If you are new to the Band, occult imagery posts are shorter looks at the background and patterns in occult images. For more posts on occult symbolism, click here. For an introduction to the Band and the Dismantling Postmodernism series, click the featured post to the right or check out the archive.
Derek Galon, Monstrous Deception – tribute to Nightmares by Henry Fuseli, 2013
It is so important to remember that the appeal of any art, comics included, is an illusion. What you see may trigger real feelings, but it is someone's creation. The most skillful artifice seems the most sincere, but it can never be more than fiction.
So artistic quality has nothing to do with the truth of the message. You have to put aside the appeal and judge art like any other statement - how close does it align with the truth.
Early Marvel has been a good opportunity to look at a pattern in post-war American pop culture. The first post was on luciferian heroism - morality is a vague blend of pop civic nationalism, 'good of mankind' idealism, and will. This isn't necessarily immoral, but it isn't moral either, because it is entirely subjective. The second followed up with demoralization - literally the removal of any sign of the implicit American Christian morality of the time from the representation of daily life. This gave us material versions of spiritual beings that were cool because they were "cosmic". In a demoralized lucerferian world, the martyr/savior can be a sappy bald alien on a surfboard because Jesus is just a "type". This hollows out culture spiritually by offering a familiar form with its meaning replaced with a pale or perverse material shadow.
Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, 1509-12, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City; John Alvin, E.T. the Extraterrestrial Poster, 1982
This isn't limited to the comics. There are a couple of reasons for this. The Christian story is powerful and the lifeblood of the Western tradition. Atheists and inverters are parasitic because they want to draw on the power while denying the source. They have nothing to offer the human yearning for transcendence so they steal real metaphysics, suck the spirit out, and sell a soulless, material husk with cheap melodrama and manipulative music.
Then there is the debasement of Western culture. The infusion of the soul, the spark of divinity, in Michelangelo's painting captures the higher nature that distinguishes humanity from beasts. Replacing this with a monstrous, imaginary alien is perverse. It is a direct strike at the human spirit.
That said, actually bringing Satan into the shared universe is another level of inverted heroism. Comic bloggers have commented on this, but their interest is in the comics, not the bigger social picture. Two circumstances generally come up that are relevant - the loosening of the Comics Code and changing attitudes towards religion. But these are vague. This post follows luciferian heroism and demoralized heroism to satanic heroism - where everything is relative and "good" comes from the worst places. You can actually see the alienation of a people and society on cheap newsprint pages.
John Buscema and Stan Lee, Silver Surfer #3, p. 8, Marvel Comics
Mephisto was explicitly not Satan in name, but was Satanic in appearance and actions. A diabolical red demon that collects souls in a Stygian hellscape comes off as "pure evil" because it associates with the Christian notion of Satan.
Remember that Marvel metaphysics is made up of alternate dimensions and parallel realities, not higher or lower spiritual states. In this universe, Mephisto is just the lord of another dimension - not really any different than Odin in the Thor comics.
Getting Satan into the comics was a priority for Stan Lee. Mephisto debuted in 1968, and within a few years, Lee was pitching a comic starring the actual Satan. According to Roy Thomas, Lee's successor as Marvel editor-in-chief, the idea came from the success of Marvel's turn to horror-themed comics in the early 70s. Thomas talked him out of it with The Son of Satan, a half-human offspring that battles against his father's evil. This way you could have Satan, but not make him the hero per se.
Son of Satan #1, December, 1975, cover art by Gil Kane
The Son of Satan was ridiculous. His own title was axed after a spine-tingling 8 issues, before he spent the next few decades kicking around the Marvel d-list.
But look past the absurdity and you see marriage of globalist blank-slate nonsense about human interchangeability and complete moral inversion. Everybody is what they want to be. There are no biological natures. And America needs a hero with a trident and flaming chariot.
There is a lot going on here. Socially, the boom of the 50s had run its course and the dyscivilizational policies of the 60s were starting to bear fruit. There was a turn to horror in early 70s comics and pop culture. Religion was subverted. An alternative culture where moral and physical ugliness is art. The hopeless nihilism of the anti-hero. There's more, but these are some big ones.
New York Post, June 6, 1968
It is remarkable how normalized the assassination of public figures became. The social harmony of immediate post-war culture collapsed so quickly.
Part of this social decay was a demoralized, luciferian pop culture that turned against the civilization that spawned it. The inversion of religion, morality, social order, and art are all connected. They are just different ways to reject the call of transcendent order that allows us to live fulfilling lives and build against the entropic nature of a fallen world. Just keep one thing in mind:
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Song of the Angels, 1881, oil on canvas, Getty Center, Los Angeles
Top of the French art world circa 1880. At his best, Bouguereau used his mastery of academic technique to bring uplifting images of beauty into the world. This is very traditional - the notion that supernatural holiness is supernaturally beautiful is as old as the faith. The beauty goes beyond surface flawless complexions and facial symmetry. There is a careful order in the arrangement of the figures that speaks to the higher order or logos of creation. The painting, like the music it depicts, gives a glimpse of a more perfect reality to aspire to rather than wallow in our base nature for a visceral tingle.
Yves Klein, Anthropometry: Princess Helena, 1960, oil and paper on wood, MOMA, New York
Top of the French art world 80 years later. Klein's Anthropometry series consisted of him, formally dressed, directing nude models covered in paint as they rubbed against blank surfaces. The event included blue cocktails and a his Monotone Symphony, described by the MOMA as a single note played for twenty minutes, then twenty minutes of silence.
It is quite possible Klein was mocking the same world that he was cashing in on, but we'll never know - the world was robbed of his gifts by his premature death in 1962. But there is no way culture institutions can recover from pedestalizing the likes of this. It is absurd beyond any lampoon or insult. The official arts of the modern West - the schools, galleries, scene, etc. - were broken beyond repair. Today they shamble about like well-endowed zuvembies, unaware that they are already dead. The buildings may have value, but any restoration of Western culture will happen outside the current keepers of Western culture institutions.
The 60s was a flowering, but like the Red Guards, the crop was cultural self-immolation. Less violence, but the same rejection of all the principles and responsibilities that built the prosperous, high-trust society able to support such infantile self-indulgence. The idea of subverting nations through culture was a lot older - the Band has a long post on the avant-garde in art around the turn of the 20th century. What happened after the war was that general prosperity plus consumerist media monoculture equaled an audience for "artistic" subversion of unimagined size.
The same path of demoralization, hopelessness, and self-erasure that drizzled like poison through the arteries of European high culture was repackaged for a hopelessly naive t.v. audience. But it can't happen overnight. It looks quick in hindsight, but it was over 20 yeas from the end of the war to the manufactured controversy of this 1966 Time magazine cover.
The source is Time's own self-congratulatory reflection that more than anything reveals a correlation between the masturbatory arrogance and myopic ignorance of the modern media and cultural decline. A more pertinent subject for reflection might be readership trends.
In 1966, there were very few media channels. Music, t.v., movies, magazines, etc. were dominated by big nationwide players. Time mattered in a public conscious-shaping way that the current echo can only reflect wistfully on. This is very important to understand. To create a false reality and a hopeless pliant population there has to be unity of message and the suppression of alternatives. This was presented to Americans as something the Soviets lived with, but the land of the free lapped up their free programming every night and configured their lives and belief systems around what it told them. Read that last sentence again. It would seem unrealistic in a sci fi story, but it is what happened in 20 years of post-war America. The Band wasn't around for that collective act of cultural seppuku, so we can only speculate about the details. But from an outside perspective it is difficult to fathom.
Monocultures are not responsive to popular feelings or beliefs. They are programmed by a relatively tiny number of people with little exposure to the general public. There is room for only a tiny number of alternatives, so choices were made based on what delivered the most viewers to the advertisers.
Motorola television ad from 1950
The choices are pre-selected. If the only alternatives are demoralized playgrounds for marketing wizards, there is no winning option other than not playing. It's a mug's game where almost everyone was the mark.
What happened was that media came to replace reality in the public imagination. How this happens is beyond a post, so some basic observations will have to do. It looks like a kind of transference - where people projected their personal experiences of growing up in a culturally-homogenous high-trust community onto the larger, impersonal structures of government, finance, and media.
Getting to hold the flag for the pledge of allegiance, ca. 1950s
High-trust, homogeneous, cohesive, prosperous society means that personal formative experiences of that society's institutions are ordered and well-mannered.
The glowing screen brings the most sophisticated techniques of psychological manipulation and gaslighting into the intimacy of the family interior. Personal reality and media blur together - media becomes personalized.
The Band is deservedly harsh on the Boomers. But this isn't a generation of Boomer fathers abrogating their paternal responsibility as head of household to a glowing screen. The "Greatest" survived tough times, but didn't stick the landing.
Everyone remembers where they were when something that they weren't there for or have a personal connection with happened. What they actually remember is a reaction to media images. The events occurred, but how we think of them was edited and scripted for broadcast. It is subconscious - one of these things gets brought up and the image that comes to mind came from the media.
Dramatization of the Viet Nam war from a site summarizing the official narrative.
All the "great" social upheavals of the 60s were media-driven. Imagine civil rights, Viet Nam, the counter-culture, any of it - as significant social movements in a world without t.v.
The most trusted man in America exuding reality
Imagine if families hadn't self-lobotomized nightly in front of glowing screens, building moral visions between commercial breaks.
Imagine if there was no confusion between the personal realities of a prosperous, high-trust society and cathode make-believe.
Imagine if people hadn't extended their blind faith in demoralized civic nationalism and personal will to "government" as shown on t.v.
Imagine that when the talking heads proved unworthy of that faith, there was no "crisis" of American morality.
