MYTHCOMICS: KAMASUTRA (1990)

If people say you can’t do something, then you want to do it even more. Things that are considered forbidden, means other people aren’t doing them yet! -- Go Nagai, interview.

I'm nowhere near having a satisfactory overview of the works of manga artist Go Nagai, but I have made an effort to read a fair sampling of the ones for which he's celebrated: the first ecchi manga (1968's Harenchi Gakuen ("Shameless School"). the first piloted mecha (Mazinger Z), and the first "magical girl" manga (Cutey Honey). And while not everything Nagai wrote and/or drew was obsessed with depicting "forbidden things," there's no question that most of the time he depicted transgressive, highly kinetic levels of sex and violence. This penchant is clearly tied into his protean creativity, but his heavy concentration on the kinetic potentiality may have stunted his ability to depict things mythopoeic. As yet I haven't delved into his first DEVILMAN series, which is rumored to be one of Nagai's more ambitious undertakings. But I did investigate the four-volume series KAMASUTRA. Nagai drew this series and co-wrote it with Kunio Nagatani, who also has a substantial catalog of works, many of which have generated controversies similar to those of Nagai.

Since the actual Kamasutra sex-manual from the 2nd century CE is just a collection of instructions about the many methods of human intercourse, the manga is not a straight adaptation of that work. If it was, this manga would not be admissible to my mythcomics project, which is all about original (or mostly original) comics-stories. Nagai (and I'm going to use his name as shorthand for Nagai-Nagatani) structures KAMASUTRA as unrestrained pulp adventure with a metaphysical theme. Some indebtedness to Spielberg's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK is signaled through one of the story's support-characters: a Japanese comedy relief who dresses like Indiana Jones, complete with whip, and who calls himself "Indy Yakko." 

Like RAIDERS and its sequels, KAMASUTRA depicts a struggle between good guys and bad guys for possession of some arcane artifact from ancient times. But whereas in the Spielberg-Lucas films, possession of the artifacts gives one side temporal power, Nagai is more focused on a pulpish version of the Greek hieros gamos, often if not always defined as a "sacred marriage between a mortal and a god or godlike entity." The Greek term lines up well with the Hindu/Buddhist religious variant sometimes called "Shaktism," which focuses on rituals symbolizing the union of male (Shiva) and female (Shakti) principles. Illustrated passages from the Kamasutra are interspersed throughout the manga-narrative, serving to gloss the events.

Some such transcendent union is suggested by the opening chapter of KAMASUTRA. Ordinary Japanese teen Ryuu Aikawa tells his randy girlfriend Yukari Tsuji that he Ryuu can't have sex because his grandfather Isamu, a famed archaeologist, predicted that someday Ryuu would marry Surya, a fourth-century Hindu princess. Yukari is more than a little pissed off by Ryuu's credulity, not least because this Surya ought to have been dead for centuries. Then Ryuu receives a message that Grandpa Isamu has gone missing in India, where he's been seeking an artifact called the Sex Grail. Ryuu drops everything and takes a flight to Calcutta-- though not without an opening encounter with some agents of an evil power.

In Calcutta Ryuu meets two of his grandpa's assistants, the aforementioned Indy and the lissome female known as "Shakti." Shakti seems less concerned with locating the missing archaeologist and more with following his instructions, that she should take Ryuu's virginity to give him experience for his impending nuptials with Princess Surya. (This sort of things happens so often in the course of the story, I won't bother to note each separate interaction.) Once the cherry's been popped, it's off to Khajuraho, a series of 12th-century temples west of Calcutta, temples well known for depicting sexual postures of male and female statues. 

On the way Shakti gives Ryuu the basics about Isamu's quest for the Sex Grail, and the artifact's power to confer immortality. But during this flight, the agents of the evil "Naga Cult" hijack the plane, with some very gratuitous use of "snakes on a plane" (yes, sixteen years before the American movie). The Nagas (named for a mythical species of Indian snake-demons) force the plane to land and then bus most of the passengers away, except for Ryuu and Shakti. The two youths are interrogated by "The Sage," master of the Naga Cult, a man whose extreme age makes him look like he possesses reptilian scales. Then both Ryuu and Shakti are imprisoned. This section also introduces the heroes to the Sage's henchman "Bearded Godzilla," a doppelganger of a goofy Nagai character seen in his "Harenchi Gakuen" manga.

I won't cover every twist and turn of the adventure. Suffice to say that not only do Ryuu and Shakti win free, they liberate Grandpa Isamu from his prison at the Naga hideout. Isamu takes his young helpers to Khajuraho, where they find the Sex Grail with ridiculous ease. In the ensuing chapter, Isamu and friends are also able to unearth the immortally-preserved body of Princess Surya from an icy tomb beneath a Himalayan mountain and to bring her back to Calcutta for treatment. There's also a reference to the Grail having been forged in the legendary otherworld of "Shambala," which reference pays off later.

At this point Nagai decided that the story required a more virile villain. The Sage's son Rudra is summoned to the Naga hideout, just in time to watch his aged patriarch succumb to old age, due to the Nagas' failure to acquire the Sex Grail's power of immortality. Rudra-- whose name is derived from a Vedic god, believed by some to have been an early version of Shiva-- lays his plans to acquire both the Grail and Princess Surya, so that he can become absolute ruler of Earth. Not only does Rudra manage to abduct Surya single-handedly, Bearded Godzilla witnesses the advent of Ryuu's girlfriend Yukari showing up in Calcutta, trying to track down her fugitive boyfriend. In a subsequent chapter, Yukari's used as a pawn by the Nagas, though none of the good guys ever hold this against her afterward. 

Rudra not only gets both Surya and the Grail in his power, he consigns Ryuu and Yukari to that most venerable of cliffhanger-perils, the "closing walls"-- which, like most other situations here, leads to yet another sexual encounter. Indy Yakko sets the young lovers free, but before the three of them can escape the Naga stronghold, Rudra uses his supernatural powers to manifest energy-snakes, which form themselves into a huge rolling ball, so that the heroes can emulate "Indiana Jones running from the big boulder."

Rudra then attempts to marry Surya in a ceremonial "Garuda boat." (This may have been a mistake by Nagai, since in Hindu lore "Garuda" was a bird-spirit who was generally opposed to all snake-spirits.) Enemy forces interrupt these nuptials, but Rudra, nothing daunted, managed to use the Grail to propel himself and Surya into the land of Shambala. Ryuu and Indy follow, and though they eventually find that Shambala is no longer inhabited save for temple ruins, there's a mysterious "space egg" hanging in the sky. Nagai does not articulate the egg's full nature, but it's likely that the idea stemmed from the Vedic concept of the Hiranyagarbha, the cosmic womb from which creation proceeded. The Wiki article notes that the "golden womb" was sometimes associated with Surya, the (male) Hindu god of the sun.

