Hello all! I hope the approaching holiday season (in much of the world, including mine) finds you having a good time or at least a solid rest. I’m doing fine. Reading away, immersing my mind in the most mysterious past of all: the proximate one. And doing recreational reading, too… to keep the mind limber. Today, I’ve got a link to the podcast I sent out last week for those who missed it and a rundown/celebration of this year’s Mithra Award winners! And, for all the Ed Heads out there, a fresh new Ed’s Corner. Enjoy!
PODCAST
My friend Quentin helped get me back into the podcast groove! We discussed scifi giant Robert A. Heinlein- his heroes, his dreams, his… odd ideas, especially in the context of what might be his magnum opus (at least, from the perspective of Heinlein himself), Time Enough For Love. Quentin and I don’t come away loving his work, but respecting that he at least provides us with something to talk about, more than can be said for many duller, respectable types…
https://open.substack.com/pub/peterberard/p/reading-in-the-time-of-monsters-014
MITHRA AWARDS
This is my second year doing the Mithra Awards! I very much enjoyed, when I read a book over the course of the year, mulling over whether it “belonged in the conversation” for a Mithra Award. I no longer work for a 3D printing company, but some friends who do helped me out with some of the printing. I think they came out pretty good! I might score a cheap 3D printer (companies other than my former employer make some pretty neat-looking inexpensive ones!) so I can print them out myself in future.
Without further ado…
NON-FICTION WINNERS
Best “We Live/They Live in a Society” Book: Rick Emerson, Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries (2022)! Man, this was a fun book. A close contender to win Best Nonfiction. And I had a great time talking to John Dolan about it on my podcast. Literary fraud, drugs, Mormons… what else do you need in a book?
Best Work of Criticism, Philosophy, or Theory: Jordan Carroll, Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (2021)! Highly toothsome, provocative work in the vein I plan on working myself for the next long while.
Best Work of US History: Malcolm Harris, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023)! I know he annoys people online. He annoys me online sometimes! And in the conclusion of this book. But damn if he did not bring serious archival, analytic, and writing chops to this big chunk of historical writing. It is not to be denied.
Best Work of World History: Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud: Volume II, The Tender Passion (1986)! I’ve come to enjoy Peter Gay’s work more and more as time has gone on, even if I’m not much closer to agreeing with all his perspectives – a sort of gentle, social democratic skepticism towards radicalism and more use of psychoanalysis in history that I’d recommend – on the strength of his erudition and grace of thought and expression. If “humanist” is an insult to you, Peter Gay might help remedy that.
Best Work of Non-Fiction: Jose Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (1975)! I’m going to write more about this in a later review, regarding what it is bringing to my own efforts to write about the historical structure of Generation X. Needless to say, its sophistication and power proved both intimidating and inspiring.
FICTION WINNERS
Best work of 4H (Horror, Humor, Historical, and/or Hombres (Westerns)) Fiction: Maurice Druon, Accursed Kings novels (1955-1960)! These novels by a French writer and homme de lettres got rereleased with a lot of fanfare because George RR Martin said they helped inspire the Game of Thrones series. To my mind, that’s the best thing that series has done- bring these highly enjoyable, dramatic, at times funny, novels of 14th century France to higher prominence.
Best Crime/Spy/Thriller Fiction: Candice Wuehle, Monarch (2022)! I don’t like the word “mindfuck,” and in casting around for an alternative to describe this thriller about child beauty queen sleeper cell assassins (and a lot more), I came up with one I like- it’s “heady,” as in, you feel the impact in the head, as well as appreciate it in the mind. If there’s a book I’d encourage general readers to go out and read among these, it would be this one.
Best Science Fiction/Fantasy Fiction: Octavia Butler, Kindred (1979)! Got this classic in this year. I don’t have a ton to say about Butler that hasn’t been said already (though I worry she’s being made into a plaster saint by some). Historical slavery presents as many horrors that reach into the intimate spaces of the heart as anything based in the present or future.
