THOUGHTS ON PETER DAVID

 I wasn't sure I'd write anything about Peter David following his passing on May 25 of this year. Though I once saw a fan fulsomely compare David's comics work to that of Steve Gerber, I'd probably see more comparison to Len Wein. With both writers, I read a fair amount of work that I liked, but probably more than I wasn't crazy about. But then, Steve Gerber himself said (and I paraphrase from his JOURNAL interview) that everyone who makes writing his career inevitably turns out some dreck in addition to some good stuff. Every invested reader makes his own estimation as to whether the good stuff outweighs the dreck or vice versa.

This principle inheres even with specialized criticism like mine. A writer who follows certain formulas in order to keep the checks coming may or may not be able to keep up an interesting flow of either correlations, cogitations, or both together. Said writer is more likely to concentrate on the lateral virtues, since those are the factors that draw in committed buyers. From what I know of David's comics-work, he almost always devoted his efforts to what I called "the basic serial," defined thusly here:

The basic serial in most iterations is not meant to possess an overriding structure. Rather only its constituent parts, be they short stories, long arcs, or other forms, usually display the sort of patterns that can be judged in terms of concrescence.     

Yet I must admit that I probably didn't have as thorough a knowledge of David's work as with others who worked on long-term serials. During the 1980s, when David rose to comic-book prominence, I bought none of his long-term serials-- HULK, AQUAMAN or SUPERGIRL-- as they appeared for purchase. I only picked up odd issues from quarter-boxes and later re-read them in correct sequence. So this week I decided to read through the first twenty-something issues of David's famous 12-year run on INCREDIBLE HULK, to gather a better sense of what he'd accomplished and how it differed from what others had been doing, that had resulted in HULK being a low-selling Marvel title.

Before David became the regular scripter, he was preceded by Al Milgrom, who set up two ongoing plot-threads which would also dominate David's first creative phase on the title. One was that Bruce Banner became associated with a SHIELD-sponsored project, The Hulkbusters, as  did his girlfriend Betty Ross and his perpetual foe General Ross-- all devoted to finding ways to counteract the Hulk's outbursts of violence. Another was that during one experiment to cancel the Hulk's power over Banner, a new "Gray Hulk" was born in HULK #324 (1986), somewhat smaller and less strong than Green Hulk. Milgrom clearly meant this Hulk as a callback to the very first issues of the character's debut, where the heroic monster had some brief moments of potential villainy and seemed more werewolf-like, transforming only at night. David collaborated with artist Dwayne Turner on one issue, HULK #327, but Milgrom remained the main writer until issue #330, which concluded with the death of General Ross. That issue debuted the work of the artist who would remain teamed with David during the aforementioned "first phase:" Todd MacFarlane, who had yet to become a top Marvel artist via his tenure on SPIDER-MAN, much less becoming even more generally famous for Image Comics and his feature SPAWN. 

I've never seen either David or MacFarlane go into detail about their pivotal collaboration. Given how the two of them feuded when David started negatively reviewing MacFarlane's Image works in the fan press around 1993, I doubt either of them would have yielded a balanced account of that interaction. But my critical impression is that both of them, though thrown together by circumstance, shared a desire to use Milgrom's Gray Hulk concept to give Banner's alter ego a meaner, more visceral edge. Milgrom may have intended to do something similar himself, but together David and MacFarlane managed to give the HULK title a more unpredictable, horror-movie mood, lasting from #331 to #346, with only one issue drawn by another artist. Throughout the first phase, Gray Hulk continued to contend against the Hulkbusters and grisly villains like Half-Life, but in this sequence of stories the dominant evildoer was a new incarnation of The Leader-- who, in keeping with the increased use of violence in 1980s commercial comics, was also no longer playing with kid gloves. Indeed, the first phase culminates with The Leader putting his old enemy through an emotional wringer by threatening to blow up a small town-- which he does, killing five thousand inhabitants just to produce a few gamma-mutants. This end sequence showed some decent myth-content-- not least the way the Leader's private endeavors mirror those of the government's plan to stockpile gamma bombs-- but it didn't meet my criteria for a mythcomic. 

I did find one mythcomic within the David-MacFarlane run, which I'll analyze in a separate essay. All of the Hulkbusters storylines were wrapped up in #346, except for the little matter of Betty Ross's revelation that she was pregnant with Banner's child. Yet, instead of following that plot-thread, David launched a new chapter in Gray Hulk's life. The character walked away from his old rampaging existence and took on the identity of "Mister Fixit," a bodyguard for a Las Vegas casino-owner. This was arguably the most famous development in David's long HULK run, and though I don't remember getting much out of this new phase, I'd have to give the series a re-read for further consideration.  I'm not sure what David had in mind for Betty's pregnancy, but as Wikipedia notes, David's editor dictated that Bruce and Betty would not have a child, and so she lost the infant by miscarriage. Ironically, David had Betty consider abortion of her child, who might or might not have carried gamma-genes, though the "A" word was never directly spoken. I mention this just to spotlight one of many aspects of commercial comics that changed once they were directed not at children but at older hardcore fans.

For whatever it might be worth, though I'm not David's biggest fan, I did assign to him one other mythcomic, discussed here. But that was something of a one-off. I appreciate that David vastly improved the reputation of the Incredible Hulk, albeit in what I'm curently calling "ontocosmic" rather than "epicosmic" terms, so I'm glad he did at one good Hulk-myth that ranks with the Lee-and-Kirby origin.                                  

COMPRESSING CONCRESCENCE

 Though I'm sure I've made assorted comments on both the ARCHIVE and my movie-blog about the many difficulties in adapting prose works into other media, it seems I've not codified anything regarding how the process of cross-media adaptation affects mythicity. The 2023 essay MASTERING EPISTEMOLOGY probably comes closest to providing possible criteria.

I have been reasonably consistent about showing how different literary works display different levels of mythicity because their authors either do or do not render the four epistemological patterns with a sense of their complex possibilities. In 2018 I dubbed the process of mythic coalescence as "concrescence," and attempted to link it to the Aristotelian concept of "the unity of action," even though I almost immediately revised that standard phrase into a "unity of effects."

From this basis, a successful translation of a work's mythicity would have to maintain concrescence, though inevitably the second media effort must alter much of the first work's content. Often this means leaving out content that supports the original work's symbolic discourse, and so, while the media translation may reproduce the original's lateral meaning, it's unable to achieve the same vertical meaning.

Nevertheless, I have seen examples where a given secondary work must adumbrate a primary one, but still manages to achieve concrescence of the symbolic discourse, and thus realizing high mythicity. 

