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The Red Skull: Sick Galatea

As much as I might bemoan the failings of public transit, particularly its ability to waste time when I have little of that particular commodity, I must admit that sometimes wonderful insights come to he who spends much time on the bus. For example, while riding the #1 bus that passes in front of the Capitol Building here in sunny Austin, it occurred to me that a cultural link reaches all the way from dead but well-thought-of ancient Greece, through vectors of drama and popular entertainments, to connect all the way forward, through the millennia, to a comics concept that embodies the vilest qualities of the worst the twentieth century had to offer: Marvel Comics' Red Skull.

At each stage, the idea became transformed into something different. Yet the core notion - of a human creator attempting to forge a perfect being from imperfect matter or flesh - persists throughout. And the path takes some peculiar turns, from a mythological origin, through a specimen of socially-conscious literature of the turn of the twentieth century, past a side-trip to the stage, until making its appearance in the origin tale of one of Marvel's more loathsome ongoing villains.

We see here more than a slight change - we encounter no less than an altogether diametric inversion of the original notion of a man who created a (human) object to create his love to the vision of a madman who created a perfect proxy to live out his warped hatred for humanity in general.

Can You Get There from Here?

How, you might ask, do we get from Greek tales of antiquity to a costumed avatar of national socialism? Can we assume that the years 1998 to 2001 have finally taken the toll on that last remnant of Your Humble Redactor's judgment, and that absurd interrelationships between disconnected ideas, inane fantasies, and stupid conspiracy theories now pollute my fevered brow?

We need move stepwise, from point to point, to trace the path of a concept that spirals inward rather than bee-lines from point A to point B. However dubiously one might regard the initial, vaguely-stated premise, however, the forensics trail points back to these origins through one or two intermediary stages in the twentieth century.

I apologize, again, if this argument and trail of ideas seem to form less than a perfectly connected chain to all readers. The connection, however clear, obvious, and inevitable to myself nonetheless does cross great leaps of time and culture, and furthermore connects things some might hope no one would ever want to connect. Nonetheless, a few stages of likely, or sometimes obvious, transmission do strongly imply a cascade of ideas from Ancient Greece to a four-color treatment of the genesis of a truly ugly, truly vile, and sometimes compelling character.

Pygmalion and Galatea

From Greek tales, we know of a legendary figure named Pygmalion, who evidently once lived on the island of Cypros, a place particularly dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite (and, some say, the origin of her sometime epithet Cypriot). I recall a version of the tale where Pygmalion, convinced that no living woman lived up to his exacting standards, swore off mortal women altogether. Then, evidently either lacking the determination to stick by this resolution, or driven by some vision he had of what constituted a "perfect" woman, he resolved to sculpt an example which did live up to what he expected in perfection of the female type.

Inasmuch as Pygmalion worked in granite or marble rather than inflatable vinyl we can, for the moment, dispense with some of the jokes that inevitably arise when someone claims the intent and ability to create a perfect female companion. True to the original tale, indeed, Pygmalion created a fine sculpture, which he named Galatea, possibly after a nymph of the same name who had some connection to the deity Poseidon (and, therefore, provided the name for one of the moons of Neptune discovered after 1970).

The image of the inflatable love doll, however, never travels far from the myth, inasmuch as Pygmalion fell in love with his creation, tragically yearning over an inanimate object that somehow possessed virtues its sculptor failed to see in the flesh-and-blood females of his homeland. Aphrodite, therefore, stepped in, and, as an act of mercy, gave life to the statue. Thus we see that not all gods practiced cruelty or caprice; indeed, in a case where one wishes that a god or goddess might step in and straighten out poor Pygmalion's warped worldview (what made him think that a perfect woman should lower her standards to accept the imperfect likes of him?), we see some rather shameless pandering to the ill-considered goodwill of a man, albeit a talented one, with issues.

Shaw's Pygmalion

At the next stage of the genesis of Marvel's twisted paragon, we move to the life and works of George Bernard Shaw. We know Shaw today for two intertwined elements of his life: his commitment to mainstreaming socialism for the European middle classes through vehicles such as the Fabian society, and through his theory of an art of meaning (meaning that works of art should have a moral-political message to convey).

A political biography of Shaw would warrant an altogether separate study, and mostly would not relate to the transmission of an idea from Greece to American comic books. However, his work Pygmalion pertains to the subject at hand. In this play, a linguist named Henry Higgins posits that he can teach human beings the skills necessary to transcend humble class origins, primarily through coaching them in dialects of speech to allow a kind of camouflage-of-accent that will allow them to pass in British upper-class circles.

The question comes up while Higgins, a flower girl, and some onlookers become a small crowd in seeking shelter from a downpour, and Higgins passes some of the time waiting for the sky to clear by analyzing the accents of the people around him, in the process inadvertently insulting said flower girl. Higgins ultimately makes the following claim:

You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden party. I could even get her a place as lady's maid or shop assistant, which requires better English. Thats the sort of thing I do for commercial millionaires.

In this particular, then, Shaw's work revealed the meaning of the title. As the legendary Pygmalion had created himself a perfect woman as a sculpture which divine forces would animate, Higgins, too, intended to take (presumably) rude material and refine it into something greater.

