I'm Outta Here!

Please visit me at my new home, here.

Whew! I knew Blogger would have to switch on eventually. Okay, let's make this quick:

So I heard from Blogger Help, and they want me to change my browser, re-set my firewall, all these things. But, I don't think I will: if, as they say, it isn't their problem but mine, then I need not concern myself with questions like "when will the problem be fixed"...it will never be fixed, unless I fix it. So, off to the new digs! Sadly, Wordpress informs me that it can only import posts and comments from Old Blogger and not New, but what the hell, I'll just have to work around that.

Okay! See you soon!

The House In My Head

A wise man (in other words, me) once said that writers are only carpenters, while readers are architects.

Which is a nice thought, I think, but even so, you've got to be a half-decent carpenter, if you want anyone to come and draw your hammering and sawing into a structure.

A roundabout way of saying: I've fixed that post. I'm much happier with it now. You may be, as well.

Second time I've done this! I'll try not to make it three.

Et In Arcadia, Bird-Nose

It's creeping up, slowly...

So welcome, finally, to the crossover between the Dynamic Defenders and Howard The Duck, in many ways the capstone of The World's Longest Graphic Novel, as written by Steve Gerber for Marvel Comics over roughly the course of the 1970s. No, we're not actually finished talking about it all, but the end is in sight now, anyway...

You can tell.

Marvel Treasury Editions, for those who don't know, were oversized “Greatest Hits” packages of Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Thor, The Avengers, etc...reprints of the earliest or most significant or most representative stories featuring their title characters. Consequently, any appearance of an original story in an MTE was a bit of (you'll pardon the expression) an odd duck; in fact with the exception of a handful of pages slipped in as framing sequences for Christmas MTEs, I feel on pretty safe ground saying that the only place to find one of these is in Howard's own Treasury. And, what an elegant story it turns out to be! After the extended unhinged blowout of the Headmen/Nebulon arc in Defenders, and the runaway existential faux-climax of the HTD Presidential campaign in Howard's own book, Gerber finds an opportunity to cook down the perspectival themes of both books into a thick, goopy stew of...

Uhmm...okay, maybe a bit less of that stuff, this time around. Okay? This is satire, after all, so it won't help matters if I overbake the analysis. Like any satire, this one has something definite, and serious, that it wants to communicate...but, again as with any satire, tone and message are of a piece, so even if I can't capture the tone, at least I shouldn't outrage it. Or, to put the whole thing another way, this is a Howard The Duck story, so if I can't get along with the way Howard looks at things, then I might as well write about something else.

Whoops! But, it's a tall order, there...

Anyway, to get started: somewhere in Central Park, a team of absurd supervillains (well, are there any other kind?) hook up under the leadership of “Dr. Angst”, an cacklingly puerile analogue of Dr. Strange who styles himself a “mystic of the mundane.” Well, evil is banal, as we've been told...anyway they all meet. Roasting marshmallows. Yes, roasting marshmallows. Over a campfire. In Central Park. The fiends! Tillie The Hun, angry Teutonic ballbuster with a mace and pigtails; The Spanker, private school headmaster dismissed because of his predilection for corporal punishment...a sort of Hannibal Lecter with a ping-pong bat; Sitting Bullseye, ex-CIA agent with...oh, the hell with it, ex-CIA agent with silly (yet deadly) joke arrows and a giant red target tattooed on his chest; and the Black Hole, guy from Brooklyn who was the victim of the very dumbest of dumbass cosmic accidents, which left him with the self-described “extremely gross power” to suck things into a cavity in his chest. All clear? And Dr. Angst has gathered them all together because they're the most pathetically ridiculous bunch of mediocre nobodies who ever had a pathetically ridiculous origin story...or, scratch that, they're barely even ridiculous actually, they're just kind of dumb. Derivative; unimaginative. Put simply, they're bad ideas. Who would even bother ridiculing them? The thing is already accomplished. What's the point.

Naturally, to Dr. Angst, all this glorious, glorious soul-deadening averageness makes his wannabe-supervillainous heart positively...well, sing, if it could carry a tune. And he promises to rid them all of their PAINFUL lameness of theirs, if they will just band together with him to KILL THIS DUCK.

Holy crap, excuse me, I just realized I'm dying to re-read this story! Back in a tick...

Oh my God, that was funny. Ahhhhh. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. So Howard and Bev have just been thrown out of their hotel room after the failure of his Presidential campaign left them without any money to pay the bill. And after bumping into Mary-Jane Watson on the street and getting really bad directions from her, they wind up – where else? – at the Sanctum Sanctorum of Dr. Strange, where the Defenders are hanging out, doubtless having some sort of tea. Nighthawk, ever irony's plaything, opens the door.

KYLE: You...You're a duck!

HOWARD: No offense, pal – but you're hardly in a position to criticize.

Let's see now, what to say, what to say...Doc is gonna send Howard home. “I mean, Bev's a sweet kid, but...” “But not your species. I understand.” When suddenly they are interrupted by the forces of stupidity, which plan to kill them! Howard, it almost goes without saying, ends up wearing an unconscious Doc's ornamentation, and casting spells at Dr. Angst in his stead; fittingly, Nighthawk fights The Spanker; Val takes on the obnoxiously vapid symbolism of Sitting Bullseye; and the Hulk tries to get away from Tillie. In other words, everybody's got an opposite. Kinda. Then Black Hole threatens to suck everybody completely away, only to be defeated, with ludicrous (not to mention telling) economy, by Bev...just before Howard takes down the Conjuror Without Class with a bust in the chops. And it's all over, folks! The Defenders return to their tea; Howard feels too guilty to leave the adoring Bev; Doc makes a hysterically funny joke about modern music which no one notices.

So...what does it all mean?

Well, I guess that depends on what you bring to it. With the conclusion of the Headmen/Nebulon sequence in The Defenders, Gerber has successfully pushed the straight-faced superheroic encounter with absurdity into completely new territory: baby deer, things that are not U-boats, French bozos with guns, second mortgages, elf assassins, and just a little brainwashing. Not too much. Just a little.

And – not to do an end run around Ed, so no spoilers – it's absolutely an unprecedented existential crisis. Hell, it's a freaking meltdown, is what it is. The absurd elements in the supervillainy might only provoke laughter here, but they don't...because these absurd elements are in earnest, you see, and in words of one syllable they mean to mess shit up. Nagan is more impassive about human fate than a Celestial. Nebulon is so out of touch he makes Galactus look like the King of Kensington. Jerry is such a narcissist that Dr. Doom would stand in awe of him...and Doom's met the Devil, you know. Don't think for a minute that absurdity is cute or nice, people; absurdity's all about the jugular, and it doesn't stop for donuts. And Gerber may satirize many things in The Defenders, but he isn't writing a satire...

It's a drama, see?

Still, as Yondu observed over in Marvel Presents, no act of spirit can ever be wrong against Karanada. “When was the last time you had fun, Nikki-mote?” Absurdity may not feel so laugh-out-loud funny when it's got its hands around your throat (in fact the proper word for what that feels like is horror) but it remains absurd for all that, and that's its ultimate weakness: that it exists, and is absurd, and so will yield to the application of the human sense of proportion which understands it as such. A is A, if I may make so bold; a thing is itself. But then, so is everything else, too, which makes A nothing special: in fact, all the intricately-designed plans of specialness and horror that Gerber's absurd villains absurdly depend on are just the sort of things that his moral universe takes the most pleasure in collapsing, since they're so utterly incapable of having a sense of proportion about themselves. A sense of humour, that tells them that destiny is not so much a matter of chess, but of Irish stand-down instead...last personality on its feet takes all...

I mean, what's more humourless, more devoid of personality, more full of horror, more sheerly implacable, than a Black Hole?

And yet, it's something so easily pre-empted, by sarcasm...

Well, but whatever. Over to Howard, now, who knows all this better than anybody, because everything in the world of hairless apes is equal madness to him. Horror? Let me tell you, once you've been brushed by the ice-cold udder of a vampire cow, the word has no meaning anymore...and that's at least part of the reason why Howard is satire, where The Defenders aren't: so instead of the Headmen, it's Dr. Angst and his crew, skewering everything there is to skewer about the tail-swallowing pretensions of the superhero biz (their own creators' work not excepted), while our heroes gape at the off-beat bloodthirstiness of it all...and then retaliate with their own enlightened (if still mote-like) sense of self-acceptance. Yes, even the Hulk. Because Dr. Angst et al. are bad ideas, sure, but who isn't a bad idea? In the end, it isn't just about whether you're a silly character or not, or even whether you're the hero or the villain or not; as Doc says (maybe Luke Cage has rubbed off on him a bit?), either you've got soul, sucker, or you haven't, and that's what counts. Absolutely, there's a yawning absurdity that underlies everyone's everyday life...but how is that news, really? And, who should that shock? This bizarre undercurrent may be mostly invisible in the central regions of prescriptive legitimacy, but that doesn't mean it isn't there, and so what's by turns funny and unfunny about Dr. Angst's non-team is only what's by turns funny and unfunny about the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, too, or (even) you and me, and so it doesn't matter. It's really all the same. It's normal. There is no normal, but if there were, that's what it would be, and surely if Doc and company have learned anything at all through Gerber's tenure, it's that... (“Eyes of Oshtur! Kyle!”...)

But, and also, this: somewhere on the various SSoS comments threads I recall mentioning that, just as the Defenders originally played the role of outsiders to the outsiders (and therefore, if you see, the protectors of the protectors), characters like Howard and Man-Thing have always served as indicators of an essential fuzziness about the meaning of such outsider positions, that exists at the very furthest fringe of the marginal existence that all superheroes symbolically represent – and thus they're Virgils, to these various spandexed Dantes, that show up to demonstrate for them that beyond the world where good people grapple with madness, there's another world where the madness and the people are all part of the same thing, in and of themselves quite undifferentiated...a realization that supercharges the psychological meaning of the flashy capes and cowls, precisely so that it may step beyond their power to encapsulate identity as trait. To put it another way: the revisitation of superheroic identity-symbolism that takes place at the fringes and the margins serves to refresh the relationship of symbol and identity in the centre spaces too, inasmuch as it reveals the marginal space to really be everywhere, and the central space only its invention...a revelation that therefore causes everyone, in every space, to become deeply involved with the exploration of boundary that's usually farmed out as the fringe's own extra-special concern. And of course, one need not even be a super-person to explore these boundaries, once the revelation has taken hold: as I've mentioned before, in The Defenders superpowers may stand for the question of what to do, but never for the question of who to be, and (as Howard knows) whether it's superheroes, regular joes, or whatever, in the end people are all just hairless apes mired in self-delusion anyway, and therefore no different from one another. Gorko isn't any different from Ultron; the Space Turnip isn't any different from Dr. Spectrum. Well, think about it! Thog, Kang, the Kidney Lady, Dormammu, the Melter, Ego The Living Planet (!), Thanos, Stilt-Man, Magneto, Stiletto, J. Jonah Jameson...Holliman, Pennysworth, the punks Charlie-27 scares off in the alley, Dr. Bong. Bob Doom. Eelar. Loki. The Green Goblin. Winky-Man. It really doesn't matter.

(Although I like Winky-Man...)

So that we get the satirical villains instead of the straight ones, and Howard as the team-up instead of (say) Hawkeye, means only that our Defenders have finally arrived at the point of transformation that can accept all this for what it is: in other words having realized that their ridiculous identity as costumed hero-types is something they can't simply ignore or gloss over, but just have to accept, embrace, take on faith, work with...whether it's absurd or not. Because the thing is, if you've got soul, then you've got it, baby, and so what're you gonna do with it? The state of being ridiculous is an unfortunate one, but since it comes with the package there's no use kicking against the fact...

When one can use it, instead. “But we don't laugh,” say the desperate comedians of Beckett's masterpiece...however, Howard does laugh, or at least he could if he chose, and so that makes him more than just a prisoner of reality's capricious pattern. And the Defenders, too, are free in this way, at least as free as anyone can be...because soul accomplishes a lot, in the Gerberverse. With it, the problem of costume-silliness fades away, to be replaced by a firmer originality, and Truth - at least a truth, as Gerber's later HTD series under the MAX imprint will tell us - becomes something that personality can retrieve from madness after all.

And so, finally: why does Howard elect to stay with Bev, in the ceaseless craziness of the world of hairless apes, when he could just as easily go home? We shouldn't wonder, really: we'd stay with Bev, too, because she's as real as the world of "central" spaces, "home" spaces, is not. We might as well ask why Bev stays with Howard! Which is a silly question, itself.

Because as Douglas Adams put it: no matter where you go, there you are.

Complete with all your ridiculousnesses, too.

But, it isn't as bad as all that.

I Just Realized!

I'm back in Vancouver, with a broadband connection!

So I've turned the comments moderation back on. I hope it doesn't appear untrusting of me...it's just that Tom Foss just left me a comment, and I couldn't find the bloody thing he commented on for twenty minutes!

Also, Studio 60 is a horrible, horrible show. God, I hope it shambles on forever. I'm quite enjoying this now. Call me sick.

The Bee-Loud Glade

So, notwithstanding my attempt at drunken arithmetic the other evening, today (Jan. 25^th, Robbie Burns Day – gee, hope I get this all posted before midnight) is the one-year anniversary of A Trout In The Milk.

Thank you all for coming. It's been an interesting, not to say addictive, exercise.

Beyond that, I hardly know what to say. My first post still sums up my blogging philosophy pretty well, and the experiment that tests futility is still ongoing...however, like the universe I think I'm content to ride the edge between expansion and collapse, there, content to be mysteriously flat so that I may cause myself to speculate endlessly about the reasons for it. I dunno, it's interesting. I seem to be almost perfectly poised between “futile” and “not-futile”. I will say, since I've got the floor, that my inspiration for blogging ultimately came from three things: one, the CSBG article “Mark Waid's Fantastic Four: World's Shittiest Comics Magazine”, probably by Joe Rice; two, whatever article his buddy Alex wrote that established his mad manifesto of L*O*V*E for early Green Lantern comics; and finally a long and tedious essay that I myself wrote about “Batman Begins” for Jim Roeg's site, that Jim was kind enough to say he liked. And I guess all you Bloggers had a similar experience? One day you wrote a huge giant (possibly beer-fuelled) comment on a thread, that made you think “well, crap...why don't I just get a blog of my own, and stop peeing on somebody else's carpet?” Yes: I never knew I cared. I never dreamed I had something to say. I mean I'm a lousy journalist, really, because I never believe my own bullshit generalizations – I can never write more than seven hundred words without thinking “this guy doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground!”, and then writing another seven hundred words against the point, before inevitably concluding “this guy doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground!” I have a file folder marked “Essays” which gets stuffed full of ideas and ideas and ideas that I can never follow through on because they'll eventually disgust me. I suffer, in other words, from what the Catholics call scruples; God's own forgiveness is not enough for me, if I've written something I judge to be crap. In fact some of the worst writing experiences of my life have involved me naively giving somebody something to read (aspiring writers out there: never do this) when they've asked for it...only to hear them say something like:

“It was good.”

It was good?

How in the fuck do you imagine I was asking you if you thought it was good? What I want to hear is whether or not you liked it, or you hated it, you want to read more, you think I suck, you want to sleep with me, you're gonna get your boyfriend to beat me up...

But...good? PAH! I spit on your good...

Anyway...

Where was I. Oh yes. I was going to say: thank goodness for blogging! And not just for the swell people you meet, but for the ability to finally all but empty out those “Essays” files, to have the freedom to write in (as Jim put it) a raw and diaristic style, that (as I put it) bridges writing and performance...well, it's great.

Whoops! There goes the midnight marker! I've officially screwed up...

But to continue: me, I've mysteriously found that I can make the occasional piece of coin as a songwriter. Well, who knew? It was never in my plan, or even my self-image, to be a person like that. I always envied musicians, because they could write a song, then BANG! perform the song, and immediately know whether or not people thought well of them. Writing, as I'm sure many of you know, is really different from that: you write the story and then BANG! you rewrite it and then rewrite it once more, and then you rewrite it again, and again, and then finally BANG! rewrite the goddamn thing again, because you sense there's something wrong with it...and then BANG! you get depressed as hell, and BANG! you start sulking, and BANG! your girlfriend meets a guy at her work, and then BANG! she moves out, and then...

Gee, I hate to be repetitive, but...where was I?

Oh, yeah.

BANG!

You get a blog.

But good for you: it's healthy. Bloggers, the whole world thinks this is unhealthy and sad, but I say unto you: there ain't nuthin' healthier. You get feedback right away; you move yourself to write something you think is good, or funny, or at least something that you care about; whatever anyone says, you're out there. You're cutting it. You're making something from nothing. Take me: my revelation last month was that this humble blog of mine has actually acquired some sort of an overall shape, one that I didn't expect when I started it. And in it, my voice – which is not quite my real voice, but it's a voice that belongs to me nonetheless, and I'm not sure I owned it before – has gotten to the point where it has something serious to say. Yea, and it is even here, among the comics fans, that it will be said. For lo, where else could I have been so bold as to put up terminally-embarrassing things like Fan-Fic Films and abortive Morrison JLA fill-in scripts and aimless psychosexual meditations upon Vance Astro and Yondu, except here? And where else could I have successfully deluded myself that any of it mattered?

And lo: yea. And furthermore: forsooth. And lo!

Only here. Only with you people. Hey, thanks. I really appreciate it. And let me just say, specifically, thanks Joe and Alex, thanks Jim (is it all right with you if I abstract that Batman Begins comment of mine from your site and post it here?), thanks Thomas, thanks Shane, thanks Jon, thanks Johnny B., thanks RAB, thanks Tom, thanks Sean the Elder, thanks Sean the Younger, thanks David, thanks Matthew, thanks Dave Fiore, thanks Willow, thanks everyone I've forgotten because between one sentence and the next I just spent three hours swilling delicious beer, there, and oh am I all gooned up...thanks Prof. Fury and Gorjus for voting, see it really did pay off like the City Fathers said it would, thanks Marc Singer, thanks Chris from 2 Guys and Jake from Ye Olde, thanks to everybody.

To everybody.

The buzzing in my beard, the scent of skaldic mead on my fingers, the sound of the linnet's wings, hovering like ravens 'round my eyebrows...it's all down to you folks. I lied to myself when I started this blog. I told myself it was a good place to store ideas for copyright purposes. I told myself it was a good place to empty my “Essays” file. But really I just wanted to meet you all, 'cause you seemed kinda cool.

And I apologize if I've left anyone out.

Hey!

I'm sure I'll remember what I've forgotten, as soon as the bee-loud haze stops buzzing about my ears. Buzz...buzz...time for bed.

I leave you with my own personal supremely brilliant fortune-telling trick. It works like this: say there's four major textiles.

Silk

Cotton

Polyester

Linen

And furthermore say that there's four major types of cooking fats:

Oil (you may say it's olive or canola, as you like)

Lard

Butter

Margarine

Now...match them up. What works with what? I guarantee you that some incredible secret truth about you will be revealed by this. Those who participate...and prove to have the right attitude...

(looks around)

Will be favoured with the Disney Tarot, if they deposit their email addresses in the right spot. Suitable for vanity T-shirts, mousepads, and card decks. It's all I can give, people. I don't have much.

Did I say thanks?

Thanks.

You've been really great.

And I do regret forgetting the people I should've remembered, but...isn't it enough that's I'll be working hung over with a sledge and a wedge tomorrow? For whoever I did wrong by, I won't wear earplugs.

Okay goodnight.

Blogaround Challenge 2007

Hey, everybody: fun game. Hot on the heels of the new comics blog update, an invitation to review three blogs not currently on your sidebar, all in the name of that thing only available by Internet, free gloriously FREE comic books.

My sidebar's pretty outdated, of course, so I'm also going to eschew blogs that I've pointed to in posts, as well as bloggers that I frequently correspond with...and, a review? I don't know if I'll be quite capable of turning in anything that lives up to that name, but...

Here goes!

No Time To Explain. Did you know Peter B. Gillis had a blog? Well, he does...and it's great. Nothing against any of the other creator blogs I like to visit, or even feel I should visit more often...but Peter's long-form, free-wheeling, well-crafted rants are just to my taste: funny, eclectic, free of bum steers, and sparkling evidence of a nimble mind at play. And, updated regularly! Other creator's blogs delight for the way they allow access to an already well-known voice and personality; No Time To Explain is simply a blog I would read anyway, that (weirdly) just happens to be written by a creator I always liked.

John & Belle Have A Blog. I'd almost forgotten about this one, so congratulations, Guy! This challenge has already been a huge success, at least for me. Jeez, John & Belle...I used to come look around here when I just wanted some down-to-earth yet still academic commentary in the Marc Singer vein...but there's more to see here than that. First off, I love the look of this blog! It invokes the voyeuristic pleasure I remember from the mid-Nineties, of surfing around just to see what the different people are like (“Hello, my name is Ryoko, I am from Osaka, here is my resume and a picture of my cat” – how I preferred this early style of autobiographical webpage to the early style of its “content”-rich cousins!), while also offering as much in the way of high-powered topical analysis as you could wish...and I suppose this became the template in my mind for other blogs I would eventually visit much more frequently, like Pah! and (probably nearer) Pretty Fakes...”project” blogs, you could call them. Art-blogs? Well, John and Belle are clearly as much the cool kids as Gorjus and Prof. Fury are...the principle of design looms large on their spiffy magazine-like pages, accurately informing even the casual reader of what it is they can expect to encounter there...just as if they themselves were a kind of laid-back brand, their lives a sort of two-person cottage industry all about taking time to think, reflect, read, write, and do things properly. I'll admit it: I'm envious of those two. So pardon me, I just have to go look them up again...

The Fate Of The Artist. I know, I know...everyone knows about this blog already! But I can't help it! You get Alan Moore scripts; 23-year-olds' magnum opus notebooks; thanks for roning. I cannot leave this off the list of three. And you (whoever you are) cannot avoid reading it any longer, if that's what you've been doing.

Ahhhh...

Say, that was kinda fun.

Here's hoping I win the prize!

New Comic Weblog Updates!

Over here.

Thanks, Chris!

Falling Apart, Falling Together: Jim Roeg's "On America" Revisited

Howdy, folks. Just getting ready to unload another essay on you for Seven Soldiers of Steve, this time on the Howard The Duck Treasury Edition, guest-starring The Defenders...

But suddenly I've realized there's something else I ought to cover before I get to it.

You know, this thing has gotten so large over the last eleven months or so that every time I think of working on a new entry for it I have to first do a fair bit of review...because no one who has put fingers to keyboard on this project has done so without bringing up something riveting about it that would never have crossed my mind otherwise. And: thanks again, everybody! There's no doubt in my mind that I've read this stuff over a lot more than anybody else, and I must say the interconnections are quite illuminating...which is something I plan to make much of in my final wrap-up post.

But, there is the odd illuminating thing that I don't intend to jam into the wrap-up, but which still deserves a closer look, and one of these is Jim's second Marvel Two-In-One post. Now, at the time he wrote it I was working off of a limited number of dial-up hours, and also much engaged with ditch-digging, swimming, and replying in the affirmative to party invitations. Boy, that really sounds great, when I put it like that...

But anyway, because of all that I didn't manage much of a reply to Jim's post then. However, it seems it made quite an impression on me regardless, since certain of his observations somewhat slyly made their way into my voluminous posts on the Guardians of the Galaxy later on, probably chief among them the notion that Steve Gerber's non-team American families are so bound up with ideas of difference that they resist totalization, which is to say that maintaining the diversity of the parts is the only way to maintain the value of the whole. It is, as we say in Canada, more of a mosaic than a melting-pot. Furthermore, the ad hoc symbolic families of the FF, the Defenders, and the Guardians find an even more fractured reflection in MTIO, with substitutions both simple and complex: as Jim points out, there are many “Fantastic Fours” in MTIO, formed and re-formed out of many different perplexities of origin, election, and adoption...and as I've had occasion to note before, the truly compelling thing about a chosen identification is not in the choosing at all, but rather in the choosing again. Well, you can take that one all the way back to Robert deBoron, if you feel so inclined...just as with Perceval and the Holy Grail, even to choose is to in a sense be naturally moved by events and qualities – because even to make a free choice is sometimes an erogatory act, that can't conveniently be avoided – but to choose again is to experience a rebirth: a reformation of identity that is supererogatory in nature, because it is required by nothing at all.

This stuff goes deep, mind you. Very deep.

And so, on second reading, it reminds me forcefully of my contention in those Guardians posts that one of Gerber's main topics is the way narratives often fall apart under their own pressure to achieve completion. Or, should that be “collapse”? To collapse is also to implode, of course, to fall in on oneself instead of apart. To fall together? And then to fall apart as a consequence, to disintegrate. Mind you, you can have it the other way around, too: falling apart to fall together, falling together to fall apart...that's forty-five years of FF stories in a nutshell, really...

And, the formula holds for the Guardians too. The human race shuffles two steps forward, one step back...the bloody catharsis of the crowd waiting to tear the Badoon apart is forestalled by Starhawk just as the liberation of the future by the past is forestalled by him as well...an interesting complexification of Jim's argument about Gerber's “looking back” to heirloom ideals...and thus, that things only repeat and reiterate and fulfill symbolic patterns in order that those patterns may be broken seems to emerge as a major theme in all this. The Guardians save the Earth, but are cast out; Vance and Nikki sacrifice themselves to save the galaxy, but live...and everywhere the old comic-book editorial logic of a necessary return to the status quo is reimagined, as a more philosophical insistence that victory, salvation, and redemption come through the deferral of expectations rather than their fulfillment. Through defiance, if you will, of all that “return to the status quo” promises, at least in its simplest and most non-reflective form.