There are probably assorted examples, but the one that most comes to mind is the 1925 silent film adaptation of Rider Haggard's novel SHE. In my review I noted the impossibility of a film of standard feature length being able to deal with all the detail of the book. But I judged that the filmmakers had managed to keep ENOUGH details to keep a commensurate level of conscrescence. Of the 1925 film I wrote:

Though the film is only able to suggest bits and pieces of the novel’s romantic grandeur, on the whole its co-directors manage to suggest at least some of that grandiosity despite the lack of dialogue. They did so by resorting to silent cinema’s potential for suggesting more than it shows, and as a result the city of Kor, of which we see very little, comes alive through the bearing of the queenly Ayesha.

I speak of “bearing” rather than beauty, because actress Betty Blythe is only fair in the looks department, never seeming to be a truly bewitching figure. But the script does let this version of Ayesha be a true sorceress, rather than just a sexy white queen. For all the divergences between book and movie, I was impressed by the fact that the script kept a vital scene, When Ayesha curses a female rival, she does so by touching the other woman’s hair, so that the imprint of the queen’s fingers whitens the hair touched.

So where secondary adaptations are concerned, they may not be able to duplicate the concrescence of the primary work, but they CAN muster a lesser concrescence with its own integrity. For a forthcoming film adaptation review, I will use the term "secondary concrescence" unless something better comes to mind.

 

 

NEAR MYTHS: "WHY ME? WHY NOT?" (HAGAR THE HORRIBLE, 1973)

 In THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH PART 3, I wrote:

As I said, the two BLONDIE strips are closer to real stories than the other strips, regardless of the presence or absence of plurisignificance. Still, they would best be labeled "sketches" or "vignettes," which means that even when they do possess super-functionality, it's used for very restricted purposes. For this reason, I doubt that I'll include many of these type of "gag strips" within the corpus of the "1001 myths project:" at present the aforementioned "Linus the Rain King" continuity is the only one that seems worthy.Ideally, the stories chosen for this project show the mythopoeic potentiality at its highest possible potential. And just as we judge the best dramas as being those that convince us that we're seeing simulacra of real people talk believably to one another, the best myth-stories are those that establish a believable "dialogue" between a variety of symbolic representations.

Most of the time, there probably still won't be any good reason to explore the simple vignette-type of gag strip. But here's one that garnered a certain amount of political fame. According to this online essay, Presidential candidate Joe Biden claimed that he'd kept the following HAGAR THE HORRIBLE strip on his desk since the 1972 loss of his son Beau.

Now, a lot of people keep comic strips that have a special, snapshot-like personal association for them. But the HAGAR strip relates well to what Jung called "transpersonal" associations, because it's patently using Hagar's particular situation-- the wreck of his Viking ship in a storm-- to put forth a condensed version of Job's argument with God. Admittedly any reader of the strip will know that Hagar's troubles are transitory; that by the next strip he'll back in his little Viking hut with his family, no worse for wear, because he's that type of cartoon character. But the answer of the unnamed sky-deity is one that many people can apply well to their real troubles. Why, in a world full of travails, should anyone expect not to be plagued by ill fortune?

All that said, there's nothing more than can be said about this two-panel strip, so "Why" does not present, as a concrescent work would, a "dialogue between a variety of symbolic representations."

WHEN IS A VIGNETTE NOT A VIGNETTE?

 The word “vignette,” which I referenced in CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH, originally wasn’t applied to any sort of narrative, having been formulated to describe a type of illustrative design work. Only later did it take on such meanings, according to Merriam-Webster, as “a quick narrative sketch” or “a brief scene within a play or movie.”

For the purpose of literary analysis, I make a distinction between two types of vignettes. The non-narrative type of vignette may be set apart from the main narrative, but it doesn’t have its own unity, often existing solely to relate some information to the audience, as with a character’s flashback that uses past events to explain the present. The narrative type of vignette, though, does possess some form of unity, usually seen in the consummation of one of the four potentialities. I’ll provide examples by drawing on previous mythcomics analyses, which of course means that in both examples I’m emphasizing the mythopoeic potentiality.

In the version of Wonder Woman’s origin set forth in WONDER WOMAN #1, the author, having already introduced his character in both ALL STAR COMICS and SENSATION COMICS, opens with an extended flashback to show the beginnings of the heroine’s homeland Paradise Island. Princess Diana herself has not even been born during the first four pages of the flashback, which are devoted to the origin of the Amazons and the travails they suffer at the hands of cruel male warriors. I would deem this section to be a non-narrative vignette. In terms of form, it meets my criteria: that of focusing mostly upon the beginning and the end of the story, without much in the way of a middle. Once the reader gets to the point where Paradise Island is established, the natural response is likely to be, “Yes, and then?”

The two-page “Origin of the Batman” from DETECTIVE COMICS #33, however, is a narrative vignette. The origin-tale is not organically part of the larger story in which it appears, and in truth the same two-pager might have been inserted into any story in that time-period, with the same narrative results. Yet it’s not the vignette’s functional independence that gives it the quality of unity, but the way in which the mythopoeic potentiality builds from beginning (“young Bruce Wayne suffers the trauma of seeing his parents killed by a ruthless criminal”) to end (“mature Bruce Wayne decides to use the omen of a creature of darkness to terrorize the denizens of the underworld.”)

To draw upon my observations from the essay-series THE LINE BETWEEN FAIR AND GOOD, the difference is comparable between a “disorganized essay with a strong theme statement” and an essay well organized enough to reinforce its central argument with copious evidence.

CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PT. 4

 Prior to posting my second mythcomic review for the month of January 2021, I find that I need to add a new category to the ones set forth in the original STRUCTURAL LENGTH essay.

In that essay, the first four categories I mentioned were “the vignette,” “the short arc,” “the short story,” and “the long arc,” I further stated that the short arc could take the form of a subplot within a greater context, be it a novel or a continuing feature, though the short arc did not always take the subplot form. This quality of “relatedness” is the main thing that distinguishes the short arc from its relative-in-length, the short story. A short story by its nature suggests an item that can read apart from any greater context, as per Edgar Allan Poe’s encomium on the form. Though his three “Dupin” stories qualify as a series, a reader need not read them all to understand any single story. The short story takes a moderately different form in a more regularly published series, such as a Batman comic book. Any given Batman short story makes more sense if the reader does know something about the Batman mythology, about the ways in which he battles crime and the types of criminals he encounters. That said, before one reads a particular standalone story of Batman fighting the Penguin, one does not have to read any other particular Batman-Penguin story to understand what’s going on. However, not every medium handles the short story identically. It’s rare, though not impossible, that anyone ever issues a prose short story in installments, but the practice is fairly common in the comic book medium. A relevant example appears in the two-part QUESTION story “Saving Face.” As much as any prose short story, “Face” has a definite beginning, middle and end, though it’s extended over the course of two serial issues. I would say, however, that there’s a limit on how much an author can extend a short-story continuity within a comic book format before said continuity morphs into something else. I would tend to say that in comic books three issues would probably be the upper limit.

