NEAR-MYTHS: WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE (2016-2021)

 

I have a dim recollection that when Grant Morrison first began publicizing his WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE project-- and I was not able to locate the item I'm remembering, so this is at best a paraphrase-- that he considered it something of a challenge to devise a Wonder Woman concept modeled on the original Marston/Peter series of the Golden Age. Morrison stated that he intended at the very least to address the bondage element in some way, which element has been largely elided from many if not all post-Crisis WW renditions. Whatever I read sent up a bit of a red flag in my mind. I've liked a lot of Morrison's work, particularly many of his takes on DC characters like Superman (in ALL-STAR SUPERMAN) and Batman (various arcs from roughly 2008 to 2013). However, I wondered if he was simply undertaking the WW project because she was part of the "DC Trinity," not because he had a sincere interest in Marston's concepts.

Well, the three graphic albums of WW EARTH ONE-- part of a DC imprint that sounds like little more a refurbished ELSEWORLDS-- are at least more focused than Morrison's scattershot ACTION COMICS run. Still, I never felt like Morrison was allowing his EARTH ONE take on WW to soar into the heights of erratic creativity for which the writer is best known.

Several departures from the Marston canon are entirely justified. The Marston series was launched a few months prior to the Dec 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, but there was no way that a contemporary WW series, even a limited one, would begin in a WWII setting. However, one of the base concepts of the Marston series was that the heroine undertook her mission to man's world not just to fight Nazis, but to reform warlike males and bring them under the loving authority of the Amazon goddesses Athena and Aphrodite. I don't imagine that Marston, as much as he may have believed in his gynocentric philosophy, had any notion of showing the rise of a dominion of pagan goddesses in 20th-century America. However, Morrison-- who honors Marston as a representative of "alternative lifestyles-- decides that his Amazing Amazon will not just attempt such a conversion but accomplish it within a span from the 21st century to a time three thousand years in the future.     

To emphasize this manifest Amazon destiny, Morrison dials back the eternally-frustrated hieros gamos Marston arranged for his heroine and her beloved American Steve Trevor. In order to tweak expectations, Morrison makes his Trevor a Black man. However, Morrison isn't interested enough in his Trevor to make him into even a two-dimensional character. Morrison gives the readers mixed signals regarding the Diana-Steve relationship. It's as if he and artist Yanick Paquette were leery of imparting too much importance to the Amazon Princess's first potential heterosexual encounter. It's clear all the Amazons of Paradise Island have had frequent lesbian relationships, including both Diana and her mother Hippolyta-- even though no erotic encounters as such are shown-- so it's arguable that he might as well have dispensed with Trevor altogether.

Surprisingly, Morrison gets far more mileage with his version of perpetual comedy-relief Etta Candy, here renamed "Beth" and given the persona of a randy, plus-sized cheerleader for Wonder Woman's feminist agenda. Even the famed "woo woo" schtick works, possibly thanks to Morrison emulating various plus-sized celebrities. As a counter to all of the countless stories in which Diana's mother, Amazon queen Hippolyta, was simply a timely aid to her heroic daughter, Morrison forges a more acrimonious relationship between the two. But given that Hippolyta is destined to be disposed of in the second book, the effort feels somewhat doomed. Morrison also dispenses with WW's "clay statue" origins, but to no great effect  

But just as Marston couldn't really elaborate villains who had a well-conceived reason to oppose the Amazon's "loving authority," Morrison also struggles to embody believable masculine villains. Though a prelude establishes that in ancient times Hippolyta did encounter the genuine son-of-Zeus Hercules, the status of the Greek gods in the EARTH ONE domain is dubious. Does Ares, usually the opponent of loving Aphrodite in the comics, really exist, or is he just metaphorically true in the head of main villain Maxwell Lord? Possibly Morrison wanted any converts to Diana's philosophy to embrace her POV without any assurance of deific confirmation.

 Morrison's version of Doctor Psycho is not any better. In Marston, Psycho is an ugly dwarf who seeks to control women with his mental weapons, rather than with male muscle. Morrison's Psycho is a handsome charmer who comes close to seducing Wonder Woman with skillful mind games, but he like Trevor lacks depth. 

Similarly, Morrison devotes no background to his only female villain, the only holdover from WWII-- the Nazi Paula Von Gunther. Hippolyta allows Paula to join the Amazons after mental conditioning, much as Marston did, but this time, mercy for Paula has dire consequences. All of the villains, like most of the support-cast, are a little too transparent in their status as plot-functions.

Paquette's art is nice-looking but far too poised to possess any dynamism, even in the fight-scenes. Rough and blocky though H.G. Peter's art was, there were times it got across the cruel basics of the sadist/masochist tangos between various characters. In the hands of Morrison and Paquette, all that transgressive stuff just seems a little on the vanilla side.st

I'm not sorry I read WONDER WOMAN EARTH ONE, but it's clearly not really Grant Morrison's jam. I'd be totally okay with Morrison steering clear of Matters Amazonian for the future.        

