PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4

 Here I'll discuss an "alignment-inversion" like the one primarily addressed in Part 3, where the main topic was the alteration that took place when Lois Lane, a Sub to Superman's Prime in the SUPERMAN titles, assumed the Prime posture in the LOIS LANE feature. I said that despite being in the position of a Prime for some years, Lois Lane's status is dominantly that of a Sub-- just like another subordinate-ensemble member who never had Prime status (Perry White) -- because she owes her existence to Superman.  

A similar situation pertains with the cast of the long-lived ARCHIE franchise. Because the titular character makes his first appearance alongside the equally durable characters of Betty Cooper and Jughead Jones, I gave some consideration as to whether Archie was the series' only Prime, or if he, Betty, Jughead, and the slightly later additions of Veronica and Reggie were all Primes within a superordinate ensemble. But it seems to me that the main focus is upon the simple ordinariness of Archie Andrews, "America's Typical Teenager," and that thus the other four are meant to play off him in one way or another. That makes the other four Archie's primary subordinary ensemble, who are the ones who appear most of the time in any ARCHIE story, while a secondary Sub ensemble is formed by other teens (Dilton Doily, Moose and his girl) and various teachers and parents, whose usage is more occasional. 

Thus when in the late forties-early fifties MLJ bestowed ongoing titles for all four Subs, their situation was the same as that of Lois Lane, for no matter how long their individual titles persisted, they were always determined as Charisma Dominant Subs. For the record, the title devoted only to Jughead (ARCHIE'S PAL JUGHEAD), and the one to both Betty and Veronica (BETTY AND VERONICA), lasted into the 1980s. The first title devoted to the acerbic Reggie only lasted five years, 1949-1954, but the concept was revived under a new name (REGGIE AND ME) in 1966 and then lasted until 1980.    

  

However, the setup changes somewhat for a group of phase-shifted variations on the originary characters. The first full wave of Silver Age superheroes had swelled forth at least by 1958, meaning that in 1966 the wave had persisted in the comics for roughly seven years before people began hearing about ABC'S new BATMAN series. Said news began the second wave, in, which many comics companies joined the spandex parade, and MLJ decided to produce spoofy superheroic versions of four of the firm's five best-known characters. Archie was the first, transforming into the noble Pureheart (who sometimes lost his powers if a girl kissed him, implicitly threatening his super-purity). Jughead became Captain Hero and Betty became Superteen, and all three had separate as well as crossover adventures, though it would take a fan more dogged than I to sort out the "continuity" of these haphazard stories.  Still, not even the naivest fan of the time would have believed that all three super-teens were continuous with their absolutely ordinary identities as middle-class/upper-class adolescents. So the whole "super-Archieverse" can't be judged on the same terms as the originary proposition. In essence, all of these superheroes have phase-shifted away from their models. In these stories, it's possible for Betty and Jughead to be Primes in their superhero personas, as much as Archie.   

But there was also-- EVILHEART, the costumed persona of nasty Reggie Mantle. He didn't tend to have separate adventures as did Super-Betty and Super-Jughead. Usually if not always, Pureheart was in those adventures too, because the whole point of Reggie Mantle was that he existed to rag on Archie Andrews, so that's what Evilheart did to Pureheart. So it might sound like Evilheart might be dominantly a Sub antagonist, and his independent adventures would be in the mold of, say, The Joker having his own feature in which he fought with villains and heroes, triumphing over the former and losing to the latter. Evilheart for his part enjoys his first supervillain team-up with none other than Mad Doctor Doom, who was first introduced in the pages of LITTLE ARCHIE in 1962.      

And yet, the Mad Doctor Doom episode loosely anticipates the pattern of all the later Evilheart stories, where he more often ends up making common cause with Pureheart against some third menace, even if Super-Reggie is primarily motivated by the desire to one-up Super-Archie. So for that reason I do regard Evilheart as being just as much a Prime as the other three, because all four super-spoofs exist in their own cosmos and are, to use my new term again, "discontinuous variations."    

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 3

Successful spinoffs, in contrast, usually take a path opposed to that of funneling charisma-characters into ensembles, where they have collective stature. Usually a given icon is introduced in a Subordinate relationship to a Prime icon or icons, and then the Sub icon gets a separate serial, thus accruing some degree of stature, depending on how the serial fares in terms of either quantitative or qualitative escalation. -- INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE PT. 2.

In PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 2, I described how a particular stature-bearing icon, Robin the Boy Wonder, completed a phrase shift away from being an icon within a superordinate ensemble to being (in the identity of Nightwing) a stand-alone superordinate icon. Here I want to deal with a phase shift related to a subordinate icon graduating to a qualified superordinate status-- qualified, because the icon remains stature-dependent upon the icon from which she was derived.

For most of her existence, Lois Lane was a part of Superman's subordinate ensemble. Starting in SUPERMAN #28 (1944), the girl reporter got a backup series in that title for about a year. Now, for the length of time that said series existed, Lois Lane was the superordinate icon, while Clark Kent/Superman, whenever he appeared, became a subordinate icon. But for Superman that was a very qualified status, since Lois's popularity was contingent upon that of Superman. 

