ORDERLY DRAFTSMEN, CHAOTIC CARICATURISTS

 Let's see if I can get in one last barnstorming essay for the last day of 2025, building on what I wrote in this essay:

when it comes to strip-artists whose "insanity" allowed them to spawn innumerable grotesques, Capp and Gould are probably roughly equal-- which is a subject worth pursuing in a separate essay.

I'm going to relate twin concepts of "artistic insanity" and "artistic sanity" to a couple of other paired concepts, both alluded to in the title. One of those pairs, "draftsmen and caricaturists," I may have made up out of whole cloth. However, in general "draftsmen" are praised because of their fidelity to visual imagery as normally experienced, and thus they're dominantly associated with representational art. In contrast, it's a given that "caricaturists" deliberately distort commonplace visual reality for the sake of expression, so they can be dominantly associated with non-representational art. I place both Chester Gould and Al Capp in the caricaturist camp, in large part because of their comparable facility with bizarre looking characters.

Now, the second concept-pairing comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, but I'm going to lead off with Camille Paglia's evocative interpretation of Nietzsche:

The Apollonian and the Dionysian, two great western principles, govern sexual personae in life and art. My theory is this: Dionysus is identification, Apollo objectification. Dionysus is the empathic, the sympathetic, emotion transporting us into other people, other palaces, other times. Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought. Dionysus is energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism — heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice. Apollo is obsessiveness, voyeurism, idolatry, fascism — frigidity and aggression of the eye, petrification of objects. … The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains.

It's also worth noting that in the philosopher's original text, he also aligns the Apollonian with the art of "the dream" and the Dionysian with the art of "intoxication."

To reach a closer understanding of both these tendencies, let us begin by viewing them as the separate art realms of dream and intoxication, two physiological phenomena standing toward one another in much the same relationship as the Apollinian and Dionysian.

Now, both Gould and Capp wrote story-strips, in contrast to the once-and-future dominant form of the gag-strip. But both of them designed their successful features in reaction to the rise of the adventure genre in comic strips of the late 1920s. Hal Foster's TARZAN began in 1929, while in the same year two older gag-strips, Elzie Segar's THIMBLE THEATER and Roy Crane's WASH TUBBS, were successfully reworked to feature tough-guy heroes, respectively Popeye and Captain Easy. While Segar was fundamentally a caricaturist, Crane and Foster were representational draftsmen, and Foster became one of the three most influential artists upon early comic books: Foster for both TARZAN and for his 1937 PRINCE VALIANT, and both Alex Raymond and Milt Caniff, respectively having breakout successes with FLASH GORDON and TERRY AND THE PIRATES. The latter two debuted in 1934, the same year as LI'L ABNER. By contrast, TRACY, debuting in 1931, predated the influence of Raymond and Caniff. However, many testimonies of artists from the time-- for instance, Joe Kubert in ALTER EGO #119 -- indicate that in the late 1930s, Foster, Raymond and Caniff were like master classes in draftmanship to such developing comics-artists as Sheldon Moldoff and the aforementioned Kubert.

What the great draftsmen had in common, despite all their different types of content, was what Nietzsche called "the art of the dream." One should probably specify that Apollonian art-talents guide their fantasies in what might be best termed "waking dreams," dreams guided to a semblance of representational reality. This aesthetic permeates Caniff's 20th-century Oriental adventure, Raymond's space opera, and both the jungle-adventure and Arthurian exploits of Foster.

Now, from the first of Capp's LI'L ABNER strips, comic caricature ruled all of the major characters: the Yokums, the aforeseen General Bullmoose, the jinx Joe Btfsplk, Lena the Hyena, Evil Eye Fleagle, and of course Capp's DICK TRACY spoof Fearless Fosdick. Even the one category of characters who are supposed to be physically desirable-- the many hot girls of ABNER-- tend to be pneumatically stupendous, even Amazonian, in nature.

Now, the earliest TRACY strips, while not as accomplished as the Big Three in terms of actual draftmanship, might be perceived as being fairly representational in nature. However, by the late thirties Gould was investing more energy in developing his rogue's gallery of freakish fiends, as well as upping the *intoxicating* effects of ultraviolence and emphasizing stark use of black and white in the non-Sunday strips. (For that matter the Sunday color strips favored simple, primary colors rather than a graduated color-palette.) Gould didn't share Capp's enthusiasm for busty women-- most of his good-looking women, like Tess Truehart above, are ordinary types-- but he does seem to use a fair number of female grotesques, just like Capp.  