MYTHCOMICS: "THE LAST DAY OF THE AMAZONS" (WONDER WOMAN #149, 1964)

 

In my overview of Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN comics of the 1960s, I asserted that the writer hardly ever made much use of the mythical elements present in the mythos bequeathed to DC by creator William Marston. In contrast to Kanigher's contemporaneous METAL MEN, wherein the author sometimes managed to imbed his juvenile formulas with the substance of epistemological myths, Kanigher wrote as if he thought his readers too simple-minded to care about consistency or elucidation of fantasy-concepts. However, at the end of the essay I added that I found one story that achieved mythopoeic concrescence. True, it's flawed. A lot of time is wasted with a side-plot showing Wonder Woman in her Diana Prince ID, where she has to rescue a rocket crew from disaster without revealing her identity to Steve Trevor. However, one of the corniest elements found in many WW stories of the time actually works to the advantage of LAST DAY OF THE AMAZONS. 

I noted in the overview that I was no fan of Kanigher's "Wonder Woman family." a sterile emulation of the Weisinger "Superman family." Back in the Golden Age Wonder Woman was always an adult. Her only family member was Hippolyta, the immortal queen of Paradise Isle, who created her daughter Diana from clay with the help of the Amazons' patron deities Athena and Aphrodite. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, though, Kanigher added to Hippolyta's brood two time-tossed incarnations of Diana, one the teenaged Wonder Girl, the other the toddler Wonder Tot. By 1964, the time of DAY, Hippolyta has evidently grown contemptuous of the perils of time-paradoxes, for all three versions of Diana co-exist on Paradise Isle and have adventures together. They begin DAY with all four Amazons asleep, though all the later scenes are in daytime, so apparently the catastrophe waits until dawn to strike. A massive earthquake strikes the island, and the Amazons have to form a "human chain"-- a favorite Kanigher trope-- to keep Wonder Tot from falling into a chasm.

            

The Amazonian quartet goes outside. Their two patron deities materialize and tell them that Paradise Island is falling apart due to Hippolyta's transgression against Athena's law, that no man may be allowed to tread upon a sanctuary meant only for the immortal Amazons. The presence of a man in Greek armor, "The Prince," is at the root of the trouble, but since Hippolyta insists on explaining how things came to this pass, even juvenile readers would have figured out that DAY is a tale beginning "in media res," which gives Kanigher the chance to start things off with a bang before settling in for a big explanation.

Hippolyta briefly mentions that her unnamed Prince was her consort, if not husband, back in the days before she was granted immortality. However, he was lost at sea and presumed dead. However, because Kanigher also wants to acquaint his readers with the lives of Hippolyta's daughters, the exegesis is delayed so that the reader can see a lot of incidents in the lives of the three Wonders. Eleven pages go by before Kanigher tips his hand. In contrast to all the other stories in which Hippolyta sends her children off to have heady adventures, this time she's haunted by the memory of her lost love. In a nice bit of irony, Wonder Tot swears to stay with her lonely old mother, but then in a short time the child ventures forth to have a one-page exploit with her wacky buddy Mister Genie. 

While Hippolyta's lost prince was never mentioned before this story or afterward, at this time the amazon queen feels her lovelorn state exacerbated by the fact that all of her daughters have interesting, vital lives. So to anneal her sorrow, Hippolyta creates a stone statue of her beloved. But as she goes to sleep-- presumably the night immediately before the earthquake-- she makes the mistake of praising only the sculpting skill lent her by Athena for giving her a semblance of her lost love. By doing this, Hippolyta emulates the act by which she brought her child Diana to life from clay, though without any intention of making the stone come to life.

According to Kanigher's cosmos, though, Aphrodite was responsible for imbuing the clay statue of Diana with life. The love-goddess is affronted that her worshipper Hippolyta would credit Athena with anything concerning love. There's some justice in this. Athena, the virgin war-goddess, is the image on which all of the Amazons have modeled their (presumably celibate) lives. They seem to evoke Aphrodite not with respect to forging romantic alliances-- although both Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl are pursued by attentive males-- but with respect to invoking Aphrodite in a vague spirit of beneficence, one that Marston tended to call "lovingkindness." This arrangement seems to have been okay with Aphrodite until Hippolyta credits Athena with anything pertaining to the exigencies of romantic love. This is probably the only time in Kanigher's career that he portrays the Greek gods of the WONDER WOMAN cosmos as being as fractious and petty as they often are in traditional stories.

    

A massive fire-creature sticks his head out of a crevasse, and wonder of wonders, Kanigher actually explains that this is "the God of Earthquakes," whom Athena presumably summoned to devastate Paradise Island. All of the Wonder Family members try to sacrifice themselves to save the other (barely seen) Amazons, and once again they form a human chain to support one another. Aphrodite is not impressed by acts of heroism; she only wants to see a sacrifice rooted in romantic love. The animated statue-- which for all we know might incorporate the long-dead spirit of the Prince-- then gives the love-goddess the sacrifice she wants. Once his intrusive male presence has vanished from the island, Athena is free to cancel the execution, and the goddess leave.

