CURIOSITIES #33: "THAT SURE WAS A BONER I PULLED WITH LANA" (SUPERBOY #13, 1950)

 Much funnier, IMO, than the better known "Joker's boners" meme.

I found this item reviewing the earliest appearances of Lana Lang in the Golden Age SUPERBOY. In her first outing, she's all but a xerox dupe of Lois Lane, and is overtly compared to the lady reporter. In this, her third appearance in the title, she monologues what I assume was the established credo of all the nosy women in the life of the Kryptonian hero: they think that if they can learn his secret ID, they can insinuate themselves into his private life and romance him. However, later in the same story she also makes clear that she wants to boast about her cleverness to all of her friends. Just like a woman!

Of course Superboy punishes the young girl for her pride and snoopiness. But in one sense Clark's more backward than Lana, for the super-Boy Scout doesn't seem the least complimented that this hot young redhead wants to romance him. All he can think about is how she may endanger his status as a superhero-- and I'm not sure if his indifference to romance makes him more mature or more childish. (I know which one DC writers meant to emphasize, but it would be an interesting bit of trivia to figure out the first time Superboy ever, like, noticed the unique appeal of pretty girls.)

ADDENDUM: Though in 1950 Whitney Ellsworth edited both SUPERBOY and the anthology ADVENTURE COMICS, where the Boy of Steel was the lead feature, he didn't bring Lana into the AC continuity until issue #161, dated February 1951. This quasi-introduction went further on portraying Lana as a demi-Lois, to the extent that both Lana and Clark get temporary summer jobs at a Smallville newspaper. Though this Lana still suspects Clark of being Superboy, she's less Superboy-crazy than scoop-crazy. I imagine the editors dropped the idea of "Lana Girl Reporter" pretty quickly.

And surprise, surprise-- I wasn't really expecting to find stirrings of romance between Clark and Lana (albeit with miscolored blonde hair) as early as November 1951. But the ADVENTURE COMICS for that month allows readers the first peek at Clark Kent's fancies turning lightly to-- well, maybe just puppy love.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD" (1927/1941)

 

For convenience's sake I read the above Belmont paperback edition and then read through Klinger's annotations on the book. I noted that most of said notes talked about all of the antiquarian accuracy that HPL poured into this short novel-- which meant very little to me, given that I think all that detail hurt the story.

For me as a reader, WARD inverts all the strengths of CTHULHU's gradual detective-style revelation of a great mystery. WARD uses much the same structure and approach, but the story broadcasts the Big Reveal on the first page, talking about a magic ritual that can bring back "any dead Ancestour." The titular Ward, born in 1902, becomes enthralled with the legend of his sorcery-using, 18th-century ancestor Joseph Curwen, and accidentally revives Curwen's spirit, which then usurps Ward's body. Ward's doctor intrepidly discovers the truth and destroys the body Curwen inhabits.

HPL wasn't entirely without ability to create at least broad characterization, but he utterly fails to make Ward (a probable self-insert) even as interesting as Henry Wilcox from CTHULHU. Doctor Willett is no better, and Ward's unnamed parents are only brought in to serve very limited plot functions. For me WARD has only two distinctions, aside from inspiring loose film adaptations like 1963's HAUNTED PALACE:

(1) WARD is the first text to mention the Old One Yog-Sothoth, though only as a name within a mystic chant.

(2) There's a brief mention of a "Sign of Koth," which receives a little more expansion in DREAM QUEST. Robert E Howard used Koth as a place-name in the Conanverse, and in the 1930s tales of the comic-book hero "Doctor Occult," writer Jerry Siegel used the name for the titular hero's villain.

I guess I should also add that HPL may have been having some fun by portraying his self-insert as unwise for having invested so much time and energy into his antiquarian pursuits, since they bring about his doom. At the same the story may have been primarily a method by which HPL could share his passion for New England history with readers, though WARD wasn't published until after HPL's passing.