Now, a short arc has similar length-restrictions, but it parts company with the short story in being more intimately tied in to a greater continuity. A relevant example is the three-part TOMB OF DRACULA narrative I’ve entitled “Where Lurks the Chimera.” The plot also has a beginning, middle, and end, but the events of “Chimera” are not independent from other ongoing TOMB stories as the events of “Saving Face” are independent from other stories in the QUESTION series. The main plot of “Chimera” revolves around the vampire-lord’s search for a mystical relic, and it concludes with Dracula failing to obtain his goal. Yet the narrative also intertwines with other events from previous narratives, such as the Count’s ongoing conflict with another villain, Doctor Sun, and his ongoing romance with a young woman, Sheila Whittier, and the reader who has not read previous or subsequent Dracula-tales dealing with these characters has missed a lot of content.

Going by my original list, the “long arc” would be the next category, but I’ve come to think that a new category is necessary, to signify an arc that’s a little more involved in terms of both length and story-content. This I’ll term the “medial arc,” and as far as installment-fiction is concerned, I would say that it usually lasts from six to eight installments, while its narrative is much more strongly imbricated with the ongoing continuity. One example of the medial arc is the five-part arc “Motherland” from the series Y THE LAST MAN. Now, “Motherland” was published late in the history of the ongoing feature, and it happened to solve a lot of the mysteries the author propounded about why almost all the males on Earth perished. But it’s just as possible to see the same level of continuity-involvement in a medial arc published at the beginning of a series. “The Black Pearl” occurs near the outset of the INU-YASHA series and serves to establish one of the dominant plotlines of the narrative: the relationship between the heroic Inu-Yasha and his more ruthless brother Sesshomaru.

At present I would not seek to fix a length of chapters for a long arc. I mentioned in LENGTH PART 1 that long arcs were best known to audiences through the form of the television soap opera. Since the only soap opera I’ve seen in its entirety is the 1966 DARK SHADOWS, I would tend to regard each season of this program as comprising a long arc—which, in the case of Season One, came to 135 30-minute episodes. With such a quantity of episodes, there’s certainly no sense of a unifying beginning, middle, and end. Every time a given story-conflict is resolved, some other conflict emerges from the metaphorical wings to take its place, and the final episode of the season is usually just a stopping-point rather than an organic conclusion.

Long arcs in comic books are rarely that long. In practice, I would say that they rarely exceed twenty installments, allowing for variations in story-length, before the author shifts to another arc or short-story. The events of the plot are not as strongly focused as those of the shorter arcs, though there may be an overreaching purpose unifying all the events. In the NISEKOI long arc I’ve entitled “Limit,” all sixteen installments are principally concerned with the teenagers rescuing their classmate Marika from an arranged marriage. Given this expansive narrative, each of the principal characters is given some feat to perform that serves the aim of rescue, and, given that NISEKOI is a comedy, many of these feats draw upon running jokes in the overall series. For instance, one such joke involves the erratic cooking skills of Kosaki, whose meals are almost always vomitous in nature. During the rescue operation, the operation’s planner assigns Kosaki to cook for the guards attending the wedding, with the humorous result that any guard who ate the girl’s meal become sidelined by virtue of stomach pains.

I mentioned in the cited essay that some comic-book serials are unified enough that they could function as “episodic novels” in the vein of Melville’s MOBY DICK. I noted that some long serials, like Akamatsu’s LOVE HINA lacked a “structuring principle,” be it related to plot or to theme, and thus I did not regard these as episodic novels, only as assemblages of arcs and short stories. NISEKOI, however, qualifies as such an episodic novel, in that it combines several of these structural forms into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES

As I’ve noted here and thee, most serial narratives never evolve any sort of discourse-thread beyond the level of “good will triumph over evil.” Though I’ve defended the idea of the Golden Age Superman more than once, I can’t say that the execution of the idea rises above this level in its first fifteen years.

Although Bob Kane and Bill Finger created Batman as a response to Siperman’s sudden popularity, they evolved a far more creative property than either the Man of Steel or the great majority of Golden Age serial concepts. During the first six years of the feature’s history—the period I’ve termed “Gothic Batman”—displayed a unique approach to the characters, even though the stories might appear to advocate simple “good vs. evil” morals for the kid-readers. I, like many critics, have emphasized that the early years possess an extravagant, somewhat morbid creativity that bears some comparison with the better prose Gothics. And yet, it’s recently occurred to me that those years are also marked by a certain amount of whimsical fantasy, closer in spirit to stories of swashbuckling adventure than to Gothic deeds of darkness.

To be sure, both adventure tales and Gothic horrors loosely descend from the courtly romances of the Late Middle Ages, so such an alliance has a certain appeal. I’m now of the opinion that the introduction of Robin to Batman’s grim world insured that sinister Gothicism and fanciful adventure would become conjoined; a true marriage of the grotesque and the arabesque.

(I could write a long sidebar as to why I chose to hijack these art-history terms for my own purposes, without agreeing with the way the terms are used in art history, or by such luminaries as Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Walter Scott. But at present, it seems to me that commonplace dictionary definitions back up my usages, so I’ll let it go at that.)

As I stated earlier, Batman’s pre-Robin world depicts the hero battling common criminals, malefic masterminds and supernatural horrors with stoic determination. Batman’s seventh adventure, scripted by Gardner Fox, roots the crimefighter’s joyless struggle in personal tragedy. To be sure, though, a lot of earlier heroes began with traumatic backstories, ranging from Dick Tracy to the Lone Ranger to the Shadow. Indeed, Batman’s devotion to stamping out evil—with no reference to finding the killer of his parents—bears strong resemblance to the origin of the first Phantom, who devotes himself to fighting evil after losing a parent to vicious pirates, and then passes the same cause along to his descendants. But Golden Age authors did not tend to revisit origin-tales as have later generations. In a world where Robin never joined Batman, it would have been routine had readers eventually forgot the reason why Batman became a costumed hero.