Given that almost every bit of characterization in Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN is annoyingly flat, the conclusion proves eyebrow-raising. The three daughters realize that their mother has lost her only love a second time, and they try to soothe Hippolyta by telling her that they'll devote more time to her. But Hippolyta's last words are those of an aging (and not immortal) parent ceding power to the younger generation, giving them permission to live their own lives, no matter how it isolates her. Perhaps Kanigher allowed himself this isolated moment of sensitivity because mortal men, as much as mortal women, feel time's winged chariot hurrying near. And even an immortal queen, devoted to the battle-ethos of Athena, must satisfy all forms of erotic romance, even in the form of memories, to the exclusive claims of the Goddess of Love.                

AMAZON ATROPHY

 Yesterday I decided to do a deep dive into a section of the shallow pool known as "Robert Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN." I didn't want to try reading everything that he might have written since he (almost exclusively) took over writing the DC feature following the passing of William Marston in 1947. But since I think Kanigher was a guy who had real talent, I wanted to get as much info as possible about why he didn't seem to show any of that creative ability during the decade of the sixties. He was doing some good scripts in that decade for BATMAN, METAL MEN, and the war books, but as far as WONDER WOMAN was concerned, a Kanigher script from the 1960s reads just like anything he did in the 1950s. I don't fault him so much for being dull in the 1950s, because the majority of the stories from DC Comics were dull then, as the company sought to keep its squeaky-clean image amid industry controversies. But why couldn't he seem to craft a decent story for the Amazing Amazon?

In this essay I suggested one reason:  

"[Kanigher's] use of myth-ideas was both derivative and desultory, giving one the impression that he could barely summon any enthusiasm for the series, even when dealing with characters he himself created, or at least substantially re-worked, like the idea of “Wonder Woman as a girl.” Another reason may have related to his insider knowledge that DC wanted to keep control of the franchise in those days, before the company bought the character from the Marston estate outright. His knowing that the company wanted to keep their hold on the character, and that they didn't seem to have any concept of what to do with the Amazon except to emulate Marston (but without as much bondage), probably contributed to Kanigher's sense that he could do anything he wanted, as long as he kept turning in scripts on time.   

I started collecting superhero comics after the debut of the Batman teleseries, so Kanigher's WONDER WOMAN was my first experience with the heroine. I remember thinking at some point that I didn't initially like the Andru-Esposito art or the romantic aspect of the Amazon's ongoing romance with Steve Trevor. Was any of that just the usual antipathy of a pre-teen toward matters of sex? Possibly, but if so, the phase didn't last, as I welcomed the change to "Mod Wonder Woman" with the new editorship of Mike Sekowsky, and even bought those issues off the stands new-- and there was a fair amount of romance appeared in those stories.

I didn't confine my study only to issues in the 1960s but rather extended it from issue 105 (April 1959) through issue #176 (May-June 1968). I did so because #105 introduced the aforementioned "Wonder Woman as a girl." Since these stories usually took place before the juvenile Wonder Woman became a superhero, a lot of them took place in the fantasy-domain of Paradise Island and various vague fantasy-domains. But here, as described, Kanigher just tossed out his concepts willy-nilly, with no attempt to ground them in any knowledge-system, as one could find in titles of the time like FLASH and SUPERMAN. Thus even though Wonder Girl might have been introduced to give the title "teen appeal," both her character and her adventures were superficial. As time went on, Kanigher devised ways for all three members of the Wonder Family -- Wonder Girl, her adult self, and Wonder Tot, a baby-wonder-- to appear in the same adventures. But this merely made Kanigher's attempt to imitate the "Superman Family" of the more popular SUPERMAN titles more forced and therefore pathetic. In both sets of stories, the authors were attempting to get readers invested in the recursive nature of the SUPERMAN and WONDER WOMAN worlds; worlds in which repetition of motifs was intended to be reassuring. But though there were a lot of dull 1950s SUPERMAN stories too, there were also tales that sustained a sense of juvenile charm, particularly in the late 1950s, when editor Mort Weisinger became somewhat more venturesome in his choice of story-subjects.    

The Marston feminist message was given no more than lip service during the sixties decade, even in the brief period when Kanigher and his artists emulated the general look of Golden Age WONDER WOMAN. However, there was an aspect of the Superman books that both Marston and Kanigher imitated: the hero's use of incredible powers to perform unique feats. Kanigher's concoctions of bizarre tasks were no better or worse than those of Marston, but generally speaking Marston usually provided some rationale for the menaces WW faced. In the above excerpt from WW #154, Kanigher wastes no energy figuring out why a giant flaming humanoid happens to be dwelling right under Paradise Island. Is the Boiling Man a member of a subterranean race? An ancient Greek Titan confined to the underworld by the Olympians? It's astounding that Kanigher worked in comic books for so long but had so little insight into what his audience wanted. Yes, the flashy super-feats might be the primary concern of kid-audiences. But Marston sold well in part because he challenged his audience, while Kanigher seemed to have had a low opinion of kids' capacities.

