FORMAL AND INFORMAL EXCELLENCE PT. 2

 I first used the terms "formal postulate" and "informal postulate" here, but I've devoted many earlier posts to sussing out which aspects of  a story appeal to the intellect, which to the imagination, and which to a combination of both abstract "vertical values."

But as I want to try out the new terms on something, it's time to break down some examples in terms of the didactic and/or the mythopoeic potentiality.

The famous EC Comics story "Judgment Day" (WEIRD FANTASY #18, 1953) is my selection of a story that appeals only to the didactic potentiality, and thus is a pure formal postulate. Symbol-hunters like myself would search in vain throughout Al Feldstein's story for any of the symbolic discourses familiar in prose science fiction-- discourses about whether robots can take on a wide variety of human traits, or man's quest to conquer the cosmos. Feldstein subordinates everything in this one-story universe to making one pedagogical point: that even in the far future, the scourge of bigotry will still exist, improbably incarnated in artificial beings-- despite the intimation that actual humans have overcome bigotry, which is the point of showing the galactic inspector to a Black man.

Since this essay-series started with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the reader will notice that it's no coincidence that I'm going to pick particular stories by each to illustrate two other types of vertical value.

I mentioned that some stories combine the didactic and mythopoeic potentialities, and this combination appears in the Stan Lee-John Buscema story "Origin of the Silver Surfer." For this story, Lee-- almost certainly the dominantly creative member of the team-- sought to give the character more humanity than the "science fiction angel" in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR, who was essentially beyond commonplace humanity. Lee's new origin not only posited that the  Surfer had once been a mortal alien humanoid, Norrin Radd, but also that he hailed from Zenn-La, a civilization that had advanced so far that it held no challenges for one as restless as the future hero. This new element had a didactic purpose-- beware of becoming too coddled by advanced technology-- but there's a mythopoeic quality to Norrin's discontent as well. He's seen as a throwback to a more venturesome era, one who would be more suited to Zenn-La's frontier era. In other words, the Silver Surfer was just a "space cowboy."

Then Galactus comes calling, making a mockery of Zenn-La's defenses as the gigantic alien prepares to devour Norrin Radd's homeworld. Here Lee follows through on the loose God the Father/Jesus the Son opposition that arguably appeared in the Galactus Trilogy. But this time the Surfer is not an inhuman angel sacrificing himself for Earth-humanity; he's a mortal sacrificing his freedom to save his own world. So he's a cosmic Christ-cowboy, but significantly, this mythopoeisis still carries a didactic message. As the Surfer bids his beloved farewell before beginning his servitude to Galactus, he tells her. "Let not the spirit of our ancestors be lost a second time! Let not our people grow soft and indolent!" Norrin Radd gets his earlier wish, to emulate the ways of Zenn-La's early explorers, for now he can range the entire universe in his quest to find non-inhabited worlds for his master. Even the Surfer's estrangement from his girlfriend resembles the sacrifice of similar pleasures by heroes in Western films, in order that they may serve a greater cultural cause. So "Origin's" vertical values include a blend of formal-didactic and informal-mythopoeic postulates, though in this case I find that the mythopoeic postulate predominates.

Lee's story-- which may be the finest single story he ever wrote without input from "The Other Big Two"-- was the beginning of a series, but for my selection from Kirby, I choose a conclusion, the end of the NEW GODS series, issue #11, which bears the curious title, "Darkseid and Sons." Some fans speculate that prior to scripting this story, Kirby had been told the axe was about to fall upon the majority of the Fourth World. Thus he had but one issue to present some rough thematic conclusion to his series, while leaving the door open for a follow-up. An earlier issue had established Kalibak, son of Darkseid, had been captured by humans following Kalibak's inconclusive battle with his frequent rival, the heroic Orion. So Kirby chooses to match the two powerhouses against one another for his NEW GODS finale.

In early NEW GODS issues, Kirby had dropped broad hints that Orion might bear some shadowy relationship to Darkseid, Lord of Apokolips, and then he let fall the other shoe in NEW GODS #7. That story explicitly stated that Orion, Darkseid's son, was raised on New Genesis from perhaps age five onward, while Highfather's son Scott Free was raised on Apokolips, in an exchange one might call "hostage-fosterage." So it's a little anti-climactic when Darkseid makes a reference to Orion and Kalibak having fought as "children," though apparently neither warrior remembers growing up alongside the other. During Orion's battle, he more or less guesses that he and Kalibak are brothers. Kalibak himself has apparently never told of his parentage, but even the basic idea inflames him with nascent sibling rivalry.

The title actually gives the game away: the final revelation is not that either sibling, but that of Darkseid's own history. NEW GODS #7 also introduced the reader to both Heggra, Darkseid's mother, and Tigra his wife, also Orion's mother. There's no didactic point to this revelation, but there's a very big mythopoeic quality evoked by Kirby. Darkseid he complains that his two sons "darken my future as surely as their maternal forbears ruled my past! My mother, Queen Heggra! Orion's mother, Tigra! And the sorceress Suli!" It's not just an instance of misspeaking for him to include Heggra, who was obviously not mother to either of Darkseid's sons. Symbolically, he's including himself alongside his sons as having been "hag-ridden" (or "Heggra-ridden?") by powerful women. He wanted Suli, who possibly complemented Darkseid's own evil by spawning the brutish Kalibak. But Tigra, the choice of Darkseid's mother Heggra, unleashed from the seed of Darkseid's loins a force for good, a son capable of opposing his father rather than serving him. The story strongly suggests that Darkseid comes to admire the son who fights him, even though he retaliated for Heggra's murder of Suli by an act of indirect matricide. 