Now, I’m not saying that the Golden Age stories, as we have them, make any more reference to the origins of either Batman or Robin than, say, the CAPTAIN AMERICA title kept coming back to the origins of that hero and his sidekick. However, in contrast to most features that paired superheroes and kid sidekicks, BATMAN continuously emphasized the daily familial interactions of Bruce Wayne and his youthful ward. Thus, even if a reader didn’t know exactly how the two characters came together, he’d be able to find out from readers-in-the-know that Batman quasi-adopted the Boy Wonder because they’d shared a similar tragedy. And even if some readers never knew about these interlinked origins, the authors knew, and they played the contrast of the worldly adult with the exuberant youth for all it was worth. (To be sure, once Robin shows up Batman rarely affects his original obsessed, near-humorless attitude, though on occasion the writers allowed the Big Bat a few moments of fear-inspiring brutality.)

Batman, then, despite his handsome face and ripped body, is at heart a grotesque, because the very look of his costume inspires fear more than admiration. Robin’s costume, in contrast, evokes the fanciful spirit I term arabesque. He affects bright daytime colors of red, green and yellow in direct contrast to Batman’s night-hues, and some of his garments, such as boots and tunic, are designed to evoke famed swashbuckler Robin Hood. Even his main weapon in early stories, a David-style sling, carries an arabesque quality in comparison with Batman’s deadly looking Batarang.

The dynamic between Batman and Robin also extended to the way the raconteurs created their super-villains.

Some villains project fearful visages, just as does Batman. These include such notabes as the Joker, the original Clayface, the Scarecrow, Two-Face, the Monk and Doctor Death.

Yet others, however destructive, project images that are more fanciful in character. Thus, the somewhat shorter list of notable arabesques includes the Penguin, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cavalier, and the Catwoman (who, it should be noted, had as her first costume a simple dress and a cat-head mask).

With the grotesque-arabesque distinction in mind, it’s possible to see that later creative eras can be seen as putting increasing emphasis on one mode over the other. “Dark Procedural Batman” doesn’t entirely eliminate all sinister content from the feature, but the Joker becomes more of a harmless clown, while villains like the Riddler and Killer Moth never project any sort of fearful aspects. I sardonically termed the period after the Comics Code ‘Candyland Batman” because the dominant art-style emphasized lots of daytime scenes and new villains who were usually characterized by bright colors, ranging from goony aliens to goofy one-note villains like the Kite-Man and Mister Polka Dot. This overemphasis on the arabesque resulted in a downturn of the BATMAN franchise, and the following era, “Gothic Procedural,” borrows from all three previous periods, emphasizing ratiocinative detective tales and occasional forays into the Gothic, but not entirely dropping goony sci-fi menaces. Probably most of Bronze Age Batman, to which I’ve assigned no name, became almost totally focused upon Gothic images and tropes.

What I find interesting is that in the 21^st century, some fans-turned-writers have become intrigued by the arabesque craziness of the Candyland era. Grant Morrison revived bizarre figures like the Rainbow Creature, and the teleseries BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD celebrated all the light-hearted aspects of both the Bat-comics and numerous other DC features. Arguably, though, the biggest influence that the Candyland era ever had on the career of the Dark Knight was its effect on the 1966-68 BATMAN teleseries, which took the wacky kid-fantasies of the early sixties and viewed them through an ironic prism. (And yes, I know that they borrowed story-content from the following era as well, but the show’s producers never showed much interest in the franchise’s more grotesque aspects from any era.)

Thus, there's definitely something to be said for the aspect of Bat-mythology that Alan Moore called "funny uncle Batman." At some point in the future, I may incorporate this bachelor-thread concept into a wider analysis of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries.

DEGREES OF MASTERY AND BACHELORDOM

Back in April 2020 I formulated the term “master thread” as a perhaps less didactic substitute for the common literary phrase “theme statement.” Therefore earlier essays, such as February's CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PART 3, don’t use the term, though that particular essay does mention a “structuring principle” and its significance with the operations of concrescence.

Had I coined the new term back at the time of the February essay, I probably would have said something like, “Because a hyperconcrescent symbolic dialogue requires a very strong master thread, it’s impossible for the form termed a ‘basic serial’ to exhibit more than a fair level of mythicity.” This type of serial narrative—which henceforth I’ll term the “open serial”—lacks any potential for the closure one can generally find in the eight narrative forms discussed previously. “Closure” in this sense refers to the closure of the discourse, symbolic or otherwise, and has nothing to do with whether or not there currently exist a finite number of installments in the open serial.

The open serial, as I remarked before, can be comprised of several long or short arcs, several short stories, or combinations thereof. It’s because the open serial depends on a loose assemblage of sub-narratives that the overall narrative cannot attain closure. Not that its authors want such closure: the entire appeal of the open serial is that it gives its audience a constant situation that either does not change at all or changes very slowly. Open serials fall into three categories:

The Story with a Planned Conclusion—here, though the overall narrative may include any number of sub-narratives that don’t tie into one another, the author intentionally designs for the narrative to end with a culminating incident. LOVE HINA and many other manga fall into this category. The FUGITIVE teleseries also managed to wrap up its hero’s arc in its final season. In some cases, producers may plan for a serial to be open-ended, but upon receiving bad reviews, the show-runners successfully manage to wrap up a saga’s continuing arc just before termination, as with the one-season wonder GUNS OF WILL SONNETT.

The Story with an Accidental Conclusion—in this category, the narrative, though designed to be open-ended, is terminated by outside forces. Serials consisting of unconnected short stories, like Classic STAR TREK, have no culmination as such; they simply have a last episode. Dozens of serial narratives have simply stopped at an arbitrary point, leaving protagonists in mid-cliffhanger, a phenomenon I’ve frequently observed in the first few years of DC’s early title ADVENTURE COMICS. Up to the filming of the last episode of DARK SHADOWS, the production team apparently didn’t know whether there would be another season or not, so that the last episode concluded with a tacked-on narration explaining how things finally shook out. On rare occasions an arbitrary last episode seems to provide an accidental summing-up. MARRIED WITH CHILDREN’s final episode just happened to spotlight Kelly Bundy’s incredible lubricity and Bud’s eternal victimization, certainly a recurring motif throughout the show’s history.

The Never-Ending Story— in terms of structure this type is identical to the Story with the Accidental Conclusion, but this feature/franchise has existed continuously over many generations, executed by dozens of raconteurs. Thus, though a critic should know when the feature began, he may have no indication as to when it might end. Certainly I expect that, whenever Superman and Batman finally cease publication, I won’t be around to witness it.

