is, "Not being so nice that they don't KEEP away from robots posing as humans." (Data would be mortified.)

THE CORBOMITE MANEUEVER-- The Trekkers use guile to "keep" a potential enemy at arm's length, only to find that they both SHARE in the implicit brotherhood of ETs.

THE CONSCIENCE OF THE KING-- "Neither a borrower nor a 'sharer' be:" justice must be KEPT by unearthing the sins of the king, even when those sins have passed on to the next generation.

BALANCE OF TERROR-- Who will KEEP sovereignty in a war of rival powers?  

ARENA-- Though the source material was all about "keeping" the upper hand against one's enemy, here the Trekkers learn to SHARE the universe with an apparent rival.     

COURT MARTIAL-- "In the name of a humanity that KEEPS truth, as against those damn dirty machines that can be programmed to lie, I demand the correct verdict!"

THE RETURN OF THE ARCHONS-- The Trekkers must teach a whole planet, warped by the control of another damn dirty machine, to KEEP the counsels of the Federation on how to run one's civilization.

SPACE SEED-- Even though the Trekkers cannot allow an autocrat to return to power, they still find a way for him to SHARE in the manifest destiny of taming the spatial frontier.

A TASTE OF ARMAGEDDON-- This time it's a planet whose people think they can regularize the death-toll of war to avoid armageddon. The Trekkers show them how to KEEP an existential awareness of how messy death is.

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE-- No flaming sword needed here, to KEEP the Trekkers away from the perils of Eden.

THE DEVIL IN THE DARK-- Kill the monster! Oh, it's really a mother? And a mother who can save humans from loads of labor? Why, sign her up for a role in "The Not So Secret SHARER."

ERRAND OF MERCY--  "Who will 'keep' sovereignty in a war of rival powers?" Well, it would be either the Trekkers or the Klingons, except that a third power compels them to play nice and SHARE.

THE CITY ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER-- "Though they're disapprovin', KEEP them time-dogies movin,'" so that they run in the right direction and make certain that the good guys won World War Two-- even if a sacrifice proves necessary.

(Season One episodes omitted: MIRI, DAGGER OF THE MIND, THE MENAGERIE, SHORE LEAVE, THE GALILEO SEVEN, THE SQUIRE OF GOTHOS, TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY, THE ALTERNATIVE FACTOR, OPERATION-- ANNHILATE!)

         

MYTHCOMICS: THE RECKONING WAR (FF: RECKONING WAR ALPHA, FF VOL. 6, #40-46)

 

Following the respective departures of first Jack Kirby and then Stan Lee from the FANTASTIC FOUR title, almost every later raconteur said something or other about how the starring characters needed special treatment because they were a "family," as opposed to super-groups that functioned like loose affiliations of super-policemen. But saying this doesn't mean anything if a creator doesn't have any insight into what sort of conflicts and tensions are unique to families. 

FANTASTIC FOUR certainly wasn't the first adventure-series organized around a familial matrix. In the Silver Age of Comics, there had been two notable predecessors, and both of them-- DC's TIME MASTER and SEA DEVILS-- came closer than the oft-mentioned CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN to the makeup of the FF: smart leader, strong sidekick, leader's girlfriend, girlfriend's kid brother. Stan Lee or Jack Kirby may have seen one or both DC-features and subconsciously imitated the template of the character-types. But they added elements one would never find in those strictly juvenile DC titles. Maybe their success stemmed, as some have argued, from combining Lee's penchant for soap-operatic drama with Kirby's passion for sci-fi tropes. But whatever "origin story" fans might choose to write about the creative success of FANTASTIC FOUR, Lee and Kirby arguably produced the first adventure-series built around a family where the female characters had some agency opposed to the will of the males. In fact, I see in the Lee-Kirby oeuvre a gender-dynamic reminiscent of what little we know about the sex-roles of primeval families, which coalesced around the female's need to "nest" and the male's need to "hunt."