Kirby got one final chance at a sequel to NEW GODS in the graphic novel HUNGER DOGS in 1985, but he didn't bring up this maternal trope again. Did the artist, who was at least lightly conversant with some of the famous plays of Shakespeare and the Greeks, just happen upon the same trope so frequently evoked by Greek playwrights, in which stalwart heroes are undone by conniving females like Medea, Electra, and Clytemnestra? I think he incorporated the maternal motif into NEW GODS because he understood its dramatic appeal, at least on an instinctive, mythopeoic level. But because he doesn't have a didactic point to make with these revelations, "Darkseid and Sons" can only be what I term an "informal postulate," because there's no attempt to subject the correlation to intellectual cogitation.

MYTHCOMICS: "WELCOME TO DYNAMO CITY" (SILVER SURFER #40-43, 1990)

In ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, Northrop Frye asserts that adventure and irony are practically inversions of one another, and I tend to agree, since these two mythoi seem to interweave far less well than the other two mythoi, comedy and drama. Most Marvel franchises fall squarely within the mythos of adventure, and any ironic content-- say, that of Peter Parker having to work for the man who wants to ruin Spider-Man-- is subsumed by the more exhilarating aspects of adventure.

In most of the Silver Surfer's incarnations, the character has been bereft of ironic content. Norrin Raad is known for being a pop-Christ figure, spouting doleful speeches about man's inhumanity to man, and he demonstrates a level of power that necessitates pitting him against opponents able to match his level of potency. However, for four issues of the 1990s SURFER feature, writer Jim Starlin and artist Ron Lim took the surfboard-riding stalwart in a darker direction.

Issue #39 concludes a plotline in which the Surfer overcomes a suitably cosmic menace-- the much-heralded Thanos, who dies yet another temporary death at the end of the narrative-- and #40 follows up with the Surfer and his allies ruminating on the villain's demise. Unexpectedly, the Surfer receives a summons from an outer-space satellite community, Dynamo City. The authorities of the satellite want the Surfer to testify as to the demise of Thanos. Though the summoner cannot compel the powerful hero to comply, the agent plays on Norrin Radd's curiosity by claiming that Thanos left behind a taped message for the Surfer as part of his last will and testament.

As soon as the sky-rider arrives in Dynamo City, however, he finds that he's been too confident in his great powers. Dynamo City's rulers insist upon a total hegemony of power, and as soon as Norrin enters the satellite, his cosmic powers are drained from his body, making him entirely mortal. Though bemused by this development, Norrin accedes to the authorities' demand for testimony regarding his role in Thanos's death. The court rules the Surfer innocent of Thanos's murder. But the villain's taped message suggests that Thanos has somehow mousetrapped the hero by bringing him to the satellite.

The Surfer finds out why when he tries to leave, for a local policeman informs he cannot depart without paying an "exit tax." Of course the hero has no money of any kind on his person, and he's forced to do what any ordinary shlub in Dynamo City would have to do: get a job in order to pay his debts. Starlin and Lim capture a rare level of ironic humor as the Surfer faces the horror of job placement, trying to explain his talents as a former herald to Galactus. Unable to get regular employment, the Surfer is forced to join Dynamo City's huge community of homeless vagrants. He makes the acquaintance of a scruffy little alien, Zeaklar, who knows the workings of Dynamo City even though he's never been able to escape the poverty level himself. It's through Zeaklar that the Surfer learns that he can make some money by selling his memories to the citizens of Dynamo. The Surfer is disgusted by this prospect, but he badly desires to escape the city, and so he makes a deal to let the jaded Dynamo populace be titillated by his personal experiences. However, the producers of the memory-show take advantage of his lack of business sense and cheat him.

Once more relegated to vagrant status, the Surfer gets the idea that even if the underlings serving the system are corrupt, he may win clemency from the ruler of Dynamo City, "the Great I." Of course any reader who hears that name will rightfully suspect that the hero is setting himself up for a fall, since "Great I" sounds a much more famed ruler of pop-fiction, "the Great Oz." When the Surfer manages to confront the ruler, he finds that there isn't even a clever mountebank behind the curtain of power. Instead, the "Great I" is just a near-brainless creature who does nothing more than process information. There isn't even a particular power behind the throne: just a bunch of self-interested, self-important  bureaucrats.

Indeed, even the down-trodden citizens of Dynamo are largely complicit in the corruption. By his continued defiance of the city's mores, the Surfer earns himself a trial, and though he's guilty of all the charges brought against him, the court can't resist tossing in a bunch of false charges as well. This scene is one of the few in which any female characters show up during the four-issue story, but they're just as bad as any of the males in terms of framing the Surfer for phony crimes.

