Classic Comics: Thoughts from 1997

Most people think they know what comics are: “crude, poorly drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare” in the words of Scott McCloud in his groundbreaking 1993 work Understanding Comics. Recognising this to be a ridiculously narrow, not to mention subjective, definition, McCloud set out to discredit it. Starting from Will Eisner’s description of comics as “sequential art”, McCloud eventually reached a far more precise and comprehensive definition of comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer.”

Having seen McCloud demonstrate how things as diverse as the Bayeux Tapestry and the Stations of the Cross can thus be regarded as comics, I began to consider whether or not the classical world might have contributed to the artform. When I was fortunate enough to meet McCloud in 1994, he persuaded me that there were probably plenty of examples of comics in classical art and a course in Roman relief sculpture later that year convinced me of this. 

In this article I shall not attempt a comprehensive survey of such examples, as, space restrictions aside, I am hardly qualified to do so. Instead, I shall focus on a very small number of art works that clearly illustrate that the principles of comics were quite evident in Greek art.

Narrative was a vital element in ancient art and by the middle of the seventh century BC Attic vase painters were painting pictures that often continued around vases, separated by bands of decoration. Having an oblong shape, the pictures lent themselves to subjects such as processions, races, and hunts, as, being essentially narrow friezes, they required many figures to fill them. Though these friezes did not always have a chronological element they certainly sometimes did, an excellent example of this being found on the Francois vase, painted by Kleitias around 570BC.

Along with more conventional subjects such as the procession of guests at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and the funeral games of Patroklos, the vase also illustrates the story of the pursuit of Troilos. The frieze extends halfway around the vase and shows a number of distinct scenes, clearly separate from each other in both time and place, on a continuous background. At the far left is a fountain house where a girl stands waiting for her hydra to fill. Next are the figures of Hermes, Thetis, and Troilos. After is Priam receiving the bad news in sorrow, and finally two of Troilos’ brothers can be seen setting out from the city gates to avenge his death. Assuming that the frieze is “read” in this way, its sequential nature is clear.

Greek art was clearly not “photographic” in nature, in that it was not taken for granted that a single image should represent a single moment. A good example of this is evident on the neck of a mid-seventh-century Attic amphora found in Eleusis. It features an illustration of Odysseus and his men blinding the Cyclops Polyphemos. In the Odyssey the story is clearly related: Odysseus plied Polyphemos with alcohol, the Cyclops then fell asleep, and Odysseus blinded him. Here, however, the Cyclops is depicted sitting up, with one hand trying to push away the heated stake wielded by Odysseus, while clutching his wine cup with the other. Clearly the wine cup, which really belongs to an earlier part of the story, is depicted in order to hint that the Cyclops is drunk rather than still drinking.

Perhaps the most well-known “non-photographic” image in Greek art is a scene showing Achilles and Ajax playing some form of board game on an Attic black-figure amphora made and painted by Exekias between 540 and 530 BC. 

This vase features “speech balloons”, perhaps the most distinctive element of modern comics, a device which through attempting to represent sound in a scene also introduces the concept of time. 

Extracts from Understanding Comics, explaining how in comics speech bubbles can subvert otherwise 'photographic' images.

Achilles says “four” and Ajax responds “three”, possibly referring to dice scores. It is not clear whether Ajax is responding to Achilles, Achilles is responding to Ajax, or both men are speaking at once; what is certain is that this image does not represent a single moment, but rather the length of time it takes the two men to speak.

The two heroes are labelled above their heads: Achilles is on the left, with Ajax on the right.

One black-figure vase, Boston 08.292, is a perfect example of Greek comics. This vase features what McCloud calls an “action to action” transition, probably the most common type of “panel to panel” progression in comics. One side of the vase shows a man in a vineyard courting a young boy. When the vase is turned around, however, the young boy is jumping to embrace the man. Though the background remains continuous, the pictures are clearly intended to represent the same couple, with one scene obviously following the other.

Greek vase painting, therefore, clearly provides examples of what would now be termed comics, but there are also examples to be found in architectural sculpture.

The low-relief metopes on temples offered an obvious opportunity to tell a story in pictures, but it is difficult to tell how often this opportunity was taken. The Parthenon metopes, for instance, seem to have been put in place in such a way that sequence was largely irrelevant, whereas the metopes on the temple of Zeus at Olympia, dating from the second quarter of the fifth century BC, may have been intended to tell a story.

The twelve metopes there represent the twelve labours of Herakles, and are ordered in such a way that Herakles is evidently older in the twelfth metope than the first. The final metope depicts the cleansing of the Augean stables, two places later than conventionally related, with the acquisition of the apples of the Hesperides and the capturing of Cerberus being brought forward to the tenth and eleventh places. This might suggest that the metopes are merely showing scenes for Herakles’ life in no particular order, but as the traditional order postdates the building of the temple at Olympia this seems an unsafe conclusion; it seems more likely that this collection may represent the first attempt to assemble the twelve episodes into one story.