In juvenile sci-fi comics, "hunting" doesn't connote tracking down savage beasts. Rather, it means that the heroes are always seeking the next adventure to please a dominantly male audience. When a familial ensemble included girls/women, the females' function was often to worry about how the group could possibly overcome the Peril of the Polka-Dot Gorilla. Alternately, the girl might be a tomboy who was as enthusiastic as the guys at seeking the next adventure and so didn't challenge the male priorities, like the girl-member of SEA DEVILS. Family conflicts showed up in crime melodramas or even in teen humor titles, but not appreciably in adventure-comics.

 Yet almost from the start, FANTASTIC FOUR showed the tense dynamic of a family cooped up in the same "nest," often depicting Reed and Sue playing "mommy and daddy" to a fractious couple of "siblings." Sue Storm, though, not only fretted when the Thing and Torch quarreled, but apparently considered at one point chucking the "den mother" gig for a seat on the throne of Atlantis.

I don't want to suggest that Stan and Jack were more than loosely aware of the molds they were breaking. Clearly, they were mostly flying by the seats of their respective pantalones. But over time, many of the latter-day raconteurs on the FANTASTIC FOUR gave such matters as "female vs. male" agency a lot of thought-- and that brings me to Dan Slott. In tandem with assorted collaborators, Slott's run on the FF title-- from issues #1-46 (2018-2022) -- has done the most to logically extend What Stan and Jack Wrought, at least in terms of gender-dynamics, culminating in the arc called "The Reckoning War."

There's a lot of backstory stuff Slott works into "War" that one has to track down in other features. An advance ad for the arc claimed that WAR was "fifteen years in the making." Well, what that really meant was that Dan Slott introduced the idea of the war back in a 2005 issue of his SHE-HULK run and then sat on the idea for fifteen years, possibly with the hope of being able to develop his concept in a plum series like FANTASTIC FOUR. I don't say this in disparagement. I like the fact that Slott's FF run culminates in the ambitious Reckoning project. (There's some romance-stuff between She-Hulk and Jack of Hearts that also comes from the SHE-HULK title, but I found it easy to roll with.) But Slott's main foundation for his new epic was in a 1964 story told by Stan Lee and Larry Leiber, the origin of The Watcher from TALES OF SUSPENSE #53.

                         

Of course this simple cautionary tale about the perils of arming rude savages had to get a more "cosmic" treatment by Slott, which is more or less what fans expect these days from FANTASTIC FOUR and similar Marvel titles. In the new narrative, the benighted Prosilicans don't just get atomic power, but some Watcher super-technology that dwarfs anything that even the most advanced Marvel-aliens can come up with. 

The Prosilicans launch a war of dominion, and when their opponents retaliate, nine-tenths of the then-known universe is destroyed. Only the power of the Watchers can preserve what's left, by sealing the corrupted parts of the universe into a veritable "outer darkness" called The Barrens. So in this iteration, the Watchers swear their oath of non-interference not because they harmed one world with their act of Promethean generosity, but because the entire universe was almost expunged. But millions of years later, the Watchers' original hubris will come back to bite the universe in the ass again.

       

One Prosilican, name of Lord Wrath, apparently survives all those millennia in the Barrens and finally decides to annihilate the protected one-tenth of the cosmos the Watchers saved. He rustles up three henchmen, similarly immortal Prosilicans who also sport super-powers and the euphonious names of Ruin, Rapture, and Reject. Together they are "the Reckoning," and they start disseminating Watcher-tech throughout the galaxies to foment in what might be called (after David Brin) "Negative Uplift."

Everywhere various alien empires go to war, and of course one group of aliens just has to hassle Earth, home of the Fantastic Four and that premiere alien-fighter, Reed Richards. First Reed gathers intelligence from She-Hulk, who informs him of her experiences with various time-guardians and the Reckoning prophecy. Then the FF stumbles across Nick Fury, who became an aide to Uatu the Watcher in a very involved subplot. Uatu is out of the picture for a bit, but Fury brings a gift to the party; a device with which super-genius Reed can perform a "Positive Uplift" on himself. Or maybe it's not so positive, according to worried Mrs. Richards (and anyone who ever saw FORBIDDEN PLANET).