All of these types of open serials are far too disorganized to maintain a master thread as such. At best—and here I reference the setup of my essay-title—one could devise “bachelor-threads,” which are, as per the collegiate metaphor, not as advanced as the masters. Bachelor-threads simply codify the most prominent story-motifs used in the open serial, but there’s no sense that they all add up to a coherent discourse.

MARRIED WITH CHILDREN, for instance, came close to expressing its own bachelor-thread with Al Bundy’s comic credo, “A Bundy never wins, but a Bundy never quits.” Still, this could use a little modification. The Bundys actually do win a few minor conflicts, but it’s usually because they’ve worked together. But because they feed off of fighting with one another, the thread might read more like, “Hell is the other members of your family.”

To segue to a serial more focused on long arcs, I could codify the thread of LOVE HINA as, “Constantly bothering girls (whether intentionally or not) gets you punched a lot, but at least that way you’re bound to wind up with a hot-looking sadist.”

Classic STAR TREK certainly lends itself to a more profound-sounding bachelor-thread, if one renders it as, “Humans, though advancing to the heavens with logic and reason, forever carry with them their primitive natures, which must always be controlled, sublimated, or, more rarely, weaponized (see “I,Mudd.”) But again, one can always find episodes that don’t exemplify this quasi-theme, usually because some writer has chosen to plop Captain Kirk down in a Roman arena or at the O.K. Corral.

A “never-ending story” is even harder to break down, since its focus may change over generations. In my essay THE MANY MYTHOI OF BATMAN, I attempted to break down the Cowled Crusader’s career into different “creative eras,” characterizing each era by the dominant visual and/or narrative tropes used by the storytellers. It would be functionally impossible to find even a single bachelor-thread that described all of the eras together. However, in my next essay, I’ll take a shot at formulating a bachelor-thread for the many disparate creative eras of the Dark Knight’s career.

CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PT. 3

After formulating my distinctions of the longest structural forms in Part 1-- the compact novel and the episodic novel-- I should point out that a partial reading may be deceptive.

Last year, partly in response to the release of the film ALITA BATTLE ANGEL, I read some of the chapters of the manga. I rated IRON MAIDEN as possessed enough concrescence to qualify as a mythcomic, which is naturally predicated on recognizing it as a "long arc," but the following long arc, KILLING ANGEL, did not qualify for the same status.

To date, I still have not re-read all of ALITA, but it occurs to me that when I do, the entire series might qualify as an "episodic novel," and thus as a mythcomic in itself. If I made that judgment, then the fact that KILLING ANGEL lacked a certain level of concrescence would not affect my judgment of the whole series, any more than a mythically-weak chapter of (say) MOBY DICK would affect my judgment of the whole book.

In some cases, if a given work or series of works has been left incomplete, it's hard not to make a partial reading. I stated in Part 1 that I could have considered the eleven issues of Jack Kirby's NEW GODS series to be an episodic novel, even if the author had not been able to craft an ending for the series many years later. The ending that Kirby used in HUNGER DOGS was probably very different from anything he might have written had he concluded the series in 1971. Yet I would say that the mythic discourse of those eleven issues was strong enough to view them as a technically incomplete but symbolically complete novel.

Similarly, Steve Gerber's VOID INDIGO only enjoyed one large-sized graphic novel and two issues of a regular-sized comic book, before hostile fan-reaction to the series encouraged publisher Marvel Comics to shut down the series. Possibly I might not have liked whatever ending Gerber might have designed for the series, but I felt that the early part of his discourse was strong enough that I deemed VOID also to be akin (to borrow Aristotle's metaphor) to the acorn that, under the right circumstances, has the power to give rise to an oak.

It's hard to state with precision exactly when the discourse is strong enough to subsume any weak elements. The Don McGregor long arc "Panther's Rage" in BLACK PANTHER #6-17 is one in which I did not find a strong enough discourse overall, though I critiqued two of the McGregor stories, "The God Killer" and "Thorns in the Flesh, Thorns in the Mind" as possessing the same strong mythicity as an isolated short story, even though they're part of a larger arc. On a side note, I would probably rate the entire "Panther's Rage" highly concrescent in terms of the dramatic potentiality, since I'm of the opinion that interpersonal dynamics were the main focus of McGregor and his collaborative artists.

CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH PT. 2

Once again, I append a "part 2" to an essay written over a year ago. Just the way my mind works, it seems.

In the first CATEGORIES, I formulated seven forms of narrative, oriented upon but not confined to the medium of comics: the vignette, the short arc, the short story, the long arc, the novella, the compact novel, and the episodic novel. These formulations grew from earlier meditations on the ways in which symbolic/mythopoeic discourse arose with the sub-medium of comic strips, so the idea of mythicity was primarily my subject. I would tend to say that any of the other "domains" I've addressed on this blog follow the same narrative rules, but I don't choose to follow any of those threads at this time

At the end of the first essay, I cited one form of narrative that was somewhat outside my concerns:

Just to be clear, most serial endeavors are really just assemblages of ongoing episodes with no structuring principle, usually combining short stories and long arcs. Akamatsu's LOVE HINA is not a novel, episodic or otherwise, just because the author has in mind a summary wrap-up story.

What I simply implied in that paragraph I'll make more explicit here: such "assemblages of ongoing episodes" don't share a common "structuring principle," which I later related to such terms as "concrescence" and "epistemological patterns." Thus, I can declare a particular handful of Classic STAR TREK episodes to be mythic discourses, because each of those episodes follows the structuring principle that makes mythic discourse possible. But there's no single structuring principle uniting all of the episodes, good and bad. OPERATION ANNIHILATE is a bad "alien plague" story, and I can demonstrate how even a bad episode shares some of the some story-tropes found in a good episode on the same theme, such as THE NAKED TIME. But stories about the virtues of Federation society, whether mediocre like THE OMEGA GLORY or superior like THIS SIDE OF PARADISE, are not inherently tied to the tropes of the "alien plague" story-type. It's certainly possible to imagine an episodic novel that somehow dovetailed both themes and made them part of a greater whole. But Classic STAR TREK is not structured even to attempt such a synthesis.

Since "assemblage" is not an apt term in this case, from here on I'll substitute the term "basic serial." The basic serial in most iterations is not meant to possess an overriding structure. Rather only its constituent parts, be they short stories, long arcs, or other forms, usually display the sort of patterns that can be judged in terms of concrescence.