So an important freedom from destiny is seen in the action of character, which is perhaps itself the action of a type of fate that looks on destiny as an enemy...I reverse the usual maxim that “character is destiny” on purpose here, you see: making destiny a tragic force, that will trample every character underfoot in its rush to level its story's terrain...while making fate something else, that this destiny can't quite enclose or comprehend. Fate as the old unpredictable Necessity, that even the gods must answer to: the inevitable fly in their ointment. And maybe this little fancy of mine is even true! After all, it is the existential hero Ben Grimm who thwarts a cosmic scale-balancing that would otherwise doom humanity, but he doesn't do it for humanity, or even for existentialism: he does it for Val, whom he sees as a person even though the larger cosmic forces swirling around him presume her a cipher, and therefore no more than a means to an end. Likewise, the rhythmic fluctuations of cosmic power that comprise Wundarr's existence imply destruction, until they are diverted into other activities more human and less harmful; whereupon Wundarr becomes a pleasing and well-beloved child, instead of a strange, threatening visitor from another planet who is merely plot's prisoner. Because every plot contains its own quota of destiny, perhaps; but if that's true, it also seems (at least in the Gerberverse) that every character contains a fate of his or her own that can force destiny to bend aside, into a new shape. A non-totalizable shape, that sustains itself (paradoxically) by continually frustrating itself, unnaturally maintaining its many internal frictions and divisions against the pull that would collapse them all into a singularity.

Well, but what else, when even the mindless Man-Thing's character is not a prisoner of destiny? You could see poor Ted Sallis as the epitome of the non-negligible character, in this way: unable even to have a thought, he still manages to act, and changes the balance of fate every time he does so. If you like, he's just as free – as well as just exactly as constrained – as Dr. Strange is, or Reed Richards, or the Silver Surfer. So, no: to get away from this kind of fate in the Marvel Universe (and I would argue: in our own, too) doesn't seem to be possible. Bear in mind that the Marvel Universe is positively lousy with destiny: everywhere there's a superpower, there's a destiny. Well, what else is a superpower? But because of this, the election of destiny actually ends up counting for very little, because destiny is so ubiquitous that it's as much chance as choice. One person gets a power ( a purpose, a personality) and chooses to become a hero, another gets it and chooses to becomes a villain...and if we only stopped here it wouldn't matter what the names are, because all this destiny is just the precursor to freedom anyway. Sure! Because how many Eschatotrons has Reed Richards built, and forced his family to step into, only to discover that the immanentizers haven't been properly calibrated? How many final enlightenments have come, how many apocalypses, armageddons, Ragnaroks, satoris? Destiny is summoned every other hour in the Marvel Universe, and confrontations with “ultimate” power seem merely to mark the solstices and the equinoxes; hardly any story exists, that isn't seeking to rush in on itself and finish.

And yet as well as being very deep, this stuff is very old, too; world mythology is rife with stories in which destiny foreordains that a given character will be a “Chosen One”, and makes it impossible for such a character to elect against his role...but frequently (we can look back to Perceval again, here), being a Chosen One does not just mean having the power to fulfill prophecy, but it also means having the power to defeat it as well. Culmination is defused, to create an unqualifiable futurity; the predetermined footprints are filled up by Chosen feet, but somehow what they mean is changed, along the way. Necessity derails the train, upsets the timetable, uses its last cigar to burn through the rope...and as a result, events are pruned away from the direction of destiny, and destiny never really arrives, though it still hangs there in the sky overhead, like a sun.

I could ramble on for a long time about this. Character...fate...divinity (what all supervillains are dying to achieve, don'tcha know)...the history and significance of the Individual as a topic in literature. Don't worry, I'm not going to ramble on about it like that! I'm almost done, in fact. But just before I go, perhaps I should say that even though (as Jim has noted) Gerber's run on MTIO has much to do with the silly and the scattershot, it may be that very sense of ungoverned playfulness which caused “On America” to strike such sparks in my head. These team-up books often seem like natural vehicles for picaresque storytelling, and Gerber is undoubtedly Marvel's pre-eminent picaresque storyteller...and the Thing himself seems like he'd make the best picaro to be found anywhere outside the Everglades, or the Cleveland city limits...except that part of the fun here is that Ben isn't the picaro at all, but instead everybody else is. So if you will, America takes a somewhat loopy tour through his life (instead of the other way around), just as if he were playing the part of the road in this road story...and in that capacity (which we might easily meld together with the idea of Ben as Existential Everyman) he's privileged to see the kaleidoscopic reconstruction, the continual rearrangement and re-sorting – the endless re-choosing – of the American non-team from its many discrete pieces.

And therefore I'll agree with Jim, and say that Gerber's political (and philosophical) ideal here is indeed “something like democracy”...but how compelling, how numinous, is that “something”! Unlike life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, unlike equality and freedom and all the other cardinal American virtues, it isn't part of the corpus of American law, but it seems to me to be no less an irreplaceable part of the essential American aspiration than anything that is written down. We could call it a crucial part of the American persona, if we liked: something that only becomes real in the perception of it, as it falls apart to fall together, falls together to fall apart.

Ah. And now I'm out of coffee, at last.

Yeesh, what a relief!

The Wire Of Eustace Cranch

For shame!

Bloggers, be Bloggers!

Yes, you're off the hook for my one-year bloggiversary that's coming in two days, you Bloggers who (thank you!) read me regularly...but won't you say hello to my friend Merrie? She's a person who has every reason to think we're the most terrible nerds that ever crawled out from under a geeky rock, and yet she came here, and yet I mean to show her that we have access to some stories that she needs to know about.

She's very funny (very goddamn funny!), and she's very smart (very goddamn smart!), but no one she knows is telling her about Alan Moore, or Steve Ditko, or Jack Kirby, or Steve Leialoha, or Gil Kane. That world of storytelling is totally alien to her.

So Bloggers, join me in recommending a TPB for Merrie, that adaptable and intelligent friend of mine, who wants to like modern comics, but doesn't know it yet, because she hasn't seen any. Bloggers, Merrie is a real person. Bloggers, Merrie is smart as shit. Bloggers, her mind is open to ideas and to media, and I will buy her a TPB or something based on your recommendations. You may suggest three things, three different TPBs, to ignite her interest. I'll start you off:

Vimanarama
From Hell
Beanworld

Hey, you got a better idea?

Good: I'm calling for it.

And also you must preface every entry with the words "Hi, Merrie!"

Or, if you could extemporize a little bit on what I've given you, I may give you extra points.

Oh God, is it that late?!? Why didn't one of you stop me?!? Jesus Christ, next you're gonna tell me you were so irresponsible that you let me publish thi

Merrie, Girl Of A Thousand Gimmicks

Not what you think, Bloggers: I have a guest today, and I thought since she's here I might as well point her to Jim's fabulous essay on comic-book existentialism. Much more useful than Mark Kingwell's articles for Saturday Night...you know for a while there I thought he was going to start asking questions like "How come in Scooby-Doo it's always Freddie and Daphne who go down one tunnel, while the lesbian, the asexual guy, and the dog go down the other?"

I confess it: I did.

Oh, To Be An Engineer In The Springtime!

Well, I've posted about this before, but there's no reason not to post on it again. Read at a discussion of copyright and digital devices:

There existed a time in human history when people in western societies were so bogged down with the labour of survival that it was necessary for society to subsidise creations of the mind if there were to be any of them, and the machination of that subsidy was the root of intellectual property law.

By the way, the person being quoted is against excessive extension of/enforcement of copyright, and I agree with them about that, whoever they are. But their contention above is WRONG.

You come across this fallacy quite often, in high-tech circles: that governments created patenting, copyrights, trademarks and such in order to spur innovation by granting monetary rewards for it. However, this is only Adam Smith and John Locke by way of Ronald Reagan and Bill Gates, and it isn't so. Obviously, the "labour of survival" was itself a sufficient spur to innovation in the form of "creations of the mind", throughout our long human history: everything from basket-weaving by the Black Sea to astronomy in Africa helped us, materially, cope with the circumstances of our lives. The lesson being, I suppose, that knowledge is good to have for all kinds of reasons, as are devices and techniques. Farming, metallurgy, medicine, art, literature, music, none of these innovations came to be through the gentle midwifery of state-administered intellectual property rights. It simply didn't happen.

And I'll tell you why.

Suppose I am a technician with a secret process. If other people desire its benefits, all I have to do to be a Rockefeller or a Carnegie is to keep it secret, and sell products that are made with it. And I will be a millionaire, sure as you're sitting there staring into that screen. But, suppose my process would be of more general benefit to the world if it weren't a secret? Well, that presents more of a problem: as much as I may want to help the millions, I'm not sure I'm willing to give up my security to do it. What about my fine feather bed? What about my children's education? Etc., etc.

Patents are the answer to this. That way everyone can enjoy the fruits of my genius, without me having to impoverish myself (or worse, make only other people rich) along the way. So patents, in this sense, are very clearly compensation, but they are not stimulation. I can be a rich man whatever happens, with my secret process; patents only encourage me to loosen secrecy's strings. As an added bonus, it also screws up my competitors' efforts at industrial espionage: ha! ha! They can use the process all they want, but not without having to pay me for the privilege! Suckers!

So that's patents. Then again, there's copyright. Applied by government as a tool to improve society? Quite the contrary: that the U.S. Constitution (and not uniquely, either) sets limits on the duration of copyrights, in the name of "ye Progresse" or whatever, that is the instrument that promotes the commonweal. Not the copyright itself. Naturally: because how on Earth does it benefit the government to merely tolerate a special someone's exclusive right to make money off something for all eternity? No, no, I'm not a communist or anything...but the benefit to the government in granting copyright, what is that? We can dismiss the "spur to innovation" argument right away, I think: if you are a novelist or a composer who cannot make money on the recirculation of your work by a publisher, then that is all the more reason for you to write another book, or another symphony, because in that case you will need to get paid again, and soon, or you'll fall back into ditchdigging. All the jobs you create and taxes you pay as a copyright owner can be created and paid instead by whoever it is who buys your literary labour cheap, whether they be Marvel or Microsoft, and so there need not be anything so special about you in this regard. But, you'll be paid at a higher rate than a ditch-digger, and you might very well end up being celebrated by an adoring public, and living in a nice house...and isn't that enough? No, perhaps it won't be fair, but remember the argument is not one of fairness but free-market efficiency: if granting copyright is a spur to innovation, and in everybody's best interests, then "fair" hardly enters into it, right?

So much for the carrot. How 'bout the stick? I think we can all remember the Intellectual Property-Owners' Revolution of the mid-nineteen...

Oh yeah, I forgot! There never was one. What there was, instead, was only a bunch of wealthy lawmakers, and a bunch of wealthy judges. No matter, though: as I got it from Chesterton, an average person is quite capable of doing average justice, or we wouldn't let Psychic Phone Friends sit on juries...and we do. Even an aristocrat or billionaire industrialist will do average justice, probably most of the time...unless you hit him in the sweet spot and ask him to answer whether "wealth is morally good", in which case he'll go running for his Smith and his Locke and (in the worst case) his Reagan. Me, I think wealth is pretty much morally neuter, but I'd rather have it than not have it, if you see what I mean...after all, somebody's gotta have it. Why not me? But there's no point kidding around about how one deserves it; the most you can probably ever hope to have someone say about you if you have it, is that maybe you don't totally not deserve it, and in my opinion if you're looking for higher praise than that, you may want to consider employing a psychiatrist.

Or a PR firm?

Or an architect.

Or just start bribing people, or perhaps enter politics yourself, or take the King down to the river and have him sign the Magna Carta, and then wait a thousand years or so for it to simmer...

Or, start your own country?

Because I lied, of course, when I said the Intellectual Property Owners' Revolution never happened. Clearly, it did. Because what is intellectual property? It is simply the principle that a thing belongs to the person who made it. Which is really not too different from plain old property, drop the "intellectual", and as soon as we can see this, we can also see that we have had revolutions over this, and not just a few of them. Call it philosophy in action: if a thing is true in fact, it ought to be true in law, as well. If you make a thing, buy it, build it, invent it, occupy it, save it, salvage it, harvest it, draw your daily bread from it...it's yours. Only if you stole it, is it not yours. All else is window-dressing.

And none of it more dressy than the contention above, which I take as a claim that the money made or protected by patents and copyrights (and trademarks, though I failed to mention them) is justified because it is good for society, and therefore must have been created through some Smithean homeostatic free-market principle that ensures whatever the winners get, is what winners deserve. But, engineers working in the software industry (yeah, I'm singling you out), now is the time for all good men to abandon the notion that they are doing the Important Work that props up the best of all possible worlds. Seriously. Because when you invoke the tale of society rewarding you for your innovation (I should mention that I recently heard the results of a study showing that the proliferation of "strategic" patents in the high-tech sector has not resulted in a corresponding increase in "innovation", so parse that as you will), you only reinforce the trickle-down point of view that enables your opponents to claim copyright should be eternal, that patents create processes, and that trademarks are ideas. And this is precisely the point of view that, slowly but surely, is poisoning the well you drink from.

Once I asked a lawyer friend of mine to apply his signature to an envelope, inside of which was a story. Sort of an early attempt to get as much mustard on the copyright-protection ball as I could. Well, I was still learning. Anyway, he said:

"I think you have to apply for copyright, don't you?"

I just looked at him. "I HAVE the copyright," I said.

"No, I think you have to apply for it."

"No...I HAVE IT already. I made this; this is mine. I own it. It's MINE. The right of copy belongs to ME."

"But...I think, for it to be legal..."

He was still learning too, I believe. But anyway, if you see, his way of looking at this was a rather dangerous one, because if society granted copyright to people it thought were super-cool on account of their excellence as an act of validation, instead of simply acknowledging the principle that ownership inheres in the act of creation, then we would all be in a terrible, terrible pickle. Because it would be as much as there being no right to property at all! Except at the discretion of the powerful.

Which, as I hope it's plain to see, really would be a spur to innovation. Just, not the good kind.

Weird!

Here's something strange: I just read this totally brilliant parody of Civil War #6, somewhere on the web, with new snarky words over Steve McNiven's art. The pictures are, indeed, very pretty ones. Mr. McNiven is a talented fellow.

But!

You know, I'm being totally serious when I say the pictures failed to fascinate me. They just didn't grab me. In fact I was conscious of slogging through them to get to the funny words.

Isn't that awful?

I mean, like I said, Mr. McNiven is unquestionably a very talented guy. So why don't I feel any interest in what he's drawn? I mean, I like comics art as much as the next idiot. It isn't about my anti-Civil War prejudice. I sometimes look at lettering, for God's sake! I can distance myself from what I think of as bad writing to look at the art as craft alone, in fact I do it all the time!

Don't I?

Hmm...

Trying to whip up some theory to cover this (strange and unexpected!) datum, I suspect what I fail to find engaging is not so much the artist's work, but instead the current Marvel house style. Somehow; although it isn't much of a trick for me to find examples of that style that do draw my eye, I think maybe that can be attributed to me having a special liking for particular artists' particular quirkinesses, that come through subliminally no matter what style they're working in. Or, maybe it is the scripts? Maybe these scripts are being written in a way that doesn't require...you know, whatever it is that interests me visually on a comics page.

I honestly don't know for sure. I think it's probably a little of both. Unless those two things are actually the same...

But it's weird, huh? I don't like the art. Oh, I don't actively hate it or anything, and I'm quite aware of how really impressive it is...but I guess I just never thought to ask myself if I enjoy that kind of "impressive" so much that it's something I can't get tired of.

Turns out, I can. I guess. That is, if I'm not wrong about the whole thing...

Anybody else share this feeling? Or am I simply an evil bastard for dissing McNiven this way? I admire his work, for sure. But the admiration is kind of a distant one, I'm realizing...

Okay, late-night noodling over! I've had this blog too long, I'm just starting to write down every damn thing that flits through my head...

On Delurking

It isn't absolutely necessary: you could do this, instead.

You're welcome.

Days And Dollars

Whoops!

It seems Sean got there first...and, may I say, with considerably more concision.

In other news, the Rich Buckler Swipes people are back. I know it sounds weird, but I kind of missed them while they were gone...

Oh, of course! It was the holidays!

I've Had An Apostrophe

Hey...

Let's dump Marvel.

C'mon, why not?

You know, during the Nineties I was not an X-fan. Everything Marvel was doing with Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters pissed me off and bored me. So I didn't mind not reading any of it, because...well, it sucked, and I wasn't the audience for that crap, and they didn't want me, and I didn't want them, and so...

This Disassembled/House Of M/Civil War/The Initiative thing is obviously going to go on for years to come, and I'm just not interested anymore, like at all. Characters I like have been all messed up, characters I think are stupid have been promoted all over the place, NuMarvel is gone, Speedball is Penance, Onslaught's coming back, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Jesus Christ, time to leave. What the hell's the point in staying? I am the fan that Marvel is willing to sacrifice for what they perceive as their current audience, you know. They've already decided they can live without me, and you too, if they have to.

So...

Think I'll let them!

How long do you really think it'll be before the plotline begun in Planet Hulk finally winds up? Before Nick Fury resurfaces? Before somebody locates The Scarlet Witch and decides to do something other than sleep with her and then sneak out? Before the Inhumans get their Terrigen Mists back? Hell, before "Ultimate Conspiracy" begins? Oh my God, folks, it isn't looking good as far as timeframe goes, I'll tellya. It is gonna be a long, long time indeed, and that's even supposing that all the books come out on schedule.

So my recommendation to you is, hey, if you like a standalone book, by all means buy it. But as for Marvel as a line? Probably not worth it anymore. I wouldn't bother, if I were you. Most of it is being made for somebody else, now.

AAAAHHHHHHHHHH! That feels better. A little bit of truth, in all the hype. Marvel Comics: not for you anymore.

They're not, you know.

Responses To Watchmen

You've heard this one before, I might as well warn you.

Watchmen as “postmodern”.

I don't really think it is, naturally, or I wouldn't bother writing. Oh, it's a tapestry woven almost entirely from motif, yes; a commentary on the fundamental insolidity of perspective, time, space, genre, reading...yes, sure. But “postmodern”?

We won't get too crazy with definitions, if you don't mind. It costs us nothing to affirm that there can indeed be “postmodernist” works of literature, and that they can be good or bad, enlightening or unenlightening, as the case may be. You've got your pastiche; you've got your writerly capacity to bring matters of theory into the narrative; you see I am being very slapdash about the whole thing, and I think that's probably okay. Having read not-too-widely on the subject, and having few lit-crit credentials I can use to prop my overheated arguments up with, I think it's best not to attempt a whole lot of precision. I can decode (but, perhaps that should be “encode”?) the World's Worst Writing as well as anyone, but as to generating it...nah. So I won't be doing much tapdancing, is what I'm saying.

And so there's your disclosure!

And now back to the show, in which I will commence arguing that postmodernism doesn't own the patent on clever experiments with form. As an old professor of mine once put it, what about James Joyce? Is Ulysses postmodern, just because it's fucked in the head? Is that the definition? Or can we not say, “fucked in the head” is an attribute also belonging to the peak of modernism, as well as what came after it? As with Einstein and QM, there's an argument to be made against a “natural” distinction between progenitor and inheritor theories – today's most celebrated QM prestidigitators really aren't carrying on in some grand channel of quasi-biological difference that yields historical distinctiveness, but rather they're continually inventing a history for themselves intellectually, in a feat of retcon worthy of any cape-and-tights book...and therein lies some significant limitation, because the schools and the schisms are all just stories when it comes down to it, stories we made up for our convenience, because history isn't the record of successive trends, after all – we can admit that, surely – but of successive events whose succession we try to characterize, to naturalize, after the fact. Which means it's all just high-level language, the sexy way it's talked about. Pareidolia. Hype. GUI. Crap, to say so. The kind of crap that leads to the Muchmusic maven who claimed that the Sex Pistols “started the debate” over class consciousness in England. Really, you can look it up. She said that.

And: what a supreme tool, but then that's rock journalism for ya...

Meanwhile it's Einstein himself who developed the quantum theory of light, just as (arguably) the fruit of postmodern theory only dangles from the branches of the modernist tree. These things need not be separated, is what I'm saying! They are not warring armies meeting on the plain, to decide something awful, and decide it forever...

Well. A reading of Watchmen certainly makes for some very fertile ground for postmodern analysis...but then so does a reading of Humphry Clinker, and so that isn't the point. Because Watchmen, for all its astounding formal brilliance, is more like Clinker than it is like (even) From Hell...superficial appearances to the contrary, it is not a story of the familiar which is artfully torn to bits, and then reassembled and reified into a new structure, but instead is the story of the familiar as itself, before any of that takes place. The story of what the familiar really is, and really implies, on its own. That's the tragedy of the whole thing, in fact: as Dan Dreiberg's essay on owls points out to us, something has gone wrong in the modern quality of the world, and can't be mended, or even stopped; the spirited youthful dabbling with sex and power and freedom and identity has soured into something unpleasant and obscure, and is rolling inevitably downhill to an apocalypse that must destroy the whole world and everything in it. And none of that constitutes the discovery of a new or hidden meaning in the text of superhero modernism, but is only evidence of the arrival of the genre at modernism's summit, at long last: the clock ticks down its final minutes; the climb runs out of “up”. It's the end of everything. It's the shadow of the Bomb. It's all right there. Right in front of us. Naked.

Contrast this with, say, Astro City. Busiek's masterpiece is all pastiche, all reassembly and reification, a cleverly and appealingly self-conscious toying with genre elements that quite clearly aims at resuscitating the form's “spirited youth”, overleaping the countdown to midnight to land in a new, post-apocalyptic (literally post-revelation) world, that is really the old world's Elysian afterlife, where the old clothes can be put back on again, only this time more deliberately. And this is as good an example of “postmodernist” fiction as we could wish for: decentred narrative, the erosion of distinctions between the character types that show themselves in capes and masks, and the discovery of new meanings and new possibilities in the artful collage of old stories. I don't mean that shallowly, either: anyone who read post-Watchmen superhero comics got a pretty good sense of how little there was on offer there, a sense that the reins had been dropped and that the number of storytelling possibilities left available in the genre were dwindling towards zero. Well, it's still going on, actually! But the realization that there is still room to move among these tropes and types, if one only cares to, is a very postmodern one. Astro City was a positive reading experience for the superhero aficionado, that many of us despaired of ever having again until we picked it up. So I mean it just like it sounds, and “discovery of new meanings” is not a put-down or a here-or-there phrase. It's real.

Well, kind of real. Don't get me wrong, I love Astro City, but it's no ABC – where we saw Moore revisiting superheroes in the post-Watchmen era (after doing some true postmodern comics in From Hell, as I alluded to earlier...but maybe I'll just leave From Hell for another day) and demonstrating that a postmodern creativity wasn't limited to decoupage...and in fact this washed out a lot of the bad taste left in the mouth from the whole previous experiment. Because it's the story of history again, you see: apres le deluge, what? The question can be very vexing. What do you do when history ends? What is there to do? Even Astro City, as good as it was, only followed in the wake of the collapse of expectations...in the large-but-finite possible number of recombinations from the bits of history's flotsam and jetsam...

Except, of course, as I was saying before, history isn't as natural as we think it is. It's made up, mostly. Characterized. Naturalized. So all that post-apocalypse stuff is really out, illusory, a lot of worrying over nothing. Because it's only a problem of too much perspective, you see. Too much drama: art and science and history aren't ever at an “end”, and in fact not even Dr. Manhattan says they are. I mean, we think he's fucking with us in Watchmen #12, but he isn't...because in Astro City it may matter a great deal that The Confessor is built on Batman, but over at ABC it really doesn't matter at all if Tom Strong is built on Doc Savage. Why should it? There is no escape from repetition of form, but then again if you think about it, no escape is necessary; this is genre fiction, after all. And, how did we ever convince ourselves that it wasn't? When genre, I humbly submit, is perhaps the one thing that's immune to the corrosion of this “history”, anyway...

Well, all the better to comment on it, I suppose.

Boy, if I ever wrote a post I expected someone to disagree with me about, this is it. I should probably take some time to carefully expand/edit it before I push the fateful button...I really should...

Oops.

Good Lord What A Peevish Man John Byrne Is!

Oh, hi. Wasted some time tonight reading over a thread on JBR about Alan Moore, Lost Girls, and propriety.

I don't advise you doing the same. Head-rotting stuff. My goodness, but Byrne is a bully, though! Astonishing! Deplorable! And truly maddening. I mean, let's face it, it isn't any kind of news; still, when one sees the man in action, one's blood can't help but boil.

Meanwhile, of course - and it really goes without saying, but I'll say it - Alan Moore continues to break new ground for everyone with his valuable, enlightening work, and shows no sign that he's yet reached the apex of his considerable storytelling powers. I haven't even seen a real live copy of Lost Girls yet, and I already think of it as an impressive victory over the forces of darkness. So cheers to the Mad Wizard of Northampton!

And jeers to this rusty tailpipe.

I Don't Want To Write Superhero Comics

I know, I know...it's a terrible admission to make. I mean I've dreamed all my life of writing them; they form a deep and dark and dense part of my ideas about what genre fiction can do. I love them. Hell, I adore them. But, I don't want to write them. Honestly.

Why, you ask?

Just take a look at something I did for fun. I actually posted this not too long ago, but I had to take it off within an hour. It gave me a sort of a quiver, you see. It's the first fifteen pages of an Atom script, in the Morrison/Porter period. I should probably mention, too, that it's a part of an imaginary twelve-issue...