Now, in the essay referenced in the quote above, I went on to describe how the "spin-off" Batgirl functioned as a subordinate icon within the Batman serials up until the point that she graduated to her own serial. However, BECAUSE Batgirl appeared to be fast-tracked to getting her own series within about five years of her debut, she was also a proto-crossover. Lois by contrast was a pure subordinate icon, and neither her 1944 serial nor the Silver Age one that lasted for about thirteen years-- SUPERMAN'S GIRLFRIEND LOIS LANE-- really did anything to lesson her standing as what I've labeled a "Charisma Dominant Sub." My same verdict holds even given the existence of a couple of television shows in which Lois and Superman were arguably equal Prime types, those being LOIS AND CLARK and SUPERMAN AND LOIS.   

Now, all the serials in which Lois is a stature-dependent Prime and Superman is her Sub do not count as crossovers, the way all of Batgirl's appearances in BATMAN serials do hold that status, simply because Batgirl became a "Stature Dominant Prime." By the same token, Superman does not have any crossover-status with Lois in her own serials, in the way that he does when he teams with Batman in the WORLD'S FINEST feature. The "phase shift" associated with a support-icon being spun off in a separate feature, but a feature that does NOT alter the overall status of the feature's star, is distinct from the one in which such an alteration of status does take place. For this, the example of Robin-turned-Nightwing is instructive, because once Nightwing is independent of Batman he's no longer automatically aligned with the Bat-universe. One example I cited was that because Batman meets Ra's Al Ghul after discontinuing his partnership with Dick Grayson, Ra's Al Ghul does not belong to the Grayson-verse. Thus, whenever Nightwing and Ra's Al Ghul cross paths in any story, that's a charisma-crossover, because Ra's is exclusively Solo Batman's foe. If Ra's has a later encounter with one of Batman's later Robins-- Jason Todd, Tim Drake-- then there's no crossover, because those Robins at that time are aligned with Batman. If one of those Robins phase-shifts his way into a new identity, as "Jason Todd Robin" did to become The Red Hood, then any encounter between Ra's and Red Hood would be a charisma-crossover.

Now, in the Silver Age LOIS LANE feature, unlike the short-lived Golden Age one, the Prime star sometimes met other icons who belonged to Superman's Sub-cosmos, such as Lex Luthor. Everything in Superman's cosmos is also in the dependent cosmos of the girl reporter, so Luthor and other Super-villains have no crossover value, as they would if they interacted with Batman under the WOR LD'S FINEST umbrella. 

Lana Lang presents a slight anomaly, because, by the rules I set up in Part 2 of this series, Lana belongs to the SUPERBOY cosmos, not to that of SUPERMAN, because the personas are different even though they belong to the same person at different ages. Further, at the time that Lana made adult appearances in LOIS LANE, she also continued to appear as her juvenile self in the SUPERBOY title. Lana Lang remains a "Charisma Dominant Sub" in the SUPERBOY feature, but Mature Lana Lang's status is not identical with that of Juvenile Lana Lang (who, incidentally, had only debuted two years previous). 

The former first appears in a 1952 story, "The Girls in Superman's Life," in SUPERMAN #78, but this story is just a one-off. Mature Lana does not show up again until the first Silver Age LOIS LANE comics, 1957's SHOWCASE #9. The two stories don't blend, because the SHOWCASE story ignores Lois having previously met Mature Lana in 1952. Mature Lana is a Sub to Superman in 1952 and a Sub to Lois in 1957, and she continues in that capacity whenever she appears in either feature from then on. She's arguably more strongly aligned to the LOIS feature than the SUPERMAN one despite having probably made more total appearances in the latter. This superior alignment to the LOIS feature s qualitative in nature, because Lana as a competitor to Lois for the hero's heart proved much more significant in that feature than any function(s) she served in assorted SUPERMAN stories. Since "phase-shifted Lana" makes two separate but not congruent debuts in both 1952 and 1957. I would regard that both debuts are crossovers, whether between Superman and Mature Lana in 1952 and between Lois and Mature Lana in 1957. 

TUTELARY SPIRITS

In DOWNGRADING (OR DEGRADING) ON A CURVE, I discussed the dynamics of the BEWITCHED teleseries. I stated that even though the characters of Samantha and Darrin were the superordinate icons of the ongoing narrative, the subordinate character of Endora was the one most often used to generate stories, often by her desire to "teach Darrin a lesson," whether her reasoning was good or bad.

Though on this blog I've mostly discussed accomodation narratives featuring romantic ensembles, another frequently seen trope is that of two characters linked by some tutelary activity. These may be entirely distanced from anything resembling romantic pairing, as seen in both GOOD WILL HUNTING and the more recent HOLDOVERS, where the give-and-take relationship of a teacher and a student makes them both superordinate characters. Another variation appears in the 1956 TEA AND SYMPATHY play-adaptation. In this story, an older woman, not a teacher but connected to a school through her husband, perceives a young man's confusion about his sexuality and dispels his fears by initiating him into manhood. Somewhat related are narratives focusing upon a psychologist and his patient, such as Peter Schaffer's EQUUS, wherein the former must play detective to comprehend the latter's malady, and in so doing experiences some insight about himself.