Both the Surfer and Zeaklar are scheduled for execution, and the hero can do nothing about it. Only dumb luck, and the inherent stupidity of the Dynamo hierarchy, saves the two of them, for their means of execution is to hurl condemned prisoners into deep space.

This, of course, turns out to be a case of throwing Br'er Rabbit into the briarpatch, though the Surfer has no inkling that this is what the authorities plan to do. Once he's in space, his cosmic powers return and he saves Zeaklar from extinction. The Dynamo cops send a few robot spaceships after the Surfer, and the hero gets the chance to vent some fury by wiping out all of these mechanical maraudders. However, when the hero considers wreaking vengeance on the satellite-city as a whole, Zeaklar reminds him that to do so will expose thousands of innocents to death. The Surfer decides that he will find some way to avenge his suffering, but since Dynamo City has never appeared again in a Marvel comic, that threat turned hollow.

This story was certainly not the first time Jim Starlin attempted to make satirical points in his various works. However, this is probably his most thoroughgoing attempt to mount a story devoted purely to the satire of a particular social system, implicitly that of commodity-driven capitalism. Starlin is no subtler here than anywhere else, but at least his mythic theme is fully developed, and at no time can the normal thrills of the adventure-genre overthrow the sense that Dynamo City's way of life cannot be undone even by "the Power Cosmic."

MYTHCOMICS: "ORIGIN OF THE SILVER SURFER" (SILVER SURFER #1, 1968)

Following the Silver Surfer's 1966 debut in The Galactus Trilogy, the character became a peripatetic guest-star in assorted Marvel features, with the exception of his one starring role in the backup tale of FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5. As I noted in my essay on the Trilogy, the SF-trope of menacing Earth or some comparable planet with a world-destroying being had been done before, The Trilogy, however, succeeds in infusing the story of Galactus and his rebellious herald with a dense level of symbolism, largely drawn from Judeo-Christian mythology. However, the Trilogy also offers a more mundane point of interest for fans of Silver Age Marvel, given that it's the one time in the history of the Lee-Kirby collaboration that Lee unequivocably credited Kirby with inventing one of the characters totally on his own, repeatedly asserting that the Silver Surfer appeared in the story sans any input from Stan Lee.

Without rehashing the many facets of the Lee-Kirby history, suffice to say that when the Surfer appeared, he had no explicit origin. He's consistently portrayed by Lee and Kirby as an alien humanoid, who, much like Galactus, is beyond human comprehension, and who shares none of the emotions known to Earth-people. From a "Skrull's-eye" view given to the reader, it appears that the Surfer has existed for some time as Galactus's herald, and it seems implicit that in the past the silver-hued, surfboard-riding extraterrestrial has guided his gargantuan master to devour planets that may have been inhabited. Certainly the Surfer evinces no initial compunction about drawing Galactus to the Earth, and only within the course of the narrative does he develop a conscience against killing, which brings about his opposition to his master and the Surfer's concomitant exile to the Planet Earth.

Reportedly Jack Kirby had conceived an origin for the Surfer, and he was not pleased when Stan Lee, working with John Buscema, presented his own origin for the hero in SILVER SURFER #1. To my knowledge, Kirby never spelled out exactly what his intended origin would have looked like, but clearly it would have proceeded from the initial idea that the Surfer was distinctly not human. Lee must have been on the same page with this conception back in the day, for in FANTASTIC FOUR #55, the Thing picks a fight with the Surfer out of jealousy over Alicia Masters, and Mister Fantastic tries to tell his partner that the Surfer doesn't even understand human modes of expression because "he isn't even human." I've theorized that some of Kirby's original concept was possibly recycled into 1978's SILVER SURFER graphic novel, the last collaboration of Lee and Kirby. Although the dialogue establishes that the story is "in continuity" with the origin given by Lee in the 1968 tale, there are suggestions that the Surfer may be, like other characters in the GN, an emanation from Galactus's own being, not unlike the stories of angels being directly manifested by the Will of God.

But in 1968, Lee distances himself from Kirby's 'science-fiction angel." It appears that Lee wanted to humanize the Surfer, probably to make the character more relatable to the average comics-buyer. At the same time, clearly Lee wanted the Surfer's debut to be perceived as an event, since the story premiered in a 25-cent "book-length" format to start, though by issue #8 the feature was retooled for the 15-cent market and kept that status until cancellation at issue *18. Lee had received approbation from his fans for the philosophical musings of the Surfer and other Marvel characters, so it's likely he thought that the SURFER title was a chance to see if the audience would support a continuing character with an extremely heavy philosophical attitude.

For the first six pages of SILVER SURFER #1, the protagonist evinces the same speechifyin' tendencies seen in his earlier appearances. He rails against the "unforgivable insanity" of the human race with whom he's been consigned to dwell, and speaks of humans' "hatred, fear, and unreasoning hostility." He's met with animus even when he rescues astronaut John Jameson from a watery death, which is certainly a patent reference to one of the earliest feats of Lee's most popular martyr-hero, Spider-Man. Then on page seven, the Surfer begins recollecting what his life was like before he was the Surfer-- and this remembrance of things past, though occasionally interrupted by present-day interludes, forms the bulk of the story.