Well, just take a look at what I had planned to post.


...


Submitted For Your Disapproval

Oh, hi there. This is going to be a little embarrassing. For you, if not for me.

A while ago I was thinking about how difficult it would be to come up with comic scripts on a monthly basis. Now, I complain about bad comics as much as the next guy, and that isn't going to change, but I wondered: could I even come up with reliably half-decent FF scripts month in, month out? Could I even write a script that held together at all?

So I decided to try it out. Of course I had to come up with a story first...but fortunately, I had this old idea for a twelve-issue mini-series featuring The Atom kicking around in my head, so I thought “what the hell”. And this was cheating a bit, I guess. I mean I'd had the idea quite a long time ago. I had many, many lines of dialogue all figured out well in advance, so I was quite prepared to write them down.

But, screw it, I reasoned; I'm just playing around, so who cares? I glanced briefly at somebody's sample script on the web, got some beer from the liquor store, and sat down to type. And then a funny thing happened: I didn't get to use all my carefully-crafted lines after all. Everything up to the third-page title of my little story went according to the script in my head just fine, but then right after that I found I had noplace to go.

So I opened another beer!

What follows was the result of that beer. Readers please note that the JLA used here is from the Morrison period, and that I mostly picture them in my head as being drawn by that same great Porter/Dell team; and I hope it's obvious that everything written here is no longer at all compatible with DC continuity, which is why I throw it out there.

In fact you don't even know the half of how incompatible it is with current DC continuity!

Holy Mackeral, is it ever not compatible!

And so now...you've been warned. It's quite long. It's my first try. It's entirely likely that it may be a huge pain in the ass to slog through. It will be amateurish. You don't have to read it!

But if you're absolutely determined to read it anyway...

Then I guess I can't stop you.

So here it is:

...

...

...

...

PAGE ONE SPLASH

The Atom falls wildly, face first at the page. Behind him we see wild swirly inter-molecular Ditkoesque jazz going on, but Ray's face is calm, determined, as he reaches out for a strange spherical device that has apparently fallen from his grasp.

Ray: (capt.) Have you ever had a secret?

Ray: (capt.) I mean, a really big one?

PAGE TWO AND THREE SPLASH

Big view of crazy subatomic world as Ray tumbles through it, shrinking, trying to catch up to the sphere...he strobes through Steranko-like vertical panel divisions from left to right as he gets smaller and smaller, the little glinting speck always just out of reach.

Panel 1:

Ray: (capt.) When I was a young man, I discovered a secret. Right out of a clear blue sky.

Panel 2:

Ray: (capt.) And it changed my life.

Panel 3:

Ray: (capt.) At first, of course, I thought it was my secret to tell.

Ray: (capt.) Then, a little later on, I thought it was mine to keep.

Panel 4:

Ray: (capt.) It took me years to realize the truth. Which was, I didn't really keep the secret at all.

Panel 5:

Ray: (capt.) It kept me.

[TITLE: “IMPROVISATION”]

PAGE FOUR

Panel 1:

Ray catches up with the shiny globe and gloves it, removes a module from it and tucks it in his belt...this was how it was shrinking without him holding onto it.

Ray: (capt.) My name's Ray Palmer. I'm a scientist. Or at least, I used to be.

Ray: (tht) There. Managed to stop the runaway shrinking, anyway...

Panel 2:

He pulls the globe apart into a sort of open spherical cage, affixes it somehow to what looks like a fuzzy, glowing ball of light, so it's clamped around it like a football helmet.

Ray: (tht) Now, if this works like it's supposed to before the damn thing blows up...

Ray: Okay, Wally...I'm set. Do your stuff.

Panel 3:

Flash: (voice over communicator) Uh...yeah, okay. So do you just want me to, uh...?

Ray: Just do some kind of super-speed thing. It doesn't matter what. Anything that'll give me vibrations I can measure.

Flash: You know, Ray, like I said, I don't know if all this is really necessary. I mean, I could just tell you whatever you want to know about the speed force...

Ray: Wally...who's the Ph.D. here, anyway?

Panel 4:

Flash: Uh...well, that would be you, I guess.

Ray: So...?

Flash: So I guess I'll get started, then.

Ray: Great.

Panel 5:

The “atmosphere” around Ray starts to brighten up, flashes of yellow energy spitting everywhere as the speed force energy starts to flow. Particles rush into the crackle, and then finally the sphere zooms off into it too.

Ray: (capt.) I shouldn't really be sharp with Wally. Maybe strictly speaking he isn't a scientist like Barry was, but it isn't like being the Flash has nothing to do with physics. I mean, I happen to know Barry Allen's doctorate was in chemistry...

Panel 6:

Ray: (capt.) ...But when you can run zigzag patterns at the speed of light, you're pretty much a walking thought experiment in relativity anyway. So even Wally probably deserves an honorary master's degree in the subject.

Ray: (capt.) And it's not like I even know what I'm doing half the time, myself...

The light from Flash's speed has been getting brighter and brighter, and things around Ray more and more dynamic, like almost scary-dynamic, a Negative Zone-type thing. His body is silhouetted against the light, where the sphere's gone.

Ray: Okay, that's great, Wally. You can ease off, now.

Ray: Wally!

Ray: Wally!

PAGE FIVE

Panel 1:

Close up on Ray's face.

Ray: Oh, for God's sake...

Panel 2:

Pretty big horizontal panel: Ray dives into the maelstrom of speed energy, and grabs the sphere.

Ray: (capt.) ...In fact, to be honest, most of the time I'm just making it up as I go along.

Panel 3:

Still partly silhouetted against the Kirby dots, he unhooks the device from the particle it was attached to (which zooms off), and starts fiddling with the sphere's control panel one-handed, trying to upload his data...

Ray: (tht) Tricky, tricky...well, the uplink's working...datastream's a bit sluggish, though.

Panel 4:

...But it's starting to spit weird crackly static at him, and the energy of the speed force is still swirling all around him. Partial close-up as the energy sizzles around his ears...he's still not completely out of the hot zone, and it's getting hotter.

Ray: (tht) Although, what can I expect, right? All new technology...all new tolerances...

Flash: Uh, Ray?

Ray: (tht) Still, if I can just tweak it a little to handle this extra flux...probe can't last much longer before it...

Flash: Ray?

Panel 5:

Long horizontal panel: the probe explodes; Ray is sent flying.

Flash: Ray!

PAGE SIX

Panel 1:

Ray: (shakes it off) Wally, I thought I told you...

Flash: Look, Ray, you better get up here, man...

Panel 2:

Close up on Ray's face.

Ray: Why? What's going on?

Flash: Well, let's just say...

Panel 3: TWO-THIRDS SPLASH

Ray returns to visible height, riding Flash's shoulder, we see things through his eyes. Big fight scene in the Watchtower with the Morrison JLA and the fully space-armoured Weaponers of Qward. There's fire everywhere, especially a huge amount of it surrounding J'onn J'onnz, who is practically out of commission, and who has reverted to his original freaky pterodactyl-form. Green Lantern is behind a circular shield that is fraying at the edges under an attack by some kind of big yellow energy-beam. Batman is protecting Connor Hawke, who's shooting flame-retardant arrows into the fire. Flash is circling the attackers at high speed. Superman, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman are absent

Flash: ...We're having a fire drill.

PAGE SEVEN

Panel 1:

Ray: Who are these people?

Flash: Do they look like friends of mine? Ask Kyle!

Panel 2:

Ray: Right.

He jumps off Flash's shoulder...

Panel 3:

...And out into the path of a blast aimed at Green Lantern's faltering shield, shrinking as he does so, while in the background Flash steps into some kind of mine-type device or freeze-inertia ray or something. Long horizontal panel: we just see Ray's trajectory as he shrinks toward it, the Atom-effect symbol flaring up about two-thirds of the way along so we know he has just vanished into the subatomic. Despite the fight, it's almost a quiet scene, because since Ray's no longer visible there's no figure in the centre of it.

Ray: (capt.) No one ever notices me doing this, for some reason.

Ray: (capt.) Too bad. It's a good trick.

Panel 4:

Ray is shrinking right into the energy of the blast, feet first. It's like a river of swarmy yellow particles, like squash balls with spikes on them.

Ray: (capt.) I mean, why waste time guessing what your enemy's throwing at you, when you can just take a look?

Ray: (capt.) Why speculate, why theorize...

Panel 5:

Ray shrinks down small enough to land on one of the squash balls.

Ray: (tht) ...When you can just go and see?

Ray: (tht) Hmm...that's odd. Something coming from the “ground” here, like...

Ray: (tht) A humming noise?

Ray: (tht) Some kind of resonance pattern...and Green Lantern's ring isn't vulnerable to yellow anymore anyway...

Panel 6:

Ray jumps off the golf ball, gaining size as he flies upward through the “air”.

Ray: (tht) Of course! These aren't just particles...

PAGE EIGHT

Panel 1:

Ray expands out of the particle stream and over Green Lantern's quickly-fragmenting shield, to land first on his shoulder, before bouncing off and onto the wrist of his outstretched power-ring hand. Old-time DC art action!

Ray: (tht) ...They're machines!

Ray: Kyle!

Panel 2:

Close up on Green Lantern's face, breaking a sweat. Ray is in foreground, on his wrist.

GL: What up, Ray? Little busy here...

Ray: Uh-huh. What would you say if I told you this energy blast you think you're fighting is really a stream of billions of nanomachines designed to set up stress harmonics across your shield?

GL: What, really?

Ray: Really.

GL: Well, I guess I'd say...

Panel 3:

GL: WHOO-HOO!

Another big horizontal panel, this time incorporating a diagonal shot from in front and overhead: as Ray leaps away, GL turns his shield into a gong in the blink of an eye, and conjures up the guy from the J. Arthur Rank movies to strike it. Show his patented ridiculous imagination here: as the nanostream scatters into bits under the pressure of the gong's vibration, he also whips up a huge batch of Arabian concubines doing the Dance of the Seven Veils, green drummers surrounding them, and a squad of harem eunuchs with gigantic scimitars that attack his opponent. It's a whole B-movie in itself, pointlessly elaborate, lots of action.

GL: J. Arthur Rank presents me kicking your butt, Weaponer buddy!

Panel 4:

Ray grows to full size, lands on the ground next to Batman and Green Arrow.

Ray: So...what's going on?

Batman: The fire-suppression system's been disabled. Everything else is just a feint, to stop us from dealing with it.

GA: (firing arrows) Classic misdirection. Tie up Lantern and Flash with attacks while the fire spreads, and then when the oxygen's all eaten up...game over.

Panel 5:

Ray: Huh. Kind of a low-tech solution, though, isn't it?

Ray: So what about the rest of the Watchtower? Fire-free?

Batman: No idea.

GA: Uh...guys? I didn't exactly make a million of these chemical-foam arrows...

Panel 6:

Close-up of Batman's cowl and ear and eye, looking spooky.

Batman: We need J'onn. Now.

PAGE NINE

Panel 1:

Long horizontal panel, in which Ray is sitting atop one of GA's arrows, preparing to be shot. Connor holds the bow sideways, which is probably incorrect, but what the hell.

Ray: (capt.) Anyone will tell you that physics is a young man's game.

Ray: (capt.) Usually, if you haven't broken significant new ground in it by the time you're thirty, you never will.

Panel 2:

The arrow is loosed; Ray clings to its head.

Ray: (capt.) When I was in my early twenties, I broke ground so new that the rest of the world hasn't even started to catch up to it yet.

Ray: (capt.) And almost every day since then, I've discovered something else that builds on it. But, I can't tell anybody about it. What's more, there's no point in me even trying to.

Panel 3:

The arrow flies through a bank of fire; Ray shields his head.

Ray: (capt.) No one can reproduce my results. No one can review my work.

Ray: (capt.) I should be living in a mansion built entirely out of Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals by now, but I'm not.

Panel 4:

Ray leaps off the arrowhead and through the flames.

Ray: (capt.) Crazy world, isn't it? Where you can either be a scientist, or a superhero, but not both?

Panel 5:

Ray lands by J'onn, in the midst of the flames, at full size. Fishes around in his belt for the shrinking module he used on his probe earlier on.

Ray: (capt.) This is going to be tricky.

Panel 6:

Ray pulls out the shrinking module and sticks it on J'onn, programs it swiftly.

Ray: (capt.) But hey, it's all tricky.

Panel 7:

They shrink away in the Atom effect.

PAGE TEN

Panel 1:

In the Ditkoesque microverse, beyond reach of the flames. Ray “swims” over to J'onn.

Ray: (capt.) At this size, we're actually in between the photons that carry heat. So J'onn should start recovering almost right away.

J'onn: Uhnh...

Panel 2:

He removes the module.

Ray: (capt.) I've just barely figured out how to make this module shrink inorganic material without destroying it, so this shouldn't work at all...but as long as we can maintain physical contact, J'onn's Martian molecular structure should protect him, at least for a little while...

Panel 3:

Another long horizontal panel with diagonal view: more old-time DC action, man! We're looking up at Ray as he starts to grow. So does J'onn, but Ray stays big enough to hold J'onn in his hand.

Ray: (capt.) And, well...

Ray: (capt.) Maybe it's not quite science as we know it, but it gets the job done, and that's all that's important...

Panel 4:

Ray reaches normal size, pitches the still-growing J'onn over the flames.

Ray: (capt.) Because some things are worth all the Nobel Prizes in the world.

Panel 5:

J'onn is full-size, or very close to it, as he flies over the heads of the Weaponers, and somewhere past Batman and GA. Weaponers point up at J'onn, very alarmed he's free.

Weaponers: The Martian! The Martian!

PAGE ELEVEN

Panel 1:

Long horizontal panel: J'onn lies behind Batman and GA in a heap; they take dramatic, serious-as-hell defensive positions in front of him.

Batman: Back.

Panel 2:

J'onn's eye opens blearily, obviously still in pterodactyl mode.

Panel 3:

His eye changes to his normal quasi-human mode as he comes fully alert.

Panel 4:

Long horizontal panel: the Weaponers, staring at our heroes, suddenly freeze rigid as J'onn turns his telepathy on them off-panel. He addresses the others through his thoughts.

J'onn: (tht) Somewhat simplistic, these creatures.

J'onn: (tht) Lantern. Flash. We should evacuate.

J'onn: (tht) Immediately.

PAGE TWELVE

Panel 1:

Reasonably long horizontal panel: the JLA is on the lunar surface, protected by one of Green Lantern's constructs. Not a simple force-bubble, of course, but something more elaborate, like a Mexican beach hut bar, with attractive waitresses and tropical cocktails all in green. The figures of the JLA are in silhouette: nearby, a smaller green bubble holds trussed-up Weaponers to the lunar surface, also silhouetted. In the background, the Watchtower is depressurizing ostentatiously. What looks like a shooting star is in the sky, far away. Of course there's no such thing as a shooting star on the moon.

Batman: Aquaman set up an emergency oxygen-hydrogen splitting system in the reserve water tanks for just such a situation. It's only a temporary measure, though. We'll need to replenish our nitrogen/oxygen mix as soon as possible.

Batman: And the water, of course.

GL: I can do that as soon as you're all back inside. Shouldn't take more than ten minutes.

Flash: It took you twenty, the first time.

GL: I tend to pick stuff up.

Flash: Really, new girl? 'Cause from where I sit...

Panel 2:

J'onn interrupts, points to the shooting star.

J'onn: Look.

Panel 3:

Long horizontal panel: Superman streaks in from space.

J'onn: Superman.

Panel 4:

Reasonably long horizontal panel, again: a few seconds later. Superman is standing just outside GL's artificial bar environment, in the lunar vacuum, completely comfortable. Never mind how he manages to talk: he's Superman.

Superman: ...And that's it. So as soon as Arthur and Diana and I took care of the Weaponers...

Superman: ...Although there's something funny about that, they didn't quite act like Weaponers...

Superman: ...We tried to teleport up to the Watchtower, but got an error message saying it was an unsafe environment. And no word telepathically from J'onn, so...

Batman. Hm. It was...

GA: Planned. They weren't Weaponers.

Panel 5:

Just GL and GA.

GL: Dude, you don't even know the Weaponers!

GA: I don't have to. You do.

PAGE THIRTEEN

Panel 1: TRIPTYCH PART ONE

Batman in left foreground, Atom in near-left middle foreground, Superman beyond the green bubble in middle-right near-background.

Batman: He's right. It's too much of a...what did you call it, Atom?

Ray: A low-tech solution. Weird, for a bunch that prides themselves on their technological superiority...

Superman: Hmm. Yes, they usually rely on...

Panel 2: TRIPTYCH PART TWO; BUT DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE, AS IF ROTATING AROUND SCENE

GA: ...Tactics...

Flash: ...Instead of strategy. Right.

GL: (to Flash) Dude, now you're doing it?!

Flash: Doing what, grasshopper?

Panel 3: TRIPTYCH PART THREE; ROTATED OUT NOW TO SUPERMAN'S PERSPECTIVE – HE STANDS WITH CROSSED ARMS AS THE LUNAR SUNSET ARRIVES.

J'onn: We should get inside, now. Batman?

Batman: I agree.

Superman: Me, too. (So maybe he's a little cold, or tired of holding his breath, or something.)

Panel 4:

Long horizontal panel, again with the diagonal-from-above thing: inside the Watchtower, everyone is relaxing a little. Superman and Batman stroll off down a hallway off the main meeting room, deep in conversation (hey, it's not like it sounds...!), GL, Flash, and GA are goofing around at one end of the table, J'onn and Aquaman and Wonder Woman are conferring intensely around the other...meanwhile Ray floats above it all, close to us, notepad in hand in his Atom-chair, tapping his head with a light-pen.

Ray: (capt.) Some people do how, and some people do why. Usually, the superhero game is all about the action: high-speed detective work, high-speed engineering. In other words, problem-solving.

Ray: (capt.) But those are all hows. Whys take longer. For whys, you have to try to see problems that don't exist yet, problems that sometimes don't even really matter...

Ray: (capt.) The first thing that comes to my mind is a tracking device, for their unique anti-matter signature, but the fratboys are probably right. This isn't standard Weaponer behaviour.

Panel 5: ANOTHER TRIPTYCH, BUT SKINNY, ABOUT HALF NORMAL WIDTH

Superman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman fighting dimly-seen enemies on Earth...somehow we know this is Ray's imagination, based on what he overhears from one end of the table. In at least the last panel, the moon figures prominently, maybe over Superman's shoulder or something.

Ray: (capt.) No extra-durables on the moon, except for J'onn. No telepaths on the moon, except for J'onn.

Panel 6: ANOTHER TRIPTYCH, SLIGHTLY SKINNIER

J'onn immersed in flames, in pterodactyl mode. Batman and GA standing in smoke; GL and Flash caught by super-scientific weaponry.

Ray: (capt.) J'onn and fire – so easy to think, in the heat of the moment, that it's to cover their real attack...

Panel 7: ANOTHER YET MORE SKINNY TRIPTYCH

Lunar landscape, with flaming Watchtower in background. Lots of black, like symbolic darkening that tells us what would have happened had things gone wrong.

Ray: (capt.) When really the attack itself is the cover...

Ray: (capt.) But then there's the antimatter...

PAGE FOURTEEN

Panel 1:

Close-up on Ray in his chair, tapping his head with the pen, legs crossed, going into physics professor mode.

Ray: (capt.) And why antimatter, at all? Why the Weaponers?

Ray: (capt.) Why not something else?

Batman: (off-panel) Ray.

Panel 2:

Batman looking up at Ray.

Ray: Any new information?

Batman: Unsurprisingly, no. Our “Weaponers” were all conveniently teleported out before J'onn and I could finish interrogating them. Superman's gone to track the teleport signal to its source...

Ray: ...But you don't expect him to find anything.

Batman: Not really.

Panel 3:

Ray: You know, Bruce, the people we fight...

Batman: Yes?

Panel 4:

Reasonably long panel.

Ray: Well, they're not usually big on subtlety, are they? It's always superpower against superpower: whose power is the best, whose power beats whose. Even when they have a plan, the plan's all about the powers, ultimately...

Batman: Of course.

Ray: Because that's the point of it all, isn't it? The whole reason a super-villain is a super-villain is because he's a megalomaniac, too. So using his powers is the way he flexes his ego.

Batman: That's occurred to me.

Panel 5:

Ray: So given that...what kind of megalomaniac wants to use his powers to distract, instead of to defeat?

Batman: Isn't that obvious, Ray?

Ray: No. Should it be?

Panel 6:

Long horizontal panel: Batman talking while ghostly images of famous villains muralize themselves behind him...Luthor is in there, as well as R'as Al-Ghul, but most notably the Joker is at the right-hand side of the mural, as a kind of summation of Batman's point.

Batman: Well...in my experience the most dangerous madman is the kind that doesn't just want to defeat you, but convince you somehow. Which means he needs to impress you. With his cleverness, or his morality, or his ruthlessness...as long as you remain unconvinced of his superiority, he can't really win, because he can never really be the person he thinks he deserves to be unless he can get you to admit it to him...

Batman: So powers are immaterial, in that case. It may be a conflict, but it's not a competition, and that's why the most dangerous super-villain is the one without superpowers, because he has the most to prove...

PAGE FIFTEEN

Panel 1:

Ray: So...what's this one trying to prove?

Batman: (almost off-panel) At a guess?

Panel 2:

Again, the close-up of Batman's spooky cowl, eye, ear. Irony!

Batman: That we're ridiculous.

Panel 3:

Batman and Ray regard each other silently for a moment.

Panel 4:

Batman turns to go.

Ray: We're not, are we?

Batman: Actually, no. Maybe we should be, but we aren't.

Batman: What we are, is needed. And there's nothing ridiculous about that.

Panel 5:

...

Aaaaand...sorry, folks, that's as far as I got! I ran out of beer, you see, and then later I had to work on other stuff. And it was just an experiment, anyway. Very instructive, actually! But since it can never be a real script, I don't see any reason to turn it into one, so...

I suppose it's faintly possible that somebody out there wants to know how it ends. Well, as Buddy Baker was to say to Ray Palmer in about issue #4 of this imaginary series, "I'm not going to tell you how it ends." How it ends isn't the point! I post this because I'm curious about whether I did it right, that's all.

So...how'd I do? What's clumsy? What wouldn't work, and what would? Is this remotely similar to what they call “full script”, or was I writing Marvel-style? And most importantly, was this way, way, way too long? Because that's kind of when I stopped, when I realized it might be getting that way...

...

And that was around the point, dear reader, when I realized I wasn't being entirely straightforward with you, or with myself. Because I didn't want to know if I'd done it right. I knew I'd done it right. At least, right enough. But, it was still wrong.

Because I just can't have my voice say what Ray says to Kyle when he's perched on his wrist. As comic-booky a guy as I am, something in me rebels at it. It feels phony. It feels forced. It feels...

Silly.

And so now I have an even greater respect for those immensely skilled creators who can push past whatever phoniness they may be forced to deal with, and on into something good...and even less respect for those that don't see it, or don't care, and don't bother pushing past. This is a terrible razor's edge, this genre writing. It really is difficult; it really does take a special sort of mind. Looking back on this little experiment of mine, all I can think of is the bit from Countdown To Infinite Crisis (or whatever it was), where Blue Beetle confronts Shazam about the lightning bolt that killed Booster Gold. Because the first time I saw that dialogue was not in the context of a drawn story, but just as words on a page that someone had abstracted, and it sounded obnoxiously stupid to me. Something like:

"The lightning that killed your friend was not of magic. It only laid claim to be."

And Ladies and Gentlemen, I submit to you that that piece of dialogue, read on its own, is a brick that the whole building must founder on. It's bloody horrible. It's as clumsy as a man with three elbows. It's everything we don't want people to think of us when we say we read comics. It stinks. And yet in the context of a drawn page it doesn't seem horrible, though that's just exactly what it is.

And I, I've just realized, can't do that. I think I could just about manage a Stan Lee: "Gosh, these web-shooters I whipped up work great!", and I think I could manage a James Robinson: "Ultra, the Multi-Alien!" "Surprised, huh?", but somewhere along the line contemporary superhero comics writing for the most part seems to have fallen between those stools of naivete and irony that Lee and Robinson exemplify, and I don't think I've got the guts to help it up from where it lies. I never was embarrassed of my comics until I read that line, and then watched myself write a line just like it, but now - as the original post warned! - I am. And, possibly, you are too.

And, well, thank God Steve Gerber's writing the new Dr. Fate, is all I can say. Because make whatever remarks you want about those old Seventies pros, but they don't write clunky. Their dialogue never contrives to fall between those two stools, as mine did. Somehow they manage to stay realistic, no matter how ludicrous their subject.

Oh, and did I just write around and around a major point, without ever picking it up and pointing at it directly? My, my, how metatextual of me. Why I feel positively Morrisonesque...

Yes?

No?

You got all that, right?

Well, thankyou for that. For the catch. For everything. As Derrida says, you know: one can always write a letter, but sometimes the letter does not arrive...

The Blog-Driver's Waltz

Look at me, I'm being lazy. In nine parts.

1. Sorry, Internet: Sue Richards is not the most powerful member of the Fantastic Four. Good grief, where did you lay your hands on that little bit of dogma, anyway? And why is it so important to you? Let Sue be Sue, and let the FF's most powerful member (an honour worth precisely nothing) be who it's always been: her younger brother.

2. If you think you can discern left-leaning politics in anything written by Mark Millar or Warren Ellis, then I don't know what the hell “left-leaning” even means to you in the first place. But I would like to know where you buy your microscopes.

