Them Blasted Mutants
and their gosh-durned evil lotions
Before we get started, there’s one last chance to get in out of the rain at ReCon, a church-run board game convention in Kernersville, which had some separate downtown excitement over the weekend where rain would have been helpful.
Rumors of a femme fatale crashing a stolen Corvette into a power pole during a high-speed chase were rampant at both of the places I visited during my post-afternoon-nap tour of downtown K-Vegas. The peanuts I found there were equally hot, but could have used a touch more salt.
After that panel at RavenCon, I realized that there were a lot of episodes of the 90s X-Men series that I hadn’t seen, either. The animation started to go downhill around season 3, but by season 5 it was much worse. Equally disappointing was the characterization of small-town Kentuckians as a literal torch-and-pitchfork-carrying mob. For one thing, they woulda had guns, especially that mullet-headed kid in the Punisher shirt (Y-7 kids’ show, but still, let’s be real here). Then there’s the tribal looking down on people who are either poor or just choose to live differently, which always annoys me. Hell, we ain’t even burnt a witch since 1840!
But Enough of the Hometown Hatred
At an actual science fiction convention, like RavenCon a few weeks ago, there’s a decent chance that your fellow panelists (and maybe some of the audience members) know where the X-gene came from, in Marvel myth and lore.
As the cover of Eternals #2 above shows, Marvel jumped on the Ancient Aliens bandwagon with both feet, after Erich von Daniken’s book topped the bestseller lists. By the 1960s, there was apparently an audience for such things. Nobody in the States knew or cared about HP Lovecraft at that point in time, but according to archaeological debunker Jason Colavito, the French did.1
Colavito's thesis is that consciously or unconsciously, every one of the “ancient aliens” authors was using concepts derived from HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, an early experiment in shared world-building. If you're unfamiliar with HPL, he was a pulp writer whose vision of cosmic nihilism has now influenced five generations of science fiction and horror creators, everybody from Robert E Howard (who knew and corresponded with him) to Ramsey Campbell in prose, to Mike Mignola and Alan Moore in comics, to HR Giger in the visual arts and Guillermo del Toro in the movies.
HPL was writing about the Elder Things starting life on this planet and humans interbreeding with the Deep Ones in the 1920s and 30s. In Colavito’s telling, Erich von Daniken, being Swiss, would have been exposed to that stuff. And after EvD’s book came out in 1968, Marvel test-marketed the concept before green-lighting Jack Kirby to include it in his work on The Eternals.
From the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History website:
Marvel Preview was a short-lived black and white comic magazine published by Marvel Comics' parent company Magazine Management. It is one of several titles from the 1970s where the publisher used Marvel's talent to produce content outside of the publishing industry's self-censoring "Comics Code." Marvel Preview was used as a way for the Company to introduce and develop characters and storylines, changing subject matter almost every issue. The magazine ran from 1975 –1980, when it changed titles to Bizarre Adventures before ceasing publication in 1983.
One of the other RavenCon panels I went to was called “Why Won’t the Alien Intervention Theory Go Away?” Panelist Tom Doyle proposed a feedback loop between commercial pop culture and folklore, citing the lizard people in Kenneth Johnson’s mini-series V (for ‘visitors’ not ‘vendetta’) as potential inspirations for the Reptoids of British and American conspiracy theories. We clearly see a similar loop in action with the Marvel example above.
In an additional twist, Chariots of the Gods became its own series of comic books in Europe during the 1980s.2
Despite its links to [von Daniken’s] deeply ambiguous schtick, though, The Gods from Outer Space was also a handy primer for young minds re: the idea that humanity’s myths and legends might in reality be nothing more than the misunderstandings and misrememberings of events or inventions long past, and that even the god we sang hymns to in school assembly every morning, even the idea of “good” and “evil” themselves as discrete and mysterious forces instead of the results of circumstance, history, and environment, might all just be a load of bollocks we’d made up over the millennia because it was easier than actually trying to understand things.
which seems a little harsh to me. I interviewed a person who does exactly that — trying to understand things — by mining old stories for potentially real and useful information about the past.
Of course, there are also charlatans and frauds and snake-oil salesmen, but I vaguely suspect that even those people probably have to believe their own stories to some extent in order to sell them effectively. This post from my old Steemit blog centers on David Wilcock, whose interests extend beyond ancient aliens to all sorts of New Age ideas.
But WHY?
As I wrote a couple weeks ago, people just have a really hard time with the concept of evolution. They’re not being dumb. Paradigm shifts are difficult and scary. Two thousand years of Western cultural insistence that matter and spirit are necessarily and by definition different things makes it really hard to imagine how they can be related, how we can get from dead chemistry to living biology, much less to thinking / computing psychology.
has some good thoughts about the latter below.
I hope to come back to this idea shortly, but we’re out of space for this week, and after a full week of last-minute grading, I need some supper. And maybe a beer. Or two.3
Thanks for reading!
HPL died in 1937, unknown outside his small community of amateur journalists and the readers of Weird Tales. He had a couple of small bumps on Google Ngram before 1980, but the Chaosium role-playing game Call of Cthulhu seems to have been a turning point.
Just one more, I promise. Those pulp-style painted covers were a feature of Gold Key comics, which were petering out just as I started reading in the mid-70s. This video features some of their original characters, including Tragg, the first Cro-Magnon man, and his girlfriend Lorn, created from Neanderthals by aliens.
I did in fact go out for a beer, and caught a set by Crumb Catcher while I was scrolling Substacks at the bar. Both were toe-tappin’ good.
One possible answer for the origin of life? Ice crystals.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a64906716/rna-world-replication/