The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 302: 1st Issue Special #1, April 1975

Oh, Jack Kirby. Will you ever be done mining the past for the future?

Say what you will about Kirby, he understands the superhero. His dialogue may be shaky. His plots might verge on the adolescent. Every now and again, he's kind of racist and sexist. (I'm really selling you on him, right?) But his artwork is always, always, gorgeous, and his conception of the superhero as god is sophisticated and beautiful, if occasionally naive.

After finishing this comic, I looked to see where the story continues, and it turns out that it doesn't. I had a quick look through the 1st Issue Special entries at the GCD, and from the looks of things not many of them got a second glance. I'm surprised that this Kirby creation didn't, but the mid-Seventies is moving into his more grounded Marvel work, so perhaps the gods were being put on hold in that decade. Considering that Howard the Duck makes his debut not to much later into the decade perhaps upholds this notion.

The other thing that may have kept the series from continuing is its "meh" factor. There's nothing new here, even for a comic that is drawing on mythology. We have a child, orphaned by evil raiders. We have a quest for vengeance, pursued by a heroic altruist. We have a lizard-like antagonist. Kirby seems to me to have been a champion of the Platonic notion of the outer appearance reflecting the inner nature of a person. His villains are always ugly and disgusting, his heroes always 50s movie star pretty. Frye notes that myth, in its underlying of literature, is akin to geometrical objects as underlying visual art - I think the problem with this story is that the underlying geometry is just too obvious, and the flourishes that one desires in these mythic variations are too thin to conceal the foundation upon which the story is built.

That does it for my recent dollar bin finds. Some Christmas stuff for the next few days. See you then.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 296: DC Comics Presents #46, June 1982

When I sat down to read this comic this morning, I was not expecting it to be quite so stellar. The story itself is slightly trite, with Superman being sent from country to country to stop 8 evil magicians from raising an ancient enemy of Dr. Mist. Along the way, the Man of Steel has to team up with heroes from each of those countries. One of the difficulties I've always had with the DCU is that international heroes, inevitably, are somehow stereotyped to their particular land of origin. In this comic, for example, Greece has The Olympian. Denmark has The Little Mermaid. And while this could have been a really terrible, utterly mediocre story, E. Nelson Bridwell manages to pop so much mythic resonance into these characters that it was like I was reading basically everything I've been teaching my class this term.

The Seraph, Israel's superhero, wields both the Staff of Moses and the Ring of Solomon. The Olympian's cowl and cape are fashioned from the Golden Fleece retrieved by Jason and the Argonauts. Jack O'Lantern has a companion who is a tiny member of the fairy race. Their nemeses are similarly inflected, with the Mermaid's enemy a troll, obviously culled from Danish myth. The Green Fury's opposite number is El Dorado, who commands a pair of ghostly jaguars. In Bridwell's hands, what could have been the clash of the stereotypes instead becomes a lesson in how our myths travel down the years and into our popular culture. The question it really begs, and one that I've spent far too long pondering, is where does this put Superman? He's obviously not emblematic of the myths and legends of Native Americans, so his mythic status is not quite the same as those of the Global Guardians. What he is then, I would (briefly) argue, is a consolidation of exile/immigrant myth. He takes notions wrapped up around displacement, about adopting a homeland, and puts a bright blue suit on them. This is not to say that there's not some deeply problematic things going on if we consider him a representative of American myth, but he's definitely got the qualifications to stand with the rest of these heroes.

So, rather than simply stereotypes, the Global Guardians turn out to be distillations of the myths of their respective countries.That's pretty cool.