Rising From the Ashes: An Examination of the Role of Mythology in Shaping Comics, and Vice Versa / R. W. Watkins
Rising From the Ashes
An Examination of the Role of Mythology in Shaping Comics,
and Vice Versa
R. W. Watkins
Where does mythology end and the world of comics begin? Are the contents of the magazines and newspaper sections dedicated to the latter gradually becoming their own myths? If so, what are the processes or steps involved in their ‘full-circle’ ascent to the realm of the mythical? In this essay I will examine the intriguing relationship between comics and mythology; specifically, the influence of ancient myths upon the origins of superheroes and supervillains; and, ultimately, I will attempt to demonstrate the uncanny possibility that such characters and (to a lesser degree) their storylines are themselves now in the process of becoming mythologised in contemporary society. In doing so, I will occasionally compare the comics medium to other art forms in regards to the extraction from myths and the cycle of influence.
In any analysis of the relationship between comics and mythology, one must keep in mind the (ongoing) context in which comics as an art form both originated and continues to simultaneously develop and perpetuate. Richard Tarnas outlines this Eighteenth Century-derived context most accurately and eloquently:
With the exception of the Romantics, the modern mind also gradually outgrew the Renaissance's fascination with ancient myth as an autonomous dimension of existence. That the gods were nothing more than colorful figments of pagan fantasy needed little argument from the Enlightenment on. Just as the Platonic forms died out in philosophy, their place taken by objective empirical qualities, subject-concepts, cognitive categories, or linguistic “family resemblances,” so did the ancient gods assume the role of literary characters, artistic images, useful metaphors without any claim to ontological reality. (Tarnas, 1991: p. 296)
Yes, the Age of Reason had arrived, and the pagan, superstitious, and (to a then lesser degree) Judaeo-Christian mythologies of old had begun to be relegated to the ‘working clay’ of artists, designers, entertainers and dreamers. This is where comics would eventually come in.
At this point in the essay, a concise account of comics’ early years might prove of some assistance in putting further discussion of the medium’s relations to myth into better historical perspective. As well, a short, somewhat tangential explanation of the art form’s basic entertainment dynamics will hopefully serve as an informative-yet-smooth segueway or ‘springboard’ into said further discussion.
Briefly, comics—or, as Scott McCloud definitively calls them, “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud, 1993: p. 9; note that neither single-panel ‘cartoons’ nor animation fulfill this definition by nature)—were first published in a regular newspaper strip context in 1895, when Down in Hogan’s Alley (featuring ‘The Yellow Kid’) was launched in New York World. This strip was traditionally held to have been the first example of comics in general; however, many comics historians—including McCloud—now see comics’ roots extending back to the cartoon picture stories of Rodolphe Töpffer (fl. mid-19th Century), the 1731 engravings of William Hogarth, and even Egyptian pyramid paintings circa 1300 BCE. Regardless of the exact date and context of origin, comics continued to develop throughout the early decades of the 20th Century, with the first ‘detective’ strip (Gould’s Dick Tracy) appearing in 1931, and the first comic magazines, a.k.a. comic ‘books’ (respectively, Gaines’s Funnies on Parade and Famous Funnies) appearing in 1933 and ’34. Although the title of ‘first comics Superhero’ has been sometimes applied to such strip and magazine forerunners as William H. D. Koerner’s Hugo Hercules (1902-’03), Lee Falk’s The Phantom (1936- ), and George Brenner’s The Clock (1936-’44), it is Superman who is generally seen as the prototypical costumed superhero, displaying feats of extraordinary strength and a hidden identity. The so-called ‘Man of Steel’ was introduced in the first issue of National’s Action Comics in 1938....
Dynamically, different comics have served—and continue to serve—different functions for different people. In other, more extrapolative words, the entertainment value of comics is arrived at through diverse means for specific purposes in varying contexts (i.e., according to reader and social climate of a particular era). For example, Classic Comics (which featured adaptations from Shakespeare, among others) and various ‘Bible Comics’ magazine series served a quasi-educational / culture-enhancing purpose for children from the 1940s through the 1970s—albeit somewhat intermittently. In recent years, such full-length ‘graphic novels’ as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (which focusses on his parents’ Holocaust experiences) and Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year have served similar functions (history preservation, awareness-raising, etc.) for a young adult audience. Thus it seems safe to say that, although waning as an end goal among larger and mainstream publishers, education or culturisation continues to be a major function of comics—in spite of the medium’s traditional linkage to illiteracy, low culture and juvenile delinquency.