Atlas offering the apples of the Hesperides to Heracles, with Athene watching.

The continuous frieze common to temples built in the Ionic order, however, can be seen to demonstrate principles of comics with remarkable subtlety. The Parthenon offers an excellent example of this.

The Parthenon’s Ionic frieze was about 160 metres long and showed an idealised version of the Panathenaic procession. Though the frieze was continuous and therefore seemed to be one image, there was clearly chronological progression in it. 

The western end, the first to be seen by people coming from the Propylaea, featured horsemen gathering for the procession, which begins at the south-west corner. Continuing along the northern side the procession had many elements –  horsemen,musicians, etc – before reaching the eastern end. Here it culminated with the gods looking on as a group of people held a peoplos, which would have been presented to the sacred olive-wood statue of Athene on the Acropolis. The south side of the frieze, which was not as visible as the other three sides, also had an eastwards direction converging at this scene.

The Parthenon frieze, assembled as one text, read from right to left and top to bottom.

Clearly this was sequential art, the appearance of which would have been heightened by the bright colours in which it was painted. 

The fact that it would have also been seen through gaps between columns would also have given it an added element of timing – the columns would have acted as “gutters” or panel divisions.

Overall, therefore, I think it can be plainly seen that the principles that make comics what they are were quite evident in Classical Art. Though I’ve only dealt with Greek art up to the mid-fifth century BC, the traditions of sequential art continued throughout the Hellenistic period as can be seen in the Telephus frieze surrounding the altar of Zeus at Pergamon and thrived in the Roman world, with Trajan’s column being but the most obvious example.

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Originally published in UCD Classical Society Journal, 1996/1997, and tweaked here merely to amend the most clunky of sentences. I found this in the shed today, and was amused to see how my writing had changed. Glad, too. Mind, it has been a very long time. 

Primitive Dubbing Techniques

A friend of mine -- perhaps my closest friend, really -- had a little baby girl last night, all tiny and pink and perfect. I mentioned to an expectant friend today that the newcomer has a very pretty nose, which surprised me, as I tend to think of newborn babies as looking uncomfortably like Winston Churchill.

Oh yes.

She responded by pointing out that I'd not seen any of hers as newborns, and that my pretty nose comment reminded her of Asterix and Cleopatra. Rightly so, I'd say, but that in turn reminded me of this.

That third panel always strikes me as one of the finest comic panels I've ever seen -- it's utterly dependent on the incongruity of picture and words -- and possibly my favourite joke ever on a comic page.

The Dark Knight Rises: Hope does not Disappoint

Superhero films offer us a “faithless, modern mythology”, according to Tom Hiddleston, who played the renegade Norse god Loki in this summer’s Avengers Assemble. Writing in the Guardian this April, he observed that “In our increasingly secular society, with so many disparate gods and different faiths, superhero films present a unique canvas upon which our shared hopes, dreams and apocalyptic nightmares can be projected and played out.”

He’s almost right. Superhero films offer a modern mythology, but there’s nothing faithless about them. Modern morality plays, they’re expressions of a world built by Judaeo-Christian tradition, and embody not merely explicitly Christian ideas but also those universal images that J.R.R. Tolkien described in 1931 as having prefigured Christian truth: “The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there,” he said, “while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”

The Norse myths Tolkien so loved, for instance, pointed to Christianity through such images as Odin hanging on the World Ash, or Baldr, the dying god, but it remained for Christianity to fulfil the truths to which they pointed.

Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow makes a very modern mistake in Avengers Assemble when she says of Thor and Loki, “These guys come from legend. They’re basically gods.”
“There’s only one God, ma’am,” replies Chris Evans’s Captain America, a recently revived relic of the 1940s, “and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.”

This isn’t simple religious chauvinism; rather, having some idea of what the word ‘God’ means, Captain America recognises Thor and Loki as mere men writ large.  The ancient Vikings would have understood what he meant; they knew that their gods and the God of the Christians were different not merely in degree but in kind.

Avengers Assemble develops this idea when Loki attacks a crowd of people in Germany and demands they kneel before him, embracing what he sees as their natural state. “In the end,” he says, “you will always kneel”.
“Not to men like you,” says an old man, willing to kneel before the right person but recognising that Loki is as mortal as he is.
“There are no men like me,” replies Loki.
“There are always men like you,” answers the old man, clearly recalling his youth, when so many of his countrymen showed themselves willing to prostrate themselves before the false gods of Hitler, the German state, and the earthly paradise the Nazi regime promised.

