The Superhero Mega-thread

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Fairy tales for adults? Hmmm... it's almost mythology. I think he went with fairy tales because he was doing the "Like the stories you read as a child" angle. But if it's close to fairy tales, it's close to myths. They all spring from the unconscious through dream-logic, and carry deeply resonant undercurrents of unconscious subtext. He isn't the kind of dude who talks about that level of things (or puts it into stories). He was entirely writing for the common person on the street, and didn't want to alienate anybody with highbrow stuff or deep ponderous thinking. He wanted kids to be able to enjoy it too.

And of course he was much older here than when they first set up shop and started making these things. They'vs had planty of time to think it through from all angles, and I'm sure many people have said things to him like "They remind me of fairy tales" etc. So it doesn't mean they were thinking of it that way from the beginning.

Never mind working on Jessica Jones now, my mind is focused on Logan. I think it's important to work these notes up while I still remember all the connotations of the cryptic scribbles. After a week or so of being this deep in something else they'll be Greek to me. I think it's time to launch into writing the first draft now. Get well into that before I change focus.

The Warren Horror Comics
I would be remiss to not post my other huge comic book influence here. In the late Seventies, when I was getting close to graduating high school, I noticed something extremely eye-catching on the rack at the grocery store (it was Shop-Land, the same store where I had doubtless discovered comics to begin with). There were these big magazine-sized horror comics that I normally didn't look at, but this one caught my eye:

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Note the character is dressed a lot like Han Solo, and there's a robot up in the corner a little like C-3Po. Obviously Star Wars had already come out and I was swept away by the magic of it, and this gobsmacked me. I threw down my money immediately, and inside I discovered art like this:

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Yes, there were robots, and the main character did look like Han Solo, but what really blew me away was the warmth and humanity of the art, especially in faces and figures. It's all a little bit caricatured, but not overly so, and you can tell this guy knows how to draw the figure. And everything else.

These magazines had several different stories in each issue, drawn by different artists. One of them was Jose Ortiz:

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And then there was Vampirella, drawn by the amazing Jose Gonzalez:
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This was extremely different from the American superhero comics I was used to. So much more expressive and humanistic. This is all I'll post here of it. It hardly belongs on a superhero thread. But again, for anyone interested, I have more on my art blog:

• Warren Horror Magazines and the Spanish Invasion

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I just woke from an incredibly fun dream. I was in the endless mega-mall type environment so many of my dreams take place in, at a little checkout counter, and because of the way the counter was set up I was struck by the idea to make a little video. Just a fun action scene, something you might see in a superhero movie. I started moving things around (product) to set up for it, and rather than tell me to leave immediately or call the police, the two brothers working the counter joined in and wanted to play parts. So did some random bystander. There was a growing sense of cameraderie and excitement that kept expanding until I woke up, all charged up with it.

Of course I immediately came in here and wrote about it in my dream journal, and realized it represents several things. Mainly my sudden decision a few days ago to create this thread and to do the Logan and Jessica Jones analyses—to turn it into another Summer of Superheroes. That was sponteneous, but it's drawn together several of my interests and areas of study into one really fun and exciting project that's advancing my understanding of story and several other things all at once—the connections between ancient myth and modern superheroes for one. And hopefully it's also providing some entertainment for whoever keeps popping in here and reading this stuff. And whoever will read the finished products. Drawing us all together for a little while for some fun, entertainment and maybe education.

And suddenly it struck me. Remembering what the gods are according to the Melville and Odysseus lectures I wrote about a while back, all this enthuiasm and excitement is a god inspiring me, focusing my scattered attention toward this one unified project, powering me through it, and drawing other people in at the same time. I said a while back that I really need some kind of creative project or I'm just going to fade away, and suddenly out of the blue here it is.

Thank you, whichever god you are! I'll make a little sacrifice to you in a bit.

To be more specific, Dreyfus said

what a god does in Homer is to provide focus and enthusiasm toward a particular purpose. ​

Often anyway, there may be other things. That's the one I remember. Odysseus' son Telemachus was just sitting around dejected, watching the suitors eat him and his mom out of house and home, and suddenly he was inspired by Athena (I think it was her) with great passion, enthusiasm, and the words necessary to stand up and make a powerful speech, in which if I remember right he announced he was going to go off and do something purposeful (he hadn't been doing anything of that nature). Sail off in search of his missing father maybe? He simply stood up, and the words came one after the other, spontaneously, and he was as stunned by the speech as everyone else was. The suitors, who usually saw him as a wimpy little brat and an annoyance they had to put up with (but could freely insult), were impressed, and everyone saw immediately that he had now become a man.

This idea that the words just come to you spontaneously—this is discovery writing (or speaking). It's trusting in the intuition, the muse, or the god within. It doesn't always work that way, but when there is inspirsation suddenly you're aimed at some goal, some project, and you're powered up with excitement for it. And if you just start typing, the words will come. You just have to bring the faith, make yourself available when inspiration strikes, and be willing to devote yourself to the project and put in the work.