Another major function of comics is social satire, which is usually presented in magazine or underground broadside format, and sometimes borders on full-blown propaganda. Such satirical comics take aim at any of a variety of targets for the entertainment of a specific group or movement (according to age, political persuasion, income bracket, special interest, etc.) whose ‘collective voice’ would otherwise not necessarily be heard by or reflected in the general media. The existence of such comics does not depend (solely) on national or international trauma, catastrophe, military conflict, etc., and therefore can emerge at any given time in history. In the 1950s, for example, children, teenagers, and young beatniks and jazz fans were driven almost hysterical by the mockery made of virtually everything ‘straight’, corporate, and middle-class American (including other comics—e.g., ‘Starchie & Bottleneck’) in the early issues of MAD by Harvey Kurtzman and his associates at EC Comics. In the 1960s, on the other hand, the American Nazi party came out railing against growing left-wing movements and ideologies in the form of racist super(anti)hero Whiteman (“With my supervision, I can see three niggers have been caught in the act of trying to burn down a Negro church. If they had not been caught in the act, some poor southern white man would have been blamed for it.”). A more recent example of comics functioning in this manner would be the occasional strips of Johnny Noxzema, Joe McDonnell, etc. included in the outside-the-mainstream Toronto ‘queerzine’ Double Bill. In the case of Noxzema’s work, the satire borders on propaganda, with a kindly, female-compatible William ‘Bill’ Conrad always confronting and outwitting a heroin-addicted, misogynistic William ‘Bill’ Burroughs.
A third major function central to comics is the humourous presentation of ‘everyday’ problems and solutions with which the average human being—under regular circumstances during ‘normal’, ‘non-threatening’ episodes in social history—can identify. Comics serving this purpose are not unlike light verse in their intention and characteristics, and it is not surprising that (a) they usually take the form of daily (read: ‘average’, ‘everyday’, ‘mundane’, ‘through the motions’, etc.) strips, and (b) they usually continue unabated for often decades on end, due to the fact that they do not rely on, nor deal exclusively with, national or international ‘turmoil issues’, and thus can remain in fashion most perpetually. Probably the best example of this type of comics is the most famous one: Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (1950—2000, with posthumous reprinting ongoing). As Loria puts it, each prepubescent character in this classic strip “has mastered in his own way the art of living in a society filled with pressures and problems.[...] When situations get out of hand for the Peanuts, Lucy Van Pelt is always ready to provide psychiatric consultation” for five cents (Loria, 1967: pp. 12, 13).
Finally, a fourth major function of comic books and strips is the one which is central to this essay: the adaptation, adoption or symbolisation of myth and mythical figures—usually heroic, but sometimes villainous or neutral—in an attempt to relate inspirational ‘crime’ or ‘adventure’ stories involving humans overcoming adversity and/or peril. This function differs from those previously discussed in that it traditionally only manifests itself fully during times of war, economic hardship, intense and/or prolonged catastrophe, pestilence, famine, national paranoia, etc. In fact, it was an era riddled with virtually all of these calamities out of which myth-derived comics were born. The genre of comics generally referred to as ‘superhero’ has been the principal conveyor of these mythologically based characters and stories (‘history’ and, of course, ‘war’ comics being the lesser conveyors); and in regards to their said derivation from myth, let me say outright that such comics are not radically different from the canvas on which Picasso composed Guernica (invoking the minotaur to represent the bombed-out city’s confusion) and Warhol painted Gold Marilyn (adapting the Virgin Mary as the homosexual’s Madonna); the typewritten page on which Aldous Huxley wrote his novel After Many A Summer Dies the Swan (borrowing heavily from Phoenix and Fountain of Youth legends to establish an Immortality theme) and Ginsberg spawned and projected his epic poem ‘Howl’ (adopting the Canaanite fire god Moloch to emphasise the ‘consumption’ of the young generation by the middle-age middle class of the 1950s); or the celluloid on which Orson Welles improvised Citizen Kane (reworking the Moses story to satirise William Randolph Hearst) and Spielberg captured Jaws (evolving the Old Testament’s Leviathan into an insatiable 20th Century shark). Hence the superhero comics’ derivations from golems (the rabbi-controlled, Semitic Prague-defending automatons of Mediaeval Jewish folklore); Robin Hood; Eastern European vampires; Pontusian female warriors, the Amazons; legendary or semi-legendary American folk heroes Uncle Sam (an abstraction from early U.S. meat inspector Samuel Wilson), Paul Bunyan, frontiersman Daniel Boone, and nurseryman Johnny Appleseed (a.k.a. John Chapman); Norse gods and inhabitants of viking ‘heaven’, or Valhalla; the alleged lost continent of Atlantis; and Welsh/Cornish ‘patriarch’ King Arthur and associates. As well, there have been derivations from the Übermensch—a hypothetical, highly evolved, morally and culturally advanced human, as conceived from historical and mythical (often warrior) figures by 19th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Today, the word Übermensch is usually translated (non-literally) into English as ‘Superman’; so it is quite appropriate that the more in-depth, thesis-specific sections of this essay begin with an exploration of the 1938-born superhero of the same name.