Yet there was one type of super-feat Kanigher avoided in the six years of my survey: the hand-to-hand fight-scene. Marston's Amazon was a jock; she liked not only entering athletic contests but challenging opponents, particularly conceited males, to fights. Kanigher didn't show any reluctance to show his Golden Age creation Black Canary duking it out with male crooks, so he wasn't personally repelled by "tough females." Even his female robot Tina of the contemporaneous METAL MEN was a spitfire. So it's possible that the low incidence of fight-scenes in the five-plus years from #105 to #155 (July 1965) was a dictate from DC editorial not to make the heroine seem too masculine, since that had been a major complaint about the character from the fanatic Frederic Wertham, the man whose fulminations made the 1955 Comics Code necessary for the comics-industry. However, evidently by 1965 sales on WW had declined enough for Kanigher to attempt impressing readers with his Marston-imitation, beginning in issue #156. Sales probably did not appreciably improve, but this new direction resulted in much more physical violence between the Amazon and her opponents for the remaining three-or-so years of Kanigher's tenure. Here are a few examples from that period:

    

This development certainly allowed artists Andru and Esposito to make the art more dynamic. Another possible factor is that even though the Marston-emulation took place before the debut of BATMAN in January 1966, by 1965 many DC superheroes began getting more "punchy," possibly in recognition that Marvel Comics was cutting into DC's action with the hyperkinetic fight-scenes of Kirby, Ditko and others. But apparently, even once the Marston-schtick ran its course in about eight issues, Wonder Woman's sales did not improve despite more fight-scenes either. This resulted in the aforementioned phase of "Mod Wonder Woman," which seemed to do a little better for the first year before its sales also declined.

Of all the stories I studied, only one merited the designation of a myth-comic, and I'll devote a separate essay to Kanigher's only exceptional WW story of the 1960s.   

MYTHCOMICS: "THE (SECOND) ORIGIN OF THE CHEETAH" (1944)

 'density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience."'  -- GOOD WILL QUANTUMS 

Thanks to my acquisition of IDW's collection of the complete run of the 1944-45 WONDER WOMAN newspaper strip, I found a good example of a prominent author-- i.e., William Moulton Marston  -- taking a second shot at an early story and infusing it with greater density. 

Though Marston put a lot of (shall we say) mature content into the Golden Age WONDER WOMAN comic book, often the creator of the Amazon heroine tended to write down to his audience in terms of plotting. This was true of most raconteurs of the era: they assumed kids who bought comics just wanted as many marvels to gawk at as possible. But Marston took a different tack with the newspaper strip. He knew there was at least a chance of reaching an adult audience-- a chance eliminated by the strip's cancellation-- so in many cases he dialed down the sheer quantity of wild inventions. And in the case of his rewrite of the 1943 comics-story "Wonder Woman and the Cheetah," he upgraded a story with only fair mythicity into an exemplar of good myth. Unfortunately, there are almost no free scans of the newspaper strip available online. Thus I'm flung back to my practices during this blog's early days: depending on textual description with minimal illustration, partly taken from the 1943 story.

In the original CB story, Marston starts out by having Wonder Woman show off her prowess at a stateside benefit. However, she doesn't show up on time, and the chairman of the relief fund tries to placate the anxious audience by introducing debutante Priscilla Rich. This only exacerbates the audience's fervor to see the Amazon, and there's just one panel devoted to Priscilla being slightly miffed that the audience ignores her. Then Diana Prince shows up on stage, demonstrates her inability to move a heavy piano, and then cedes the stage to her powerful alter ego.

But in the CS version, Marston takes a more layered approach to introducing Priscilla. In a sequence that took up two weeks of daily strips, Priscilla shows up at the office of General Darnell, barges past his secretary Diana, and asks the officer to put her in contact with Wonder Woman, to ask her to appear at the benefit. This establishes a slight animosity between Priscilla and the heroine, but Wonder Woman quickly shows up and agrees to appear. However, on the night of the benefit, Diana Prince goes out dancing with Steve Trevor and just happens to forget her commitment. Thus, not only is Priscilla personally embarrassed by the absence of the special guest, Marston subjects the upper-class woman to more humiliation. She tries to placate the audience by performing "The Death of the Swan" with her balletic skills, but she earns only catcalls. Then the heroine shows up, curiously in both her guises, and satisfies the audience's desires.

