Where Have You Gone John Kemmerer?

Here’s something I found rooting around in archived folders: the manuscript for Mythology Around the World: Mesoamerican Mythology, a non-fiction book I wrote for Rosen Publishing in October 2005. Due to a misunderstanding (meaning I probably didn’t read the Series Guidelines closely enough), the book I wrote was a survey of the myths of all the Mesoamerican cultures when it was supposed to focus on a specific people (I forget which). I was paid a kill fee and this was never published.

Mythology Around the World: Mesoamerican Mythology

© Paul Kupperberg

Chapter 2: “This is the Beginning of the Ancient Word...”

No matter what the culture, regardless of their history, we all share the need to understand who we are and where we came from. While modern man depends on science for his answers, earlier cultures had to rely on their imagination and nature. Myths, traditional stories presenting supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serve as representations of certain types and ideas, are the response of primitive societies to this need to understand their place in the world.

Modern cultures also have the advantage of the accumulated knowledge of the past millennia, allowing us to better understand our place on this planet, this planet’s place in the solar system, this solar system’s place in the galaxy, this galaxy’s place in the universe.

We know that that thunder and lightning is nothing more than the interaction of electrons and moisture in the air. We understand that the sickness afflicting us is caused by a specific one of any number of microscopic organisms that infiltrate and disrupt the body’s natural and normal functions.

Nature and the Gods
Prior to learning these things, people trying to understand their history, their lives and their place in the world and the broader universe had to create the reasons based on their limited understanding of how the world worked. Unable to peer through powerful telescopes out to the edge of the universe, they credited beings created in their own images with responsibility for everything from the stars in the heavens to the crops in the fields. Uncomprehending of the organisms that sickened them, they could only believe that disease was a sign that they had somehow offended a god.

History becomes mythology, changing fact to fiction as it is told and retold down through the generations. A storm that may have turned the tide of a long ago battle becomes the epic tale of a divine intervention that determined the fate of a nation. An eclipse is the hand of a god blocking out the sun to punish a rebellious people.

Traditions and rites of passage are formalized in myths as stories that give them a history and a reason for their observance. Family tales, life lessons, the interactions of man and nature are all explained in myths.

A tale from the Oaxaca valley warns of the danger of pride in a story about the bat who, though he complained to the gods that he was cold, was in reality jealous of the colorful plumage of birds. The gods asked each bird to contribute one feather each to keep the bat warm. With so many different colored feathers, the bat became the most beautiful flying creature around. Day and night, he spread color across the sky and could even create rainbows.

The bat became insufferably proud of himself and the birds soon had enough of his arrogance. So they flew to the gods and asked that something be done about the bat. The gods summoned the bat to the heavens so that he could show them what he could do. But as the bat demonstrated his abilities, he began to lose his feathers, one by one. Soon, his feathers were gone and he was back to being his old, drab self. To this day, the bat is still ashamed of his ugly, unadorned body and only comes out at night, flying rapidly back and forth in search of his lost feathers.

The Power of Mythology
In his book, The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell, the cultural historian and chronicler of mythology, outlines two distinct orders of mythology. The first is the naturally-oriented myth, created to explain the origin of man and his universe. The second is the socially-oriented mythology that explains man’s place as a member of a particular society.

Together, Campbell writes in The Power of Myth, “they integrate the individual into his society and the society into the field of nature. It unites the field of nature with my nature. It’s a harmonizing force.” These myths may be stories about gods, but these powerful gods are really just metaphors, “personifications of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe—the powers of your own body and of nature. The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the human being, and the same powers that animate our life animates the life of the world.” In other words, “there is a natural order and harmony to nature, and what the individual or group must do is fit in.”

The epic legend of the Popol Vuh, the creation myth of the K’iche’ Mayan, exemplifies the interplay between man, nature, and the gods, determined to inhabit the world with a people who would worship and praise them. After creating the world itself in the first age, the gods made animals. But the animals couldn’t praise the gods so they told the animals that they would therefore be of service to others as food.

In the second age, the gods tried again, this time making a body from the mud of the earth. This too was unsuccessful, crumbling and falling apart and capable only of speaking nonsense. This creation they let dwindle away, until it became “thought.”