On the plus side, with this intelligence-boost, Reed instantly figures out that all the galactic brush-wars are "smokescreens" for Lord Wrath's real purpose: to get hold of a handy reality-nexus with which to end reality. On the minus side, Super-Big Brain becomes so clinical that he disregards Johnny Storm's plea to cure his affliction (yet another earlier subplot) -- and that's just for starters. Both the Torch and the Invisible Woman pursue other avenues against Wrath, and so do independent actors like Doc Doom and The Silver Surfer. But following a foray against Wrath's henchmen, Reed does something to his old friend Ben that makes turning him into a rock-monster look like small potatoes.

  

Even Reed using a coma-gun to shut down his son's mind (way back in FF volume one, #141) can't equal this act of cold-blooded intellectual hubris. Reed deceives his best friend Ben Grimm into thinking that his wife and his kids have been destroyed, just to snap the big guy out of a tendency to get freaked out in combat with Rapture, For Reasons. The "fake death" sequence is not strictly necessary for the plot, so Slott may be saying that even a well-intentioned desire for boundless knowledge-- in other words, endless "hunting"-- holds peril for the "nest" of the family.    

 In other news, the Silver Surfer brings Galactus back from the dead (I didn't even know he was sick), and the Watcher tries to persuade his fellows to go to war against the Reckoning. The other Watchers respond by putting Uatu in a chair and making him read old WHAT IF comics. Not really, they're not that inhuman. Uatu is just forced to watch so many scenarios of alternate realities that they jumble his ability to know right from wrong. Fury and the Invisible Woman liberate Uatu, and for good measure, they all learn that the narrative about how the Barrens were created is not accurate, and that there was a Watcher-thumb on the scales.

The Richards and the Grimm kids don't get a whole lot to do in most issues, but they do manage to neutralize one of the henchmen. When Reed and Sue are finally reunited, Sue rightfully busts Reed's chops for his manipulations and secret-keeping, and in contrast to most of the Lee-Kirby oeuvre, the excuse of saving the universe doesn't quite suffice.

  

And now it's time for the big showdown: Thing vs. warrior-bitch Rapture, while everyone else piles on Wrath. And it's a big confession time for Reed too, as he admits that all the knowledge he's gained from the Watcher-uplift means nothing next to all the little things of their relationship. Then Reed faces off against Wrath with the Ultimate Nullifier, which should kill both of them.

 But after all this heavy stuff, it's time for a little eucatastrophe. Reed learns one thing he didn't know: using the Watcher-made Nullifier kills the Watcher who uses it, and that has the effect of removing the Watcher-boost from Reed's brain. The Surfer shows up with the revivified Galactus and they save the universe from destruction. And Uatu goes from being one of a race of godlike aliens to being the Only God in Town, able to repair all the problems and to change the Barrens into the Borderlands, "a canvas of infinite possibilities." (Uatu does miss the little detail of curing the Torch's flame-problems, but Slott had to leave something for #46, the wrap-up issue.) 

  The last Slott issue has nothing to do with the Reckoning War, but, but it does sum up the FF's family dynamic. In this finale, Mister Fantastic reaches out to a sister he never knew, as well as introducing her to two other half-siblings, all creations of their mutual and utterly irresponsible paternal unit. Yes, there's a minor kerfuffle with Psycho-Man. But this time the "nesting" takes precedence over the "hunting," and I have to tip my hat to Dan Slott for "reckoning" the best way to resolve the tensions between action-adventure and family drama.        

    

THE READING RHEUM: SUNDIVER (1980) and STARTIDE RISING (1983)

 

David Brin enjoyed a pretty strong breakout in the early 80s. It's been said that his "Uplift Trilogy" conferred the fan-term "uplift" on a standard SF-trope: that of superior aliens using genetic manipulation and breeding techniques to transform non-sapient beings into fully sapient entities. The second book in the series, STARTIDE RISING, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The third. THE UPLIFT WAR, failed to win a Nebula but won awards from Hugo and Locus.

