HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE PT. 3

 

I started thinking once more about the topic of "story-hosts" after re-reading Batman's visit to "The House of Mystery" in BRAVE AND BOLD #93, courtesy of Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams. In a previous installment of this essay-series, I had talked about how certain issues of that rotating team-up title, because those stories paired Batman, a superordinate icon, with such subordinate icons as The Joker, the Riddler and Ra's Al Ghul, none of whom have ever progressed beyond the subordinate level (in contrast, say, to a rare character like The Catwoman, who made her superordinate mark in the 1990s and who has kept that stature thereafter). 

But at least all of the villains so featured were actual icons. In the story "Red Water, Crimson Death," the two "headliners" are Batman and Cain from DC's "House of Mystery" title-- but not only do they not interact with one another, the latter character has, as far as this story is concerned, no power to interact with Batman or anyone else. He might best be termed a "null-icon" here, as he is in most if not all of the horror-stories he hosted. Thus, in contrast to what I wrote in COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 6, in all such narratives Cain would be neither Prime nor Sub. I'm aware that he becomes a Sub in the SANDMAN comic, which parallels what I also wrote in the above essay about the EC story "Horror Beneath the Streets." In that tale the three EC horror-hosts come into "reality" to berate the comic-book makers-- but only to make the humans assign the hosts to their already established venues. Technically they are Primes and the comic-book authors are Subs-- though the categorization is made more difficult in that story-hosts are essentially identical with their authors. They serve the same purpose as omniscient narrators, but as "null-icons," they convey a sense of personality absent in such narrators.

So in my book, "Crimson" is essentially a Batman story, concerning his adventure when he tries to take a vacation from being Batman. He meets a young Irish boy, Sean, during an ocean voyage , and though Bruce Wayne has no idea that Sean is involved in a criminal case, he ends up accompanying the boy back to his small fishing-isle, and thus, getting some necessary exposition-- and an introduction to a supernatural manifestation.          

I won't recount the whole story here, but suffice to say that there's a human agency behind the so-called "red tides" and the never-specified deaths of Sean's parents. However, there's also a superhuman agency that manipulates the Gotham Guardian into intervening to capture the criminals and save Sean's life. And yet, though as scripted this is a Batman story, with no crossover elements, O'Neil and Adams structured the tale as the sort of thing that could have run in HOUSE OF MYSTERY. And suppose that it had been reworked to be just such a story, with Batman ejected and replaced by just some basic one-shot viewpoint character? Then the centricity would have shifted from that POV type to either King Hugh, the ghost that renders aid to the boy's protector-- or even to Sean, since O'Neil's backstory slightly suggests that the boy, still grieving for his lost parents, may have subconsciously summoned the spirit of his dead relative to enact vengeance.

COSMIC ALIGNMENT PT. 6

My formulations on observations re: static and dynamic alignment in Part 5 only discussed villains appearing in serial features in subordinate roles. But the same distinctions apply to all Sub characters, including those that might ordinarily be described as "support-cast" members.

In ASPIRIN FOR ANTHOLOGIES PT. 3, I took pains to establish that the 1981 HEAVY METAL anthology-film was a crossover-movie, but not because some of its stories adapted icons from established features, specifically "Den," "Captain Sternn," and "So Beautiful So Dangerous." If the film had just introduced each story with some non-diegetic interlocutor figure akin to EC Comics' Crypt Keeper, then there would have been no crossover-elements. But the demonic Loc-Nar, a creation of the movie-script, both tells the stories and participates in them as an icon with agency-- though not more agency than any of the characters with which Loc-Nar interferes. It's possible that the deleted "Neverwhere Land" sequence might have shown Loc-Nar with true agency, since it involved him creating an entire civilization, only to destroy it. But in the existing sequences, Loc-Nar usually just sets events in motion. He causes comical consequences in "Dangerous" and "Sternn," heroic ones in "Harry Canyon," "Den," and "Taarna," and tragic ones in "B-17," but in each story the primary agency is not Loc-Nar but those he influences. Even "B-17," in which Loc-Nar wreaks an unalloyed evil by turning a dead airman crew into killer zombies, the primary agency rests with the animated cadavers, who attack the plane's pilots. One pilot escapes the assault and parachutes down to an island-- where, it would appear, Loc-Nar has also animated the corpses of other slain airmen. The agency here is with the living dead men, for though they have no conscious motives, they arouse revulsion in the viewer out of the conviction that if the dead could come to life, they would seek to slay those still living, for spite if nothing else.