Isamu then shows off his archaeological chops (and his perversion, as he belongs to Japan's inexhaustible supply of dirty old men) by coming up with a sexy way to follow Ryuu and Indy into Shambala-- though it only proves possible when Bearded Godzilla goes along for the ride.

Rudra plans to enter the space egg and use it as a wedding-chamber for his first impregnation of Surya, but Ryuu horns in. Thus the two men find themselves in the position of rival sperm seeking to fructify the same ovum, which is at once Surya and the "space egg." In addition, the space egg launches into space, leaving Isamu and Company to find their way out of Shambala by their own resources.

Out in space, both Ryuu and Rudra are tested by phantom sex-workers called "egg angels," who all look a lot like Shakti. Initially the contestants are told that the one who lasts the longest in these sex games will win Surya. However, Nagai evidently decided that wasn't dramatic enough, so a giant snake manifests inside the egg, ostensibly "the snake god Naga" himself, turning on the man who claims to be his worshipper and dragging him outside the egg into deep space.

Then at last Ryuu and Surya have sex-- but not the sort of marriage Ryuu imagined, for it's purely a hieros gamos, a cosmic marriage to bring together mortality and immortality. The space egg separates into two halves, one taking Ryuu back to Earth, while in the other, Surya enters another long sleep, planning to awaken only when life on Earth goes extinct and she gives birth to Ryuu's child as the father of a new race. And things go back to normal on Earth, as Yukari starts bugging Ryuu about having slept with another woman, but with the clear implication that they'll remain together for a happy ending.

This is the first mythcomic I've personally encountered that makes fruitful use of the complexities of Hindu myth for a fictional story (as opposed, say, to non-fictional retellings of traditional myths, which have apparently shown up in Indian comic books.) In fact, I'm not aware of any prose fantasies that excel KAMASUTRA in this respect--and yes, that includes Roger Zelazny's LORD OF LIGHT. So it's rather remarkable that two Japanese manga-artists-- both of whom coincidentally have something like the Sanskrit word "naga" in their names-- should be able to accomplish such an impressive level of mythopoeic insight. Whether I can find any similar works by Go Nagai alone remains to be seen.

COGNIITIVE CHAINS PT. 3

I won't spend a lot of time on the "cavils" I mentioned in Part 2, but the main one relates to author Ray Nayler's decision to use an eccentric pronoun whenever referencing his intelligent, but sexless, android Evrim-- for that pronoun is the now notorious "them." "Them," as many readers will know, is a pronoun enlisted by "non-gender-conforming human beings" to signal their independence from gendered pronouns. 

As far as I can tell, Nayler's 2022 novel THE MOUNTAIN IN THE SEA takes no position whatever on the concept of gender neutrality. MOUNTAIN is, however, without question a novel imbricated in Liberal (but not necessarily Ultraliberal) politics. The protagonist is a female biologist of Vietnamese ancestry, and her quest is to learn whether or not the sea holds a new intelligent species of life, derived from the non-intelligent species of the octopus family. The novel largely takes place in Asia, not just because Doctor Ha is conducting her studies on a Vietnamese archipelago but so that the author can focus upon a largely Asian cast of characters. Most tellingly, one of the other main characters is also a female biologist, something of a rival to Doctor Ha, and it's a validation of the infamous "Bechdel Test," in that when these two women get together, they definitely aren't discussing men.

All fine and dandy; I observe these tropes but do not condemn them. However, in Ha's extended lecture on the human propensity for language, and for imagining things that "are not here," I wondered if the author was working in an unspoken defense of just about every subgroup that feels itself marginalized by some more numerically dominant subgroup. After all, the android Evrim, whom Ha claims to be human because he participates in the "symbolic world," despite "how you are born."

All of this could be food for a greater discussion than Nayler provides in his novel. But I will note in passing that in her defense of language's symbolic, "unreal" qualities, Ha mentions that language can also be used to promote "absurdities." Again, as I said in Part 2, Nayler does not attack what I would consider the pat "absurdities" that an Ultraliberal would usually attack. So I will do Nayler the courtesy of not claiming, as do some Conservatives, that "non-gender-affirming" persons are themselves "absurdities." But it's certainly arguable that some of the POSITIONS endorsed by persons in this subgroup are absurdities. For example, if a male is sentenced to a prison term, he can "claim to be a woman" and perforce be confined in a women's prison, simply because the authorities don't want to provoke a legal battle. Such a legally spawned delusion is also a result of language's potential for distortion, as much as any spawned by religion or philosophy.

THE SEXUAL DIMORPHISM BLUES

There was a time when the majority of liberal thinkers distanced their political and philosophical statements from anything falling under the rubric of "myth." For much of the twentieth century, myth meant "untruth," and neither Lefties nor Righties wanted their thoughts to be associated with the fantasies of archaic tribesmen. Marxist Roland Barthes was particularly insistent about distinguishing his ideology from the "mythology" that he claimed pervaded his society, as I showed in this 2010 essay.

But the lure of money titillates a lot of authors, even ideologues. Even anti-Jungian Richard Noll, toward the end of THE JUNG CULT, admitted that Jungianism had gained ground over other psychological systems thanks to the "New Age" subculture. Jung was gone by that era, but Joseph Campbell rose to prominence in the sixties, and many of his books have remained in print for the past sixty years. I think it's likely that Campbell's success in the marketplace led to many liberal thinkers putting aside any qualms about myth and trying to draft the allure of mythic discourse to validate political ideologies. I've shown this by demonstrating the anti-mythic agendas both in 1998's DEEP SPACE AND SACRED TIME, which I view as a "proto-woke work," and in 2011's THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, wherein the author tried to prove that fairy tales were all about Marxist dialectic.

Maria Tatar's 2021 HEROINE WITH 1001 FACES is at least partly honest, since her agenda is to break down the masculinist emphasis she claims to find in all of Joseph Campbell's works. (Strangely, toward the end of her book she cites a quote from a 2013 collection of Campbell essays, GODDESSES, but Tatar does not in any way engage with anything Campbell said in that book.) Her main target, as her book's title indicates, is Campbell's 1949 HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, in which the author promoted a "monomyth" that unified all the major motifs relating to male heroism, which left female heroes without any say in the matter.