Lee's retconned Surfer is still an alien, but one with an entirely mortal nature. In that life, the Surfer was Norrin Radd, a native of Zenn-La. Despite the resemblance of the planet's name to that of James Hilton's pacifistic paradise Shangri-La, Zenn-La is drawn from the science-fiction trope of the overcivilized civilization, one whose inhabitants are supported by such glorious technology that they need do nothing but live in sybaritic stagnation. But here Lee reverses the formula of the Surfer inveighing against the savagery of Earth-people, for the mortal Norrin is discontent with the complacence of his people, observing that "those to whom no distant horizons beckon-- for whom no challenges remain-- though they have inherited a universe, they possess only empty sand." His girlfriend Shalla Bal, also introduced for the first time here, is as happy as any other Zenn-Lavian with their unchanging status. Norrin alone mourns the loss of real history: of his ancestors' renunciation of warfare, of the dawning of an Age of Reason, and, most relevant to Norrin, the culture's era of space-exploration. 

However, an invader appears to menace the peaceful world. Since the locals have forgotten how to practice eternal vigilance, they fall back on their sole defense: a great super-weapon. The use of the weapon wrecks half the planet, but the invader's craft takes no harm at all. Norrin, though he has no method of retaliation, chooses to confront the invader in a spacecraft, if only to learn what menaces his world. He gets more than he bargains for.

Galactus, possibly impressed by Norrin's courage, deigns to justify his planet-devouring proclivities with one of Lee's best lines: "If your own life depended upon stepping on an ant hill-- you would not hesitate." When Norrin continues to plead for the lives of his people, Galactus happens to mention that he would be willing to spare living  beings if he had a herald capable of searching out worlds that could nourish a world-destroyer's appetite, but without intelligent life. Norrin responds by offering his services to the planet-eater, even though it means cutting all ties with his mortal existence. 

At the same time, though Norrin gives up his beloved to become the Silver Surfer, cutting ties with Zenn-La doesn't seem to affect him much. In this quasi-Faustian bargain, the hero loses the girl but he pursues a higher passion: the exploration of the universe's ceaseless wonders. However, though in this iteration the compassionate Surfer is able to guide his master away from some planets with intelligent life, he's unable to keep Galactus from imperiling Earth because the master just happens to be really hungry. In other words, Lee exonerates the Surfer from the deeds of his earlier, indifferent-alien persona, and ends the story by having the depressed alien state to the reader that "my destiny still lies before me."

I've omitted the interludes, though one of them is interesting because it shows the Surfer musing in "Ozymandias" fashion on a long-dead civilization. To be sure, Lee isn't interested in cosmic relativism. In this story at least, Lee celebrates the period of civilization in which people are still young and vital, yet wise enough to renounce war and pursue the goal of enlightened exploration. It's  not a particularly deep proposition, but there's a germ of a good idea in it that could be given more sophisticated treatment. The biggest problem with Lee's retcon of the Surfer is that the character's constant jeremiads against violence were not likely to prove popular with an audience that wanted to enjoy spectacles of violence. Most Marvel heroes in those days showed some reluctance to fight, but once they were pressed to do so, they were usually allowed to feel moments of triumph for overcoming a powerful opponent. The Surfer, awash in his ongoing Christ-complex, could never take satisfaction in his victories, and this-- perhaps more than the feature's almost total lack of humor-- may have spelled doom to the first outing of the silver-hued sky-rider.

LOWBROW, BUT HIGHLY SERIOUS

He Chaucer lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and therewith an important part of their virtue.-- Matthew Arnold.

I seem to be one of the few people in the country who didn't like THOR: RAGNAROK, and found its over-dependence on jokes to be an indicator of how little the show-runners "got" the character.  However, the more I think about it, the failings of RAGNAROK may indicate even more about the problems of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as put forth by the fellow most associated with its success, studio chief Kevin Feige.

I say this with the full knowledge that Feige's version of "the Marvel Universe" is not likely to be surpassed within my lifetime. Feige clearly gets some of the key elements that made 1960s Marvel a success. Had there been no Marvel, it seems unlikely that (1) fans would have been motivated enough to create the direct market, and thus (2) mainstream comic books probably would not have survived their distributor problems of the 1970s.

Feige has reportedly called himself a "fanboy," and almost all of his cinematic credits support this assertion. Prior to 2008's IRON MAN, Feige worked in a production capacity on fourteen films, all based on superhero characters. In time he may be seen as being every bit as influential as Jim Shooter in promoting Marvel as a "superhero-first" company. And in some ways, Feige "got' Marvel better than Shooter. Feige understands three major aspects of Marvel's "Silver-Age" success;

(1) The Continuity Thing.

Stan Lee, as editor of the Marvel Line, probably had no aim beyond cross-promotion whenever he had Spider-Man try to join the Fantastic Four and the like. However, as time went on, he apparently found that continuity was not only popular with readers, it was a useful tool for a writer. For instance, in 1964's AVENGERS #4, he and Kirby whipped up a villain, Baron Zemo, who used a super-glue against two of the heroes, Giant-Man and Captain America.