Best Literary Fiction: Lu Xun, The True Story of Ah-Q: Collected Fiction (1936)! This was a pretty good year for literary fiction for me, I gotta say (historical fiction too! Crime and scifi a little less so, though with some highlights). But Lu Xun’s stories of republican-era China had to take the Mithra for their wit, humanity, and sentimentality. Another I’d strongly recommend to most readers!
Best Fiction: John Williams, Stoner (1965)! The competition was fierce, but I had to hand it to “the perfect novel,” as some put it. I don’t know if I’d say it’s not perfect, but I’d rather call it something else: great. Just a human story, rooted in a time and place, extraordinarily well-told.
Well done, all! See you at the Mithras this time next year!
ED’S CORNER: How To Squash A Spider & A Phoned-In Year End Listicle
I’m still working my way through the transitionary intellectual property movies that came out this summer: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, The Barbie Movie, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie. I’ve seen them all, but by misfortune I started writing about the Dungeons & Dragons movie first, and the film’s place in the universe of intellectual property went and got complicated by the release of the smash hit computer roleplaying game Baldur’s Gate 3, which uses the Dungeons & Dragons rule set as the backbone of its mechanics. Of course, I had to give that a try and see how it has impacted the franchise, at least in the short term. It is definitely going to change the landscape of Dungeons & Dragons as a cultural and intellectual property. I’ve mostly gotten my head around it, except just recently there’s a new wrinkle: there have been massive layoffs at Wizards of the Coast, the company that produces Dungeons & Dragons, despite the fact that they’ve been highly profitable. This happened largely due to their parent company, Hasbro, taking a bath on this year’s less than stellar toy sales. But, it also points toward some systemic problems with the business model that we’ll get to in our next article, I promise.
In the meantime, I thought I’d fit an Ed’s Corner into my busy holiday schedule by adopting something I was riffing about with some friends of mine a few weeks ago into article form, as it’s mostly an easy to digest (and produce): a listicle. As a preamble, my friends and I were talking about Spider-Man, and what exactly makes a good Spider-Man villain. Incidentally, Spider-Man as a franchise is experiencing a lot of the same elements endemic to the transition involved in moving from a creative property to an intellectual property. Both the Spiderverse series of movies, and developer Naughty Dog’s videogame franchise, have parallels to the movie and video game releases in the Dungeons & Dragons transition. That said, there are enough differences where it’d be more trouble to compare them in article form rather than gesturing broadly at both and saying “something to consider,” before moving on to the topic at hand. One of the main reasons the two properties, Spiderman and Dungeons & Dragons, are not directly comparable, is that while Dungeons & Dragons is a fairly open set of narrative elements, the form and function of any given Spider-Man is fairly locked in. While there’s a broad range of what can happen in any given Spider-Man story, it can’t accommodate literally anything that anyone can imagine as sometimes Dungeons & Dragons must do in order to account for player autonomy. The narrative conventions of Spider-Man as a literary endeavor are fixed and well defined enough that clear patterns start to emerge, and can be analyzed such that elements within any given Spider-Man story can be talked about in terms of being in conflict with the general structure of a work of literature specifically within the genre of Spider-Man comics.
To be clear, what I mean is that the general category of Spider-Man has enough literary structure to it that you can half-derive a Joseph-Campbell-style mono-mythical structure specific to works within the category of Spider-Man media. Let’s give an example of this analysis to demonstrate my meaning. Spider-man is a high value character, and there’s often a high demand for comics which feature him, and a superhero he has to have something to do, which is most often fight costumed villains. While Spider-Man does have a very well regarded roster of classic villains, Marvel has had to pump out enough Spider-Man stories that more and more new villains have to be introduced for the sake of variety, and to try and add something new for Spider-Man to do. Most of these new villains don’t catch on, Spider-Man’s roster of villains has stayed fairly consistent since the early days with staples like Doctor Octopus, the Green Goblin, and the Rhino being established early and sticking around until present, so you might assume that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko got to all of the good ideas early, or that the popular Spider-Man villains are popular solely due to nostalgia, and that there’s really no room to cram another villain in the roster. Surprisingly, that’s not the case. Every so often a new villain does break into the roster: Venom came in during the 80’s, and a good chunk of the plot of the two new Spider-Man video games hangs on a recently popular Spider-Man Villain named Mr. Negative, who I think has a good chance of sticking around as a staple of the rogues gallery despite his recency.