Having a say is extremely important to Tatar, so much so that her volume might have been better titled "1001 VOICES." Tatar never critiques Campbell in depth, either fairly or unfairly. She only attacks those aspects of Campbell that she views as attempts to stymie or silence the voices of women, and she pursues the same strategy with respect to archaic myth and folklore. If the story's about men winning glory in battle, it's bad. If the story's about women exposing male perfidy through speaking out, it's good. It's no coincidence that an early chapter of HEROINE is subtitled "From Myth to #MeToo." At all times, Tatar remains lockstep within the boundaries of that ultra-feminist ideology. Thus, even though she sometimes evinces impressive erudition, everything she writes about is distorted by that determination to make her own monomyth that excludes the supposedly male province of glory and violence.

One amusing thing about HEROINE is that Tatar duplicates one of Campbell's minor vices: that of assuming a commonality of meaning between archaic fables and modern literature. I call it a minor vice because Campbell was a good enough writer that his comparisons were usually interesting if not always logically supportable. But when Tatar windmills from talking about the English folktale "Mister Fox" to modern works by such authors as Philip Pullman and Toni Morrison, she fails to build even a loose chain of associations.

If Tatar had merely claimed that there had been plenty of writings about male heroes and that she was simply going to focus on what she deemed examples of female heroism, she would have been on surer ground. But the #Me Too ideology requires the demon of toxic masculinity. Thus Tatar sprinkles her text with glib indictments of masculine myths. In her first chapter she inextricably associated archaic myths of male heroism which "we no longer lionize but call toxic masculinity" (p. 20). No hero in Tatar's ideology ever protects a woman from rape; men are just in it to force women into servile bondage, keeping them barefoot and pregnant.

I will give Tatar this much: though many of her potential readers will assume that she's going to address the presence of martial heroines in antiquity and in present-day pop culture, Tatar gives this "face of femininity" short shrift. On page 258. she tosses out a short list of "pumped-up, tough-talking women," including Diana Rigg, The Catwoman, Wonder Woman,Lara Croft and the Bionic Woman,"  but then chimerically changes the subject to first GAME OF THRONES and then to Disney heroines. Why? Well, on page 26 she also listed martial heroines of antiquity, but opined that it was a "perversion of the feminine" to show female characters "usurping the power of the heroic." So at least she's consistent in her antipathy to a power she wants to view as strictly male and therefore toxic.

That's not to say she's consistent about anything else. Wonder Woman is the only martial heroine to whom Tatar devotes any extensive attention, but her analysis is wonky, even leaving out the outright error on page 152, when the Amazon is said to be "the first female action figure in the Marvel Universe," but that she owes her live-action cinematic debut to "DC Films." At the start of Chapter 4 she excoriates Frederic Wertham for his hostility toward Wonder Woman because Wertham believed that the Amazon might keep young girls from becoming homemakers. But how is that any different from complaining that such heroines are a "perversion of the feminine?" On page 232 Tatar claims that "the love of justice-- avenging injustices and righting wrongs-- is what makes Wonder Woman so powerful a force in the pantheon of superheroes." Wait-- so aside from Wonder Woman, no other superheroes, even other female heroes, had any interest in avenging injustice or righting wrongs? I should note in passing that Wertham's ideology also could not see fictional violence as being anything but anti-social in its effects.

Her nastiest inconsistency, though, is that after having burned up a lot of hyperbole inveighing against male violence, she unleashes snark against the late Campbell in her first chapter, implying that he promoted his 1949 adulation of heroism as some sort of compensation for his having "sat out the war" (that is, World War II). This armchair psychology takes up about a page and a half, and amounts to nothing more than character assassination. (At least Richard Noll provided a detailed critique against Jung.) But this side-swipe shows Tatar's basic hypocrisy. Is it good to refuse the allure of toxic male violence, or is it not? 

Tatar doesn't care; any dirty trick will serve her ideological agenda, making her a kindred spirit with the #MeToo movement, whose leaders ranted about believing all women but decided to ignore a woman who leveled charges of sexual harassment against Presidential candidate Joe Biden. If one goes into HEROINE knowing that it's a snake pit, one may learn some interesting facts about serpent behavior, but not much more.

THE READING RHEUM: A PRINCESS OF MARS (1912)

 

In one crucial respect, the French writers of the degeneracy school differed from their American counterparts. Where Mather and his cohorts saw the Indian as insatiably lustful, a being of overbearing sexual power, these European writers saw him as sexually weak, cold-blooded, insensitive to pleasure or pain, passionless—perhaps even defective in his manhood.”—Richard Slotkin, REGENERATION THROUGH VIOLENCE, p.203.

Numerous critics have remarked that in A PRINCESS OF MARS, Edgar Rice Burroughs created his “myth of Mars” out of myths of the American West. Prior to publication of PRINCESS (serialized under a different title), Burroughs had already penned three or four traditional westerns. John Carter, the protagonist of the first Martian novel, claims that he remembers no personal history, but nevertheless his main identity is that of a native of Civil-War Virginia and a former Confederate officer. Having become impoverished because his side lost—which is Burroughs’ only direct comment upon Carter’s Southern heritage—Carter goes West. He teams up with another former Rebel officer and seeks riches. However, savage Indians attack the two white adventurers. Carter’s partner is killed and Carter is cornered inside a cave by the hostiles. Believing himself doomed, he suffers a strange paralysis, after which a part of him separates from his mortal body, and he looks down upon what he deems his own “lifeless clay.” His “alternate self” then gazes up at the heavens and beholds the planet Mars, with which he identifies as a “fighting man.” In no time, Carter’s other identity manifests on Mars, where he seems to have as physical an existence as he did on Earth. He learns that Martian gravity gives him fantastic strength, and this leads in turn to Carter becoming the supreme warrior on the planet, as well as winning the hand of a red-skinned princess, Dejah Thoris.

In keeping with the theme of the Roman god of war, all denizens of Mars are warlike, but their warring nature springs from their world’s geological catastrophes, resulting in the planet’s slow loss of its atmosphere. Earlier Martian generations possessed a higher level of technology, which makes it possible for the natives to use super-science on occasion. Nevertheless, every race on Mars—red, white, black, or green—fights with pre-industrial weapons: swords, spears, bows and arrows. The people of Dejah Thoris, who are red-hued like the Indians of Earth, are somewhat more sophisticated than their fellow Martians, but in PRINCESS Burroughs is far less interested in them than in the bizarre green men, the Tharks and the Warhoons. These science-fictional ogres, Burroughs’ most memorable monsters, do not share the humanoid characteristics of most Martians, in that they have four arms and tusks in place of teeth. In addition, they incarnate the deepest idea of the ruthless savage, appearing to have no concept of pity or kindness. Carter will eventually learn that “nurture” rather than “nature” makes the Tharks pitiless, thanks to their habit of being raised by an impersonal village rather than by natural parents. That said, a couple of Thark characters prove themselves capable of being ennobled by Carter’s example. John Carter himself clearly loves the savage life—never once is he disheartened by killing an opponent, since all of his killings are justified—but he is a savage who has not forgotten the benefits of civilized life.