So, after all those examples of highbrow theater and cinema, my main illustration of a tutleary superordinate ensemble in this essay will be-- the completely lowbrow hijinks of Jack H. Harris' MOTHER GOOSE A GO GO.

Though Darrin Stevens never learns any lessons, Tom Hastings of MOTHER desperately wants to find out what's causing him to freeze up when he tried to have marital relations with his newlywed bride. But I wondered, "Is that enough to make him the main character?" He's a mystery to be solved, but his neglected wife certainly does not function in the narrative as the Samantha to his Darrin. Rather, only psychotherapist Marilyn Richards can unlock the secrets of Ted's impotence and its goofy association with Mother Goose imagery.

Now, whereas both EQUUS and TEA AND SYMPATHY seek to produce reasonable, rational propositions about human behavior, all of MOTHER's propositions are, to use an earlier phrase, "informal." Writer Harris wasn't concerned with probability: he wanted a smarmy sex-comedy. So the script has Marilyn's sexy professional woman, whom I term a "mother-imago," ends up liberating Ted from a subconsciously prohibition accidentally laid upon him during his childhood by his real mother. Toward the end of the movie, Marilyn kinda-sorta makes an erotic move on Ted, justifying the move as "therapy." But long before any such move has been made, Ted has a fairytale-dream-- the second in the story-- wherein he imagines Marilyn as the Evil Queen in "Snow White," who seeks to keep Snow, "played" by Ted's wife, from uniting with Kirk's Prince Charming. 

At the climax, when Marilyn has managed to call forth the nature of Ted's prohibition from his buried memories. she discourages Ted from seeking out his wife, claiming that he ought to use her as a test-case for his restored virility. Then the script has Marilyn change her mind for no good reason and fend Ted off, probably because Harris guessed that his target audience wouldn't like seeing the male lead cheat on his loving wife. So even though Marilyn and Ted don't end up in bed together, they provide a fascinating example of a tutelary ensemble with a strange mother-and-son dynamic, though it stops short of a TEA AND SYMPATHY resolution.

ICONIC BONDING PT. 4

 A story with a subordinate ensemble, however, has a collection of characters who function in the same way as the characters in a superordinate ensemble, except that the former simply lack the stature of one or more starring characters.-- CALLING ALL ENSEMBLES.

A somewhat different ensemble without crossover-charisma is that of the Lord With Many Powerful Servants. In the original NEW GODS universe Darkseid is the guy in charge of many such servants-- Mantis (seen above), Desaad, the Deep Six-- but there is no crossover-vibe there...-- ICONIC BONDING PT. 3.

 

In the second quote, I mentioned first two types of bonded ensembles in which villains who had been "familiarity-icons" since their introduction did not incarnate a crossover-value. My first example was a duo of villains, the Enchantress and the Executioner, who had been introduced as a team in their first appearance and who remained in that configuration in most though not all of their appearances (at least up to the point where the latter character dies). The second type, as specified, was that of a coterie of evildoers more or less permanently bonded into the service of a leader. But now I've become aware of what may a third, even more rare type, thanks to beginning a re-watch of the Fox teleseries GOTHAM.

Prior to GOTHAM, I believe every adaptation of the BATMAN franchise has utilized only Batman himself as the sole superordinate icon, or else has combined Batman with various other partners, whether bonded, semi-bonded or unbonded. Most of these iterations also include a sampling of characters from the franchise to serve the same subordinate-icon purpose that they serve in the comics, such as Alfred the Butler and Commissioner Gordon.

GOTHAM formulated a relatively new approach. It's set in the years that most iterations pass over: the period immediately after twelve-year old Bruce Wayne is orphaned. But in this universe, Young Bruce receives succor not only from faithful Alfred but also from a young James Gordon. During the five years of the series, Young Bruce grows older but does not don his caped costume until the show's last episode. Nevertheless, the youth, slowly maturing toward crimefighter status, enters into a superordinate, semi-bonded ensemble with crusading cop Gordon. I say that they're semi-bonded because though both are central characters involved in investigating crimes in Gotham City, they don't "team up" as such but rather pursue parallel courses that sometimes dovetail. 

Most BATMAN iterations also maintain a subordinate ensemble, and that ensemble usually consists of icons who are allies to the hero or heroes. GOTHAM has a wealth of such characters, but the show seems unique in that some of its villains who also belong to the subordinate ensemble, in that they're present in most episodes and are woven into major story-lines. This is NOT the case with the ongoing serial comics, even when they utilize long arcs focusing on various criminal figures. 

Some of GOTHAM's ensemble-icons are relatively mundane characters, either derived from the comics (mob boss Carmine Falcone) or created for the teleseries (ambitious lady gangster Fish Mooney). And some villains from the comics are introduced in long arcs that eventually terminate, just as they do in the comics. But from the show's first episode GOTHAM set up its analogues of three comics-villains so that they would enjoy story-arcs that lasted the length of the entire series. These three were Catwoman (a fourteen-year-old street thief who befriends Bruce), Riddler (an eccentric medical examiner who eventually blossoms into a psychopath), and Penguin (a junior mobster who eventually becomes one of the crime bosses of Gotham).

