ALLOMYTHS AND ISOMYTHS PT. 4

"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." -- ALLOMYTHS, pt. 2.             

                       

As I've looked over the various entries I've made since starting this project, I see that I've tended to emphasize three types of monster-mash. The first emphasizes a group of monsters who occupy superordinate status, what I've called Primes. The second deals with a group of monsters who occupy subordinate status, what I've called Subs. (An interstitial category involves both groups in opposition to one another, as in the TV cartoon DRAK PACK.) The third opposes two monsters from separate franchises, as seen in FREDDY VS. JASON and ALIEN VS. PREDATOR.                                                   

In the essay quoted above, though, I did account for the existence of a low level of allomythicity in simple one-on-one conflicts between monsters, usually where one of the freakazoids (Godzilla, Gamera) is the star of a series. Yet I've also devoted posts to one-off encounters of two disparate monsters like "Full Moon," wherein the two opposed monsters not only don't generate franchises or histories beyond their generic identity; they don't even have proper names. Surely, even if a Godzilla-foe like Biolante only has one go-round with the Big G, just being part of Godzilla's gallery of grotesques earns him more mythicity than a one-off vampire and werewolf. At this time, I don't know that I'll start posting that many more examples of monster mashes comprised of just a continuing mon-star and a one-shot enemy, if only because there are so many of them. But I'll probably start working in a few just for consistency's sake.  ADDENDUM: This post invalidates my statements in the first two "anti-mashup" posts that a couple of one-shot encounters, respectively in the "Gamera" and "It the Living Colossus" serials, were not true "monster mashups."    

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.

 

ALLOMYTHS AND ISOMYTHS PT. 2

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.

More later...

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.