But the closest similitude between Carter and the Tharks is their reserve toward sexuality (hence the opening quote). In Burroughs’s cosmos, the unrelenting chaos of Martian life has made it difficult for the Martians to have more than perfunctory interest in spawning. There are occasional “degenerates”—though “throwbacks” might be a better term—among the Tharks, as with one of the book’s main villains, Thark chieftain Tal Hajus. Of this nasty villain, who later comes close to committing inter-species rape on Dejah Thoris, Burroughs writes:

[Tal Hajus] was, in contrast to most of his fellows, a slave to that brute passion which the waning demands for procreation upon this dying planet had almost stilled in the Martian breast.

Burroughs writes this in Chapter 12, and not until Chapter 27 does Tal Hajus attempt to assault the comely princess. Thus, long before the threat manifests, Burroughs has Carter meditating (on the same page of Chapter 12) that it may be necessary for Dejah Thoris to take her own life as did “those brave frontier women of my own land rather than fall into the hands of the Indian braves.” In Tal Hajus, then, Burroughs allows for the reader to imagine the savage as “insatiably lustful.”

But even though John Carter wanders through a world where he and everyone else walk around near-naked, he himself seems as “underfunded” as the majority of Tharks—and for the same reason, that of being almost wholly oriented on the arts of Mars, with little experience in the ways of Venus. In Chapter 14, Carter gives readers their only view of his own sexual experiences as he thinks about his burgeoning affection for the princess.

So this was love! I had escaped it for all the years I had roamed the five continents and their encircling seas; in spite of beautiful women and urging opportunity; in spite of a half-desire for love and a constant search for my ideal, it had remained for me to fall furiously and hopelessly in love with a creature from another world, of a species similar possibly, yet not identical with mine.

In other words, in Burroughs’ cosmos, inter-species sex is okay when sanctioned by the goddess of love. Yet in contrast to the author’s same-year TARZAN OF THE APES, there’s not a lot of lust in the pages of PRINCESS, except from villains like Tal Hajus and the spite-filled Thark villainess Sarkoja. But then, the loyalty of Carter and most other Martians to the martial spirit mirrors the author’s dedication to spectacular violence. Even though Burroughs does not dwell on the resultant gore from blades piercing flesh, he provides so many guttings and slicings that it’s impossible for readers not to imagine the sights the author denies them. It would be interesting to compare the sheer quantity of violent acts in any Mars book to those in the contemporaneous novels of the period. I tend to think that Burroughs had no literary peers in the realm of spectacular violence until Robert E. Howard came along—but even I am not dedicated enough to the spirit of Mars to undertake such a comparative study.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 4

At the end of Part 1, I wrote:

To re-state: even though I don't believe that biology is the sole determinant of gender differentiation, I categorically do believe that the biological potential of males to develop greater strength and body-mass makes a crucial difference in their tastes in fiction. The next logical questions, then, would be:

(1) What tendency of females can be seen as the "objective correlative" (borrowed from T.S. Eliot, even if I don't agree with his application of it) for the female preference for "love and domestic situations?"

(2) Assuming that I find such an objective correlative, in what way do fictional love-narratives express "high spirits," paralleling the expression of similar spirits in fictional war-narratives?

I decided to answer the second question first, and so devoted Part 3 to giving examples of "love-narratives" in which two characters found some method of accomodation to one another, whether fully or partly successful. All five of the narratives I chose used some tropes that suggested a negotiation of non-martial power between two individuals, though in the case of THE FALL, the trope-- female temptress manipulates aimless male-- did not eventuate in megadynamic sexuality.  In the case of SWAMP THING, I didn't think the story exhibited evidence that both of the principals engaged in "mind-sex" were equally dynamic, which means that the encounter couldn't register as a parallel to the combative mode. In the other three accomodation narratives, the principals in each couple, whether they had literal sex or not, displayed some form of megadynamic might which could metaphorically translate into evidence of sexual potency.

In real life, males and females of the human species also possess differing forms of "might" in terms of their biological proclivities. For males, the tendency to "develop greater strength and body-mass" than females is their form of "might," and influences the male's taste in entertainment. A frivolous answer to the question of "what do women have" might involve the ability to bear children. However, this is not an ability that females possess independently of males, since fertilization is necessary for pregnancy to take place. So this ability does not represent a true parallel to the male tendency toward muscular development.

However, the female's ability to produce multiple orgasms, irrespective of whether her stimulation comes from a male partner or not, would seem to be the "objective correlative" I'm looking for. Some references attribute the female's capacity for orgasms within a regulated time-frame is about ten to one, though some of these references caution that not all multiple orgasms are equally satisfying, for women any more than for men. Nevertheless, the potential seems intrinsic to the human female, even if the potential comes about due to the male's great refractory period after sex.

The respective bodily propensities of males and females might be seen as a rough parallel to the Yang and the Yin of Chinese Taoism, given that "Yang" is seen as an active principle and "Yin" as a passive one. Of course, in this case "activity" is a matter of perspective, since a body that can orgasm many times exhibits more activity than one that only does it once. So maybe a better parallel would be between "extroversive activity," in which the subject seeks to use bodily strength to acquire other objects, and "introversive activity," in which the subject seeks to experiences the body's deeper ability to produce pleasure not necessarily tied to external objects.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 2

My essay THE NARRATIVE RULE OF EXCESS was the primary argument in which I connected Nietzsche's specific idea of "high spirits" with my concept of megadynamicity, extrapolated from Kant's considerations of "might" in CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT. In EXCESS I argued that Nietzsche's philosophical championing of the "excess of strength" had a parallel within literary narratives, where "excess of strength" manifests as the megadynamic power of one or more characters.

Now, for the majority of my posts on the "conflict and combat" subject, I have analyzed the appearances of megadynamic power within what I termed, in ACCOMODATING ACCOMODATION, "confrontation narratives." Historically, such narratives have been devalued by critics, who disparaged violence-based narratives as being either vulgar or counter-progressive. I still value confrontation narratives as much as I ever did, and I focus upon accomodation narratives merely for the purpose of exploring other aspects of the dynamicity theory. I hope I will never be accused of sharing the views of those jejune critics have often championed accomodation narratives for idiotic reasons like "they're more like real life."