But the first book in the series, which was also Brin's first published novel? Well--

I must note that the Uplift Trilogy is a discontinuous series, sharing a common universe but no continuing characters, so far as I know. SUNDIVER is implicitly centuries in Earth's future, when humans have made contact with assorted aliens ("Eatees"), some of whom are "patron races" have uplifted "client races" into sapience. Earthpeople are something of a scandal to other Eatees, because humans evolved to sapience without a patron. However, Earth-tech did at some point advance to the point that humans could "uplift" semi-intelligent animals, mainly chimps and dolphins, to co-equal stature. SUNDIVER's main character is a scientist involved with uplift procedures, though we don't see him doing his specialty. 

Instead, Jacob Denwa, because of his relationship with some of the friendly Eatees. gets invited to join a crew of humans and Eatees on a ship, the Sundiver. This vessel journeys to the periphery of Sol itself, to study what seem to be sentient "Sun Ghosts" dwelling in the midst of the solar orb. Sounds like a "blazing" good time, right?

Sadly, SUNDIVER is not an enthralling investigation of a new form of life, but rather, what might best be called a "locked ship mystery." In this situation, a group of passengers on a vessel are confined in each other's company, only to find that there are one or more parties aboard who have insidious or ulterior motives. In fact, the novel even has a wrap-up chapter in which one of the "detectives" sums up, in the best Scooby Doo manner, how the culprit attempted to perpetrate "the hoax of the anthropomorphic Ghosts."    

Since I mildly enjoyed Brin's later novel THE POSTMAN and plan to read the second UPLIFT book, I think SUNDIVER was mostly just an excuse for Brin to set up his conceptual universe, not to tell a compelling story. The characters are two-dimensional and not all that consistent, and Brin injects some modern political content that dates the novel somewhat. Early in the novel, Denwa describes in glowing terms how Eatees on Earth have turned some humans out of their own cities, which is not universally a good thing in the 2020s. There's a political debate about whether or not Earthpeople might've been covertly uplifted by some unknown patron, but this has no resolution and is merely an excuse to motivate a couple of those parties with ulterior motives. 

SUNDIVER offered a quick and easy introduction to the Uplift universe, but it's pretty thin stuff overall. 

ADDENDUM: The following week I read the second book in the Uplift Saga, STARTIDE RISING, and though it won both a Hugo and Nebula, I found RISING worse than SUNDIVER. Both books are afflicted to "univocal-itis," that authorial disease that causes all of a writer's characters to sound the same. The book badly needed a strong villain, or group of villains, to make the reader care about what happened to the good guys. Without one, all I saw was a bunch of pseudo-Heinlein smart-talk, some of which was being spouted by conceited dolphins in a sort of phony-baloney image-language.         

MYTHCOMICS: "NOAH'S ARK" (MIGHTY SAMSON #27, 1975)

 

In my kidhood, I was aware of the Gold Key title MIGHTY SAMSON, but I don't even remember looking at it. I probably was busy emptying my pockets for much of the output of the other companies, so something had to be overlooked. In retrospect, though, MS does have some points of interest. It was probably the most successful Gold Key franchise not owned by some company other than Gold Key and was created by the celebrated Otto Binder in 1964. Binder wrote the first twenty issues, after which other writers pinch-hit on an irregular basis until the series ended in 1975. 

