The self-references and meta-references continue:
We get a little of Hellboy's backstory in "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story." One sentence stands out to me:
And there had been countless hours reading pulp magazines and comic books on the floor of Professor Bruttenholm's office, or his study at home. [Emphasis added.] (p. 6, col. 2)
I think that sentence describes not Hellboy so much as many of the authors represented in this issue, as well as the editor who recruited them and whatever number of readers Weird Tales #367 might have had in its year (or less) in print. Things in their experience that are left out of Hellboy's are countless hours of watching TV and playing video games. If there is a stepping-down in our culture, it has reached a point where people learn about storytelling not by reading or even watching stories unfold on screen but by playing video games.
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Decades and decades ago, a large part of American literature became not only by writers but, to the point, about writers and for writers. A good example of this is Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, from 1972, a novel by a novelist about a novelist writing a novel, and in which most of the action in the novel takes place in the head of the novelist McMurtry as he writes about his fictional novelist. In other words, it's not set authentically in a fictionalized real world but inauthentically inside a real-world novelist's head. In one sentence, the fictional novelist gets in his car, and in practically the next, he arrives at his destination hundreds of miles away. Didn't anything happen in the in-between? Didn't he do any living or thinking or seeing on his trip? Or did Scotty just beam him to where he was going inside of his car? Actually it was the real-world novelist who did this because he needed his fictional novelist to get from one place to the next as quickly as possible and without event. Things happen this way in novels, less often in real life. I like better what happens in The Charisma Campaigns by Jack Matthews, also from 1972, in which a short car trip--and the protagonist's story--is badly interrupted and the novel takes a drastic turn towards the end. This is more true to life. Matthews' protagonist, by the way, is a used car salesman, even if he writes imaginary newspaper headlines in his head. I guess that makes them literally headlines.
Anyway again, the same thing can be said now of genre fiction, at least in the case of Weird Tales #367. It's one thing to write about writing, writers, and stories in an essay in "The Eyrie." That's what essays are for. (I have just done a little name-dropping myself.) It's quite another to say that your main character reads pulp magazines and comic books and then write your story as if that's all you yourself have ever read, Edgar Allan Poe notwithstanding. Like I said, one thing missing from Hellboy's upbringing is countless hours of watching TV shows and playing video games. Poor Hellboy. Don't worry, though. Authors, editors, readers, and fans of today have more than made up for what he missed, and it all shows in what they create, what they prefer to watch and read, and how they spend their time.
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In addition to Poe, there are references in "The City in the Sea" to:
- Lemuria, a pseudoscientific, pseudo-historical, or pseudo-religious appropriation by Madame Blavatsky and her Theosophists of a previously hypothesized lost continent.
- Pangea, a supercontinent of the distant past, in other words, another lost continent.
- Hyperborea, a place in ancient Greek myth and another that has been appropriated by esoteric thinkers and writers. It isn't supposed to have been a continent (I don't think), but it was and is lost.
- Mu, a mythical lost continent that also has a place in esoteric thought.
- Vril, a type of energy and an overt fiction created by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, taken to be nonfictional by some people who can be described pretty well, I think, as crackpots. Writing like Vril is real drags down your story, I think. If your characters have a brain in their heads, they should know that Vril and things like it are not real, that they exist in the real world only as crackpot ideas and hoaxes.
- Thoth, an ancient Egyptian god used in twentieth- and twenty first-century popular culture. His name is inside of Lovecraft's name for his god Yog-Sothoth and his own name for what is called "the Cthulhu Mythos," that is, Yog-Sothothery.
That's a list. Not a very long one, but still a list. It reminds me of the listing that August Derleth did in The Lurker at the Threshold (1946).
As you can see, some of these references are to cities or civilizations situated on island continents or surrounded by seas, just as in Poe's original poem "The City in the Sea." You could call all of this background information. Alternatively, you could call it name-dropping, a series of meta-references, or a lot of inside information. The problem is that all of these words and concepts have been used and overused to a point where they don't mean very much, if anything, any more. Their use could be an attempt to invoke something larger and more powerful than themselves, or to evoke thoughts and feelings in the reader. Words do of course have that kind of power. But these words have lost their power and their mystique. We don't need grimoires and dusty, buckled tomes at hand in order to read about obscure and esoteric subjects. We all have access to Wikipedia now. The mystique is gone. The balloon has been deflated. And all of it is old, so old, after we were promised new things.
* * *
I don't think name-dropping (or listing) works very well in fiction. When I read something like this:
On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint.
it doesn't mean much to me. (At least the artist's names are euphonic.) I guess those names are supposed to provide a kind of shorthand imagery. They are supposed to move us, or to hint at some esoteric, inside information held by the author in all of his erudition. But what if we are unfamiliar with the artists and their work? I think a better use of the author's limited word count would have been to tell us what he wanted us to envision or imagine rather than relying on name-dropping for his effect. The quote by the way is from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, from Weird Tales, February 1928.
* * *
There are also in "The City in the Sea" indirect references or similarities to other works of weird fiction or fantasy, including She, A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard (1887); "The Girl in the Gem," a Brak the Barbarian story by John Jakes, first in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (Jan. 1965); and "Claimed!" by Francis Stevens in Argosy (three-part serial, March 6-20, 1920). As for the statuette, it reminds me of the Maltese Falcon, which also arrives wrapped as a package. Or maybe it's like the weird obelisk on the cover of the Led Zeppelin album Presence. If they keep gazing at it, those nice people on the cover are going to be transported to that awful City in the Sea.
* * *
You might think that I don't like "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story." Sorry for sounding cranky and complainy. It's actually a story one can enjoy, I think, with a good setup and some vivid imagery. The prose is good and clean, meaning unencumbered and not clunky (there is at least one vulgarity, though), which is often a wonder in our world of today. And I didn't pick up on any twenty-first century inanities. Thank God. I think "The City in the Sea" suffers, though, from being unsustained or not fully developed. It moves too quickly from one thing to the next and then back again without much of an explanation of why they're happening and what it could all mean. But I'm not sure that's the fault of the authors. That lack of full development appears to be a feature of Weird Tales #367. I'm not sure why there couldn't have been more content in this issue. There's room for it, but the whole thing seems to have been cut short for some reason. Also, we know that because Hellboy is a series character, nothing extremely bad or life-changing can happen to him. He has to come through his experience unscathed, with all of his sanity points still on the board and ready for his next adventure.
Finally, being a comic book artist myself, I can't complain about reading a prose story about a comic book character. This kind of thing can actually work. (I have done it myself. I hope it can work.) See for example The Avengers Battle the Earth-Wrecker by Otto Binder, from 1967. It's not great literature, but it works. On the other hand, it has to be handled and developed in just the right way. The appearance of a comic book character in Weird Tales is something new, even if the character is not and the type of story in which he appears is not, even if the inspiration for the story is more than 175 years old. Finally, finally, I'm not sure that a comic book story, which is what this is, should take the lead over real prose fiction that does not resort or refer to any other work or form but instead stands alone.
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
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