Now, I've usually said that any time a given episode of a serial crosses over two distinct icons, either unbonded or semi-bonded, that counts as a crossover, even when both are regular members of the main hero's "rogue's gallery." However, much of that logic was based on the idea of the crossover being what I've called "dynamic," something that the regular reader does not expect to see on a regular basis. 

A "static" crossover generates a different aesthetic. That's why I went into laborious detail about this type of crossover in INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE STATURE. In AVENGERS #16, three characters who had only been subordinate icons in other features-- Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch-- were transformed into superordinate icons, possessed of stature rather than charisma. But after that first change of status, the membership of the three new inductees becomes something that the reader does expect to see on a regular basis. So as far as those three icons are concerned, only the one issue in which their status changes is a crossover-story.

A loosely similar change in status takes place in the transition of Penguin, Riddler, and Catwoman from the comics-pages to GOTHAM. Within the sphere of Batman serial comics, not counting any narratives focused upon the villains as main characters, the trio are all subordinate icons. However, upon transitioning to the GOTHAM serial, they all become members of that show's cast of regular subordinate icons. None of them have stature, but they do have greater charisma than any of the shorter-term villain-adapations, like Hugo Strange and Firefly. But-- to pursue the same aesthetic I put forth with respect to the Avengers, only the first episode of GOTHAM sustains a crossover between those three characters, simply because they all have agency within the story, though none of them literally meet one another in that first episode.

Now, other episodes can be crossovers when they bring any of these characters into proximate contact with other adapted villains from the comics. A second-season arc introduces GOTHAM's version of The Firefly. The TV character has almost nothing to do with the template provided by the comics, not least in that the TV version is female. I would tend to say that Firefly just being in the same story as Penguin and Riddler is not much of a crossover, if it is one at all, specifically because the latter two have been "regularized." 

Yet in the same arc Female Firefly is befriended by Young Catwoman, and the two pull off a robbery together. And at least the specific episodes showing that interaction carry the "dynamic crossover" vibe. 

All this to say that at least the three premiere villains of GOTHAM don't automatically cross over with one another, or with other villains, unless there's a narrative effort to transition past the bond tying the three of them into high-charisma members of the subordinate ensemble.

ADDENDUM: I neglected to add "The Court of Owls," whose presence is only implied in the first episode, but who are later identified as the killers of the Waynes. They, like Penguin, Catwoman, and Riddler, are also "crossovers" only for the first episode, albeit by implication only.

THE READING RHEUM: THE ALICE BOOKS (1865/1871)

 

What do you suppose is the use of a child without meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning-- and a child's more important than a joke, I hope.-- The Red Queen, THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS.

Though both the Red and White Queens talk a great deal of nonsense, there's actually a good deal of sense in what this royal chess-piece says to Alice, even if the response is disproportionate to Alice's line, "I sure I didn't mean--" (the thing the Queen attributed to her).

Now, since Lewis Carroll was a self-appointed apostle of nonsense, "making sense" is not necessarily a good thing. The author had already expressed a dim opinion of a similar outlook in WONDERLAND, when the Duchess self-importantly informs Alice that "everything's got a moral, if only you can find it." 

Clearly Carroll means for readers to laugh at the presumption of both the Duchess and the Red Queen and to embrace the lunacy of the author's mad, mad worlds. The two ALICE books are meant to delight children (and adults) with every sort of word-play imaginable-- which is to say, telling jokes whose appeal is that they don't apparently mean anything. Though Carroll avoids taking a philosophical position in the books, since that would be too much like "sense," it seems obvious to me that he rejected the utilitarianism of his time that would say a child only has "meaning" if he or she is "moral." The ALICE books are in every way a "vacation from morals."

That does not necessarily mean, though, that Carroll's works are a "vacation from meaning." And by "meaning," I'm not talking about allusions, like the allusions to familiar nursery-rhymes or well known political figures. I'm talking about Carroll using his unique logical system to mirror mad dreams with their own internal logic, a logic drawn from common human fears and anxieties. The primary tropes I find in both books are:

(1) Frequent references to injury and death, starting in WONDERLAND with Alice speculating on what would happen after she falls off the roof of a house-- though I like better the second one, where she wonders what it would be like to he a candle-flame once it was snuffed out. LOOKING GLASS begins much the same, in that before Alice goes through the mirror, she remembers having playfully told her nurse to pretend she's a bone while Alice is a hyena eating the bone.

(2) A trope I call "omniphagia" is related to the death-and-injury trope but not identical. All children are obliged to grapple with the fact that they, as living things, must devour other living things to survive. Carroll's worlds are defined by the sense that "everybody eats everybody," and this trope extends from the cake and drink labeled "EAT ME" to the foodstuffs that come alive on the Queens' table before one can devour them. 

(3) Egotism and quarrelsomeness. Only rarely does any character tender useful advice to Alice (the Caterpillar is one exception), and that's usually because they're busy pontificating on whatever's important to them. When any of these butt-headed characters butt heads, they get into ridiculous fights, though LOOKING GLASS emphasizes such conflicts more than WONDERLAND. I tend to class all the size-changing episodes under the "egotism" trope, for when she's small, Alice has to worry about being eaten by crows or puppies, and when she's tall, she has to contend with getting her long neck stuck in the trees.