In formal anthologies-- that is, collections of completely separate stories that may have a "guest-host" interlocutor-- the agency of the story's Prime icon or icons appear within the story proper, and if the tale-teller could be deemed any sort of status at all, he would be a Sub rather than a Prime. The only way an interlocutor could become a Prime would be to enter the story proper and assume agency through specific actions. "Horror Beneath the Streets," a 1950 tale in HAUNT OF FEAR #17, posits that the two writers of EC Comics, William Gaines and Al Feldstein, begin discussing the idea of publishing magazines devoted to horror stories. They are then duly ambushed by the Old Witch, the Crypt Keeper, and the Vault Keeper, who force the beleaguered authors to give them all contracts to host their own respective titles. Clearly the horror-hosts are the stars of this story, and one could even deem "Streets" a crossover of characters who are usually subordinate icons in other, otherwise-unrelated stories.

However, in another EC story the Old Witch enters a story but just remains another type of Sub. "A Little Stranger," in HAUNT OF FEAR #14, depicts the romance of two Prime characters, vampire Elicia and werewolf Zorgo, whose unholy unison begets the Witch herself, who's only in the story proper for one panel.

Since Part 6 ended up running extra-long with its analyses, I'll save the actual remarks on static and dynamic alignment for Part 7.

HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE PT. 2

One of the biggest problems for my theory of centricity pertains to the concept of the "rotating team" franchise.

I consider myself fully cognizant of the most important crossover-permutations of crossovers in popular fiction. The earliest examples seem to be short-term, usually dealing only with two established characters or concepts encountering one another, like the 1920 SHE AND ALLEN. John Kendrick Bangs' four "Associated Shades" stories, which I have not read, may be the first time someone invented the idea of a "team" whose members were fairly fluid, though most of Bangs' characters were historical rather than fictional figures.

As far as I can tell, the first true "rotating team" concept appeared in 1963. Since 1955 DC Comics had been trying to score a hit in its anthology series THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD. Though DC was sometimes able to use the title as a showcase for serials that graduated to their own series, such as the Justice League, nothing caught fire within the magazine, until issue #50 teamed up two of the company's lesser lights, Green Arrow and the Martian Manhunter. Batman began enjoying team-ups irregularly in issue #50, but not until issue #74, in 1967, did he become the exclusive co-star in the series, using his TV-amplified clout to help DC try to hype its vast array of non-bat characters.

In many respects, this innovation resembled the core idea for the Golden Age Justice Society, whose principal raison d'etre was to use the more popular DC heroes to spark readers' interest in lesser lights. I tend to doubt that any of the 1960s lesser lights burned any brighter thanks to hobnobbing with Batman, any more than 1940s flops like Starman and Hourman had benefited from their temporary association with the Flash and Green Lantern. But once BRAVE AND BOLD became dominated by the Caped Crusader, the series provided its writers with a dubious challenge: that of finding rationales for teaming up the urban hero with characters rooted in wild concepts of SF and fantasy, like the Metal Men and Green Lantern, or even in different time-frames, like Scalphunter and Sergeant Rock.

Now, had any of these short-term team-ups appeared in one of Batman's own books, then the team-up characters would be mere "guest stars," and the charismatic action would be non-distributive, descending only to the Big Bat. But in theory, even though Batman is a constant presence after 1967, the concept of the franchise should mean that Batman shares charisma with any of his co-stars--

-- with just a few exceptions. Most of the time, the co-stars either had their own franchises, or had enjoyed such regular berths at some point in DC's history. However, on a few occasions the Bat teamed up with one of his famed enemies, and I would consider all of these to be subordinate rather than coordinate figures, because the villains had not previously enjoyed their own franchises.

Here's the crusader being forced to team up (sort of) with the Riddler--

And here he is with Ra's Al Ghul.

And then there was Bats and the Joker:

Admittedly, by the time that the Brave and Bold Bat had to make a temporary alliance with the Joker, the Crown Prince of Crime had enjoyed a short-lived nine-issue solo series. But since he wasn't really known as a starring character despite that series, I would say that he too became as much a subordinate figure as Riddler and Ra's, due to the dominant approach of the BRAVE AND BOLD series.

A similar aesthetic came to pass when Marvel attempted to sell Doctor Doom as a regular co-star in the title SUPER VILLAIN TEAM UP.  Though the Sub-Mariner was also a regular for the first nine issues, issues 10-12 11 focus upon Doom's (non-team) encounter with a genuine Marvel fiend, the Red Skull. Admittedly #10, seen before, still shows the "team" of Doom and Namor above the series-title, the next two spotlight Doom and the Skull.

Namor gets the above-title billing in #13 again, but then it's Doom and Magneto in issue #14.

Following a reprint of an earlier Doom-Skull tale, the series then finishes up with a two-parter with neither Doom nor Namor, but presenting the Red Skull working alongside a far less popular Marvel menace, the Hate-Monger.

Since at the time Red Skull, Magneto and Hate Monger had not enjoyed serials of their own, all of them would be subordinate figures, even as the Joker, Riddler and Ra's are within the context of BRAVE AND BOLD, and so Doctor Doom alone is the sole coordinate in the stories without the Sub-Mariner. HOWEVER-- in the final two issues, it can be fairly judged that both the Red Skull and the Hate-Monger share the centric position. In the absence of a figure who dominates the narrative, the way Batman dominates most texts in which he appears alongside one of his vilains, the two villains here are coordinated as the unchallenged stars of the story.