 

THE READING RHEUM: "THE SILVER KEY" (1926/1929)

In my review of CALL OF CTHULHU, I included no biographical data on what was going on with HPL in the year he wrote this major "Mythos story." But that story, this story, and THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH were all either begun or completed in 1926, the year that HPL ended his attempts to find gainful employment in other cities and returned to his beloved home town of Providence. This may not have been good for his personal life, as the move eventually led to his divorce from his wife. But the move was very good for horror fiction, because HPL wrote the majority of his major works while remaining in his cherished boyhood home.

KEY, in contrast to THE UNNAMEABLE, is an unquestionable follow-up to 1920's STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER, not only because the character's full name is used, but because the unnamed narrator of the story explicitly mentions the events of STATEMENT. KEY covers some of the same philosophical ground as UNNAMEABLE, and makes Carter's dilemma far more relatable. The narrator tells how Carter once possessed a Dunsanian ability to imagine far-flung realms of fantasy, but he loses this ability as he allows his mind to be polluted by the doctrines of realism. It's hard to say what sort of philosophy Carter ends up with, according to the narrator, but it leads him to seek unknown horrors in STATEMENT.

However, thanks to surviving his horror-hunting, Carter is able to acquire a special silver key "handed down from his ancestors," at least one of whom sounds like a magician. With the key in his possession, Carter goes driving near "the lonely rustic homestead of his people," which, incidentally, lies near the fictional Arkham. Carter never precisely opens a door with the key, but just having it on his person allows him to transition back to the time of his childhood, where he essentially merges with his younger self. The narrator concludes by saying that he will try to block the probate of Carter's possessions, since he's not really dead. And possibly Carter returns to mundane life so that he can experience the more involved visions of DREAM QUEST-- though this work too has a sort of "there's no place like home" message.

As much as I like the first half of KEY, I found that the second half did not resolve any of the philosophical questions raised, and I'm not entirely sure why Leslie Klinger included it in his collection, except for the Arkham association. Klinger does not include the sequel HPL co-wrote with E Hoffman Price, which I may examine in a future post.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE CALL OF CTHULHU" (1926/1928)

 

In my review of the short HPL story "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," I wrote:

Many commentators have talked about HPL's abhorrence for non-white races, and sometimes even for white ethnicities that the author considered decadent. I don't deny that he sported these racist views to make himself feel superior. Yet it's interesting that the first example of a wretched ethnicity in HPL's fiction-cosmos is lowborn "white trash," and the author treats Slater just as condescendingly as he would ever treat any other ethnic figure... In my opinion HPL was always separated from most of humanity thanks to his superb intellectual attainments, meaning that he related no better to most whites than he did to non-whites. Yet because HPL knew that he was of the same common clay as the most ignoble human being, and thus his fiction is filled with examples of his fear of degenerating into something inferior. (In Jungian terms Slater would be "the shadow" who incarnated that dominating fear of bodily devolution.)

I confess that I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of HPL, even regarding the specific topic of his theories on race. CALL OF CTHULHU, though, far more than the above short story, brings to mind the old quarrel between two theories about the concept of racial evolution (putting aside the question as to how applicable the term "race" is to the human species):

Polygenism is a theory of human origins which posits the view that the human races are of different origins (polygenesis). This view is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.

Was HPL a foursquare advocate of one position or the other? Since polygenism was on its last legs in the early 20th century, it seems unlikely that he could have placed total faith in that theory, even if (as one online authority argued) he'd been strongly influenced by the work of Ernst Haeckel. But what I find fascinating about CTHULHU is that it promotes a sort of "psychic monogenism."

CTHULHU proceeds like a detective story, as viewpoint character Thurston labors to collate the voluminous notes left behind by his late uncle Professor Angell, who perished under dubious circumstances. What Thurston eventually learns is that there exists a widespread cult devoted to a collection of archaic cosmic entities, one of whom, Cthulhu, is said to lie buried far beneath the ocean waves. Angell's notes reveal the widespread activities of cultists, many of whom are described as "mongrel" or "degenerate." Yet at the same time Thurston remarks that the mythos worshiped by the cultists "disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it."