How to get out of it? Well, you have the Avengers consult another expert on glue, the Human Torch's foe Paste-Pot Pete (whose face Kirby apparently forgot, making him look rather like his sometime partner the Wizard).

More importantly for the MCU, Lee also found a lot of material simply in having heroes from different milieus, and with different speech-patterns. Here's Daredevil trying to prove his "mad skills" to a certain thunder-god.

Whereas a lot of writers would have written the two characters indistinguishably, Lee understood that a thunder-god wasn't going to talk the same as a modern superhero. This discovery also led to another aspect of Lee's approach:


(2) Heroes with Problems.

For Stan Lee, this was clearly another device to draw readers into the fictional worlds of the Marvel characters, so that they would buy each and every issue of a given series, rather than just picking up random issues according to chance. But there's every indication that Lee himself became invested in the characters, as when he decided that he wanted to lay near-exclusive claim to chronicling the adventures of the Silver Surfer when the character graduated to his own series. I can't be positive that there might not have been some hard-boiled business decision behind Lee's claim, since he'd publicly admitted that Jack Kirby alone created the character. However, Lee definitely attempted some things he never attempted in other Marvel features, such as making his main character a Christ-figure.

(3) The Prevalence of Humor.

Of these three aspects of Marvel's success, this is clearly the one that Kevin Feige most emulates. Long before the rise of Marvel Comics, Lee's writing demonstrated an ability for "snappy patter" in humor comics like TESSIE THE TYPIST and MY FRIEND IRMA, and in many ways he simply translated that talent to the 1960s superhero books. However, he also made much of the humor flow from character, which had generally not been the rule for the superhero genre. Most of the Marvel features of the Silver Age were replete with a jazzy sense of humor, and even the more "serious" titles, like the aforementioned THOR, allowed for moments of whimsy, as seen with characters like "Volstagg the Magnificent."

Ironically, SILVER SURFER was possibly the only Lee-written title that boasted no humor of consequence, which may have contributed to the feature's early demise.


I believe that no fans familiar with Silver Age Marvel would dispute these three aspects as major factors in the Marvel success,but I think there's a fourth one that usually goes unacknowledged, and that is Lee's flirtations with what Arnold, in the quote above, called "high seriousness."

What Arnold meant by the phrase doesn't matter to me here, since the phrase has taken on a life of its own. In general it connotes a sense of gravitas, and is almost always applied to works of literary merit. At the time Lee made his first breakthroughs with Marvel, it's a given that the forty-something editor had no illusions about the status of comic books, no matter what he may have said later in his "bullpen bulletins." He knew that they were deemed lowbrow entertainment, and that any efforts he made to "elevate the form"-- like SILVER SURFER-- were aimed to impress fan-readers who wanted something a little different with their superhero action.

But even though Lee probably knew that he'd never be "taken seriously," he showed a talent for scenes of faux high seriousness, even within a lowbrow context. For instance, here's Thor facing the death-goddess Hela from the Mangog saga I analyzed here.

Granted, Jack Kirby staged the visuals that contribute at least fifty percent of the page's serious tone. Still, it's easy to imagine a modern writer-- say, Peter David-- trying to dialogue the same page, and missing the boat entirely. Lee's amateur experience in the theater, however limited, seems to have contributed to his sense of how to show characters both in their "light" and "heavy" moods.

My personal interpretation of Feige is that he's someone who may have read Marvel Comics like a demon, but who was into Marvel, like many readers, mainly for the jokes. The rapid-fire quips of Downey's Tony Stark read a lot more like the snappy patter of the Stan Lee persona than they do like the relatively sober-sided Stark of the comics. Feige even showed some facility with characters with a basically serious outlook, like the Evans version of Captain America, finding ways to exploit humor in other characters without hamming up the main hero.

In the first two THOR films, one can see Fighe and his collaborators trying to do something similar, keeping Thor basically serious while allowing support-characters-- in particular Kat Dennings' "Darcy"-- to provide the humor. That said, Fighe's Thor films don't really make any organized attempts at "high seriousness." The wars of the gods and the giants have no more mythic resonance than the opposing parties of a videogame, and thus it's not surprising that the figure of Hela the Death-Goddess becomes similarly over-simplified in RAGNAROK.

The only other time that Feige attempted another Marvel feature grounded in Lee's lowbrow version of high seriousness was the 2016 DOCTOR STRANGE. I've not yet been able to force myself to re-watch this artless adaptation for purposes of review. But the mere fact that it had to import some dumbed-down humor into the straight-laced STRANGE mythos in the form of the master magician's CAPE speaks volumes about the producers' inability to do anything without the support of jokes, no matter how inane. Thus I shouldn't have been surprised when THOR RAGNAROK stuck a bunch of pratfalls into the encounter of two of Stan Lee's more poker-faced characters, the thunder-god and the master of the mystic arts.