It might seem odd for an avowed atheist like Joss Whedon, writer-director of Avengers Assemble, to make such meaningful theological points, but Judaeo-Christian tradition has so formed our world that modern secularism and even atheism stand on Christian foundations. The light of Christian truth, if there is any truth at all in our art, must inevitably shine through.

Interesting though Whedon’s theological asides are, Avengers Assemble is ultimately a light – albeit immensely entertaining – piece of work. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, on the other hand, is far weightier fare, and one which repays repeated viewings.

2005’s Batman Begins shows the young Bruce Wayne falling down a covered well, crashing to the bottom and being terrified by the bats that launch themselves at him. “Why do we fall, Bruce?” his father asks after rescuing him, before answering his own question with the words that define the trilogy: “So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

The motif of fall and rise pervades Nolan’s trilogy, reflecting its themes of sacrifice and resurrection and embodying an idea that has been central to the western mind for millennia. The Apostles, in the earliest sermons recorded in Acts, cast the Crucifixion as a prelude to the Resurrection, while Paul, in Romans 5, explained that the price we pay for the Fall is nothing compared to the grace we receive through the Incarnation, a mystery distilled by the Easter Exsultet into the seemingly paradoxical cry, “O truly necessary sin of Adam... O happy fault, that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer.”

Few mythic figures are more iconic than the scapegoat who bears the price of others’ sins, and as Michael Caine’s Alfred says in Nolan’s second Batman film, 2008’s The Dark Knight, it’s a role for which the Batman is supremely well-suited. “Endure, Master Wayne. Take it. They’ll hate you for it, but that’s the point of Batman. He can be the outcast. He can make the choice that no one else can make – the right choice.”

The Dark Knight concluded with the Batman apparently guaranteeing Gotham City’s future by becoming a scapegoat for murders committed by the city’s deranged district attorney, Harvey Dent. The Batman’s sacrifice enabled others to build a new era of law and order upon Dent’s supposedly pristine reputation, but as this year’s The Dark Knight Rises makes clear, a victory built on a lie – no matter how noble – is a false victory.

Eight years after The Dark Knight, Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon is haunted by the lie which empowered him to clean up Gotham’s streets, and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is a broken recluse, haunted by the death of his childhood love. The Batman is but a memory while the dead district attorney is idolised by a city unaware of his dreadful crimes. Gotham may be peaceful but the city's prosperity rests on rotten foundations, and it seems discontent is ready to boil over among the city’s poorest.

When the city’s underclass erupts from its sewers, it becomes clear that the Batman will have to face his greatest challenge, one that drives him to the darkest pit of despair and forces him to face the question of whether his city is worth saving.

The Dark Knight had answered that positively, but The Dark Knight Rises is more ambivalent; Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman points out that ‘innocent’ is a strong word to use for Gotham’s citizens, who seem to have revelled – or at best cowered – in the anarchy unleashed by Tom Hardy’s Bane. “You don’t owe these people any more!,” she says, “You’ve given them everything!”

“Not everything,” replies Batman, determined to save Gotham regardless of whether its people deserve it or not. A more convincing Christ-figure than at the end of The Dark Knight, the Batman is willing to go to his death for the guilty as much as for the innocent.

“Suffering produces endurance,” writes Paul in Romans 5, “and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” Batman has always been an adolescent revenge fantasy, but Nolan’s Batman suffers and endures until he learns to hope, transcending his self-imposed mask as an angel of vengeance, and is redeemed. The Dark Knight rises.

– from The Irish Catholic, 2 August 2012

The Freedom of the Press

Well, the Irish Times is on form today. 

The Freedom to Have an Opinion

Here's Fintan O'Toole, for instance, talking about Seán Quinn:

'Fr Brian D'Arcy, who is supposed to be in the morality business, addressed the Ballyconnell rally and essentially credited Quinn with the creation of peace in our time: “He brought peace to the country by creating thousands of jobs.” 

Senior GAA figures such as Mickey Harte, Jarlath Burns, Seán Boylan and Colm O’Rourke threw that organisation’s considerable authority behind Quinn’s outright defiance of the courts and determination to hang on to public money. Thus, a formidable if unofficial nexus of Sinn Féin, the GAA and the church is giving Quinn comfort. 

 This desire to kiss the rod inflicting the pain is surely rooted in something older than the current fad for designer masochism – some twisted notion of ethnic and religious solidarity in which Quinn has to be protected because he’s one of us – a Catholic, nationalist, GAA man.'

This is after lots of valid stuff, it should be said, but still. Is it really right to say Brian D'Arcy supports Seán Quinn, therefore the Church is part of an unofficial triumvirate of forces supporting Quinn? Brian D'Arcy?

