The Flash Notes - Jay Garrick

Single-powered character
Reader identification
Dynamic motion versus static images
The Flash exemplifies comic book's energetic potential
Artistic expression of speed
i.e. Speed lines, blurred images, forced perspective
Flying, put them in the clouds

All-American Publications
Flash Comics # 1 (Jan. 1940)
Hard water fumes or "heavy" water vapors
College student
Father's WWI helmet redesigned as Hermes
Hawkman, Black Canary

All Star Comics (summer 1940)
Two DC Comics (Adventure & More Fun)
Two All-American (All-American & Flash)
Sandman, Hour-Man, Green Lantern, The Atom, Hawkman, Johnny Thunder,
Spectre, and Dr. Fate.

All Star Comics #3
Introduction of the Justice Society of America

All Star Comics #4 (March-April 1941)
Poll results pick Flash for solo title

All-Flash Quarterly
"Honorary" status in JSA due to editorial policy

Comic Calvacade (Winter 1943)
Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern

All Star Comics #24 (Spring 1945)
Flash returns to JSA
Series canceled at #57 (Feb/March 1951)

Four titles in Golden Age.

Most believeably written of superheroes.
Jay Garrick fought gangsters, kidnappers, racketeers, corrupt politicians, swindlers, and frauds.
Humiliation and tormenting his opponents.
Vibrating superfast he could become invisible and haunt the criminals "ghost-like".
Throwing pies and forcefeeding criminals.
Mischievous streak.

Supervillains.
The Fiddler, the Thinker, the Thorn, the Shade
Usually a villain initially triumphs before the hero discovers how to turn the tables. Jay Garrick's conflicts, however, were remarkably unchallenging, and the entertainment value of such stories relied upon the reader enjoying the villains being toyed with unmercifully before they surrendered - or in some cases, before they saw the error of their ways and reformed.

Post WWII costumed characters fell out of favor.
All-Flash cancelled with issue #32 (Dec./Jan. 1947) and the last issue of Flash comics was #104 (Feb. 1949). After Comic Calvacade #29 (Oct./Nov. 1948) became a funny animal book.

Ten years after his final JSA adventure Jay returned to DC Continuity with The Flash #123 (Sept. 1961). Gardner Fox.

The "multiverse" concept.

All-American Comics
225 Lafayette St.

Harry Lampert, artist
Gardner Fox, writer
M.C. Gaines, boss
Shelly Mayer, editor

Gaines & Mayer pulled Superman from DC slush pile. Within 18 months
Flash was third superhero to garner a second title.

Superman
Strong, invulnerable, alien

Batman
Escape artist, detective, human

Flash
Fast, scientist, superhuman

Flash Comics #1
Jay Garrick, college student, tries to get Joan, but his football skills don't impress her. Studying gases from "hard water", he separates the elements, and while taking a smoke break late night, he is too slow to catch the broken beakers. Professor Hughes finds him in the morning after he has inhaled all the fumes. After weeks in the hospital, he finally recovers and then some. Chasing after Joan, Jay realizes his speed, compared to a hurricane, a wind, a ghost. He gets books superfast for Joan from the library, who then decides to go with him to the dance if he uses his speed to play in the state game. Benched most of the game, a star player getting taken out puts Jay in the game. Leadfoot Garrick scores touchdown after touchdown, becoming a football hero. After graduation Jay heads to New York for Assistant Professorship at Coleman University. Reading in the newspaper about racketeers, Jay becomes the Flash and confronts them, never actually seen in a panel, but mentioned in the next. He feels a sense of purpose. Playing tennis against himself, no regard for secret identity, Joan recognizes Jay's powers. Her father was kidnapped, the thugs drive by shoot at Joan, but Jay catches the bullet. Sieur Satan, Serge Orloff, Duriel, all concoct a plan to find out the secret base of the atmoic bombarder. The villains keep him in a room made of mirrors, which he says are stealing his mind. They then try to get Joan's body to show him they mean business to get him to talk, the Faultless Four. Joan tells Jay of their threats to find out the secret. The Flash then charges after the car following it to the hideout. An explanation of his powers, catching a bullet, rescues Joan's father, then speeds back to listen in on the four's plans. They attach Coney Island Beach with a machine gun from a plane. Satan kills his cohorts trying to fry the Flash with an electrified room, but he speeds out. Satan tries to escape by his car but crashes.