The 60s was a t.v. show that people took as real and acted accordingly. A mug's game with dyscivilizational consequences. That's not to say the "crisis" of the 60s wasn't real, but that it was also a media creation. People personalized the media world then brought it to life through their own responses. Think about acting out because someone "cool" on t.v. or radio did. Or trusting the cathode heads:
In real life, trust is an personal quality earned over time. To trust someone's character means that you know them deeply enough to understand their motivations and beliefs. The notion that this most intimate judgment applies to a talking head on a screen is the taking media for reality that we are talking about. The media world gradually creates a moral crisis than proclaims on their moral crisis. They sold a lot of copies.
Aspects of the crisis of the 60s were real - the illusion of Progress! from post-war affluence and decades of demoralized civ-nat virtue signaling ran headlong into the realities of terrible policy and cultural subversion. But there was also no more frontier in the real world, no lands to discover, and with MAD and modern war, no heroism in battle. The adventure and intrigue was in the media world.
The cast of Space Patrol, a hit sci fi series on 50's t.v. and radio.
Gene Cernan moonwalk photo
The media can create worlds of adventure but trying to bring them to life hardly transformed society like the opening of the American West.
This isn't aspirational in any real sort of way. It isn't anything that offers people a shot at personal fulfillment. You're sitting on a couch.
Easy Rider poster
A a nihilistic 1969 story of some banal losers that ends in meaningless death. Art... 60s style!
But there is more to it. Heading into the 70s, demoralization becomes inversion as media replaces virtue and spirit with depravity, ugliness, and despair. One of the arguments for this garbage was that it was more "realistic" than than the sanitized pap of the 50s. When the choice is demoralized sacchrine or degeneracy, the smart player doesn't play.
The attack on truth, beauty, and good followed a familiar modern pattern - a race to the moral and intellectual bottom in the name of "freedom" from something. In the case of the 60s, freedom from the responsibilities to family, faith, and nation that made Western civilization possible in the first place. Reality was oppression, and with exploding debt supercharging the waning boom of the 50s, it could be imagined away in one big blow-out of the cultural seed corn.
Midnight Cowboy poster, more degenerate trash from 1969. This one got an "Oscar".
The pattern was the same as the early 20th century avant-garde, only playing out in popular monoculture rather than the salons of Paris. Rational morality and social health go from bad because they oppress artistic freedom to bad because the oppress... something. And like avant-garde and Modernism, no one wanted it. The public wasn't clamoring for gay hookers and junkies instead of someone more admirable. This was pushed top-down through narrow channels. In a mass monoculture with few stale options, buzz gets attention and the whole bloated carcass wheezes on.
It shouldn't have to be pointed out that undermining the social order may generate buzz from jaded, demoralized Skinner boxes, but it isn't a long-term for national survival.
60s pop culture was a lot like the avant-garde in art in that it inherited a highly structured, somewhat stale social order that didn't meet the psycho-social needs of its people. The avant-garde attacked the artificial aristocratic pretension and hypocrisy of the academies - what they called the banality of popular taste. The 60s attacked the artificial social ritual of post-war suburban commuter culture - what they called the banality of social convention. One was a "high culture" fine art implosion and the other a broad popular movement. This is because they are different phases of the same decline pattern.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston at the Folies-Bergère, Paris, 1926
The avant-garde turned high art culture into toxic gibberish in the teens, but the negative impact on popular culture came in the next decade - the Roaring 20s.
Willem de Kooning, Untitled, 1950, Private Collection
Undated photo of Height-Ashbury hippies
The cultural immolation of the 60's came after the same Modernist ideas of the avant-garde turned American high art culture into toxic gibberish in the 50s.
The pattern isn't exactly the same - MAD and fiat currency prevented any sort of natural collapse or reset, which is where we are now. But it is close enough to be notable. Think generally - in both cases there was a legitimate target. But the solutions - replace any form of culture with self-indulgent atavism - were orders of magnitude more destructive.
What happened over the 60s was that the alienation of the post-war individual from the structures and institutions of society became obvious. The changes of the 60s were driven by media, pushed through by corrupt politicians, and enforced by an increasingly active judiciary. This was all imposed - there was no grass-roots pressure from the population as a whole to throw out Western culture, and there was no way for the individual to put the breaks on a world going mad.
1970 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight model ad, 1969
The trap was that the same unaccountable system was the only path to prosperity and social standing for more and more people. Ignore the big picture, focus on "getting ahead" so you can impress the neighbors with the newest model car, or whatever, and life will just keep getting better.
The ponzi scheme keeps working so long as Progress! maintains the illusion of endless horizons. But we know that there were no more frontiers. Realistic ones, anyhow. The problems start when things obviously stop progressing, and people wake up to an hostile, alien government openly working against the interests of the nation.
The stereotyped emasculated suburban man was fed a path to success that made him an easy target of ridicule. Helpless to influence his surroundings while his culture disappeared, betrayed by the same media and institutions that he had placed so much trust in he let them raise his family. What is a hero in this world?
Hero Mastering a Lion, possibly Gilgamesh, from the façade from the Palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad (Dur Sharrukin), 713–706 BC, Louvre, Paris
Humans have always been drawn to heroes. The oldest story we have - the Epic of Gilgamesh - tells of a superhuman warrior, and prehistoric paintings show hunters vying for the survival of the tribe. A hero is someone who does difficult or dangerous things to further the interests or values of a group. They are inspiring as well as entertaining, and a culture's heroes tells you a lot about its moral fabric.
Consider who the heroes are. Pre-modern heroes excel at something or things that is of present-day importance. A legendary king like Gilgamesh or Arthur drives back the forces of chaos to establish social order. A traveller like Odysseus overcomes fantastic challenges to make it home. Folk heroes were better at everyday life, while warriors won victories for their people.
Post-war consumer culture was inherently unheroic. The war provided material for decades of increasingly outlandish tales because it offered a clear-cut struggle for life and death stakes. But walking through an orderly neighborhood to school, commuting along the parkway to the office, or picking up some ground beef at the grocer had no room for heroism. So media made them up.
Still from The Lone Ranger t.v. show, 1949-1957
Cast from Bonanza t.v. show, 1959-1973
In an unheroic modern world, heroes come in other times and places. Where there was an "uncivilized" frontier, and survival could depend on personal wits and character. Where life happened on an individually-relatable scale. Put aside questions of realism. Nothing on t.v. is real.
The criticism was that the cardboard "values" were not consistent with actual history or human nature. But the real problem isn't the character sketch - hero tales often traffic in archetypes for didactic purposes. It's that the values being taught were cut off from their source. Where was the spiritual foundation? The morality was the demoralized superficial civility - American Christian culture where the Christian was implied - that was so easily attacked by degenerates as hypocritical and fake.
Milton Berle and Bob Hope in Murder at NBC, a Bob Hope Presents in the Chrysler Theater special
Let's be clear. Civility is necessary to any successful civilization as social glue. This is beyond question. But when fake manners cover widespread immorality and self-indulgence, propriety becomes hypocrisy - the winking 'everyone's doing it' that hollows out morality. The weird, mannered popular "culture" that gave Skinner box America the Rat Pack and Uncle Milty in a dress was a figurative pinata for even moderately skilled rhetoricians.
A worthy one too. Because it was dishonest.
The Doors on the Ed Sullivan Show,
The pinata. Establishment square Sullivan was the perfect relic of fake civility to establish Morrison's socially dangerous cred.
This is the false choice that media world offered - establishment or counterculture? Destroyers of logos and culture or hypocritical plastic manikins? A neat binary struggle to put fake meaning into an alienated, materialist society with no frontiers. Traditional societies had survived in equilibrium for centuries all over the world, but Progress! made that impossible in an increasingly regulated society. On a personal level, no one really believed the fake media morality because it didn't express anything organic in the public. Then 60s media shredded the empty platitudes that 50s media promoted.
The heroes of post-war t.v. culture were icons of contemporary fake propriety - where binding moral distinctions were as obvious as speech patterns or hat color. People were good except for the clearly bad ones, and unveiling the villain brought tidy resolution before the final credits. Propriety also meant all conflict was clean and bloodless, regardless of weapons. Older fairy tales prepared children for the threats presented by the world outside familiar circles. Post-war stories inculcated a simplistic world-view that was as fake as the propriety of the society that spawned it.
Jimmy Stewart on the set of Winchester ‘73, 1950
Notice the LIFE magazine watermark. It was anything but.
The problem with fake heroes is that they are fake. The behavior they model is a formulaic reaction to artificial circumstances that has no connection to the real lives of the audience. There is no inspiration here, because the scenarios aren't anything you can actually experience. Where do you get to live out John Wayne movie values in real life? Heroism in media was criminality in centrally-controlled modern life.
The Lone Ranger, Robin Hood, Tarzan, any number of John Wayne characters, etc. did their heroism in "historical" settings that were so distorted from any actual history as to be no more real than the worlds of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. But the audience identifying with them are sitting on couches - alienated cogs in a consumption machine. There is no personal investment, and without any real meaning, the formulas quickly get tired. The fantasy has to keep changing to distract from the same thin demoralized message to 'help the downtrodden and they will all clap'.
Fake history is easily attacked. This is oversimplified, but if you look at the big pieces, you can see how it plays out in individual cases. It looks sort of like this:
1. The media creates fake national history and values that is demoralized but reassures the couch sitters that they are special:
2. The history is easily shown to be fake. The reassurance becomes guilt:
3. Remember the transfer. Media world gets personalized:
4. The pattern:
Easy pickings for the two-pronged attack of edgy cool degeneracy and academic Postmodernism. But see the inversion? The failure isn't that the government is alienated from the people and the controlling fake media fantasy misrepresents human nature. It's that specifically American human nature failed to live up to fake media fantasy.
