ALLOMYTHS AND ISOMYTHS

 I've been rethinking my classification of monster mashups on this blog, and here are the fruits of my meditations.

I think that in my early formulations I was too quick to speak of *centricity* as a factor in determining what was or wasn't a monster mash. This concentration came about because I was trying to find a rationale to disinclude all stories that simply pitted one monster, particularly one in a serial format, against a "monster of the month:"

I'll assert that in general one cannot have a "monster rally" if one has just one type of monster versus another type of monster. Examples of these would the meeting of "werewolf star" Waldemar Daninsky with assorted vampires in FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR, or the encounter of the Big G with one-shot nasty insect Megaguirus in GODZILLA AGAINST MEGAGUIRUS.

In this essay, I also specified that any such rally/mashup ought to emphasize monsters that were significantly different from one another. I used the term "allomorphic" ("allo"= "other," "morphic"= "related to form") to make that specification. 

Yet there are a couple of examples of "groups of monsters" that appear allomorphic while sharing the same basic background. Case in point: the beast-men of H.G. Wells' ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU. These creatures are animals whom Moreau has altered into quasi-humans with his techniques, but the various freaks-- wolf-man, dog-man, panther-woman-- are as "allomorphic" with respect to one another as they were when they were all different animal species. Yet I would never consider Moreau's beast-men to be a mashup. I could, however, easily imagine a mashup-story which combined a wolf-man and a panther-woman who enjoyed some separate origins, along the same lines as the supernatural beasts in "The Pharaoh's Zoo." 

It's recently come to me that the real criteria is not that of different form, but different narratives behind the form. A combination of creatures who all share the same origins, like the beast-men or Anne Rice's vampire variations, would be *isomythic,* in that all of the characters, despite physical differences, are derived from the same mythic origins. In contrast, real monster-mashups are those in which two or more monsters derive from different mythic backgrounds, making them *allomythic* to one another. 

(I'll note that this use of the term "mythic" is somewhat at odds with the way I use the term in my ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE writings, where "mythic" indicates "symbolic complexity." In this essay alone, it means more like "the totality of the mythic tropes used in a given narrative," rather like the way Northrop Frye uses the term. I plan to show how the two usages may complement one another, but that will be in a separate essay, probably on the ARCHIVE.)

One notion that brought about this re-orientation dealt with considering how characters, either in serial or stand-alone narratives, create their mythic backgrounds. FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN, one of the most influential mashups, garners at least some of its charm from combining the dissonant origins of the Monster, being born from weird super-science, and the Wolf Man, having arisen from a supernatural gypsy curse. This sort of cognitive dissonance is a great part of the charm of most mashups, even those in which the monsters actually arise from the same mythic origins but resemble entities who were separate from one another. For instance, the spook catcher Doctor Spektor never meets all of his monster-enemies in reality, but he does undergo a dream in which he's attacked by their respective spectres. The aesthetic appeal of seeing all the monsters together, even in dream-forms, is still communicated, since the reader will inevitably view the dream-shapes as extensions of either the "real" characters within the SPEKTOR series or of the original characters on which the comics-characters were based, such as movie-versions of Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster.

Often many "homage monsters" (such as those of the 2000 kidvid-movie MONSTER MASH are about as insubstantial as the figures in a real dream, being little more than bundles of vague associations taken from the original models. A film like this one holds more of a potential for myth than its actuality.

But given that I've decided to allow that such meager characters may quality as "allomyths," I must admit that their status doesn't depend upon their centricity within their narrative. I've labeled a number of stories "mashups" even though the main characters were heroes or demiheroes rather than monsters, not least JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #47-48.

In this story, the noble heroes of two Earths contend with two of the most brutish monsters of those Earths, Solomon Grundy and the Blockbuster. Neither of the two monsters had ever been central characters in any media-narrative (although I think Grundy got a short-lived series in relatively recent years), and so what makes the story's use of the two bruisers interesting is the way the narrative interweaves the different propensities of each creature. So neither had centricity-- but both did have "myths" built around their respective careers fighting superheroes. 

Based on this line of thought, I have to reverse myself on my position in ANTI-MASHUPS (-1). I said that I didn't think that the crossover of Superman, Swamp Thing, and Solomon Grundy counted as a mashup for these reasons:

In the previous mashup post, I said that an issue of SWAMP THING, guest-starring DC's "THE DEMON," qualified as a mashup because both the main hero and his antagonist had once enjoyed their own features.

DC COMICS PRESENTS #8, though, is not such an example, because the formula is "good hero and good monster" team up against "monster who hasn't had his own feature," that is, Superman and Swamp Thing vs. Solomon Grundy (despite what the cover depicts)

But while that line of logic would have worked if Superman and Swamp Thing were facing some first-time monster-character, it doesn't work so well with a character who has sustained a myth though his repeated appearances. So now I would say that this story does count as a "monster mashup" because Swamp Thing and Grundy are allomythic toward one another.

My caution, then, was directed mostly at monster-characters who had only appeared once, for such characters are often throwaway types, like most of the gargantuan opponents of Gamera. None of these one-shot boogiemen sustain myths of their own to match Gamera's, and so they're basically like the "monsters of the month" that would be encountered by Swamp Thing in his own series.

Based on my JUSTICE LEAGUE example, I would tend to say that even if a monster-opponent has appeared only twice in a serial format-- and I believe Blockbuster had only appeared in two BATMAN tales before showing up in JUSTICE LEAGUE-- that the character then begins to generate a "mythic presence." Whether or not the readers welcome a given character, an author's attempt to keep a character going means that he must try, with whatever success, to put a little more effort in said character than he might with a one-shot. Then there arises the question of reboots. Toho Studio's "Rodan" is a familiar presence in several 1960s monster epics, but is he coterminous with the one who appears in 2019's GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS? I suppose the later Rodan would have at least as much mythic presence as, say, the lousy imitations of Classic Universal Monsters found in the aforementioned MONSTER MASH, so my answer is a cautious yes on that question.

And that's probably a good place to stop for now.