Here we have adequate definition of a theme to identify, at the least, an idea replicated through parallel imagination, However, we need resort less to speculation and look more to the entertainments of the early sixties to find how the idea might have come from the ancients and arrived in a Marvel comic book of the 1960s.

Amateur cultural forensics strongly points to, of all things, a Broadway musical.

Popular Entertainments of the Sixties

The year 1964 included a number of events. These include my own birth, and the return of Captain America to superhero comics. We might consider, regarding the latter - superhero comics - that the popular entertainments of the day might shape the material somewhat. For instance, absurdities like a Bizarro Beatle Jimmy Olsen must owe considerably to popular enthusiasms of the day.

Broadway musicals, slightly over a generation ago, seemed to enjoy more overall cultural approval, at least in a day before music would serve as a tool of cultural balkanization to the extent that it does today.

Returning to 1964, that year saw the production of "My Fair Lady."

The sources from which this piece of musical theater borrowed, and the window of time in which it appeared, combined with the role of New York as fountain of entertainments (which may, in time, become cinematic productions able to reach the boondocks), strongly suggest, in the absence of positive proof, that the essential Galatea theme came to Kirby through this channel.

Consider: We have the argument about the improvability or perfectibility of human beings, with a resolution based on a test or wager. We have an object from humble origins which one man, possessed (or obsessed) with a vision, believes he can remake as something better.

Assuming the truth of the driving insight behind this particular study of derivative material in comics - that a conceptual thread does connect Kirby's 1960s origin of the Red Skull, backwards, through stages, to the Pygmalion and Galatea myth - we have here a particularly potent piece of black humor in a story where the murderer of millions acts out key scenes from a stage production featuring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.

The Return of the Red Skull

Bringing Captain America back meant, eventually, bringing with him some of the baggage from his past, whether this past actually appeared in earlier comics or simply represented a revisionist interpretation based on a mid-sixties view of the conflicts of the forties. Since the definition of Captain America somewhat depends on the enemies he opposes, we need not express surprise that Kirby and Lee might choose to bring back his most perfect opposite number.

However, I suspect that Kirby or Lee intended some severe sardonic humor here in the sequence, above, explaining the events that brought about the creation of the Red Skull. As in Pygmalion, and, again, as in "My Fair Lady," the entire enterprise of perfecting of a randomly-selected target resulted after an argument, followed by one disputant's contention that he could make an exemplar out of rude raw material. The raw material could come from the Cockney underclass (as did Eliza Doolittle) or a bellboy in occupied Poland.

In the simplified way of derivative material, however, the entirety of the "nature-versus-nurture" argument doesn't come out. A writer would find it problematic to have Adolf Hitler, advocate of a sick brand of genetic determinism, nonetheless taking the role of the "environment makes the man" through attempting to improve a bellboy into the perfect nazi - indeed, in creating the avatar of naziism.

Once created, furthermore, Hitler had in the Red Skull's person a kind of perfect knight of national socialism, a fearless, ugly, mirthless, merciless apparition that lived to destroy people and things for no better reason than it could and it wanted to. The Skull fused the dubious ideal of German eugenic perfection with the role of an avatar of death, come to end the tenure of so-called lesser beings on the face of the earth in order to wipe clean the slate of history for a new beginning for a (self-designated) master race. Separate the Red Skull from his considerable personal prowess, in other words, and we would have just another brain dead insensitive nazi scumbag; but combined with abilities not different from an amalgamation of a perfect soldier and a perfect schemer, and we have something that could, left to its own devices, do a great deal to advance the (ultimately doomed) social / political / racial utopia the Hitler envisioned.

In part, we can assume that the historical personalities involved left a strong enough imprint on history that it somewhat limited the ability of artistic treatments to interpret them. If Henry Higgins, in Pygmalion and "My Fair Lady," might argue about the ability of man to intentionally improve himself or another, no such opportunity would occur in the context of a mass-murdering megalomaniac like Hitler. His record in having people he never even met liquidated for little more than glorified differences of opinion does not strongly suggest that he showed any more charity in the circle of his immediate attendants and companions.

Do The Pieces Connect?

We have, through most of the stages of this projected genesis of an idea, elements that do implicate previous generations of the thoughts involved. We have the created-person aspect of Galatea, although in the form of a recreated person shaped by the dominating, if sick, vision of a driven mind; we have Shaw's notion that will and action can shape or reshape human beings into something very different than what we might consider an inevitable form dictated by circumstance and origins; we, fortunately, do not have this in a musical version with Rex Harrison singing about partitioning Poland, but we do have a context where the creative minds behind a version of the Skull's origin enjoyed some proximity to a well-known, well-distributed piece of theater that could easily have transmitted the central Galatea theme to the likes of Lee and Kirby, whose careers in New York could well have exposed them to such material as the musical interpretation of Shaw's Pygmalion before it became current in America or the west in general.

While a healthy doubt may deny to any of the preceding claims the label of proof, we may nonetheless consider that the occasional unfortunate goes to jail on weaker evidence.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 244. Completed 28-MAR-2001.