3. I emailed the Comics Weblog Update guy, and in his reply he says he's too busy to fix it up to work without blo.gs, so it'll be out of order at least for some months. He didn't rule out fixing it at some later date, though. So it's a bit of good news/bad news, I guess.

4. Page and panel layouts are getting worse all across the Big Two, and no one seems to be noticing. In some cases the unintelligibility is verging on Nineties X-Art. As I've said before, if I only had a scanner this would be the basis for an ongoing feature called “What Would Toth Say?”...and in fact if things keep going on like this I may have to join in with those who excuse Rob Liefeld on the grounds that he has a gigantic desire to enthuse...which is obviously true...because at least that's something. Yes: I have pet peeves. Among them “widescreen” Green Lantern space battles, Salvador LaRocca's seeming inability to draw feet (of course many people can't draw feet, but then why does Mr. LaRocca insist on drawing so many of them? I picture Claremont FF scripts reading “Sue comes into the room; we see her gorky feet...”), Chris Bachalo's thoroughly impenetrable pencils...really I like Chris Bachalo a lot, but you should never be reading a comic and have to ask yourself questions like “is that guy holding something in his hand, or not?”, much less “how many figures are in this panel, and how many of them have heads?”...if I can refer to the GL thing again, this sometimes comes up for me in that context as “is that an explosion, or just somebody's knee?”...which as anyone can see ought to be a great big unmissable whaaa-aat? moment...

Where was I...

The insipidity of the subcaption is something I've already discussed, I think...

Oh yeah! Since when was I supposed to think The Punisher is awesome? This just plain confuses me, because when it comes down to it I hardly care about Frank Castle at all, really. Ditto current-day Daredevil, to be honest. I mean I liked Miller's run as much as anyone, and maybe even more than many, but come on, that mine's played out, is it not? Oh, for just a plain old story again...

5. Kirkman's Marvel work isn't too good, after all. Everything he does would be great in Invincible, but somehow just doesn't pay off anywhere else, and I find myself a lot less interested than I thought I'd be...it's all a bit disappointing.

6. Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, can really write, you know? So if you didn't like 1602 or The Eternals, I hate to tell you, but...it wasn't because of the writing. It must be something else that did it! So...food for thought...

7. And so naturally the Rich Buckler Swipes people have not been back since I posted about them. Very mysterious. You'd think that if anything would draw hits from the query “rich buckler swipes” it'd be a post entitled “Rich Buckler Swipes”...but no. Now I'm getting really, truly weirdly generic things. “Kurt Busiek comics” (and I haven't even posted about them yet!); “Spider-Man”. Stuff like that. I don't understand it at all.

8. Latest blog samplings: aside from the usual rounds (and why Lady, That's My Skull and Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog aren't on my sidebar is a question I can't think of a good answer to at the moment), I've been pleasantly diverted lately by My Fucking Sound: Season Two, always well-loaded with stuff; Four The First Time; Lit(erature) Chick (never seen a picture of Table Mountain before, only read about it, so...thanks, Amanda!); The Silent Penultimate Panel Watch; Strange Maps; Pretty Fakes; Harvey Jerkwater's Greatest Hits; Kleefeld On Comics; and a few others that I can't recall at the moment, but did you see? Neilalien linked to me, so I've made it, Ma...

9. Which brings us, finally, to my nominee for Prick Of The Web: the webmaster at the official Harlan Ellison site, which I won't link to here because, well, why would I invite you to go stand in the spray of his noisome piss? A more obnoxious site I've never seen: truly antisocial. Kudos to you, sir! You're a jerk.

And with that, I guess I'm done. Just a few scattershot musings, as you see, but then with all that turkey inside me I'm impressed I can even sit upright...

Happy Wintermission, everybody! I'll return shortly, with more of the usual tedious thoughts...just one more sandwich...

Rich Buckler Swipes

Ha!

Gotcha!

...Oh, please forgive my little joke, there, mysterious Rich+Buckler+Swipes Googler(s), but I couldn't help but notice how often that query leads you here, so I just thought I'd invite you in. So how are you, anyway? Finding much Rich Buckler Swipes material out there? You know, personally, I'm kind of a fan of ol' Rich's...but then I like Vince Colletta's inking, too, so I'm not sure you can go by me. Well, just a curse of growing up in the Seventies, I guess! Buckler and Colletta everywhere! Still, do check out the Buckler pencils on Steve Englehart's run on Fantastic Four, if you get a chance. I actually talked about that a little bit in a post that's linked over on my sidebar, the one titled "What Ifs". I don't go into an awful lot of detail about the art, though, so, you know...caveat emptor!

Thanks for dropping by. Hope I didn't waste too much of your time. Just couldn't resist the gag, you know?

'Bye for now!

Destruction Lurks In The Cycles Of Time, Too, Mr. Welch

So I saw Jack Welch on Steven Colbert last night, saying that top-level American CEOs aren't even compensated well enough, for the jobs they do.

Of course, neither am I. But you don't hear me being a dick about it, do you? Hell, you don't even hear professional athletes being dicks about how underpaid they are, and they make literally thousands of times less than what Mr. Welch and his ilk are accustomed to earning. The comparison (that Jack himself brought up) is actually an odious one: these people, the pro athletes, are themselves the employees of billionaires, and the idea that because their paymasters are willing to part with "giraffe money" to secure their services (although in the cases of athletes who belong to a union, "willing" may be the wrong word), then therefore the paymasters' paymasters must deserve a raise, well that's...

It's...

I mean can I at least separate Jack's shoulder, or tear his ACL for him? You know?

What a maroon. Sitting at the top of the pyramid, and grousing about how it doesn't go any higher. Meanwhile here am I, here is the whole world, building our huts in the sewer pipe that carries his gold-plated shit to the sea, and what do you even think I'm about to get for daring to lump myself in with "the rest of the world" this way, when the rest of the world is far, far less fortunate than I am? That's right: I'll get a well-deserved slap in the face. Meanwhile Pharaoh Jack has his charities. Permit me to applaud him for that. But also, permit me to ignore his hat as he passes it. Jesus, how long have we been doing this trickle-down bullshit now, anyway? Has it really been over twenty-five years? More than enough time to call this myth busted, I think.

Although I might consider the wisdom of giving the CEOs a raise anyway, if I could only be sure it'd keep them out of politics...

Kee-rist. Talk about your sense of entitlement.

Flashback! To "Fantastic Four..."

The movie, I mean...although for a flashback to the comics themselves, you could do worse than hop on to this interesting blogging project, which I hope lives long enough to realize its dreams...

But, the movie. I'm sure no one is avidly wondering what I thought of it. So let me relieve the nail-worrying unsuspense right now, by revealing the fact that...

I had a mixed reaction to it.

First things first, what everybody knows: the Doom sucked. Well, what can you do? As so often these days, the navel-gazing egotism of evil businessmen refuses to tolerate the existence of any cinematic villainy not born from their their own brotherhood...and, pah! Suddenly it's a General Hospital script. For the actor, I can only express my sympathy: one imagines him growling at the director something like "well if you wanted Kevin Spacey to play it, why didn't you go out and get frickin' Kevin Spacey to play it..." Here's where the absence of a comic-geek director like Sam Raimi really drags the whole enterprise clanking to the earth, obviously: evil simply means oily, in the standard Hollywood action-film vocabulary, and this Doom isn't permitted the breadth of character - so much more important than depth! - that would allow him to wish for any superiority not already within the reach of, say, Mike Ovitz. A sleazy Doom...I confess I wasn't ready for that.

In hindsight, though, you can understand the rationale behind it. It's all about the shortcuts, as indeed it always must be about the shortcuts when you have so much ground to cover in translating from a paper medium to a celluloid one. Doom is jealous of Reed; therefore, if he isn't actually competing with him on the level of "who's the bigger genius" he must compete with him some other way. And as much as I'm wedded, myself, to the idea of Doom as evil scientist, I can also see that it could be done this way, if it had to be...

It doesn't work, though, in this case. Not enough texture, you see. There's no room for Doom to be from Latveria - come on, there isn't, you know it made you cringe when it was mentioned, it just didn't have anything to do with the story! - and little enough room to show Doom's jealousy of Reed except by the device of the hotly-contested charms of the ex-girlfriend. In other words, the notes are here, but they aren't in the right order. Easy mistake! And yet acknowledging that the mistake was easy to make, doesn't mean it didn't suck...when even Doom's iconic iron mask means nothing, and the donning of it carries no weight, then there's no point insisting that something didn't get tangled up in this movie's execution, because obviously it did. Doom seems out of character here, kind of pissy and kind of irresolute, and I don't think it's worth denying that this is at least partly because his superpowers aren't a sufficient shorthand for his character, as his ruined face certainly would have been if only it had been used. Look, at one point Victor sees a blemish on his face, and basically goes "huh"...and this is a nod to the comics character he's drawn from, but look at what a nod it is: in an instant, he comprehends the motivation of the four-colour Doom, only to immediately and pointedly dismiss it. So it isn't meaningless; but, it isn't the right meaning, either. Hey, they just missed it, is all! They tried something different, and it didn't work out. Doesn't mean I approve. But it wasn't exactly a war crime, either. It was just kind of dumb.

And yes, that's too bad.

But let's get on to the rest of it, because there were also one or two other things that bugged me about this movie. I'll get to the things I liked in a minute! But first, this.

Why such a modest title sequence? When everybody else is offering sickly-bloated five-minute pregnancies of "A Film By..." and striking musical graphics, why did Fantastic Four insist on making me jump into suspension of disbelief in such a jarringly artless way? Not that I like big title sequences so much myself, but when everybody else is using them, and you're not, doesn't your product end up looking a little...well, cheap, at least by comparison? Anyway, arguably a superhero movie is the place where you really need to give people a minute or two to sink into the fact that this is what they're seeing, what they paid money for...and here, this wasn't done. I don't really understand that. Nor do I understand the use of a seemingly-boilerplated score: the other main cue, natch, for helping the moviegoer identify the silly as serious. Such things are much more than mere filler, of course, because they establish tone...so again, why this choice, to recycle stale motifs rather than create fresh ones? Or, was it just me?

Ed had an interesting (mild) complaint that was somewhat along these lines, too: basically, he suggested that it would've been a lot more fun to have Reed's science-stuff be a lot less prosaically computer-ish and a lot more "what in the hell is that big machine?" You know, just to show that Reed is not just a genius, but a weird genius...a little more Kirbytech, and a little less boardroom, might have gone a long way here...fresh motifs, it could be argued, are really what the Fantastic Four has always been all about, anyway...

I won't go on and on about it. But there is one more thing that bugged me, aside from my (purely subjective, and apparently unusual) slight disappointment in the Johnny Storm character...no, it isn't the science screwup about the Kelvin scale, which is hardly unique to the FF movie (although honestly, how hard is it to check that?), it's something that to my mind is much bigger.

Sense of place.

When they get to the bridge scene, I remember feeling just a little bit confused, distracted, like I was missing something...and then when I realized what it was, what I disliked about the movie opened up to me suddenly, in a flash of revelation. I had forgotten that it was all to take place in New York City! Wow. I mean, that's a big part of the FF's appeal, I think, and yet we don't really see NYC in this movie until that bridge scene, at all. We see a skyscraper, a boardroom, an elevator, a space station, a high-tech hospital buried in evergreens, a ski hill...we hear a fleeting reference to somebody named Baxter and something called a Building...in fact everything we see and hear leads us away from a sense of real place, and into a sense of the indeterminate sort of place that only exists in movies. A "City"...a "Hospital"...a "Lab". And no doubt this is not a big deal to non-comics fans, true enough...but imagine if it all had been aggressively situated in New York, instead! I submit that even if the non-comics fans hadn't enjoyed that detail (and I believe they would have), it would've meant a great deal to me...

But oh well. Whaddaya gonna do? On now to the things that worked, and they're significant:

Michael Chiklis as the Thing. I think he nailed this. I didn't mind the suit one little bit, either.

The rest of the cast. I thought I'd hate them, but they were just fine. No problems. I understand and accept the wimpy Reed, clearly this is the "arc" they made up for him, the whole familiar overcoming-of-reticence arc that we've seen a thousand times, and...you may not agree, but I say "who cares?" It was something I was quite prepared to put up with. If nothing else it is a typically heroic arc. It was fine.

Some of the visuals. Reed's lab lit up like a Christmas tree was a nice image.

The main special effects. The Human Torch's flame looked pretty good, and the Invisible Girl's force fields were convincing.

The modified origin. Solar flare? Sounds fine, let's go! Even better that Ben is caught in the thick of it. Exciting!

And finally, the climax. You know (and I believe I've mentioned this before), there's nothing that annoys me quite so much about this sort of thing as when the superheroes all get their powers together to put up the tent, but that combination in this movie was absolutely on the money. This is precisely what happens all the time, in almost every issue of real FF comics, and I was happy to see it: because in superhero comics action is invariably the main part of character, and moreover intelligibly so...how refreshing, then, to see the Fantastic Four be the Fantastic Four, and not just a handful of people in blue jumpsuits! For just a second, the central idea that they've been truly united as a group by cosmic circumstances comes rushing to the fore, and (as it seems I must contrive to say in every second or third post) the powers become the personalities, the personalities become the purposes...ha! I thought this part would suck! But in fact it was the part that made me want to see the next movie. Which I have an unspeakable creeping dread of, but still. I'll see it, because this part wasn't screwed up, and it was true to the Fantastic Four I love. I didn't like the plotting and I didn't like the writing and I didn't like most of the directorial choices, but I liked this, and so...

Mixed reactions?

Yup.

But really, I'm just happy they're "mixed", at all!

And if I can even get as favourable a response to this post as that, I'll really be pleased...

To Your Scattered Bodies Go

This is a post about the philosophy of “What If?” Why “What If?” Oh, there's a philosophy behind it, don't you fret. And in keeping with the flavour of my latest scribblings, I think a diligent reader could find some ways in which this philosophy breaks out of the title itself, and into the title's “universe”...

Perhaps even into the heads of various creators and editors, who make that universe?

Let's see.

What was “What If?” for, as originally conceived by Roy Thomas, the mad scientist of historical continuity? I think it's easy to argue that in its first instance it was a way of telling “imaginary stories” while still having them belong to that continuity – interestingly damaged idea there, Roy! – and as such it was a way to say things about Marvel's characters and the structure of its universe that perhaps couldn't be got at in other ways. I myself was thrilled to read it when it first came out, for probably just this reason: not only did it require the imaginary stories to be not just bullshit (cf. Elseworlds, where Kipling's Mowgli stories are inexplicably rewritten as being about Superman – Jesus, Elseworlds writers, what's next, the Wally West version of Heart Of Darkness?), but it also suggested something dramatically satisfying about time, which was that although the course of eventuation in the Marvel Universe was plastic enough to be (at least theoretically) deformed, it was also elastic enough to return to something pretty well resembling its “original” shape once the deformation was done.

And that's the moral of the story, if you like.

Comforting, isn't it?

Well, but not always. As it turned out, there was quite a lot of discomfort in the original What Ifs, too, because although the imaginary story was embedded in the idea of the universal structure, and generally proceeded in true-blue science fiction style from the ramifications of a minimal alteration to the “original” MU timeline, and then in a true-blue comics style “back” to some kind of rough homeostasis or balance, it was, still, in fact, an imaginary story...meaning that the whole point of it was to make plots available to the writer that he would ordinarily be constrained from dealing with. Tony Stark could confront, finally, the irony implicit in his superheroic activity bringing on his long-deferred fatal heart attack...Bruce Banner could confront the nuclear guilt of the Hulk in a different guise, by being unable to save Rick Jones from the explosion of the Gamma Bomb...Peter Parker could avoid his headlong crash into the nexus of power and responsibility long enough to learn that that nexus is as big as the whole world, and that that particular sword always cuts both ways, accidental spider-bite or not...

In other words, these stories often produced casualties. But, not in vain: though the termination of seriality in the cases of individual characters that normally would have been exempt from such termination was permitted within the pages of What If?, this was not an end in itself, but a storytelling tool like any other...and the aim of the storytelling that employed it was in the end no different from that of any other example of storytelling within the Marvel line. Furthermore, because What If? was a specific sort of exercise in MU continuity, there was always more than moral at stake: this particular type of imaginary excursion – this specific sort of “imaginariness”, as I shall call it – was of course something which Marvel Editorial had always professed to disdain, as a mark of what separated them from their “Distinguished Competition”, and therefore each What If? story had to justify its existence...perhaps I should say its indulgence...by provoking interest on the metatextual level as well as the level of pure story. Metatextual meaning could even compensate for stories that, frankly, weren't all that great: Roy Thomas' own “What If The Fantastic Four All Had Different Powers?”, for example, added a canonical fact to Marvel continuity, despite its imaginariness, that persisted right up until JMS callously threw a shoe in its face...even though when compared with some of Roy's other What If? efforts it pales somewhat on the level of story. Other issues explored unworkings of plot so ultimate (including the immortal “What If Gwen Stacy Had Lived”, I believe by Tony Isabella) that they challenged the reader's own ability to negotiate the shoals of well-documented and ferociously interconnected consequence, to make its “new” continuity compatible with the old (as I was just noting to Ed at coffee the other day, in the MTU of the Seventies Len Wein kept Peter Parker depressed as hell over Gwen for what would today be a ridiculously long time – gee, there's another nip in the ass for the modern idea of the “about ten years”)...

And this all worked fine, for a while.

But after that while was over, there began the familiar “apocalyptic” variant of What If?, the ramifications of whose plots could not be fit in, could not in any way be fit in, ever, to the mainstream Marvel Universe. These were true “imaginary stories”, that implied nothing about the universal structure except that it was stupid for not allowing the guck, and gore, and gratuity that lay outside of its formula...and so let it be noted, these stories were truly imaginary, in that they owed nothing to nobody, no writer, no artist, except they owed to the trademarks only that these stories wouldn't count...that these stories wouldn't affect anything because they were imaginary.

I regret to say it, but it's the difference between the “lost” Phoenix story by Claremont and Byrne, and the “What If Phoenix Had Lived?” story that appeared in the actual issue that I still have three bagged copies of. Still bagged, you know, because the fourth and unbagged copy of it was such awful crap that there was never any point unbagging any of the rest of them: I mean who would want to read that? Let it sink to the bottom of the longboxes, oh Lord...let it come up and bother no one no more...

But let me leave the world of justified outrage and snark right now (justified because I paid for certain books under what I think can be proved false pretenses), instead to systematize the What If idea for you. And I won't even say that the apocalyptic perversion of “imaginariness” is a bad thing. Because surely if I were to say that I would doom even Watchmen to the junkheap! As I intimated earlier (and I won't even put a link here, because it's only a couple posts ago that I said it), the flirtation with seriality's termination that begins by upending the causality of the shared universe, that begins and in fact ends with the authorial threat-by-fiat, can be a heckuva tool for engaging a new excitement in the comic-book lover's mind. If it's done well!

And, even if it's done not-so-well...

Hmm. Before I get to the list, let me dwell briefly on the “What If?” issue that featured “The X-Man”, a creature that fought off Galactus in the absence of the Fantastic Four by being the combination in one supreme person of Reed Richards, Charles Xavier, and Bruce Banner. And, first of all, let me say this: no. Although the story ends with a weirdly satisfying presentiment of doom that has everything to do with the elasticity I mentioned above, and it's good and chilling on that account, it still takes a number of liberties that are hard to forgive, and easy to dispute. For one thing, it counts not on a single meaningful variation in the list of events that comprise the continuity of the Marvel Universe, but on several unstated cosmological arrangements that are hard to uphold...or, in other words, it may partake of What If?'s imaginariness, but it is by no means the gloss on reconcilable alternate-history versions of Marvel heroes that such imaginariness might imply. Everything is wrong, in this story. Everything is slightly twisted, and slightly nasty. And nothing it says can be construed as “what would have happened”, if things had only been a little bit different.

I liked it, by the way.

If only its successors had followed it half so well! At the very least, there was a glimmer of unreconstructed bad fate, there...

But, I'll just leave that to one side for now. Okay, to the list, then! I'll use seven examples. Here are the examples:

1. “What If The Invisible Girl Had Died?”

2. “What If The Avengers Had Never Been?”

3. “What If Rick Jones Had Become The Hulk?”

4. “What If The Fantastic Four All Had Different Powers?”

5. “What If Captain America Were Revived Today?”

6. “What If Conan The Barbarian Walked The Earth Today?”

7. “What If Jessica Jones Had Joined The Avengers?”

And I'll put them into six categories. Here are the categories:

1. Permitted Possibility.

2. Forbidden Possibility.

3. Ridiculous Possibility.

4. Impossibility.

5. Dubiety.

6. Savagery.

Okay? And here are what the terms mean:

Possibility – Technically could have happened according to plot.

Forbidden – Technically could have happened, but would never be passed by a good editor.

Impossibility – Technically possible given details of characters and plot, but not in the superhero genre.

Dubiety – Consisting of arbitrary developments intolerable to continuity of existing character and plot.

Ridiculous – Non-forbidden possibilty, nonetheless unthinkable; cannot be of use in future plots.

Savagery – Unjustifiable appropriation of one writer's voice by another.

It should go without saying that a What If? starring Howard The Duck would be a case of Savagery, and of course that has not happened. The others are for real, though. And here's how they break down:

1. “What If The Avengers Had Never Been?” Forbidden Possibility. This is a superhero story taking place in the Marvel Universe – Multiverse, rather – that despite its unexpected elements may be regarded as definitive. However, the termination of seriality for one character makes this Forbidden.

2. “What If Captain America Had Been Revived Today?” Permitted Possibility. In fact this is perfectly put by Peter B. Gillis, and I think unassailable as a perfect example by any reasonable person – see this post for an elaboration.

3. “What If Rick Jones Had Become The Hulk?” Permitted Possibility. Silly, yet given the loose “rules” of superhero comics there's nothing serious to be held against this.

4. “What If The Invisible Girl Had Died?” Impossibility. Suspense is one thing in the superhero form, the negative fulfillment of suspense quite another. This is a great story. But it isn't a superhero story, regardless of how it uses superhero characters and settings.

5. “What If The Fantastic Four All Had Different Powers?” Forbidden Possibility. Of course the Fantastic Four can't have different powers, come on!

6. “What If Jessica Jones Had Joined The Avengers?” Dubiety. Although I liked this What If? a lot, there's no question that its story is wholly arbitrary – heck, Bendis says as much, in his insistently faux-apologetic way! Captain America falling in love with Jessica...would he have? Jessica preventing the Scarlet Witch from going crazy just from happening to be in one doorway, at one time, on one day...would she have? In fact this isn't one key alteration to the “original” timeline, but many not-so-key ones, and so the story's status as “continuity” is far from automatically supportable. Meanwhile I'm not even so sure Avengers: Disassembled! wasn't a dubious What If? story...

7. “What If Conan The Barbarian Walked The Earth Today?” Ridiculous Possibility. And a great fucking comic! Maybe the best What If? ever written or drawn, really. A close second is John Byrne's powerless FF (by the way, Forbidden Possibility), although I admit I haven't read “What If The Beatles Had Been The Fantastic Four?” or “What If The Marvel Bullpen Had Been The Fantastic Four?”, and if there were a comic that asked the musical question “What If The Marvel Bullpen Had Been The Beatles?” I don't know how much I'd pay for it...(by the way, that goes Impossibility, Ridiculous Possibility, and God-Knows-What)...but it would probably be a very large, very round figure....

But anyway, if you like, there are four things that What If? was about, and two things (Dubiety, Savagery) that it wasn't. And the downfall of What If? lay precisely in this fact: that one of these became wrongly privileged above all the others. Man, but Dubiety is hard to pull off, though! It's a real Black Diamond run of a plot-strategy! Because once the moral of time's elasticity is lost, outraging that moral, for whatever purpose, becomes harder and harder to pull off...“The X-Man” story threw sand in those gears pretty well, and compelled not despite, but because of its unconventional assertion about the status quo's (in)ability to reconstruct itself; however, on the other hand, “What If Wolverine Were Dracula?” just seemed stale, and stupid. Because if time is treated only as plasticity, and never as elasticity, then who cares about any of it! Eh? Who cares if Wolverine (look, don't blame me for bringing him up so much!) leads a new race of Universal Humans (who, might I add, just “know” that Wolverine is their saviour) off to submersion in an Ultra-Cosmic Mass-Mind that destroys the universe? Who bloody cares if Korvac wins, or if he doesn't?

Sorry...little carried away, there...

So...

Why “What If?”. That was the question that set me off down this road. Why “What If?”, indeed? Aren't all the comic stories themselves “What If?”s, every one of them?

Answer: they are. So...

Why?

Well, basically because of Roy, is why. Because there never was anyone at Marvel like Roy, nor anyone at DC, neither. Listen, we can learn something from this: just think of how strange Roy is! He never asked “What if Spider-Man fought Hawkeye?”, after all...no, he asked things like “What if Spider-Man fought The Shadow?”, instead! And then he plonked the results of his “What If?” musings smack down in the middle of the background paintings of everybody else's intertwined stories, and made them wave their hands at it. Yes, certainly Roy was the only one who ever had such a feel for Marvel continuity that he could handle it effortlessly, without contradicting anything, play games with it if he wanted to, spin it up into a big mountain of toxic candy-floss, paint the walls with it, brush his teeth with it, dye his hair with it...as Kirby effortlessly generated groundbreaking characters, as Stan effortlessly generated groundbreaking pop-fascination, so Roy effortlessly generated groundbreaking connectivity, every time he put his fingers on his typewriter. And still, after all that, he found he had something else to say about it...something I am being careful to not quite say out loud to you, my reader...