Assuming I've made my case that Gould and Capp were dominantly caricaturists, does it follow that they were "Dionysians" as well? Not necessarily. But in practice, I believe that even though Gould was doing adventure (with barely any humor) while Capp was doing comedy, and usually spoofing adventure-tropes (like death-traps), both of them tapped into The Wellspring of what Paglia calls "energy, ecstasy, hysteria, promiscuity, emotionalism — heedless indiscriminateness of idea or practice." Capp may seem to be mocking "emotionalism" while Gould is fully invested in his melodramatic tropes. But Capp was never a deep intellectual, or even a pseudo-intellectual. He clearly loved designing grotesques just as much as Gould did and found a way to exploit that penchant through comedy.

I have not read as many works by Foster, Raymond, and Caniff as I have of those by Gould and Capp. Still, from what I have read, I see hardly any grotesques in the Big Three Draftsmen. All three build up the glamorousness of the regular female characters-- with Caniff's "Dragon Lady" becoming a trope for "dangerous female" all by herself. But the glamour-girls of the Big Three were somewhere between Gould's mildly pretty women and Capp's anticipations of the Russ Meyer aesthetic. The draftsmen generally align with Paglia's description of Apollonian creativity harnessed for the delectations of the conscious dream: "Apollo is the hard, cold separation of western personality and categorical thought." 

Comic books, aimed at children, were not that invested in the distinctions of western personality, as embodied by chivalric knights or spacefaring crusaders. Many of the superhero artists of the early Golden Age emulated the draftmanship approach of the Big Three, though they frequently injected grotesques that were more typical of the caricaturists. In fact, the BATMAN strip began developing its cast of freak-villains a little before Chester Gould had fully committed to giving Dick Tracy more and more bizarre antagonists. 

I'm tempted to theorize that the Dionysian art-method allows creators to tap deeper creative energies than does the Apollonian method, while the reverse is true with respect to organizing material into coherent narratives. And that's a good place to leave this line of thought until next year.
                                   

  

 

 

 

 

NEAR MYTHS: [LI'L ADAM"], THE SPIRIT (1947)

 This seven-page SPIRIT strip, dubbed "Li'l Adam" in reprints, was one of many clever parodies Will Eisner produced in the postwar period. "Adam" is arguably somewhat mythic in terms of one narrative commenting upon the underlying propositions of other strips. 

Following an establishing page, the hero, preparing to leave on a fishing trip, is forced to return to the crimefighting grind when Al Slapp, creator of the popular "Li'l Adam" hillbilly-humor strip, is severely injured by an unknown assailant. The manager of Slapp's syndicate helpfully implicates two other comic-strip rivals of Slapp: Elmer Hay (Harold Gray) and Hector Ghoul (Chester Gould). The manager also mentions a "Maggie Malone," but as I'll discuss later, there was good reason that both Eisner and the Spirit did not pursue that particular quarry.

   Page 3 establishes one of Eisner's main conceits: all of the suspect-artists both look like, and hang out with, characters from the strips being parodied. Thus Elmer Hay, creator of the "Little Homeless Brenda" strip looks like Daddy Warbucks of "Little Orphan Annie," and has in his company doppelgangers for Annie's dog Sandy and Warbucks' Hindu aide Punjab. (Annie/Brenda is represented by a drawing on the wall.) After dispatching the minor threat of Punjab, the Spirit learns from Hay that he had no reason to attack Slapp, because "Adam" has so outpaced "Brenda" that the older strip only excites interest in the public whenever Slapp skewers the orphan-girl.   

The Spirit then seeks out the low-rent apartment of Harold Ghoul, who looks just like Dick Tracy, while in a flashback Slapp is seen to look roughly like Li'l Abner. Ghoul spins an even sadder tale of woe, telling the hero how he poured his heart and love into the exploits of hero-cop Nick Stacy-- only to see Slapp's parody, "Fearful Fooznick," reduce the heroic policeman to a publishing non-entity. The distraught artist tries to take his own life and is knocked out by the Spirit-- but by the time Slapp has emerged from his coma at some hospital, the Spirit has doped out that the syndicate manager tried to kill Slapp for reasons also related to economic disadvantage. For an end-joke Slapp gets clocked by a dead ringer for Li'l Abner's pappy, albeit a Pappy who's got bodybuilder-muscles like his "son."