(4) Inconstant motion. In both books Alice experiences long falls that seem to take a great deal of time, and LOOKING GLASS stresses that the Red Queen must constantly keep running to stay in the same place. Though WONDERLAND includes many examples of sudden transitions, like the door in the tree that leads Alice back to the long hall, LOOKING GLASS provided a sort-of rationale for said transitions in the chessboard pattern of the domain. Not that Alice always needs to move between squares: she undergoes at least three transitions in the shop run by The Goat, a character I've yet to see appear in any adaptation.

(5) Finally, the meanings of both words and one's sense of identity are just as inconstant. Alice can't say a word without one of the Carrollian creatures inverting her words or interrogating her intent to looney effects. And when Alice can't remember the correct words to familiar poems like "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" or "Father William," she immediately begins to doubt her identity. Throughout both books, various characters forget who they are and what they intend doing. Arguably WONDERLAND emphasizes this trope more than the other book, culminating in a group of jurors who can't recall their names unless they write them down. The arbitrariness of legal systems is also one that takes refuge in the meaninglessness of jargon, as with "sentence first, evidence afterwards." Most of Carroll's logic games in both books depend on the many-sided nature of words and expressions.

Because the ALICE books depict two nonsense-realms where all the denizens are mad and no form of logic applies, I deem them both to fit Northrup Frye's category of "the irony." With respect to focal presences, I've stated before that I consider Alice to be largely a viewpoint-character, even though her own egotism and sometimes erratic grasp of logic makes her a stronger character than most similar ones. But it's the denizens of the two weird realms who form the superordinate ensemble. In WONDERLAND, the narratively important characters are the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, the Cheshire Cat (none of whom were in the 1864 draft), the Caterpillar, the Queen and King of Hearts, the White Rabbit, the Mock Turtle, and the Duchess. Others, such as the Gryphon and the various minor animals Alice encounters, form a subordinate ensemble. LOOKING GLASS is not nearly as rich in original characters, which is probably why many adaptations fold some or all of LOOKING GLASS's superordinate icons into the WONDERLAND universe-- usually Humpty Dumpty (whom Carroll did not invent), Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Red and White Queens, and (more rarely) the White Knight. The aforementioned Goat and the Gnat seem more like undistinguished spear-carrier types. However, Carroll allotted two subordinate "guest appearances" in LOOKING GLASS to the Hare and the Hatter, though both appear under pseudonyms.

All and all, though LOOKING GLASS hasn't been mined nearly as much as WONDERLAND, both deserve their status as literary classics for all ages. One documentary claimed that the ALICE books are the works most quoted after the Bible and Shakespeare, and that speaks to the author's incredible facility with the mysteries of language and logic.

TIME OUT OF ALIGNMENT

 A major aspect of my crossover-theory is that of alignment; the principle that every literary cosmos, particularly with regard to serial concepts, is dominated by one or more superordinate icons whose are the "center" of the narrative, while all subordinate icons orbit around the central icon or icons. In CROSSING GODS I gave several examples of innominate figures from mythology being "crossed over" with one another, and sometimes with newly created serial characters, the example of the latter being Atticus of "the Iron Druid Chronicles." In COSMIC ALIGNMENT PART 3 I spoke of a different form of innominate character, that of a fictionalized version of a historical personage. I asserted that no crossover took place when a narrative associated legendary characters already associated in history-- Jesse James and Cole Younger-- but that it was one if the author depicted an association between characters not known to have encountered one another, like Jesse James and Belle Starr.

Characters involved in time-travel, though, break down normative categories of alignment, and for that reason even figures I've rated as properly "legendary" don't rate as crossovers when they interact with characters who (more or less like authors) are no longer bound by restrictions of the time-space continuum. Thus, a goodie-good Billy the Kid meeting a version of Dracula? Crossover. A vampire-version of Billy the Kid, who has no real connection with the historical figure, meeting Bloodrayne? Crossover. But Billy the Kid, as portrayed by Robert Walker Jr. in the scene above, meeting one of the Time Tunnel guys? Not a crossover. And the same principle applies to works in which the time-travelers bring together assorted characters from different eras, as Billy the Kid, Napoleon and Socrates are brought together by those excellent time-dudes Bill and Ted.

The same applies to figures of myth and folklore, as when Bill and Ted take a bogus journey that brings them into contact with both the Easter Bunny and Satan, or when the Time Tunnelers meet the equally innominate figure of Merlin.

There's also a cognate figure of characters who summon up innominate characters without those icons leaving their own time-frame. In comics the hero who did this most often was Quality's Kid Eternity, who was forever enlisting characters from both myth (Nepture, Midas, Achilles) and from history (Annie Oakley, Abraham Lincoln). None of these would even be charisma-crossovers, either with one another or with Kid Eternity.

However, unlike the time travelers Kid Eternity did possess the power to plumb the vasty deeps of fiction as well-- and so, when he conjured up Sherlock Holmes or (more amusingly) Blackhawk, THOSE would count as crossovers with nominative icons.