As early (as late?) as the 1960s, comics artist Jules Feiffer (in The Great Comic Book Heroes) was pointing out that Clark Kent/Superman represents a dichotomy: the character’s ‘civilian’ personality symbolises the ‘average joe’ non-criminal with whom the typical, everyday reader can identify, while his superhero personality symbolises the mythical hero of the needy and oppressed whom we all long for or long to become. Mordecai Richler extended on this, insisting that co-creator Joe Shuster (who was Toronto-born) was also commenting on the Canadian psyche: Clark Kent was symbolic of the stereotypic middle-class, “self-effacing” Canadian, who secretly burns with desire to be a powerful “superhuman” hero of global (read US-diminishing?) proportions (Richler: 1968: pp. 82-83).
I would extend even further than Richler on Feiffer’s original assertion, and suggest that Superman was—given his name, his creators (North American Jews Jerry Siegel and the aforementioned Shuster), and 1938 debut—a Jewish ‘harnessing’ (to match/counter the Nazi intellectuals’ harnessing) of German Nietzsche’s Übermensch (literally, ‘Overman’), as a response to the rise and growing antisemitic threat of Hitler’s Deutschland in the early to mid 1930s. One should be able to appreciate the appeal of the Übermensch concept to two creative young 1930s Jewish men after digesting the following passage from The Gay Science:
What makes heroic?—To go to meet simultaneously one’s greatest sorrow and one’s greatest hope.
What do you believe in?—In this: that the weight of all things must be determined anew.
What does your conscience say?—‘You should become him who you are.’
Where lie your greatest dangers?—In pity.
What do you love in others?—My hopes.
Whom do you call bad?—Him who always wants to make ashamed.
What is to you the most humane thing?—To spare anyone shame.
What is the seal of freedom attained?—No longer to be ashamed of oneself. (Nietzsche, 1882, 187; Kaufmann [trans.], 1974: sections 268—275)
Although the above translation succeeds the 1930s by four decades, it should be made clear to the reader that English versions such as The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Oscar Levy [London and New York, 1909—1913] would have been readily available to Siegel and Shuster long before the 1938 debut of their superhero creation.
Such a Jewish harnessing of German myth, vision and tactic in an attempt to beat the oppressive elements of Germany ‘at their own game’, so to speak, is nothing new to fiction of almost every medium. The poems and songs of Leonard Cohen (e.g., ‘Suzanne Wears A Leather Coat’, ‘First We Take Manhattan [Then We Take Berlin]’) often symbolically suggest Jewish uprising and retribution for German atrocities. Less obviously, in An American Dream (1965), the late novelist Norman Mailer (something of a self-styled Jewish Übermensch in his own right, some might argue!) has protagonist Steve Rojack sodomise a German maid (whom he has caught masturbating), telling her sardonically in the process, “You're a Nazi”; moments later, the woman congratulates him on being an absolute sexual genius. Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler's List (1993), although founded for the most part in reality, seems to take great joy in offering a twist on the Übermensch theme, by emphasising the idea of the ‘all-powerful’ Nazi soldier being traitorous, sparing Jews from a certain deadly fate. And Laird Koenig’s The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane—the highly symbolic story of a young secular Jewish girl who resorts to murdering antisemites and other undesirables in a World War II-suggestive setting—utilises the Übermensch-harnessing technique ever so subtly (and uniquely) in an impressive three mediums: novel (1974), film (1976), and stage play (1997).
Still, no medium seems to epitomise the harnessing of the mythically messianic German Übermensch like the superhero comic. This is probably due to the fact that the vast majority of its stories and characters’ feats and abilities are (as of yet!) impossible, and thereby foreshadow a highly evolved era of the not-too-distant future. Regardless of such specifics, Superman and its original Action Comics title was the first (and some might say best) example of adaptation from this hypothetical advanced human as envisioned by Nietzsche. One must admit that the idea of a patriotic crime-fighting alien (i.e., ‘Kryptonian’) who looks like an extremely developed human, and who has been raised by ‘all-American’ step-parents, does sound like a very worthy candidate for a comics prototype. Ultimately, of course, it proved to be the first in a long line of mythologically derived superheros conceived during the Depression and Second World War.