Structurally, this justification is identical to the one HPL uses in "Wall:" that, because cosmic visions appear in the dreams of an uneducated specimen of "white trash," said visions must have some reality outside the brain of the individual experiencing the visions. In the case of the CTHULHU narrative, the visions commonly shared by Eskimo "diabolists" and Louisiana voodoo-worshipers stem from "thought transference," which is the method by which Cthulhu and his fellow Old Ones communicate with one another and with their human servants. But CTHULHU goes a good deal farther, for Angell also discovers a particular sculptor affected by Cthulhu's call-- an educated white fellow, one presumes, since HPL does not say otherwise. This artist, ignorant of the cult or its object of worship, was spontaneously inspired to carve the same image of Cthulhu venerated by the "half-castes and pariahs." Further, during the same period that this one sculptor created his Cthulhu-image, Angell's surveys prove that numerous "artists and poets," as well as individuals who may just be psychically sensitive, experienced their own visions, which either result in strange artworks on in suicide. 

So what do the two groups have in common? All HPL says is that other (presumably white) New Englanders surveyed by Angell-- "average people in society and business"-- had no strong responses during the period when the hypothetical "call of Cthulhu" goes forth. HPL's chauvinism meant that he probably would have not credited "degenerate" peoples as possessing similar social hierarchies between workaday types and visionaries. So my best guess is that he thought that the "mongrels" and the Caucasian visionaries all shared a common psychic receptivity, which I choose to term "psychic monogeny," since no other species save humans are affected by Cthulhu's Call. I qualify this view by stating that at no time in CTHULHU does HPL promote a widespread theory of human psychic abilities, such as we get from a later "demi-follower" of the author, like Colin Wilson.

Though HPL sneered at the "puerile symbolism" of Sigmund Freud in "Wall," the aim of the cultists seems roughly parallel to Freud's idea of the unrestricted "Id." One cultist in Angell's records claims that when the Old Ones rule Earth again, they will "teach [their followers] to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the Earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom." The corresponding theory would be that Caucasians functioned as the "Ego," the "reality principle" that keeps the Id's impulses in check. But since there are no records of what Freud texts HPL read, this is just an interesting side-note.

CTHULHU shows HPL expending far more effort in chronicling all the details of the Call's influence upon humanity before he gets to the Big Apocalyptic Moment. As in the short story DAGON, the monster and his forbidding island only remain on the surface long enough to suggest the terrors that will come when Cthulhu and his kindred enjoy full reign; then they disappear, leaving narrator Thurston to realize that "we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity." Why does Cthulhu Island re-appear so briefly, which would imply that the stellar configurations are not quite right for the Old Ones' rebirth? And if it's not time, why does Cthulhu send forth his call? HPL does not say, so one can only guess.

It's implicit that in most if not all stories, HPL wanted to believe his own kindred were at the top of the cultural and racial matrix-- also eclipsing, I should emphasize, all those Caucasians with whom the author didn't identify. Yet had HPL been a true follower of racial polygeny-- a specter that sometimes appears in certain works of his contemporary R.E. Howard-- then it would be easy to dissociate the activities of "people of color" as being foreign to the nature of "the white race." The horror is made far greater by the intimation that all the grotesque people who embrace chaos share the same base nature as the most sophisticated spawn of humankind.

CRISES AND CONTINGENCIES

 Though I don't follow any regular serials from "the Big Two," the TPB market makes it quite evident that both companies remain as heavily invested in "multi-feature crossovers" in 2024 as they were in 1986, when such rival serials as SECRET WARS and CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS duked it out for sales supremacy. In fact, because "multi-feature crossovers" is an unwieldy mouthful, I'm considering a new term,"clusterfubars." The whole purpose of most crisis-events since 1986 has been to fuck up the status quo beyond all recognition, even if the original status quo later reasserts itself or is replaced by some other manageable state of affairs.

I have not written a great deal about clusterfubars here, though the most involved essay is probably 2008's EARTH SHATTERING CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE. I argued that the commercial comics-medium's penchant for "earth shattering changes" was nothing new. In fact, though I didn't explore the topic in a more systematic manner, I quoted anthropologist Lee Drummond on the subject of crises in fiction, be they in myth or in popular fiction:

...the figures of myth do not live solely by virtue of the operation of a collection of sentences woven into a 'plot'... The critical thing about the doings of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, R2D2, C3PO, and the rest is the elemental level of crisis-- identity crisis-- that lies right at or just beneath the surface of their actions: Will the Force or its Dark Side triumph? Will R2D2 survive? Will Luke discover the awful truth of his paternity?