Now, I've specified in various essays that Kantian "might" did not necessarily manifest only in violent forms. The three-part essay A REALLY LONG DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE, beginning here, cites how a non-violent form of might informs the ending of the Moore-Gibbons WATCHMEN. I would deem this graphic novel a "confrontation narrative" even though it's one in which the "good guys" essentially lose. Yet although the heroes are forced to cover up the villain's perfidy for a perceived public good, it's the journal of the slain crusader Rorschach that *may* have the power to defeat the villain's long-term aims. I would not call the journal "megadynamic," of course. It serves as an objective correlative for the power of the people, who will presumably rise up against the villain's hoax *if* they are given the knowledge to do so.

The journal also has nothing to do with Nietzsche's "high spirits," which is appropriate, since Moore makes poor usage of Nietzsche in "The Abyss Gazes Also." I bring it up, though, to show that "forms of might" can inhere in a variety of situations that do not involve violent confrontation.

So I began to ask myself: what would "high-spirited," megadynamic might look like within the context of that subset of "accomodation narratives" known as "love stories?" And here's one of the first examples that came to mind, provided by Yeats in his 1921 poem "Solomon and the Witch:"

'A cockerel 
Crew from a blossoming apple bough 
Three hundred years before the Fall, 
And never crew again till now, 
And would not now but that he thought, 
Chance being at one with Choice at last, 
All that the brigand apple brought 
And this foul world were dead at last. 
He that crowed out eternity 
Thought to have crowed it in again. "

Some critics aver  that this is a reference to the idea that Solomon and Sheba had such great, mutually-satisfying intercourse that the cock that had crowed when the world started crowed again because the bird thought the end of the world had come. This is probably as "megadynamic" as sex can get, and provides an illustration of the theoretical upward limit of sexual ecstasy in its fullest sense of "high spirits."

Part 3 will explore other, less cosmic examples.

LOVE OVER WAR (FOR NOW) PT. 1

Nietzsche's "high spirits" line from TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS prompted this current line of thought. Once more, with (high) feeling:

"Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part."

I last used the "high spirits" in M FOR EFFORT to assert that such spirited-ness was a necessary component to both of my "big M's," megadynamicity and metaphenomenality. I won't be addressing the latter, because I've decided to focus on a (comparatively) new concept: viewing the mode of the combative through the lens of sex rather than violence.

The combative mode, as I've generally defined it, comes about only when two or more megadynamic agents in a narrative contend with one another. Combative works are, I've specified, a subset of the total set of works dealing with any form of conflict, be it physical, moral, psychological, etc. Over the years I've tended to compare combative works with works that included some form of violence that was not combative, though I've also frequently written about works that have no violence, or works in which the conflict is extrinsic to the narrative.

So in recent weeks I've been meditating on the following topic: if in combative works "high spirits" are best shown by the act of combat between near-equals-- the quintessential "male" theme of war-- then what do "high spirits" look like in works in which the conflict-emphasis is more oriented upon the "female" theme of love?

It's axiomatic that male audiences generally like violence and contentious situations, and female audiences generally like love and domestic situations. There are basically just two extant explanations for this differentiation of gender-taste: either the tastes are expressive of the physical natures of the respective genders, or the tastes have been manipulated into existence by the Evil Culture Industry. Anyone who reads this should be able to guess which explanation I find more credible, but even though I agree that physical nature is a primary influence, I don't agree with those who consider it determinative.

I'm aware, of course, that the latter explanation is the one most favored, possibly because it gives its adherents the chance to wallow in victimhood. To them, absolute equity between the genders is the only possible ideal. In this essay I took issue with Heidi McDonald's ideal of equity by saying:

The whole "who's exposed more" question should never have been one of pure equity.  Equity is something to be observed in the workplace or the boardroom, but not in fiction.  Fiction is a place where fantasy reigns, and as I said in the essay, it's simply a lot harder to sell hyper-sexualized fantasies to women than to men.  I tend to think that this is because in general men are hornier bastards than women, but others' mileage may vary.

A couple of years previous, I wrote DEFINING PSUEDOFEMINISM, in which I contrasted remarks by a writer I considered a "pseudo-feminist" with remarks by noted "anti-feminist" Dave Sim. Both, I pointed out, attempted to shore up their opinions with appeals to what each of them considered empirical fact. Sim's views about female athletes dispensed with any considerations of equity whatever. I observed:

Sim "proves" that women are "inherently, self-evidently, inferior beings" by asserting that women cannot beat men on an equal footing.  Hence fantasies of women kicking butt, in sports or in other forms of entertainment, are related to "the Charlie's Angels Syndrome," and so stand as further proof of women's inferiority.

In addition to disproving Sim's view in that essay, I championed the concept of the "fighting woman" archetype in several essays, and showed in NON-ADDICTIVE VICTIMAGE that I was not allied to the "biology is destiny" crowd.

I wouldn't have written as much as I have on the subject of "the Fighting Woman Archetype" if I believed that the greater body mass of the human male decided all questions of supremacy. But if it's almost inevitable that most men are stronger than most women, then this physical factor inevitably will be reflected in fiction. This inequity will at all times comprise an "is" that cannot be negated by any *ought.*  Even comic books, which have arguably been a greater haven for the Femme Formidable than any other medium, can't refute the basics of physical law. 

To re-state: even though I don't believe that biology is the sole determinant of gender differentiation, I categorically do believe that the biological potential of males to develop greater strength and body-mass makes a crucial difference in their tastes in fiction. The next logical questions, then, would be:

(1) What tendency of females can be seen as the "objective correlative" (borrowed from T.S. Eliot, even if I don't agree with his application of it) for the female preference for "love and domestic situations?"

(2) Assuming that I find such an objective correlative, in what way do fictional love-narratives express "high spirits," paralleling the expression of similar spirits in fictional war-narratives?

More in Part 2.

MYTHCOMICS: "RITE OF SPRING" (SWAMP THING #34, 1985)

When holiday-seasons roll around, I sometimes give thought to the idea of organizing these essays on a holiday theme. However, it's not often that comics-makers have succeeded in coming up with symbolic discourses about seasonal events. One exception, perhaps more appropriate for Easter than for the current season, is the Moore-Bissette "Rite of Spring." Indeed, the magazine, released in March 1985, may be the only example of a 'springtime comic book." If there are others, this is still probably the best.