The Timely company’s Human Torch was one of the earliest characters to be modeled after National’s new comics prototype. Created by Carl Burgos and introduced in 1939, this obviously Phoenix-derived superhero was a human-manufactured android, who—after a series of misunderstandings and tragic incidents involving the public—eventually (oddly!) joins the New York City police department in fighting crime. Similarly, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon’s Captain America (introduced in Captain America Comics in 1941) was a Nazi-battling super-soldier who had obtained his mighty strength after allowing himself to be inoculated with a “strange seething liquid”. Dressed in the stars and stripes and red, white and blue of the American flag, and equipped with a large shield, he looked like a bizarre combination of the Norse god Thor and the Uncle Sam (“I Want You...”) character of wartime posters. The vampire myth had been tapped into three years earlier, when national introduced Bob Kane’s Batman—one of the most enduring comics characters ever, so time has proven. Two years after Batman’s start, Will Eisner’s The Spirit, a rather lengthy and offbeat superhero strip for newspapers (something of a rarity during this period) debuted. Like National’s The Phantom Stranger ten years later, The Spirit appears to have been derived from a mixture of mythic Christian and Jewish saints, rabbis, wise-men and golems. Fawcett’s Captain Marvel (who activated his super-powers by uttering the very Hebrewesque expression, Shazam!) and National’s The Flash also seem to have been drawn from mythological sources in particular.
There is no doubt in my mind that such a cast of myth-derived characters, and the genre of comics they helped comprise, could only have originated in a poverty-stricken, war-torn era of despair and genocide like the 1930s and ’40s. For the Allied nations, superhero comics provided both an anger outlet and a ray of hope during these grim years, by—as Jack Kirby has put it—“help(ing) the war effort by altering the times” (Mann, 1988), and righting the criminal wrongs on the largely unemployed home front... at least on the printed page. In other words, witnessing indefatigable, often god-like heroes defeat supervillains of equally mythic origins—like the Satan-derived Red Skull, who symbolised the Nazis; the Jekyll/Hyde-based Two-Face, who embodied corruption in the justice system; and the Atlantis-indebted Sub-Mariner, who represented the Unknown—was psychologically medicinal: helping the Western ‘free world’ cope in an age of war, holocaust, breadlines, gangster shootouts, lynchings, general antisemitism, and the other dark aspects that constituted its greater reality. Ultimately, of course, such comics characters and their exploits appealed to their readership as if an elixir or panacea; an antidote to not only the warring, genocidal, criminal and impoverishing elements of society, but also the less life-threatening—yet undeniably disappointing and disillusioning—unforeseen social occurrences. This was especially true of children and adolescents who were coming of age during these decades, and who had already become comics’ most avid readers. As Mordecai Richler (1931—2001) has pointed out, it was the myth-recalling acts and antics of the superheroes that made them
...our golems. They were invulnerable, all-conquering, whereas we were puny, miserable, and defeated. They were also infinitely more reliable than real-life champions. Max Schmeling could take Joe Louis. Mickey Owen might drop that third strike. The Nazi rats could bypass the Maginot Line, and the Yellow-Belly Japs could take Singapore, but neither dared mix it up with Captain America, the original John Bircher.... (Richler, 1968: pp. 87—88).
Obviously, such heroes gave youth something, someone to believe in; offering an escape from reality. But as I've been suggesting, regardless of age, virtually every superhero comics reader during this period can be considered ‘guilty’ of this escapism to some degree. Such mental activity was perfectly normal, and only what one should expect, given the perilous environment. As one media analyst has observed, subordinating reality out of preference for a fantasy world is an unconscious process to which we are all prone whenever reality becomes too stressful and/or monstrous to bear; and when said process is evoked, it is quite often amplified by regression to a past defined by “imagined glories, security, justice, honesty...”, etc. (Key, 1989: p. 82). Certainly, the mythological archetypes from which superheroes (and supervillains) were derived must be the stuff of such a fabricated past.
As I have iterated, only in an era of war, murder, poverty and hopelessness could the myth-derived variety of comics have originated. Likewise, only in the same type of era can the genre truly perpetuate or expand. This becomes obvious when one examines the performance of superhero comics (as well as war and history comics) in the post-Word War II years: by the mid to late ’40s, the popularity of virtually every title was waning; by the end of the decade, only a handful of magazine titles—all National/DC—were still to be found. It seems that without the stress and strain of combat, genocide and food stamps, the hope-inspiring escapist adventures of superheroes served very little real purpose. One might say that the G.I. Bill had become a new, accessible, real-life, material hero. By the early 1950s, UFO paranoia had grown into the new ‘dark cloud’ of interest in (particularly) the U.S.; and the genres which would exploit this bizarre and heretofore unseen phenomenon would be primarily ‘monster’, horror and science fiction, in the mediums of film, television and the pulp novel, as well as comics. This is the way it would remain until 1961, when, out of the ashes of Atlas (formerly Timely) Comics, Marvel Comics was formed.