I took these images from this extant but discontinued site. The comments-section contains some interesting speculation, that Eisner probably intended this story to be part of a phony "artist-feud" between him and Capp-- but if so, Capp never reciprocated by spoofing the Spirit. Other respondents mention that Capp also participated in a "phony feud" with Allen Saunders of "Mary Worth," and that Capp also spoofed "Peanuts" in addition to "Dick Tracy." However, the most consequential spoof in the history of "Li'l Abner" was Capp's attempt to spoof the popular novel GONE WITH THE WIND. Margaret Mitchell-- aka Eisner's "Maggie Malone"-- assailed Capp with so much legal firepower that, despite the law's protections of parody, the artist and his syndicate decided to discontinue the WIND parody, with Mammy Yokum explaining to the audience why the story would never be finished. Contrary to Eisner's pronouncement on Maggie Malone, Mitchell in real life had in fact shut down Capp's mockery and forced an independent syndicate to do her bidding. I'm sure in 1947 Eisner knew that Capp's mockery had nothing to do with Mitchell never writing another novel, since GONE WITH THE WIND was such a hit that not only was Mitchell made wealthy, she was unlikely to ever write anything that would not be overshadowed by that one big novel. But I doubt Mitchell ever read Eisner's toss-off joke-- and as one of the blog-respondents noted, Harold Gray probably took no notice of the fake feud.

     Perhaps less well known than the Eisner strip, however, was this "Hey Look" strip by Harvey Kurtzman, appearing one year after Eisner's strip. According to my recollection of a Kurtzman interview in COMICS JOURNAL, the artist, in addition to drawing assorted junky humor strips for Timely, got permission from Stan Lee-- who admired Kurtzman's turn of mind-- to do one-page, free-form humor strips under the title "Hey, Look." Usually there was almost no point to these strips from the creator of MAD Magazine (four years in Kurtzman's future). However, using a schtick not unlike MAD's habit of distorting the names of celebrities or characters for parodies, the unnamed speaker of this one-pager sticks the consonants "Shm" in front of every name evoked, beginning with "Shmill Shmeisner." There's not much question that the story Kurtzman is referencing is "Li'l Adam," though I doubt the majority of Timely's kid-readers knew what the monologist was talking about. They might have just barely grasped that "Shmill," whoever he was, had parodied Li'l Abner and Dick Tracy, which was true. Interestingly, Kurtzman does NOT mention "Shmeisner's" parody of Little Orphan Annie, though the figures of that strip would have been just as recognizable. 

Instead, Kurtzman makes it sound as if Chic Young's "Blondie" was somehow part of the mix. I don't think either Eisner or Capp ever parodied "Blondie." However, though I can't verify it from GCD, I have read somewhere that Kurtzman might have done some work for the Timely comic "Rusty," whose star "Rusty Rumple" was a knock-off of "Blondie Bumstead," complete with an idiot husband who was the series' goat. Whether Kurtzman worked on the "Rusty" strip or not, "Hey Look" also appeared in the "Rusty" comic, so Kurtzman had to be aware of the comic's existence. Maybe Kurtzman was implicating himself in the whole "knock-off/parody" concept-- though in 1948 he could hardly have guessed how dependent his own career would center upon parody.         

MYTHCOMICS: "ANIMAL CRACKERS" (ARCHIE GIANT SERIES #196, 1972)

 

I didn't have too much luck this month looking for my annual "Xmythcomic" until I just randomly decided to look through some online Archie Giants. I don't usually expect much if any mythicity in Archie stories, having said here that "I might not allow that the characters of ARCHIE function on any conceptual level, that they remain staunchly lateral and thus non-vertical in most of their adventures." Still, since I have found myth-stuff in other teen humor comics, so I thought an Archie mythcomic a mild possibility. I just wouldn't have thought it would be a Christmas comic.

It's also from Al Hartley, an ARCHIE artist who became a born-again Christian in the late 1960s. Supposedly he got into his religious crusade so much that his editors had to tell him to tamp it down. I'd seen a few stories into which Hartley worked Christian polemics, but I wasn't sure if he had the artistic ability to emphasize vision over dogma. Yet I was slightly impressed by a 1972 "near myth" in which Hartley tried to communicate a sacral attitude toward nature and American history.

