From SUPER DUCK #35 comes one of the most peculiar creations I've come across, Ugh Lee Heap, a fat Indian-type who has a long tail and prehensile-looking feet. The story makes it sound like he's appeared in an earlier story (though GCD shows nothing else for the character-name). In this scene he uses his tail for sleeping arrangements.
To recapitulate the substance of the preceding post, I've determined that the format of the particular type of "crossover story" known as the "monster mashup" takes two broad forms of the "isomyth" and the "allomyth." In this sense myth refers to "the totality of the mythic tropes used in a given narrative," and the characters who are potentially "mashup monsters" conform to one of those two forms. My primary insight in the earlier essay was to establish that every character is used more than once-- one example being the DC monster-character Solomon Grundy-- begins to establish a "narrative myth," a myth not present in characters who only appear in one story.
Now, on THE ARCHIVE, even though I generally use "mythicity" to mean something other than "totality of tropes," I also judge each narrative's mythicity on a "good/fair/poor" spectrum of development. On this blog, with this different but complementary usage of the mythicity-term, I will assert that the two forms of the isomyth and the allomyth further subdivide in "high" and "low" levels for both, because I judge this division to be a good means of distinguishing the "mashup" from the "anti-mashup."
HIGH ISOMTHICITY-- This type of narrative is almost never associated with the "monster mashup," even though the various creatures in the narrative in question may have some significant physical differences between one another. I gave prominent mention to Wells' ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU. All of the monsters in ISLAND are natural animals who have been artificially altered by the mad scientist, and thus, even though each one belonged to a different species originally, now they all share the same "species," having become "of the same species" of the Beast-Men.
At the same time, monsters who actually belong to different species may still be isomythic depending on their context. In the 1933 KING KONG the big ape fights a T-Rex, a pterdodactyl and a giant snake. They're all typical representatives of these fictionalized animal-types, but they lack myths of their own for the same reason as the sparring partners of Gamera: they're intended only to be used as one-shot opponents for a principal monster-character, and so they generate no mythic narratives.
LOW ISOMYTHICITY-- The characters in these narratives also share the same myth-origins, but they APPEAR to look like characters who do not share such origins. In the DOCTOR SPEKTOR story entitled "She Who Summons the Dark Gods," an evil sorceress causes the titular hero to fall into a dream where he encounters doppelgangers of his "real-world" enemies. All of the dream-images of Dracula, Frankenstein Monster et al, share the same origins, but they LOOK LIKE the real creatures of Spektor's world.
In fact, these faux-monsters don't even have to be copies of characters who share the monster-persona. In SCOOBY DOO 2, the Great Dane and his buddies contend with artificially created copies of their old enemies-- none of whom were literal monsters, but rather villains who dressed up as marauding monsters.
LOW ALLOMYTHICITY-- This would apply largely to what I've called a "monster of the month" situation. Godzilla faces a number of one-shot monster-opponents-- Ebirah, Megaguirus, Biolante-- and although they are allomythic in comparison to Godzilla, their stories end in their debut tales, and so they do not sustain their allomyths beyond a low level of intensity.
HIGH ALLOMYTHICITY-- This is the most flexible of the categories. Some characters may stem from separate narratives, as did FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN, where both are monsters. But one may also have high allomythicity in a narrative where two or more monster-types appear for the first time against any type of persona, monstrous or not. This is seen in the one-shot film MONSTERS VS, ALIENS, wherein the four heroes are modeled upon four "classic movie monsters," and they join forces to contend against a villainous alien. The reverse also applies in a comic like JUSTICE LEAGUE #45. Here a group of non-monstrous heroes fight not one but two newly debuted monsters, the Shaggy Man and the Moon Creature. Had there been but one new monster, of course, I would have labeled that character just another isomyth. But an allomyth is generated by the interaction of the two monster-types, even though said interaction lasted only for that issue, since to my knowledge the Moon Creature never appeared again, and though the Shaggy Man did, he was just another superhero sparring-partner and didn't cross conceptual paths with any monster-types.