 In the CB story, Wonder Woman proposes a second stunt-- apparently one she arranged with the relief effort in advance-- which involves her being chained and submerged in a tank. CB Priscilla, for no reason, decides to bind WW with her own magic lasso, making the heroine's escape more difficult. But in the CS story, Priscilla does have a reason to resent WW for her superior popularity. 

In both versions, Wonder Woman escapes despite the added difficulty, and Priscilla pretends she didn't mean to endanger the Amazon's life. In the CB version, Priscilla is merely miffed because the heroine goes to dinner with the benefit chairman, though there's no real indication that Priscilla cares about him in a romantic sense. Out of nowhere, the rich girl simply looks into a mirror in her room at home and her "evil self" manifests in the mirror. There's no particular reason for Imaginary Evil Priscilla to wear a cheetah-costume, except that there happens to be a cheetah-rug in the room, and Evil Priscilla tells Normal Priscilla to make it into a costume.

The CS version is much more psychologically compelling. After WW breaks free, she lets Priscilla off the hook, but Steve Trevor and a half-dozen other people accuse the girl of attempted murder. This sort of attention Priscilla did not want, and she flees, thinking, "Everybody adores Wonder Woman and hates me... I feel so low, so inferior!" She hides in a theatrical prop room, and there she encounters the dummy of a woman in a cheetah-costume. In this arrangement, Marston juxtaposed Priscilla's desire to escape her inferior feelings with her discovery of the dummy, and thus a more believable symbol-association is made, whereon she again imagines herself talking to her evil self, convincing her to become a costumed criminal.

In the 1943 story, Cheetah steals the benefit money and tries to improbably frame both the chairman and Wonder Woman for the crime. Since Priscilla doesn't really care about the chairman, the next five pages of the cops arresting the accused are nothing but filler. However, the 1944 continuity has Cheetah set fire to the theater-- which arguably involves her taking vengeance upon the audience that rejected her. In the former tale, Cheetah lures the heroine into a death-trap, while in the latter, the villainess captures the Holiday Girls, friends of her nemesis, which amounts to a more personal attack. 

In the CB, Marston then devotes two separate sections to Cheetah finding new ways to assail Wonder Woman. One involves using a beauty salon and a mind-reader to learn military secrets, which leads WW into a tangential battle with Japanese troops in the Pacific. In the final section, WW gets involved with training female soldiers on Paradise Island, and Cheetah infiltrates the program. There are several moments in which the villainess continues to express the hatred of all Amazons for their athletic superiority, but this twist means that Cheetah is no longer specifically focused on her star-spangled nemesis. She steals the magic girdle of Aphrodite, which empowers her to battle WW on her super-strong level, but she's defeated and consigned to an Amazon reformatory. The first section of the 1943 tale garners at least fair mythicity, but I'd probably rate both of these sections as poor, being just a collection of random incidents.

As for the remainder of the CS story, Cheetah imprisons all the Holliday Girls at her mansion and subjects them to various humiliations (with copious bondage of course). Cheetah also lures WW to the mansion, and despite various upsets, finally binds WW with her own lasso and forces her to make an Amazon "shocking-machine." This device (admittedly the most ludicrous item in the story) brings out the "subconscious personalities" of the Holliday Girls in a manner supposedly analogous to the way Cheetah was born, though in the case of the Hollidays, they actually become anthropomorphic animals. (Etta Candy naturally becomes a pig-girl.) WW finally defeats Cheetah and restores the girls to normal. However, when Priscilla is arraigned at trial, WW's personal lie-detector, the lasso, can't prove that the rich woman's the Cheetah, because in the Priscilla ID she no longer remembers being a super-villain. And so ends the career of Comic-Strip Cheetah, as Priscilla is sent to an asylum for examination. Obviously, it was Comic Book Cheetah who became an enduring opponent for the Amazon Princess, but the "Second Origin" provides an interesting example of a revision being more symbolically complex than the original, which is generally not the norm.  

      

                  

 
                                                            

NEAR-MYTHS: BATGIRL YEAR ONE (2003)

The Barbara Gordon Batgirl, despite being one of the more iconically recognizable superheroines since her creation in 1966, has not fostered any concrescent myths, at least in her own assorted features. I wouldn't even have re-examined her 2003 opus, BATMAN YEAR ONE (penciled by Marcos Martin and co-written by Chuck Dixon and Scott Beatty) if I didn't intend to cross-compare the comics story with a motion-comics video production.                                                           

Naturally, Beatty and Dixon rewrite a lot of things from the original sixties iteration. This Barbara still ventures into her costumed identity without intending to become a costumed crusader full-time, but she's also made previous attempts to become a law enforcer both in the FBI and the Gotham PD, only to be frustrated by height requirements. This Barbara is extremely petite, which may have come about as a rationalization of her hero-name, since it's still politically problematic to call a twenty-something woman a "girl."         