"Animal Crackers" was printed the same year as the "Bus Fuss" story, and it draws upon a few aspects of Christian faith that I suppose a Christian might not consider "mythic" (except maybe for Jordan Peterson). There's a slight irony that the story is introduced by the character of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The character debuted in 1962 but only became part of the Archieverse seven years later, first by dint of getting an animated cartoon in 1969 and then graduating to her own title in 1971. This led to Sabrina getting a "giant" collection of stories like this one, though "Crackers" only gives her two panels of a "half-frame" story. Clad in a Santa-outfit, she gives the reader a quickie intro to the idea that animals also celebrate Christmas, and then promptly does a fast fade.  

So here begins the main conceit: it's the regular Archie characters, as animals. Archie, though not exactly a commanding presence in the comics, gets to be the Lion because he's the King of the Archie Universe. Jughead is a kangaroo who envies a pelican for his food storage capacity but doesn't appreciate being able to use his pouch for Xmas presents-- though this really doesn't have anything to do with the main point of the story.

So in quick succession most of the Archie characters get their beasts on: Moose the Gorilla, Reggie the Tiger (because the tiger is the lion's "rival"), Big Ethel the Giraffe, Dilton the Owl, and Veronica the Peacock. Strangely, Hartley leaves out any iteration of Veronica's rival Betty. Maybe it was a bit of conceptual strain to animal-ize any other females, since he doesn't draw Veronica as a female critter, but as a humanoid with a peacock-tail and bird-feet. But aside from some minor sex-jokes-- Big Ethel turns off all the boys while Veronica only has to "flutter her tail" to mesmerize the males-- nobody's doing much of anything, good or bad. So is Dilton going to excoriate the gamboling beast-people for not going to church?

  Yes-- and no. Lion Archie defends whatever games they've all supposedly been playing at the "Christmas party," because "Christmas is a sort of make-believe time." This ought to sound logical to most readers, juvenile and otherwise: isn't Xmas a festive time, to gambol about with friends and family?

However, Dilton does have a point beyond being a spoilsport. In the remaining two pages of the story, he sketches out a time before Christmas, when animals-- and, by extension, the humans they represent-- were ruled by "the law of the jungle." People ruled by that law fought all the time, governed only by the "survival of the fittest." (Not much love for Darwin here...) However, though without explicitly mentioning the birth of Christ, Dilton states that Christmas was responsible for introducing the current state of all creatures, able to appreciate one another despite any differences that might divide them. I hypothesize, though, that since Hartley's editors didn't want him proselytizing in the Archieverse, the artist chose not to invoke "the Prince of Peace" as such. Instead, he employed a cognate principle: that of Isaiah 11:6, in which "the wolf shall dwell with the lamb" (as opposed to the popular "lion and lamb" misquote). And though I'm agnostic (albeit with a Christian background), I have to appreciate the skillful way Hartley managed to communicate his feelings on the millennial nature of his faith with Aesopian version of the Archie cast and a fusion of the Christmas holiday with the vision of Isaiah.

I have to admit, though, that I still haven't found a myth-tale for those immortal kids of Riverdale in their own personas. But if I never find one, this is an adequate substitute.                 

THE LOVER, THE DILETTANTE, AND THE CLINICIAN

 For once the new terms I'm tossing out are not full-fledged aspects of my personal literary theory. They're just approximations of the different orientations I find in different creators. 

THE LOVER is the type of creator who finds something deeply important to him/her in whatever fictional narratives he/she encounters, and who seeks to reproduce those moving elements or tropes in his/her own works. That doesn't preclude working on projects that do not excite the Lover personally, but if the Lover has a sustained career, the Critic can usually see one or more favored tropes, often a "master trope," repeated again and again. As a kid Jack Kirby (born 1917) belonged to the first generation of American juveniles to be exposed to periodicals centered upon the still gestating genre of science fiction (beginning with AMAZING STORIES in 1926). The totality of SF-tropes, far more than the related tropes of horror and fantasy, became an endless resource for Kirby, and I would venture that his creative "master trope" was the ceaseless exploration of all the most famous sci-fi scenarios-- lost cities, prehistoric domains, alien worlds. I for one see this trope in everything from TUK, CAVEBOY to FANTASTIC FOUR to CAPTAIN VICTORY.