Remember what Fintan said about Brian D'Arcy a few months ago, when he took the view that D'Arcy having -- at his own discretion -- to have a fellow priest glance over his writings to make sure they weren't completely off the wall was the worst thing that had ever happened?

Fintan saw D'Arcy as being part a powerless priest, being sadistically humiliated -- no, really -- by a heartless and clueless hierarchy.  D'Arcy, more to Fintan's point perhaps, was a decent and admirable man, somebody who stood apart from the institutional Church.

But now? Well, now that D'Arcy's saying something that Fintan (rightly) disagrees with, he's been elevated in Fintan's eyes to an official spokesman for the Church. This is the kind of inconsistent, hypocritical nonsense that's rendering the Irish Times less relevant by the day.

The Freedom to Disturb Religious Ceremonies

It seems only fitting that it's sitting in an edition of the paper where an editorial begins by absurdly saying that a clear instance of disturbing the peace wouldn't be considered an offence in modern Ireland if it took place in a church, since we've all moved on from that auld religion hogwash now, thank God:

'It's likely that if three young women in balaclavas marched up uninvited to the altar of the ProCathedral to then perform a crude punk ballad lambasting the church and the Virgin Mary there would be calls for their prosecution. Disturbing the peace, blasphemy . . . Such appeals might well have prevailed a couple of decades ago. Not so, one hopes, today. We have as a society developed an understanding that the sometimes-uncomfortable price of democracy and free speech is the tolerance of speech of which we may disapprove, which may offend, which may be blasphemous – we’re even thinking of removing the offence from the Constitution.'

Yes, the Irish Times editorial line now seems to be that it would be okay to do this. I'm not saying that the Russian Orthodox Church's reaction to Pussy Riot's actions in a Moscow cathedral isn't a tad over the top, but really, is it really okay to interrupt a religious ceremony in this fashion? Does freedom of speech really mean a freedom to interrupt other's worship? Does the Irish Times believe that freedom of religion so irrelevant that people should be allowed to interfere with it whenever they want?

The Freedom to Drive Out Jews

Oh, and then there's another piece about circumcision, which describes one of the defining Jewish and Muslim practices as barbaric, wonders whether Germany should hold a referendum on children's rights, and insists that in a secular society the rights of children -- as the author sees them -- should always trump religious freedom.

He's basically saying that the right of a child to retain its foreskin is more important than the right of a child to be Jewish.

I'm not sure what thought he's given to what Jews and Muslims should do in any country where children cannot be circumcised. Sure, there's much more to Judaism, say, than circumcision, but then there's more to bread than flour; it's still an essential ingredient. Maybe he'd just rather there were no more Jews. 

I do wonder if the author, the Thailand-based Kenneth Houston, is aware that Germany doesn't do referendums, mainly because of Germany's bad experiences with Nazi demagoguery using them to steer the mob. Or maybe he just doesn't care. 

That said, I'd be curious to see some serious large-scale surveys asking people, simply, whether they'd been circumcised, and whether infant circumcision should be illegal. I've a very strong feeling that the vast majority of those who'd been circumcised would have no problem whatsoever with the practice continuing, while those opposing it would probably be, in the main, people who've merely heard about it.

As for those who'd ban it, what do they think Jews should do in a country where infant circumcision is illegal? Leave altogether? Engage in circumcision tourism, ensuring their children are born in countries where infant circumcision is practiced? Arrange for backstreet circumcisions? Or just abandon their ancestral faith?

(Illustrations, for what it's worth, are from the anti-circumcision, anti-semitic, and deeply improbable comic Foreskin Man. He's a bit of an advert for Aryan supremacy, really. He's also neither well-written nor well-drawn. Offensive on so many levels...)

The Boy Reporter: A Catholic Hero?

As I said the other day, I have of late been reading my way through Hergé's Tintin books, finishing them this week. They're remarkable, really, and once one gets beyond the crude stereotypes of the first couple of volumes they develop in subtle and intriguing ways.

A few weeks back I read a post on Dylan Parry's Reluctant Sinner blog in which he took issue with a ridiculous column in the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, which argued against restrictions on how Tintin in the Congo is sold in Britain.

Pointing out that such columns make a joke of a once-important paper and run the risk of making the Church and Rome seem out of touch with reality, Dylan rightly homes in on L'Osservatore Romano's ludicrous and embarrassing attempt to argue that Tintin in the Congo isn't racist, and I think I'd agree with almost everything he says.