To date, STAR TREK is the only series for which I've reviewed every episode, and oddly, it's one of the few serials that I would consider to be "mythic" not just in the epistemological sense, but in the lesser sense that a vast number of people, even  non-fans, are aware of its themes. Whenever I've reviewed whole serials in a single review, like this one, I've usually given them only a "fair" rating of mythicity, though this was meant to be only a general judgment. Now it occurs to me that it's impossible to give any rating higher than "fair" to a basic serial, since greater concrescence is not tenable in that form. The only serials that I envision proving an exception to this rule would be those that don't fit the scattershot format of the basic serial-- in other words, novellas like THAT YELLOW BASTARD, compact novels like HELLSING, and episodic novels like Kirby's NEW GODS.

SOAP OPERA SOAPBOX

I've watched reruns of the original 1966-71 DARK SHADOWS twice before this, but only in this third re-watch that I've started attempting to analyze the series in terms of its mythicity. But to even make the attempt, it's necessary to dwell on the way the series told its stories, particularly in terms to the topic of structural length.

I introduced my CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH last year, in which I made one reference to the form of melodrama known as the soap opera, in my section dealing with "the long arc:"

the long arc also takes place within a larger continuity, but like the short arc doesn't entirely stand on its own. The American "soap opera" did not originate the long arc, but it's the genre best known for particular plot-lines that could be extended for weeks, if not longer.

Now, I should specify that there are two different subspecies of soap operas, and that when I made this statement, I was speaking of what I'll term the "weekday soap" rather than the "weekly soap." While there may well be any number of other subspecies of which I'm not aware, I think of "soap opera" as productions that appear five times a week on daytime television. (I presume that early radio dramas of this type, of which I know nothing, followed this general tendency.) For most of my life, television dramas that aired on a weekly basis-- almost always in the evening-- tended to be episodic stories with only marginal continuity between one another. Eighties serials like DALLAS and DYNASTY weren't the first "weekly soaps" on television, but since then they've provided a storytelling model not only for serials in the exact same mold but also those that alternate between long arcs and self-contained short stories, like most of the seasons of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER.

Despite the fact that I'm now going to generalize on the structure of the weekday serial, I confess that I've only followed three in my lifetime: the supernatural soap DARK SHADOWS, the spoof-soap MARY HARTMAN (which was technically a "weeknight" serial), and PASSIONS, which was a little of both. Still, I believe that the typical weekday serial consists almost entirely of long arcs, short arcs, and the occasional vignette. The narrative appeal of the soap opera is that for the most part it forestalls pleasing resolutions-- perhaps very loosely comparable to the Freudian notion of disavowal-- with the result that even when a given problem seems to be wrapped up, a new problem ensues so quickly-- often one introduced through the uses of subplots-- that there's no real pleasure from the first difficulty's solution.

If it's accurate that the first American soap was a 1930 radio drama called PAINTED DREAMS, then it may be that newspaper comic strips like 1924's LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, began utilizing the essence of the long arc first. Yet even though a number of comic strips appeared on six out of seven weekdays-- and sometimes on Sunday as well-- the comic strip doesn't make heavy use of subplots, except to lead into the very next ensuing storyline. The weekday soap comes closer to the jumble of real life, in that neither long arc, short arc, nor vignette has dominance. The viewer seems to be seeing regular lives-- even those of 18th-century vampires-- to be unfolding before them.

Following the innovations of Stan Lee's Silver Age Marvel comics, the comic-book medium was able to master many of the rudiments of the weekday soap. Nevertheless, even though comic books had a greater potential to master narrative forms than did comic strips, they weren't published as often. Even the rate weekly comic-book feature could not develop its narrative any more quickly than could a weekly television serial.

Because there's so little resolution in the weekday soaps, the writers behind the scripts tend to repeat themselves a lot. Thus a serial like DARK SHADOWS exhibits not Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence" but an "eternal recursion," going by this American Heritage definition of the word:

A method of defining a sequence of objects, such as an expression, function, or set, where some number of initial objects are given and each successive object is defined in terms of the preceding objects. 

With this in mind, a serial like DARK SHADOWS doesn't have "continuity" so much as endless variations upon a theme, which become more and more complicated as new information is added.
The serial starts out in 1966, and its central Gothic mystery seems to be the familial background of Victoria Winters, who may or may not be related to the Collins family. Victoria's relation to the Collins past shifts into a new phase with the introduction of vampire Barnabas Collins. Though the two of them originally have no direct relation to one another-- Barnabas is searching for the reincarnation of his long-dead lover Josette, and thinks he's found her in Maggie Evans-- but eventually Victoria becomes identified, however imperfectly, with Josette. At the same time, when the actress playing Victoria leaves the show, the serial simply shifts into exploring other mysteries of the Collins family, with or without involving Barnabas.

It's almost impossible to analyze a single episode of a weekday soap like DARK SHADOWS, because the incidents of one episode are designed to lead quickly, albeit often not seamlessly, to yet more and more incidents, with hardly a breath taken to reflect upon the Meaning of It All. Rather, SHADOWS can only express any mythicity in its primary structural forms of the long arc, the short arc, and the vignette-- which I'll attempt to show in a forthcoming review.

CATEGORIES OF STRUCTURAL LENGTH

I devoted some time to the factor of what I now term 'structural length" in the essay-series THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, but only today decided to coin a term for the concept.

There are various accepted categories that pertain to the structures narratives take on when their authors work within certain length-specifications, and I accept the terms "vignette" and "short story" pretty much as they are regularly used. However, my study of comics convinces me to put forth my own comics-centric list of terms, to wit:

VIGNETTE-- a narrative so short that it usually consists of just set-up and resolution, of beginning and end with barely the suggestion of a "middle." THE ORIGIN OF BATMAN may be the most famous such sequence.

SHORT ARC-- this form of narrative usually does have a bit more progression, but it's clearly meant to function as part of a greater continuity, and may function as a "subplot," though it does not necessarily have to take that function. In this essay on the manga FREEZING, I mistakenly termed the two stories discussed therein as "vignettes," but I've decided that "short arc" is the better description. Just as the traditional subplot can morph into a central plotline, the short arc can develop into a longer arc.

SHORT STORY-- this is the short form best known for the traditional beginning, middle, and end. It usually has a compact structure, and can be read without reference to other stories, though such stories often appear in continuing features simply to illustrate particular situations or characters. The reader can presumably think of many stand-alone stories that conform to the paradigm, and for an example of a short-story-within-a-continuity, I'll cite SECRET OF THE MYSTERIOUS GIRL from the LOVE HINA continuity.