In the third age, the gods created manikins of wood, the man of coral wood, the woman of reeds. But though the manikins could walk, talk, and multiply, they had no hearts to love their creators or minds to remember them. So a great flood was released to smash them, and today only monkeys, it is said, are still made of wood and look like humans as a warning that people must have a heart.

Finally came the fourth age when the gods at last understood how to make proper humans. Fox, coyote, parrot and crow bring yellow and white corn to Xmucane, the goddess of corn. She ground it up into cornmeal that becomes human flesh, arms and legs. Their blood is water; the water in which Xmucane rinsed her hands became human fat. These beings can speak and think and, most importantly, praise and thank the gods for having made them.

Here is man’s place in the cosmos: created by the gods to worship the gods, made from the very things that sustain them and tie them to Earth and nature. It integrates, as Campbell believes a myth must, man “into his society and the society into the field of nature.”

The universality of Campbell’s statements can be seen in the many cultures whose mythologies would seem to be drawn from the same or similar sources. It is not uncommon to find the story of a great flood that partially or completely wipes humanity from the planet (which we know as the Biblical story of Noah’s ark) in cultures from all over the world. Is this because they have all experienced a great flood at some point in history, or because the fear of such a cataclysmic event is common to the human experience and, therefore, likely to make its way into multiple mythologies?

The myths surrounding creation also contain common ideas and themes, including the shaping of human beings from nature (clay in the Judeo-Christian world, corn and water in the Mesoamerican) by a superior being. Even the telling of these tales may share surprising common ground. The King James Bible (a translation commissioned by England’s King James I, published in 1611) opens with the sentence, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Mayan Popol Vuh starts with “This is the beginning of the ancient word, here in this place called Quiche (K’iche’).”

But while mythologies may share themes, every culture puts its unique stamp on their myths. Feathered serpents, giant brothers posted at the four corners of the universe to hold up the sky and gods who turn into black ants to bring corn to mankind are only the beginning of the rich and ancient mythology of Mesoamerica.

Spiders? Ick!

As a glance at the sidebar to the left of And Then I Wrote... will show, I also write a bit of non-fiction, mostly for the young adult (5th - 8th grade) market. I seem to do about two of these year, the first dozen or so for Rosen Publishing (a library and school school library publisher) and I'm about to begin on my third for Chelsea House, a division of Facts-On-File. I've done books on the Titanic, spy satellites, disease (in general and one on influenza, specifically), Edwin Hubble, John Glenn, careers in robotics and rodeo clowning (you heard me), the Alaska Highway, the Great Depression, hurricanes, and the origin and creation of Spider-Man. The latest is about Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo. It's a wide--and sometimes strange--range of subjects, but seeing as how I enjoy reading books on subjects like salt, codfish, the screw, the library shelf, giant redwood trees, oysters and the history of bookbinding, work I enjoy.

Here's a bit from one of the books closer to my heart than something like, say, rodeo clowns and robotics engineers:

ACTION HEROES: THE CREATION OF SPIDER-MAN

© The Rosen Rublishing Group

Chapter Three: Does Whatever a Spider Can!
At first, Martin Goodman gave him every reason Spider-Man would never work.

“For months I had been toying with the notion of a new super-hero, one who would be more realistic than most, despite his colorful superpower,” recalled Stan in Excelsior! “So I did what I always did in those days, I took the idea to my boss...I told Martin that I wanted to feature a hero who had just a touch of superstrength but his main power was that he could stick to walls and ceilings...I also mentioned that our hero, whom I wanted to call Spider-Man, would be a teenager, with all the problems, hang-ups, and angst of any teenager. He’d be an orphan who lived with his aunt and uncle, a bit of a nerd, a loser in the romance department...Except for his super-power, he’d be the quintessential hard-luck kid. He’d have allergy attacks when fighting the villains.”

Creative Differences
Goodman was less than enthusiastic. He told Stan that teens could be sidekicks to adult superheroes but not superheroes themselves. He pointed out that heroes did not have personal problems, which, in any case, only served to slow down the fast-paced action of superhero stories. Stan’s nerdy, allergic Spider-Man was, at any rate, a comedic character not a hero. And anyway, nobody wanted to read about a character named Spider-Man; people were creeped out by spiders. They didn’t want to be reminded of them while reading a superhero comic book story.