When I decided to do the Daredevil analysis it was largely out of boredom, because I was offline (mixup with billing) and rather than scroll through all the usual websites I dug out Daredevil and started watching, and then started seeing things that made me want to do the analysis. Boredom can be seen as a katabasis, a descent into the underworld. A low point with no activity, no focus, no enthusiasm. And suddenly there, at my lowest point and completely inactive (open and receptive), I just put on a Netflix series and started to chill, and BAM! Inspiration struck, along with a burst of enthusiasm that hasn't waned yet.

enthusiasm (n.)

c. 1600, from French enthousiasme (16c.) and directly from Late Latin enthusiasmus, from Greek enthousiasmos "divine inspiration, enthusiasm (produced by certain kinds of music, etc.)," from enthousiazein

"be inspired or possessed by a god, be rapt, be in ecstasy,"​

from entheos "divinely inspired, possessed by a god," from en "in" (see en- (2)) + theos "god" (from PIE root *dhes-, forming words for religious concepts).
Source​

Entheos:

"The inspired genius was said to be entheos, “filled with god,” and because he utters divine words, able to give “birth to beauty."

"The man who was only common clay before his inspiration, and will be common clay when it departs, feels, for the time, as if a god had descended, and was within him."
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That's a perfect description of what it feels like when I'm deeply engaged in a creative project and inspiration is rolling in. I keep forgetting to do mundane things like eat meals or mow the lawn etc. I lose all track of time. I'm in the other world for that time, the divine world where time works differently. It's precisely the same as the state you enter in meditation, where all anxiety and worldly problems fall away. This is what this stuff always meant, it's in the everyday world around us and within us. We just have to become inspired (breathed into by a god). Inspired comes from the same root word as spirit. Perspire, expire, inspire. To inspire means to breathe into—to breathe life into or to breathe enthusiasm into.

They didn't know about the unconscious or archetypes back then, but they knew something powerful was going on, so it was something like children trying to explain the light in the refrigerator by saying "There's a little man who runs out and turns it on when you open the door." They were trying to explain very real phenomenae, but didn't have the conceptual tools in place yet. And they were working from the unconscious mind mostly, which works in very dreamlike ways. It tends to personify things, to depict internal states as various types of figures or animals or monsters. Or gods. This is why on old maps unexplored areas or dangerous areas were labeled "Here Be Monsters."

Heroes, Masked and Mythic has finally arrived after apparently its ten-year wandering around the Mediteranean (sorry, a little Odysseus joke there folks). I just want to hit a few highlights in here.

The first chapter compares Captain America to Achilles. The similarities are pretty striking.

"Both are an army of one, reclusive, and prime examples of the Other," or the outsider. "Formal strategists, they are imbued with almost superhuman powers and abilities, equipped with seemingly magical technology that sets them apart from their compatriots. Young and beautiful, they also develop close friendships with with their male companions who die in battle, resulting in deeply rooted feelings of resentment and personal responsibility. Similarly, both heroes are removed from the theater of war, returning to deal with issues of loss, abandonment, and post-traumatic stress."

"Captain America has many of the same qualities born in the epic hero. Courageous and brave, he is willing to lay down his life for his country and those he loves, fighting on the front lines with his fellow soldier, but he is equally proud, stubborn, and self-righteous."
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They're both soldiers/warriors great war heroes (not grunts), so of course there are a lot of similarities. Aside from the technology and maybe some matters of strategy, war was the same then as now. Ok, the scale has changed. But on a personal level, the level these myths are dealing with, a soldier is a soldier. They all have to deal with the same issues.

Many of these qualities are also present in Thor—great strength and courage in battle, seemingly invulnerable, proud and boastful, and endowed with the best in cutting-edge technology of the day. Oh, I haven't really got to that yet—

The Shield
Achilles' pride and joy was his magnificent shield, forged for him by Haphaestus. His mother, the nymph Thetis, asked a favor of Haphaestus (who owed her big time) to make him an unrivalled suit of armor and a great shield to protect him (I believe he was foretold to die young but gloriously).

Armor you say? This is starting to cross over into Iron Man territory now. Every mythological hero apparently had some secret weakness, some "Achilles heel" (Kryptonite) that could be exploited if discovered by his enemies. Thetis was afraid of her son dying in battle, so she had him armored up by the armorer of the gods, who promised to make his new bling more magnificent and powerful than any ever seen before. Another similarity with Iron Man is that the armor is to fend off their fear and vulnerability. See my Iron Man analysis [1][2] (or the chunks of it that are available now (the only parts I've written out yet)). I identified terror as his driving force, and the reason he needed armor and such powerful weaponry—the weaponry of war, which is what he had formerly sold, and not been careful about who got ahold of it, so it fell into the hands of terrorists.

