by Neil Vodavzny

Just a bit of background - perhaps as a result of experience as a comicbook fantasy writer, I’ve become convinced that mythical action is needed for reality to be ‘felt’ or meaningful. I’m actually quite serious about this. The world of action is the world of ethics. It’s the idea acting makes things more real, through cadence & song, ritual.

Action and myth
Myths provide a basis for reality because they contain action as ethical constructs. Pictorially, this could be Disney’s fairy-tale world - you have cuteness & at the same time hints of goth wickedness. It’s quite easy to extend this concept into Levi-Strauss’s structural ideas - Man the hunter, gatherer, harvester - but even without going into tribal lore, it’s apparent that a world without action is amoral.

I myself am a believer in structuralism, and it’s worth noting Levi-Strauss is dealing with myth in terms of action – predatory raptors, crows that scavenge, the prey, the harvest. You believe in myths because they seem sensible, not because of any formal proof. That’s the point - if the universe is an ethical construct predicated on action, this is why we have myths. Myths have reality because of their meaning; contrast latter-day existentialism – we live in a world which believes in ‘realism’, not sense & feeling, archetypes of heaven and earth.

This is a circular argument. Myth & action belong together because neither are capable of formal circular proof - instead they are ethical constructs. Basically, you have to believe in the presence of a moral grounding to reality, and myths are accessories to that belief.

Mythical sub-culture: superhero comics

The cue for extending comics’ mythic action into the fake reality we’re led to believe is in our immediate future comes from The Comics Journal contrarian John Clifton. How many of today’s Conventioneers have heard of Clifton’s ‘’De-Elfing” and “Bite Now, Suckers” published around 1980? They loosed a volley of philosophical diatribes at progressive titles many may have assumed a type of smartass in-joke. His discourses were willing & able to defend some of the worst excesses of genre-cliches, while simultaneously putting-down anything he (or his spokespeople) considered over-extended or over-refined (Maus, Raw and the like).

One example will suffice (though I urge the Journal to reprint some choice extracts). Cerebus he singles-out for the pinnacle of admirable amateurism. Early issues have a sort of lithe simplicity, as Sims struggles to animate the offending earth-pig with stories (it should be noted) in a direct line from Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan the Barbarian..

Sims’ work was a loving spoof of the S&S genre, and he sought to render suitable barbaric touches with sinewy grace. I was happy to concur with Clifton that the Aardvark was a type of clumsy wonder to behold. Sims then refined his linework to tableau-esque scenes of relative stasis (and lengthy narratives) and I could see the legitimacy of criticism.

Then I got to thinking, does one case necessarily apply to all & sundry? Barry Smith’s novice works in Avengers and Iron Man are so amateurish they’re plain bad. Contrariwise, his later issues on Conan are an astonishing high-water mark. Sophisticated tableaux happily co-exist with rugged renderings of warriors and maidens, in perhaps the most harmonious barbaric marriage ever consecrated.

Over the years, I kept those issues of TCJ and they sort of lodged in my mind, in some far-off wilderness. The idea of the ludicrocity of comics and their essential playfulness seem points well made. Barry Smith for one has a tendency to over-refine his style, and actually his better works are Weapon X and Young Gods & Friends. The former evokes berserker rage with stream-of-consciousness grace. His last mainstream work is a fluid homage to Kirby, set against scurrilous bitching of a high order.

So, to the extent Clifton’s contention was that in order for myths to have resonance, they must move you, it’s well put. They themselves must have that quality which you could liken to a type of cartooning simplicity.

Memories are made of this

In Jean-Luc Godard’s 60s homage to pulp-fantasy, Alphaville, Lemmy Caution destroys the omniscient Alpha-60 by exposing its inherent contradictions. Myths permeate the film and it’s probably safe to say myths have a presence that Alpha-60 doesn’t. Incidentally, a circle is a recurring motif.

The immediate future we’re encountering is a world more & more of the present – just replace Alpha-60 with igoogleverse. A reasonable question to pose, therefore, is to what extent are myths the counter to this? Have they intrinsic reality? Can life imitate art?

Alphaville makes it apparent in its threatening images and enigmatic sayings that fantasy is the enemy of Alphaville. The opening line is, |”When reality becomes too complex, legend recreates it’”. Lemmy Caution even asks at one point, “Are Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon dead?”

In that case, in the film, fantasy is more real than ‘normality’ and there’s a reason for that. Fantasy figures are specific to time and place - he makes a point of asking Natasha where she was born, ie, not in Alphaville. Time and place are the province of action, and without them it’s difficult or questionable to say what’s there – apart from materialism. Einstein said time is an illusion, which means deceptive – maybe so.

Superheroes are a modern folklore if only by dint of longevity, ie, they parallel the modern era, the era of mass-production, dated from the Model T Ford and Ford’s dictum ‘History is bunk’. Action Comics #1 actually has Superman hoisting a car above his head, the man of steel echoing the product of steel.