Before seeing RAGNAROK, I had numerous warnings as to how much comedy to expect, but I like to think that I kept an open mind, hoping for something no better or worse than the two GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY films. But when the film started out with Thor, chained in Muspelheim and teasing info out of evil Surtur--

-- and I realized that it was just a steal from a similar scene in 2012's AVENGERS, with a bound Black Widow interrogating her captors--

-- it became clear to me that Feige's MCU is beginning to cannibalize itself, and with less interesting results that when Marvel Comics began repeating themselves so badly in the 1970s.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE PEERLESS POWER OF THE SILVER SURFER" (FF ANNUAL #5, 1967)

In my essay on the first appearance of the Silver Surfer, I wrote:

For all that the Surfer is not integral to the conflict's resolution, he combines some fascinating Judeo-Christian motifs. It's hard to say whether or not either Lee or Kirby drew any conscious parallels between the Surfer and the Christian Son of God, not least because the latter does not rebel against his heavenly father. Rebellion is more the department of Satan/Lucifer, who is generally characterized as being opposed to the good fortune of humanity. Nevertheless, I think it possible that Lee and Kirby's collaboration brought a fortuitous confluence of ideas, possibly one that neither creator could have pulled off alone. In the Surfer's later appearances, the character became more visibly an Imitatio Christi, though Kirby still tended to emphasize his inability to comprehend human mores.

The Silver Surfer made a few appearances in the FANTASTIC FOUR title before the character finally received his first solo appearance in a short tale in FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5, about a year and a half after his first appearance. I have the sense that though both creators hoped to find some way to spin off the hero into his own series, they might not have quite known what direction to pursue. Yet this story-- the only solo-starring role for the Lee-Kirby Surfer, before Lee decided to launch a Surfer series in 1968 with John Buscema-- does touch on some of the same themes that Lee would explore without Kirby. For instance, many Kirby stories begin with a little gratuitous action, and this one is no exception: the Surfer is just flying around on his board when some duck-hunters fire at him.

After the Surfer sends the hunters running for cover, he moralizes on the unique penchant of human beings to hunt other creatures for sport. I recall that in the day this prompted a letter from a fan who's seen a Lee-Kirby tale in which the alien Skrulls were seen in hunting-activities, but even without this continuity-cop input, it does sound pretty unlikely that the Surfer has never seen any other sentient beings hunting for sport.

More successful on the next page is a moment where the Surfer, far from being a stranger to human emotions, now seems attuned to the massed emotions of humankind. I view this as the real beginning of the Surfer's "Christ complex," in which he takes on the appearance of a secular savior toward humankind. Prior to this story, the Surfer tended to keep his distance from the sufferings of humans, like a distant deity. But where Galactus took the role of a "destroying angel" in the Galactus trilogy, here the Surfer becomes a de facto  "creator-god."

The sky-rider's sensitivity to emotions leads him into the company of Quasimodo, a sentient computer created by the Mad Thinker, last seen in FF ANNUAL #4. The Surfer feels pity for the mechanical being, and liberates him from bondage.

However, Quasimodo isn't immediately impressed with the form he receives. Kirby, a long-time fan of the 1923 HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME film, clearly modeled the living computer on the tragic freak from the movie. But that Quasimodo, despite his crude upbringing, tried to show some kindness to the gypsy girl Esmerelda. This Quasimodo not only fails to thank the Surfer for the alien's act of largesse, he immediately starts bitching about how his "creator" didn't give him a better looking mug. Lee or Kirby may have also had in mind something like the attitude of Mary Shelley's Monster, when he quotes Milton about not getting a good break in the looks department:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

Of course, Quasimodo is also the creation of a super-villain, so maybe the apple simply doesn't fall far from the tree. The villain blasts the Surfer, apparently killing the alien. Then Quasimodo goes on a rampage, tearing up New York (at least one King Kong visual quote appears here), until the Surfer shows up. Following a seesaw battle, the Surfer takes back his gift of life, and returns Quasimodo to stationary status-- though of course later stories resurrected the villain for further use.

It should be noted that there's a strong psychological motif here regarding physical appearance. Quasimodo is so sensitive about his looks-- even though he's only been ambulatory for a few minutes-- that during the battle he thinks the New York citizens are worried about the Surfer because "he is handsome, and I am ugly!" It's long been a commonplace trope in comics to pit ugly villains against handsome heroes, and even though the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR mitigates that trope somewhat with heroes like the Thing, clearly Kirby didn't mind playing up to the audience's tendency to equate ethical superiority with physical attractiveness. It's possible that on some level the rejection of the "ugly villain" also represented for Kirby-- and possibly for Lee-- the rejection of what are usually called "baser instincts," such as cruelty and envy. This would accord with the tendency of Lee and Kirby in their Surfer-collaborations to see the "handsome" Surfer as the embodiment of the "higher instincts," even though, truth to tell, a number of the Lee-Buscema stories portray the hero as being somewhat corrupted by his interactions with human culture.But that's another story.

NULL MYTHS: SECRET WARS #1-12 (1984-85)

While a relatively recent re-read of CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS disclosed some mythic diamonds amid the multi-crossover dross, there's not even the glitter of fool's gold in the abominable awfulness that is Jim Shooter's SECRET WARS.