Almost everything. Not all of it, though. Drawing his post to a close, he says:

'Tintin is a cartoon character, and one would be hard pushed (as far as I know) to find any explicit reference to God or religion in Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin. Although Hergé first published the Tintin stories in a Catholic newspaper, it's probably right to say that his time in the Boy Scouts had more of an influence on the cartoons than did the Catholic catechism. Being a divorced and remarried man, one would have to question, too, how much of an influence, if at all, Catholicism really had on Tintin's creator.'

Well, having read all the books in a fairly concentrated period, I've been surprised to discover just how Christian -- and in particular how Catholic -- Tintin is.

Hergé originally created Tintin for the youth supplement of Le Vingtième Siècle, a Belgian newspaper a strongly Catholic and conservative slant; its editor until 1933, when the first Tintin stories were written, was Abbé Norbert Wallez, a right-wing priest-journalist who had an immense influence on Hergé. There's a level, then, at which Tintin was originally intended as Catholic propaganda, but what's remarkable is the extent to which religion remains important in Tintin right up to the end.

Frankly, there's more evidence for Tintin being Catholic than for Tintin being a reporter...

Religion first appears in an overt way in the early, controversial, and quasi-canonical Tintin in the Congo, a book that makes for very strange reading now, notable not merely for its racism but for Tintin's rather dramatic depopulation of the local wildlife, whether accidently gunning down more than a dozen antelope, shooting a chimp so he can don its skin as a costume, or using dynamite to dispatch a rhinocerous in a rather decisive fashion. 

Anyway, there's a scene where he's rescued from crocodiles by a Belgian missionary priest, one of I think only two clergymen to appear in the entire Tintin oeuvre, the other being Reverend Peacock who appears and never speaks in a scene in The Cigars of the Pharaoh. I'd be inclined to assume Peacock's an Anglican to judge by the context -- British India -- but given that he's introduced as 'our padre', I'm not sure.

So, having been rescued Tintin is taken off to the Mission, where we see the only church that appears in all 24 volumes, that being the Mission's chapel, with the cross displayed prominently on the roof. Impressed by all of this, Tintin's dog Snowy remarks 'Missionaries are the tops!'

Hergé eventually struck out from Vingtième Siècle but in the subsequent decades there are occasional moments when Tintin's Catholicism flickers through. It is, after all, his knowledge of Christian iconography that enables Tintin to solve the riddle of Red Rackham's Treasure.

While some might be tempted to dismiss this as simply childhood knowledge, retained while his infant faith faded away, but there are glimmers that show Tintin as holding fast, even when nobody is looking, to the faith within which this iconic Belgian would almost certainly have been raised.

Look at his comments about how Captain Haddock seems to have some kind of heavenly protection. In Prisoners of the Sun he explains to a presumably-Catholic Peruvian boy that the Captain's guardian angel has a full time job. While that is something that every educated Christian, or whatever denomination, should recognise as part of the deposit of faith, the line in The Crab with the Golden Claws, an earlier book telling the tale of how Tintin befriends the Captain, about there being a patron saint of drunkards, reflects a more distinctively Catholic theology.

This begs the question of where the Captain stands on the whole issue of religion, and there are glimmerings that he is, at the very least, clued in on the subject. In Flight 714, for instance,  he's seen imagining a grateful man in prayer, as though he thinks of prayer as a natural reaction for a grateful man.

That's worth noting, as it happens. Prayer's a real rarity in the Tintin books, save amongst Muslims, so it's striking that when Haddock imagines it he does so in the context of prayers of thanks and praise, and not of petition. Flight 714's an odd book all told, hardly short on religious references, and it's striking that Haddock's contribution to the jigsaw is to think of prayer and to refer to a French saint notable for having heard messages...

Saints are referred to one way or another throughout the Tintin books. If you're paying attention you'll catch references to Mary, St John the Evangelist, St George, St Augustine of Hippo, a St Theodore, St Vladimir the Great, and St Joan of Arc.

St John the Evangelist is the crucial element in the riddle of Red Rackham's Treasure, as I've said, and St John of Arc is mentioned by Captain Haddock in Flight 714, but what of the others? Well, if we read King Ottakar's Sceptre carefully we'll notice a few things. We'll notice that Syldavia is a tiny Balkan country the identity of which is defined by its early -- I would say historically impossible -- opposition to the Turks, where the King wears a Maltese Cross at  his neck, and where the crown is surmounted by a cross. The key national day seems to be St Vladimir's Day, and the kingdom is known as the Kingdom of the Black Pelican.

Here is where the crown jewels are kept; you can see the crown in the centre and beside it the royal sceptre, surmounted with a pelican, just as the canopy housing both items is surmounted with five pelicans. There's no explanation given anywhere in the text as to why the pelican is important to the Syldavians, but it's surely not insignificant that in Christian iconography the pelican has always symbolised Christ himself, with particular reference to his feeding of us through the Eucharist. If we look on the walls of this room we'll see a number of frescoes, at least two of which are religious in character; the one on the far left I cannot identify, though it clearly shows an angel addressing someone, while the on the far right we can see St George slaying the dragon.