“What If?”

Well, if only we knew these days, you know?

But we don't. And that's some philosophy, if you like.

And so next time, I'll do Len Wein.

Cheers! Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! I'm off to fall into bed, and finish The Moonstone. Let me tell you, it's pretty great. So after I've left, just turn out the lights, put the chairs on the tables, and have a little glass of something for Peter B. Gillis, great "What If?" writer, who inspired this post of mine by commenting on another of somebody else's.

Okay?

Great.

And I'll see you soon.

Meanwhile re-read your 1602.

A-ha!

An Online Giant Lives Up To Its Name

So...Yahoo keeps telling me I'm not permitted to ping blo.gs, which kind of sucks, as I usually use the Blogotronic to surf around and look at what people are saying, and now (I can only assume) that everybody else is having the same ping-inability too, there's a lot less to look at.

Too bad!

However I'm not sure I really care enough to figure out what Yahoo would like me to do, instead. You know? It was there; now it's not there; Yahoo Help and Search don't understand what I'm looking for if I ask them why I can't ping; well fine. I get the feeling of gigantic fingertips poking at me, saying "who you? what want? go 'way", and so I can't get into making an obsession of finding out what's what...a couple of days ago it was easy to do something, and now it isn't, and I'm kind of lazy, so that's probably that.

To the mysterious folk behind the comics blogulator: your service is awesome, and much appreciated! Shame about the yahoos, though. Hopefully one day soon it'll all work properly again.

TCJ And The New Frontier: An Eternal Question

God knows I love The Comics Journal, that at one time (and only half in jest) I liked to call the best-edited American magazine. I don't know where we would all be without it. I don't know where I would be without it: to the degree that I feel educated about comics as an art form, I must acknowledge I mostly have the Journal to thank. And also, to the degree that I can be educated about the art of comics while still taking vast pleasure in wandering the wasteland of superheroes, I also have the Journal to thank. Because the cognitive dissonance born in my head years ago, that stemmed from knowing it was all crap while still liking it anyway, is something Gary Groth placed there. And I don't think I'd be able to continue liking superhero comics in what (I now think) is the right way, if I hadn't spent all that time struggling to reconcile that liking with what I'd learned.

And thank God, every once in a while the dissonance comes up again, just to remind me that I have a position.

Which is what I intend to talk about here. Because, are superhero comics good, in the sense of having literary merit comparable with the best the medium has to offer? Certainly they're not. Their appeal lies somewhere else, and so (therefore) does their interest. My interest...

Let's take a look at Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier. Is it good, by these standards? Again, certainly it isn't; superheroes are not so important as to be “good”, usually. But there are very, very good things in it, and those good things have everything to do with superheroes, and so...

Oh, a digression? Well, thank you...I won't say no. Very kind of you, by all means, let's digress:

...In a recent post, I went on at some length about what I take to be the most basic forms of superhero stories: my own mythological life-cycle diagram for them, if you will. But my interest wasn't in showing how Superman or Spider-Man fits into any kind of larger generalization of this type! No, what I was most interested in was looking at where the appeal of the superhero really comes from in the first place (i.e. the conceit of the secret identity as an overwhelmingly dominant shaper of action and story), and seeing how things shook out of that appeal that were different in the superheroes, from the things that shake out of Siegfried or Robin Hood or James Bond or Darth Vader or Walker, Texas Ranger or Frosty The Snowman, or even figures like Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel which are the superheroes' logical antecedents. Adolescent fantasies of special birth and special purpose, which leads to special power and special authority, aren't exactly rarities in our culture, needless to say; still, in my judgement the superheroes must mean more than simply “what all those other things mean, only dumber”. There have been some recent discussions of class and the superhero, for example...but although I find it a fruitful discussion, I must confess I don't really think superheroes are about class, because I think class in superhero comics is just another road – though a very interesting road – whose destination is the central topic of the secret identity. Or, maybe I should put that another way? Discussions of class among the superheroes can be seen as discussions about the ramification of the secret identity, and that's where my focus lies, so that's what I find gripping about that.

(And so therefore I ask you, how fortunate am I to have the Internet? Because I can't read about all that in the Journal, and rightly not; I don't need a TCJ that spends column inches on such things, do you?)

That superheroes are more than “just” adolescent power fantasies is, I think, apparent: well, just look at those bloody costumes, for God's sake! It's more than simply fantastic: in an early FF comic Sue Storm says, “we should have costumes!”, and the rest of the Fantastic Four look at her and say “Uh...no.” So something is going on, there, isn't it? Some sort of commentary, at the very least, on the selection of identity...

We could get historical about this: what forces are or have been operating in society that made/make this such a resonant issue? Off the top of my head, I'd suggest mandatory public schooling might have something to do with it...for in what other of society's institutions do we find such relentless pressure, not to conform, but (in Jack Vance's brilliant phrase) to optimize the personality? Well, well, it may have some truth to it, or it may not...perhaps I'll return to the thought sometime later on. At any rate that the superheroes sport the costumes they do goes beyond any attachment to some notional Arthurian heraldry of the past, I think...the idea that superhero costumes only echo the heroic accoutrements of fantasies past is, after all, founded on the idea that there must be an echo of this that booms down through time, and this foundation is far from watertight. (Wow, mixed metaphor! Once again: thank you, Internet.) More likely the importance of costumes is at least partly (probably mostly) sourced in the social effects of a more recent era, and not just in some sort of fourth-hand archetypal inheritance. By the same token (and pretty inarguably, from my point of view), it's also sourced mainly in the logic of pictorial representation rather than manipulation of more abstract plot devices. Does it seem too obvious to say that? Well, it does go overlooked, you know...I'd submit to you that very often the costume-logic of superheroes is taken to be given meaning by the story, rather than the other way around. It's armour, it's special stretchy fabric, it's a machine, a tool, a weapon, a disguise that finds its justification in simple utilitarian need...

Well, except, it isn't. It's a controlling design feature, plain and simple: it's a way of producing visual excitement on a page. And what does that mean, that handy shorthand “visual excitement”? That isn't a superficial matter. Because that's art, buddy. That's, if you like, mystery. Look, I love superhero stories as much as the next fellow, but that isn't how the costumes get justified. It isn't why readers accept the trope of the superhero costume! The costumes get accepted because they come first, implying various bizarre things like super-modernity, psychological freedom, difference, oblique menace, the primacy of the rules of magic (in an anthropological sense, natch) such as proximity, similarity, etc., being asserted under the cover of a science-fictional milieu. To put it more bluntly, those costumes sizzle, man; without them, the stories just lie there on the page waiting to be ignored.

And this brings me around to a couple of matters already discussed: that the addictive zing of superhero comics lies not so much in the adventuresome qualities of their narratives, but in odd little moments of artistic felicity that grab at the reader with an implication of the sublime...if only (and especially) the trashily sublime. I was looking at some of Sean's cover-month posts lately, and spied one there that I remember from my earlier days: Captain America and The Falcon running through city streets, I believe, “To Stalk The Spider-Man!”, with a huge Spidey figure looming over the city with an air of (what was to me) impenetrable mystery as they race toward it. To gaze upon this example of the artistic vocabulary of superhero comics, while still being too young to have any real familiarity with it, is to feel a certain sense of arrest – something is speaking, there, and even though what it's saying may not be too clear, the immediacy of the vocalization (if you'll permit me) is profound. Maus it ain't, nor even Pogo; but then again it doesn't have to be smart, to be art. Pencil and pen and ink and brush have their own intentions, separate (though not entirely separate) from those lying hidden inside the keys of the typewriter, and when those intentions are bundled up together in the right way, they hit like a prizefighter.

Which brings us back to New Frontier. Is the story good? Well, the story of the Challengers of the Unknown is quite good, and the story of young Hal Jordan in Korea is very good, and if you're not interested in the fact that Lois Lane loves Superman I think you must have a heart made out of stone, but the rest of it hardly comes up to TCJ standards. No matter, though: something else is going on in those pages which is absolutely brilliant. Cooke puts drawing and word together with a smack that has to be seen to be believed, amid a charming, fascinating repurposing of late-50's and early-60's commercial art styles, and each appearance of his superheroes is a revelation of just how damned excellent they are, for doing what they do. What's good about New Frontier? The Flash and Captain Cold end up sitting in a fountain in Las Vegas, mere moments after Ted Grant digs up his last bit of strength so he can punch out Cassius Clay, and the image is...well, it's striking.

Why is it so striking?

I'm not an artist, so I can't tell you why it is. As a reader, I can only tell you that it is. As our first glimpse of Cooke's Batman is striking, as a meeting of different parts of the comics Mind drawn out for us there on the page. I first noticed Darwyn Cooke's art in his stint on Catwoman, and after that I was always looking for him, but I was unprepared for just how affecting New Frontier would be as a love-letter to the Silver Age of DC comics, and indeed to the concept of adventure comics as a whole. The climactic scene of the gathered superheroes rushing forward into modernity doesn't actually do that much for me, but good heavens what depths of found time are in the rest of it! I pored over it all for, let me check, yes, it's hours, just marvelling at the way I was made to care about each scene, the energy implicit in every detail of every drawing. Just superheroes, of course. Silly stuff. But I defy anyone to read New Frontier and not come away realizing that the silliness is varnish over a mesmeric trompe l'oeil that's worth contemplating in its own right. Not that it would be better with the varnish stripped off! Clearly, it would be much worse: after all, you can't remove the illusionary bits from your illusion and still expect it to fool anyone, can you?

The Journal is right: superheroes ain't art. But, then again, it's wrong, too, because the name “trash” doesn't necessarily translate as “empty category”, and genre by itself doesn't guarantee anything about the good or bad quality of expressions within it...and ah, there, my fleeting dissonance is gone again, now: time to put down the Milton and pick up The Moonstone...

And maybe one day soon I'll find something to say about Watchmen and Astro City, too.

Second Pass

Yo, Bloggers: for those of you who may have had the misfortune to read my post on the Ten Superhero Plots yesterday, I've got good news and bad news, and they're both the same news.

I gave it a second pass.

So read on down, if you care to see it make a bit more sense!

Poor Dumb Wrongfooted Bastard

What your people call "Studio 60 Psychotherapy Breakthrough Aftermath".

Short answer: aaaand once again, it isn't a show. My Lord, how tedious this all was! But, I guess that's to be expected...clearly this was a script written in the pre-Psychological Breakthrough Days, at a guess designed as a Series Finale, only now with (Very welcome! Don't get me wrong!) trigger-pulling romantic bits on the part of both Matt and Danny, and various hopelessly wrongfooted threads that, when woven together according to the familiar old Sorkin pattern, amount, really, to a big-ass tapestry of nothing.

Let's look at the parts I haven't already forgotten. Which aren't many.

First off, Jordan's ultrasound at twelve weeks is misplayed. Danny: "We're having a baby?!" Um...

The thought also occurs that he is deliberately dropping gossipy morsels in the doctor's lap, who of course is not bound by any confidentiality with regard to Danny. So...nice guy? Or fucking idiot? Or conniving asshole. And I guess we'll see about the doctor...

Let's go to Matt, and the big kiss, and the strut past the rival: nice guy? Or fucking asshole...?

Wait, wait, I've gone too far: don't you remember the cameraman who said "Fuck" (honestly, I thought it was well-worked out that I was screaming the word at the TV by the fifth time someone refused to say it, but even so, Sorkin...I mean we do live in a world with HBO in it, you know)? And how the FCC...

GHAAAAH! I can't even say it! Okay. Deep breath. The FCC is going to break up the network because of this, if they don't pay their "indecent speech" fine.

I simply can't even enumerate how many things are wrong with this. Do I really need to tick them off? I won't do it. Seriously. I won't. Count 'em yourself, and if you can't count, shut up. This from a show that drenches itself in "Biz" cologne every night before it goes out to draw the terribly, terribly simple lines between idiots and jackasses, but just ends up making a circle around its own feet. My goodness. Aaron Sorkin is a know-nothing. I bet he's never heard of fingerprints, or satellites, or stenography, or coal. I bet he thinks the thumb is a bodily organ. I want him to start writing CSI: Miami.

The good news is: they came up with the New Orleans jazz players thing, for Christmas.

The bad news is: Danny did it as a favour to America, and there's no other reason it happened.

This is called missing the boat. Wrong beats everywhere, in people pigging out for misplaced "laff moments", in meaningless chatter during the music, in incorrect Bible de-thumping, inexplicably downplayed tensions, stupid Stones name-checking, and incorrectly anxious Christmas-loving Jews. I'm very surprised at Sorkin. In a truly West Wing universe, the N.O. jazz Christmas thing would've come together as the Christmas Miracle that Matt was looking for, and it would've been the confluence of rock, homelife, Christianity, and the world-weary acquiescence of showbiz types to the value of real, live, healing, non-sectarian sentiment. The dialogue hints at this. The whole frickin' show hints at it. In fact the whole show was supposed to go like this:

Matt wants "Christmas".

"Christmas" goes horribly wrong for him, no matter what he does. Warehouse cave-ins, cynical writers, Hitlerian Santas, Harriet going Hollywood at palm-tree lunches. Meanwhile the terrible Mr. Potter Christmas doom-snow of Pontius Pilate is threatening to shut down the network.

Throughout, he is, ah...shall we say, just for kicks...visibly Jewish.

And he becomes very frustrated. And we wonder why. And then we find out why. And then we're sad.

But then Danny shows him the true meaning of Jewish Christmas, without quotes, just to surprise him, and as America is touched, Matt hears the N.O. jazz, and then kisses Harriet, and then we're happy again!

And then meanwhile, in counterpoint, Ed Asnerhovah ("with his grandchildren" - fuck off, really) forgives, anoints, and encourages his only begotten network Chairman. Yay!

And then furthermore, for his good deeds, Danny gets to become Joseph to Jordan's Mary. Huzzah! And...

Done? And done. In and out, in only...let's see...

Twenty-five minutes.

Except if you screw it right up, it can go a full hour, and pull all its smarmy Christmas punches so that they don't land properly. Except who cares, right? 'Cause they're not cancelled, suddenly, and that means Aaron's working on a new script. Yes, I could almost guarantee it...this one was torn off all-hurried-like, while Sorkin bent his dubious powers towards next week's show, which will prove once and for all...

Whether or not anyone cares.

One week, Studio 60, to make me care even a little. This week's episode was even more decompressed than "Nevada Day", and I should know - I watched it twice. This will honestly do it now, this next one. This is absolutely, positively, your last chance to snow anybody.

Ring-ring-a-ling. That's the bell. You're out of time. And I would say more about what you got wrong, but I just spent more time on this, than you did on that, so screw you.

Happy Holidays!

Anxiety, The Secret Identity, And The Ten Basic Superhero Plots

Yes, they all have to do with the secret identity. Because the secret identity is what makes everything go.

Oddly enough, though...they're not just superhero plots. At least, not anymore they're not.

Gee, that says something, doesn't it?

Okay, here we go. Note the frequent overlaps!

1. Justification. Not to be disregarded, this is the period during which the superhero's doubled identity emerges and he adopts the role of society's protector. Typically he enjoys success against a variety of villains in this phase, thus proving himself through competition, and becoming known to the inhabitants of his world as gradually as he becomes known to his readers. Character takes its first, exciting, hesitant steps: the doubled identity provides freedom to self-create, to more fully express inner values and motivations, and to directly reach out and engage with an unspecified “public”...furthermore, as this public/protector circuit is set up, it enables him to overleap the complications of the daily, limited, individual interactions he must struggle with as a normal person. His personal problems are displaced from a private sphere of ineffectual reaction to circumstances, to a psychological dreamlife wherein which his sense of self is the only tool he needs to conquer them. Publicly and privately, he begins to achieve a reconciliation with the world.

2. Discovery. The superhero finds an arch-enemy, whose identity is a contrast to his own (it is also usually, but not always, a singular identity), and since the arch-enemy can do things the superhero can't, the question becomes one of whose identity will be proved more powerful, and hence worthier. This is where the masterpiece of identity is created, as a new and sharper identity comes into being, not just dependent on the public/protector circuit or the weak multiple reflections of identity in the superhero's Justifying opponents, but on a contrastingly “super” persona of the same type as his own, that is equally as distinctive.

3. Disempowerment. The power of the doubled identity is lost, and must be recovered: meanwhile, the superhero must do whatever is necessary to maintain the illusion that he is still who he appears to be. Because, now that he has become his true identity at last, how can he bear to give it up?

4. Mirror Image. The superhero encounters a rival, often springing as a “second shoot” out of the superhero's own, previously unique, origin. This is not a “super” persona as distinctive as his own, of course; rather, this is a twin character whose persona is easily confused with the superhero's, whether or not they share the exact same complement of powers. A different kind of threat to identity! The superhero is not so special after all, and may even be less special, in the eyes of his beloved public and even his friends, than his symbolic “brother”. Below the surface of the popularity contest, the binary states of the hero's secret identity are what's being attacked here, by forcing them to coexist with each other continuously: the “super” identity is suddenly as plagued by feelings of inferiority as the “everyday” identity, and feels as unrecognized and unloved. The solution of “being super” has found something it can't dissolve, and the sanctuary of the “everyday” identity is threatened by constant intrusions of dissonance, where the “public” praise once secretly basked in is now all for someone else. But in the end, this problem becomes its own answer, too, and a vindication of the whole necessity of the secret identity: because the same tension that the superhero has built up in his two contrasting identity-states over time, that causes his distress here, also proves to be a sort of knowledge, a hard-knocks education, that the twin is unacquainted with. As soon as the “brighter brother” is confronted by anything but pure, easeful success, he can't cope, and swiftly falls apart. Like everyone else, then, he needs the superhero to save him, and forgive him.

5. Atonement. The superhero inadvertantly caused something terrible to happen, while he was only trying to do good, and now must correct it. This saving of identity by making amends often results in the creation of a villain from the mistake: as (almost) always in superhero comics, issues of responsibility are settled by displays of virtue, that become decisive in the physical battle which represents ethical conflict. As in religion, the atonement provides absolute forgiveness once it is done, so long as there is no backsliding; unlike as in religion, though, the core of atonement isn't submission, but reassertion of right in the claimed identity that was lately tarnished, and the forgiveness comes from the superhero himself, as the atonement was delivered to himself. In other words, the atonement is wholly restorative, but not the least bit transforming: and, how can it be, when forgiveness is only the road to resumption of selfhood? So this absolution is really, if you like, a sort of time-travel story, only without the time-travel...

6. Collapse. The superhero fails, or is defeated, and must reinvent or rediscover himself in order to be effective again. Purpose is revealed – or, it would be better to say, reexamined – as a crucial part of the complex identity's justification. No room for time-travel here! But once again there's atonement. Only this time, the atonement doesn't provide the opportunity to resume the identity, but the resumption of the identity is itself the act of atonement. And there's more here than meets the eye, perhaps: because where the result of the superhero failing to reinvent his purpose is a terminal splitting-apart of the doubled identity, then his success in doing so must represent a falling-in of the two halves of himself upon each other. Permanent fusion is achieved, in the moral necessity of being “super”, and whatever breach there was between the two identities previously is therefore mended. Which I guess is why modern-day rehashings of “Spider-Man: No More!” always seem so pointless...but also why Elliot S! Maggin's Superman was so brilliant, because it allowed Collapse while still finding a way to revert to the Clark Kent/Superman identity tension again once the Collapse was over...

7. Rejection. The superhero is deserted by the public, unwanted by the object of his good deeds, and the public/protector circuit is broken. Who is he now, since one of the main props of his identity has been kicked out from under him? Superficially, this doesn't quite appear to be all that much of a crisis, but deep down at the juncture of the double identity it's a serious problem indeed, because once the superhero's good name has been taken away, accusations that his good deeds really only serve himself become possible. Not being a straightforward egotist (or is it “egoist”? I can never remember...) like the villains he fights, he's more vulnerable to the imputation of egotism than they are, and so the danger lies in his acceptance of his superheroic identity as a delusion. What suffers from this is his Justification: suddenly his own sense of self is not sufficient to overcome all obstacles in his way, and the virtue he relies on for that final knock-out punch against the big villain of the week is harder to summon up. So the crisis of legitimacy becomes a crisis of purpose, a crisis of method, a crisis of power...but fortunately, the crisis is found to be artificial in the end, usually the crafty plot of evil men, and the faith the superhero has been forced to find in himself is also a faith he can give back to the inhabitants of “his” city when the story is over...making the connection explicit, that he is part of their identity now, too, and for them to turn on him is as mad as him turning on them...is as mad as them turning on themselves. Which they might still be in danger of doing one day, being non-super; fortunately, they have him around to remind them of their higher purpose, by being both its symbol, and its indefatigable champion. Thus, with the overt recognition of the unspecified public as another kind of heroic “secret identity”, the matter is settled. Heh heh...

8. Nightmare. But, what if the superhero's doubled identity had never existed at all? This is the flip side of Rejection, in which due to a dream or a spell or a trick or just a “What If?”, the “everyday” persona is simply extracted from the doubled identity, left to regard the heroic self from a distance in reality, rather than (as it usually does) in pretense. This is the oft-stated wish of the secret self to be “normal” in truth proved every bit as false as the masquerade with the glasses or the milksop attitude or the clumsiness with women. The secret self does not want to be “normal”, any more than it wants to be free of the necessity of pretense – the secret self thrives on its own delicious marginal status even more than it relishes the freedom of action and power that the mask and the cape give it, and even a secret retirement is more palatable to it than a retirement from secrecy itself! Because the latter is really impossible: even a magically blameless divorce from identity can't wipe out the fact of that identity's having been, and so whatever it is, wherever it is, whomever or whatever is invested with it or attached to it...it's still a secret, no matter what anyone does, and so it defies real erasure. That the secret protects its reality by being a secret is perhaps as close as one can get to laying bare the one essential truth of how it constructs identity...and in the end of the Nightmare plot, it's always that thing-that-can't-be-known which arises from inside the secret-keeper himself, that destroys the illusion of change.

9. Usurpation. This most-frequently disguised identity complication is also the most lethal, usually the least well-handled, and the most potentially engrossing. Though bearing a superficial similarity to Plots #2, #3, #4, and even #8, it cuts deeper and is more dramatic than any of these because it goes beyond confrontation, loss, or even rivalry. Put simply, it is the theft of the hero's specialness itself, by one who does not deserve it, and because it goes outside the simple plot permutations of “like meets like” (who is really himself, of course), it's a pure narrative-buster. Because it's somebody else's fantasy: some (usually inconsequential) Other who wishes to take charge of the superhero's own narrative finds a way to definitively and finally (less often, and more pleasingly, temporarily and non-exclusively) transfer the powers that denote unique origin and uniquely hard-won virtue to himself or herself (note the irruption of gender issues into the identity-story here), and in so doing as much as declares that the specialness is in the powers, and who holds them, and nowhere else. Of course, the crippling thing about this, at least in the context of superhero stories, is that it is true: that's precisely what the powers are. The same principle applies, in somewhat less pure form, whenever the superhero's powers are effortlessly overthrown without the bother of sufficient explanation: what couldn't be removed by rivalry or symbolic opposition or “what-iffery” proves answerable at last to sheer, insistent, unappeasable emasculation, which refuses even to sit down at identity's bargaining table to work something out, but merely (injustice!) shames the victim, by taking what it will. As an aside, the concrete word “rape” is often bandied about with regard to the primary, pure form of this plot...but (perhaps paradoxically) I feel it to be more confusing than the abstracted term “emasculation”, because although the Usurpation plot does indeed have much to do with rape-analogues, it is, precisely, the analogy that is important in this case, rather than the thing that it is being analogized with. This is not hair-splitting: if anything is important here, it is that the Usurpation is not rape, because if it were, there could be no analogical reflection on it; how it feels would be in danger of being glossed over, in favour of what it is. And obviously this would serve no purpose at all, except perhaps to make a shocking elision over a serious matter, and trivialize a true and heinous crime by saying it is the same thing Superman goes through when he gets hold of the wrong sort of Kryptonite. Obviously, it is not the same thing. It is not even like the same thing. But if Superman is symbolically emasculated by the Usurper, then he simply is, and we can say that he is without committing an outrage. Furthermore, if by doing so we can point out that the victim of the Usurpation shouldn't have to suffer the added injustice of feeling shamed by it, even if it feels to him as if he should, then in addition to not being bastards we have also managed to say something worth the effort it took to write down. Because in the (predominantly) boy's world of comics, rape is just a word for something a hero ought to get mad about; emasculation, on the other hand, is something that can actually happen to the reader on the playground during recess, and therefore it feels like injustice rather than merely sounding like it. And, is this important? Well, yes, it is...because it's effective writing. After all, we're meant to suffer along with the hero when his uniqueness is taken away, not to feel disappointed in him for his inability to defend himself! Or else why tell the story? By its nature, Usurpation is meant to be a consequence of the thing I referred to earlier as threat-by-fiat...the dramatic power of a scenario in which the superhero's indefeasible specialness is nevertheless assigned to another lies in it being a transgression of the narrative, so for a writer to allow this transgression to be normalized only means that he makes the theft, the emasculation, the crime, into something legitimate. It becomes failure, not unfairness: it means the hero was never all that special to begin with.

And that, my friends, is off-message.

Allow me to digress just a little further. What else happens, following from all this, if the word "rape" is used, then? The thought occurs that to call it "rape", even to have it be "rape", is to flirt with utter disaster, because can a superhero comic take rape and turn it to its own typical narrative purposes? I think it can't, not really. Superhero violence is cartoon violence, symbolic violence...even supervillainous murder isn't "real" murder, but only shorthand for a certain kind of consequence, a certain type of character. So the question arises in my mind (and I'm looking at Judd Winick now, among others, as I write this): is cartoon rape, rape qua rape, really a symbolism that can get a superhero-narrative type of job done?

