Create Your Own Thirteenism! (Tales of the Unexpected #2 Backup Story, Cover Date January, 2007)

Characters

Main Heroes: Dr. Thirteen, Traci Thirteen

Main Villain: I, Vampire

P'Shat

Dr. Thirteen awakens from a dream to find himself in the cave of a vampire, who claims to have died two (or three) times already. Dr. Thirteen thinks he's just a goth. Traci walks out of the cave and is kipnapped. When he runs after her, he is knocked out by what appears to be a Nazi Ape. Dr. Thirteen has another dream, and awakens to find a cro-magnon buried in the ice below him, completely missing the floating pirate ship above and behind him.

Drash

Giant Floating Nazi Pirate Apes! Is there a better concept for a villain in all of comicdom?

Putting behind all thoughts of incest this week (not even in two otherwise ambiguous dream sequence), Dr. 13 gives us some good quotables this month, that seem to fit into an ineffible category of their own. Image John Cleese from Monty Python, playing a straight man in a show that was not otherwise a comedy. Or maybe the comedy team of Abbott & Hardy.

For example:

Dr. Thirteen: As much as the rest of the world would have us believe otherwise, cavemen didn't speak French.

What an unusual conspiracy! And again:

Dr. Thirteen: Look, I'm humoring you as far as the bloodlust goes, but cryptozoology I just won't cotton to.

A guy's got to have his limits!

So, what would your Dr. Thirteenism be if you were, say, attacked by giant floating Nazi pirate apes? I'm thinking something along the lines of:

"Keep my daughter as a slave if you must, but for the love of decency please dispense with at least one of your cliched villainous tropes!"

The Lighthearted Humor of Casual Incest

If you're interested in a complete rundown of the plot, background, and detailed allusions in the Dr. Thirteen backup story in Tales of the Unexpected #1, please read this post at Absorboscan.

That's not what I've come to talk about.

I've come to talk about incest which, if you go by the statistics, is overwhelmingly cases of older male relatives raping younger female relatives. If you go by media portrayals, though, you're likely to think that half the time there's some teeange Lolita "coming on" to the older male. I counted three distinct incest references in the brief first part of Dr. Thirteen. None were deeply hidden in subtext.

1. Father's dream of "slutty daughter" hanging over shirtless father in bed.

2. "Doomsbury Mansion, our in -- uh -- ancestral home."

3. "Daddy . . . Would you eat me?"

So, what percentage of incestuous relationships begin by a daughter seducing her unwilling father? If any number or decimal in your percentage is above "zero", you're probably estimating a little on the high side.

I fear this story is already verging on paedophiliac propoganda, in which any bad things that happen to the daughter will be because she was "asking for it."