It's striking that St George is evidently important to the Syldavians, given how closely his cult was linked with the crusades, and how Syldavia's nationhood was forged in war against the Turks. There appear to be haloed saints depicted on the king's royal carriage, which appears later in the book, but it's impossible to tell who they are.

If it's not really possible to say whether Syldavia should be understood as a Catholic country or an Orthodox one, there can be no doubts about the other great fictional land of Tintin's adventures, that being Latin America's troubled little republic of San Theodoros. The land is named after a saint, albeit in a grammatically dubious way, and it's clear that Carnaval is a high point -- perhaps the high point -- of its national calendar. And, as it happens, it houses the only church ever named in a Tintin book.

Yes, the principle church in San Theodoros' capital city, Los Dopicos, is the cathedral church of the Holy Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. This isn't the only reference to Our Lady in the Tintin books, though, as she also gets a mention in a scene in The Red Sea Sharks, a book which is largely about people being freed from slavery. Yes, people being freed from slavery in a story that entails them crossing the Red Sea. I'm not making this up, you know.

Anyway, there's a scene in The Red Sea Sharks where Tintin is adrift at sea with Haddock and an Estonian pilot named Skut; they come within range of a luxury yacht called the Scheherazade, owned by Tintin's recurring nemesis, Rastapopoulos. Onboard is Bianca Castafiore, the opera singer who appears on a regular basis in the tales, and someone whose reaction to seeing Tintin is in stark contrast to that of Rastapopoulos.

Whereas Rastapopoulos, clad in a red Conquistador outfit surmounted by two plumes and completed by a pointed beard, with the effect that it's almost a Mephistopheles outfit, swears by the Devil and by the fires of hell on seeing the heroes, Bianca responds with a delighted invocation of Our Lady. It may not be wholly insignificant that her name translates as 'White Chaste-flower', which itself calls to mind the idea of the lily, the standard medieval emblem of Mary; Captain Haddock, curiously, bears the name of a fish and bears on his body the emblem of an anchor, those being probably the two oldest symbols for Christ.

That might seem to be pushing things, but the more I look at Tintin, the more I think there are depths there that need excavating. Take, for example, this scene from Flight 714, where the millionaire Laszlo Carreidas is given a truth serum and asked to reveal his bank details to Rastapopoulos.

Immediately launching into a lengthy confession, he begins by telling of how he stole a pear. So what? Well, trivial though the theft of this pear was in itself Carreidas seems acutely aware of the damage such behaviour did to his soul, and there can be no doubt that Hergé must have adopted the idea of using this particular fruit in this way from St Augustine, who famously describes in his Confessions how he stole pears in his youth; it's a blatant allusion of a sort that every educated adult of Hergé's generation would have recognised.

Granted, that's probably the kind of subtext that would have bypassed all of  Hergé's younger readers, but he could be pretty obvious when he wanted to. Here, for instance, is how we learn of the fate that befalls the villains of The Broken Ear:

You can't really get much more to the point than that, can you? That last panel's coloured a striking red, for what it's worth, standing in stark contrast to the sequence of largely blue panels that preceded it, and it's not presented -- as in scenes where Snowy's or Haddock's better and worse angels squabble over them -- as merely someone's imagination. I think we're meant to take this as a genuine depiction of how villainous sorts who die suddenly without making their peace with God can wind up facing a very dark fate.

I've no doubt there's far more to say on this topic, but I'm a busy man and it's not for me to say it. I've work to be doing.

The Famous Boy Reporter?

The last month's been an odd one, as readers of this blog will probably have guessed; output here has dropped due to a combination of being busy and being ill, such that priorities haven't been what they were. My studies take most of my time, of course, and other matters have rode into second place, so the blog and other things have slipped a bit behind them. I'll be rectifying that from now on, all going well.

Work and other matters aside, I've not even managed any serious reading of late; Congar's The Meaning of Tradition remains unfinished and I've made little headway into David Copperfield. I have, however, managed to plough through Hergé's entire Tintin oeuvre, which has been both fascinating and fun.

There's an immense amount to say about Tintin, and no doubt pretty much all of it's been said already, but one of the first things that's struck me is how the boy reporter seems to be no more dedicated to his trade than Doctor Watson was to his practice or Father Brown to his parish. Indeed, were one to exclude the quasi-canonical Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo from the Tintin canon -- as my set of hardback omnibus volumes does -- one would wonder about the veracity of Tintin's press credentials.