On the surface, the world into which Marvel launched The Fantastic Four No. 1 in August of 1961 was a radically different place from the one into which Timely had launched Captain America a mere twenty years earlier. The Berlin Wall was being erected—separating not just the city, but the First- and Second-World nations in general; the Civil Rights movement was underway in the U.S.; the hydrogen bomb had become a reality; the Bay of Pigs invasion had been carried out unsuccessfully; and, although no shrapnel was exploding, there was indeed a cold war that had been unofficially entered by the United States and the Soviet Union—now both nuclear powers. Within three years, the Cuban missile crisis would arise and ultimately result in a nuclear disaster averted, President John F. Kennedy would be assassinated in a cloud of mystery, and the spotty ‘beatnik’ arts scene would begin to blossom into a full-blown free-speech movement and hippie counter culture. Obviously, the world—the U.S. in particular—had entered an era of perpetually evolving turmoil, and therefore it invites comparisons to the era in which myth-derived comics were born. The planet had become a ‘pressure cooker’, to utilise a cliché. And hanging over all of this, either lurking in the backs of people’s minds, so to speak, or spewing forth from history textbooks and the media, were memories and/or reminders of the atomic explosions that had put an end to the U.S.-Japanese side of World War II. For Baby Boomers, not even born when the bombs had been dropping, these destructive episodes were not only black marks on the history of humanity, but the stuff of dusky, gloomy legends—legends that were being amplified by the continuing nuclear tests and Cold-War warhead stockpiling. Simply put, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, along with the growing potential for further nuclear warfare and (ultimately) total world destruction, had taken on a mythical status comparable to that of the combined Flood and Armageddon narratives found in the Bible.
Thus the vast majority of new superheroes and supervillains created by Marvel’s ‘bullpen’ of writers and artists—Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Gene Colan, etc.—during this period were derived from this lingering Biblical/nuclear mythology. Sure, Spider-Man had obvious links to the semi-legendary Biblical Moses and other aspects of Jewish heritage (the character's orphan status, and strained relationship with right-wing Hitleresque newspaper boss J. Jonah Jameson); as well as comparability to the King Kong and Beauty and The Beast mythical archetypes in his submissive civilian identity and his public’s perception of him; but his amazing super-powers had originated in a bite from a radioactive spider—a detail that could not have been created 20 to 25 years earlier during the first wave of superhero comics. In fact, radioactivity was behind virtually all of Marvel’s most popular 1960s superheroes (Hulk, DareDevil, The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man), and some of its most memorable supervillains (e.g., Doctor Octopus and Sandman). Hulk, who was actually more of an anti-hero, was probably the most symbolically reflective of the looming Cold War: his hatred of ‘everybody’ in the aftermath of his nuclear origin can be interpreted as representative of the growing notion that both sides of the U.S.-Soviet arms race were by now equally guilty. Similar to the way in which the World War II-era superheroes gave people some sense of hope and escape by “altering the times”, Marvel’s superheroes provided readers with a positive take on radioactivity by envisioning it as beneficial in certain instances, and therefore adaptable as a means for doing good. It is also interesting to note that those title characters not derived from this nuclear mythology—the mythological Thor of Norse origin, sorcerer Dr. Strange, a revived/updated Captain America—have not fared overly well with comics consumers in the years since the 1960s.
Indeed, virtually all the Marvel titles that launched and dominated the ‘second wave’ of superheroes in the ’60s were in decline by the mid 1970s. It seems that the Cold War nuclear threat had been both eclipsed by, and connected with, the Vietnam War; so following the United States’ pullout, North American interest in nuclear stockpiling (or any other aspect of war, for that matter) began to wane. Disco, cocaine and self-interest became fashionable, and Marvel superhero comics, with their reliance on radiation for mythology and the controversial war for sub-text, were suddenly without a public fear to write up to, harness, and conquer. People were preferring to deal with potential nuclear war simply by turning their backs to it and considering it impossibly out of their hands. Also, it had now been some 30 years since the Cold War was first called by its rather paradoxical moniker, and many now saw it as permanently stalled in a stalemate of fear and common sense on both sides. Quite frankly, it was time to have fun, and the ‘Marvel Age of Comics’ (as the company had been referring to its popularity for over a decade) was now no more a reality than an ‘Age of Comics’ ascribed to DC, Charlton, Gold Key, or any of the other comics companies that had endured 15 years of mockery as ‘Brand Echh’ at the hands of Marvel.
In the years subsequent to this superhero ‘bust’, there has been only the one, yet rather lengthy period when the myth-derived, costumed crime-fighters once again held sway in the magazines. Between 1986 and 1993, all of the mainstream comic-magazine publishers saw a sizable increase in the sale of superhero titles. In some cases, like the first issues of Marvel’s ‘adjectiveless’ Spider-Man (1990) and X-Men (1991) series, the sales were record-shattering. But this had more to do with the nature of the growing comic-book collecting phenomenon during these years than it did with, say, the first Gulf War, or any other military campaign or social stress that may have inspired people to seek out a relevant and closure-providing second reality. During this period, many new series with highly sought-after first issues appeared, as did several key mini-series (e.g., Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns for DC in 1986). There were also long ‘runs’ featuring critically acclaimed artists such as Todd MacFarlane, Rob Liefeld, John Byrne, etc. All such output was considered very collectible, and, as one can probably imagine, on many occasions multiple copies of an issue were purchased, sealed in polyethylene protector bags, and stashed away for (alleged) appreciation growth without ever being read. In other words, comic magazines were being seen more and more by Generations X and Y as investments rather than as sheer entertainment and mental distraction; and, although most buyers from these said ‘generations’ would lose their penchant for collecting by the middle of the comics-glutted, comics-bankrupted 1990s, the myopic view of comic books as primarily investments is still a dark reality today.