I used "Rite" earlier in the essay LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION as an example of  a sexual activity free of any aspect of physical violence, summing up the action thusly:

SWAMP THING #34's story "Rites of Spring" (Moore/Bissette/Totelbein) features about the most non-violent sexual encounter one can imagine, since the sex act is abstracted into an interweaving of minds rather than bodies. The narrative concept is that because Swamp Thing doesn't have a penis, he uses one of the hallucinogenic fruits growing on his vegetable body to give his human love Abby an ecstatic ride into his enhanced consciousness. Thus the mind-sex scenes in ST #34 bear kinship with those Hollywood sex-scenes which depict the literal sex-act as a flurry of abstract movements, with lots of touching but no hint of one body actually entering another body. I imagine that a simplistic Freudian would read the significant value of this story as an instance of "castration anxiety." But since the sex-scene takes place in a story that hypothesizes that all living things possess energy-fields to which Swamp Thing and Abby are both attuned, it's more accurate to the narrative to see "Rites of Spring" as a celebration of Jungian energy/libido in all things. In addition, to the extent that Swampy does "put" his consciousness "into" Abby, he doesn't function as a castrated male in narrative or significant valuations.

The "mind-sex scenes" in "Rite" would be enough to make it a mythcomic, but it also belongs to a much more prevalent myth-image, that of "the woman and her demon/monster lover." Prior to this issue, the characters of Matt Cable and Abigail Arcane, who functioned as support-cast for many of the early Wein-Wrightson stories, had been married for some time. However, the marriage was on the rocks even before Abby's evil uncle Anton possessed Matt's body and used it to have indirect sex with his niece, before he was defeated by both the swamp monster and Cable herself.

Prior to Alan Moore's tenure on the feature, I don't believe other writers had even entertained the notion that Abby Arcane could entertain any feelings for Swamp Thing beyond a certain distanced respect. But Moore was in those days the guy who went the extra distance.

To be sure, though Matt Cable's body is still alive, there's not much chance of his recovery. and it's clear that, in keeping with the changing of winter to spring in the story proper, Abby's feelings have also undergone a seasonal shift, so that she's fallen in love with the monster. In turn, Moore reveals that Swamp Thing, even though he no longer thinks himself to be a human transformed into a plant-creature, has been in love with Abby for a long time. Since the two of them can't have sex, Swamp Thing suggests a communion of spirits, which can be obtained when Abby eats one of the tubers growing on the plant-man's body.

Abby then gets to see that the world of animal life and death is suffused with interweaving energy-fields, merging the cosmological world of life-processes with the metaphysical world of spirit.

This "good trip" lasts for eight pages, most of which must be read vertically rather than horizontally, which is one of the few truly artful uses a comics-artist has made of said arrangement. The trip then culminates in a figurative orgasm, an experience beyond words.

In contrast to the many interactions of woman and monster that are predicated on violation-- not least that of the vampiric intruder-- Moore and Bissette are clearly seeking to break down the barriers between the human world and the world of "the other," at least insofar as it makes for a better story. This storyline led to other developments, such as a hybrid spawn from Abby and Swamp Thing, but the narrative of issue #34 never feels like a set-up for future events, and can be read with only minimal acquaintance of preceding continuity. To my knowledge Bissette's designs here constitute one of his highest achievements, while Moore-- whose command of poetic elements in his prose hasn't always proved sure-- never hits a false note with his visual accompaniments. Even when Abby sees visions of rodents fucking and fighting in their holes, Moore's images of "small hearts spilling poppies of blood on  black earth scented with urine" causes even the images of violence to become subsumed by those of sex.

I'll add that the subsumption of violence applies to the story as a whole, for though the tale follows the violent encounter with Abby's uncle, here there is no villain to be defeated, no cataclysm to be averted. Of course even 1985 readers knew that this was an idyll at best, that by the next issue Swamp Thing would again be battling gruesome entities. Still, like the story I discussed in THE BASE LEVEL OF CONFLICT,  this one is more about overturning expectations than about fighting opponents. In an addendum to the original essay on said story, I fleshed out my original view:

I still assert that the predominant appeal of "The Last Night of the World" is its defiance of audience-expectations re: the equanimity with which the viewpoint-characters-- and implicitly, all other people in the world except the children-- meet the world's irrevocable end. But this conflict arises from the combination of a dire situation with reactions which do not seem to fit that situation...

"Rite of Spring" is, like the Bradbury story previously discussed, devoted to presenting an ordinary person, in this case, Abby, and presenting her with new insight into the familiar world she knows, thus transforming her perceptions. If there is a conflict, it's one appropriate to the theme of springtime, in which the old expectations of winter gives way to the rebirth of vernal possibilities.

MYTHCOMICS: "SHE TRIED HER OWN ON" (DOMINA NO DO PART 35, 2008?)

Though I've devoted a number of mythcomics to the topic of sexuality, none of the comics I've addressed deal with the act of sex itself, but with sexuality as it occurs within culture, usually in such genres as adventure and romantic drama. Sex itself-- which I talk about under the blog-label "sex" rather than 'sexuality"-- is, within the literary continuum, primarily a cosmological phenomenon, in that it deals with bodily functions. Sex can also have, in literary works, psychological, sociological and metaphysical connotations, but most of these are manifested within the corpus of "sexuality."

What people commonly call pornography is literature that focuses primarily upon some aspect of the sex act. The acts depicted may be "hardcore" or "softcore." In my estimation the more specific the work is about the specificity of the sex act, the less it is about the symbolic discourse surrounding the plot and characters involved. However, I have found at least one exception, thanks to a writeup on TV Tropes.

So far as I can tell, DOMINA NO DO is an original manga work, written by one "Zappa Go" and illustrated by Sankichi Meguro. It's a comedy-romance in the "hentai" style. Most of the material in its 41 chapters is softcore, along the line of LOVE HINA, but there are a few scenes are close to hardcore, though in Japan there are still various restrictions on what is shown. Part 35 displays these restrictions, for even though it's a comic take on the differences between male and female sex organs, a lot of the imagery is adumbrated through devices such as dream-imagery.

Some quick backstory: average high-school youth Takeshi is abducted and taken to a private estate owned by an insanely rich family, the Dominas. He learns that the oldest daughter, Hikari, is a previous acquaintance, with whom he enjoyed a brief friendship back in grade school. However, teenaged Hikari has recently been encouraged by her parents-- a practicing sadist/masochist couple-- to make a marriage of convenience. Desperate to avoid an arranged marriage, Hikari convinces her parents that she still holds a deep romantic longing for her childhood friend. Since her parents are both rich and insane, they more or less buy Takeshi from his worthless middle-class parents-- who almost completely disappear from the narrative-- and make him their permanent "guest' in their capacious mansion.

Most of the stories in DOMINA are, despite their hentai aspects, pretty typical comedy-romance. Obviously, once Hikari is forced to remain in close propinquity to Takeshi, she begins to relate to him as a human being more than as a possession. And in Chapter 35, this is exploited for comic effect with regard to one of Freud's favorite tropes: what he termed "penis envy."