NEAR MYTHS: CONTEST OF CHAMPIONS (1982)

I wondered if a review of this 1982 curiosity-- put together when Jim Shooter still ruled Marvel Comics with an iron editorial hand-- might be the first to show up on the Internet, at least by Google search. I didn't remember much talk about this three-issue mini-series on any of the boards I used to visit, even though it precedes the more famous mega-crossovers of 1986, Marvel's SECRET WARS and DC's CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. However, I did find one essay here, which articulated a few facts not present in the explanatory writeup furnished in issue #1 of the actual comic.

From the comic itself, I knew that writers Mark Gruenwald, Steven Grant and Bill Mantlo conceived the CONTEST storyline (with Mantlo alone credited with the dialogue). I did not know before reading the Science Fiction.com essay that the same threesome had authored a 1980 Marvel Treasury Edition which had Spider-Man fight the Hulk with the Winter Olympics as a background. For CONTEST this team brought together all, or nearly all, extant Marvel heroes for a contest that also would have been  Olympic-themed had the U.S. not withdrawn from 1980's Summer Olympics. This was at least one reason that the completed John Romita Jr. art for this planned Treasury Edition was shelved for a couple of years, until Marvel finally published it as a limited series in regular comics format-- albeit after many corrections to the art were made to bring it in line with 1982 continuity.

The most interesting thing about CONTEST from a contemporary POV is that John Romita Jr's art looks nothing like what readers expect of his work today. At this point in his career, Romita Jr.'s art didn't even look that much like that of his famous father. If only because of the need of stuffing dozens of heroes into one narrative, here he looks a lot like George Perez, particularly in this two-page crowd scene:

(Note: in the real Marvel Universe, Sub-Mariner would probably squash Ant-Man if the latter stood on his shoulder. And maybe the Werewolf, off to the far left, is relatively calm because his human half in control, though the script never says so.)

The art on average is just adequate, though it's still better than the Mike Zeck pencils on SECRET WARS-- though it's been rumored that Zeck was obliged to follow thumbnails from his scripter-and-boss Jim Shooter. I can see Shooter advocating such a project because he was aware that Marvel's strength was its shared-universe of long-underwear characters, and he may well have modeled SECRET WARS on this mini-series-- with one important difference.

In SECRET WARS, every character abducted to "Battleworld" has something to do, no matter how banal the actions might be. Here, nearly all the 1982 heroes are abducted to partake in a game played between two cosmic beings-- but of those dozens of heroes, only twenty-four are active participants. The two game-players, the Grandmaster and a mysterious entity revealed to be the Marvel incarnation of Death, decide that they will play four games with Earth superheroes with their pawns, pitting three of Grandmaster's choices against three of Death's in a treasure-hunting schtick. All of the other characters apparently just chill out in some bunker until the four games are done, and eventually everyone's allowed to go home.

The motive for the game is that the Grandmaster wants Death to revive his brother The Collector. Mantlo et al try to give this boring idea a twist at the end, but clearly the only real attraction of the story is the crossover aspect. And because Mantlo et al were modeling this selective conflict on the real-world Olympics, they created a bunch of newbie non-American heroes-- Australian, French, etc.-- who get heavily featured in the match-ups. I interpret this as the authors' awareness that the New X-Men's success was partly attributable to its multi-national makeup. However, to the best of my knowledge none of the newbies went on to great fame, at best showing up as guest-stars here and there-- so the writers didn't quite manage to tap into Marvel's new mythos of Superheroes, International Style. 

Though the story is routine and the characters deliver long expository lectures at the drop of a hat, Mantlo does keep the characterizations relatively consistent and even pens a few funny bits here and there. And for my purposes, CONTEST provides an apt illustration of my theory about the  difference between superordinate and subordinate ensembles. In other mega-crossovers that I've analyzed, I have to show how particular "starring" characters stand out from "supporting" characters. But in CONTEST, it's clear that only twenty-four characters comprise the serial's superordinate ensemble, while everyone else, no matter how winsomely Romita Jr draws them, is relegated to the subordinate bunker.

NEAR MYTHS: JSA THE GOLDEN AGE (1993-94)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

GOLDEN AGE, written by James Robinson and penciled by Paul Smith, is an Elseworlds take on some of the many latter-day interpretations of the Justice Society heroes, crossbred with an assortment of characters who had nothing to do with the Society or, sometimes, even with DC Comics (such as Captain Triumph from Quality Comics, whose company's heroes were belatedly acquired by the Superman people). 

I reread GOLDEN for the first time in many years, in part because I was so pleased with the second season of STARGIRL, on which teleseries Robinson serves as producer and occasional writer. STARGIRL is much like GOLDEN in being a virtual love letter to the Justice Society, directed to all other such fans. Yet STARGIRL has a crucial advantage in that it's all about legacy characters who inherit the mantles of the WWII crusaders. In contrast, GOLDEN is set in the America of the postwar 1940s, which in the real world would herald the cancellation of all but a smattering of DC's costumed heroes. Since the Golden Age characters were not revived, but were instead temporarily replaced by the legacy figures of the Silver Age, Robinson was obliged to follow the established game-plan followed by such earlier writers as Roy Thomas and Paul Levitz, who set up the notion that in the DC-cosmos the various luminaries simply retired for about ten years until they got back into action-- occasionally in the Silver Age, and then with greater frequency in the Bronze.

