It all started in '63; the original pulp imagination that comes from primitive roots. Those same routes that are described by Kari Hohne in The Mythology of Sleep: the Waking Power of Dreams (prev.) The forest of belief and fear that the hero must conquer and integrate to the Self.
Pulps are our books of conquest, and the fighting never stops - until everything is neutralised by sameness. This was why I took an unpopular line vis-a-vis the Ukrainian war, since the neutralizing dragon of the West is somewhat more subtle than a Russian tank.
Once everything is neutralised there will be no more wars since what is there to fight about in a kingdom of the dead? The physical reality is acrobatic and not of the head (ego.) It was the acrobatics of a Kirby cover that enticed BWS, according to a YouTube snippet.
Pulps are the acrobatic world; the primitive expression that is lost to calculation of the head. A good indication of what has been lost is to pit Tony Stark against Elon Musk!
Both are ostensibly doing very similar things. Helping the military (in Ukraine or Vietnam); miniaturising electronics (in satellite arrays or iron suits); acting the playboy (in Hollywood or Monte Carlo.)
What is to explain the fact that Iron Man's gadget-laden universe seems to increase in interest with each passing year, while Musk's becomes an electrically neutralizing force of palpable dimensions?
The answer is that Musk lives in his head while Stark lives in the dreamland of the pulps. Dreams are myths, and despite any modern futurist credentials, are rooted deep in the past; in the forest of fear and the serpents of lore.
Musk is on a one-way trip to the calculating land of ones and zeros - the dual-note of 'Jirel Meets Magic' (prev.) The end-product of that trip is the neutralizing effect of information, or the vanishing-point of technique (sun, the Relativity of time.)
Dreams are primitive, primordial, serpentine and cannot be distracted by these neutral types of technique that lead nowhere. The calculating head is ineluctably drawn into itself, into the universe of electromagnetic impulses.
Outside is the dream that animates reality; the forest of fear; the labyrinthine, serpentine ways. Into this delves the Iron Man, and it is the old world of myth rather than a Brave New World of nothing.
It is ever the case that delving into myth opens the route to a revival, a renaissance. From Greek ruins come majestic insights.
In Tales of Suspense #43, Stark labs are assaulted by the Netherland, in the delectable shape of the lady Kala, who wants Iron Man to help them conquer the overworld. As descendants of Atlanteans, their technology is sophisticated, but Kala discovers this is one conquest she can't win.
The primitive blood and corpse-like land of the pulps is a harbinger of vitality that is lost to the calculating head. Like the dog in Goodbye to Language (N3) that rolls on decaying matter and springs up invigorated, the germs and nasties that inhabit the physical reality also imbue strength. Metamorphosis and revival are linked to lifecycle and the psyche of childlike wonder (imago).
Pulps inhabit a primitive, dreamlike world where the psychology is one of conquering fear, one that Marvel's heroes epitomised. The timeless area is like a type of detritus that continually revives.
The strength of revival is forever attached to immortality or death, and this gothic principle runs through comics. The Eternal Vishanti; the Living Tribunal; Eternity.
Ditko's dynamics in Doctor Strange may be the opposite of Iron Man, but the dreamlike and the primitive vistas are eternally there. Anything else is a wasteland that vanishes the further one advances into it. The mirror of illusions; the head of the sorcerer; the promise of a future that vanishes into the mists of oblivion; the land where calculation is everything and physical reality nothing; time is relative and eternity is nowhere; primitive realism and psychedelic grandeur are lost to time.