   

She still has her first bout of crimefighting when she encountered the Bat-villain Killer Moth, though the writers can't resist the Alan Moore impulse: to make the naive creations of kid-focused comics look ironic from a "mature" viewpoint. Further, this time the current Batman and Robin (still Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson) don't immediately welcome the newly christened "Batgirl" to their ranks. To the extent that YEAR ONE has a master trope to tie together the serial's episodic structure, it would be the trope of "new hero must pass baptism of fire to win respect."                                                                                                

                                                                                                                     

   

                                                                            
Naturally, the revised origin of the Barbara Gordon Batgirl must also incorporate aspects of her development in the 1970s, when she and Dick Grayson Robin begin a tentative romantic arc. These scenes are cute and certainly better written than the heroine's running battles with Killer Moth, the Moth's new partner Firefly, and various hoods. There are also a handful of heroic guest-stars who just serve to eat up space. The only time YEAR ONE generates sparks occurs at the story, when Batgirl comes up with a novel way to take down the villains' helicopter.                                                                                         

At the story's opening Dixon and Beatty make a reference to the Greek myth of Cassandra, but this myth-tidbit isn't developed into anything. The authors whip the reference out again at the very end, but it's less effective than just the general "prediction" of Barbara's fate as a costumed crusader by itself.                                                                                                          

MYTHCOMICS: "MARY MARVEL GOES OVER THE RAINBOW" (WOW COMICS #14, 1943)

This 1943 tale, written by Otto Binder and probably drawn by his brother Jack, is "metaphysical" in the sense of taking discriminate phenomena and attributing abstract aspects to them. I analyzed a story with a similar trope-- that of "light versus darkness"-- in THE PERIL OF PAINGLOSS. Here Mary Marvel encounters a war between "color" and "blackness," the latter to be understand in the visual sense, as the absence of all color perceptions.

In her civilian ID of Mary Batson, the heroine reads a newspaper story in which a reputable scientist claims that the legend of the "Pot of Gold at the Rainbow's End" is real. Mary, being patriotic, wonders if this treasure could be used for America's war effort. At the same time, a crook named Porky Snork talks his gang into seeking out the same golden horde. Meanwhile, Mary finds out that the person claiming to have seen the pot of gold is not reputable science-guy Tinkerman but his self-important son Creighton.

When Porky and his thugs show up, Mary changes into her heroic identity, but can't manage to stop the malcontents from stealing the balloon Creighton meant to use to track down the rainbow's end. Mary flies after the balloon, towing Creighton behind her, perhaps less for his guidance than for his potential for comedy relief. When both protagonists and antagonists arrive at rainbow's end, they learn that the rainbow actually creates the pot of gold, as all the colors of the spectrum "drip" off the rainbow and coalesce into the fabled treasure.

Mary contends with the petty thieves, and the balloon drifts to the top of the rainbow, where all see a colorful city dwelling. Mary rather rashly punctures the balloon, and the crooks fall from the basket. However, the greedy men are rescued by a "Batplane" piloted by Mister Night, a mysterious figure in black. Mary clouts the new villain, but he escapes with Porky's gang, so Mary and Creighton decide to investigate the city. It turns out to be inhabited by "sky spirits" whose purpose is to dispense color to the mortal world.

King Color informs Mary that Mister Night was exiled from Rainbow City, and that he's probably planning some fell scheme against his former brethren. Sure enough, Night has apparently been waiting around for some plug-uglies to fall into his lap, since his first gambit is to send the thugs after Jack Frost.

(Jack Frost, incidentally, comes into the matter because there was a tradition in which the frosty fellow was portrayed as being the entity who "painted" plants with autumnal colors.)

Mary thwarts the thugs but Mister Night rescues them, while revealing that his real purpose was to kidnap "Aurora, Spirit of Dawn." The dark villain's true plot is to eliminate all colors from the mortal world, so that he can become Earth's ruler. Mary flies to "Night Land" to rescue Aurora, without whom dawn can't transpire on Earth. However, for all her myriad powers, Mary can't see in absolute darkness. She changes to her human self so that the magic lightning will illuminate the landscape. The same light allows Night to see and capture the intruder. However, because the story's running out of space, the fiend doesn't take the time to either clobber or gag Mortal Mary. She easily "shazams" her way back to her super-powered ID and slugs Night, though he escapes into the darkness of his domain. 

With Aurora returned to her celestial duties, all that's left is the wrapup, as Porky's gang once again tries to acquire the pot of gold (with the use of a toboggan, yet), only to be captured by Mary. She also returns Creighton Tinkerman to his home, though one can wonder how much approbation he received for the discovery of Rainbow City, whether Mary donated the pot of gold to the war effort or not. I haven't found evidence that Mister Night ever returned, though Binder helpfully equates the shadowy evildoer with real-life world-beaters like "Hitler and his henchmen."