LONG ARC-- the long arc also takes place within a larger continuity, but like the short arc doesn't entirely stand on its own. The American "soap opera" did not originate the long arc, but it's the genre best known for particular plot-lines that could be extended for weeks, if not longer.  By length alone, the long arc may be compared to the novella, though no arc can be independent of its parent continuity, as a novella can. The LOVE HINA sequence SISTER SYNDROME is my exemplar.

NOVELLA-- The novella is more expansive than the short story, but resembles the latter in being more focused than a long novel can be on a clear "beginning, middle, and end." The example here is the recent SIN CITY six-part story, THAT YELLOW BASTARD.

COMPACT NOVEL-- The compact form of the novel allows for a wider variety of plot-lines than a novella, but it is always structured to dovetail all significant plot-lines toward a satisfying resolution. This is what most people think of as a "novel," though I extend it also to serial concepts that have a similar coherence, as with Kohta Hirano's HELLSING.

EPISODIC NOVEL-- This form includes a vast number of sub-forms, such as "the romance" and "the picaresque novel." Though there's usually a unifying theme, the episodic novel does not emphasize, as the compact novel does, distinct plot-threads, but instead focuses on episodes that may or may not bear heavily upon the main plot's resolution. Melville's MOBY DICK may be the most famous example of a modern-day "literary romance," but I extend it also to serials which have thematic, albeit not  narrative, unity. Jack Kirby's NEW GODS series qualifies here, and I would view it as sharing the basic structure of the episodic novel even if its creator had not been able to provide a resolution of sorts, years after the original continuity was interrupted by cancellation. Steve Gerber's uncompleted VOID INDIGO series furnishes an example of a continuity that was patently intended to function as an episodic novel, but that was doomed by overheated fan-reaction.

ADDENDUM: Just to be clear, most serial endeavors are really just assemblages of ongoing episodes with no structuring principle, usually combining short stories and long arcs. Akamatsu's LOVE HINA is not a novel, episodic or otherwise, just because the author has in mind a summary wrap-up story.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH PT. 3

Returning to the subject of comic strips:

I stated in Part 1 that I had in past found mythic material in such comic strips as Windsor McCay's DREAMS OF THE RAREBIT FIEND and Gary Larson's THE FAR SIDE. However, both of these were "gag-strips" rather than 'story-strips." Given my contention that a "literary myth" should be an actual story with a beginning, middle, and end, it behooves me to consider to what extent a "gag" is or isn't an actual story. Certainly a gag can at least convey a "myth-motif," but even so, not all "short myths" are equal-- hence, the possible use of Wheelwright's concept of *amplitude* (see Part 2) to sort out the mythic from the not-very-mythic.

I've not read all of McCay's FIEND strips, but I have the strong impression that they all follow the same structure. They all begin within someone's psychedelic dream, which runs its course until the dreamer awakens and groans about the folly of having eaten a Welsh rarebit. The strip depended on fulfilling this base function, regardless of whether the dream had or did not have "more to say." Thus, by the rules of *functionality* that I defined here, the strip would be "stereotypical" or monosignative when it did no more than fulfill its base function, yet "archetypal" or plurisignative if it went beyond the base function, and became in some way "super-functional." (The Campbellian part of me sees this "going beyond" as encoding one of Campbell's four functions, but others' mileage will vary.)

For my first example, here's one McCay strip that I consider merely monosignative:

The idea of a dreamer being chased and/or devoured by dream-monsters is fairly typical, and the motif of a dreamer extrapolating his bath into a river with a devouring hippopotamus seems to lack any special characteristic. Thus the cartoon also lacks what Wheelwright calls *amplitude.*

On the other hand, here's another strip:

This is a little more psychologically interesting because it deals with two older persons taking in a small dog that grows to monstrous size, to the point that they try, without success, to destroy the canine. Even though the overall situation satisfies the same base function as we see in the "hippo cartoon," McCay has invested more imagination to this cartoon-- not least because the monster dog never responds to the couple's attempted executions, but simply endures them stoically. Within the cartoon there are no diegetic parallels drawn between the dog and a human child. And yet this McCay scenario cannot help but beg such parallels. Because the second cartoon can call forth deeper associations, it possesses a greater amplitude, defined in physics as "the maximum extent of a vibration or oscillation, measured from the position of equilibrium."

Now here's a monosignative FAR SIDE cartoon:

The cartoon is amusing enough, but it depends entirely on the reader's recognition of the story-trope, "wolf in sheep's clothing."  Beyond that, there doesn't seem to be anything else going on.

This Larson gag also plays upon a reversal of biological norms:

However, this is the sort of cartoon I considered when I assigned symbolic complexity to the FAR SIDE strip. Larson is known to be a nerd about matters biological, and here he's having fun with the notion that a given biological adaptation-- in this case, sharks' dorsal fins-- might be more of a stumbling-block than an advantage within the shark's environmental niche. It's perhaps even more amusing when one considers the situation of real creatures who are victims of their own biologies, such as the peacock.

Larson's cartoons were always one panel, though on occasion he subdivided that space for the sake of telling a joke with some sort of progression. In contrast, the McCay FIENDs were usually either a quarter-page or a half-page, so McCay could do as many panels as he could fit into the designated space given him. Nevertheless, I would not consider either "McCay's dog" or "Larson's shark" to be mythic narratives simply because they possess an amplitude beyond the merely functional. They tell gags that can reduced down to simple motifs, rather than having the "tying-untying" progression of a genuine narrative.

Chic Young's BLONDIE, although its Sunday pages had as much space to work in as did McCay's FIEND entries, tended to construct mini-stories that conform more to Aristotle's narratology. I've observed in earlier posts that the "base function" of BLONDIE was generally to show Dagwood as "the Goat of the World," constantly being victimized by his wife, his kids, his boss, his neighbors, and almost everyone else. But again, some cartoons merely fulfill the function, and others go beyond it.  Here's a stereotypical example:

The "complication" is that Dagwood proposes that he might grow a beard, and everyone in his family goes postal in exaggerated reaction: the resolution comes when he gives in and promises not to become a "beatnik." This is typical "family-comedy" schtick, but nothing more.