Well, I'll be happy to leave that for others to figure out, and return now to the subject of Usurpation. Oh, except, just one more thing: something else that makes the Usurpation Plot dramatic is the fact that the superhero himself could symbolically emasculate his peers and co-workers, but because of his virtue chooses not to. Obviously, the choice not to rape is not really what one would describe as “virtue”, but rather merely a lack of criminally reprehensible viciousness...okay, I'm done with Winick now, the utter tool, and we're back on track with secret identity issues. Because once again the conceit of the secret identity ensures that there is in fact very little for the hero to gain by making those around him feel small and worthless, and disposable: well, there's nothing gratifying about pretending to be as emasculated as everybody else, not when you're the one who's doing it! For the Usurper, on the other hand, all need for identity of any sort is past in the moment they appropriate “their” powers, and so they can act with an unalloyed caprice, and fuck up whomever or whatever they wish, in whatever way they wish. Well, it's the old story: anybody (except the hero) may have an identity within them which is secretly a devil...and once having acquired preternatural (love that word!) power, they may abandon themselves to it, even to the point where “identity” becomes an empty category. Steve Gerber, not surprisingly, managed to get down to the kernel of this meaning of power in three panels of Gorko The Man-Frog sitting on a ledge, even though that HTD story wasn't expressly about Usurpation...which speaks well of his talent as a writer, since it was something even such a Kosmik luminary as Jim Starlin still contrived to just slightly miss in all those issues of The Infinity Gauntlet, even though his story was rather expressly about it...likewise, it's something Paul Jenkins (it appears) sometimes sees through a large telescope, and waves at in the mistaken assumption that it's looking back at him...

And perhaps this would be a good place to point out that Usurpation is also the only standard superhero plot in which the reader senses that the hero would be justified in killing his attacker. Because the threat-by-fiat is also in a way a threat to the very experience of reading this genre's fiction anymore, at all...a satisfying resolution must come, or the genre must become something else (Romance, perhaps, if Lois stays Superwoman?)...and yet the very meaning of successful Usurpation is that all the moves are rendered moot, and all the loopholes closed, and what lies ahead is simply Fatality, that value antithetical to superheroism. No cosmic menace threatening to unmake Creation itself was ever more intolerable than this removal of hard-won identity, that even time-travel couldn't accomplish! Except that of course time-travel is often employed as a cheap device here, that gets the story to a point of Usurpation, where the villain (if it is a villain) need not even fear defeat...well, but that's the bad side of time-travel, that noble McGuffin usually employed to maintain the idea of the status quo being unlikeable but necessary...and in the hands of genius, even a "bad use" can be genius, but it doesn't make the use any less bad. Of course, in the hands of genius, even a bad use can be purposeful...!

Anyway. No cosmic menace threatening to unmake Creation itself could be more...etc., etc. Fatality looms, and in the case of one particularly-brilliant comic book it actually ensues...and what is the hero to do? Leaving aside the complete and fulfilled genius of that one comic, it's all about the hero's own never-used potency (said potency now being slung around like nobody's business, left and right and all over town), which is only recoverable by some leverage on, perhaps even a trick that plays on, the failings of the identity-less Fatality. Or, the identity-less flailings, which are failings, of Fatality? It's a stretch, honestly. But anyway Fatality has to fail, somehow, even if it's in some way unbelievable to the Other who wanted it, in order for the status quo to be restored...and in the end, because the hero has not won in his usual way, he can sometimes be permitted a transgressive act of his own, to counter the betrayal of the threat-by-fiat, and reinstantiate the balance that is so desperately needed. The household name for this (as I believe I've mentioned elsewhere, but where I don't know) is of course Vengeance, the very thing that the superhero ordinarily rejects because the specialness of his identity makes it unnecessary...in the normal course of things, literal Vengeance is avoided in favour of sublimated Vengeance, which the superhero is the agent of. But. In this case, where identity itself is in danger of being, not tested, but permanently disposed of, sometimes what is necessary is for the Other to be annihilated, even if that annihilation must compromise the heroic identity to an uncomfortable degree, ding it up a bit until some later storyline comes along and pounds the dents out. Please note, it doesn't have to be this way! It's only that it can be. Nevertheless, here's another place where Usurpation becomes difficult to pull off, if a writer lacks sufficient delicacy, or isn't free to take his superhero off into the world outside the borders of the map...because rupturing the logic of the superheroic world with threat-by-fiat can so easily go too far, and in enthusiasm for the dramatic possibilities associated with it, the danger arises that one might cause the termination of seriality itself. Yes, it can be some very tricky stuff, this implicational wasp's-nest of the Usurpation Plot...one can all too easily find oneself in the position of Gargunza in "The Red King Syndrome" (have I got that right?), desperately whispering that it was all a dream, and hoping that the whisper sticks...

My cautionary meanderings aside, though, the Usurpation Plot can be tremendously involving, and like the other Plots it has a unique message to relay about heroic identity. Put simply, this is that the superhero's arch-enemy is actually not his nemesis: because the doubled identity's true opposite number isn't singular identity, or contrasting identity, but no identity...which in the scheme of superheroic metaphysics has every bit as much right to power as the superhero himself does. But what can "no identity" use it for, once it gets it? This is exactly what Gorko The Man-Frog sees to the bottom of as he sits up on his perch: power doesn't need purpose, at all, in fact it's just as happy to do without it entirely. Power isn't identity, nor vice versa, but instead both things are meaningless, without personality to colour them in. And personality, far from being accidentally tacked-on to the doubled identity by chance, is even more secretly the seed of it in the first place...which is why it can still save the day, even if without the doubled identity's power it can't actually win it.

10. Ego-War. Finally, having in every way excised what can change him, and triumphed over what can't, the superhero must now confront and defeat his own dark impulses directly. Yes: not the dark impulses represented by the archenemy or the rival, or even the nemesis, but the superhero must (oddly) win out over his own villainous desire, a desire which as anyone can see is purely hypothetical in him, but still he must conquer it because there is nothing left about the weird state of his identity that can be concretized as an opponent. So the thought-balloonish conflicts within personality itself become the attackers of the doubled identity, suddenly, essentially proposing "why don't we become two, and see which one's the more important?" This is the familiar ground of the evil double, the brainwashed or amnesiac hero-become-villain, and it's pleasantly boggy and atmospheric...the place where heroes are finally allowed to fight each other, albeit with much handicapping. In the end, it's pretty Jungian stuff, most of the time, and it ends well, with the dire presentiments of doom that accompany its onset usually revealed as simple fear of integration. And I wish I had more to say about it! But maybe I can add on some more later...

Hope you enjoyed the first edit, those who returned! It makes more sense now, I think.

Nota Beta

My apologies to anyone who may be reading, or have read, the post below this one: I keep revising it a little here and there, you see. Everytime I think I've stopped, I see just one more tweak I could've done, and can't resist going back to do it...

I'm pretty much finished it now, though. Sorry if you got stuck with the beta!

Pregnancy And Detonation: Jim Roeg's Comic-Cover Triptych Revisited

Well, there's a lot of background reading to do on this one, but to start things off:

Here's the triptych in question.

And I might as well warn you: I'm not Jim, so this is going to be a little quicker, and a lot dirtier, than his subject probably deserves. Well, naturally! Because Double Articulation could be seen as one great big digressive meditation on it, anyway...and I don't think he's even finished, yet!

Earlier, we were discussing the flip side of comics meaning crafted in stories and arcs and conscious rearrangement of (and toying with) the elements of nostalgia...that flip side being, panels. Weird momentary flashes of sublimity in the apprehension of image, that leads (at least, it leads for me) to mesmerization: how many hours did I spend as I child lost in contemplation of a single drawing of somebody hitting somebody, somebody jumping over a rooftop, somebody flying through the air? And yet forever unable to say what drew me to it, what made it so dynamic. “Found time”, indeed: that the striking symbolic oppositions embedded in the comics page fascinated because they were fragments belonging to the puzzle called “identity” never occurred to me at that age, and yet I played with them ceaselessly, tirelessly, in a little world of my own. Not, so much, the imaginative world of “the Marvel Universe”! But the world of pages and panels and gutters that it lived inside, yes. Because it was the grammar I was trying to fathom, as much as the meaning in the sentences.

And, following Marc Singer's comments on one or another of those posts of Jim's, is this what comics do best? Great cinematography aims at what comics used to achieve in practically every issue, though it has many more refined tools at its disposal with which to accomplish it...film noir, arguably the most electric of the film genres working within strict formal conventions, bites at the matters of sex and identity as fiercely as the comic book superheroes do, but handles its generic vocabulary in a way that is far less carefree. Because the masked avengers and cowled defenders of the night do more than announce the pregnancy of each frame they inhabit: they are that pregnancy, figures tensed with significance, waiting to be activated. Uninvented icons parade from chest to chest, and meanings all unexpressed wait for the moment of action to vie with one another; while around them, between them, the whole order of time and space is deformed by their weird gravity.

Let's look at it.

The side panels of the triptych first: Defenders and Avengers, Jim's “female” and “male” comics principles. On the right-hand side, the enormous mystery-figure as container of weird energy, that causes the Avengers' angry rush up and forward to be splintered into confusion, as it prepares to act. As it begins to act? My favourite little Joseph Campbell-delivered mythological anecdote shimmers into view, here: seems the Hindu gods are walking along the road one day, and...

Oh, you know this one? Great. Anyway they're walking along, when they're suddenly confronted by a fog, out of which issues a (feminine, if I'm remembering right) voice claiming something like “I'm the source of you all...I made you, and I can unmake you.” As proof, out of the fog falls a little piece of straw, and the gods are invited to work their will on it...but they prove mysteriously incapable of doing so. “I made you, and I can unmake you.” But if this relationship is being loosely restated on the Avengers cover, it isn't the artist talking, nor the writer...not even, yet, the reader. Clearly. This isn't self-aware metacommentary, not even such brilliant self-aware commentary as Grant Morrison has lately produced. This is, simply, the thing itself: the empty figure brimming with energy, about to spill over in some awesome, unknown way, is the very pregnancy of form (or should that be potency?) in superhero comics made manifest. In a word, it is fascination: the child's sense of awe at the poising of unnamed forces before his eye. A border containing inexpressible meaning, a filter or prism that breaks up and fractures the superhero images in order to pit them against its own unity, to which they belong. Oh, too flowery? Sorry. Try this, then: as with any cover, the reader's perspective is positioned outside it, so he can look in...but through the focus-figure of the drawing being pushed up into the foreground, and yet facing away, the entire tableau becomes too big to take in in a glance: elements don't add to each other as the eye is drawn into the centre by perspective, instead things begin with the massive singularity of potency, and break up from there. Just as Jim, I remember seeing this cover in the store, and in an instant realized that I had to possess it...if there ever was a comics cover that promised a key that would unlock a code, this was it, and it worked just this way. Inside the cover, too, the “Enemy” causes a fracturing of the Avengers' purpose, deferring his own moment of action as he defers theirs, and all by design...just until the moment when things are reassembled into climax, a bit too soon. And then: freeze frame! Continued next issue! No wonder the finale of the Korvac story disappointed...how could it ever live up to what the ultimate moment of activation promised?

And yet...

Well, there's more to say about that, but it really isn't what I came here to talk about today. We're working on covers, not stories, so...

Okay, just one more thing about “Destiny Hunt!” (Ouch, what a name!) When the Avengers finally make it to the place of confrontation with their “Enemy”, we're granted a concluding splash that flips the scene on the cover around to the opposite perspective, with Michael growing from normal human figure to (as Jim puts it) “homicidal god”. That's where the action stops, with a cleverly reversed view of the same scene that brought us into the comic in the first place. The promise of meaning and context in the (still) suspended moment is fulfilled, through a particular sort of comic-book irony that should again remind us of the foggy gods on the mythological road: because it's a well-kept, anonymously suburban home that the Enemy hides himself in, you see...and for the Avengers to get there (may I say, for them to penetrate the bizarre maze of curlicues and cul-de-sacs that forms the somewhat nebulous dream of normality that is any suburban area? Or would that be just too damn cute?) of course they have to all...ahem, load into a bus, and be delivered...

Oh God, I can't go on with that, it really is too damn cute...

So let's switch sides, now. Consider the flipping-around of things in the Defenders cover: the first thing we notice is that the central figure of the Red Guardian is smaller, positioned so that as our eye is led to it by perspective, it also assembles the foreground elements into a graphical story (or if you like, dramatic diagram), the punchline of which is that apocalyptic vision which she has become. As we might expect, things are richer, here: the faces and attitudes of the Defenders project horror and sadness as they recoil back towards us, and unlike the effect of the Avengers cover, this implicates us – implicates our response! – in the action. The Defenders cover isn't prismatic, but rather it's theatrical: outside the focus of the Red Guardian's form, the reactive ring of Defenders; outside the Defenders, us.

And outside us...?

Neither is the figure of the Red Guardian as primally, simplistically potent as the figure of the Enemy; instead of actually being a border that contains indefinable energies, Tania Belinsky is herself (and as herself) something that is contained. Contained, and clearly affected: that she's been (is being?) transformed is in the literal sense of the image, but more than that, she's being swallowed up by it...inheriting, we might say, the implications of the nuclear explosion's apocalyptic, even somehat yonic, imagery. What kind of message should we plug in here? There are more than a few to choose from, especially if we factor in the fact that Tania's “marriage” to Sergei is fated to be a barren one...but, no, this essay isn't going to be big enough to hold all those things in it, too. For now, let's just say that ruminations on identity lurk in both covers, and that each cover somewhat playfully and subversively makes use of the symbolic imagery of male and female – in Avengers #176 events are broken up in such a way that pregnancy ends up standing for the deferred meaning of the moment of ultimate potency, whereas in Defenders #53 pregnancy is pregnancy, the remorseless creation of new meaning that cannot be stalled or put off once it's begun, that will happen – except that of course it's pregnancy without literal issue – and that to put them together is interesting not just because of their symmetry but also their asymmetry: since each cover accomplishes much more than a simple reversal of what its counterpart portrays. It really almost seems like a deliberate trick, actually! Note the application of size and height: Avengers #176 gives us a huge foreground figure with its back turned, using its posture to force down and confine the smaller figures that are (at least a couple of them) nevertheless located fairly high up on the page, while Defenders #53 causes the smaller, background figure to dominate, but also to push outwards, downwards, by placing the larger figures below her on the page, falling back “past” the cover's frame. Merely to say that these things invert each other is to miss what their common urgency might be construed as saying...because it is not just the suspended moment of pregnancy/potency that's featured here, but the suspended moment of detonation that goes along with it too. In “The Power Principle!” we're shown the Red Guardian inevitably “Reborn!” from Jim's oceanic confusion of gender identity in nothing less than a mushroom cloud, and the Defenders too late – having been too late from the beginning – to prevent this end-of-the-world-like culmination...while in “Destiny Hunt!” a seeming chase is concluded, only to have the fugitive stag turn on its pursuers, and show the face of cosmic Immanence and Fate and Transformation that it secretly always wore beneath its disguise...and that (of course!) they as its prismatic components have therefore always worn as well. Fascination? Sublimity? Fascination and sublimity, you bet...why you simply can't get it more fascinating or more sublime than this. Both compositions are imperfect mirrors, that above all reflect an elision...in each, in both, the eye is drawn back out once it's fallen in, to consider the reader's own unaddressed, yet terribly important, placement in the scene before him.

To the centre panel of the triptych then, and the origin of Jim's obsession: debris, sex, and the urge to an utter, utter secrecy that is no less murderous than the Enemy himself. And yet (as I take it) the impossibility of completing secrecy's guarantee is present there, too...the FF, whose identities are (if nothing else) the least fractured of all the Marvel heroes, whose personal relationships are knit the most tightly, and bound up the most thoroughly – well, why else would they always face so many situations in which they're forced to break up, and then get back together? – are literally tangled up with the virile, phallic, yet essentially neuter limbs of their destroyer, surrounded by the inescapability of that Perez-ian debris Jim describes so beautifully. Interestingly, in this cover foreground and background are both really the same thing: the planes of antagonist and protagonists simply interpenetrate, while the backdrop and the debris alike are bent out away from them by the suggestion of a circular frame of light. The middle distance of the centre replaces the foreground here; everywhere the centre goes, that's what it is, and everything else merely englobes it, whether it's drawn above, behind, before, or below the focus-figures. The arrangement of the figures is suggestive, too: where in Avengers #176 the arrangement was prismatic, the heroes' postures broken up by the limbs of the Enemy, and in Defenders #53 the heroes were arranged in an expanding arc, out and away from the Red Guardian and the amphitheatre of her Ground Zero moment of apocalyptic revelation, in FF #184 the heroes' positions may be too jumbled up to constitute any sort of “array” (prismatic or otherwise), but unlike what's shown in the triptych's outlier panels they are connected to their attacker. And this is engagement, though perhaps it isn't perfect: the FF are struggling with the personification that splits them apart rather than confronting it or recoiling from it, and so (paradoxically) it also serves to group them together as a unit. God, but it's always the bloody Fantastic Four, isn't it? That's just weird. And yet if there's any group of heroes anywhere that's about transcending placement and consequence, in order to move on to active choosing, it probably is the FF...and notably, despite the Eliminator's (ouch!) great height and size in this picture, it's a type of size that he shares with the FF's members, who are directly measured next to him: he grows up between them, instead of confining or repelling them.

Let's look at this just a bit more carefully, and then I'll let you get back to heating up that leftover spaghetti. Who the hell is “The Eliminator”? To us seasoned comics readers, he's somewhat less than a credible threat at first blush: not an ongoing character like Black Bolt or Dr. Doom, not a grand villain on the scale of Galactus, he is just big and plain and empty and brand-new enough to look generic. He crowds the shot with size, but the perspectival elements around him subtly contradict it: Reed clings to his leg (clearly hyperbole! I thought when I saw it, me already a veteran of deceitful covers), and Ben cowers before him, but the setting isn't the Moon or some giant Kirbytech space habitat, or mountains, or anything with any vista at all, it's only a small, cramped hallway with stairs politely rising to the second-floor landing. The debris is stunningly evocative, as it always is in George's hands...but the proportions of the pictures and the railings on the stairs and the height of the ceilings, and the lowness of the light, and...well, everything...all argue against this figure being quite as imposing as we're meant to think him. The perspectives are doctored, like a sitcom house: in real life that cramped-seeming hallway would be big enough to build a small plane in. So though the Eliminator is unquestionably menacing, he's also (at least to experienced FF readers) a little bit ludicrous in just how menacing he is...

Which is itself, perhaps, the very essence of the menace he does exude. Sometime or other, probably soon, I'll discuss this further, but for now I'll just say that the opposite of the cheating cover is the cheating story, in which the heroes aren't defeated by trickery, or cunning, or even really power, but by fiat. This is a very delicate storytelling device indeed, maybe the most delicate: used right, it can stimulate such a powerful sense of unfairness, delusion, anxiety, and even horror in a reader that the objection “that wouldn't happen” comes out more as a plea, and sometimes doesn't even come out at all...and then a clever writer can work wonderful tricks along the way to restoring the status quo...

And when used poorly, it produces the hated Mary-Sue Villain. But the point is, if even superhero powers and gumption can arbitrarily fail in a comics story, then everything – everything! – is suddenly off the table. The FF can lose. Spider-Man can die. The familiar roadmap that shows the way back to Yancy Street or the Coffee Bean Barn doesn't work anymore, and new ways back to normality have to be cleared...

Say, now that I think about it...the Enemy (so promising at the beginning!) was rather a Mary-Sue Villain, wasn't he? And Sergei, "The Presence"...the moment, if we're getting cute again...why he was as arbitrarily “powerful” as hell!

Hmm...

Anyway, the Eliminator. Dangerous by fiat, it appeared at first. But then – surprisingly – the complete promise of the "cheating" cover - that is, both the promise of relevance to the story on the inside of the book, and the "promise" of deceitful contrivance in the illusion of danger - was actually fulfilled in story terms. Wow! Well, but, such is the sly power of symbolism, and the impact of the sublime as intuited through superhero art...and thanks to Jim's explication of it, we can see how covert sexual and gender issues augment the complication of a written-in "threat" to our superhero narrative here. In fact I'd go so far as to say that something very like this augmentation is going on whenever we encounter the danger of fiat in our reading experience, at least in the heroic sphere...but, more on that later, perhaps. In the meantime we have the fulfillment of meaning and context in the "cheating" cover, which arises out of just the matter of sexual secrecy that Jim...ah, brings up. And just how is it intimated by Perez' artwork on that cover? That's really the question, isn't it?

Well...

Just look at that house, people!

That, I submit, is your grandmother's house, that's covered with all that...debris. All smashed up, emptied out, made a mess of. Disappointed. And those perspective-tricks that make the Eliminator look just a bit off? Well, he is just a bit off, isn't he? He and that hallway and all that garbage strewn about are much, much bigger than they ought to be, than in fact they are, just as, in the end, the Eliminator is more an appearance of menace than menace itself. And thus, in actuality, the cover tells the precise truth about this story, in that the Eliminator is less menacing than he seems, but he does seem, and in symbolic terms that is his menace. The oppressive sense of threat-by-fiat, threat to expectation, is met head-on here, and its ability to be defused through the events of plot is a significant development in the exploration of pregnant (yet barren, or perhaps sterile) danger that the cover announces. In other words, it's no cheat that the FF defeat this horrifying anti-pregnancy by misdirecting their enemy, and giving him enough rope; by simply outwaiting the storm of consequence he seems to stand for but doesn't, they end by going on without him, past the moment of apocalypse and on into the resumed meanings of their lives. And...do we do the same thing, because of this? Where, we might ask, as we've asked before, is the situation of the reader in this tableau? Well, if we read the Eliminator's form as suggestive of reader-placement in the same way we did with the other two covers, we can probably perceive a slightly different kind of pregnancy-tension, potency-tension, in it, which is: that the action is not after all as coyly suspended on the cover of FF #184 as it is on its neighbouring triptych-panels. What may happen, what is going to happen, what could happen...these aren't as much of a concern as the fact that something may already have happened, that wasn't supposed to, and that now can't be taken back. The intense liminality of the Enemy's self-revelation, and even of the Red Guardian's fateful transformation, is absent from the central image here: what we're seeing is not the gathering of forces on the razor's-edge of coming-to-be, but the immediate aftermath of that moment, the long, lingering, and regretful glance of triste of "having-done", instead. Gracing the cover of Avengers #176, we have the suspended moment of potency, utterly without form, breaking up and pushing down and confronting the heroes that rush up towards it, and behind it, you, the reader. On the cover of Defenders #53, we have the circle of emotional reaction to the inevitable change of a known, detailed, familiar character that you are, similarly, implicated in. And in the middle, on the cover of FF #184? A drawn and distinct form, that's yet an anonymous one no matter how much it towers...a form that dominates its surroundings, and yet is in some way covered by them...and an already-defeated group of heroes, in a moment of action, a moment of detonation, that has just passed...now pregnant with nothing but the consequences.

The debris.

Interesting that they're the only ones who get a win out of it.

Well, thanks for dropping by! I think I may finally have gotten to it, after all. Must review all this tomorrow...or, y'know, sometime...

But until then, I too intend to go and heat up that leftover spaghetti. Mmm, spaghetti!

Wait, wasn't there something I was supposed to remember about spaghetti?

Signal And Carrier

Or, "The Skull Of Brian Boru".

Or, "Copyright Issues, Quantum Entanglement, and Superboy".

Or...

Oh, hi there. Here's the thing.

I wrote something before about the modern enthusiasm for decoupling the idea of signal from the idea of carrier - as you can read in almost any science-for-the-layman periodical, the current view of quantum entanglement answers the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox (i.e. "wouldn't this allow faster-than-light signalling to occur, in violation of Special Relativity?") by saying that while instantaneous action-at-a-distance can indeed occur, it doesn't constitute signalling because what the information that's transmitted is, must wait on the speed of light to be found out. And let me just take a moment to confirm that I'm not a physicist, by saying that this sounds like epicycles to me...

But that's okay. Maybe I'll talk about that later, and maybe I won't, but anyway...

I'm not a lawyer, either. However it seems to me that if DC owns all the trademarks associated with Superboy (and they do, they own every single blessed one of them), then the Siegel's copyright consists of just one thing. I've mentioned this before.

It's the idea of Superboy.

But, what is the idea of Superboy? If you like: what's the definition of "is"? That's the real interesting part of this, to me...so much of the detail of Superman's world has come straight out of the later invention of Superboy (read those comics, folks!), that Superboy has almost become the more "original" figure by now...and it might be well to remember that in the first instance of Superman there was no room for any of the Smallville stuff we now take so for granted, which possibly is the reason Jerry Siegel was granted his copyright to it as a separate entity by the court in the first place. I say "possibly"...it may not have (in fact, probably didn't) go down like that at the time, but if we consider the way in which the idea of Superboy was quite at odds with the idea of Superman as initially presented, I think we can say that Superboy's distinctiveness is, at least, arguable from that standpoint. It's not so now, of course! But at the time, it may well have been. In fact I'd suggest that the idea of the Superman character as a twistable template that can be altered a little bit this way, a little bit that way, not just in terms of appearance but in terms of story, while all the time still remaining Superman, had not yet occurred. Oh, did I mention already that I'm not a lawyer? I suppose by this time it could almost go without saying...and yet it still seems to me that if you only removed the Superboy costume, and the names Kent and Krypton, and that's all, from Superboy, then suddenly the matter of his connection to Superman would have become much less clear. This is where the Superman/Captain Marvel thing comes in, perhaps: DC is busy asserting that big strong guys in flashy costumes are all really just Superman in disguise, of course. So what does it matter if they come from other planets or not?