Supersoldiers
Both Captain America and Achilles took some kind of supersoldier serum to turbo-charge their badassery, and each was couched in the magical/sci-fi language of the day. Cap got put in a big tube and pumped full of chemicals and came out all ripped and massive and charged with superhuman agility and endurance. I don't think his strength or toughness were enhanced beyond the human, but his endurance was mega-massive. Literally, as he's so fond of saying:"I could do this all day."

The Fatal Weakness
As a child Achilles was picked up by his nymph mother Thetis, held by one ankle, and dipped into the river Styx. This imbued him with superhuman qualities too, though like Cap, apparently not invulnerable. Just toughened up quite a bit. Except for that one heel, which stayed dry. That represents his weakness. Well, it actually is a physical weakness, but it also stands in for his vulnerability in general. I'm not aware of a specific weakness Captain America has, but most superheroes have one. Here's where I must admit I'm not very knowledgeable about the good Captain. I've seen each of his movies once, and probably no more than that. Though I did have a bunch of his comics from back in the day when Kirby (a god among mortals) was drawing him:

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A new thought—
These kind of superheroes and mythic heroes are ideals. They're not supposed to be actual living people, they're the high bar, the thing a soldier (for instance) should look up to and aspire to be. That's very different from the more humanized and traumatized heroes I've been writing about. Ok, I know, Captain America and Achilles both exhibit symptoms of PTSD, but it's fairly minimized and not dwelled on to any depth (I think). Even in ancient Greece, these things were well known. It's the price soldiers often must pay for defending their country or fighting for justice.

I'm not sure exactly how to differentiate between idealized heroes and the more human ones. Maybe there's no hard dividing line. Maybe some of them have wavered between both ends of the spectrum at various times in their existence. Superman is definitely an ideal. Usually—though in the DC movies and some of the comics from recent years I think he's been dragged through the mud quite a bit and probably no longer the Blue Boy Scout (as he's been called).

The difference is the same as between the old black hat/white hat cowboy movies and, say the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns. Hmmm, not a perfect analogy. Eastwood was really more of an antihero, in it only for his own gain, not to protect anybody. But I remember the way John Wayne (the big cowboy hero before him) hated Eastwood at first when those movies came out. He had always played the larger-than-life idealized cowboy hero, who followed the Cowboy Code (I don't think he was ever a singing cowboy though). He hated that Eastwood wasn't that at all, in fact was pretty much the opposite of it. Opportunistic, in it only for himself, and almost more a bad guy than a good guy. At least that's how I remember his character. I believe he was mostly motivated by money and power, and only nominally better than the real bad guys. I think what The Duke really lamented was the days of the idealized hero itself. He just wasn't ready when the age of the antihero crept in (and a younger star stepped up and stole his spotlight). But in time he relented and even played a few antiheroes himself, notably Rooster Cogburn in True Grit.

So that's probably a big part of what happened to superheores. Between WWII and Vietnam everything changed. We lost our innocence and our trust in basic goodness. It had come to seem hokey and fake. Most Americans no longer felt they could trust their government (a change Captain America went through as part of his arc). And those old black and white shows like Andy Griffith and Leave it to Beaver seemed ridiculous. Instead we had All in the Family. So the period when a superhero was created will determine a lot about how idealized it is, though some of the older idealized ones got the treatment and became grittier and more realistic in later eras.

Oh, and speaking of superheroes existing in different eras, this was pointed out in the book too—

The classical Ages of Myth were divided up into the Golden, the Silver, the Bronze, and then the Modern. Comic books are broken up into exactly the same categories. The golden age is the 30's and 40's Screw that, it's too complicated. I'll just link to an article explaining it:

• The Gold, Silver & Bronze Ages of Comics Explained @ Screen Rant

Looks like what I called the Ages of Myth (actually the classical Ages of Man) is a little more complicated too:

• Ages of Man @ GreekMythology.com

So, somewhere along the way somebody definitely noticed the similarities and started playing up to them intentionally. I just don't know when it happened, or if it was going on right from the beginning. It sounds like it must have been, the way so many of the superheroes share an incredible number of traits with their ancient counterparts.

Oh, I think I do know how to differentiate between the ideal heroes and the human ones.

The ideal ones are under the aegis of DC or other early comic book companies, like Timely Comics, (which eventually became Marvel), where Captain America was born (of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon).

The more human heroes were created in the Marvel bullpen. That was Stan Lee's big contribution to the superhero genre in fact—he didn't want to make the larger-than-life boy scout types who demonstrated perfect character traits and no human frailties. Instead he wanted them to be extremely human and not idealized at all. Also, the former heroes were adults of indeterminate middle age, or at least full adulthood. Stan the Man wanted his to be teenagers (to appeal to the new teen market—it was the Swingin' Sixties, after all). So yeah, post Vietnam. We were no longer living in the age of idealism and projected perfection (onto our heroes). He also wanted them to have the same problems the readers had. So yeah—humanized.

Daredevil isn't a teenager you say? You would be right, But then he was also based on an earlier Golden Age superhero. Plus I don't think there are any teenaged lawyers. It takes too long to get through law school. I think you have to be like in your Forties.