Hard water or heavy water stops cell division, causes infertility, more dense.

Placing females on a pedestal.
Joan Williams, more than just a girlfriend, a partner, helpmate, a confidante, and a force to be reckoned with. Mayer looked at men and woman as equals.

Humor, Three Dimwits.

Flash #123 Flash of Two Worlds
Jay as comic book character
Inspiring Barry to name himself the Flash
Jay's villain Rival
Hero worship

The genius of the parallel world concept was that it promised so much more. Throughout the 1970's, more prominent alternate Earths were developed, each offering unique viewpoints and glimpses of a veritable multiverse that's begun to flower anew in 21st century DC comics.

"Elseworlds"

Doralla Kon "Lady Flash"
Flash #145 & #157

Joseph Campbell - the Return

When ther hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal, personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin his labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds.

Refusal of the return.
Numerous indeed are the heroes fabled to have taken up residence forever in the blessed isle of the unaging Goddess of Immortal Being.

Muchukunda, awoken by Vishnu incarnate in the person of Krishna, who defeated the demons and ruled India in Utopian peace, decimated barbarians who stumbled upon him asleep.

"My Lord God! When I lived and wrought as a man, I lived and wrought - straying restlessly; through many lives, birth after birth, I sought and suffered, nowhere knowing cease or rest. Distress I mistook for joy. Mirages appearing over the desert I mistook for refreshing waters. Delights I grasped, and what I obtained was misery. Kingly power and earthly possession, riches and might, friends and sons, wife and followers, everything that lures the senses: I wanted them all, because I believed that these would bring me beatitude. But the moment anything was mine it changed its nature, and became as a burning fire.

Then I found my way into the company of the gods, and they welcomed me as a companion. But where, still, surcease? Where rest? The creatures of this world, gods included, all are tricked, my Lord God, by your playful ruses; that is why they continue in their futile round of birth, life agony, old age, and death. Between lives, they confront the lord of the dead and are forced to endure hells of every degree of pitiless pain. And it all comes from you!

My Lord God, deluded by your playful ruses, I too was a prey of the world, wandering in a labyrinth of error, netter in the meshes of ego-consciousness. Now, therefore, I take refuge in your Presence - the boundless, the adorable - desiring only freedom from it all."

The Magic Flight.
If the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or the god and is then explicitly commisioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron. On the other hand, if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero's wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit.

A popular variety of the magic flight is that in which objects are left behind to speak for the fugitive and thus delay pursuit.

Another well-known variety of the magic flight is one in which a number of delaying obstacles are tossed behind by the wildly fleeing hero.

"The incomparibly useful function of the dogmatic symbol {is that} it protects a person from a direct experience of God as long as he does not mischievously expose himself. But if...he leaves home and family, lives too long alone, and gazes too deeply into the dark mirror, then the awful event of the meeting may befall him. Yet even then the traditional symbol, come to full flower through the centuries, may operate like a healing draught and divert the fatal incursion of the living godhead into the hallowed spaces of the church."
Dr. C. Jung

Escape from the Underworld
Orpheus & Eurydice
In spite of the failure recorded, a possibility exists of a return of the lover with his lost love from beyond the terrible threshold. It is always some little fault, some slight yet critical symptom of human frailty, that makes impossible the open interrelationship between the worlds; so that one is tempted to believe, almost, that is the small, marring accident could be avoided, all would be well. The myths of failure touch us with the tragedy of life, but those of success only with their own incredibility. And yet, if the monomyth is to fulfill its promise, not human failure or superhuman success but human success is what we shall have to be shown.