Protecting the Settlers, 1861, illustration from Harper’s New Monthly.
The colonial process was brutal. This is a human truth when two ways of life compete for the same space. But the lesson isn't to pretend your founders were comic book good guys that shot the weapons from bad guys hands. It is to recognize what the society that you inherited cost and protect it from new invasion.
The Viet Nam War was deep state nonsense with horrific social consequences. But the lesson isn't that America "lost it's way". It's that government is alienated from and hostile to the nation.
Roads not taken.
This is what is important to understand. The lies were attacked with more lies. The reason for deconstructing the fake history was to strike at the real American nation. This is why no manner of "owning up" or virtue signaling could ever appease them. The pop culture avant-garde of the late 60s lashed out at real traditions and fake civility with equal aplomb. This plays out in different ways. We'll look at some that will move us back towards Satan in comics.
Ugliness Modernism is ugly. It attacks beauty because it has to reject the organic expression of logos through culture that makes something beautiful. A Satanic trailblazer like Rosemary's Baby replaces anything beautiful - aesthetic, spiritual, emotional, pleasurable - with grinding depressing ugliness.
Still from Rosemary's Baby, 1968, directed by Roman Polanski
Here Mia Farrow, whose preparation appears to have been a diet of heroin and cigarettes, is shot by a child rapist. Her waxen pallor is appropriately sepulchral.
This sort of trash is a bit different from the Time cover. This accepts a loosely Christian metaphysics - the birth of the devil's child - but makes the genesis of the evil the point of the story. This isn't demoralization any more. That happens when the spiritual is removed altogether. This is inversion, where popular entertainment presents the triumph of Satanic evil to media acclaim. The repugnance of plot, cast, themes, and mood are the point. Beauty expresses the good and the true; Polanski radiates the ugliness of the evil and the false.
Consider the hero in this artificial, alienated consumer culture. Contemporary life was alienated and unheroic - a demoralized race for trinkets in an increasingly regulated society. There was little ability to control one's own life and no input into the dyscivic culture masquadering as America. The post-war suburban man was in an impossible position. What had been pushed as proper, responsible, doing the right thing was already powerless but was now square as well. The t.v. that had provided comfort, parenting, entertainment - reality - had flipped reality on its head. And the couch sitters floated along, increasingly disconnected from the imaginary world that they were told defined them.
This is more general pattern stuff to think about:
The last point seems really important.
The fake world of the early t.v. era was sunny and reassuring. The implied social order seemed consistent with social values so the demoralization went unnoticed. Being a cog in an alienated system is one thing when society is implicitly normal and life looks good. But when the the myths are ridiculed, the government corrupt, and social order seems to be spinning out of control the powerlessness leads to despair.
The way out is to realize that none of it is real. Reality is messy and complicated, with beauty and tragedy. A complete human faces all of it over the course of life - wisdom comes from the perspective of long experience. This is why elders were traditionally respected. Media reality is one dimensional, but people personalize the fake reality so when the dimension inverts, the social mood goes with it. Consider how our elders are warehoused in sometimes sanitized and occasionally abusive hives to live out those golden years where no one else needs to see them while they burn the rest of their seed corn. There is a simple economy at the root of this - in a fake world that can change on a dime, there is no value in experience. Memory is an enemy to globalists.
But people are drawn to heroes. Looking for heroes has been a human trait for as long as we know of humans. Drumming out the sunny civ nat heroism of 50s media left a void. Pop avant-garde movies like Easy Rider or Rosemary's Baby purge the idea of hero altogether, but that can't fill the void. Pop music inverted beauty and made heroes of degenerates.
The Band appropriates Greatful Dead imagery for different reasons, but the reality is that they were a spearhead in social inversion. But it was worse then this. The famous "acid tests" link directly to Deep State experimentation in drugs and mind control.
While it is wise to be skeptical, the bulk of evidence on this site is damning. There will be a post on the psychedelic occult in the near future so we'll leave it with these two things. LSD and the Dead's early free jam style are both based on experiencing formlessness and therefore counter to order or logos. The other is more general. Seeking the truth means facing the truth, even when it stings.
The morally inverted "heroes" of the counterculture couldn't really fill the void either, because they had nothing to offer but fleeting pleasure and formlessness. Heroism is inherently positive - neither absence nor negation can't replace it. Consider:
There is a huge range of possibilities - anything from surviving a danger to establishing civilizations - but hero stories reflect cultural values in a way that is appealing and inspiring. Heroism is literally positive because it offers something other than the self-interest and entropy of the world. It is also relative. There is no "universal" hero, because there are no universal values. Take Odysseus - an archetypal Western hero who has been spun countless different ways.
John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria
He was no paragon of virtue but a self-absorbed sensualist and liar whose arrogance costs the lives of all his men.
Giuseppe Bottani, Athena Appearing to Odysseus to Reveal the Island of Ithaca, around 1775, oil on canvas, Private Collection
But the Odyssey is a story of persistence and resourcefulness that puts the importance of home and family above all things. Humans are weak and lapse, but not all the lotuses and enchantresses of the world can touch this in the end. These are not popular values to globalist mouthpieces.
John Flaxman, Ulysses Killing the Suitors, 1805, engraving and etching on paper from The Odyssey of Homer, Tate London
Homer reminds us that house and home are not free. Even after Odysseus reveals himself as the rightful king returned, he has to slaughter the over 100 suitors who had infested his home in pursuit of his presumed widow Penelope.
Henry Fuseli design, Odysseus Slaying the Suitors, 1806 Engraving and etching from to Alexander Pope's translation of the Odyssey
The full range of his talents are on display here. Odysseus is best known for cunning, and he sets up the fight to his maximum advantage. But he was also a physical beast, wrecking havok on the battlefields of the Iliad and wrestling the monstrous Ajax to a standstill. Having given himself the upper hand at the start, his martial skill is sufficient to take care of the rest. His household is restored because he did what was necessary to preserve it.
Thomas Seddon, Penelope, 'Then during the day she wove the large web, which at night she unravelled', 1852, oil on canvas, Private Collection
And it goes further. Penelope actually is a model of virtue. As clever as her husband with far better character, she uses all her resourcefulness to protect the fidelity of her marriage and the life of her son Telemachus. Without Odysseus' strength, she is limited against the powerful outsiders who invade her home - her time was running out at the climax of the story. But when he returns and cleans house, the value of her skill and relentlessness becomes clear.
Thomas Degeorge, Odysseus and Telemachus Massacre the Suitors of Penelope, 1812, musée d'Art Roger Quilliot, Clermont-Ferrand, France
Telemachus is also transformed by his father's presence, from a doomed boy to a stone killer.
Matt van Lieshout, Odysseus and Penelope, 2010, from the Illustrated Odyssey
The message of this hero story isn't to be like Odysseus. It is a cautionary tale with a lesson. The broken family is weak, the broken home vulnerable. The sum of the parts is less than the whole. The temptations of the world do seem supernaturally powerful, and alone and isolated, even the strongest man can succumb to them. Likewise, the pressures of the world are such that the most exceptional woman can offer only limited protection. But together, they are overwhelming.
Odysseus bids farewell to his wife Penelope and infant son Telemachus, as his faithful dog Argos lies nearby, Britannia Kids
Odysseus' wanderings came at a huge price. Embarking on an inane foreign war cost him his soldiers and led to the slaughter of over 100 suitors. And the war was required by an oath - the prototype of international treaty.
The Odyssey is a profoundly anti-globalist hero tale if you actually read it. It offers something - persistence, commitment, family, home, responsibility, and personal excellence.
Now contrast:
All the avant-gardes in the 20th century, all the year zeros of the 21st, only exist in opposition to their cultures. Their goal is to cancel values. They are literally negative in that they they take something away. Creation adds something.
Inversion needs a creation to invert.
Evil is most seductive when it can subvert the human appeal of heroes instead of denying it outright. Globalism has a string of fake heroes. So what was there for the alienated cog in a world spinning out of control?
The Anti-Hero Ugliness meets heroism in the anti-hero - in some ways a logical reaction to public powerlessness as a centralized, materialist society failed to deliver on its endless promises. Think how quickly the 50s boom time ended. Crime and civil unrest skyrocketed in the 60s. Toxic leftist policies were rammed through by corrupt politicians with support from media lickspittles and a traitorous court. Meanwhile, the news brought a steady pulse of fear and depression to the hypnotic comfort of cathode reality. Anti-heroes combine the ugly "realism" of pop avant-garde anti-culture and the desire for some sort of positive values. This comes in many forms.
The Wild One, 1953, directed by Laslo Benedek
The Godfather, 1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola
From homoerotic leather boy to Mr. Mumbles in one dysfunctional arc. The irony is that criminals offered a version of tradition, family, and honor, where men operate outside the system on wit and toughness.
Like all heroes, anti-heroes reflect value set of the culture that created them. The catch here is that the culture was fake and alienated from the historical values of the nation. And the unheroic nature of post-war life meant that traditional, manly heroic virtues were actually pathological in modern life.
1950 Mens Suits Vintage Ad From Featuring Suits By Hart
When manhood is defined as a prancing martinet that strangers want to sleep with, the self-reliance of the rugged criminal becomes appealing. It's like Odyssus, but without the prowess. This is the exact opposite of the lesson that Homer offered up 2800 years ago.
The more positive anti-hero was more or less a "good guy" in that he dealt violently with degenerates, but was otherwise unheroic or even immoral.
Dirty Harry, 1971, directed by Don Siegel
High Plains Drifter, 1973, directed by Clint Eastwood
One presents the fantasy that there is a place for manly ass-kickers in modern urban police departments. Another has a psychopath exact bloody revenge on a even more repulsive characters.