 THE DILETTANTE might sound like a putdown in comparison to the Lover, but it merely signifies that the creator in question didn't become strongly cathected to a particular theme or trope. From what I've read, Stan Lee probably enjoyed the SF/adventure pulps of his time as much as did Kirby, but I don't see any particular trope from any particular genre looming large in Lee's oeuvre. That doesn't mean that he didn't have particular tropes that he used again and again, only that he used them more for professional convenience, rather than for personal expression. I might argue, hypothetically, that over time Lee became invested in using the trope of "the suffering savior" that one can find in his fifties SF-stories (like this one) on through SPIDER-MAN and SILVER SURFER. But I can't really claim that trope dominates his work anymore than that of the "quarreling best buddies" trope I see in pairings from "Millie and Chili" to "Ben and Johnny."

For THE CLINICIAN I cheated on my categories a little, for my initial example is Timely/Atlas publisher Martin Goodman, who was not to my knowledge a creator of any kind. However, the ALTER EGO article referenced establishes that at times he did show a rough, if not always correct, instinct about what sort of stories would prove popular with his target audience. Of course, Goodman is most famous for indiscriminately flooding newsstands with quickly produced titles, purely to grab shelf-space, so it's fair to say that he didn't make many, if any, decisions based on what moved him personally. I call him a Clinician because I see in him a clinical attitude toward creative efforts. 

       

But of course I can find many more examples of all three types in all media. Michael Carreras, who wrote and directed several movies for Hammer Films (founded by his father James), strikes me as another Clinician. I've never read a biography of MC, but from looking over the movies he did before and after the birth of Hammer horror, I get the sense that he like Goodman just went with the flow most if not all the time. In my review of THE CURSE OF THE MUMMY'S TOMB, I took note of how he used a complex Egyptian myth-tale for no better purpose than to make one more mummy-movie. A Clinician type of creator can produce exemplary work, though in Carreras's case, CURSE and the risible PREHISTORIC WOMEN are probably at the top of his creative roster.

In line with some of my recent ruminations on LOST, I tend to think that some of its blown potential stemmed from the different creative types involved. In the early seasons, I might have believed that head honcho J.J. Abrams to be a Lover ensorcelled by a multitude of tantalizing tropes. But exposure to his work on the STAR TREK and STAR WARS franchises showed me that he was at best a Dilettante. Had he remained active in guiding the six seasons of LOST, the show still might have emerged as a media landmark. But the producers to whom he relegated LOST were in my estimation just Clinicians with not much skill at keeping the tone and content consistent-- which is why, in this month's LOST essay, I said that the only way I could analyze the program would be to go armed with both a "good shit" detector and a "bad shit" detector-- or words to that effect.        

TO BE HULK-KORRECTED

 Useless boomer-kid recollection #337: back in the Silver Age of Comics, a few HULK comics, upon ending on a cliffhanger, would end with the goofy phrase, "To Be Hulk-inued." Hence, my title.

So on the CRIVENS blog, I was talking with Kid on a response-thread about the evolution of the HULK comic in the sixties. I wished I could have found a certain old article by Will Murray, in which he discussed the Hulk's sixties career in detail. But not only did I not remember where it appeared, I was briefly on a listserve with Murray, and when I asked him where he'd done the piece, even HE did not recall. So I did my own quickie history of the period of the Hulk's career in between the cancellation of his own title and his getting a berth in TALES TO ASTONISH.

So HULK 6 is dated March 63. It's roughly 7 months later that Stan and Jack have Hulk join the Avengers. Two months after that, they do a callback to FF#3, where the Torch splits from his group--- but the guys keep things unpredictable. Not does the Hulk not rejoin the super-group, he becomes an ally of a Public Enemy, the Sub-Mariner, in AVENGERS 3. (That by itself might've got the pardon revoked.) But after #3, Hulk-- still more or less "Tough-Guy Hulk"-- doesn't do much of anything. The Avengers supposedly keep looking for him but somehow don't manage to cross paths with Greenie until FF #25-26, starting in April 64. Was Stan thinking about launching the TTA series even back then, which began in Oct 64? In the FF stories, I might argue that Hulk is more obsessive than he is in the "Tough Guy" stories, getting into a massive snit because his kid-partner has supposedly started hanging out with the WWII living legend. SPIDEY 14 follows two months later, which also might be advance publicity for the TTA series. One issue before the Hulk officially gets his own berth, he also fights Giant-Man in Sept 64, suggesting to me that Stan may've thought that even though Greenjeans had been cancelled before, he still couldn't do worse than Gi/Ant-Man. And from here, it looks like Stan's policy of farming the Hulk out in various features built up reader curiosity about him, improving TTA's sales enough to jettison Henry Pym-- who certainly went on to a better class of stories once he rejoined the Avengers than he'd ever had in his own title.