Before examining the applicability of "crises" to myth and fiction generally, though, I would be remiss not to define what would be the opposite of "crisis narratives" (especially after one of my recent essays  faulted Joseph Campbell for not providing counter-examples to a proposed term).

I duly looked up antonyms for the word "crisis," and was surprised to find "contingency" listed as a SYNONYM for the word. Every connotation in which I've heard the two words suggests the opposite. A crisis is some event that few if any participants can foresee or avoid. A contingency is some event with which forethought can cope, at least up to a point. The application of each term may also depend on a given subject's span of knowledge. For the majority of persons around the globe, the appearance of the Covid virus was a crisis. For Anthony Fauci, who coordinated the use of gain-of-function research with the Chinese lab in Wuhan, the virus' appearance would have been a contingency, something he could anticipate happening if things went south.

Drummond is broadly correct that a lot of fiction of all genres and mediums depends on "crisis narratives." The theatergoer who views OEDIPUS REX learns nothing about the day-to-day life of King Oedipus or his family. Everything in that play and its sequels is defined by an unforeseeable crisis. And comedies are no different from tragedies in a structural sense. The AMPHITRYON of Plautus centers upon the merry mix-up that ensues when the title character returns from the wars, and must be prevented from finding out that the supreme god Jupiter is schtupping Amphitryon's wife, at least until Jupiter successfully impregnates the woman with Hercules.

But what would be a "contingency narrative," which is to say, a narrative whose conflict does not hinge upon some larger-than-life crisis? There are some archaic examples of such narratives in theater and in folklore, but it's correct to stress that contingency narratives really took off with the rise of naturalistic literature, particularly in 18th century Europe. I deem Daniel Defoe's two best-known works, ROBINSON CRUSOE and MOLL FLANDERS, to be novels built around a constant flow of contingencies relating to what the main characters must do to survive and/or prosper.

And since I'm primarily concerned with the medium of comic books, where do contingency narratives appear in the history of comics? Even most of the celebrated comics-stories, as agreed-upon by elitist critics, depend largely on types of crisis, even when they may be predicated on such low-level "crises" as mistaken identity (which is a not infrequent "gotcha" in a lot of one-shot horror stories). Teen comedies like ARCHIE are probably the least "crisis-like," being usually predicated on simple formula situations that the thoughtless protagonist fails to foresee (Archie makes a date with two girls on the same night; they find out and beat him up or the like.) Most such stories are one-shots, too. Some continuing comic strips, such as GASOLINE ALLEY, presented an ensemble of characters having low-wattage adventures without any dire consequences. The first superhero to regularly exploit both narrative forms was the Lee-Ditko SPIDER-MAN, who would support himself and his ailing aunt with money (contingency) made from photographing his own heroic actions (crisis), quelling the rampages of Doctor Octopus or The Lizard.

At some point in the eighties, many superhero fans-- those that dominantly embraced the superhero genre above all other genres-- clamored for low-wattage incidents in the lives of the characters they liked. These pleas brought forth various "day in the life" contingency narratives. Arguably, in subsequent decades, this fannish preference increased the frequency of other stories in which slow-paced drama took the place of fast-paced adventure. However, the same decade, as noted above, also cemented the new business model of the clusterfubar. The Big Two sought to monetize crises by having them affect numerous features at the same time, on the theory that interested readers would purchase titles they didn't normally buy in order to keep apprised of all segments of the extended crisis narrative. I have no idea as to how well this practice works as an overall sales strategy, but it's been in place for about forty years, so someone must be making money from it.

Single features like the venerable SPIDER-MAN appear to be far more guided by crisis narratives overall, rather than by a balance of both narratives. Features with large character-ensembles-- X-MEN, TEEN TITANS-- are even more awash in constant fervid crisis narratives, so that what used to be called "soap opera" is more like "disaster opera." 