Well, a DC lawyer would naturally say "are you kidding? If Captain Marvel is an infringement, how much more so is a flying kid from outer space?" But I think there's a rebuttal to that, at least potentially: which is, exactly, he's a flying kid from outer space. That's what the character turns on, the Boy part...the Super is important, but not key. He could have been "Magic Boy". Alternatively, he could have been "Super-Robot". "Super-" as a piece of intellectual property all by itself may not be as supportable in the world of copyright as it is in the world of trademark...though it understandably seems that way to us from our current-day perspective.

And for the legitimacy of "Super-" as an idea all its own, perhaps we could look to the Captain Marvel thing...

Anyway. Just thinking out loud, here, about what it means to own an idea, but not its commercially-recognizable manifestation. Joe Simon, I believe, owns the idea of Captain America...but without the Cap trademarks (a bit less ironclad, that, I guess) what can he do with it? Well...I've heard it said that if Marvel wanted to print a Captain America story in which Cap is, say, a Nazi, then Simon could block it. Sure: because it would be very easy to demonstrate that that is not the "idea" of Captain America, and so in that case Marvel's use of the trademarks would actually work against them...because signal and carrier can only be decoupled so much. Because at some point, without an essential connection to the copyrighted material, they're valueless.

(...And here is where I could turn it all back to the EPR paradox, except I won't, because I'm not ready to talk about that yet. Sorry! Or, y'know...you're welcome!)

The Superboy situation is murkier than that, obviously. What does Superboy "stand for"? Nothing that Superman didn't stand for first. And, how many different Superboys (not to mention Supermen...not to mention Supergirls and Superdogs and Super-anythingelses) have there been by now? Lots, obviously. There may be very little for the Siegels to defend, if their "Superboy" is all we're talking about.

But.

Consider this: in regard to the television show Smallville (and, presumably, the LSH cartoon), DC's official position is that this isn't Superboy, but only Young Superman.

If I were a lawyer (and I'm not, in case you haven't noticed) I'd call that a misstep. Potentially, a big one. Because there is no "Young Superman". That idea does not exist. It could exist, sure; take Clark out of Smallville, get rid of Lana Lang...have him join the Navy, travel the world, go to college, even meet Lori Lemaris. No problem. That's Superman (let me be clear), only it's Superman a couple years before he starts working at the Daily Planet, whereupon, as anyone can see, he becomes "Superman" in the classic sense. So it's a younger Superman.

But it isn't "Young Superman".

"Young Superman" as a concept (I would argue) is simply equal to "Superman as a boy". Superboy. He's in high school, he has a paper route, he lives in his parents' house, he can't vote...he's a frickin' boy. A minor. Superman as a young adult...that's Superman. Superman modified by the special category of "young", where the meaning of "young" is spelled out to the reader/viewer in only the terms of being teenaged, unemancipated, without any of the legal marks of adulthood...

I mean, you can present the theme of "youth" - relative youth, that is - in any number of different ways. If you have a mind to. It's easy. But, it isn't what's happening here.

And so all of the Superman, Jr.'s and the Conner Kents, as cleverly distracting as they are, matter not at all, in this instance. Both Smallville and LSH (in this non-lawyer's opinion) are transparent attempts to trade on the idea of Superboy that is owned by the Siegels, and not on some twisty Superman template that only happens to be a bit younger than he is in Action #1. The show that is now "Smallville" could have been anything: it could've had a red cape and blue longjohns and a big yellow "S" in it, Clark Kent with his glasses, a Superman not quite ready to reveal himself to the world. It could've had Chloe Sullivan in it, and even Lex Luthor, and it might even have gone on to become a big success. But it didn't. And if the only way in which it seems to differ from the Siegel's Superboy is in its lack of the blue tights...

Well, the Siegels don't even own the blue tights, do they?

Law is funny. If you're like me, you're eagerly awaiting the final outcome of the legal wrangling between DC and the Siegel family. I do believe - even though I am not a lawyer - that it will set a very interesting precedent.

In physics, too.

Forgive Me, Sean!

I can hold back no longer.

The greatest Kirby design of all time does not spring from the ambiguous world of Marvel. Or DC. No Space Gods, cursed with a nature beyond good and evil, and weird helmets, and complex goals that may not even be met at all. No Noble Kings, who govern by pure restraint, whose hidden signs of sickness become beauty. No mysterious men, who aren't men at all, but only streamlined forms, blockish mistakes, cavernous yearnings made flesh. Such eidolons sicken and pale before the one true pure Kirby imagining, the perfect distillation of meaning in form. In four colours. Simple. Horrid. Fascinating.

Sad versions of thought, cast up fruitlessly on the shores of time, I give you the Absolute (my minion Sean will supply the Image):

The Red Skull

Cower before the simplicity of a dark green jumpsuit, a swastika, a Red Skull...or a morning coat, a cigarette holder, a Red Skull. No wedding ceremony is safe; no Santa's Breakfast for retarded children is holy; no wisp of feeling in this world means anything, except it means a target, for the unremitting evil and hatred of The Red Skull. As someone has said recently, there is evil that seeks to destroy the world and kill all the people in it, there is evil that seeks to enslave the innocent and turn the best and the brightest into no more than cattle, and then there is Nazi evil, that even the evil shun.

The Red Skull.

The Red Skull!

Evil Incarnate. Nazism Incarnate. A totality of evil, an efflorescence of evil, an evil that evil itself measures itself against!

No character, in any national literature, has ever been so bad.

And that's it.

That's it!

Stuff Your Heart With Steel Wool And Tinfoil, Saith The Biblical Dragons From Outer Space!

To which I reply...

Jesus Christ is Tina Fey funny!

Holy shit, what charisma that woman's got! If I had a complaint about 30 Rock, it would only be that it isn't longer...I need to somehow get a fuller dose of all the characters on this show! I mean I'm not even seeing enough of Liz Lemon, for God's sake!

But enough about me: here's what I like. Leaving aside how brilliant and funny and non-boring 30 Rock is, it reminds me of something I've been thinking a lot about lately. Which I won't expound on too much just now, but just read this, if you please...

Yes. I hope you agree. Because a media universe populated by believable, non-drama-queenish, non-plot-pointy, admirable, and protagonistic women is exactly the media universe I want to live in. I'm so bored with that other media universe, you know? And the list of what I don't need from it is growing long and loud...

But while I'm watching 30 Rock I don't have to think about that list.

So: thanks, Tina! Now I'm going to go commit the names of the writing staff on this show to memory.

Also, Rachel Dratch? Always funny. God, I hope this show makes it...

"You're Locking In With Tito? Then Choose A Dancer!"

The man is Picasso. The ideas go right from inside his head, onto the canvas, in a heartbeat. He's a Zen master.

What?

Oh, come on. Like you don't watch it, too.

What's That Behind Your Ear, Lieutenant?

You can blame Ed for it: here's the wrap-up.

If you want to make an Aaron Sorkin drama yourself, it's a simple recipe. As per Jack Cassidy's advice to Peter Falk in Columbo, you just imagine the illusion you want to create, and then ask yourself how you'd go about creating it. In other words, you work backwards.

Earlier I mentioned that there was a certain not-uncharming self-referential flavour to tonight's episode of Studio 60: as has been pointed out before (somewhere around here), one of Sorkin's tricks is to keep the focus of tension off-screen in his TV shows, and in this particular show (as in the last few minutes of the previous one) he's found a certain amount of success in making that tension all about his own recent spectacular flopping and flailing. Well, and maybe he was bound to become the focus of his own work one day: arguably even the patented “snappy” dialogue isn't the main draw of of an Aaron Sorkin program, except so far as it serves to cover over the pit of a mock-therapeutic resolution that the viewer is intended to fall into...and in my opinion it's far less than arguable that Sports Night and The West Wing both excelled at bringing these resolutions about. And was that the real foundation of their popularity, rather than the prettiness of the words? I like to think so...

Because that's exactly what drove me away. It may be axiomatic that literature differs from real life by making simple motivations seem complex (that's David Lodge; actually, Morris Zapp), or it may not, but in any case Sorkin's main trick in his teleplays seems to be reversing that axiom, so that seemingly complex motivations are reduced to, and exposed as, so much walking-around of straightforward A-to-B character bits. And then there's a great gushing-forth of Big Feelings when all the various and curious behaviours and speeches finally collapse in on themselves to show the true extent of their interconnection...and then as a final result, soap is sold.

I got tired of that.

But I've got to admit that when that collapse finally arrived in Studio 60, I found myself intrigued: because where the previous episode dabbled in self-referential apology and atonement (while still managing to specialize in slop), even the slop was self-referential tonight! This wasn't Studio 60, this was Lord of the Flies...analogy, confession, and acknowledgement, that feeling of catharsis you felt at the end of tonight's episode wasn't yours, but Aaron Sorkin's. Because every character in a Sorkin drama always speaks with the same relentless voice, but this time, as a twist, all those samey-same voices were talking to each other deliberately as the same voice: Aaron, speaking to Aaron, about Aaron, for all the world to see. Quite a dazzling accomplishment, really: just when you despaired of him being able to pull himself back from this tic-ridden hobby-horse of a show...

Well, he went all in, instead.

An inspired solution! If an egotistical one. Of course it's a one-time-only, Hail Mary kind of thing....

And the show still needs a lot of work, or rather (from my perspective), it's still bad. The usual suspects get rounded up right on schedule: last week, the basketball game; this week, the hostage crisis. Tick-tock. The referencing of “jumbo shrimp” was unforgivable, regardless of whether a person can tell a joke or not, and though the acting, as I've said, took a huge step up, it also needed to: in Canada we once had a show that lost its way on the Dramedy trail (skewered by Joe Flaherty on Maniac Mansion, actually – for the love of God, where can I get a copy of that show's theme song?) because although it had a wonderful bunch of professional actors in it, they eventually just couldn't keep up with all the mood earthquakes, the whiplashing transitions from hijinks to holocaust...sailor take warning! Studio 60, as a drama about comedy, shouldn't run too fast with that particular pair of scissors...

And: the confession may be heartfelt, but cheap contrivances are still everywhere in this show, and is it my fault that they seem like so much going through the motions, when they are just so much going through the motions? You think of the illusion you want to create, and then you create it, that's true...but you must create every second of it, and not just wait around for the prestige to arrive. There can't be any yada-yada-yada-ing! And too many pretexts spoils the subtext, really...

AND! The intercutting between past and present (carried out with some welcome sharpness tonight) may be the best way to tell these stories, but it's also a crutch: so much of the interweaving is done for one by this device that after a while it starts to look like the smart one in the room...and after a while you can't help but wonder, how much of this is just desperate distraction? Does this story really demand this treatment? Is this riff worth re-riffing, just because it'd all look kinda shallow without it? These are rhetorical questions, obviously; they're not meant to be answered. They're to fill up space. Kind of like “Nevada Day”. But let's leave all that behind us, damn it. Only three things really need to happen in this show, for its survival to successfully cancel out its programming...and the winners are...

One: what's funny must be shown; what's not funny must be stepped on. Not the other way around. When I watched tonight's episode I almost missed the punchline of the “Deal Or No Deal” bit, but couldn't miss (though I tried) the Italian Prince thing. And that's wrong. But not as wrong as the whole continuing “Crazy Christians” angle of the sketches – that shit must go, my friend. It's pretty shrill.

Two: these characters (all of them!) must make up their minds about what they want to be to each other, as well as to themselves. There are too many things to say here, so I'll just pick one: which is that if I want to watch Moonlighting, I'll rent it. This is death, watching the Matt/Harriet thing. Pull the trigger on this. And then, you know, start pulling it on everything else.

Three: I forget three. But do be careful with the musical numbers, all right? This is already an extremely mood-dependent show, and sometimes a stabilizer's as unwanted as a swing...

Oh, suddenly I remember three!

Three: slop is the enemy. Much of it is gone now, thank goodness, so all that needs to be done is to get rid of what's left, and then keep the decks clean afterwards. Changing times call for changing tricks, so think carefully about what you want the illusion to be, and then – equally carefully! – work backwards 'til you've successfully created it. After all, we all know about the quarters in the ear gag...that doesn't fool anybody anymore...

My, my, so many metaphors! And yet I can't help them...and yet I don't know if I'm finished yet, because of them...

Well, no doubt I'll be able to tell when I'm done by all the applause and the accolades.

...

Hello?

...

Hey, did we just walk around in a circle, here? And yet somehow there was no closure. Hmm...note to self...

Somewhat Hasty, but Not Without Proof

All you Sorkinites can open your eyes again, now.

It was awful, of course. In terms of writing, a train wreck.

But I'll give it this: it was, at least, finally a show. Mistakes were most certainly made, and there was some boredom, some ugliness, some bullshit...oh, did I say some? I meant lots. However, there was some self-knowledge, too, and this was not uncharming. Also, the structure was sound, even moderately tight; the actors stepped it up quite smartly; hell, there was even a funny line. It may actually be better than The West Wing, at this point...although in my opinion, that particular bar isn't exactly set way high.

In short, if it keeps on like this, you've got your darling back.

And I can go back to my "B" game.

God, I'm so depressed...

The Gasoline Generation

Everyone else has one, so why not me? Inspired suddenly by Sean's Desert Island Comics post, although I want to be clear, here - R.H. Tawney clear - that I don't believe in generation-theories. I think they're crap.

Having said which, here's mine:

You've got your older generation - people like my father, children of the Thirties, just a bit too young for the War. The last of the generation of the big pistons, their childhood coincided with the arrival of the time of miracles which was widespread gasoline power: in fishing boats and commercial aircraft, hand-held grinders and model trains and outboard motors and cheap power drills. My Dad even has a Coleman stove that runs off a bottle of gas. A simple engine is a thing of absolutely no mystery to him whatever: he and his friends can fix anything like that, can fashion old coffee cans into makeshift carburators, whip up odd-looking cannibalized devices built around the parts of an old lawnmower. Gas is their answer to everything, and they know everything about it. They're the artistes of the two-stroke. The Gasoline Generation.

And then you've got your younger generation - raised on Pokemon Blue, enjoying in-jokes about early game consoles, effortlessly texting hither and yon, grafting media onto media much as my Dad's friends grafted metal onto metal. The Digital Generation, living in a world of decentralized datapoints, swimming through a thick soup of radio sources, fragmented information, multiple convergences: in a word, collage. I'm reminded of Kim Stanley Robinson's Orange County Trilogy - a fascinating triptych of ideas about science-fictional utopia that convinced me that the only utopian scenario worthy of the name is probably that which arises from a small community of interlinked families dependent on subsistence farming and fishing...

I digress a little. What I mean to bring up is actually not the first book of that series - "The Wild Shore" - but the second, entitled "The Gold Coast". This is a future a lot like our own, a typically-extrapolated techno-paradise of computer automation, designer drugs, world-spanning information networks, anomie, and money...and the main character is a culture-vulture, who knows all about what's good, and what isn't. The programmer of arts.

But, on reflection I think that sort of "culture-vulture"-ism doesn't quite fit the type of collage that the digital generation is all about. It's a good idea! But even in the world of the novel, it isn't a widespread technique of navigation, instead an enthusiasm belonging primarily to the (somewhat reflective) main character. Young digital people of my acquaintance are just as interested - maybe more interested - in the accidental elements of collage, that co-exist with the thing called plan: after all, in a world where you turn on information feeds just like a tap, an excess of motive will only block you from experiencing the pleasure of stumbling onto patterns of meaning that haven't already been conditioned by somebody else's eyes.

Well, but everything old is new again, eh?

So, no: the intentional collageist isn't the hero of the digital generation, but the hero of the one before it. My generation. The Stereo Generation, that with their endless production of homemade mix-tapes seems to rate the value of the historical continuity of music and culture sometimes even above the value of actually enjoying music. Obsessive completists, sunk in minutiae and mystique: who else would ever want to sit through - or worse, make others sit through - a phenomenally-rare forty-minute bootleg of Ravi Shankar jamming with Roger Whittaker, jammed between Leadbelly and Bauhaus on a tape called "JazzZZzz"? Who else wants to turn off all the lights and just listen to it, all the way through? This is not the playful aesthetic of the sample or the mash-up, this is the monkish asceticism of the amateur musicologist, who claims somehow to like absolutely everything, even things that no one has ever liked, or ever will. A sampler blends; but a mix-taper toys with disjunction. It's a different thing altogether. My father has music that he likes, and listens to, and mostly he stays inside that circle of CDs that fits his taste; he doesn't want to hear Louis Armstrong sandwiched against Metallica. Well, but my friends' children don't want to hear that either! If there's a song on, then fine, and if the juxtapositions or mixtures in it are interesting, then better; but don't expect kudos from them for constructing a ninety-minute musical argument. Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone! Let's put something else on! This isn't any fun!

Needless to say, I believe in none of the above. Still, you've gotta admit it makes more sense than droning on about Generation X all the time.

Or, do you?

The Truth Is, I've Never Faced a "Desert Island Comics" Test. Not Like This...

In fact I've cheated the “Desert Island Comics” Test, and...patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. But because I haven't done it, I'll do it.

Cripes, how old is this meme?!?

Never mind, I'll do it. I'll do it.

...

1. Pogo. I could get immersed in Pogo for a good twenty years or so, and never look up.

2. Peanuts. I might be reduced to playing “Ha, Ha, Herman!” with myself, but at least I'll know that, even stranded on a desert island, it's better than being stranded on that pitcher's mound. And the commentary on the suffering of Job will probably come in handy...

3. Tintin.

4. Asterix.

5. Can I get a big phone book of everything Alan Moore's ever written? No? Then I'll take the complete Howard The Duck, by Steve Gerber. It might keep me sane.

6. Coyote. A talismanic pick, just to keep my hopes up. Hey, it's either that or the “Nobody Dies” issue of Flash!

Can I have them both?

No?

Fine, then I'm not going to list any of the comics I'd cry over not having brought with me, either! Is it not enough that I don't have any Alan Moore, for God's sake?!

It's Coming Through Now, Khan

Hey, Ed!

Thought you might need some help coming up with topics for your blog...

...

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Attachment To The Vehicle

It can be a beautiful thing. It can be a terrible thing.

Consider this an epilogue, Bloggers, to my protracted musings (if I can flatter myself by calling them such) on the uses and misuses of superhero comics' uniquely brain-damaged approach to verisimilitude, so wrong, and yet so right. A few years ago I ran across a Sufi paradox which I thought pretty neatly illuminated the old Western-canon philosophical problem of the limits of knowability, but don't you think it fits the high-wire act of comics creation/interpretation pretty well too?

“If you cast yourself into the sea, without any guidance, this is full of danger, because man mistakes things which arise within himself for things arising from elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you travel on the sea in a ship, this is perilous, because there is the danger of attachment to the vehicle.

In the one case, the end is not known, and there is no guidance. In the other case, the means becomes an end, and there is no arriving.”

This thought should be stapled to the heads of comics writers and readers alike, I think. Not because it would do so much good; just because I think it would be fitting. Because writing, no less than reading, also involves decisions about whether to take to sea with a boat or without one: and neither way may be right, but it's good to know what the choices are, so you don't get confused about what you're trying to do.

So let's talk DC, and then Marvel.

You've got your Superman, with his touted vulnerability to magic. What this means – or what it probably should mean – is that magic spells work as well on Superman as on anyone else; being Kryptonian doesn't confer any special immunity to the hoodoo. Fine. But over time, that basic vulnerability to magic has turned into a special susceptibility to magic instead, just as if magic acted on Superman as Kryptonite does. Say (just say) that I am Superman (but of course that's ridiculous, Lois...me, Superman?) and you are some magician who wants to beat me up. So if you magically conjure up a golf club and hit me with it...

Should I really be knocked unconscious?

There's a very geeky place we can go with this if the answer is “yes” (not that we aren't already in a geeky place), but let's save that for a minute. Let's say that the golf club, as conjured, is just a damn golf club. It isn't supposed to do anything beyond being a golf club. You just didn't have a golf club handy, see, so you magicked one up! And then you hit me with it. But my propensity to be knocked out by golf clubs has nothing to do with whether they're magic or not, unless they're magic “knock-anyone-out-no-matter-how-tough-they-are” golf clubs...so, if I'm Superman, I should probably be fine. And you should've whipped up something a bit more specific! Well, you'll have plenty of time to think it over in jail...

Understand: once upon a time, in the pre-Crisis days, dealing with this kind of thing was a big part of writing Superman. Will the club knock him out, or not? To put it another way, what the hell is magic, and how does it work? If you don't have an answer for this (and remember it must not be too good an answer, or you'll wreck the whole thing – once you systematize magic, it tends not to be magic anymore), then how are you going to have Superman outwit his enemy by getting Batman to dress up in his place? You see what I mean? It's a serious problem. Because in comics, verisimilitude is essential, but it's never sufficient: it isn't the be-all and end-all of storytelling, and achieving plausibility – even pseudo-plausibility! – is not always the way to move the story along to where it wants to go. Without respect for the rules of Superman's world, that world's ability to be believed in collapses...but what are those rules? They can't stand too much systematizing either: sometimes the magic fire will burn Superman a little, and sometimes it'll burn him a lot. The magic tommy-gun may or may not kill him, even if it's supposed/not supposed to. Magic scissors can always cut his hair, but they can't knock him out like magic boxing gloves can. It's all very...flexible. Sometimes you take to sea in a ship, and other times you just have to cast yourself in without any guidance...

Let's take Green Lantern as another example. As everyone knows, his ring is powerless against the colour yellow...waitaminute, it's powerless against the colour yellow? What, just the colour? Well, that doesn't make any sense at all, I'm afraid...white light has yellow in it too, y'know. If “yellow” is just a frequency, then fine: you can see how the ring might have some kind of resonance problem. But if yellow is just yellowness...

Wait...hold on, which one of these is attachment to the vehicle, again?

It's so hard to know...after all, without the vehicle you're likely to mistake things arising within yourself for things arising elsewhere...

Over to Marvel, and its current disease of misplaced plausibility. The Sentry gains godlike powers from a super-soldier serum “one hundred thousand times more powerful!” than that which created Captain America...but, hold on, what does this mean, this “one hundred thousand times more powerful”? What is that? Steve Rogers was injected with a chemical that rebuilt his body's cells, not one that “made him powerful”...there just isn't any chemical like that, that's just a “superness-bestowing” chemical! Meanwhile in Marvel Zombies the superhero plague is really a plague that affects anyone wearing a costume...it doesn't matter if the Punisher is just a guy with a gun, because he counts by category, and that's good enough (in Millar's Authority, one of the villains had the super-power of “negating the Engineer's super-powers”...just as if to say it was to make it so...), and Daredevil gets sent to jail because he's “super-powered”, even if Daredevil doesn't have much in the way of superpowers, or if no one can prove that he has superpowers, or even if, in fact, he's not Daredevil...I guess this makes sense, though, because if he counts by category then just wearing the Daredevil costume is a good enough reason to lock him up all on its own...the costume is the identity is the power (well, not “the” power, just “power”, really), and so the specific man underneath and the specific things he can do don't really even matter, for our purposes. Right?

So: attachment to vehicle? Or casting into the sea?

Which one of these is President Thor? Which one is the Bendis/Millar Electro? Which one is the Reed Richards who forgot he was a man? Which one is the “X-gene”, or Grant Morrison's “secondary mutation”? Which one, for that matter, is the execrable “subcaptioning” (gahhh! Make it go away!) that tells us (among other things) how the Ultimate Reed Richards spends his day designing disposable high-tech consumer widgets for the government (huh?), or how the Triskelion is cool?

Which one makes Ultimate Nick Fury or the 616 FBI or SHIELD so casually disdainful of other people's interpretation of the law? Which one makes the U.S. President a King in all but name? Which one makes the lives of Jean Grey's family forfeit because she was a mutant?

I'm not sure.

I think it's attachment to the vehicle, that does it.

...But anyway, whether that's right or wrong, let's return now to the promised “very geeky place” from a paragraph or two above. I'm reminded of an episode of everybody's least-favourite Star Trek spinoff, Voyager. Let me say that at one time, just for the briefest of moments, I had high hopes for Voyager. No, not at the beginning...they weren't those kind of hopes, you see. My hope blossomed during the hackneyed and boring two-part episode where they time-travel back to modern-day Earth. Do you remember this one? Seems a young man was hiking in the hills in California in the Sixties or something when he came across a downed time-ship, and he proceeded to cannibalize its technology and build himself a giant world-spanning software empire. Kind of like an evil Bill Gates. And naturally this didn't interest me one bit, except...

The actor playing this villain was Ed Begley, Jr.

And for just one second, I thought: oh my God, is he playing himself?!?

Because I'm sure young Ed probably did go hiking in the hills when he was a struggling young actor in California, you know? And Ed Begley, Jr. is certainly no dummy...if he'd found the time-ship, might he not have given up acting, knowing a good thing when he saw one? Might he not have become this villain? It is an alternate timeline, after all...

Oh well. It wasn't him. Too bad! Because I would've watched a show that dared to do such a thing, and honestly I thought: of course that's how you get Ed Begley, Jr. to be in your show! “You'll be the villain.” “What, me? Actually me?” “Why? Don't you want to be the villain?” “Are you kidding? What, are you retarded or something? I'M DYING TO BE THAT VILLAIN!”