I don’t think the success or failure of any given Spider-Man villain is mere chance. There are elements to their characters that can be analyzed for their appropriateness to the structure of a Spider-Man story. Let’s look at Mr. Negative as an example. He appears to be a selfless philanthropist in his public persona, but he has a Jekyll and Hyde thing going on where he sometimes transforms into a photo negative version of himself who’s a monster with crazy shadow powers that warps the environment around him in weird ways, and who creates tendrils of negative energy. He can use his crazy shadow powers to infect people with his photo-negativity, after which they become his brainwashed goons who wear kabuki masks and act as his enforcers. Now, this is just a list of characteristics. Any hack comic writer can just list off some cool powers for a guy to have and throw him at Spider-Man. In fact, many do exactly that. This may have even been the case for Mr. Negative, and his success as a villain could be entirely unintentional, but this constellation of characteristics has all the necessary qualities for a good Spider-Man villain, which are as follows:
Contrasts With or Runs Parallel To the Peter Parker Persona - Mr. Negative, in his public persona as Martin Li is a man of wealth, who seemingly does good in his community without resorting to costumed theatrics. He’s financially secure and an acknowledged benefit to his community, both things Peter Parker stands to be envious of.
Representation of Emotional Stakes - Mr. Negative’s whole schtick is that even though part of him wants to do good for others, he very literally makes others worse for having known him. Peter Parker as Spider-Man is forever worrying that his activities as Spider-man bring harm to the people in his life to a greater degree than how much he helps, and thus Mr. Negative serves as an obvious manifestation of this emotional struggle.
A Power Set That Challenges Spider-Man In Interesting Ways - Let’s set aside Mr. Negative’s ability to manufacture an army of goons, having a bunch of henchmen isn’t really an interesting attribute for a villain in itself. However, Mr. Negative’s ability to manifest shadow projections often come in the form of drastic changes to the environment, which Spider-Man must use his acrobatic web swinging abilities to transverse to come to blows with Mr. Negative.
Now, there are multiple axes by which a villain can be made a suitable foe for Spider-Man, and they can achieve this suitability to a greater or lesser extent. Arch-villains like the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus score very highly because their scientific prowess overlaps with the interests of Peter Parker, they both represent the irresponsible use of power which Peter often agonizes over emotionally, and finally they both have the ability to have interesting fights with Peter in three dimensional spaces accessible to Spider-Man’s webswinging by zipping around on their Goblin Glider or clambering over buildings using their mechanical arms, respectively. You don’t need to score full marks on every villain. Mid-level Spider-Man villain the Shocker has stuck around in the cast for years despite having only middling to low scores in all three categories, but, importantly, he does dip his toe into all three. His gimmick is that he’s a work-a-day super villain, who mostly just does jobs for the money, and similar financial concerns often loom large in Peter Parker’s life. The Shocker is selfish, often representing the temptation for Spider-Man to use his abilities for personal gain rather than in selfless heroics. Finally, while the Shocker is mostly ground bound, and can’t really keep up with Spider-Man’s webswinging, his sonic blasts can at least harass Spider-Man at range, and he’s occasionally shown to use the sonic equipment in his suit to baffle Spider-Man’s Spider Sense to get the drop on him. The Shocker doesn’t stand out in any of the qualifying dimensions of Spiderman antagonism, but he clears the bar by enough so that Shocker doesn’t feel incongruent with the structure of a Spider-Man story.