Death Wish, 1974, directed by Michael Winner
Charles Bronson turned the pathological hero into revenge fantasy for powerless neutered males. Message:
In a modern world, traditional heroic virtue is pathological, so it's the pathological who do the work of traditional heroes.
Which brings us around to Satan in comics. Marvel was an early adapter of the anti-hero, only filtered through the sunny super-heroics of the 60s. Villains can become the hero of the piece.
Astonishing Tales #1, August, 1970, cover art by Marie Severin
Fantastic Four #116, November, 1971, cover art by John Buscema
Dr. Doom as hero, including his own series, is a forerunner of the empathetic Thanos of the Avengers movies.
Captain America #180, December, 1974, cover art by Gil Kane
A few years later, Captain America is so disgusted with the American government that he gives uphis identity and briefly becomes the Nomad, the man without a country. The Band is unsure if the Pride Parade look was intentional.
Monster comics became a fad in the early 70s. Lee's successor as editor-in-chief at Marvel, Roy Thomas, was a big part of pushing this development and created some of the flagship books. He and Lee were on the same page:
Chamber of Darkness #1, October, 1969, John Romita Sr.
House of Mystery #174, May, 1968, cover art by Joe Orlando
Witching Hour #1, March, 1969, cover art by Nick Cardy
Stan wrote a story and edited the new horror anthology that cashed in on the success DC had with some horror titles of their own.
Werewolf by Night #1, September, 1972, cover art by Mike Ploog
This featured a guy with a werewolf curse that was really named Jack Russell. He invariably fought other monsters and "cruel" hunters trying to kill him. Thomas introduced him in Marvel Spotlight earlier that year before he was rushed into his own title.
The idea of the misunderstood outsider was an old Lee formula - see the Hulk, X-Men, and Spider-Man. Only here, the monster really was dangerous, and manipulating the reader into pulling for him is a nastier moral inversion. In a demoralized world, anything can be made sympathetic, and each push of the envelope builds tolerance for degeneracy.
That sounds familiar.
According to Thomas, the success of Tomb of Dracula is what inspired the idea of The Mark of Satan, a title where Satan would be the recurring character. Thomas claims he convinced Lee to go with a different angle - the Son of Satan. Presumably this gets "Satan" on the marquee without triggering the reaction that making him the title character would. The thing is, Satan had already appeared in Marvel:
Marvel Spotlight #5, August, 1972, cover art by Mike Ploog
After moving Werewolf by Night into his own title, Thomas used Marvel Spotlight to introduce the Ghost Rider, a demon-possessed stunt rider with a great look. Of course, we mentioned in the last post that his powers came from a bargain with Satan.
He was also quickly spun off into his own book where he morphed into a sort of supernatural superhero and had a fairly lengthy run. He has remained popular, unlike the others from this era.
This is where the second type of anti-hero comes in - the morally repulsive that goes after worse.
Well, he's empowered by Satan, but he scorches the wicked...
The Son of Satan debuts in his "secret identity" of Daimon Hellstrom in the first issue of Ghost Rider's own title.
Marvel Spotlight #12, October, 1973, cover art by Herb Trimpe
...before finally making his red spandexed appearance on newsstands everywhere in the now-vacant Marvel Spotlight.
The character was a comic version of Rosemary's Baby - the offspring of Satan and a mortal woman. Only here the twist was that he rejected his demonic heritage and fought against his father. So he's a hero!
The rebel against the rebel is... something.
Ghost Rider #2, October, 1973, cover art by Gil Kane
October, '73 was a big month for Satan on the spinner racks.
Both Ghost Rider and the Son of Satan followed the same pattern - the demonic creature that fights for some notion of "good". Really the ghost of the civ-nat, help mankind virtue of comics past, but now powered by Satan rather than cosmic rays or a yellow sun.
Ghost Rider is a"Spirit of Vengence" that punishes the wicked on earth. So there is a vaguely Biblical air, but it is Satan that is the instrument of justice.
The moral inversion is total.
Marvel Spotlight #24, October, 1975, cover art by Gil Kane
The Son of Satan had a sister too.
The camp ridiculousness of the whole thing does have its usefulness though - in like the way a caricature points out something by exaggerating it. The cartoonist does it on purpose, but the outcome is the same. The caricature here is the idea of the good bad guy - that the hero has to be morally compromised is a less evil way than the evil that he fights.
How do you take the inversion further than the idea that it falls to demons like Ghost Rider to punish the wicked? Make the Son of Satan a champion against evil.
Is this caricature the peak moral inversion of the anti-hero?
Not really...
We now have the devil himself punishing the wicked. Based on a comic book.
The argument can be made that The Avengers: Infinity War makes Thanos a Sumerian-flavored inversion of of the God of the Bible.
Iisn't just 20th century history. It never stops.
Marvel eventually backed away from Satan as a character in their universe, and ret-conned the devil in Ghost Rider, Son of Satan, and the like to a non-Christian "demon" like Lee's Mephisto. This let the stories fit into the fantasy sci-fi Marvel Universe that we saw in the first Marvel post. It isn't really Hell, but one of the countless infernal dimensions in the multiverse.
The Defenders #100, October, 1981, p. 2 & 3, J. M. DeMatteis writer, Don Perlin, pencils, Joe Sinnot, inks
Devils, not Satan.
It does not appear that Marvel dropped the actual Satan for any moral reason. Quite the opposite - including him , even as a hero, is an acceptance of some version of a Christian metaphysics. Making him a demon or using a disguise to fool superstitious humans keeps the demoralized, materialist "cosmic" universe Christianity-free, while taking a swipe at the spiritual credulity of Christians. Unsure about this?
Meet "Yahweh", the "cosmic figurehead of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam" according to the Marvel wiki:
Howard the Duck, vol. 3 #6, August, 2002, written by Steve Gerber, art by Phil Winslade, p. 16 & 11
Howard the Duck, vol. 3 #6, August, 2002, written by Steve Gerber, art by Phil Winslade, p. 8
This makes the Christian God real in the Marvel Universe, but as a skyfather like Odin or Zeus. What the religious think is the alpha and omega is just a powerful guy from another dimension that fits within the material, demoralized multiverse.
The anti-Christian tone in this fake God is loud and clear. One wonders how this Abrahamic skyfather fits with their Muslim Ms. Marvel title. Internal consistency is irrelevant when the goal is constant inversion.
That's enough of that. The patterns of demoralization and and inversion in the larger pop culture are more important topics than a short run of crappy horror titles or ham-fisted attempts at satirical blasphemy. The thing to think about is the idea that it takes evil to fight evil. There is no simple solution to demoralization and moral inversion in the current state of the West. The best thing to do is to accept that our understanding is limited and to build out from the what we do know - our actual environment, family, real communities, beliefs systems that if taken to their extremes don't destroy culture. Don't support "hero" stories that spit in the face of logos. And when reality-facing alternatives do appear, give them a look.
Arkhaven Comics is a relatively new publisher producing high-quality stories that reflect the realities of the world today. This is not the grimdark b.s. that was pushed as "realism" and essentially destroyed comics as a source of pop inspiration. Some recent releases:
Alt-Hero #6, December, 2018, cover art by Cliff Cosmic; Chuck Dixon's Avalon #2, September, 2018, cover art by Frank Fosco
So far, Arkhaven has delivered stories where actual heroism can take place in a world of controlling alienated governments and complex personal motivations.
Art-Hero Q #1, April, 2019, cover art by Hélix Haze
Marvel and DC legend Chuck Dixon has a fantastic new high-tech thrill-ride based on the QAnon phenomenon.
The thing about Arkhaven comics is that they do not push a particular political ideology. This is what makes them a tonic for the cultural lies and inversion of Marvel today. What they do is more fundamental, and that is to return to the notion that a hero story adds something - it offers real values in an inspiring and entertaining form. But it is not retro. Arkhaven is very contemporary in feel. This makes it appealing to readers who want some sort of moral order that is relevant to today.
A contrast makes this clearer:
Captain America #200, August, 1976, cover art by Jack Kirby
Kirby's stint at DC more or less flopped, and he returned to Marvel in 1975, where he took over Captain America, who he had co-created with Joe Simon back in 1941. The timing was perfect, because the 200th issue was coming out in 1976 - the patriotic superhero's bicentennial issue in the county's bicentennial year. Think of America in 1976. Many of the dyscivilizational trends that are dealing with today were already underway. And what is the big existential threat for Cap to face in the build-up to this special issue? A plot by an insane British secret society in Georgian era costume trying to reverse the War of Independence with a super bomb.
In a way, this is a throw-back to the 60s and before, when comics were childrens' entertainment, and the effectiveness of the story depended on whether it was cool to imagine being the hero from a child's frame of reference. The fact that there is a lot of action with far out bad guys and the heroes save the nation works when readers are bringing their own national values to the story. Children weren't supposed to learn cultural values from comic books. The were just not supposed to have comics that destroy the cultural values that they were raised in. But by 1976, it is pretty clear that this isn't what or who comics were aimed at any more. And older readers want stories that hew a little closer to reality than something you can play with your friends.
Alt-Hero #4, September, 2018, cover art by Cliff Cosmic
Arkhaven also deals with nationalist heroes and villains, but does so in a way that is relevant to the actual crises facing the West.
It is very important to recognize when individuals are trying to push back against the cultural rot. The Band works to dispel lies and underline the basic truths that essential to the West. After three posts on the moral degeneracy of the whole Marvel enterprise, it is worth taking a moment to acknowledge someone doing it right.