On this somewhat sad note, I now turn our attention to this essay’s second major line of inquiry; specifically, the influence of superhero comics on other art forms and fringe society, and the possibility of the medium’s various contents becoming mythologised—under inexplicable circumstances—as a final ‘step’ in a ‘full-circle’ type of process.
Just like the repetitive techniques of pop artist Andy Warhol have found their way into the poetry of John Giorno, and the writings of William Blake, Aldous Huxley, Michael Leigh and William S. Burroughs have provided some of the more intellectual rock groups with their names and/or philosophies (The Doors, The Velvet Underground, The Soft Machine, Steely Dan, etc.), so superhero comics have had an impact on other artistic mediums—an impact not limited to mere film, television and novel adaptations from the original magazines and strips. For example, Batman and Robin have been utilised surrealistically by Liverpudlian poet Roger McGough:
A glass of warm blood
and then straight up the stairs
Batman and Robin
are saying their prayers.
(fr. ‘Goodbat Nightman’, 1967)
Similarly, Dr. Strange has earned himself a mention in the lyrics of The Pink Floyd (‘Cymbaline’, 1969), and even appears on the original front cover of the group’s second album (A Saucerful of Secrets, 1968). Furthermore, the plots of the various Spider-Man titles seem to have influenced a wide array of genres in a variety of media: David Lynch’s 1986 suspense film Blue Velvet eerily resembles the first forty issues or so (1963—1966) of The Amazing Spider-Man, complete with Dennis Hopper’s twisted, sadistic character ‘Frank’ evoking images of the demented supervillain Green Goblin; a 1969 Amazing Spider-Man story arc, involving an ancient South American tablet which holds the secret processes imperative to obtaining eternal life, is mirrored by the plot of James Redfield’s best-selling novel of the early 1990s, The Celestine Prophecy; and several episodes of the science-fiction television series The X-Files (1993—2001) feature the living, extra-terrestrial ‘black oil’, which is a near-perfect replica of the alien ‘black ooze’ that briefly becomes Spider-Man’s symbiotic new costume in all of the 1980s titles. Ironically—given the distancing of the superheroes/villains and plots from their mythological origins, it is these artistic realisations of obvious influence that may very well be looked upon as the first step in the process of comics characters becoming archetypal and, ultimately, mythological themselves.
And if the artistic realisation of the superhero genre’s influence in other mediums is the first step toward the mythologising of comics content, then the second step must be the outright imitation of the said content. At this level, superheroes, supervillains and the stories with which they have been associated begin to be mimicked and reenacted (often criminally) in real life by fanatical or genuinely insane enthusiasts. This sort of extreme fiction-identification has been quite common in other art forms for some time—frequently with disastrous and tragic results (e.g., murderous and/or necrophiliac vampire impersonators; John Hinckley Jr.’s attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life in imitation of Robert De Niro’s Taxi Driver film character; adolescents igniting themselves in attempts to match scenes from Jackass and Beavis and Butthead episodes; etc.); and it appears that comics are now proving to be equally inciting to fearless and/or obsessive personalities in recent decades.
For instance, in the late 1980s, a young man in the (if I’m not mistaken) Chicago area began dressing in the traditional Batman garb, assumed the role of ‘common-folk defender’, and soon found himself a guest on the Oprah Winfrey show after being given ample exposure (often posing from tall buildings) by the news media. Comparably, several ‘human flies’ have identified with Spider-Man over the past twenty years. In the early to mid 1980s, one young man climbed Chicago’s Sears Tower and New York’s Empire State Building, and attempted one of the twin towers of NYC’s ill-fated World Trade Centre—all without the benefit of safety ropes. The man sometimes wore a Spider-Man costume during such stunts, and Spider-Man creator Stan Lee has expressed—on Real TV—his amazement at the young man’s daring. Another ‘Spider-Man’ made his debut just shortly before I began work on this essay [Autumn, 2003]: a young Chinese male ‘ropelessly’ scaled the tallest building in China and was immediately equated with the comics superhero by much of the Western media. On a less extravagant level, but more directly devoted to the superheroes’ ‘cult of personality’, are the Trekkie-like fans who enjoy going out dressed in Catwoman costumes, or fashion their motorbikes like that of Ghost Rider, or manufacture for themselves long metallic ‘knuckle claws’ á la those sported by the X-Men’s Wolverine.