On the other hand, there's this Sunday page:

Again, the base goal is realized; Dagwood is made the Goat. But there's a deeper psychological angle here. Alone, Dagwood tries to relax in the bathtub, but "his master's voice" intrudes even the privacy of his home. Rushing to answer the phone, he trips and injures himself-- all for nothing, because it's just Blondie calling for no particular reason. As a final irony, Blondie's friend avers that Blondie's gesture is the sort of thing that that makes for good marriages. I've argued that the comic-book BLONDIE story that I analyzed here shares a similar idea of inflicting pain on Dagwood through the supposedly "innocent" acts of Blondie, resulting in something of a "domme-sub" relationship-- although the camouflage of slapstick comedy concealed this from the strip's mass audience.

As I said, the two BLONDIE strips are closer to real stories than the other strips, regardless of the presence or absence of plurisignificance. Still, they would best be labeled "sketches" or "vignettes," which means that even when they do possess super-functionality, it's used for very restricted purposes. For this reason, I doubt that I'll include many of these type of "gag strips" within the corpus of the "1001 myths project:" at present the aforementioned "Linus the Rain King" continuity is the only one that seems worthy.Ideally, the stories chosen for this project show the mythopoeic potentiality at its highest possible potential. And just as we judge the best dramas as being those that convince us that we're seeing simulacra of real people talk believably to one another, the best myth-stories are those that establish a believable "dialogue" between a variety of symbolic representations.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, PT. 2

Before making any further observations on the effect of structural length to the symbolic discourses of comic books and comic strips, I should mention that even those stories that anyone would validate as genuine myths-- that is, those archaic cultural tales that usually possess some religious dimension-- are also affected by "long and short" considerations.

When I first began discussing literary myths on this blog, I related the word to its original Greek context. Since *muthos* has usually been translated as "utterance" and/or "story," I deemed that in both archaic and in modern times a myth had to be a coherent story in form, while its main attribute would be its high symbolic complexity. Conventionally, this means a story with a "beginning, middle, and end," though Aristotle invoked only two literary terms to describe narrative progression:

clearly [Cioffi's] structural summation of how anomalous presences impact on "conventional social reality" is of a piece with Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.") -- ANOMALOUS ENCOUNTERS: RESOURCE.

Yet, though I still consider this valid, I must admit that constituent parts of stories can be mythic, if not actual myths as such. Jung's best name for these story-parts was "motifs," and in his psychological investigations he often treated each motif as if it possessed its own symbolic validity, apart from its function within a narrative. Similarly, the Cambridge myth-and-ritual school, which was probably a greater influence than Jung on Frye's ANATOMY OF CRITICISM, regarded the structural elements of classical Greek drama-- such as agon, pathos, and sparagmos, to name the three referenced in Aristotle's POETICS-- as having ritual importance in and of themselves, not simply as parts of the narrative.

Thus it could be said that the motifs are the "short forms" of myths, which carry a special valence even though they are quasi-dependent on other motifs in order to form narratives. One might say, in line with Aristotle, that the myth-motifs of a given narrative must be "tied" together to provide the narrative's "long form" structure, even though Aristotle would assume that the pleasure of the text comes from its resolution, or the "untying" of all the narrative's knotty complications.

At the end of Part 1 I contended with Aristotle's term "complication" somewhat, saying:

I'm currently considering the proposition that mythopoeic scenarios, much like those of the other potentialities, need to be formulated to allow for *complication*-- though this need not be entirely identical with the Aristotelian term given that translation...

I've decided that what I was seeking in the term "complication" is better described by Wheelwright when he speaks of *amplitude* in this passage:

"Certain particulars have more of an archetypal content than others; that is to say, they are 'eminent instances' which stand forth in a characteristic amplitude as representatives of many others; they enclose in themselves a certain totality, arranged in a certain way, stirring in the soul something at once familiar and strange, and thus outwardly as well as inwardly they lay claim to a certain unity and generality."-- FOUNTAIN, p. 54.

In Part 3 I'll show how the concept of amplitude might apply in symbolic discourses hemmed in the structural limitations of the comic-strip medium.

THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH, PT. 1

I've been contemplating the place of comic strips with respect to the "1001 comics myths" project.

I've always thought that comic books have proven themselves a more fertile ground for the  mythopoeic potentiality than comic strips.  I further believe that comic books' greater capacity for myth has nothing to do with the profligacy of superheroes within the American medium; it's a capacity rooted in the comic-book medium's ability to make a more nuanced use of words than the comic-strip medium can. If one could disinclude all of the superhero or superhero-like features from both media, I believe that one would still find that comic books are superior at producing the discourses of myth, which elsewhere I've related to Philip Wheelwright's concept of "poeto-language."

That doesn't mean that I don't find worthwhile "poeto-language" discourses in comic strips. In my essay AN ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY, I mentioned the following strips: Chic Young's BLONDIE, Harold Gould's DICK TRACY, Windsor McCay's DREAMS OF A RAREBIT FIEND, Gary Larson's FAR SIDE, Herriman's KRAZY KAT, and Caniff's TERRY AND THE PIRATES.

However, it may be a mark of the difficulty with critiquing such serial comic strips that I didn't write myth-analyses of any of these, though in the first year of this blog I did devote some attention to a particular PEANUTS conitnuity, which I entitled LINUS THE RAIN KING.  I've latterly decided that this too belongs within the corpus of the 1001 comics-myths, and I'll probably retrofit the original essay slightly for this series at a later date.

Of course PEANUTS may have benefited from the fact that its author Charles Schulz was a lay preacher, so he had a working knowledge of the "poeto-language" of the Bible.

Nevertheless, as a Jungian pluralist I don't believe that one has to have special education to tap into the potentiality of the mythopoeic.

I considered the possiblity that the rather truncated form of the comic strip might tend to force it into a verbal straightjacket, so that it became the dominant practice to use words only in a denotative manner, rarely tapping their connotative associations.  This is certainly a possibility, although Schulz's example shows that one can find ways to use the medium's limitations to produce mythic effects.

Of the six comic strips I mentioned above, the most mundane is Young's BLONDIE, which was certainly not a haven for metaphysical musings. Nevertheless, though I've never devoted any space to the Chic Young strip, in my "Mythic Monday" project I gave a mention to one short tale, "Shaved and Clipped," from a 1962 issue of Harvey Comics' licensed BLONDIE comic-book title. The tale is only two pages long, yet it is more plurisignative than most BLONDIE comic-book stories, to say nothing of many of the comic strips. From this I conclude that the actual length of the narrative doesn't always mitigate against symbolic complexity.

I'm currently considering the proposition that mythopoeic scenarios, much like those of the other potentialities, need to be formulated to allow for *complication*-- though this need not be entirely identical with the Aristotelian term given that translation, as seen in this essay.

I should weigh in on these weighty matters further, in at least one more essay.