Mr. Mxyzptlk, my all-time favorite Superman character.
Note the Choking Hazard warning.
Images & Crap
Copyright c by DC Comics
The actual human in the Mxyzptlk soot is an actor from the TV series "Smallville."
Before DC Comics got Freudian and the superheroes all re-examined the meaning of their lives and got all guilt-ridden -- it was a post-Vietnam thing, until then all superheroes were white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants and spent most of their time beating the crap out of non-white non-Anglo-Saxon non-Protestant villains -- these comics were really easy to comprehend and take, they were very formulaic and mythic, they were All Violence, No Feelings.
For the Other Gender, there was "Wonder Woman" who said "Hola" and so might possibly have been pre-Protestant. She was a Greek goddess and so maybe was Greek. She didn't wear lots of clothes and villains were always tying her up in chairs.
All the superheroes were 100 percent heterosexual except, like The Lone Ranger, they didn't have any sex, and they really had no close relationships, except with their young or exotically pagan non-white sidekicks. Superheroes were heterosexual and yet Immune from the charms and tricks of devious Females. And yet, of course, every attractive woman on Earth was wild about them.
This myth, ubiquitous and rigidly enforced in the days of 10 cent and 25 cent comic books, actually reflects a much more ancient myth of American literature. The Hero As Sexless, with an Exotic Non-White Sidekick, dates back to James Fennimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking" series of frontier novels, starring (in his various incarnations as he grows younger -- the series presents him backwards, from old age to his youth) Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Pathfinder, or his rude backwoods geboren, Natty Bumpo (slicked into "Nathaniel Poe" for the movie "Last of the Mohicans") starring Daniel Day-Lewis).
For a further discussion of why American comic-book and literary heroes can't have sex with or get close to women, and hang out in the woods or on river rafts with non-white exotic subordinate guys, see "Love and Death in the American Novel" by Leslie Fiedler, and the psychological works of Wilhelm Reich, who suggested that fascist, totalitarian mass movements stress the unnatural enforced prohibition of the fundamentally natural sex urge -- artificially agreeing to never get your rocks off turns males into fascists.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration actually seized and burned tons of Reich's books in 1956, brought criminal charges against him, and he died in jail. The Wikipedia article on Reichis so controversial that there's a no-edit padlock on it. Guy's been dead for 49 years and he's still generating violent fistfights. I think that just mega-kicks butt, I hope people will still be punching each other in the nose about me a half-century after I croak.
Superman in particular -- well, you didn't need Sherlock Holmes to tell you he had Big Commitment Issues. And what up with Lois Lane for letting him pull all that "I'm Just Not Ready Yet" crap for so many decades? Superman's rap was always that if he married Lois Lane, villains would find out and attack him through his vulnerable (weak) family members.
These people were beyond Couples Counseling.
Mr. Mxyzptlk was pre-Freudian and even pre-Psychedelia. He represented Disorder and Chaos and Hallucination in the orderly universe of Superman's Metropolis.
He came from the Fifth Dimension a few million years in the future, and either he was Just Plain Magic, or else his Science was so advanced that it might as well have been Magic to primitive dummies like you and me and Superman.
But his motives were unique among the super-villains: He just loved to see a city full of people go nuts when he made all their underpants turn into Jell-o, or when he turned women into snapping turtles, or turned all the dogs into hydrants, or the Sun into blue Shaving Cream.
He drove Superman crazier than any other villain. (Superman stands for Truth, Justice and the American Way, and Mr. Mxyzpltk stands for Panic, Anxiety, Frustration, Mass Hallucinations and the Temporary Suspension of Newton's Laws.) Somehow Superman discovered Mr. M's Achilles heel. If anyone could trick Mr. Mxyzptlk into spelling or pronouncing his name backwards, Mr. M. would go POP!, and with time just for one farewell curse, vanish back to the Fifth Dimension and have to stay there for a couple of Earth months.
In one comic book story -- either "Superman" or "Action" -- Superman sneakily convinced Mr. M that there was something wrong with his eyesight, so Mr. M went to the eye doctor, who asked him to read the letters on the chart:
EKL
TPZYX
MCAURDO
TPZYX
MCAURDO
as Mr. M went POP! the eye doctor triumphantly removed his disguise: It was Superman!
Cahiers du Vleeptron again wishes to remind everyone not to go near "Hollywoodland" with radioactive tongs. It will make you ashamed of the human race, ashamed of Superman, ashamed of yourself, ashamed of sex, ashamed of love, ashamed of the movies, ashamed of being a child, ashamed of guitars, ashamed of Planet Earth. It is a tale told (and acted) by idiots, full of sound and fury (and the strange shapes of human women in the 1950s), signifying nothing.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Olsen the copy boy / photographer / whatever for The Metropolis Daily Planet. He was overworked, underpaid, had red hair and freckles, a secret Superman signal wristwatch, and a big stiffy for Lois, whose romantic interests lay Elsewhere. It's an old story. He sings about it here.
Jimmy Olsen's Blues
the Spin Doctors
(band from Princeton, New Jersey USA)
From the CD: Pocket Full Of Kryptonite
Well, I don't think I can handle this
A cloudy day in Metropolis
I think I'll talk to my analyst
I got it so bad for this little journalist
It drives me up the wall and through the roof
Lois and Clark in a telephone booth
I think I'm going out of my brain
I got it so bad for little Miss Lois Lane
Chorus:
Lois Lane, please put me in your plan
Yeah, Lois Lane, you don't need no Superman
Come on downtown and stay with me tonight
I got a pocket full of kryptonite
He's leaping buildings in a single bound
I'm reading Shakespeare in my place downtown
Come on downtown and make love to me
I'm Jimmy Olsen, not a titan, you see
He's faster than a bullet, stronger than a train
He's the one who got lucky,
Got his cape around Miss Lois Lane
I can't believe my dilemma is real
I'm competing with the Man of Steel
Chorus
4 comments:
Superman was afraid about have a formal relationship with Louis Lane. He postponed it during long decades.
What an ridiculous assortment of properly done articles, it seems like now-a-days everyone seems to be simply copy/pasting and stealing content material all the time, but I suppose there's still hope in honest blogging.
Hiya OTC anxiety medication, thanks very much for the lovely and flattering compliment.
I enjoyed writing this post. Sometimes I'm lazy and I just do copy and paste (interesting things, I hope).
But the Real Fun of this megalomaniacal one-human-band blog is the original writing. Just one author, no editor, no publisher, no advertising department, no censors, no cops or Homelamp Security spooks ... just me.
Listen ... you can't sell any products with My Cure for Anxiety Attacks & Depression, but here's what I do when things get Real Bleak and Gloomy:
I pack my backpack, grab my passport, go to the airport, and buy a ticket for anywhere where I don't speak the language but I've always wanted to visit.
Because when you're in the middle of East Slawquavia trying to figure out how to eat and catch your train and find a hotel that's not really some sort of enslaved sex factory, you don't have TIME to be depressed or panic-stricken or emotionally paralyzed.
It REALLY WORKS!
Okay, so like, Who Are You, Where Are You, What Are You, and how on Earth did you find my goofy Vleeptron_Z.
Oh, and please go through your website and make sure you spell ANXIETY correctly everywhere.
(Don't be embarrased, your English is a hell of a lot better than how I spell and speak your language.)
Quite useful material, thanks so much for the post.
Post a Comment