Pop culture is appealing. That is why it is seductive. But it has also been alienating, atomizing, and socially undermining. The way to not be the powerless eunuch on the couch is to not buy in. Take responsibility for morality rather than haplessly reacting to a glowing screen. They can only subvert you and your family when you surrender control of your own ship. This isn't a call to avoid entertainment, but to reject peddlers of inversion and demoralization and look for things that bring something real to the table. The Band gave up Marvel some time ago, these posts notwithstanding.
Haven't missed it.
Edit: what did get missed is the complete inversion of family values between Telemachus and the Son of Satan. Both are empowered by their fathers but in opposing ways. Odysseus' return reestablishes the natural order or logos of the family, and it is from there that Telemachus becomes formidable. Satan is evil - here the father is the enemy, and the moral thing to do is to use the birthright power to tear his order down. It is a metaphor of Red Guard/counterculture destruction - "the Man" is evil, but you can take your inheritance and burn him down. They are diametric opposites.
Mephisto was explicitly not Satan in name, but was Satanic in appearance and actions. A diabolical red demon that collects souls in a Stygian hellscape comes off as "pure evil" because it associates with the Christian notion of Satan.
Remember that Marvel metaphysics is made up of alternate dimensions and parallel realities, not higher or lower spiritual states. In this universe, Mephisto is just the lord of another dimension - not really any different than Odin in the Thor comics.
Getting Satan into the comics was a priority for Stan Lee. Mephisto debuted in 1968, and within a few years, Lee was pitching a comic starring the actual Satan. According to Roy Thomas, Lee's successor as Marvel editor-in-chief, the idea came from the success of Marvel's turn to horror-themed comics in the early 70s. Thomas talked him out of it with The Son of Satan, a half-human offspring that battles against his father's evil. This way you could have Satan, but not make him the hero per se.
Son of Satan #1, December, 1975, cover art by Gil Kane
The Son of Satan was ridiculous. His own title was axed after a spine-tingling 8 issues, before he spent the next few decades kicking around the Marvel d-list.
But look past the absurdity and you see marriage of globalist blank-slate nonsense about human interchangeability and complete moral inversion. Everybody is what they want to be. There are no biological natures. And America needs a hero with a trident and flaming chariot.
There is a lot going on here. Socially, the boom of the 50s had run its course and the dyscivilizational policies of the 60s were starting to bear fruit. There was a turn to horror in early 70s comics and pop culture. Religion was subverted. An alternative culture where moral and physical ugliness is art. The hopeless nihilism of the anti-hero. There's more, but these are some big ones.
New York Post, June 6, 1968
It is remarkable how normalized the assassination of public figures became. The social harmony of immediate post-war culture collapsed so quickly.
Part of this social decay was a demoralized, luciferian pop culture that turned against the civilization that spawned it. The inversion of religion, morality, social order, and art are all connected. They are just different ways to reject the call of transcendent order that allows us to live fulfilling lives and build against the entropic nature of a fallen world. Just keep one thing in mind:
this speedy decline was not organic.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Song of the Angels, 1881, oil on canvas, Getty Center, Los Angeles
Top of the French art world circa 1880. At his best, Bouguereau used his mastery of academic technique to bring uplifting images of beauty into the world. This is very traditional - the notion that supernatural holiness is supernaturally beautiful is as old as the faith. The beauty goes beyond surface flawless complexions and facial symmetry. There is a careful order in the arrangement of the figures that speaks to the higher order or logos of creation. The painting, like the music it depicts, gives a glimpse of a more perfect reality to aspire to rather than wallow in our base nature for a visceral tingle.
Yves Klein, Anthropometry: Princess Helena, 1960, oil and paper on wood, MOMA, New York
Top of the French art world 80 years later. Klein's Anthropometry series consisted of him, formally dressed, directing nude models covered in paint as they rubbed against blank surfaces. The event included blue cocktails and a his Monotone Symphony, described by the MOMA as a single note played for twenty minutes, then twenty minutes of silence.
It is quite possible Klein was mocking the same world that he was cashing in on, but we'll never know - the world was robbed of his gifts by his premature death in 1962. But there is no way culture institutions can recover from pedestalizing the likes of this. It is absurd beyond any lampoon or insult. The official arts of the modern West - the schools, galleries, scene, etc. - were broken beyond repair. Today they shamble about like well-endowed zuvembies, unaware that they are already dead. The buildings may have value, but any restoration of Western culture will happen outside the current keepers of Western culture institutions.
The 60s was a flowering, but like the Red Guards, the crop was cultural self-immolation. Less violence, but the same rejection of all the principles and responsibilities that built the prosperous, high-trust society able to support such infantile self-indulgence. The idea of subverting nations through culture was a lot older - the Band has a long post on the avant-garde in art around the turn of the 20th century. What happened after the war was that general prosperity plus consumerist media monoculture equaled an audience for "artistic" subversion of unimagined size.
The same path of demoralization, hopelessness, and self-erasure that drizzled like poison through the arteries of European high culture was repackaged for a hopelessly naive t.v. audience. But it can't happen overnight. It looks quick in hindsight, but it was over 20 yeas from the end of the war to the manufactured controversy of this 1966 Time magazine cover.
The source is Time's own self-congratulatory reflection that more than anything reveals a correlation between the masturbatory arrogance and myopic ignorance of the modern media and cultural decline. A more pertinent subject for reflection might be readership trends.
In 1966, there were very few media channels. Music, t.v., movies, magazines, etc. were dominated by big nationwide players. Time mattered in a public conscious-shaping way that the current echo can only reflect wistfully on. This is very important to understand. To create a false reality and a hopeless pliant population there has to be unity of message and the suppression of alternatives. This was presented to Americans as something the Soviets lived with, but the land of the free lapped up their free programming every night and configured their lives and belief systems around what it told them. Read that last sentence again. It would seem unrealistic in a sci fi story, but it is what happened in 20 years of post-war America. The Band wasn't around for that collective act of cultural seppuku, so we can only speculate about the details. But from an outside perspective it is difficult to fathom.
Monocultures are not responsive to popular feelings or beliefs. They are programmed by a relatively tiny number of people with little exposure to the general public. There is room for only a tiny number of alternatives, so choices were made based on what delivered the most viewers to the advertisers.
Motorola television ad from 1950
The choices are pre-selected. If the only alternatives are demoralized playgrounds for marketing wizards, there is no winning option other than not playing. It's a mug's game where almost everyone was the mark.
What happened was that media came to replace reality in the public imagination. How this happens is beyond a post, so some basic observations will have to do. It looks like a kind of transference - where people projected their personal experiences of growing up in a culturally-homogenous high-trust community onto the larger, impersonal structures of government, finance, and media.
Getting to hold the flag for the pledge of allegiance, ca. 1950s
High-trust, homogeneous, cohesive, prosperous society means that personal formative experiences of that society's institutions are ordered and well-mannered.
The glowing screen brings the most sophisticated techniques of psychological manipulation and gaslighting into the intimacy of the family interior. Personal reality and media blur together - media becomes personalized.
The Band is deservedly harsh on the Boomers. But this isn't a generation of Boomer fathers abrogating their paternal responsibility as head of household to a glowing screen. The "Greatest" survived tough times, but didn't stick the landing.
Everyone remembers where they were when something that they weren't there for or have a personal connection with happened. What they actually remember is a reaction to media images. The events occurred, but how we think of them was edited and scripted for broadcast. It is subconscious - one of these things gets brought up and the image that comes to mind came from the media.
Dramatization of the Viet Nam war from a site summarizing the official narrative.
All the "great" social upheavals of the 60s were media-driven. Imagine civil rights, Viet Nam, the counter-culture, any of it - as significant social movements in a world without t.v.
The most trusted man in America exuding reality
Imagine if families hadn't self-lobotomized nightly in front of glowing screens, building moral visions between commercial breaks.
Imagine if there was no confusion between the personal realities of a prosperous, high-trust society and cathode make-believe.
Imagine if people hadn't extended their blind faith in demoralized civic nationalism and personal will to "government" as shown on t.v.
Imagine that when the talking heads proved unworthy of that faith, there was no "crisis" of American morality.
Because there wasn't.
The 60s was a t.v. show that people took as real and acted accordingly. A mug's game with dyscivilizational consequences. That's not to say the "crisis" of the 60s wasn't real, but that it was also a media creation. People personalized the media world then brought it to life through their own responses. Think about acting out because someone "cool" on t.v. or radio did. Or trusting the cathode heads:
In real life, trust is an personal quality earned over time. To trust someone's character means that you know them deeply enough to understand their motivations and beliefs. The notion that this most intimate judgment applies to a talking head on a screen is the taking media for reality that we are talking about. The media world gradually creates a moral crisis than proclaims on their moral crisis. They sold a lot of copies.
Aspects of the crisis of the 60s were real - the illusion of Progress! from post-war affluence and decades of demoralized civ-nat virtue signaling ran headlong into the realities of terrible policy and cultural subversion. But there was also no more frontier in the real world, no lands to discover, and with MAD and modern war, no heroism in battle. The adventure and intrigue was in the media world.
The cast of Space Patrol, a hit sci fi series on 50's t.v. and radio.
Gene Cernan moonwalk photo
The media can create worlds of adventure but trying to bring them to life hardly transformed society like the opening of the American West.
This isn't aspirational in any real sort of way. It isn't anything that offers people a shot at personal fulfillment. You're sitting on a couch.
Easy Rider poster
A a nihilistic 1969 story of some banal losers that ends in meaningless death. Art... 60s style!
But there is more to it. Heading into the 70s, demoralization becomes inversion as media replaces virtue and spirit with depravity, ugliness, and despair. One of the arguments for this garbage was that it was more "realistic" than than the sanitized pap of the 50s. When the choice is demoralized sacchrine or degeneracy, the smart player doesn't play.