Rescue From Without
Amaterasu, Japanese sun goddess
Ilat, South Arabian
Die Sonne, German
Feminine sun goddess

Shinto "Way of the Gods"
Way of devotion to the guardians of life and custom (local spirits, ancestral powers, heroes, the divine king, one's living parents, and one's living children). Preserving and cultivating purity of heart.

Butsudo "Way of the Buddha"
The powers that yield release from the round.

Eight Hundred Myraid of Gods are but differing manifestations of one unique Deity, Kuni-tokotachi-no-Kami, the Eternally Standing Divine Being of the Earth, the Great Unity of All Things in the Universe, the Primordial Being of Heaven and Earth, eternally existing from the
beginning to the end of the world.

The mirror, the sword, the tree.

The mirror, reflecting the goddess and drawing her forth from the august repose of her divine nonmanifestation, is symbolic of the world, the field of reflected glory. Therein divinity is pleased to regard its own glory, and this pleasure is itself inducement to the act of
manifestation or "creation".

The sword is the counterpart of the thunderbolt.

The tree is the World Axis in its wish-fulfilling, fruitful aspect - the same as that displayed in Christian homes at the season of the winter solstice, which is the moment of the rebirth or return from the sun, a joyous custom inherited from the Germanic paganism that has given to the modern German language its feminine Sonne.

The dance of Uzume and the uproar of the gods belong to the carnival: the world left topsy-turvy by the withdrawal of the supreme divinity, but joyous for the coming renewal.

Inanna's descent into Underworld.
Ninshubur, her messenger, ran to the gods.
Enlil, Sumerian air-god, Nanna the moon god, Enki the water god and god of wisdom.

3000 BC

Inanna three days and nights upon a stake.

Two sexless creaturesm one with "food of life" and one with "water of life", sent to sprinkle it on Inanna sixty times.

The conclusion of the poem, this valuable document of the sources of the myths and symbols of our civilization, is forever lost.

Instead of holding to and saving his ego, as in the pattern of magic flight, he loses it, and yet, through grace, is returned.

Whether rescued from without, driven from within, or gently carried along by the guiding divinities, he has yet to re-enter with his boon the long-forgotten atmosphere where men who are fractions imagine themselves to be complete. He has yet to confront society with his ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend.

Joseph Campbell - The Ultimate Boon Part 2

Kashyapa "the Turtle Man" 

Married 13 daughters of ancient demiurgic patriarch, Daksha "Lord of Virtue". Two daughters gave birth to titans and gods who battled for many years. Titan priest comes in Shiva's "Lord of the Universe" favor who bestows a charm to raise the dead. Brahma & Vishnu tell the gods to form a truce

Brahma, Vishnu, & Shiva - Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer

After 7th Century BC Brahma becomes an agent of Vishnu.

Creator-Preserver versus world-destroyer

Truce to churn the Milky Ocean of immortal life for its butter 'Amrita' "not mortal" aka "nectar of deathlessness". Mount Mandara as churning stick, Vasuki "King of Serpents" churning rope

Vishnu in the form of a tortoise dove into the Milky Ocean to support the base of the mountain

A thousand years

Black, poisonous smoke, Kalakuta "Black Summit" highest concentration of the power of death

Shiva drank and held it in his throat which turned blue aka "Blue Neck" Nilakantha

Apsarases (nymphs)

Lakshmi "Goddess of Fortune"

Uchchaihshravas, milk-white horse "Neighing Aloud"

Kaustubha, the pearl of gems

Other objects to the number 13

Dhanvantari, physician of the gods, holding the moon, the cup of the nectar of life

Battle for the possession of the drink

Rahu, stole a sip, then beheaded before swallowed, body died, head immortal, his head pursuing the moon through the sky, eclipses of the moon.

Vishnu, in guise of a dancing damsel, beguiled the titans and passed the cup to the gods.

Mount Sumeru, gods victorious, titans banished.