17 December 2025 at 16:51

All the dates are correct, but I'm not sure I was correct about the Hulk-promotion being Stan Lee's idea. ALTER EGO #60 (2020) contains an overview of the career of Timely/Atlas/Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, and in the course of said overview, author Will Murray (him again) paraphrases an unsourced Ditko quote:    

Circa 1964, Steve Ditko recalled Lee telling him that Goodman directed him to revive three underutilized characters, the Hulk, Sub-Mariner, and the old pulp hero Ka-Zar. Lee gave Ditko his choice of which to work on...    

Now, I absolutely believe that Ditko quoted what he recalled Lee saying. That doesn't necessarily mean that Lee was accurately reporting what Goodman had told him, though there would seem to be no obvious reason to prevaricate on the subject of his boss's commands. So Goodman probably said something along those lines.

At the same time, the overview gives evidence that Goodman only intermittently interacted with editor Lee about the operation of Goodman's comics-line, so the statement seems a little anomalous. All we know, as crusty old fans, is that Goodman's bottom line was always whether or not he could make a comic temporarily popular, preferably by following a trend or imitating a show from a more mainstream medium.

So I'll break down the three characters Lee mentioned to Ditko.

What would have prompted Goodman to stump for more Sub-Mariner exposure? By early 1964 Namor had become a regular featured player in FANTASTIC FOUR for about two years and had appeared in various other Marvel comics. Still, I don't get any sense of a huge fannish demand for a new SUB-MARINER comic, and not until 1965 does Namor displace Giant-Man in TTA. It does make one wonder if Stan would have put Namor, rather than Hulk, into TTA had Ditko said he wanted to draw the sea prince.

Why Ka-Zar? Unlike Namor, the jungle man hadn't been anything but a backup feature in Golden Age comics, and even his own pulp had only lasted three issues. But maybe in 1964 Goodman looked around at the still popular Tarzan movies, and at the Dell/Gold Key comics for the character, so the publisher just thought Ka-Zar could coattail on his inspiration. That at least might explain why Ka-Zar started showing up as an occasional guest star in DAREDEVIL-- though the first of the DD appearances didn't occur until late 1965.   

The Hulk is a little odd, though, because his only comic had not sold well. One possible motive might be that Hammer Films was still producing Frankenstein films in the early 1960s, and maybe Goodman thought kids would still buy HULK comics because he looked like the Monster. As I said, Stan almost certainly made the decision to stick the cancelled colossus into the AVENGERS in late 1963, and then to have Greenskin depart the super-group in the second issue. But the only result of Hulk's defection is that he teams up with Sub-Mariner in AVENGERS #3 (dated Jan 64), and when that coalition breaks up, the Hulk wanders off and not much happens to him until the FF issues (dated April 64). 

So if the Hulk's appearances in FF and SPIDER-MAN were meant as advance hype for the TTA series, dated for October of that year, that only gives Lee roughly three months to start pouring on the juice for the Hulk, maybe to make sure that Greenie's second shot at stardom would get every chance to succeed-- which it did. Another alternate explanation for Goodman's Hulk-positivity could just be that AVENGERS #3 sold really well and the publisher wanted to jump on that success. I don't think for a moment that Goodman would have cared about the character for any reason but that of sales potential. But Stan could still have made the decision to take things slow and build up the Hulk's profile in Marvel's best sellers, because he appreciated the Hulk's dramatic potential and thought he could do good, profitable stories with the character.   

The only other nugget from the ALTER EGO piece is a mention that when 1950s Goodman found out about an impending WYATT EARP TV show, he had Lee launch an EARP comic that came out a few months before the show hit the airwaves. This sounds a little counter-intuitive, trying to coattail on a show that hasn't appeared yet. But apparently Goodman did the same thing with Atlas' YELLOW CLAW feature, which also appeared on stands a month or two before the airing of the ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU teleseries.

THE READING RHEUM: SUNDIVER (1980) and STARTIDE RISING (1983)

 

David Brin enjoyed a pretty strong breakout in the early 80s. It's been said that his "Uplift Trilogy" conferred the fan-term "uplift" on a standard SF-trope: that of superior aliens using genetic manipulation and breeding techniques to transform non-sapient beings into fully sapient entities. The second book in the series, STARTIDE RISING, won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. The third. THE UPLIFT WAR, failed to win a Nebula but won awards from Hugo and Locus.