The attack on truth, beauty, and good followed a familiar modern pattern - a race to the moral and intellectual bottom in the name of "freedom" from something. In the case of the 60s, freedom from the responsibilities to family, faith, and nation that made Western civilization possible in the first place. Reality was oppression, and with exploding debt supercharging the waning boom of the 50s, it could be imagined away in one big blow-out of the cultural seed corn.
Midnight Cowboy poster, more degenerate trash from 1969. This one got an "Oscar".
The pattern was the same as the early 20th century avant-garde, only playing out in popular monoculture rather than the salons of Paris. Rational morality and social health go from bad because they oppress artistic freedom to bad because the oppress... something. And like avant-garde and Modernism, no one wanted it. The public wasn't clamoring for gay hookers and junkies instead of someone more admirable. This was pushed top-down through narrow channels. In a mass monoculture with few stale options, buzz gets attention and the whole bloated carcass wheezes on.
It shouldn't have to be pointed out that undermining the social order may generate buzz from jaded, demoralized Skinner boxes, but it isn't a long-term for national survival.
60s pop culture was a lot like the avant-garde in art in that it inherited a highly structured, somewhat stale social order that didn't meet the psycho-social needs of its people. The avant-garde attacked the artificial aristocratic pretension and hypocrisy of the academies - what they called the banality of popular taste. The 60s attacked the artificial social ritual of post-war suburban commuter culture - what they called the banality of social convention. One was a "high culture" fine art implosion and the other a broad popular movement. This is because they are different phases of the same decline pattern.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston at the Folies-Bergère, Paris, 1926
The avant-garde turned high art culture into toxic gibberish in the teens, but the negative impact on popular culture came in the next decade - the Roaring 20s.
Willem de Kooning, Untitled, 1950, Private Collection
Undated photo of Height-Ashbury hippies
The cultural immolation of the 60's came after the same Modernist ideas of the avant-garde turned American high art culture into toxic gibberish in the 50s.
The pattern isn't exactly the same - MAD and fiat currency prevented any sort of natural collapse or reset, which is where we are now. But it is close enough to be notable. Think generally - in both cases there was a legitimate target. But the solutions - replace any form of culture with self-indulgent atavism - were orders of magnitude more destructive.
What happened over the 60s was that the alienation of the post-war individual from the structures and institutions of society became obvious. The changes of the 60s were driven by media, pushed through by corrupt politicians, and enforced by an increasingly active judiciary. This was all imposed - there was no grass-roots pressure from the population as a whole to throw out Western culture, and there was no way for the individual to put the breaks on a world going mad.
1970 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight model ad, 1969
The trap was that the same unaccountable system was the only path to prosperity and social standing for more and more people. Ignore the big picture, focus on "getting ahead" so you can impress the neighbors with the newest model car, or whatever, and life will just keep getting better.
The ponzi scheme keeps working so long as Progress! maintains the illusion of endless horizons. But we know that there were no more frontiers. Realistic ones, anyhow. The problems start when things obviously stop progressing, and people wake up to an hostile, alien government openly working against the interests of the nation.
The stereotyped emasculated suburban man was fed a path to success that made him an easy target of ridicule. Helpless to influence his surroundings while his culture disappeared, betrayed by the same media and institutions that he had placed so much trust in he let them raise his family. What is a hero in this world?
Hero Mastering a Lion, possibly Gilgamesh, from the façade from the Palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad (Dur Sharrukin), 713–706 BC, Louvre, Paris
Humans have always been drawn to heroes. The oldest story we have - the Epic of Gilgamesh - tells of a superhuman warrior, and prehistoric paintings show hunters vying for the survival of the tribe. A hero is someone who does difficult or dangerous things to further the interests or values of a group. They are inspiring as well as entertaining, and a culture's heroes tells you a lot about its moral fabric.
Consider who the heroes are. Pre-modern heroes excel at something or things that is of present-day importance. A legendary king like Gilgamesh or Arthur drives back the forces of chaos to establish social order. A traveller like Odysseus overcomes fantastic challenges to make it home. Folk heroes were better at everyday life, while warriors won victories for their people.
Post-war consumer culture was inherently unheroic. The war provided material for decades of increasingly outlandish tales because it offered a clear-cut struggle for life and death stakes. But walking through an orderly neighborhood to school, commuting along the parkway to the office, or picking up some ground beef at the grocer had no room for heroism. So media made them up.
Still from The Lone Ranger t.v. show, 1949-1957
Cast from Bonanza t.v. show, 1959-1973
In an unheroic modern world, heroes come in other times and places. Where there was an "uncivilized" frontier, and survival could depend on personal wits and character. Where life happened on an individually-relatable scale. Put aside questions of realism. Nothing on t.v. is real.
The criticism was that the cardboard "values" were not consistent with actual history or human nature. But the real problem isn't the character sketch - hero tales often traffic in archetypes for didactic purposes. It's that the values being taught were cut off from their source. Where was the spiritual foundation? The morality was the demoralized superficial civility - American Christian culture where the Christian was implied - that was so easily attacked by degenerates as hypocritical and fake.
Milton Berle and Bob Hope in Murder at NBC, a Bob Hope Presents in the Chrysler Theater special
Let's be clear. Civility is necessary to any successful civilization as social glue. This is beyond question. But when fake manners cover widespread immorality and self-indulgence, propriety becomes hypocrisy - the winking 'everyone's doing it' that hollows out morality. The weird, mannered popular "culture" that gave Skinner box America the Rat Pack and Uncle Milty in a dress was a figurative pinata for even moderately skilled rhetoricians.
A worthy one too. Because it was dishonest.
The Doors on the Ed Sullivan Show,
The pinata. Establishment square Sullivan was the perfect relic of fake civility to establish Morrison's socially dangerous cred.
This is the false choice that media world offered - establishment or counterculture? Destroyers of logos and culture or hypocritical plastic manikins? A neat binary struggle to put fake meaning into an alienated, materialist society with no frontiers. Traditional societies had survived in equilibrium for centuries all over the world, but Progress! made that impossible in an increasingly regulated society. On a personal level, no one really believed the fake media morality because it didn't express anything organic in the public. Then 60s media shredded the empty platitudes that 50s media promoted.
The heroes of post-war t.v. culture were icons of contemporary fake propriety - where binding moral distinctions were as obvious as speech patterns or hat color. People were good except for the clearly bad ones, and unveiling the villain brought tidy resolution before the final credits. Propriety also meant all conflict was clean and bloodless, regardless of weapons. Older fairy tales prepared children for the threats presented by the world outside familiar circles. Post-war stories inculcated a simplistic world-view that was as fake as the propriety of the society that spawned it.
Jimmy Stewart on the set of Winchester ‘73, 1950
Notice the LIFE magazine watermark. It was anything but.
The problem with fake heroes is that they are fake. The behavior they model is a formulaic reaction to artificial circumstances that has no connection to the real lives of the audience. There is no inspiration here, because the scenarios aren't anything you can actually experience. Where do you get to live out John Wayne movie values in real life? Heroism in media was criminality in centrally-controlled modern life.
The Lone Ranger, Robin Hood, Tarzan, any number of John Wayne characters, etc. did their heroism in "historical" settings that were so distorted from any actual history as to be no more real than the worlds of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. But the audience identifying with them are sitting on couches - alienated cogs in a consumption machine. There is no personal investment, and without any real meaning, the formulas quickly get tired. The fantasy has to keep changing to distract from the same thin demoralized message to 'help the downtrodden and they will all clap'.
Fake history is easily attacked. This is oversimplified, but if you look at the big pieces, you can see how it plays out in individual cases. It looks sort of like this:
1. The media creates fake national history and values that is demoralized but reassures the couch sitters that they are special:
2. The history is easily shown to be fake. The reassurance becomes guilt:
3. Remember the transfer. Media world gets personalized:
4. The pattern:
Easy pickings for the two-pronged attack of edgy cool degeneracy and academic Postmodernism. But see the inversion? The failure isn't that the government is alienated from the people and the controlling fake media fantasy misrepresents human nature. It's that specifically American human nature failed to live up to fake media fantasy.
Protecting the Settlers, 1861, illustration from Harper’s New Monthly.
The colonial process was brutal. This is a human truth when two ways of life compete for the same space. But the lesson isn't to pretend your founders were comic book good guys that shot the weapons from bad guys hands. It is to recognize what the society that you inherited cost and protect it from new invasion.
The Viet Nam War was deep state nonsense with horrific social consequences. But the lesson isn't that America "lost it's way". It's that government is alienated from and hostile to the nation.
Roads not taken.
This is what is important to understand. The lies were attacked with more lies. The reason for deconstructing the fake history was to strike at the real American nation. This is why no manner of "owning up" or virtue signaling could ever appease them. The pop culture avant-garde of the late 60s lashed out at real traditions and fake civility with equal aplomb. This plays out in different ways. We'll look at some that will move us back towards Satan in comics.
Ugliness Modernism is ugly. It attacks beauty because it has to reject the organic expression of logos through culture that makes something beautiful. A Satanic trailblazer like Rosemary's Baby replaces anything beautiful - aesthetic, spiritual, emotional, pleasurable - with grinding depressing ugliness.
Still from Rosemary's Baby, 1968, directed by Roman Polanski
Here Mia Farrow, whose preparation appears to have been a diet of heroin and cigarettes, is shot by a child rapist. Her waxen pallor is appropriately sepulchral.