More observations on this theme to come later, possibly.

WEIRDIES AND WORLDIES

 I introduced the term "weirdies" in this essay as a description for a subset of characters in the comics-medium, and I justified the term in part with a reference to a label DC Comics had used in the late 1990s: "the Weirdoverse." But the proximate source of the term was a chapter in Brian Aldiss' 1973 history of science fiction, BILLION YEAR SPREE (revised in 1986 as TRILLION YEAR SPREE). 

Aldiss' "spree," while very readable, was typical of most science fiction histories. The author had no general theory of all metaphenomenal forms of literature, and in that respect he probably knew his audience well, as being almost exclusively interested only in the genre of science fiction. Most science-fiction histories are blithely uninterested even in SF's two best-known rivals for metaphenomenal popularity: "horror" and "fantasy," and Aldiss's SPREE conformed to this paradigm for the most part. But though I have not read any edition of SPREE for over twenty years, I remember well one chapter in which Aldiss more or less accounted for the less reputable (to SF fans) forms of the metaphenomenal, and that chapter was entitled, "ERB and the Weirdies."

"ERB," of course, was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who, in addition to creating a certain ape-man, was renowned for a host of otherworldly adventures that most purists would not deem "science fiction." I'm not certain, but the portmanteau "science fantasy" may have been devised, if not strictly for Burroughs, then for everything that didn't satisfy the supposed rigor of mainstream science fiction. As for "The Weirdies," I believe this category took in all the horror and fantasy authors who were popular during the heyday of American pulps, with special reference to the "Big Three" of WEIRD TALES: H.P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Aldiss's analysis of all four authors struck me as generally condescending, even when he admitted having enjoyed this or that particular "weirdie" work.

I interpret the proponents of mainstream science fiction as having a superiority complex toward horror and fantasy via my interlinked concepts of freedom and restraint. With much the same logic used by elitists who boost naturalistic canonical literature above all other forms, fans of mainstream SF consider their favored genre to possess "cognitive restraint," the propensity to take boundless fantasies and make them reflect "real" issues in society or culture. Horror and fantasy are not incapable of such restraint, but the overall perception of both genres aligns with my concept of "affective freedom." The grotesques of Lovecraft and the arabesques of Smith are seen as stemming mostly from an appeal to affects/emotions, and to purists, that gives those genres less intellectual rigor.

Now, as a result of reviewing the JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK story-line, I began thinking more about what qualities made certain comics-characters seem like "weirdies." The Wiki article alleges that most of the Weirdoverse characters were aligned with the "mystery/occult" genres. This may be true of three of the four: NIGHT FORCE, SCARE TACTICS, and THE BOOK OF FATE (i.e, one of various titles about the sorcerer-superhero Doctor Fate). Yet, the fourth title under this rubric was CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, and even a quick look at online copies of this 1997 series indicated that it was not steeped in the tropes of horror or fantasy.

I don't think "weirdies" are purely allied to the supernatural in itself, and the 2018 incarnation of JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK bears this out, in that two of the members are productions of "mad science" like Detective Chimp and the Man-Bat. By the same token, those characters with opposing connotations-- what I now term "worldies"-- can also include any number of characters with supernatural associations, like Thor and Wonder Woman. (The Amazon Princess gets her occult mojo ramped up for her membership in the 2018 JLD.)

"Worldies," as I conceive them, may possess all manner of supernormal powers, but they seem to be tied to a commonplace representation of "the world," in much the same way that prose SF stories take place in logically consistent worlds with one or more "wonders" in them. "Weirdies," though, exist BETWEEN the commonplace world and another, twilight realm wherein nothing is logical or consistent. I relate Aldiss' use of "weirdies" to the origins of the word "weird," taken from an Old English word meaning "fate," which connotes an illogical order superimposed over mundane existence. I may devote some future posts on OUROBOROS DREAMS to some of the more interesting forms that the "weirdies" take in the comics medium.