In addition, GOLDEN could not help but take considerable influence from the fan-culture of the eighties and nineties, when comics-makers began playing to the adult readers with "grim and gritty" versions of established heroes, as per the usual suspects of WATCHMEN and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. Robinson's version of the Justice Society is not as boldly transgressive as either of these, as the peoject includes little in the way of sexuality and was only slightly more violent than the average issue of NEW TEEN TITANS. The most interesting thing about GOLDEN is that for all of the characters involved, they become divorced from the trauma-free lives they led as costumed crusaders, where the most emotional conflict came down to not being able to marry their lovers due to fighting crime. In the opening scenes of GOLDEN, Robinson is explicit about the way the conclusion of the war signals "the end of innocence."

I don't find Robinson's concept of innocence very persuasive: for the most part, it comes down to all the main characters having really bad days in one way or another.  Many of the plot-points were established by earlier writers: Hourman is now addicted to the drug that makes him super-strong, while Johnny Quick and Liberty Belle, two heroes who became romantic in an 1980s continuity, divorce. The death of innocence is also signaled on the social level: the atom bomb has changed the nature of national conflict, and competition from Russia makes average Americans eager to condemn anyone suspected of ties to Communism. (It's possibly a mark of Robinson's extreme liberalism that he brings up both of these topics but never remembers that Russia became a major competitor in part through the act of stealing the American plans for The Bomb.) It's not precisely that Robinson ever sings any sad songs for the USSR, but it is interesting that the main villain turns out to be the embodiment of allegedly-Right-leaning fascism: a recrudescent Nazi.

GOLDEN's basic plot-pattern probably owes something to WATCHMEN, insofar as various heroes pursue separate life-courses, all of which, in one way or another, end up dovetailing. The obscure DC character "Mister America" is the uniting factor: whereas many other heroes were unable to go to war for complicated reasons, this super-athlete was able to fight the Nazis behind enemy lines. Under his regular name "Tex Thompson," the former mystery-man returns to the U.S., rises to great political power, and begins a new project to create an invincible superhero as a bulwark against the threat of Russia. Since anti-Communism led to bad things like the Red Scare, no one will be surprised that Thompson turns out to be a traitor in patriot's clothing-- as well as a recrudescent super-villain.

The main plot is never much more than an excuse for the various scenes of regret and recriminations, which, to be sure, are kept to a minimum in comparison to the predominant Marvel soap-opera emotive style. The most persuasive plot-thread involves Liberty Belle's re-marriage to another hero, Tarantula, who just happens to resemble her former hubby Johnny Quick. Others are badly underdeveloped. The Golden Age Robotman becomes a stone killer for no explicit reason, and the aforementioned Captain Triumph only appears in his civilian identity, rejecting (with questionable judgment) his superhero nature and losing his life in combat with the evildoers. A subplot involves an amnesiac hero, Manhunter, who eventually fills in a lot of the blank spaces for the heroes (and the readers) about what really happened to Thompson overseas and the nature of his pet superman. Paul Smith, never one of the best delineators of superhero action, is out of his depth with the numerous battle-scenes, but he does a better than average job keeping the faces and their emotional reactions distinct from one another.

GOLDEN is at best diverting, but I certainly wouldn't rank it as one of the better homages to the Golden Age of American superheroes-. Indeed, some of Robinson's issues of STARMAN come much closer to that mark. To wrap up, I'll note that, despite the many characters in the four-issue tale, GOLDEN is yet another example, like CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS, where the dramatic personae divide into a "very significant" superordinate ensemble and a "not so important" subordinate ensemble. 

SUPERORDINATE-- Johnny Quick, Liberty Belle, Manhunter, Green Lantern, the Atom, Hourman, Starman

SUBORDINATE-- Tarantula, Bob Daley aka "Fatman," Hawkman, Johnny Thunder and his Thunderbolt, Captain Triumph, Miss America (another Quality character BTW), and the Tigress. Three characters with heroic pasts-- Tex Thompson, Dan the Dyna-Mite and Robotman-- are essentially retconned into villainous presences. There are also a huge number of cameos in the final section, including the 1950s stalwart Captain Comet and a large sampling of more Quality protagonists, such as Plastic Man, Doll Man, the Jester, Phantom Lady and the Red Bee.

CRISIS OF INFINITE ENSEMBLES

 

Earlier I broke down the superordinate ensemble of DC THE NEW FRONTIER, separating off some characters from the others in the narrative on the basis of which ones had what I’m currently calling “stature,” which I may or may not further define as stemming from a sort of “motive force.” I said that I’d contemplated doing the same for CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS.

The problems of CRISIS are more formidable than those of NEW FRONTIER. In executing the 12-issue series, Marv Wolfman and George Perez were in effect providing a “send-off” for the often inconsistent “continuity” of DC Comics that had grown, Topsy-like, since roughly 1938. Thus, partly as an appeal to hardcore fans, they included countless DC characters who had enjoyed at least a brief series, though in the case of long cancelled heroes Wolfman and Perez limited themselves to those with whom their fans were somewhat familiar through revivals and retcons. (In other words, obscurities like Nadir the Magician and the Gay Ghost got no exposure here.) The creators also introduced a few new heroes who then went on to appear in post-Crisis features, though none of these proved especially popular.