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets first began running in 1929, telling the story of how Tintin travelled to the infant Soviet Union in order to tell the world of the evils of communism; the story features the only instance in all twenty-four Tintin tales of the boy reporter actually filing copy.

Well, I say 'filing copy'; he writes a huge amount, but a whole series of shenanigans follow and there's no suggestion in the story that he ever gets around to filing his work; indeed, it seems to be left behind in his room as life gets in the way of his plans.

Still, he's evidently very successful, as Tintin in the Congo shows him being approached by several newspapers from other countries offering him huge sums of money to pay for his dispatches. Tintin, of course, will have none of this, having given his word to his own paper, Le Petit Vingtième.

This, as it happens, must have been a bit perplexing for those young readers of Le Petit Vingtième, a children's supplement, who surely wondered where Tintin's despatches were to be found. Search as they might through their weekly eight-page supplements, not once would they have found any of these dispatches for which Tintin was handsomely remunerated. It's all very fishy.

Making matters far worse is that we never again see Tintin doing even a jot of work. Sure, 1937's The Broken Ear features Tintin scribbling in his notebook while scurrying for facts, but even if we assume that he was in journalistic rather than detective mode at that point, it doesn't last long.

No, within a couple of panels he's chasing crooks, as is his wont, and he continues doing so, battling baddies and thwarting drug-smugglings and people traffickers for a further four decades or so, all the while being hailed as a great reporter whilst clearly living off Captain Haddock and coasting on his youthful reputation.

The Superhero With A Thousand Faces

Few books have ever had as big an impact on me as The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell's massively influential study of the archetypal hero's journey in the world's myths, legends, and folklore; since reading that just and a book-length interview with Campbell after I turned twenty-one, I've ploughed through several of Campbell's other books, including his monumental study of comparative mythology in general, The Masks of God. 

Why so many of our stories are similar is an interesting question, and one open to all sorts of answers, whether psychological, sociological, or theological. I'm inclined to favour a theological explanation, following the likes of Chesterton and Tolkien in seeing the legends of the world as prefiguring the Incarnation in which they were fulfilled; it makes sense to think of the story of Jesus as a true myth, where God expresses himself in reality rather than through dreams and poetic images. 

Still, attempted explanations aside, I don't think there's any getting away from the fact of how structurally similar our myths tend to be. Campbell's work has had a huge impact on Hollywood, as is well known -- George Lucas is surely his best known acolyte, but one thinks of George Miller too, and more recently Christopher Vogler, author of a staggeringly influential memo, and whose book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, has proved a potent conduit for Campbell's thinking. David Eddings has said that using mythic archetypes in storytelling is the literary equivalent of peddling dope, and in that sense there's a fair case for calling Vogler a narrative drug-lord.

His book, it's worth saying, is well worth reading, no matter what one thinks of it: his influence on the craft of storytelling has been such such that it needs to be understood. One thing I'm left wondering, though, is whether he had any influence on Disney's 1997  film Hercules, because that follows a very clearly beaten path and it's most definitely not the path beaten by the Heracles of ancient myth -- in any variant.

I'm not saying it doesn't owe a lot to Greek mythology -- it does, in that its loaded with characters and references from ancient Greece, but these ingredients are used in a recipe which is far from Classical. In fact, the story of Hercules seems to be not so much ancient Greek as modern American, in that as far as I can tell it draws from the template most firmly laid-out in 1978's Superman: The Movie.

Let me show you what I'm talking about. I've reeled this comparison off enough times over the years that it shouldn't take long here...

A Heavenly Child raised in Obscurity...

Both films start with a little baby boy being cherished by his parents in a place far from our own, a place where mere lesser mortals like ourselves don't belong. All, however, is not blissful in these paradises; Krypton is doomed, while Hades makes it known that his exclusion from Olympus does not please him...

Like Moses in his basket, the infant Kal-El is sent away from Krypton by his parents in a small spaceship destined for Earth, while Hades' henchmen kidnap young Hercules and take him away from Olympus where they attempt to turn him mortal. Each infant is found by a childless couple who resolve to adopt him as their own...

And all the adults are astonished by the little boy's prodigious strength. By this point, in case you're wondering, the Hercules story has already strayed some way from the myth; in the legends, he is indeed the son of Zeus and the strangling of serpents is an important tale of his infancy, but it's not quite like this. Rather, Heracles is the child of Zeus and Alcmene -- a mortal, and not Zeus's sister-wife Hera; consumed by anger and jealousy it was Hera who sent serpents to kill the baby in his cradle. I'll not point out any further differences, unless it's seems really obvious. You can look them up for yourself.