Because the Dominas are super-rich, they have access to all sorts of mystical resources. Hikari, despite having seen Takeshi's penis and having deemed it less than impressive, has dreams in which an incredibly well-hung Takeshi advances on her. She wakes up before anything happens in her dream, and she theorizes that it's because in a previous adventure she seemed to witness Takeshi making love to another girl. Adding to her distress is the fact that she sees Takeshi socializing with Hikari's twin sister Kageri, which threatens her potential relationship with the young man. 

Hikari's youngest sister Akari and one of the estate's many maids observe Hikari sulking around, and for some reason decide she needs a lesson in male sexuality. Then, when that doesn't seem to soothe Hikari's adolescent sensibility, her grandmother decides to let her walk a mile with male equipment. Not only does this mean that she has to adjust to new bathroom habits, she even gets to find out what it feels like for a male to get busted in the balls. Since she did that very thing to Takeshi in the previous adventure, this causes her to experience a degree of guilt, and for the first time, she tenders an apology to Takeshi, who can barely understand the change in Hikari's attitude. The grandmother then takes off the spell, and everything goes back to normal-- except that Hikari has one more comic dream. I won't describe the dream, which almost seems like a direct refutation of Freud.

OBJECTING TO OBJECTIFICATION AGAIN

Now that I've finished my review of the 2016 DVD-adaptation of the Moore-Bolland KILLING JOKE graphic novel, I may as well return to a long-neglected subject: how the word "objectification" came to be used as a buzzword for anything a given critic does not like.

Here's a sampling from online reviews, with my responses, and golly gee, the first one I found-- just a little above my own, when searching "Killing Joke+ dvd+ objectification-- is my old pal ENNBEE, telling the GUARDIAN readers that you just can't update "sexist source material."

Well, certainly not as easily as a critic can lie about what a film shows:

Pursued by a creepy stalker mafia tough-guy villain, Batgirl makes amateurish mistake after amateurish mistake, prompting Batman to sneer to her face that the bad guy “led you like a lap dog”.

Does Batgirl make some mistakes in handling the "creepy, etc." villain? Yes, but not in the repetitive manner asserted by Ennbee. Nor, despite Ennbee's claim, does the Batman character ever "sneer" at the Batgirl character. I can well understand why Ennbee would make such a claim, since he's addicted to victimage. But as written, Batman has no reason to bust Batgirl's lady-balls. The storyline, whatever its failings, does make clear that Batman values Batgirl as a partner, and when she starts going off the rails, he loses an ally thereby. He gives a tough and unsympathetic assessment of the ways in which Batgirl has allowed herself to let the villain get inside her head, and he dismisses her from the case not because she's a woman, but because she has fucked up.

And then there's this willful misreading of the whole arc of the Batgirl-prologue:

In response, Batgirl whines that Batman doesn’t trust her, has impulsive sex with him, and then indulges in a series of violent emotional tantrums before deciding to retire her Batgirl identity on the grounds that the stress is too much for her.

Really, Ennbee? When a woman protests a man's verdict, it's just "whining?" They oughtta kick Ennbee out of the Liberals' League for that one. It goes without saying that Ennbee would not approve of the sex-scene, but after the sex-scene there's only one "emotional tantrum," in which the villain Franz attempts to kill Batman, almost succeeds, and is beaten to pudding when Batgirl comes to Batman's rescue.

I'm reading along as I write this, so I'm betting that Ennbee will still top this. Let's see--

As a bonus, Batman hypocritically lectures her on the dangers of objectification while the bad guy compulsively and smarmily sexualizes her, and the cartoon lingers on a closeup image of her butt when she jogs. Girls aren’t emotionally or mentally tough enough to be heroes, is the message; they’re just too darn emotional. But hey, they look good in those tight costumes, right?

Bingo! Yes, ultraliberals cannot divorce the hero's actions from those of the villain. I pointed out that Batman letting Batgirl shag him would be problematic in real-world terms-- that is, if Batman were a person. And I'd expand on that to say that a fictional portrait of sex between two people who shouldn't be together is practically the foundation of Western drama. There is of course nothing hypocritical in Batman's warning: he's not talking about objectification per se but about the effect one crook's smarminess is having on one character's psyche. There is also no blanket condemnation of women as crime-fighters. Will Ennbee even mention the DVD's reference to Barbara Gordon's transformation into Oracle?  I'm betting not, but I'm sure I can find more prevarications.

Let's see, after he quotes one of the creators about what they meant to do, Ennbee decides that the faults in KILLING JOKE are not those of the specific creators, but of all males, and that only female creators could have possibly obviated them (though probably not in an adaptation of KILLING JOKE, which is explicitly beyond saving):

Perhaps different creators could have managed to craft a non-misogynist Batgirl story, especially if those creators were women. But a big part of the problem is, simply, that this is a Killing Joke adaptation. 

I won't waste repeating Ennbee's driveling, repetitive claims that Batgirl's failure is automatically the failure of all females, and therefore leads to a "misogynist cartoon."

However, this particular review-subject didn't allow for Ennbee any enlightened posturings on the subject of race. Therefore he drops the subject of KILLING JOKE and starts harping on why the new GHOSTBUSTERS was racist because it didn't automatically make the black character a great scientist. I think the movie's greatest crime was that it wasn't funny, but I'm not surprised that Ennbee decided to cram both race and sex into one pre-digested package.

Damn, when I started this, I thought I'd just skim a few representative quotes from different reviewers. Once again, though, Ennbee's addiction to both victimage and prevarication has taken up the whole dang post. More later, perhaps.

SOMEWHERE, WONDER WOMAN IS BEING MISTREATED

The heavens must have wanted me to tilt with Noah Berlasky again. I glanced at HU a couple of times in the last month, and found nothing worth commenting upon. But a chance citation on a CBR thread led me to yet another NB venture into social justice, THE ENDURING RACISM OF WONDER WOMAN.

This essay starts out a lot like one NB wrote in December, and to which I responded with a two-part essay in February, here and here.  In the earlier essay, NB decided that he could judge the reactionary politics of BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN on the basis of a four-minute trailer. In this April essay, he started out by attacking publicity photos released from the in-production 2017 WONDER WOMAN film, because "all the Amazons in the images are white." 

Yet, in contrast to the December film, NB isn't browbeating the movie people because they didn't hew closely enough to the Wonder Woman canon, as articulated by creators William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter. Instead, he was righteously condemning the filmmakers for not following a more recent addition to the canon: George Perez's interpolation of a black Amazon, one Philippus, who was introduced into the mythos in 1987. As one who read the series back in the day, I don't think that Philippus ever became much more than a token black character, but given that NB isn't the only online pundit bewailing her absence, clearly she made some impact-- at least as an example of ideologically-approved race-bending, if not as a character in her own right.