All such imitations of comics content are truly eccentric and/or extreme in nature, but, as I've stated, these examples merely constitute the second step towards the mythologising of the art form’s characters and plots. The actual birth of inchoate myths are exemplified in the controversial, the ‘inexplicable’ and the phenomenal—namely, the sightings and manifestations of that which heretofore was confined to the writers’ or artists’ ‘other-worldly’ imaginations as realised on the page of a comic book or strip.
Simultaneously analogous to, and/or dependent on, the subconscious mind with its system of (often) ‘undetectable’ storage and retrieval; the advanced or esoteric manifestations of psychosomatic infliction (e.g., stigmata, judging from studies done in the 1940s); and the theological incidences of self-fulfilling prophecy, lies apparently the uncanny human ability to propel the historical or fictional—indeed, the impossible (i.e., impossible, at least, in a given historical context)—into the realm of the mythical. More specifically, in cases exemplifying this phenomenon, the historical, fictional or impossible is perceived by an individual as actually existing or still existing; the result: mythology in its most infant or primordial state.
There are several different angles from which one can approach this phenomenon with an aim to obtaining some degree (or resemblance) of explanation as an outcome. For example, from a Sartrean perspective, such an incident might be perceived as merely the product of bad faith—the act of lying to one’s self in the form of denying a disturbing fact or fabricating a gratifying fallacy (Sartre, 1943: pp. 86—96). A more abstract (some might say ‘neo-Platonic’) interpretation might be derived from Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious as a sort of ‘warehouse’ of archetypes (i.e., symbols, in this context). From this angle, the human creation of myth from history, fiction and the impossible might be understood as the internal, yet outwardly projected manifestation of an X-analogous archetype, which, in turn, is the ‘outward’ expression (expressed-upon would probably be more apt terminology) of a latent want, need, conflict, etc. (Jung, it is interesting to note, explained UFO sightings as projected manifestations of the mandala archetype, which for Jung is symbolic of peace and equilibrium.) Still, probably the best angle from which one can approach this phenomenon is one which renders all other angles nullified, yet, curiously, also appears to uphold them in some capacity—seemingly, in its applicability or inclusionary nature. According to A. J. Ayer, physical objects are perceived, but only indirectly. “What is directly perceived, being dependent for its existence on the state of the observer’s nervous system, may then be held to a sense-datum” (Ayer, 1956: p. 91). In other words, the information perceived is partly determined by a person’s five senses and his/her neurons, and whether or not the roots of a mythology are to be found in any given series of received sense-data is completely under the control of that person’s neuraxis.
Regardless of how one wishes to explain the exact nature(s) of their origins—collectively with one theory, or individually by utilising several—there does seem to be sufficient evidence to support the possibility that some unexplained phenomena have some kind of origin in the world of myth-derived comic superheroes and supervillains; and, in this sense, such phenomena may be in the process of subtly propelling comics content itself into the realm of the mythological—causing the myths to come ‘full circle’, so to speak (i.e., myth → fiction → artistic and human imitation→ myth). Bearing this in mind, one might rightfully observe that superhero comics are becoming comparable to the actual deceased artists from other mediums (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley), who have been allegedly sighted after their official deaths; or the Outer Limits episode which is said to bear a striking resemblance to a ‘real-life’ story that emerged shortly after the episode’s first television airing—that of Betty and Barney Hill’s alleged 1961 UFO abduction. Similar to the celebrity ‘apparitions’ and the Hills’ ‘close encounter’ story, when closely examined, some bizarre phenomena do seem to mimic certain comics content that has preceded their occurrences (as reported). In fact, just like some inventions, discoveries and achievements have satisfied or mirrored specific human goals or aspirations (e.g., the Wright Brothers’ aeroplane fulfilling the urge to fly), when viewed historically, some baffling phenomena seem to have had an uncanny way of ‘competing’ or ‘catching up’ with the human imagination—fulfilling ‘prophecy’ or ‘vision’, as it were—by echoing various super-humans and their situations as each appeared in comics fiction.
For example, is it merely a coincidence that interpretations of unusual human incinerations as the result of ‘spontaneous combustion’ began to accelerate in the 1950s? True, for centuries, there had been reported cases—particularly in England—of human fires of unknown origin; but these incidents were generally attributed to divine intervention or excessive consumption of alcohol (Schumacher, 1967), and a belief in such enigmatic fires as a ‘mystery physics’ phenomenon did not truly come into vogue until their numbers increased around the halfway point of the Twentieth Century—shortly after the Human Torch’s introduction by Timely in 1939. (It is interesting to note that Ms. Ellen Coutres, whose corpse was discovered at her home in Manchester, New Hampshire in December of 1949, was described as having burnt to death as if she had been “a human torch” [Nickell and Fischer, 1988].)