The inventiveness of Otto Binder's story is underscored by the writer's clear avoidance of the standard association of "pots of gold" with "leprechauns." How this association came to pass has received some online speculation, and I rather like (without necessarily advocating) the idea that rainbows became associated with wealth because at times heavy rainfall might uncover buried gold. Of course that's probably too reductive by half, and the real correlation is probably all sorts of supernatural spirits have been tied to underground stores of wealth, whether of natural or man-made provenance. Binder makes a strong association between "wealth" and the pleasures humans feel at the variety of natural colors, and extrapolates those pleasures into a race of color-bestowing spirits. Of course, the title suggests that Binder was aware of the use of the phrase "Over the Rainbow" in a famous song for the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ. There aren't any strong similarities between this story and the OZ film, though of course the latter also foregrounds the experience of prismatic beauty. It's interesting, though, that he includes Jack Frost as one of these dispensers of color-beauty, because when Frost paints plants with autumnal hues, that presages the "temporary death" of such plants worldwide, when Winter, the time of darkness, holds sway. I suppose Binder could have had Mary capture Mister Night like she would any common troublemaker. But it's fitting that he did not do so, since the darkness symbolizing Death is inextricably intertwined with the forces that bring forth light and Life.   

THE FIRST TIME I SAW ALFRED (DIE)

 

I don't remember where I recently heard someone bring up DC's possible reasons for letting editor Julie Schwartz kill off the faithful butler Alfred in 1964, but it was probably in a podcast like this one. The cited podcast reports, but does not credence, the idea that Schwartz was in any way worried about the alleged problems of having three men live alone in Wayne Manor, which had been raised by Wertham in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT ten years before. Allegedly, the story goes, Schwartz immediately brought in Dick Grayson's Aunt Harriet to occupy the mansion, so that her feminine presence would allay suspicions about any hanky-panky between Bruce and Dick.

This unfounded theory intrigued me enough to blow an hour or so scanning an online pirate site for all the Schwartz issues of BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS after the introduction of Aunt Harriet and up until the revival of Alfred, and guess what?

Auntie's hardly in most of the stories. If anything, she was usually just seen serving dinner for a few panels, if that, and she had far less interaction with Bruce and Dick than the character in the BATMAN teleseries did. The comic-book Aunt Harriet didn't know the secret identities of the millionaire and his ward, but if Schwartz had any idea of having Harriet, through intention or accident, endanger the heroes' clandestine activities, he didn't follow through. There's exactly one story wherein Harriet suspects that her charges might be the Dynamic Duo. But when she's proven wrong through the usual shenanigans, the matter is never raised again. After Alfred's brought back to life and returns to Wayne Manor, there's a moment in which Harriet plans to leave, but Bruce and Dick talk her into staying. They needn't have bothered, for though Schwartz remained editor for about fifteen more years, even he didn't bother insisting on her presence, and she just faded into the woodwork.

In addition, Schwartz barely took advantage of an easy way to counter homosexual suspicions: by giving the two heroes heterosexual relationships. Fans will never know if this was the reason for the introduction of various female presences during the Batman-run of editor Jack Schiff-- pesky photographer Vicky Vale in 1948, Batwoman in 1956, and Bat-Girl in 1961. Yet the way Batwoman and Bat-Girl were paired off with Batman and Robin respectively gave some credence to the "Placate Wertham Theory," as did the long exile of Catwoman from DC comics due to Wertham's complaints about her. When Schwartz took over both Bat-books in 1964, he dumped all the rotating Schiff characters-- but that didn't mean he couldn't have come up with one or two token girlfriends to take the place of the Schiff Sirens. 

Schwartz's intention to focus on the "detective" angle of Batman's persona resulted in a lot of stories with almost zero female presence. Occasionally Batman and Robin would help out some poor pitiful damsel whose boyfriend was in peril somewhere, but really-- if there had been homosexual readers who wanted to fantasize a "wish dream" of Batman and Robin together, it would have been easy to ignore Aunt Harriet's nearly nugatory presence to facilitate such fantasies.

There was one early, almost half-hearted attempt to make a romance possible, but for Bruce Wayne rather than Batman. In BATMAN #165 (1964), Batman meets a serious young policewoman, Patricia Powell, who discloses to the masked hero that she has a thing for Bruce Wayne, even though she's only seen the handsome millionaire from afar. This short tale, and a follow-up in the next issue, tease the reader with what may happen when Patricia finally gets the chance to meet her idol face to face. But Schwartz evidently lost interest in the idea, for the second story doesn't even resolve its "what happens when they meet" cliffhanger. 

Not until after 1966, when Alfred was back and Harriet was slowly on her way out, did the two Bat-features begin re-emphasizing female characters. Some became established members of the mythos, like Poison Ivy, the second Batgirl, and a revived Catwoman. Others only appeared only once or twice, like Alfred's niece Daphne Pennyworth, for whom Robin briefly had a thing, but were still more memorable than the Schwartz "damsels" from the first couple of years. (Incidentally, the backstory of Niece Daphne was possibly recycled into that of the Batgirl in the 1997 BATMAN AND ROBIN.) The slow increase in memorable Bat-females after 1966 was probably the reaction of Schwartz, or one of his superiors, to the success of the teleseries that year, that it was a good idea to include a few more charismatic females, as the TV show did. 