However, after NB has fussed a little about the failure of the filmmakers to instantaneously live up to his lofty standards, he drops that bone and goes after an even more chimerical one: to prove that Marston and Peter were themselves racists.

I wasn't entirely surprised by this apparent volte-face. Although NB has repeatedly praised the liberal sexuality and gender-consciousness of the Marston-Peter canon, on occasion I've seen him lament the ways in which the two creators failed his purity test regarding racial depictions. To be sure Marston gets the lion's share of condemnation, since he, unlike Peter, had much more to do with the direction of the Amazon's adventures. I concur with this de-emphasis on Peter, since one cannot be sure to what extent he simply drew whatever the scripts told him to draw.

I would concur, also, that there's no question that Marston used images that qualify as "racist" rather than simply "racial"-- though it should be noted that he sometimes employed positive images of Asians, Middle Easterners, and Native Americans when it served the purpose of a particular story. But as if offering a reverse-image of NB's emphasis on the Importance of Keeping Philippus, Marston doesn't seem to have anything comparable with respect to sub-Saharan Africans and what are now called (sometimes) Afro-Americans. Here's one of the earliest depiction of a Black American in the series, from SENSATION COMICS #10 (1942).

Though there are a few exceptions to this pattern, I think it's axiomatic to say that Marston had no problem with depicting American Blacks as complete doofuses, and in that respect, he is as much a racist as all the other comics-creators who did the same thing.

However, the admission that many Golden Age creators had a nasty sense of humor is not enough for NB. He has to find ways to use Marston, the man he respects for his liberal sexual views, as a paradigm of Evil White Culture.

Taking his oversimplifications in order of occurrence:

The absolute low point of racism in the Wonder Woman comics was in Wonder Woman #19. This issue was set in some unspecified African nation, giving Peter the opportunity to draw African people as subhuman animalistic blackface monsters. For his part, Marston wrote a script in which the Africans were allied with the Nazis; they actually had swastikas on their loincloths. Hitler, of course, loathed black people. To present black Africans as Nazis both whitewashes Hitler and suggests that black people were implicated in an evil regime which called for their genocide. In short, even by the very racist standards of American wartime pulp, Wonder Woman #19 is a shameful exercise in ignorance and hate.

I confess I have not read the story in question, but-- genocide? According to this blog-writeup of the same story, it looks to me like WW and her buddies manage to win back the Africans from the Nazis, who were "threatening [the natives] with their [the Nazis'] death-ray." It's true that WW and her buddies win out by playing upon the foolish superstitions of the natives, and their natural sense of rhythm, etc. But of what relevance is it that "Hitler loathed black people?" The story in question was dated September/October 1946, so it's long after the conclusion of WWII, and Hitler's presumptive death. The die-hard goose-steppers of this story have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, by attempting to persuade the natives that they can become part of the coming regime. I don't imagine Marston bothered to work out this scenario very carefully, but WW#19 is certainly of a piece with many wartime stories in which Axis agents are seen suborning or subverting established Third World cultures. Indeed, WONDER WOMAN #1 (1942) features one story, "Wonder Woman Goes to the Circus," in which a Japanese spy infiltrates a group of Burmese mahouts in order to sabotage American interests. Frankly, IMO the Burmese get much worse treatment than the Africans in the post-war story, though I suppose it's a measured choice at best. In any case, there doesn't seem to be any attempt in the WONDER WOMAN #19 story to justify genocide, though the narrative holds much in common with a number of post-war stories that sought to validate the return of imperialism.

Up to this point NB is critiquing only what Marston put on the page, even if he's brought in some skewed interpretations. But he does have an earlier line about how "only white women were awesome," and NB justifies it here:

You could argue that Marston’s racism is inconsistent with his feminism and with Wonder Woman’s true principles. Marston generally wrote stories in which Wonder Woman would discover a patriarchal society of Mole Men or Seal Men, help the women find their true moral, physical, and erotic strength, and then depart with a happy matriarchy in place. In Wonder Woman #19, though, Marston’s racism interferes with the feminist narrative. Wonder Woman does not help black women to find strength and sisterhood; in fact, for all practical purposes, black women are not represented at all in the comic. Marston’s belief in female superiority and his belief in black inferiority are incompatible. He cannot imagine black women, and therefore, for the one and only time in the Wonder Woman series, is unable to imagine feminist revolution. Racism undermined Marston’s progressive vision. 

Certainly one can say that Marston's racial attitudes interfere with what NB conceives to be a true "progressive vision," but if Marston's ideas are in any way progressive, then those ideas stand on their own, whether or not he was progressive in every other regard. I can well believe that Marston used the African story, like the Burmese story before it, to make fun of peoples he considered amusing, or knew that his readers would find amusing. He may or may not have considered all black people inferior to white people, but there's another point NB has failed to consider--

If Marston had wanted to publish a story showing black women finding strength and sisterhood-- who would have published it?

My view of Marston is that, crank or not, he had his pragmatist side. He does occasionally show individual women of color getting it together, as with the cinnamon-skinned Pepita, also from WONDER WOMAN #1.

But in the years of 1942-1947, during which Marston wrote the Amazon, no comic book company-- indeed, no medium in the U.S. (if anywhere)-- would have published a story about empowering the women of either local minorities or of Third World countries. DC Comics was obviously OK with the Amazon liberation-fantasy as long as it was applied to archaic cultures that somehow survived into the 20th century (like Atlantis from WONDER WOMAN #8, 1944) or to alien worlds replete with winged fairy-women (like Venus, from ALL-STAR #13, 1942). But DC Comics' record on both feminism and minority relations was much the same as Marston's: they played to the prejudices of the dominant white majority most of the time, while allowing for occasional breakthroughs with particular characters. Indeed, the dialectics of feminism in the 1940s had not yet assimilated the modern era's much-touted conceptualization of "racial difference." It makes no sense to bludgeon Marston for not being able to articulate a vision of racial-and-sexual justice that few persons of his time could even imagine, and he's not a racist for not following through on implications that Noah Berlatsky deems inevitably linked. 

I made no bones about saying that there was a "dominant white majority" at the time, one that certainly reinforced the racist stereotypes in Marston's work. But this statement is very different from NB harping on every example of Caucasian identity as an extension of Evil White Culture, which is what NB does when he insists that the Amazons must not be all-white; that they must have their black token no matter what logical hoops the writers must be jump through to get Philippus to Themiscrya-- 

Even if those hoops aren't nearly as narrow as the ones that got Idris Elba into Asgard.