This sort of trash is a bit different from the Time cover. This accepts a loosely Christian metaphysics - the birth of the devil's child - but makes the genesis of the evil the point of the story. This isn't demoralization any more. That happens when the spiritual is removed altogether. This is inversion, where popular entertainment presents the triumph of Satanic evil to media acclaim. The repugnance of plot, cast, themes, and mood are the point. Beauty expresses the good and the true; Polanski radiates the ugliness of the evil and the false.
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James Rosenquist, F-111, 1964-65, MOMA, New York
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Consider the hero in this artificial, alienated consumer culture. Contemporary life was alienated and unheroic - a demoralized race for trinkets in an increasingly regulated society. There was little ability to control one's own life and no input into the dyscivic culture masquadering as America. The post-war suburban man was in an impossible position. What had been pushed as proper, responsible, doing the right thing was already powerless but was now square as well. The t.v. that had provided comfort, parenting, entertainment - reality - had flipped reality on its head. And the couch sitters floated along, increasingly disconnected from the imaginary world that they were told defined them.
This is more general pattern stuff to think about:
The last point seems really important.
The fake world of the early t.v. era was sunny and reassuring. The implied social order seemed consistent with social values so the demoralization went unnoticed. Being a cog in an alienated system is one thing when society is implicitly normal and life looks good. But when the the myths are ridiculed, the government corrupt, and social order seems to be spinning out of control the powerlessness leads to despair.
The way out is to realize that none of it is real. Reality is messy and complicated, with beauty and tragedy. A complete human faces all of it over the course of life - wisdom comes from the perspective of long experience. This is why elders were traditionally respected. Media reality is one dimensional, but people personalize the fake reality so when the dimension inverts, the social mood goes with it. Consider how our elders are warehoused in sometimes sanitized and occasionally abusive hives to live out those golden years where no one else needs to see them while they burn the rest of their seed corn. There is a simple economy at the root of this - in a fake world that can change on a dime, there is no value in experience. Memory is an enemy to globalists.
But people are drawn to heroes. Looking for heroes has been a human trait for as long as we know of humans. Drumming out the sunny civ nat heroism of 50s media left a void. Pop avant-garde movies like Easy Rider or Rosemary's Baby purge the idea of hero altogether, but that can't fill the void. Pop music inverted beauty and made heroes of degenerates.
The Band appropriates Greatful Dead imagery for different reasons, but the reality is that they were a spearhead in social inversion. But it was worse then this. The famous "acid tests" link directly to Deep State experimentation in drugs and mind control.
While it is wise to be skeptical, the bulk of evidence on this site is damning. There will be a post on the psychedelic occult in the near future so we'll leave it with these two things. LSD and the Dead's early free jam style are both based on experiencing formlessness and therefore counter to order or logos. The other is more general. Seeking the truth means facing the truth, even when it stings.
The morally inverted "heroes" of the counterculture couldn't really fill the void either, because they had nothing to offer but fleeting pleasure and formlessness. Heroism is inherently positive - neither absence nor negation can't replace it. Consider:
There is a huge range of possibilities - anything from surviving a danger to establishing civilizations - but hero stories reflect cultural values in a way that is appealing and inspiring. Heroism is literally positive because it offers something other than the self-interest and entropy of the world. It is also relative. There is no "universal" hero, because there are no universal values. Take Odysseus - an archetypal Western hero who has been spun countless different ways.
John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens, 1891, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria
Giuseppe Bottani, Athena Appearing to Odysseus to Reveal the Island of Ithaca, around 1775, oil on canvas, Private Collection
But the Odyssey is a story of persistence and resourcefulness that puts the importance of home and family above all things. Humans are weak and lapse, but not all the lotuses and enchantresses of the world can touch this in the end. These are not popular values to globalist mouthpieces.
John Flaxman, Ulysses Killing the Suitors, 1805, engraving and etching on paper from The Odyssey of Homer, Tate London
Homer reminds us that house and home are not free. Even after Odysseus reveals himself as the rightful king returned, he has to slaughter the over 100 suitors who had infested his home in pursuit of his presumed widow Penelope.
Henry Fuseli design, Odysseus Slaying the Suitors, 1806 Engraving and etching from to Alexander Pope's translation of the Odyssey
The full range of his talents are on display here. Odysseus is best known for cunning, and he sets up the fight to his maximum advantage. But he was also a physical beast, wrecking havok on the battlefields of the Iliad and wrestling the monstrous Ajax to a standstill. Having given himself the upper hand at the start, his martial skill is sufficient to take care of the rest. His household is restored because he did what was necessary to preserve it.
Thomas Seddon, Penelope, 'Then during the day she wove the large web, which at night she unravelled', 1852, oil on canvas, Private Collection
And it goes further. Penelope actually is a model of virtue. As clever as her husband with far better character, she uses all her resourcefulness to protect the fidelity of her marriage and the life of her son Telemachus. Without Odysseus' strength, she is limited against the powerful outsiders who invade her home - her time was running out at the climax of the story. But when he returns and cleans house, the value of her skill and relentlessness becomes clear.
Thomas Degeorge, Odysseus and Telemachus Massacre the Suitors of Penelope, 1812, musée d'Art Roger Quilliot, Clermont-Ferrand, France
Telemachus is also transformed by his father's presence, from a doomed boy to a stone killer.
Matt van Lieshout, Odysseus and Penelope, 2010, from the Illustrated Odyssey
The message of this hero story isn't to be like Odysseus. It is a cautionary tale with a lesson. The broken family is weak, the broken home vulnerable. The sum of the parts is less than the whole. The temptations of the world do seem supernaturally powerful, and alone and isolated, even the strongest man can succumb to them. Likewise, the pressures of the world are such that the most exceptional woman can offer only limited protection. But together, they are overwhelming.
Odysseus bids farewell to his wife Penelope and infant son Telemachus, as his faithful dog Argos lies nearby, Britannia Kids
Odysseus' wanderings came at a huge price. Embarking on an inane foreign war cost him his soldiers and led to the slaughter of over 100 suitors. And the war was required by an oath - the prototype of international treaty.
The Odyssey is a profoundly anti-globalist hero tale if you actually read it. It offers something - persistence, commitment, family, home, responsibility, and personal excellence.
Now contrast:
All the avant-gardes in the 20th century, all the year zeros of the 21st, only exist in opposition to their cultures. Their goal is to cancel values. They are literally negative in that they they take something away. Creation adds something.
Inversion needs a creation to invert.
Evil is most seductive when it can subvert the human appeal of heroes instead of denying it outright. Globalism has a string of fake heroes. So what was there for the alienated cog in a world spinning out of control?
The Anti-Hero Ugliness meets heroism in the anti-hero - in some ways a logical reaction to public powerlessness as a centralized, materialist society failed to deliver on its endless promises. Think how quickly the 50s boom time ended. Crime and civil unrest skyrocketed in the 60s. Toxic leftist policies were rammed through by corrupt politicians with support from media lickspittles and a traitorous court. Meanwhile, the news brought a steady pulse of fear and depression to the hypnotic comfort of cathode reality. Anti-heroes combine the ugly "realism" of pop avant-garde anti-culture and the desire for some sort of positive values. This comes in many forms.
The Wild One, 1953, directed by Laslo Benedek
The Godfather, 1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola
From homoerotic leather boy to Mr. Mumbles in one dysfunctional arc. The irony is that criminals offered a version of tradition, family, and honor, where men operate outside the system on wit and toughness.
Like all heroes, anti-heroes reflect value set of the culture that created them. The catch here is that the culture was fake and alienated from the historical values of the nation. And the unheroic nature of post-war life meant that traditional, manly heroic virtues were actually pathological in modern life.
1950 Mens Suits Vintage Ad From Featuring Suits By Hart
When manhood is defined as a prancing martinet that strangers want to sleep with, the self-reliance of the rugged criminal becomes appealing. It's like Odyssus, but without the prowess. This is the exact opposite of the lesson that Homer offered up 2800 years ago.
The more positive anti-hero was more or less a "good guy" in that he dealt violently with degenerates, but was otherwise unheroic or even immoral.
Dirty Harry, 1971, directed by Don Siegel
High Plains Drifter, 1973, directed by Clint Eastwood
One presents the fantasy that there is a place for manly ass-kickers in modern urban police departments. Another has a psychopath exact bloody revenge on a even more repulsive characters.
Death Wish, 1974, directed by Michael Winner
Charles Bronson turned the pathological hero into revenge fantasy for powerless neutered males. Message:
In a modern world, traditional heroic virtue is pathological, so it's the pathological who do the work of traditional heroes.
Astonishing Tales #1, August, 1970, cover art by Marie Severin
Fantastic Four #116, November, 1971, cover art by John Buscema
Dr. Doom as hero, including his own series, is a forerunner of the empathetic Thanos of the Avengers movies.
Captain America #180, December, 1974, cover art by Gil Kane
A few years later, Captain America is so disgusted with the American government that he gives uphis identity and briefly becomes the Nomad, the man without a country. The Band is unsure if the Pride Parade look was intentional.
Monster comics became a fad in the early 70s. Lee's successor as editor-in-chief at Marvel, Roy Thomas, was a big part of pushing this development and created some of the flagship books. He and Lee were on the same page:
Chamber of Darkness #1, October, 1969, John Romita Sr.
House of Mystery #174, May, 1968, cover art by Joe Orlando
Witching Hour #1, March, 1969, cover art by Nick Cardy
Stan wrote a story and edited the new horror anthology that cashed in on the success DC had with some horror titles of their own.
Werewolf by Night #1, September, 1972, cover art by Mike Ploog
This featured a guy with a werewolf curse that was really named Jack Russell. He invariably fought other monsters and "cruel" hunters trying to kill him. Thomas introduced him in Marvel Spotlight earlier that year before he was rushed into his own title.