But the first book in the series, which was also Brin's first published novel? Well--

I must note that the Uplift Trilogy is a discontinuous series, sharing a common universe but no continuing characters, so far as I know. SUNDIVER is implicitly centuries in Earth's future, when humans have made contact with assorted aliens ("Eatees"), some of whom are "patron races" have uplifted "client races" into sapience. Earthpeople are something of a scandal to other Eatees, because humans evolved to sapience without a patron. However, Earth-tech did at some point advance to the point that humans could "uplift" semi-intelligent animals, mainly chimps and dolphins, to co-equal stature. SUNDIVER's main character is a scientist involved with uplift procedures, though we don't see him doing his specialty. 

Instead, Jacob Denwa, because of his relationship with some of the friendly Eatees. gets invited to join a crew of humans and Eatees on a ship, the Sundiver. This vessel journeys to the periphery of Sol itself, to study what seem to be sentient "Sun Ghosts" dwelling in the midst of the solar orb. Sounds like a "blazing" good time, right?

Sadly, SUNDIVER is not an enthralling investigation of a new form of life, but rather, what might best be called a "locked ship mystery." In this situation, a group of passengers on a vessel are confined in each other's company, only to find that there are one or more parties aboard who have insidious or ulterior motives. In fact, the novel even has a wrap-up chapter in which one of the "detectives" sums up, in the best Scooby Doo manner, how the culprit attempted to perpetrate "the hoax of the anthropomorphic Ghosts."    

Since I mildly enjoyed Brin's later novel THE POSTMAN and plan to read the second UPLIFT book, I think SUNDIVER was mostly just an excuse for Brin to set up his conceptual universe, not to tell a compelling story. The characters are two-dimensional and not all that consistent, and Brin injects some modern political content that dates the novel somewhat. Early in the novel, Denwa describes in glowing terms how Eatees on Earth have turned some humans out of their own cities, which is not universally a good thing in the 2020s. There's a political debate about whether or not Earthpeople might've been covertly uplifted by some unknown patron, but this has no resolution and is merely an excuse to motivate a couple of those parties with ulterior motives. 

SUNDIVER offered a quick and easy introduction to the Uplift universe, but it's pretty thin stuff overall. 

ADDENDUM: The following week I read the second book in the Uplift Saga, STARTIDE RISING, and though it won both a Hugo and Nebula, I found RISING worse than SUNDIVER. Both books are afflicted to "univocal-itis," that authorial disease that causes all of a writer's characters to sound the same. The book badly needed a strong villain, or group of villains, to make the reader care about what happened to the good guys. Without one, all I saw was a bunch of pseudo-Heinlein smart-talk, some of which was being spouted by conceited dolphins in a sort of phony-baloney image-language.         

LOST, IN THE MAIL

 Posted on CHFB.

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So no one, including me, has added to this LOST TV show thread since the program went off the air. Similarly, the last time I blogged about LOST was also 2010. I've thought about doing a rewatch, but it has always seemed too daunting. I wonder if others here, who got something out of the show (albeit maybe not total satisfaction) have ever done partial rewatches (as I have), or if it's just too much trouble. 

Today I had the notion that the only way to approach LOST, lo these 15 years later, would be to go in armed with two instruments: (1) a profundity detector, and (2) a BS detector. Because whenever I think of the show, I think of some ideas that were incredibly profound, ad others that-- were just thrown into the narrative "fire" to keep the pot boiling. 

Now, I've done series-rewatches for whole shows before-- Classic TREK, BATMAN, KUNG FU. But in traditional episodic shows, it's usually easy to separate the good episodes from the bad episodes. In a show with a soap opera structure, it's a lot harder to separate good from bad, because everything in the narrative flows together.

Maybe before attempting the monster that is LOST, I need to find something roughly similar, but not as overwhelming in terms of the sheer number of characters and incidents. 

ADDENDUM: Here's a quickie example of detected BS. Many LOST characters are named for famed philosophers or scientists, but how often did the names signify anything beyond ntriguing nerd-viewers? The "immortal man" Richard Alpert was given the birth-name of the 20th-century yoga popularizer Ram Dass. Why? Possibly just because the Hindu name "Ram Dass" means "servant of God," and that's what fictional Alpert was to Jacob. But did the name mean anything else in Alpert's overall story-arc? No, so what small meaning it might have had devolves to relative bullshit.