by Neil Vodavzny

Non-cultural signs apply to nature, and are found in myth, ie, mytho-culture

Example from folk lyrics of ethnicity with non-cultural signs
From border ballad Sir Patrick Spens (Fairport Convention)

The king sat in Dunfermline town
Drinking of the blood red wine
“Where can I get a good sea captain
To sail this mighty ship of mine?”

Then up there spoke a bonny boy
Sitting at the king’s right knee
“Sir Patrick Spens is the very best seaman
That ever sailed upon the sea”

The king has written a broad letter
And sealed it up with his own right hand
Sending word unto Sir Patrick
To come to him at his command

“An enemy then this must be
Who told a lie concerning me
For I was never a very good seaman
Nor ever do intend to be”

“Last night I saw the new, new moon
With the old moon in her arm
And that is the sign since we were born
That means there’ll be a deadly storm”

They had not sailed upon the sea
A day, a day, but barely three
When loud and boisterous grew the wind
And loud and stormy grew the sea

Then up there came a mermaiden
A comb and glass, all in her hand
“Here’s a health to you, my merry young men
For you’ll not see dry land again”

“Oh, long may my lady look
With a lantern in her hand
Before she sees my bonny ship
Come sailing home wards to dry land”

Forty miles off Aberdeen
The water’s fifty fathoms deep
There lies good Sir Patrick Spens
With the Scots lords at his feet.

There you have blood red, moon, sea and land (antagonistic opposites), storm, all non-cultural signs with mythic significance. The moon is often associated with the chaos of a storm, or in Joseph Campbells’ terminology a cosmic serpent (incidentally, the Odyssey must contain many such signs and portents). That implies all myths have non-cultural signs, which is why they’re iconic in an absolute sense and not the relative or conventional one of language and culture. This is what I call mythic-culture, being common to all cultures so, in a sense, outside culture.

Non-cultural signs in super-hero comics (Silverage – 50s, 60s)

Because super-hero adventure-fantasies are iconic & idealised, they contain signs which are antagonistic. Superman the sungod to the dark, Dionysian Batman. Wonder Woman the huntress, and Marvel’s elemental super-powers. I grew up with 60s Marvels (as you can probably tell) so was not aware of their provenance, but obviously Stan Lee, Kirby and Ditko are NY Jews. Comics fan Alice Cooper was speaking on radio 2 a few years ago about East European immigrants who maybe came on US culture from an outsider perspective.

Apart from Siegel and Schuster, there’s Kane (Batman) and also Will Eisner of The Spirit, maybe the most quintessentially New York vignette-ish strip of all time. In comics, it’s difficult to disentangle place (in this case New York) from creator. Eisner’s dilapidated street and Hudson river scenes probably influenced Ditko’s crazed city contours in Spider-Man – which is the main point. In super-hero comics it’s about the universe itself, which evolves, as Grant Morrison says in Supergods, like an organic substance.

In those days you were DC or Marvel, the former mired in the conservative correctness of the 50s, the latter revelling in the zeitgeist that accompanied hippy expressions. Race (ie civil rights) was not really a big issue, and was only handled directly in the Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow series (ironically DC). The series had ‘hippy’ Green Arrow questioning Lantern’s basic assumptions, rooted in 50s ideals of justice, as represented by DC’s group Justice League America.

The idea was great in concept and execution, thanks to Adams’ felicity with character dynamics - later perfected in X-Men with writer Roy Thomas, advancing the super-group to new heights of interplay with specific events of plot. This makes another point, that talent is all. It takes an Adams or a Windsor-Smith to envisage and then carry-out new directions, building on past achievements.

A bit of history is in order here, as superhero comics are a very American phenomenon, almost paralleling Constitutional values of justice & freedom. Following a brief lull after Captain America fought the forces of fascism in WWII, the genre was revived in the mid 50s and we have the all American Justice League, teaming Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. 50s DCs are very ‘white’, if you know what I mean, and stylistically precise and formal, almost veering towards woodcuts. They are what you might think of as collectable, cute, sci-fi-laden products of suburban Americana, known as the ‘Silver Age’. Far-out fancy was the order of the day, the bottle-city of Kandor, and Earth-Two, home of the Justice Society of parallel heroes created by Gardner Fox, one of their chief writers.

Enter Stan Lee, who took one look at the 60s and thought. ‘Hmm’. Thus was the ‘Marvel Age’ born of social conflict and conflicted heroes.