The gods as icons are not ends in themselves. Their entertaining myths transport the mind and spirit, not up to, but past them, into the yonder void; from which perspective the more heavily freighted theological dogmas then appear to have been only pedagogical lures: their function, to cart the unandroit intellect away from its concrete clutter of facts and events to a comparitively rarefied zone, where, as a final boon, all existence - whether heavenly, earthly, or infernal - may at last be seen transmuted into the semblance of a lightly passing, recurrent, mere childhood dream of bliss and fright. 

The gods and goddesses then are to be understood as embodiments and custodians of the elixir of Imperishable Being but not themselves the Ultimate in its primary state. What the hero seeks through his intercourse wit them is therefore not finally themselves, but their grace, the power of their sustaining substance. This miraculous energy-substance and this alone is the Imperishable; the names and forms of the deities who everywhere embody, dispense, and represent it come and go. This is the misaculous energy of the thunderbolts of Zeus, Yahweh, and the Supreme Buddha, the fertility of the rain of Viracocha, the virtue announced by the bell rung in the Mass at the consecration, and the light of the ultimate illumination of the saint and sage. It guardians dare release it only to the duly proven.

Gilgamesh, Mesopotamian

Summerian city of Erech

Watercress of immortality, the plant "Never Grow Old"

Lions guard foothills, scorpion-men the heaven supporting mountains, a paradise garden.

The sea that surrounds the world, Goddess Ishtar in a cave, Siduri-Sabitu, closed the gates.

She advised him not pursue his quest but to enjoy the mortal joys of life.

Seeming hedonistic but actually a test. 

Seek ferryman Ursanapi, found chopping wood in the forest, guarded by "those who rejoice to live" or "those of stones", once defeated he traverses the water of death.

Utnapishtim, hero of the primordial deluge, "Noah", tells Gilgamesh the story of the flood then has him sleep six days. A bath, and seven loaves, then the secret of the plant, it was growing atthe bottom of the Cosmic Sea. Gilgamesh tied stones to his feet and sunk, grabbing the plant, mutilated his hand with its thorns. Rested, serpent stole away the plant, ate it, gained power to shed its skin, and so renew its youth. 

Fountain of Youth "Bimini", Juan Ponce de Leon

Chinese philosopher Ko Hung, pills of immortality

Three pounds of genuine cinnabar (red mercury) and one pound of white honey, mix, and dry, and roast over a fire to be shaped into pills. Ten pills a day.

To enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact. 

"All things are in process, rising and returning. Plants come to blossom, but only to return to the root. Returning to the root is like seeking tranquility. Seeking tranquility is like moving toward destiny. To move toward destiny is like eternity. To know eternity is enlightenment, and not to recognize eternity brings disorder and evi. Knowing eternity makes one comprehensive; comprehension makes one broadminded; breadth of vision brings nobility; nobility is like heaven. The heavenly is like Tao. Tao is the Eternal. The decay of the body is not to be feared."

Lao-tse

The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.

This is the highest and ultimate crucifixion, not only of the hero, but of his god as well. Hee the Son and the Father alike are annihilated - as personality-masks over the unnamed. For just as the figments of a dream derive from the life energy of one dreamer, representing only fluid splittings and complications of that single force, so do all the forms of all the worlds, whether terrestrial or divine, reflect the universal force of a single inscrutable mystery: the power that constructs the atom and controls the orbits of the stars. 

The Buddha's victory beneath the Bo Tree.

With the sword of his mind he pierced the bubble of the universe - and it shattered into naught. The whole world of natural experience, as well as the continents, heavens, and hells of traditional religious belief, exploded - together with their gods and demons. But the miracle of miracles was that though all exploded, all was nevertheless thereby renewed, revivified, and made glorious with the effulgence of true being. Indeed, the gods of the redeemed heavens raised their voices in harmonious acclaim of the man-hero who had penetrated beyond them to the void that was their life and source.

Joseph Campbell - The Ultimate Boon

...it is possible to observe, in the earliest phases of the development of the infant, symptoms of a dawning "mythology" of a state beyond the vicissitudes of time. These appear as reactions to, and spontaneous defenses against, the body-destruction fantasies that assail the child when it is deprived of the mother breast. 