The idea of the misunderstood outsider was an old Lee formula - see the Hulk, X-Men, and Spider-Man. Only here, the monster really was dangerous, and manipulating the reader into pulling for him is a nastier moral inversion. In a demoralized world, anything can be made sympathetic, and each push of the envelope builds tolerance for degeneracy.
That sounds familiar.
Tomb of Dracula #1, April, 1972, cover art by Neal Adams
The most successful of the Marvel horror stories was a bit different. The lead was based on the Bram Stoker character and was straight-up evil. The series eventually came to focus on more conventional heroes - the team of vampire hunters trying to stop him.
You have to remember that as a group, comic creators are not in line with conventional values. The men who devoted their lives to darkening children's escapism were not typical of traditional American morality. These are the sorts who saw EC horror as awesome and the Comics Code as a crime against free speech. Exactly the last people who should be programming youth.
The most successful of the Marvel horror stories was a bit different. The lead was based on the Bram Stoker character and was straight-up evil. The series eventually came to focus on more conventional heroes - the team of vampire hunters trying to stop him.
You have to remember that as a group, comic creators are not in line with conventional values. The men who devoted their lives to darkening children's escapism were not typical of traditional American morality. These are the sorts who saw EC horror as awesome and the Comics Code as a crime against free speech. Exactly the last people who should be programming youth.
According to Thomas, the success of Tomb of Dracula is what inspired the idea of The Mark of Satan, a title where Satan would be the recurring character. Thomas claims he convinced Lee to go with a different angle - the Son of Satan. Presumably this gets "Satan" on the marquee without triggering the reaction that making him the title character would. The thing is, Satan had already appeared in Marvel:
After moving Werewolf by Night into his own title, Thomas used Marvel Spotlight to introduce the Ghost Rider, a demon-possessed stunt rider with a great look. Of course, we mentioned in the last post that his powers came from a bargain with Satan.
He was also quickly spun off into his own book where he morphed into a sort of supernatural superhero and had a fairly lengthy run. He has remained popular, unlike the others from this era.
This is where the second type of anti-hero comes in - the morally repulsive that goes after worse.
Well, he's empowered by Satan, but he scorches the wicked...
The Son of Satan debuts in his "secret identity" of Daimon Hellstrom in the first issue of Ghost Rider's own title.
Marvel Spotlight #12, October, 1973, cover art by Herb Trimpe
...before finally making his red spandexed appearance on newsstands everywhere in the now-vacant Marvel Spotlight.
The character was a comic version of Rosemary's Baby - the offspring of Satan and a mortal woman. Only here the twist was that he rejected his demonic heritage and fought against his father. So he's a hero!
The rebel against the rebel is... something.
Ghost Rider #2, October, 1973, cover art by Gil Kane
October, '73 was a big month for Satan on the spinner racks.
Both Ghost Rider and the Son of Satan followed the same pattern - the demonic creature that fights for some notion of "good". Really the ghost of the civ-nat, help mankind virtue of comics past, but now powered by Satan rather than cosmic rays or a yellow sun.
Ghost Rider is a"Spirit of Vengence" that punishes the wicked on earth. So there is a vaguely Biblical air, but it is Satan that is the instrument of justice.
The moral inversion is total.
Marvel Spotlight #24, October, 1975, cover art by Gil Kane
The Son of Satan had a sister too.
The camp ridiculousness of the whole thing does have its usefulness though - in like the way a caricature points out something by exaggerating it. The cartoonist does it on purpose, but the outcome is the same. The caricature here is the idea of the good bad guy - that the hero has to be morally compromised is a less evil way than the evil that he fights.
How do you take the inversion further than the idea that it falls to demons like Ghost Rider to punish the wicked? Make the Son of Satan a champion against evil.
Is this caricature the peak moral inversion of the anti-hero?
Not really...
We now have the devil himself punishing the wicked. Based on a comic book.
The argument can be made that The Avengers: Infinity War makes Thanos a Sumerian-flavored inversion of of the God of the Bible.
Iisn't just 20th century history. It never stops.
Marvel eventually backed away from Satan as a character in their universe, and ret-conned the devil in Ghost Rider, Son of Satan, and the like to a non-Christian "demon" like Lee's Mephisto. This let the stories fit into the fantasy sci-fi Marvel Universe that we saw in the first Marvel post. It isn't really Hell, but one of the countless infernal dimensions in the multiverse.
The Defenders #100, October, 1981, p. 2 & 3, J. M. DeMatteis writer, Don Perlin, pencils, Joe Sinnot, inks
Devils, not Satan.
It does not appear that Marvel dropped the actual Satan for any moral reason. Quite the opposite - including him , even as a hero, is an acceptance of some version of a Christian metaphysics. Making him a demon or using a disguise to fool superstitious humans keeps the demoralized, materialist "cosmic" universe Christianity-free, while taking a swipe at the spiritual credulity of Christians. Unsure about this?
Meet "Yahweh", the "cosmic figurehead of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam" according to the Marvel wiki:
Howard the Duck, vol. 3 #6, August, 2002, written by Steve Gerber, art by Phil Winslade, p. 16 & 11
Howard the Duck, vol. 3 #6, August, 2002, written by Steve Gerber, art by Phil Winslade, p. 8
This makes the Christian God real in the Marvel Universe, but as a skyfather like Odin or Zeus. What the religious think is the alpha and omega is just a powerful guy from another dimension that fits within the material, demoralized multiverse.
The anti-Christian tone in this fake God is loud and clear. One wonders how this Abrahamic skyfather fits with their Muslim Ms. Marvel title. Internal consistency is irrelevant when the goal is constant inversion.
That's enough of that. The patterns of demoralization and and inversion in the larger pop culture are more important topics than a short run of crappy horror titles or ham-fisted attempts at satirical blasphemy. The thing to think about is the idea that it takes evil to fight evil. There is no simple solution to demoralization and moral inversion in the current state of the West. The best thing to do is to accept that our understanding is limited and to build out from the what we do know - our actual environment, family, real communities, beliefs systems that if taken to their extremes don't destroy culture. Don't support "hero" stories that spit in the face of logos. And when reality-facing alternatives do appear, give them a look.
Arkhaven Comics is a relatively new publisher producing high-quality stories that reflect the realities of the world today. This is not the grimdark b.s. that was pushed as "realism" and essentially destroyed comics as a source of pop inspiration. Some recent releases:
Alt-Hero #6, December, 2018, cover art by Cliff Cosmic; Chuck Dixon's Avalon #2, September, 2018, cover art by Frank Fosco
So far, Arkhaven has delivered stories where actual heroism can take place in a world of controlling alienated governments and complex personal motivations.
Art-Hero Q #1, April, 2019, cover art by Hélix Haze
Marvel and DC legend Chuck Dixon has a fantastic new high-tech thrill-ride based on the QAnon phenomenon.
The thing about Arkhaven comics is that they do not push a particular political ideology. This is what makes them a tonic for the cultural lies and inversion of Marvel today. What they do is more fundamental, and that is to return to the notion that a hero story adds something - it offers real values in an inspiring and entertaining form. But it is not retro. Arkhaven is very contemporary in feel. This makes it appealing to readers who want some sort of moral order that is relevant to today.
A contrast makes this clearer:
Captain America #200, August, 1976, cover art by Jack Kirby
Kirby's stint at DC more or less flopped, and he returned to Marvel in 1975, where he took over Captain America, who he had co-created with Joe Simon back in 1941. The timing was perfect, because the 200th issue was coming out in 1976 - the patriotic superhero's bicentennial issue in the county's bicentennial year. Think of America in 1976. Many of the dyscivilizational trends that are dealing with today were already underway. And what is the big existential threat for Cap to face in the build-up to this special issue? A plot by an insane British secret society in Georgian era costume trying to reverse the War of Independence with a super bomb.
In a way, this is a throw-back to the 60s and before, when comics were childrens' entertainment, and the effectiveness of the story depended on whether it was cool to imagine being the hero from a child's frame of reference. The fact that there is a lot of action with far out bad guys and the heroes save the nation works when readers are bringing their own national values to the story. Children weren't supposed to learn cultural values from comic books. The were just not supposed to have comics that destroy the cultural values that they were raised in. But by 1976, it is pretty clear that this isn't what or who comics were aimed at any more. And older readers want stories that hew a little closer to reality than something you can play with your friends.
Alt-Hero #4, September, 2018, cover art by Cliff Cosmic
Arkhaven also deals with nationalist heroes and villains, but does so in a way that is relevant to the actual crises facing the West.
It is very important to recognize when individuals are trying to push back against the cultural rot. The Band works to dispel lies and underline the basic truths that essential to the West. After three posts on the moral degeneracy of the whole Marvel enterprise, it is worth taking a moment to acknowledge someone doing it right.
Pop culture is appealing. That is why it is seductive. But it has also been alienating, atomizing, and socially undermining. The way to not be the powerless eunuch on the couch is to not buy in. Take responsibility for morality rather than haplessly reacting to a glowing screen. They can only subvert you and your family when you surrender control of your own ship. This isn't a call to avoid entertainment, but to reject peddlers of inversion and demoralization and look for things that bring something real to the table. The Band gave up Marvel some time ago, these posts notwithstanding.
Haven't missed it.
Edit: what did get missed is the complete inversion of family values between Telemachus and the Son of Satan. Both are empowered by their fathers but in opposing ways. Odysseus' return reestablishes the natural order or logos of the family, and it is from there that Telemachus becomes formidable. Satan is evil - here the father is the enemy, and the moral thing to do is to use the birthright power to tear his order down. It is a metaphor of Red Guard/counterculture destruction - "the Man" is evil, but you can take your inheritance and burn him down. They are diametric opposites.