So that’s a brief resume . If I may flash-forward to Frank Miller’s (of the Dark Knight) revisiting of Eisner’s The Spirit in an attempt to cut to the chase? Miller is to doom what Darkseid is to global thermonuclear conflagration – Darkseid being the patriarch of Kirby’s split clan of Apokolips and New Genesis, in 70s title New Gods (I read somewhere he intended a retelling of the fall of Man in comic-book form, which is fairly Jewish-sounding). Miller’s dire, drab, bleak noire-laden version lacked even the joie-de-mourire of the classic 40s Spirit strip – see image. The way I would put it is Miller tries to inject his own downbeat spin on a mythos – starting with Elektra, the original femme fatale, and moving on to Batman – the overpowering sense of gloom is more a trait of our new age than of the comics.

I trust you’re still with me, as it’s really just an illustration of the fact that comics instil a kind of belief in the mythos. DC and Marvel are like two sides of the American Dream, one more brash and fun-loving. Marvel in the 60s was so value-laden and friendly one is duty-bound to trust the creators. In a way it’s a religion, and as a fan you defend the values & talent that are apparent in the unfolding continuity.

Comics are also good at depicting the world as it actually is, not as ideologists wish it might be. As legendary artist of Captain Marvel CC Beck says in an interview in The Comics Journal (#95, 1985):

‘What the liberals want is more stereotypes, not less. They want cartoonists and writers to show everything in namby-bamby, wishy-washy, harmless, meaningless ways..Stereotypes are so convenient, you always know what they’re going to do, they’re instantly understandable and you can put them in a panel and forget about them without any explanation..I’ve often said when we uses stereotypes, if you went into a hockshop, there was a Jew behind the counter, not an Irishman, a Swede or a black person. Went into a bank, there’s an old conservative guy with a Hoover collar, he wasn’t sitting there in blue jeans. In the next panel a typical farmer with a straw hanging out of his mouth and bare feet and, as I said to my kid, if you wanted to show a slob you had him running around in his undershirt and his stocking feet. Now today, everybody runs around like that. It’s not the stereotype of a slob anymore because it might be a university professor or a heart surgeon or something. And that’s democracy carried to its ultimate limit; everybody’s so much alike they might as well be in uniform’

60s cartoonist R Crumb says much the same of what became of hippy-culture. What these old guys are saying, it seems to me, is that a world without myths – stories of the common man - implies there is very little of what passes for truth. Either what is plainly visible in stereotypes, or in the invisible, value-laden sphere.

This points to a truth that is gradually disappearing. If the culture is based more on myth than ideology, it will be woven into the fabric of the landscape of the particular region it hails from. Or cityscape (The Spirit), what you might call ‘spirit of place’. Since I’m in a New York state of mind, a nice example is Billy Joel. Unlike the politicised torch-songs that bombard today’s youth with airy abstractions, his songs, rooted in the 50s, are a perfect identity of person with place. Simple, heartfelt lyrics are a testament of faith in place.

The New York of myth is practically going out of fashion, stifled by Bloomberg’s millions of public service spending on sterile habitats with no history or soul.

The New York of yore was sort of tribalistic, predominantly ethnic ghettoes, but this is no obstacle to a pop-culture which is identified by non-cultural signs which appeal irrespective of race or creed, and reinforce the myth of America. America is a land of immigrants and a land of myth. It’s worth taking note of how old-fashioned and non-trendy the Silver Age now looks, with 50s values of decorum. The heroic figure is idealistic rather than sexual and is used as an object of moral force. It’s arguable that hyper-sexualizing the body (I mean, Miley Cyrus?) divests it of the sense of idealism. Silver Age heroes dramatize the body in a Renaissance sense, creating an operatic spectacle pitting Uncle Sam virtues against nefarious elements.

The history of New York is of ethnicity – the same mix you get in 50s and 60s creators. Italian, Wasp, Jewish. The sense I get from Roy Thomas’s encyclopedic Alter Ego ‘zine is of a bohemian milieu, more or less an ideal, non-political ethnicity. The sense of preserving differences is very apparent in the mutant X-Men, whose powers set them apart from humans. This is sometimes taken as a response to 60s prejudice, but could equally be a mythical response to the reality of ethnicity. This is the reality that has roots, history, identity, and also the reality that gives rise to folklore.

I’ve tried to show that folklore gives rise to non-cultural signs. Something non-cultural is also non-racial, so what that means is ethnicity is not the same as race in a political sense. Folklorically speaking, all races have similarities which are non-cultural; politically speaking, all races have to conform to the prevailing culture – equivalent to demythologizing society ethnically and folklorically. Myth is very useful because it’s outside political/cultural conventions.

This really circles round to the earlier point on unconscious symbolism. A demythologized society is in a straightjacket of cultural convention. This is actually most evident in cyberspace, with signs that are advertising-related. A story of St. George and the dragon could be to sell mobiles, say. Folklorically, a dragon can represent sexual chaos which an idealized champion has to slay. Closing the mind to non-cultural (and hence non-racial) signs is thus closing the mind to a type of truth that is visible, but non-cultural.