Though Binder had authored a healthy quantity of mythcomics, his main idea with MS seems to have been, "Kids like monsters, so I'll give them lots of monsters." To this end he devised a post-apocalyptic world recovering from long exposure to the radioactive fallout of devastating wars, which had leveled cities and bred all sorts of weird mutations. In fact, the main hero was a mutant as well, born with immense strength, not unlike many of the strongmen Binder had written for other comic books. Samson, accompanied by the scientist Mindor and his hot daughter Sharmaine (implicitly but never literally Samson's main squeeze), wandered the ruined world, seeking to rediscover the lost principles of science for the betterment of all humans. This quest brought the protagonists into conflict with numerous petty tyrants, religious fanatics, and of course, monsters. Binder seemed to take some pleasure in concocting all sorts of freaky combinations of actual animals, with such names as "The Kangorilla" and "The Horned Rhinophant," most of whom Samson slew with his fantastic strength. To be sure, the Biblical Samson wasn't that notable as a beast-killer, being credited only with the slaying of one lion, while his Greek counterpart Heracles racked up many more monsters, including a lion said to be invulnerable to spears. Binder did toss in one element derived from the Biblical strongman, that of blindness. But Archaic Samson was blinded by his captors the Philistines, while in the comic, Mighty Samson loses an eye in his first major creature-battle, with a monster combining aspects of a lion and a bear, a "Liobear."     

 But none of the mighty one's adventures had the density of myth, except this one, written by one Al Moniz, who apparently worked in comics only during the middle seventies, and then mostly for Western/Gold Key. "Noah's Ark" in issue #27 is not precisely the first time in the series any writer evoked the "original apocalypse" of The Deluge, but it's the first time any writer did so with conviction.       

For instance, the opening intro specifies that the mutated "plants and animals now match the monstrosity of man's self-destructiveness in size and horror." Moniz then alludes to Mighty Samson as a heroic counter to the monsters and then wonders if "Noah" may be just as significant.

Naturally the Noah of this story is no more related to his Biblical counterpart than Mighty Samson is to the Nazirite, and Moniz gives his character a significant surname, that of "Caine." In the Bible Cain is the first murderer and so is often viewed as the ancestor of all wickedness-- not least the wickedness that dominates humankind when God sends the flood to wipe out almost all life on Earth. So Moniz eventually answers his own question in the negative.

Samson, Sharmaine and Mindor stumble across a rarity: a fawn, a creature from the era before the great wars. The fawn leads the trio to a devastated zoo, only to discover a laboratory, where Doctor Noah Caine dwells.  
     

Caine explains that he was a zookeeper before the atomic war, and that he anticipated the coming destruction. Though other humans did not take Caine's project seriously, Caine built an ark, stocked it with the animals he loved, and placed them, and himself, into hibernation. Caine arose from his coma and made it to shore. However, he could not free the entire ark from its subsea location thanks to some big mutant critter impeding it, so he asks for Samson's help at monster-dislodging.

Once the colossal critter is vanquished, Caine is able to release the purebred beasts of the pre-apocalyptic age upon that of the mutated world. However, Sharmaine is able to learn, from some long-preserved library, that Noah Caine deliberately banned humans from his ark out of his near-worship of animals. He also hoped that the beasts of his time would "inherit the earth," but it soon becomes evident that the "normie" animals begin transforming into freaks as soon as they breathe the polluted atmosphere.

Caine is even more crazed than before when he realizes that humans alone have (apparently) built up an immunity to mutating radiation, unlike his precious pre-lapsarian animals. He announces plans to unleash his mutated creatures on humans and sets his mutant-fawn Bimbi upon Samson. The strongman himself doesn't win the battle, but the very nature of the fawn's deranged nature works against the animal-master. Bimbi hallucinates that Caine is identical with one of the native mutants of the post-apoc world, and attacks Caine's bully pulpit. Caine perishes, and Mindor decides to send all the "normie" animals back into their ark-hibernation, in the hope that someday the earth will be capable of sustaining their lives again. There's a certain irony in "Ark," since ordinarily one thinks of Biblical Noah as a great preserver of life, while a monster-killer like Biblical Samson is only good insofar as he protects his tribe from predators. But even though Caine is correct in assigning blame for the world's ruination to humans, his unconditional love for the lower beasts makes him just as destructive as any other human-- though his good intentions, at least, will be venerated in some future era, when the earth's actually ready for rebirth.