Equally strange and even more ‘commonplace’ are reports of a phenomenon that came to the media’s attention in the late 1980s in Eastern Europe. Since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986, several individuals of varying age have proclaimed their sudden possession of human magnetism: the ability to attract (usually) metal objects—pots and pans, knives, scissors—as if their bodies were exerting some inexplicable ferromagnetic force. Some of these people, like Miroslaw Magola of Poland, even asserted their capability of attracting non-metallic materials, like wood and plastics (Harvey-Wilson, 2002). Such a phenomenon is reminiscent of nothing as much as the powers exhibited by Marvel Comics supervillain Magneto, the X-Men’s arch-nemesis who advocates the fascist superiority of mutant humans over non-mutant humans—much to the dismay of his former best friend, X-Men leader Professor X. (At the most projected level, these two rivalling leaders may even be compared to the Soviet [Magneto] and American [Professor X] presidents of the mid to late 1980s!) One young woman, Natalia Demkina of Saransk, Russia, has even laid claims to possessing Superman-like X-ray vision (as documented on The Discovery Channel, 2005). What is most intriguing about all of this is the fact that it was during this period (of Glasnost and Perestroika) that comic books—like Western rock ’n’ roll and socially conscientious poetry—began slipping more frequently into Communist Eastern Europe. As a related item, it is interesting to note as well that, in the earlier 1980s, there were many claims from Western journalists and ‘Free World’ intelligence that the Soviets were indeed controlling and altering (presumably, to their own advantage) the world’s climates—not unlike the X-Men’s Storm with her weather-manipulating abilities. (Also interesting in recent decades are the numerous claims that prolonged exposure to radiation at the appropriate level actually [and ironically] safeguards against cancer.)
A much more exclusive example of such phenomena would be the bizarre case of Don Decker, the young Pennsylvanian man who, beginning in 1983, demonstrated the ability to incite rain showers wherever he went. Water would flow through the air in unusual patterns all around him, and Decker claimed to be able to control such showers at will. Initially, his ‘powers’ were often attributed to demon possession—possibly the evil spirit of his recently departed grandfather (Ieraci, 2008). However, when considered in the context of our current line of inquiry, Decker’s strange capacity for inciting and manipulating water resembles nothing as much as the abilities of Hydro-Man, the radiation-afflicted, semi-liquid Marvel supervillain who identifies with H2O to an extent that not even Thales could have imagined. He was introduced in Amazing Spider-Man No. 212 in 1981, about two years before Decker’s uncanny talents materialised.
Probably the most satisfying example of an unexplained phenomenon imitating the stuff of superhero comics is a more recent one. In June of 1988, tabloid (and some ‘mainstream’) newspapers and television news shows began reporting stories out of rural South Carolina of human encounters with a so-called ‘lizard man’—a creature whose earliest alleged sightings some sources trace back to 1972. According to the eyewitness accounts, the alleged seven-foot creature would often be spotted at night along sections of the highway passing through Lee County’s extensive swamp country. It appeared to be half-human, half-lizard, and was said to occasionally disrupt traffic and even attack motor vehicles (Correia, et al., 2006). Obviously, to those familiar with comics, this supposed creature bears a striking resemblance to both The Lizard—a Spider-Man adversary from Marvel Comics who made his debut in 1963; and the Swamp Thing—a DC contrivance which first appeared in 1971. Both characters were fictionally born out of humankind’s need to dominate nature, and, as myth-derived specimens, both owe a lot to the legendary alligator-ridden New York City sewers, as well as the alleged sasquatch and ‘skunk ape’ species. If either were to come into actual ‘existence’, a swampy region of South Carolina would be a suitable choice for its home territory.
Whether merely the result of ‘wishful’ or ‘fearful thinking’, psychological disorder, outright fraud, or the truly paranormal or scientifically unproven, each of these examples of inexplicable phenomena display a striking similarity to the characters and basic plots of previously established superhero comics. The enigmatic aspects of life do seem to be imitating (myth-derived) art—no matter how coincidental, accidental, contrived or artificial. Therefore, I think it is safe to say that there is a possibility—and I stress possibility—that such comics content is at least in the infant stages of mythologisation.
Thus myth may very well be coming ‘full circle’; and regardless of how far removed we think we are from the days of the Phoenix, Valhalla, golems, vampires, and the Nazi-exploited Übermensch, the desire (need?) to transform the fictional and/or visionary into mythic ‘reality’ still seems to lurk within us. As I’ve pointed out, the exact processes involved in the mythologising of superhero comics is unclear; what is clear is the undeniable fact that much of such fiction is becoming not only the stuff of artistic and eccentric fan imitation, but also the stuff of unexplained phenomena—the roots of myth in most cases. This, however, can only be expected of a genre so heavily founded in mythology from the outset. As a parting note, it will be interesting to see if the Harry Potter novels of J. K. Rawling will undergo the same apparent mythologisation in the future. The process does seem to be well underway....
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