Stan was not deterred. He wrote, “I couldn’t get Spider-Man out of my mind. That’s when I remembered the final issue of (the anthology title) Amazing Fantasy, which we were then prepping. As you can imagine, when a publisher prints the last issue of a title, no one much cares about what goes into (it).

“So, just to get it out of my system, I gave Jack Kirby my Spider-Man plot and asked him to illustrate it. Jack started to draw it, but when I saw that he was making our main character, Peter Parker, a powerful-looking, handsome, self-confident typical hero type, I realized that wasn’t the style I was looking for. So I took Jack off the project. He couldn’t care less because he had so many other strips to draw at the time, and Spider-Man wasn’t exactly our top-of-the-line character.”

A Question of Credit
Jack Kirby’s memories of the Spider-Man experience are significantly different from Stan’s. In a July 1982 interview with legendary comics creator Will Eisner, Kirby said, “(Spider-Man) was the last thing Joe (Simon) and I had discussed. We had a script called ‘The Silver Spider.’ ‘The Silver Spider’ was going into a magazine called Black Magic (which was cancelled) and we were left with the script. I believe I said this could become a thing called Spider-Man...so the idea was already there when I talked to Stan.”

Joe Simon, Kirby’s former partner and co-creator of Captain America and countless other characters and comic titles had yet another take on the origin of Spider-Man, although one that still owed more to Simon and Kirby than it did to Stan Lee. According to Simon’s memoir of his comic book career, The Comic Book Makers, the Simon and Kirby creation The Fly (for Archie Comics) had begun as a character they had called first “Spiderman” and then “The Silver Spider.” As Simon told the story, ”As I learned years later, Jack brought in the ‘Spiderman’ logo I had loaned to him before we changed the name to The Silver Spider. Kirby laid out the story to Lee about the kid who finds a ring in spiderweb, gets his powers from the ring and goes forth to fight crime armed with The Silver Spider’s old web-spinning pistol.”

When Kirby turned in his first batch of pages, Stan saw the artist had given him a muscular young man instead of the skinny teenager he had envisioned. Plus, the new character shared far too many similarities with The Fly.

Simon continued, “Ditko ignored Kirby’s pages, tossed the character’s magic ring, web-pistol and goggles into a handy wastebasket, and completely redesigned Spider-Man’s costume and equipment. In this life, he became high school student Peter Parker who gets his spider powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider.”

By the time Spider-Man made his debut in Amazing Fantasy #15, the only thing left of Jack Kirby’s contribution was the name (with the addition of the hyphen) and the cover that he had penciled for the issue.

Steve Ditko, Co-Creator
Stan tapped his Amazing Fantasy cohort Steve Ditko to replace Kirby. In an essay that appeared in an issue of Robin Snyder’s History of Comics, Steve Ditko wrote that the five Kirby-penciled Spider-Man pages he received from Stan “...showed a teenager living with his kindly old aunt and hard, gruff, retired police captain uncle...who was hostile toward the boy.

“Next door or somewhere in the neighborhood there was a whiskered scientist-type involved in some kind of experiment or project. The end of the five pages depicted the kid going toward the scientist’s darkened house.”

Ditko saw an opportunity to do a richer and more complex character than the one initially envisioned by Lee and Kirby. “Steve Ditko...working from a synopsis and Kirby’s pages, produced an inspired visual take on the character that drove its story for decades—bottle-thick glasses, slumped shoulders, and a homemade costume,” observed Raphael and Spurgeon in Stan Lee. “...The Spider-Man millions of readers came to know and love got his youth and voice from Stan Lee and his human frailty from Steve Ditko...”

The artist knew the importance of the visual aspect of a character in this most visual of mediums. In his 1990 essay, Ditko wrote, “One of the first things I did was to work up a costume. A vital, visual part of the character. I had to know how he looked, to fit in with the powers he had, or could have, the possible gimmicks and how they might be used and shown, before I did any breakdowns...I wasn’t sure Stan would like the idea of covering the character’s face but I did it because it hid an obvious boyish face.”

Stan was more than pleased with Ditko’s contributions to Spider-Man, finding his “toned down, more subtle, highly stylized way of drawing...perfect for the way I envisioned Spider-Man...Steve did a totally brilliant job of bringing my new little hero to life.”