ALLOMYTHS AND ISOMYTHS PT. 3

Back by no further demand at all, I'm exploring the subject of allomythicity once more.

I should start out by quoting myself from this OD essay on the matter of crossovers:

A crossover features at least two characters who have established-- or will establish-- the "mana" that has or might make them popular. In the above example, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed has one type of "mana," while Quatermain has a different type.  It is this "clash of energies" that I believe readers enjoy in crossovers, a clash that is radically different from the normative encounters of a hero and his villains.

Many monster mashups are not crossovers, but even those that are not depend on their appeal for a "clash of energies," or more precisely, an "interaction of conceptual energies." This interaction is also strongly related to the concept of allomythicity, the idea that the characters have distinct histories, or tropes that suggest such histories, which in turn generate said conceptual energies. However, there are one or two exceptions to this general rule for which I should account.

The most fully articulated example of a highly allomythic monster mashup is one in which the characters involved have starred in their own features, in which they have established their own backstories. FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN is my paradigmatic example here. However, it's also possible to have a mashup in which one character possessed a fairly involved backstory-- i.e., Toho's original Godzilla-- while the other, his opponent King Kong (the Second), has been patterned after an established character but is not actually coterminous with said character. 

Then there are mashups in which neither character has ever appeared before, but each of them is separated by the other by a separate "mythology of origins," even if that mythology is implicit, rather than explicit as with FMTWM. The script for THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE barely articulates the nature of its two monsters-- the vampire Armand Tesla and his unwilling werewolf servant Andreas-- beyond a few basic tropes about such creatures. But the interaction of disparate character-concepts still takes place.

Yet origin-implication can become even more paltry than this. RETURN is like a treasure-trove of monster-tropes compared to the  kids' film MONSTER MASH. The "Horrific Trio" in this flick seem more like plush-toy versions of monsters than dangerous predators, even in comparison to other comic takes on such figures (the default here being the creatures from ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, who retain their minatory power despite the ludicrous plot-circumstances). I'd almost go so far as to compare the monsters of this 2000 flick to be "floating signifiers" that suggest the idea of monsters without actually having any monstrous traits. 

All of these characters have some "origin myths," however paltry, which are articulated largely because they are the starring characters of their respective narratives. That said, in the previous two essays in this series, I began considering that non-starring characters could generate their own myths, which could in turn play off those of more established characters. Hence I reversed myself on on whether or not the story "The 60 Deaths of Solomon Grundy" qualified as a monster mash. It included Swamp Thing (who may or may not have enjoyed a feature at the time of the story's publication), Solomon Grundy (who had appeared in several stories as an antagonist to various heroes, but who had never been a "star" as such) and Superman, whose presence was irrelevant to the mashup-subject. 

But given that Armand Tesla and Andreas sustain the mashup-vibe even without having appeared in any previous form (despite Tesla's resemblance to the Universal Dracula), obviously two creatures can also sustain the vibe without either having a backstory from an earlier appearance. At the conclusion of Part 2, I mentioned a story from JUSTICE LEAGUE #45, which debuted both the Shaggy Man and the Moon Creature. Of this story I wrote:

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.

 

Usually the difference of myth-origins is the main criterion, in whatever form it may take. However, I make an exception for characters who may share the same basic origin but who have generated famous narratives. In an earlier commentary on a particular DOCTOR SPEKTOR story, I wrote:

The main character is an expert on the supernatural who runs around investigating spooky stuff, even though he's not really a man of action and has no supernatural powers himself. After meeting versions of Mr. Hyde, the Frankenstein Monster, and the Mummy, and an "original" vampire antagonist named Baron Tibor, Spektor has an encounter with a group of vampires. Technically this can't be a mashup since all the vampires share similar origins, but it's worth noting simply because it teams up the best-known literary vampire, Count Dracula, with three others from prose lit: Sir Francis Varney (VARNEY THE VAMPIRE, Mircalla Karnstein (CARMILLA), and Lord Ruthven (THE VAMPIRE). Baron Tibor gets involved, but on Spektor's side.

But even though the backstories of the four famous vampires aren't explored in the depths during the course of "Dracula's Vampire Legion," and even though one presumes that all four (and original comics-creation Tibor) shared roughly the same genesis, the author's reference to other established histories promulgates the same "mashup-vibe" that I found in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN, and so the short story also attains a certain degree of allomythicity. I might consider that degree comparable to all figures who are technically isomythic but who LOOK as if they arose from different sources, as per the many monsters Spektor encounters in the dream-fantasia of issue #9.