I reviewed SECRET WARS for the Comics Journal back in the day, and I don't mind saying that the review contains one of my favorite insights for that period of my critical writing. In essence, I said that because Jim Shooter had written for several years about the Legion of Super-Heroes-- characters who ranged from the one-dimensional to the no-dimensional-- he was simply incapable of adjusting himself to the demands of Marvel characters, who tended to be at least two-dimensional.

I still believe this to some extent. And yet, now that I've reread SECRET WARS straight through for the first time since that review, I wonder if my original verdict was a bit glib. After all, Shooter's LEGION work showed that he understood the basics of good storytelling. With a little bit of studious endeavor, is there any reason that Shooter could not have adapted to the Marvel standard of characterization at least as well as average scripters of the period?

And the verdict is: of course he could have; he just didn't care whether he got characters right or not. To judge from this Wikipedia entry-- and from his spotty record as a scripter on Marvel titles like AVENGERS-- Shooter cared primarily about making deals with companies like Mattel and about protecting Marvel's company image. Stan Lee tried to make Marvel's characters as distinct as possible from one another, despite their two-dimensionality. The SECRET WARS script shows no evidence that its writer studied any of the regular titles to get a sense of how the characters sounded at the time. Wolverine's snarliness can't be distinguished from the Hulk's grouchiness. This shorthand approach to characterization allowed Shooter to give the fans the appearance of character-moments, even though his approach contradicted even the bare rudiments of the Marvel style.

If one picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture overburdened with what *seems* like a thousand words should be even better to clarify how bad Shooter's writing is:

This scorecard approach to introducing characters easily rates as some of the worst writing ever to appear in comic books. Beside it, even stories that are nearly incoherent are preferable, like Gerry Conway's clumsy "Ego-Prime" storyline.

I won't dwell too much on the mismanaged characterizations, given that these are failures within the dramatic potentiality, not the mythopoeic one. But as I move away from this topic, I can't resist mentioning one of the worst: a B-story in which Colossus and the Human Torch both fall in love with the same alien girl. Suddenly, because Shooter wants a hyper-melodramatic moment in issue #10, he has the Torch-- a character with his share of faults, but hardly a diehard chauvinist-- disparage the girl as a "chippie," causing Colossus a lot of emotional turmoil-- though it comes to nothing, since the X-Man doesn't even try to knock the FF-member's block off.

There is *potential,* but completely unrealized, mythopeoic content in the rambling mess that is SECRET WARS, but at that, it's entirely derivative of the "Galactus mythology" I examined here  this week. However, Shooter seems to have been less impressed by the original "Galactus trilogy" than by one of Lee and Kirby's follow-ups: FF #57-60, in which Doctor Doom manages to steal the Power Cosmic from the exiled Silver Surfer, so that the monomaniacal villain obtains something close to omnipotent power.

While every other Marvel character in SECRET WARS is treated with a mechanical disinterest, Shooter seems preternaturally concerned with Doctor Doom, who apparently has not forgotten his brief stint as a demigod. Doom seems less concerned with the immediate situation he shares with the other characters-- that of having been dumped on an alien world by an unseen entity called "the Beyonder"-- than in figuring out how he can once more attain godhood: this time by tapping into the power of the Silver Surfer's former master, Galactus himself, who is one of those abducted by the Beyonder. Galactus hovers on the periphery of the action for most of the story, a potential threat to the Earth-heroes as both he and they seek to escape the Beyonder-- but once Doom does manage to siphon off Galactus' power, the planet-eater is summarily dismissed from the storyline, and it focuses almost entirely upon Doom's attempt to act the part of a living god.

While Shooter's exploration of Doom's godhood is mediocre at best, I must admit that he's the only character whose characterization seems relatively in line with his previous Marvel incarnations. Here's a short excerpt:

Whereas the other characters in this scene are all Johnny One-Notes, Doom comes off with an imperious dignity and an obnoxious belief in his own superiority. This at least makes him interesting, while all of the other characters are simply being put through predictable paces.

I've sometimes come across fans who evince an affection for SECRET WARS because it was the first of its kind: a limited series whose influence spilled over into several ongoing titles. This marketing strategy became a standard practice by both of the "Big Two," and generally the crossovers that followed SECRET WARS were never better than "adequate." But even the worst of these descendants of SECRET WARS doesn't evince the original's utter contempt for good characterization and good plotting-- to say nothing of good mythopoesis.

MYTHCOMICS: FANTASTIC FOUR #48-50 (1966)

The so-called "Galactus Trilogy" appeared about a year after John Broome's "Secret Origin of the Guardians." Both FANTASTIC FOUR and GREEN LANTERN had featured numerous stories about aliens and extradimensional entities, but fans esteemed both of these mid-sixties stories in particular because they revealed greater depths to the Marvel and DC universes than one got from the average SF-tale. However, it would take many years for professionals spawned from comics-fandom to celebrate some of the qualities of the Guardians' origin-tale. Within the decade of the sixties, the Guardians tale had no palpable effect. In contrast, Marvel, thanks in part to being a smaller operation, was positioned to sing its own praises for having redefined what kiddie comics could do.