"The infant reacts with a temper tantrum and the fantasy that goes with the temper tantrum is to tear everything out of the mother's body...The child then fears retaliation for these impulses, i.e., that everything will be scooped out of its own inside." 

Roehim

Anxieties for the integrity of its body, fantasies of restitution, a silent, deep requirement for indestructibility and protection against the "bad" forces from within and without, begin to direct the shaping psyche; and these remain as determining factors in the later neurotic, and even normal, life activities, spiritual efforts, religious beliefs, and ritual practices of the adult.

The profession of the medicine man, this nucleus of all primitive societies, "originates...on the basis of the infantile body-destruction fantasies, by means of a series of defense mechanisms."

Roheim

The first formula is abreaction in fantasy (my inside has already been destroyed) followed by reaction-formation (my inside is not something corruptible and full of faeces, but incorruptible, full of quartz crystals). The second is projection:' It is not I who am trying to penetrate into the body but foreign sorcerers who shoot disease-substance into people.' The third formula is restitution: ' I am not trying to destroy people's insides, I am healing them.' 

Image of indestructibility 

spiritual double - an external soul not afflicted by the losses and injuries of the present body, but existing safely in some place removed. 

Tjurunga - talisman of the man's totem ancestor

The Eternal Ones of the Dream

Roheim

Indestructible Body

Paradise of the Milk that Nver Fails

Mt. Olympus - Ambrosia (not mortal)

Wotan - 32,000 heroes eat flesh of Sachrimnir, the Cosmic Boar and milk from she-goat Hidrum: she feeds on leaves of Yggdrasil, the World Ash. 

It is obvious that the infantile fantasies which we all cherish still in the unconscious play continually into myth, fairy tale, and the teachings of the church, as symbols of indestructible being. This is helpful, for the mind feels at home with the images, and seems to be remembering something already known. But the circumstance is obstructive too, for the feelings come to rest in the symbols and resist passionately every effort to go beyond. The prodigious gulf between those childishly blissful multitudes who fill the world with piety and the truly free breaks open at the line where the symbols give way and are transcended. The ineffable teaching of the beatitude beyond imagination comes to us clothed, necessarily, in figures reminiscent of the imagined beatitude of infancy; hence the deceptive childishness of the tales. 

The ineffable teaching of the beatitude beyond imagination comes to us clothed, necessarily, in figures reminiscent of the imagined beatitude of infancy; hence the deceptive childishness of the tales. 

Wolverine

http://www.flylyf.com/x-men-origins-wolvering/

Joseph Campbell - Apotheosis Part 2

Nirvana - "Extinguised of the threefold fire of Desire, Hostility, and Delusion."

Nirva (snskrit) - 'to blow out', deprived of fuel, the fire of life is 'pacified', it is by ceasing to feed our fires that the peace is reached. Nirvana - "blown out, gone out,extinguished"

Kama-Mara vs. Future Buddha

Magician of Delusion vs. Subdued, ultimate ember of threefold fire

the last projected fantasies of his primitive physical will to live like other human beings

Myth, psychology, metaphysics

Vivid personifications prepare the intellect for the doctrine of the interdependence of the inner and the outer worlds.

Life-wish "eros or libido" corresponding to the Buddhist Kama "desire"

Death-wish "thanatos or destrudo" identical to Buddhist Mara "hostility or death"

The unconsciously grounded delusions from which desires and hostilities arise are in both systems dispelled by psychological analysis (Sanskrit: viveka) and illumination (Sanskrit: vidya).

Psychoanalysis is a technique to cure excessively suffering individuals of the unconsciously misdirected desires and hostilities that weave around them their private webs of unreal terrors and ambivalent attractions; the patient released from these finds himself able to participate with comparative satisfaction in the more realistic fears, hostilities, erotic and religious practices, business enterprises, wars, pastimes, and household tasks offered to him by his particular culture. 