Many other one off villains that serve as just grab bags of powers that the writers decided to throw at Spider-Man don’t hit these qualities in any meaningful way, and tend to slide out of the continuity never to be used again. Sometimes, in doing the hack writer equivalent of throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, a character will successfully fill out enough of these categories to stick around in some capacity. But, fans sometimes wonder why these characters aren’t more successful as Spider-man villains, when a quick analysis on how well they meet the characteristics I outline shows, in a general sense, why they don’t work. Now, there are also systemic reasons why better Spider-Man villains aren’t being created. One major reason is that the work-for-hire nature of comics writing makes a situation where writers will get next to nothing in the way of residuals for the characters they create for big name intellectual property books like Spider-Man. This means it’s just really isn’t worth it for them to create new IP when they can just keep recycling old characters. But from time to time over the years writers do take a crack at creating new Spider-Man villains, and by and large they miss wildly, when there’s a ready formula that exists within the text to build one out.
The field of Spider-narativology is by no means limited to the analysis of villains. While you can’t exactly break down all Spider-Man comics into a monomyth, The Hero With A Thousand Faces-style, you can recognize a series of archetypal story frameworks that are repeated in broad cycles throughout the ongoing continuity of Spider-Man stories, which is where our low effort end of year listicle comes in. In no particular order, I present the basic plot archetypes that comprise the canon of Spider-Man literature:
Aunt May is in serious condition at the hospital while a villain is on the loose.
Spider-Man is late for a date because he ran across a villain of his robbing either a bank or an armored car enroute to meet his date.
Some guy who is either dressed like Spider-Man, or just bears even a passing resemblance to Spider-Man from a distance, commits a crime and now the cops are out to put Spider-Man behind bars.
J. Jonah Jameson uses the bully pulpit of his media holdings to antagonize a villain, and now much to Spider-Man’s chagrin, he must keep that loud mouth safe.
The Scorpion fights Spider-Man within a confined space, often the inside of a water tower, and Spider-Man does not think to leave that confined space in favor of somewhere where his powers would be more advantageous.
A middle aged to older gentleman with a haircut that can only be described as unfortunate builds one, or several, robots and now that’s Spider-Man’s problem for some reason.
Mysterio impersonates a psychiatrist for no discernible purpose.
Peter Parker quits being Spider-Man, but the threat posed by a villain brings him back to the role.
Some mysterious new player in the criminal underworld is moving to consolidate all of New York’s gangs under their control, and Spider-Man takes it upon himself to stop that from happening.
With control of New York’s gangs radically unconsolidated by the interference of Spider-Man, there’s now a gang war on that brings havoc to the city.
A writer remembers how cool the X-Men crossover event “Inferno” was back in the day, and has a bunch of demons show up in New York City just to take another crack at it.
A mysterious mastermind is putting an elaborate conspiracy into place to enact its master plan. The mastermind will ultimately be revealed to be either Doctor Octopus, or if at first it appears to be someone other than Doc Ock, the real mastermind will several years later turn out to be Norman Osborn the Green Goblin, even if that doesn’t make any sense.
Doc Ock commits a blatant crime to steal some science whatzit, and is beaten by Spider-Man and sent to jail. Half the time this is an intentional misdirect to cover for the fact that he’s currently acting as the mysterious mastermind who is putting together an elaborate conspiracy.
Spider-Man stops a super villain from stealing one particular item from an unusually specific museum exhibit.
Peter Parker is broke as hell for several issues.
The Vulture is either out for revenge or was some sort of wacky contraption that will make him young again.
Dr. Curt Connors has turned back into the Lizard and Spider-Man has to go fish him out of the sewers of New York.
One of Peter Parker’s co-workers is either blackmailed, kidnapped, or otherwise mixed up with exactly the same gang of criminals that Spider-Man has been chasing as of late.
A new character to the Marvel line-up has a crossover with Spider-Man either directly before, or directly after, they have a crossover with Wolverine depending on which books are currently selling better, to promote them as a character. The plot of the crossover is of no consequence.