Since I spent a certain amount of time deciding whether or not a Swamp Thing/ Solomon Grundy crossover counted as a mashup in my system, and decided in the affirmative, it just makes sense to include it now in the mashup list.
About the only noteworthy thing about the issue is that the situation shown on the cover actually takes place in the story.
I'm not yet finished with the long-running Quality feature "The Death Patrol," but so far its Native American member "Chief Chuckalug" (top panels) seems to be the only Real American in the mix. All of the members of the Patrol were broad ethnic stereotypes, whether red, black or white.
In a story entitled "The Auction" in BORIS KARLOFF'S TALES OF MYSTERY #12, professional auctioneer Bentley is commissioned to preside over an auction at lonely Lochshire Castle. To his consternation, the items being auctioned are full of black magic associations, and the bidders appear to be nothing less than "the living dead."
Bentley identifies only two species of spectre, "ghouls" and "vampires," though there's no telling what the artist had in mind when he drew the above images of a colorfully clad dwarf and a bald guy with pointed ears. Vague as these "modern-day spectres of evil" are, there's just enough diversity there to judge them "allomythic."
However, the more interesting aspect of the story is the writer's catalogue of weird objects. Not everyone would deem "occult artifacts" to be "monsters" in their own right, but I would invoke the famed short story "The Monkey's Paw" as precedent. Bentley's evil auction-items mentions only one artifact that arises from traditional myth, a "Medusa shield" which is based on the aegis of Athena, a shield donned with Medusa's head. Other items include a hangman's rope, a pierced knight's helmet, and a black panther that may or may not be alive, all of which are apparently capable of being used for evil purposes. I've seen just two examples of "catalogues of famous weapons" in literature. One is the 12th century Welsh story "Kulwych and Olwen," in which King Arthur boasts of four great weapons, and the 17th-century allegory "Pilgrim's Progress," in which the protagonist enters an armory full of weapons from the Bible, such as Samson's jawbone-of-an-ass, et al. But "The Auction" might be the first mashup of monstrous artifacts.
Here are two examples of groups of allomorphic monsters who all share the same origins and are therefore "isomythic."
The first appeared in BORIS KARLOFF TALES OF MYSTERY #12, in which a typical American town plays host to a convention of club-members who call themselves "Kreepers" and who appear to be wearing an assortment of monster-masks. Big surprise, the Kreepers are all real monsters. The unbilled writer never supplies any origin for the disparate creatures but there's a loose solution that they're some "parallel race" that's existed on Earth for centuries.
The second appears in issue #30 of the same title, in the story "Produce Me a Monster." A reporter investigates the secret of Karlarka, a Hollywood producer who makes horror movies with incredible makeup effects on his monsters. The reporter follows Karlarka to a remote island, and finds out-- yeah, you guessed it-- all of Karlarka's "actors" belong to an isolated race of allomorphic monsters, as does the movie-maker himself. I think this is the only story in BORIS KARLOFF in which the name of the comic's "host" is transparently parodied.
Just reviewed the 1973 Andy Milligan film BLOOD, which deals with the acrimonious marriage between a mad scientist who's a part-time werewolf, and his vampiric wife. There's also a man-eating plant, but I don't count this as a "monster," just a tool used by the mad wolf-scientist.
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.
The DC humor feature ANGEL AND THE APE made one appearance in the company's showcase title, and then enjoyed three issues under that title. Apparently someone thought the word "meet" would be a grabber, for issues 4-6 bore the header "MEET ANGEL AND THE APE," and the last issue just read "MEET ANGEL." Though the characters never encountered any monster rallies in the stories, three covers included unflattering versions of Dracula and Frankenstein, possibly because the editors thought the JERRY LEWIS comic had done well by featuring Classic Monsters.
HOW TO MAKE A MONSTER, reviewed here, feels in part like an oddball homage to FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN. However, in the universe of MAKE A MONSTER, both the Teenage Werewolf and the Teenage Frankenstein initially have no existence save as fictional creations. Mad makeup artist Dumond then works his wizardry on two young actors wearing monster-masks, turning them into unwitting killers. So it's a monster-mash, though a referential one more akin to SCOOBY DOO 2.