MYTHCOMICS: [THE LORDS OF ORDER] JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK (2018)

The story-line I've designated as THE LORDS OF ORDER appears within two TPB collections, respectively subtitled "The Last Age of Magic" and "The Lords of Order." I've chosen to designate all pertinent material under the umbrella-title LORDS OF ORDER because said characters constitute the primary menace. Not all of the material collected in these two compilations is relevant to the main plot, which appears principally in issues #1-3, 5-6, and 8-12. Cutoff points for the narrative are problematic, and without reading the entire 29 issues of this JLD incarnation-- the second to focus on a "Justice League of Weirdies"-- I would not be surprised to learn that one or more raconteurs kept some of the subplots going to the bitter end. But issue #12 at least supplies some conditional closure, supplied dominantly (though perhaps not exclusively) by writer James Tynion IV and artists Alvaro Bueno and Daniel Sampere.

I'll explain my highly complex term of "weirdies" in a subsequent post. I have read a few of the issues of the 2011 JUSTICE LEAGUE DARK series and I found them unremarkable. Tynion, however, did show a greater facility for exploring aspects of DC's "weirdoverse" (a term DC itself advanced for a quartet of inter-related "supernatural" titles during the late nineties).

Taking place following the so-called "DC Rebirth," ORDER builds upon a relatively-new rethinking of the DC multiverse, to the effect that it's mirrored by a "dark multiverse," possibly inspired by the so-called "Dark Web of the Internet." I believe that Tynion is the first to claim that all of the magic in Regular Multiverse has been stolen, a la the Fire of Prometheus, from the Dark Multiverse, but he may have had inspirations from previous works. 

The DC Universe, like its One True Business Rival, is and always has been something of a never-ending palimpsest. For instance, the character of Nabu, perceptor of the hero Doctor Fate, appears with little backstory in the character's 1940s origin tale. But not until the 1970s is Nabu said to be a member of "the Lords of Order," the opposites of their eternal foes "the Lords of Chaos," both of whom were probably borrowed from the early 1960s prose stories of Elric by author Michael Moorcock. In general Nabu and his fellow Lords were depicted as positive forces in comparison to their antagonists. However, even as early as a 1987 AMETHYST min-series, the Order-Lords sometimes came off cold and unfeeling,

Tynion posits that in the earliest phases of DC prehistory, the Lords were responsible for codifying all the rules and rituals surrounding the magic called up from the Dark Multiverse. But now the denizens of that domain are coming to reclaim their stolen powers, though the Dark Multiversals are something of a side-threat in ORDER. The Lords have decided to cut their losses and eradicate magic from the non-dark multiverse, and that forces Justice League Dark to get involved.

As with Geoff Jones' cosmic restructuring from a couple of years earlier, "the plot is not the thing" here. Tynion uses some of the same team-members seen in the earlier series, particularly Swamp Thing and Zatanna, but other members are de-emphasized, such as the popular mage John Constantine. Wonder Woman, a heroine with a foot in both magical and scientific worlds, becomes the leader of the 2018 group. The new lineup includes BATMAN's monstrous foe Man-Bat and Detective Chimp, a DC character from the late Golden Age who was reworked into something of a supernatural sleuth, as well as being tied to marginal sword-and-sorcery crusader Nightmaster. Tynion throws out a lot of subplots for the various characters, but none of them are extraordinarily consequential for the Lords of Order narrative. And only one Lord of Chaos, the LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES villain Mordru, becomes tangentially involved as well.

The most visionary aspect of ORDER is the way Tynion depicts the passing of the old order. The denizens of DC-Earth did not beseech the Lords of Order to give them magic, but once many of those denizens built their lives around the existence of things mystical, the Lords seem a bit like Promethean Indian Givers. To his credit, Tynion does not simply dodge the problem he's created with a wave of his hand. Magic does get eradicated, but the heroes are able to bring it back by what one might call "returning to the factory default," which means that all the old rules have to be rewritten. The ORDER narrative concludes while this reboot is still in progress, but it's a more effective conclusion to yet another multiversal reshuffling.

Bueno and Sampere provide better than average design elements that put across the mood of the eldritch, particularly in the image of the Wonder Tree (though this creation was the result of a yet earlier Tynion narrative).