A crime boss foolishly hires Doctor Octopus to serve as a technical specialist in order to complete some elaborate plan to eliminate Spider-Man, only for Doctor Octopus to usurp his operation at the last moment.
Venom shows up, and symbiote bullshit becomes basically the only thing going on for the next several issues.
There is some manner of dramatic revelation about either a dead relative of Peter Parker’s, either his mother and father, or Uncle Ben, or it is revealed he has a secret living relation he wasn’t currently aware of, that for some reason gets Spider-Man mixed up with some spy stuff where the main bad guy behind all of the cloak and dagger stuff accidentally blows himself up at the end.
A new formulation of the Sinister Six gets together.
Spider-Man is swinging around New York when the Hobgoblin flies into frame on his Goblin Glider and then starts throwing pumpkin bombs at him. What more story do you need?
An early villain that another Marvel hero eventually sort of outscaled in terms of power filters his way down to Spider-Man’s level and it turns out to be a difficult challenge for Spider-Man.
Spider-Man must trick the Rhino into running into one particular load bearing wall/electrical substation transformer/other member of the Sinister Six.
Kraven the Hunter has a very poorly articulated plan to antagonize Spider-Man that ultimately ends in a confrontation at either the Bronx Zoo, a collection of natural sciences specimens like taxidermied animals or fossilized remains, or a graveyard. At some point either Spider-Man or Kraven or both will be either trapped in a net, or locked in an animal cage.
The Black Cat shows up for just so long as they can tease out some sexual tension, then falls out of the story for several months when they can’t think of anything else to do with her.
Doctor Octopus needs to steal a rare mineral to power a science weapon of some kind, and if he has to ruin Spider-Man’s entire life in the process of stealing it, so much the better.
The Green Goblin, either Norman or Harry Osborn, somehow deduces Spider-Man’s secret identity and embarks on a campaign to destroy Peter Parker’s life that culminates in a confrontation that ends up with the Green Goblin getting amnesia and forgetting that he’s the Green Goblin and Peter Parker is Spider-Man.
The Green Goblin overcomes their amnesia and comes after Spider-Man for revenge.
Some crime boss either discovers or hires a never before seen superpowered individual with nearly incontestable super powers that they instantly decide to use as a means of killing Spider-Man rather than exploiting these incredible powers to achieve more mundane ends such as cornering the transportation market because this guy can teleport from one end of the globe to the other instantly.
A powered individual is coerced into fighting Spider-Man through something like a brain control chip, or an abducted sibling, or just via some grand deception, and Spider-Man has to help them get out from under the control of their evil manipulator, after which Spider-Man leaves them on friendly terms.
Several years after that powered individual is freed from coercion, another writer remembers them being cool for Spider-Man to fight, and just brings them back as a villain, forgetting their previous motivations and relationship with Spider-Man.
Spider-Man’s radioactive spider DNA becomes unstable, and he has to get some science stuff or turn into a spider monster.
Some kind of science or mystical something or other happens and creates a creature that while it isn’t technically a vampire out of folklore, is for all intents and purposes functionally indistinguishable from a vampire, and Spider-Man has to deal with it because I guess Blade was busy that night.
The Chameleon is being sneaky.
A bunch of different movers and shakers in New York’s underworld all want one particular macguffin and recruit several of Spider-Man’s villains to serve as muscle to acquire it, somehow catching Spider-Man in the crossfire.
Spider-Man crosses over with the X-Men and has a lot of interesting chemistry and interactions with the assembled cast, but both of their editorial schedules are too full that the threads in this crossover aren’t really developed.
Spider-Man lifts a very heavy thing.
I’m not really talking much about the new Miles Morales Spider-Man, he’s different enough that he doesn’t necessarily fit within this framework, but give him time to build up a canon, and similar shapes can be drawn about his adventures. In the meantime, enjoy your holidays and I’ll see you in the new year.