So my laborious answer to the "Aunt Harriet" question is that if Schwartz had some hope that her presence would inspire good detective stories, that hope was dashed, because most of the scripts just shunted the old lady off to the side. Schwartz may not have had any strong reason for getting rid of Alfred, who in the past had proved quite useful to Bat-writers seeking to craft detective-stories. But rather than having some arcane fear about "three men living together," Schwartz probably just wanted another means of divorcing his regime from that of his predecessor. The fact that Alfred didn't just get written out like Vicky, Batwoman and Bat-Girl was probably a sop to those fans who would have complained had the faithful butler simply vanished.  

MYTHCOMICS: "SINS OF THE FLESH" (SPIDER-WOMAN #18, 1979)

As I said in the previous essay, Jessica/Spider-Woman breaks up with her boyfriend Jerry in issue #16. Issue #17 in part concerns the "Dark Angel" trying to get back into the dating scene by attending a disco. She meets a guy named Eric and allows him to drive her home, though he ends up parking with her on a lonely knoll. The issue ends with Eric hiding his face from Jessica as his very flesh starts to dissolve. At the beginning of "Sins," he bolts from the car into a nearby forest. Jessica, concerned that her pheromones might be having a bad influence on an innocent man, follows. When she overtakes him, he seems totally fine again. He leans for a friendly kiss, and...

 "I can't hold it anymore," indeed! I'm rather surprised that in the early 2000s, when snarky comics fans entertained themselves trying to find panels that put pop-fiction characters in compromising positions, none of them apparently came across this oddball gem.

Of course, my interest isn't mere snark, but the ongoing psychology underlying the War Between Men and Women. Instead of acting like an imperturbable superhero, Jessica is quite naturally freaked out by having "worms of flesh" crawl over her after coming off the face of a melting man. She copes somewhat through her ability to zap away the flesh-threads with her venom-powers.

In her Spider-Woman guise, the heroine tails Eric to another disco, but fails to see him leave his car, considering the likelihood that the strange man may be "able to mold his face like putty and change his appearance." She stakes out the disco and sees a different-looking man drive away in the car, accompanied by a pickup. Spider-Woman surveils the house where the suspect takes the young woman, but when nothing happens for a bit, the heroine flies away, wondering if she could have hallucinated the episode. But she gets no surcease of trepidation when she goes home, haunted by the experience of "having flesh crawl on me that is not my own."

To no reader's surprise, the young woman Spider-Woman watched the previous night is a corpse in the morning. Angry at her own negligence, the Dark Angel begins hitting the discos again, trying to look for anyone who behaves analogously to the mysterious Eric. She finally meets a likely candidate, but instead of taking the man to her own domicile, she conducts the fellow to the unoccupied house of her former landlord Mrs. Dolly. Jessica leaves the man alone, steals out of the house and changes into her super-identity. As she confronts the man whom the captions call "The Waxman," he has a flashback as to how he mutated to his melting-man form. Then he hits the heroine with a gob of loose flesh and flees upstairs.

The final two pages, while not a "fight" in the usual Marvel sense, plays merry hob with the nature of identity. Waxman alters his appearance to that of Jessica herself, poleaxing her long enough to unleash a flesh-trap. But this time Spider-Woman zaps the killer and his flesh-worms with her venom, and all of his "sinful flesh" apparently collapses from his denuded skeleton.

The ambiguous ending allowed a later writer to revive the Waxman further down the road, but thankfully Gruenwald "lets the dead lie," so to speak. Despite the presence of a superhero, "Sins of the Flesh" is a better example of "body horror" than most comparable stories from later comics-generations.

ADDENDUM: Carmine Infantino only penciled one more issue of SPIDER-WOMAN after #18, while Gruenwald finished up his run the issue after that. I will probably reread the other thirty issues, but I doubt there will be much worth commenting on, since Wolfman and Gruenwald had provided the groundwork for the Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman mythos. As noted earlier, Roger Stern would weave that mythos and several other loose ends into an overarching continuity. But in the SPIDER-WOMAN title, I don't believe there were any major developments, particularly eliminating the "weirdie" vibe seen in the first twenty issues. Michael Fleischer wrote some rather pedestrian tales, Chris Claremont rendered various strong formula-stories (most often with artist Steve Leialoha), and Ann Nocenti finished up the last four issues with a controversial narrative in which Spider-Woman was erased from Marvel history. Naturally, this was soon reversed, for the essence of Marvel Comics was the potential interfusion of every element with every other element. It's my loose impression, though, that even though the SPIDER-WOMAN series was not a great sales success, few if any later iterations have eclipsed its accomplishments.