I won't go into great detail here about the plot of the Galactus Trilogy. In contrast to that other famous '60s trilogy, these three issues of FANTASTIC FOUR are not a unified story, since #48 starts off by resolving the Inhumans saga from the previous issues, and #50 concludes by introducing a new menace and playing catch-up on the heroes' mundane activities. In truth, the heroes come close to playing second fiddle to the "coming of Galactus" and his surfboard-riding herald.

As a concept Galactus wasn't stunningly original. The 1957 film KRONOS dealt with a gigantic alien mechanism sent to Earth to plunder it of its resources, and just one year before Galactus appeared, DC created an almost forgotten beastie, "The World-Destroyer Creature," who menaced Adam Strange in MYSTERY IN SPACE #99.

Lee and Kirby, however, presented Galactus and the Silver Surfer with far more pomp and circumstance than they'd allowed, say, to super-powerful aliens like 1964's Infant Terrible (FF #24). When the relevant plot begins, the heroes are bemused to see weird aerial phenomena like floating rocks and curtains of flame in the sky. The local New Yorkers, despite having seen weird phenomena on a regular basis, react to these displays as if they're the "signs and wonders" of the Apocalypse itself. The FF's cosmic buddy The Watcher shows up, revealing that he created the sky-marvels in an effort to distract the Silver Surfer, herald of the insuperable destroyer of worlds, Galactus.

The Surfer is not fooled by the Watcher's deceptions; having determined that the Earth is a viable planet for his master to devour, the Surfer sends his master a signal. The Thing punches out the shiny alien, sending him flying off the Baxter Building, though we don't learn until issue #49 that he lands near the apartment of the Thing's girlfriend Alicia.

Galactus descends, and Kirby frames his stature against that of the Watcher. Kirby offers a strong visual contrast between the Watcher's usual garb-- a free-flowing toga-like garment-- with the high-tech armor of Galactus. Both are described as aliens with the powers of gods, but whereas the Watcher is an "angel"-like presence forbidden to intervene in any direct manner, Galactus is given the gravitas of an otherworldly deity. Lee frequently describes him in terms resonant of the King James Bible: the Watcher's first description of Galactus-- "He is what he wishes to be-- He is Galactus"-- is patently a borrowing from the phrase "I am that I am" in Exodus 3:14.

After the Fantastic Four fail to make any real impression on the super-alien, the Watcher enlarges on the threat he presents: that Galactus plans to use his machines to drain Earth of its "elemental force," which is the only substance on which Galactus can feed. By making Galactus's depredations a matter of survival, Lee and Kirby render him as beyond the scope of comic-book villainy.

While all this transpires, Alicia befriends the Silver Surfer. Strangely, given that the Surfer's existence is devoted to making sure his master is fed, it strikes him as strange that other entities feed by consuming organic matter. Lee and Kirby do not provide any background for the Galactus-Surfer relationship, but I'd hypothesize that Kirby's original intent was that the Surfer would have been, not an alien being in his own right, but an emanation from Galactus's own being, in much the same way that the Judeo-Christian God created his angels, according to non-canonical speculations.

The Surfer's lofty indifference soon yields-- perhaps a little too quickly to be credible-- when\Alicia pleads on behalf of the human species. The Surfer's soulful rebellion against his master remains one of the best-known moments in the history of Silver Age Marvel.

However, in point of fact, his rebellion only provides a delay to Galactus, just as do the efforts of the Thing and Mister Fantastic. The solution to the problem of an almighty planet-eater is provided by the efforts of the Human Torch, who, acting with the Watcher's direction, gets hold of a miniscule weapon capable of cutting off Galactus from future meals, by destroying the entire universe.

It's impossible to resist comparisons between the Ultimate Nullifier and the Bomb, and there's a good chance the storytellers saw the likeness themselves. When Galactus swears to leave Earth alone, he takes his leave, but not before speaking for the authors themselves: advising the barely emerged race of human beings to "be ever mindful of your promise of greatness," which has the equal potential to take humans to the stars or bury them "within the ruins of war." At the same time, the narrative doesn't dwell much on other moral issues-- such as the fact that if Mr. Fantastic used the Nullifier, it would not only provide a pyrrhic victory, since Earth would perish with the rest of the cosmos, but it would involve dooming a host of other alien worlds if Galactus chose to let everything go to hell.

For all that the Surfer is not integral to the conflict's resolution, he combines some fascinating Judeo-Christian motifs. It's hard to say whether or not either Lee or Kirby drew any conscious parallels between the Surfer and the Christian Son of God, not least because the latter does not rebel against his heavenly father. Rebellion is more the department of Satan/Lucifer, who is generally characterized as being opposed to the good fortune of humanity. Nevertheless, I think it possible that Lee and Kirby's collaboration brought a fortuitous confluence of ideas, possibly one that neither creator could have pulled off alone. In the Surfer's later appearances, the character became more visibly an Imitatio Christi, though Kirby still tended to emphasize his inability to comprehend human mores. Kirby's idea for the Surfer's origins did not appear in the canonical Marvel universe, though arguably the 1978 SILVER SURFER graphic novel may recapitulate the original idea in altered form. Lee, of course, co-opted the character and gave him a more "relatable" origin-- but that's a story for another essay.