Basically, Wolfman and Perez chose two methods for assembling their hundred-plus protagonists into action against the evil Anti-Monitor. Either a small group of heroes went on a mission of some sort, or a larger group participated in some big fight-scene. These tended to use characters purely for quick shots, making them functionally indistinguishable from the roles of “spear carriers” in theater. Of all those in CRISIS, only two fight-scenes focused on events that would carry over into extrinsic stories: the killing of the Dove, which would affect all future depictions of his brother/partner the Hawk, and Doctor Fate’s interaction with Amethyst Princess of Gemworld, which would give rise to a rewriting of Amethyst’s backstory, as I chronicled here.

Most if not all of the heroes who went on missions together, though, had sufficient stature in the narrative to be deemed part of a superordinate ensemble. Thus, in addition to the four characters mentioned above, this would include:

The Earth-One Superman, the Earth-Two Superman, Batman, the Earth-One Wonder Woman, the Ted Kord Blue Beetle, Firestorm, Geo-Force, the Jay Garrick Flash, the Barry Allen Flash, Kid Flash, Supergirl, the second Doctor Light, the Red Tornado, the second Wildcat, Captain Marvel, Power Girl, Uncle Sam, The Spectre, Captain Atom, Dawnstar, the second Firebrand, Mon-El, Jade, The Ray, J’onn J’onzz, the John Stewart Green Lantern, the Guy Gardner Green Lantern, the Blue Devil, Zatara, Madame Xanadu, the Thunderbolt, the Phantom Stranger, Doctor Occult, Deadman, Fury, and possibly the three characters created especially for CRISIS: Harbinger, Lady Quark, and Alexei Luthor.

A few villains took part in missions as well, such as Doctor Polaris. But since there was no substantive “team-up” between any of the DC heroes and villains for any length of time, I would not deem any of the villains to possess ensemble-status. As in the features where the criminals usually appeared, they exist to oppose the ensemble, not to enhance it.

CALLING ALL ENSEMBLES

 

I’ve established here and elsewhere the way that a narrative’s centricity can be either concentrated upon one starring character or distributed across an ensemble of characters. And in this essay I showed how a particular narrative with a huge cast of characters, DC THE NEW FRONTIER, could center upon a more limited ensemble of characters who possessed stature superior to all of the others. I’m contemplating a more involved definition of stature with respect to centricity, one that might define stature as a sort of “motive force,” something that impels the narrative, but I haven’t concluded those meditations.

Because of my recent reading of the manga NISEKOI, which I’ll discuss separately, I’ve noted that it’s not impossible for a narrative, particularly a serial one, to possess two ensembles, a superordinate one and a subordinate one. The subordinate ensemble does not simply consist of all the supporting characters within the narrative. In DC THE NEW FRONTIER all the characters who lack centric status are simply support-characters. A story with a subordinate ensemble, however, has a collection of characters who function in the same way as the characters in a superordinate ensemble, except that the former simply lack the stature of one or more starring characters.

I’ve expended a fair amount of attention to the interlinked teleserials ANGEL and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. According to my lights, BUFFY is always focused on the titular character, and every else in the story exists to support her. However, her “inner circle” of allies, informally called “the Scooby Gang,” function to have strong interactions with Buffy and to generate plot-threads centered temporarily upon them. Originally the subordinate ensemble includes only Xander, Willow and Giles, while later seasons introduce a variety of other featured characters to the ensemble, including a former adversary, Spike. However, some of the Scooby Gang’s allies—Angel, Riley, Tara—never reach the same stature. Angel is transformed into a foe and then leaves the show to star in his own series, Riley only lasts one season as a temporary boyfriend for Buffy, and Tara is killed in order to give her lover Willow a new emotional arc.

Angel starts out his own series as the sole star, with just two characters, Cordelia (a transplant from the BUFFY show) and Doyle forming a subordinate ensemble. But within the first season Doyle is slain and Cordelia inherits his precognitive talent, which makes her character more consequential. In addition, another refugee from BUFFY, Wesley, joins the team. The stories shift to stress the importance of the team rather than just Angel, and from then on Angel and all of his form a superordinate ensemble. Though other characters join the team  the ANGEL series never generates a corresponding subordinate ensemble but only handfuls of disparate support-characters.

Some serials may generate huge subordinate ensembles in which none of the characters ever quite eclipse a single central figure, as I’ve observed in both DRAGONBALL and BLEACH. A number of serials in the romantic comedy genre center upon a male and female lead, such as both URUSEI YATSURA and RANMA 1/2. Both of these Takahashi serials generate populous casts who function as subordinate ensembles, and URUSEI in particular includes a number of stories in which the romantic duo of Lum and Ataru is sidelined by the activities of ensemble-characters like Mendou or Ryunosuke, though none of these characters ever assume greater stature thereby. NISEKOI follows this basic paradigm in that the serial’s main emphasis is a romantic couple, but the activities of the subordinate ensemble are more centered upon either enhancing or undermining the romance of the two main characters.