HOSTS, HEAVENLY AND OTHERWISE

In KNIGHTS OF COMBAT AND CENTRICITY PT. 1, I argued against Nancy Springer's view that Ivanhoe was not the central character of the book named after him. I compared him to the serial hero The Spirit, saying in part:

From all my statements on centricity, it should plain that I have no problem with a main character having little color-- or mythicity-- of his own. For me Ivanhoe is as much the star of Scott's only story with the character as the Spirit is of his long-running serial adventures. Springer's metaphor of a "common thread" catches some of the sense of Ivanhoe's role in the narrative, but she apparently does not realize how often famous works may be organized around an essentially unremarkable character. The Spirit is not really any better-characterized than Ivanhoe-- Eisner tended to refer to his hero as something along the lines of a "big dumb Irishman"-- and as I mentioned above, most of the mythicity of the Spirit's serial adventures inhere in his supporting characters, just as figures like Rebecca, Richard and Robin Hood are more mythic than Ivanhoe himself.

To adjust this slightly to the new terminology introduced in the STATURE REQUIREMENTS essays,  both Ivanhoe and the Spirit enjoy the centric position because their respective authors have invested them with charisma, which is identical to the "organizing factor" I used in place of Springer's "common thread." In the case of non-serial hero Ivanhoe, his charisma is established early in the novel and remains the main organizing factor based on the "charismatic action" he takes then, even though other characters later shine more brightly. Ivanhoe doesn't even get to best the villain at the climax, though the hero's mere presence does ensure the villain's defeat.

Now, though one might say that Ivanhoe "plays host" to the supporting characters of his novel-- making him what I would call a "non-distributive" type-- the Spirit, as a serial hero, has a related but distinct dynamic. Though the Spirit is the undisputed star of many of his exploits, he plays very little role in some SPIRIT tales, sometimes appearing for no more than a single panel, having no actual impact on the story's events but still serving as an organizing factor. It should be a narrative given that no serial feature lasts long by focusing only upon the hero: usually he is required to become involved in the dilemmas of other people, whose stories take the forefront in a literal sense even if they still remain under the aegis of the star. In STATURE REQUIREMENTS PT. 5, I pointed out how the Joker provides most of the plot-action in THE KILLING JOKE, while Charlie Collins is the plot-center of the TV-episode "Joker's Favor." But I maintained that these were still Batman stories, that his charisma was only distributed to a partner such as one of the Robins.

The Spirit's only long-term partner was Ebony, but none of the Spirit's charisma was distributed to him, nor was it distributed to any of the many characters who provide the main plot-action of stories like "Wild Rice"  or "The Curse." The Spirit is thus non-distributive. There are many other ensembles that are arguably more varied than that of Batman and Robin: the three-man team of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in Classic STAR TREK, Gil Favor and Rowdy Yates in RAWHIDE, and some (though not all) of Jason's allies in THE ARGONAUTICA. However, though these ensembles are distributive in the sense that there isn't just one non-distributive character at the center of the mix, one might view the ensembles themselves to be non-distributive in comparison to a given narrative's support-characters. Thus all of the fabled TREK side-characters, despite their fame, do not receive any distributed charisma due to the original serial's concentration on its "holy trio."

Structurally, though, many exploits of THE SPIRIT are much more obvious about their status as "short stories brought under the SPIRIT umbrella" than are comparable TREK stories in which Spock, Kirk and McCoy have to involve themselves in, say, the personal affairs of the problematic lovers in "Metamorphosis." Both the Spirit and the TREK-team are non-distributive with respect to all of the (usually) one-shot characters they encounter, but the Spirit seems much more akin to the figure of "the storytelling host."

I won't try to trace the lineage of the storytelling host in modern times, but will note that one of the oldest examples of a continuing host would be Lord Dunsany's "Jorkens tales." In modern media everyone is familiar both with real-life celebrities playing the role of story-host, such as Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock, and with totally fictional characters created for this purpose, as with EC Comics' famed characters the Old Witch and the Crypt Keeper.

But here's the rub: though it could be argued that the presence of, say, the Crypt Keeper provides a familiar point of reference within a given narrative, he does not become an "organizing factor" because he's not actually a part of any of his stories (with the exception of one humorous "origin of the Crypt Keeper" tale). Thus none of the charismatic action from the author centers upon the Crypt-Keeper, Doctor Graves, Baron Weirwulf or any of these fictional types, except in those rare cases where they become focal presences in a given story. In contrast to the way Charlie Collins is a player in a BATMAN story, or Zephram Cochrane is a player in a "Kirk, Spock and McCoy" story, the stars of a TALES FROM THE CRYPT story like "Lower Berth" are the two monsters who join in unholy bliss-- not the familiar Crypt Keeper.