Therefore the aim of the religious teaching is not to cure the individual back again to the general delusion, but to detach him from delusion altogether; and this not be readjusting the deisre ((eros) and hostility (thanatos) - for that would only originate a new context of delusion - but by extinguishing the impulses to the very root.

Buddhist Eightfold Path

"Form is emptiness, emptiness is indeed form. Emptiness is not different from form, form is not different from emptiness. What is form, that is emptiness; what is emptiness, that is form. And the same applies to perception, name, conception, and knowledge."

Having surpassed the delusions of his formerly self-assertive, self-defensive, self-concerned ego, he knows without and within the same repose. What he beholds without is the visual aspect of the magnitudinous, thought-transcending emptiness on which his own experiences of ego, form, perceptions, speech, conceptions, and knowledge ride. And he is filled with compassion for the self-terrorized beings who live in fright of their own nightmare. He rises, returns to them, and dwells with them as an egoless center, through whom the principle of emptiness is made manifest in its own simplicity. 

"Gift waves" go out from such a one for the liberation of us all. "This our worldy life is an activity of Nirvana itself, not the slightest distinction exists between them."

The Taoist Immortals

Four benevolent animals - phoenix, unicorn, tortoise, dragon

Goddess Hsi Wang Mu "The Golden Mother of the Tortoise"

K'un-lun Mountain

"Feast of the Peaches" every six thousand years

Teshouse "abode of fancy" encloses poetic ituition "abode of vacancy"

"abode of the unsymmetrical" suggests movement; the purposely unfinished leaves a vacuum into which the imagination of the beholder can pour

"the secret of temporal existence" "existence to the slightest detail was a conscious expression of eternity"

"The plants, rocks, fire, water, all are alive. They watch us and see our needs. They see when we have nothing to protext us and it is then that they reveal themselves and speak to us" 

Apache or Buddhist "sermon of the inanimate"

Shiva symbol "Lingam" combined phallus and vulva

Third wonder of the Bodhisattva myth is that the first wonder (the bisexual form) is symbolical of the second (the identity of eternity and time). For in the language of the divine pictures, the world of time is the great mother womb. The wise realize that they have come from the father and are returning to the father; while the very wise know that she and he are in substance one.

Tibetan 'Yum - female - time' 'Yab - male - eternity'

The union of the two is productive of the world, in which all things are at once temporal and eternal, created in the image of this self-knowing male-female G0d. The initiate, through meditation, is led to the recollection of this Form of forms (yab-yum) within himself. 

The male figure may be regarded as symbolizing the initiating principle, the method; in which case the female denotes the goal to which initiation leads (Nirvana or Eternity). The two are the same, each is both, and the dual form is only an effect of illusion, which itself, however, is not different from enlightenment. 

"...the pairs of opposites of the universal agony are not what they seem, and that for one centered in eternity the phantasmagoria of temporal 'goods' and 'evils' is but a reflex of the mind..."

This is a supreme statement of the great paradox by which the wall of the pairs of opposites is shattered and the candidate admitted to the vision of the God, who when he created man in his own image created man in his own image created him male and female. In the male's right hand is the thunderbolt, while in his left he holds a bell, symbolizing the goddess. The thunderbolt is both the method and eternity, whereas the bell is "illumined mind"; its note is the beautiful sound of eternity that is heard by the pure mind throughout creation, and therefore within itself.

"And The Word was made flesh"

Et Verbum caro factum est 

"The Jewel is in the Lotus"

Om mani padme hum

Tao

Supreme Buddha

Bodhisattva

Jivan Mukta

The Word Made Flesh

***

The Void    The World

Eternity     Time

Nirvana    Samsara

Truth    Illusoriness

Elightenment    Compassion

The God    The Goddess

The Enemy    The Friend

Death    Birth

The Thunderbolt    The Bell

The Jewel    The Lotus

Subject   Object

Yab   Yum

Yang   Yin

Wolverine as Mythology