Anyway, the boys grow up and never quite fit in. Young Kal-El goes by the name of Clark Kent, and doesn't play football with the other teenagers in Smallville, while Hercules isn't allowed to play discus with other Greek lads of his age. Neither boy had any idea of his real identity, until he comes unto the possession of a mysterious amulet found with him as a child.

Taking the amulets with them, the boys leave home and set out on foot on a long journey, crossing the most barren of wildernesses...

Until they eventually reach great white temples...

Where they can finally speak to their real fathers, who tell them everything about who they really are and how it is their destiny to become heroes.

Clark's eighteen when he arrives at the Fortress of Solitude and begins his training, whereas Hercules isn't so young -- he'll fly off on Pegasus, who features in the Belleraphon myth, to meet and be trained by Philoctetes, who in Classical myth is someone who only shows up as Heracles dies, but will be eighteen by the time the crucial events in the story play out.

From Obscurity to the Big City

Anyway, once they're ready, they set out for the big city. Clark Kent, who we'll henceforth know as Superman, arrives in Metropolis, while Hercules goes to Thebes, 'the Big Olive' as it's known. The two heroes meet a sharp-nosed, sharp-tongued brunettes who comment on his innocent farmboy routine. Lois Lane will bestow the name Superman on Clark, while Megara refers to Hercules as Wonderboy.

Lois and Megara both fly with the heroes, much to the girls' consternation...

You've got me? Who's got you?

And both girls press the heroes for information about themselves, including potential weaknesses.

Do you like... pink?

Time goes by, and the heroes make great names for themselves, doing all manner of wonderful deeds and saving countless lives, but all is not well, because while they can soar through the skies, great dangers lies beneath their feet.

Deep under the ground live people who are determined to destroy our heroes, supervillains, for want of a better word, who have huge plans for real estate deals -- yes, both Lex Luthor and Hades both refer to their apocalyptic plans as real estate ventures -- that they realise Superman and Hercules could thwart.

Each of these villains is notionally aided by two none-too-bright henchmen...

And each does most of his scheming in a large round room, built around a large round map.

Triumph, Death, and Resurrection

Well, the villains eventually put their plans in motion and capture the heroes, removing their powers.

But though the heroes lie impotent, eventually they are enabled to get back on their feet so they can thwart the villain's plans and save the world.

Unfortunately, even then victory comes at a cost, as in both cases the price of the world being saved was the life of the girl. 

'There's some things,' says Phil to Hercules, 'you just can't change,' but Hercules refuses to accept that and instead sets out to change things by defying the law of death itself, bringing Meg back from the dead by going to the underworld and diving into the swirling waters of the Styx to save her. Likewise, Superman resolves to restore Lois to life by breaking the laws of time, despite the admonitions of his father; he will turn back time if that will restore the one he loves to life. 

Both men drive onwards, circling as fast as they can to save the ones they love. It takes all their effort -- just look at Hercules who's clearly dying or Clark who is bearing the strain of someone who loves absolutely and who would do anything to save someone who has no idea how much he loves her, someone who will never be able to understand how much he has done for her.

And how do the two stories end? Well, Lois and Megara are both restored to life....

While as for the villains, let's just say that they both meet their just desserts, with Lex Luthor being locked away and Hades being himself dragged into the Styx. Both villains, curiously, end up bald as coots.

I've been banging on about this for years, and whenever I say to people that the plot of Hercules is obviously based on the plot of Superman they invariably laugh and say that surely I've got it the wrong way round. If anything, isn't it more likely that the plot of Superman is based on the ancient legends of Hercules. And then I sigh, and point out that the plot of Hercules owes very little to the Greek myths. Sure, the ingredients are ancient, but the recipe is rather more modern.

Though of course, there are those who'd point out that it's anything but modern, as the Superman story in the broadest sense is the story of a profoundly Jewish hero, and that the film owes more than a little to the story of Christ. Jor-El's words to his son, saying 'The Son becomes the Father... and the Father the Son.' The name, Kal-El, supposedly meaning 'Star Child', but clearly a theophoric Hebrew name like Emmanuel. The childhood rescue from certain death -- itself an echo of the Moses story -- followed by a life in obscurity. The emergence after thirty years in obscurity to perform all manner of wondrous deeds and save life after life. The transformation of death so that it becomes a path to resurrection, triumph over evil, and the salvation of the world...

I've come to disagree with Joseph Campbell pretty profoundly in some respects, but he's taught me an immense amount, not least how to look at stories, and to think about where they came from. If you've not read anything by him, you should give it a shot. The Way of Myth, his book-length interview with Fraser Boa, was my introduction to him, but I think Bill Moyer's The Power of Myth might make an even better starter.

Stick your toe into the water. You might end up walking on it.