Flash forward to our immediate future & we’re buying goods with other goods (iphone, say) delivered by other goods (google’s auto-drone octocopter). Transhumanism is the ‘inevitable’ next step, ie, for Man to also become a product, as one with machines.

The once mighty world of action has become relegated to fantasy, while reality is the province of logistics. ‘Action’ in this regard is in the directorial sense of ‘lights, camera’, basically meaning a plot, a scene, intrigue.

I guess a lot of you are under the impression the world has a lot of action in it, so let’s explore that proposition. There for sure is a lot going on – we live in interesting times, as the Chinese say. However, there’s no longer any simplicity, one-on-one, independent interaction.

In order for there to be a plot of any kind, the first requirement is for there to be an underlying simplicity. Let’s take King Lear on a cliff-top, losing his marbles & his perspective as his kingdom turns to fairy dust.

This underlying simplicity is where the visible meets the invisible or primordial, for the reason a play is a type of ethical construct. The setting is staged and theatrical and therefore very real, in the sense of fantastical! In short, you have to be able to understand the moral at a very basic, emotional level.

Now, there are a lot of words floating round the modern world – at last count getting on for 1,000,000 to the power 150, plus 196,000 – though don’t quote me on that. Many will argue for this or that advance, for this or that reason. I would argue that this may be logical, but is untrue.  If all the advances lead in the same direction, that direction may be the wrong one. I’d like to be the owner of a Merc but there’s no guarantee driving it would free me from the modern nightmare (even if google’s GPS-drone culture will enable it).

The thesis I’m advancing, and will support with individual instances, is that reality is becoming fake, while simultaneously modern folklore is gaining the moral force it conspicuously lacks.

Machines were mice & men were lions once upon a time
Now that it’s the opposite it’s twice upon a time – Moondog

Iconography

TARZAN, Burne Hogarth

Hogarth has said (TCJ #) it’s a stage for one man armed with one knife, and just his moral code for guidance.

The world of the strip is one of nefarious white hunters, big game, nefarious witch doctors, tribal alliances and Tarzan’s treetop mission to stop in their tracks anyone of whatever creed or color who poses a threat to the jungle. ‘Jungle’ meaning, broadly, a habitat that cannot be treated lightly.

In the modern world, that’s pretty vague-sounding, but this is a world governed by lore, not law. Hogarth delivers the lore with unique classical iconography

The realism of the world is entirely in its folklore & iconography. Using the jungle as a stage, the interplay of physical stances propels the moral force of the story (if you want a modern-day example, Nelson Mandela at his 1964 trial). To be honest, I was never entirely sure what iconography means, apart from something with religious connotations. Then I picked-up a DVD of Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist animation (from a Jacques Tati screenplay) featuring an interview at the Edinburgh international Film Festival.

Talking about digitalising drawings, he notes that you have to break-up the plastic perfection of CGI, almost ‘fighting with the computer’ to keep the drawings irregular & imperfect. This struck home, because I’ve always felt 3D animation to be too simple to be that interesting. Alongside that, you need subtlety.

Iconography is something that’s got a hidden simplicity, but the meaning of a painting (by classical expressionist el Greco, say) is in its subtlety. If it was ‘perfect’ the artist’s feeling wouldn’t be expressed.

In ‘our immediate future’ we are supposed to be getting virtual actors and so forth. Yet the meaning of an image isn’t in its perfection, but in its imperfection. In terms of comics and Tarzan, you need an artist to provide the vision. Hogarth happens to favour a classical iconographic composition, which has an underlying simplicity, but is driven by his vision.

Where you have simplicity you can also have subtlety and the scope for an artist to try for their own definitive version. The main reason being Tarzan (or Batman) aren’t a photographic reality, they’re icons that lend themselves to a cartoonist’s eye-view of a modern folklore.

Do you see that this is a circular argument? You need a folklore to have an icon. Folklore and myths are just stories that seem sensible, from an ethical perspective. In order to have this perspective, you need to believe in the reality of the folklore - even though it’s fantasy! That’s actually why folklore has meaning to us in a modern world which, I contend, is getting more and more fake.

ARTICLES:

MOOD THAT STRENGTHENS FOLKLORE

3) Dick Tracy, The Spirit, The Shadow

4) Batman

TIME-PLACE SPECIFICS OF POLITICAL ACTION stories set in tinpot dictatorships & other recognizable locales. Precise locales have a feel for culture, romance, intrigue. The modern political world has no sense of that reality, IE the reality of ‘being there’

5) Tintin, Blake & Mortimer (possibly Bilal)

6) Corto Maltese in Africa. Pratt’s stark lines limn the colonial expanses of French North Africa

CONSTRUCTION OF A MYTHOS time-place specific stories are so ultra-precise, you have to get the aesthetic right, ambience, milieu

7) Lil Abner, Superman in Smallville – mid-west

8) Wolverine in Japan – ancient archetypes, modern politics