...

Ah, slight digression there, sorry: that isn't the Voyager episode that “attachment to the vehicle” reminds me of. I just wanted to mention it. Shall we proceed to the point, now?

Because there's also a Q episode, see, where there's a war going on between “our” Q, and all the other Q. Q takes Janeway into the clumsily-yet-adorably named “Q Continuum”, which presents itself to her senses as (what else?) a U.S. Civil War milieu in the South, with Q under siege in a fancy estate. There's gunfire through the window, and they duck: Q tells Janeway that of course it isn't really gunfire, that's just how it presents itself to her limited mortal mind – it's really Q weaponry. But what kind of weapon can injure a Q?

Never mind: just focus on the appearances. Because they're how your puny human intelligence is translating the reality of all this stuff, see?

God, I hate Voyager. But I love this episode! The gunfire comes in through the window, and misses Q and Janeway, but it smashes some pictures on the walls and dishes on the mantel. “Well, what's all that stuff, then?” I found myself wondering. I've been told that my tiny human brain only sees it as pictures and dishes, fine, but so what is it really? There's a fireplace in the room: so, my God, what is that fireplace representing? I really have to know, you know? They go “outside” and “inside” the big manor house, but where are they really going? Later on, some of the useless Voyager crew grab up some authentic Civil War-era rifles and train 'em on the Q, and the Q surrender...because, of course, they're not really rifles. But what are they? The Q being what they are, the implication is that once those rifles have been pointed at you, you can't un-point them, and there's nowhere in all of time and space you can go to escape the shot...and you can't turn the person holding them into a pile of ash or even just a frog, either, you are simply fucked when you're on the business end of one of those things, omnipotence notwithstanding.

Me being me, I can't stop thinking about this. I'm not even paying attention to the show. I'm just thinking: so let's say that these weapons (which the rifles are only cheap representations of) must trump the Q's abilities to basically control reality in any manner they wish. So in a way the one constant in their universe then becomes the weapon, doesn't it? The weapon is stabilized somehow, both its substance and its timeline made untamperable-with. Similarly, the spacetime event representing the individual holding the rifle is secured against modification. How might this work? Well, maybe the weapon creates its own little separate pocket universe, that to the Q's senses is somehow masked so as to become an anonymous address, and while someone's holding onto it they're translated into that universe, that address, as well...and what the Q can't “find” in their presumably metadimensional space, they can't alter. But, y'know, I can find a few exploitable holes in that explanation myself, so that can't be true...so maybe, even better, the weapon is somehow detached from causality altogether, existing simply as itself in an unerasable microsecond of time, and therefore fixing the Q's presence in that microsecond so that it doesn't matter how infinitely twistable their personal continuity of existence is, for that microsecond they are there, and can be cut down...so there's no point in them trying any Q-ish tricks to escape the crosshairs, because no matter what they do they will still have been in them...

It's kind of fun, trying to explain this. Because if the Civil War illusion is taken to be scrupulously representative of the “real” events and relationships going on in the Q continuum (e.g., Q doesn't scream “oh no!” when the dish over the mantel is destroyed, because whatever it really is, it bears the same relationship to him as a real dish over a real mantel would bear to us), then whatever's going on underneath the Civil War seeming has to become ever-more convolutedly bizarre in order not to break free of that representation. What are the bushes and trees that the Voyager crew conceal themselves behind as they sneak up on the opposing Q faction's camp? What is the dirt that gets on their faces and hands? What's the cloth that Janeway bandages Q's wounds with, and what transformation has it undergone in being torn off a shirtsleeve to become a bandage in the first place? Are these pieces of ideas that get thrown onto the fire in the fireplace, and not wood? What, then, do the “trees” they were cut from, or the axes used to split them, signify? Night falls in the Q continuum, but it isn't really “night” – the sun isn't really a sun, and warmth and light aren't really warmth or light, they just seem so. To our limited senses.

Well, we'd need unlimited senses to understand it any other way!

So have I become too attached to the vehicle, or have they?

It's a bit muddled, really. It's a bit confused. I liked this episode of Voyager, but probably for exactly the wrong reasons...

And it's a problem.

Like comics.

They can be a beautiful thing; they can be a terrible thing. Rule-building, or rule-destroying: talent can do either of those. I think right now at DC, it's building. I think right now at Marvel, it's destroying. Because as I never seem to get tired of pointing out (spared you a link, there), the continuity of superhero comics can't be completely understood as context, but has to be looked at as a separate sort of content, too...just like the superpowers themselves, you can pay both too much attention to what it represents, and too little. And either way is bad. Verisimilitude in comics is always hanging by a thread, in part because there's more than one way of approaching it; there is more than one flavour of verisimilitude available, more than one way of blending imaginary “fact” with real fact, and more than one way of imagining the implications of comic-book events that result from this blending, on other pieces of continuity-invention that may come after it. Or before it.

To put it more strictly: in superhero comics there is more than one way of deciding which facts, whether real or imaginary, are best ignored. Because you can't ignore everything; but you can't ignore nothing, either.

It's a perilous sort of enterprise, this voyaging!

Contrasts And Cranberries

Snow is falling in Vancouver, the colour of wedding dresses, and it's looking pretty Christmastimey...

Meanwhile down south, it's Thanksgiving. The American Holiday.

Of course we have it here, too; it was last month. Different latitudes, of course, for a harvest festival! But historically it's got the same basic origin: a whole bunch of non-farmers manage to survive their first winter in the New World, instead of, you know, starving to death...actually I sometimes think the Thanksgiving festival itself is more properly understood as dating from the second fall period, more like an “oh my God, we actually grew food this year!” type of sentiment...

Well, but it's a bit different, even so. You had the pilgrims; we had les habitants, peasant farmers sent here for the greater glory of France. You have the colossal neurosis of interstate family homecoming, as detailed in TV and movie scripts, novels and short stories, and a charmingly universal gallows humour; we just have turkey. Our Thanksgiving is a grace-note Feast Day seemingly dropped in to alleviate the pang felt on having to depart from another summer, and a pleasant opportunity to hang out with the extended family without all the pressure of gift-giving and Jesus; yours is a unique therapeutic industry all its own, a giant billboard on the highway of the year that announces: “You Are Now Entering The Holiday Season – Population: Everybody”.

I like yours. I prefer ours! But I like yours. It's like Christmas with a bit less crassness – everybody talks it up, and it has a gigantic media footprint, and it's extravagantly decorated with bullshit, but it's homey for all that, very much of the people, by the people, and for the people. I'm particularly fascinated with the traditional crossing of the state lines; that's another difference between Canada and the States, you see, because up here most people live in a very stretched-out East-West corridor that runs across the bottom of the country, and although you can visit your mother in Toronto, you usually wouldn't choose to. The Orphan's Thanksgiving is the more prevalent custom for those living out of province, and (just slightly behind it) the Orphan's Christmas. In the States, I imagine you can blindfold yourself and throw a dart at the map, and stand a pretty good chance of hitting a town; in Canada, it's far more likely that you'll hit some sort of wandering ungulate, instead. So by and large we don't do the homecoming thing with as much zest as you do: travelling from B.C. to Saskatchewan eats up an ungodly number of miles and scenic vistas, but when you get to where you're going, in cultural terms you still haven't travelled all that far. At least (I assume) not as far as you travel when you go from Baltimore to Billings.

I'm probably exaggerating, I guess. More than probably. But, today is probably a very decent day to airily theorize about the States, if I absolutely have to do it...because it's your day! American Thanksgiving!

And there's really nothing like it anywhere else, is there?

So enjoy the football and the national mystique, America...but leave room for pie later...

Shaken, Not Stirred

Nope; it's not Bond.

It's Jack Norris, Ed's blog: active at last.

(Little Ruby Thursday reference there, in the "shaken not stirred" thing.)

And yes, he's aware that Gerber changed it to "Norriss", but that's just how things turned out...

Damn you, Ed, now that I've added you to my sidebar I have to start thinking about whether or not I should revamp it totally!

Sea Changes

Took me a while to get to this...

So they renamed the Antarctic Ocean, did you hear? That is, they finally gave it a name: up until now it hasn't had one – it's just kind of been considered the oceanic leftovers of Pacific and Atlantic for the last hundred years or so, not really needing a name.

Not hard to see where I'm going with this, is it?

They call it the Southern Ocean, now (myself, I'll continue to call it the Antarctic Ocean – sounds cooler), and define it as anything higher than the latitude line at 60 degrees south. Believe it or not, this is pretty important for you and me: now that they're calling it a place, they can get some work done on it, and this will lead to all kinds of good things. Because as meteorologists and climatologists have always known, and as satellite imaging and robotic Mars missions are hammering home to the rest of us more and more each year, our Earth is that very rare and special thing, an ocean planet. And that doesn't simply mean that it has an ocean where other planets don't: no. What it means is that the dynamism in our environment is overwhelmingly ocean-based. This is big stuff, since it reveals that the continental landmasses where we live are only secondary causes of weather, climate, and all the various kinds of environmental feedback loops that we're caught up in the gearing of; in fact most of the importance of the landmasses lies in how they modify the ocean's contribution to these things, and not in their direct impact on global climate at all. Because an ocean planet, see, is a different kind of planet; to understand the planet, you have to understand the ocean. All the ocean. And therefore, seeing as how what we've been accustomed to think of as “the ocean” isn't the real ocean, can we really claim to understand our own environment at all? The maps on the high-school walls only show “our” oceans, the ones so many of us flit back and forth across in the pursuit of holidays and trade, but there's a whole lot of territory out there besides that. You can't see it very well on the Mercator projection, but there are lots of places in this world where human beings have never gone, and never will go: places where icebergs fifty miles long and thirty miles wide bob peacefully in the sea, totally unnoticed. A lot of space out there. A lot of marine life, a lot of heat-transfer, a lot of activity that affects our daily lives. Weather. Carbon-sequestering. Did I mention weather. The Antarctic circumpolar region is the birthplace of hurricanes, you know? Now we have eyes in the sky on it, and it's about time, but as long as we think of most of the ocean as an invisible place without a name, a conceptual by-product of the borders we draw into our maps of human relations, that need not be sketched out, then we'll never really understand how a hurricane is born and grows. Hurricanes will remain inexplicable Wrath-Of-God outbursts that we can do nothing about: intrusions from the world beyond the borders of the map, forever mysterious, and therefore forever uninterpretable. Think of this: there are surface winds skirling across the plain of the ocean in every place on Earth we've never seen, that meet up with other winds, and then meet up with other winds, before they get to Miami. And satellites are in place now to study these winds, which is great, but what maximum good can the studying do if it takes place in a region without a name, that no one can ever think of as being a relevant part of their world?

Fortunately, now it does have a name.

It's funny how names matter so much. Take the name “Junk DNA”, for example: that's what we've grown accustomed to calling all the crap in our genetic code that seems to be left over from the stuff that does something, that actually makes us who we are. A minor mystery, what all that junk's doing there, isn't it? But as far as putting dollars to microscopes goes, junk DNA isn't a very big draw.

Except...

As it turns out, “junk” DNA is anything but: it's actually heavily implicated in gene-expression. So it, too, could stand to get a new, more effective name. Because once again it's the excluded zones of ground, that prove more and more to be the hidden source of order we perceive in figure...and all the parts of the world we've gotten used to calling “uninteresting” are revealed as a way to overlook the relationships that can furnish causes to the effects we study. Junk DNA is like the Southern Ocean, is like (my favourite, here in B.C.) the coastal bluff ecology, is like non-REM sleep, is like the pleasures of intellectual recreation, is like...

Is like...

Is like everything.

So raise your glass to the Southern Ocean, if you please: a breakthrough both for science, and for our own imagining of our place in the world. Out there in the colossal, unseen reaches of wave and wind, all the events of our personal histories are born from the tiniest and most transitory of interactions, and the truth about all these “no-places” is revealed: they're us. We're them.

Time we got together, I think.

Five Years Before My Birth - A Paradise

Y'all can all look at this!

It's a thing of beauty. Y'all.

Ohh, I was born about ten years too late to see that beautiful spinner rack...and about twenty-five years too late to comfortably use this idiom...

I'm a man in the middle.

Dag!

"The Untented Kosmos My Abode..."

Harvey did one. Tom did one.

Of course, they have very impressive track records, man...

But Meme Week continues here in the land of mine-salting and milk-watering anyway, as I throw in my two MMMM cents (uh, that's “Martian Manhunter Makeover Meme”, I guess), because I can't stop thinking about the very first thing I ever noticed about J'onn, and I think it might be important. Because, after all...

He's green.

But, say, if you think about it...

Why in hell is he green?

I mean, he could look like anything he wanted to, couldn't he?

...Actually, there's a lot of interesting things to be said about fantasy characters with green-coloured skin. As I may have pointed out before (somewhere around here), in alchemical thought green is the colour that represents the awakening of soul from inanimate matter – more specifically, it represents the coming to life of the senses, the resurrection of the senses if you will. I feel like I'm giving away a neat little paper topic here, but...think Frankenstein. Think Green Lantern, if you like. Mage, even. Think, in fact, any number of fantasy characters from movies, literature, or mythology (you see I won't give away everything) that incorporate this scheme of metaphorical coming-to-life. And then think how the magical, regenerative connotation of the colour green gets twisted up into other things, too: the suggestion of magic power, often insuperable magic power, residing in the tissues of the body pops up again and again in comics...in the Hulk...in the Composite Superman...in the Impossible Man...

In the Martian Manhunter!

They say he's Superman-Lite, but unlike Superman J'onn isn't an immigrant: he's a refugee. Not even an official one. He's a permanent foreigner, with no place – no place! – of belonging, and he has nothing to do but wander the world he finds himself in, until Time runs out. Superman-Lite? No, he's Phantom Stranger-Lite...and he doesn't seem all that interested in jettisoning that identification. Well, why else would he be green, for heaven's sake? As I said, if he wanted to he could look just like Superman...

So here's the pitch: J'onn J'onzz, Alien Hunter. His experiences with the JLA have given him a sense, not so much of belonging (although they've given him that, too) but of purpose. Of mission. And the mission is to protect, obviously, because that's just what superheroes do, isn't it? However Batman protects in one way, and Superman in another, and Green Lantern in another still, all according to the different talents and abilities they have. They do some things that J'onn can't. So it seems only fair that J'onn uses his talents and abilities (not to mention motivations) to do what they can't. The first time I saw J'onn, he was tracking rogue Martians. When I was reintroduced to him in the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League, one of his most interesting treatments came during his contest with a mind-controlling alien disease, to which he alone was immune. Then when Morrison took over JLA, we had more rogue Martians. And finally in New Frontier, where I liked him best, he was uncovering secrets and patterns of alien life that not even Batman could get to or reason out without his help. So I figure, that's what I like, why not stick with that sort of thing? Let Superman fight the giant robots, and Batman stymie the criminal plots, but let J'onn be the charter of secrets and threats that haven't got big enough to draw Green Lantern's attention yet. Let J'onn, in other words, be the mystery, that even smart people like Batman can do no better than to find out. Perhaps Earth is full of aliens, that the other Leaguers never even suspect the presence of...aliens who've learned how to hide from magic rings and X-ray vision, who silently observe the human race and their heroes from inside impenetrable disguises...but what they don't know is that there's one who observes them, too, from inside a yet more perfect disguise. They aren't the mystery, either, even if they think they are...

Hmm. I think J'onn's a natural for this kind of horror-flavoured Twilight-Zoney science fiction. Years ago, John Byrne put out a pretty legible homage to John Carpenter's version of “The Thing”, featuring Sasquatch and the Super-Skrull...imagine if you will a similar scenario, only with a disguised J'onn as one of the characters! Gee, that'd be...well, great. And the formula could easily be extended into a series...as Harvey points out, it's perfect for Vertigo. As in Sandman, sometimes J'onn could directly act as the protagonist, as the producer of green-coloured first-person narrative captions that the reader can follow, and sometimes he could just be there, like Morpheus: a shadowy saviour. I think it could work. I'm sure it could work! What is J'onn, anyway, but the most primal of alien types? The Man From Mars. Superman may be the best alien in DC, or at least the most modern, but J'onn is the most cardinal...why, he's practically prehistoric, for God's sake! He's practically straight out of the flippin' subconscious! Immortal (so Morrison tells us), supernaturally omnicompetent, plucked from the space and time of his own natural demise, and with nowhere else to go...doomed to wander an earth not his own, and yet not uninvolved...not Earth's adopted son, as Supes is, but one who's adopted Earth, instead. Hey, and do the other races of the universe even know what a Martian is? If you're not from here, it's probably quite uncommon knowledge...but then imagine being suddenly faced with one! How could you not have known about this Kryptonian-level creature, you'd have to ask yourself; how could this frankly terrifying species possibly have escaped notice? And apparently you're just in the deepest freakin' shit if you tangle with one...meanwhile the human beings all say, sure, Martians, we all know about them, they've been in our literature for decades...

I must say, I'm warming up to the idea.

Here's what we'll say: due to his circumstances, and his telepathy, J'onn almost feels sometimes as if he's in communication with the Earth itself...like the Earth is a broadcast that's always going through his head, a transmission of life-signs from the most rudimentary up to the most complex. He's been here so long that the susurrus of Earthlife has soaked into his bones: subliminally, he believes that he's the only one who really understands the Earth, precisely because he's so alien to it. And yet, remember, in a way he's not “truly” alien at all: because in the Earth's primeval youth it emerged from the same solar nebula, was battered by the same ice planetismals, was seeded by the same Martian biota that produced J'onn's species, and that makes everything on Earth J'onn's distant relation. J'onn doesn't belong here, and he'll never assimilate...but that doesn't mean he isn't connected. He's deeply connected. He just isn't part.

And he's got friends: aside from Gypsy, his most satisfying friendhip is with (surprise!) Aquaman, who is the most like him of all his League partners...really, in a way it's like looking into a mirror...and Animal Man, whose ability to tap into the morphogenetic field is almost like J'onn's “hearing” of the Earth, and whose animal powers are almost – well, kind of – like his shapechanging. J'onn and Buddy hang out more often than you think, as do J'onn and Arthur...but J'onn looks on Buddy almost as a protege, and that's the difference. Everyone likes J'onn and feels reassured by him, but it's harder than they think for him to form close relationships. For one thing, he can hear everything that's going on in their heads; for another thing, they can't hear anything that's going on in his. Everything he used to do and be and think about is no more: his hobbies and interests are lost with his home, his humour is as guarded as his true form, his entertainments are not easily shared, and people just seem more comfortable with him when he's being all Spock-like, than they do when he's warmer and fuzzier. Strange but true! And he even understands why. But it does make things difficult, sometimes...

That's my J'onn! Secret connector of the DC universe, man on the fringes, today's Jack Knight! And man who is slowly, hesitantly, trying to pick real friends and interests. While he tracks down the lurkers in the shadows and kicks their asses!

Oh, I can't write more. Need a crash sofa...

Another Studio 60 Post? Really?

Yes, really...but don't worry, it'll be short.

Okay, not that short.

So...ready?

...

...

...

...

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

How dumb is this show?

Come on! I don't care how big of a Sorkin fan you are, you've gotta admit - you've got to! - that this dialogue sucks. I do say it with glee, I admit: but it's true anyway. And it isn't my fault! It isn't me who made it this way! It was like this when I got here!

Okay, that was just the bit before the titles. I'll be fair: let's see if it improves.

...


AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Seriously. Seriously! It's bad.

Okay, one more break.

...

Oh my God, I have rarely been so bored as this. See, I won't say I've never been as bored as this. I'm not a bad man. And I read Marvel Comics, don't I? But...it's decompression, isn't it? That's what it is. What it is? Yeah, what it is. Dear Lord, when will something happen on this show. Oh! And now they've got the internal-show clock, too. Bet this basketball game goes on for about an hour, eh? Y'know, this'd be a perfect time for a S60/Sports Night crossover...

And is it just me, or does anyone else simply not give a rat's ass about the Harriet Is A Christian Lady thing anymore? I think Nate Corddry and D.L. Hughley are being assholes. I think Matt's an asshole. I think Ricky and Ron are assholes, but I can see their point, and anyway you just don't talk to people that way: that's not what a man does. What? When did being a man come into this? Huh? Wuzzat?

That may have been over two commercial breaks...

Having Peripheral-Vision Man (what? Oh, forget it...it actually sounds better than the Quentin Tarantino thing, but...who cares?) on Fox only makes S60 look better, actually. And also Danny (as much as I'm charmed by Bradley Whitford's deadpan portrayal) is dead wrong, here. I mean, so is everybody else, but he's...y'know, extra wrong...even if that damn Student Council is oppressing his creativity again...

...

"Jumbo Shrimp", Sorkin? Are you kidding me?

...

Finally, some delivery; but you'll notice it had to be specially ordered up. And you mean all the time I've been listening to this it's been about billboard ads? Not seriously, Sorkin; and my God I hate how you never know what you're talking about, and try to conceal it with high-schoolish banter...

...

No.

No.

NO!! That isn't how people talk to each other, damn you! And it isn't a way for that character to make sure Matt lets him go, that doesn't make sense! After saying all that, he should be shitting bricks that he just fucked himself, come on! And that he's taking the writers with him means it isn't what Matt thought it was, I don't even know if that's possible but he can't do that without being the bad guy, he can't say that and expect not to be shut down...!

Stupid. Bloody stupid. Bad approach. Well at least I was right about tempers flaring...

Oh, and how sweet. "Give him someone to talk to." Ooooh, it works on so many levels! I'm so out of here, I'm so out of here with Ricky and Ron...

...

No.

No!

NO! STUPID! BAD DOG! BAD WRITING!

NO!!

...

Yes.

Wait, what?

Oh my word.

Yes. I get it now, Jesus I don't believe it, so that's why we suddenly had that funereal tone come out of nowhere...

And I Simply! Do! Not! Believe it! But the billboard-backdrop thing actually makes sense and is clever! Unbelievable. This is me, not believing my eyes. That was...was it?...it was...

Good.

God help me, that was an actual payoff.

I'd forgotten what those looked like...

...

So: ladies and gentlemen, you have just witnessed a written apology hand-delivered to Sorkin fans everywhere who were just about to bust him in the nose because he deserved it. I didn't like it, in fact I think it was largely shit, but...

If he keeps his promise, I'll stop snarking. If he keeps it. I don't think he can.

You've bought yourself one more episode, Aaron. But that better be a hell of a party they all go to.

Oh Christ, now I'm talking like him...

...

He is saying: he wants you to give him one last chance. So that's what the week-long break was for! I knew it had to be for something, I was just waiting to find out what the "something" was...

I never expected him to just come right out and say it, though. "Does he need therapy?" "Nah. He's got me." Indeed. But who's paying for it? Nice to be appreciated, for once...

So I have to admire this, even if it's a bit grudgingly. It isn't Jackie Gleason, and I don't want to see you patting yourself on the back for it. But it was...well...not honest, obviously. But it was something. I don't at all expect to have my mind changed, I hate I hate I hate Aaron Sorkin! But I'll respect that you're admitting this all sucked hugely, and I'll give you a chance to show you can turn out a better grade of shitty. Don't flatter yourself, though. I'm just a soft touch, that's all.

Now don't fucking disappoint me. Raise your goddamn game.

And, this episode, Matt? It sucked. Maybe you just better watch it through one more time. Yes, I know that's what you were saying anyway. Do it, though. Watch the fucker. I watched it; now you watch it. Because this is step one on carrying through on what you just said...

...

By the way, your therapist and I consider it a positive sign that you didn't tell me how the basketball game turned out. That showed some of the restraint, that we know you're capable of. And: I think you owe 30 Rock a "thankyou" for giving you that well-timed kick in the ass. And: please do not think that you're out of the woods yet. You can't fool me. This is all going to be evidence-based. You can't rely on those clever, clever words of yours; you're going to have to actually deliver. Otherwise I'm coming to your house and taking back this hour of my life from you.

As one writer to another...

So...

Don't. Fuck. It. Up.

Kirby Meme Tagging

Can you believe I clean forgot to tag anybody but RAB for this? Guess I was too focussed on rubbing his nose in my pick...

How about Johnny B, Chris, joncormier, and Harvey?

They may all be busy. We'll see.

Sean's Kirby Meme: Soft Pumpkin

Go here...

And then come back so I can tell you my pick is just like the flip side of Sean's...because I choose the ever-lovin' blue-eyed idol o' millions, Benjamin J. Grimm, the one-and-only Thing. Who is not streamlined; not elegant; not free of imperfection. Far from it. All the knobbly and uncomfortable bits that (as Sean notes) have been pruned off the Silver Surfer, have been piled onto the Thing many times over, from my favourite early monsterish picture of him in FF #2 (I think - and here's where a scanner or even a memory would come in handy) transforming for the first time back to Ben Grimm, before getting stuck as the Thing again (Sean, maybe you'd be so kind as to scan that supremely-lumpy image in on your blog, for those who may not know that the Thing really did look like human porridge once upon a time, and truly had something to regret!), to the incredibly stylized, deeply-shadowed and visually crisp latter-day Thing of "This Man, This Monster!" or "By Ben Betrayed!", more a walking pile of orange hexagons than orange rocks: the perversely disordered element of human complexity united with the sagely crystalline expression of an ineliminable self, that no person or process can remove. In terms of character design, there is nothing like the real Thing, as Jack grew into drawing him; nothing to capture the sympathy of a reader so strongly, through its very ambiguity, as this chaotically patterned man of regular bright orange pieces - or rather, "soft pumpkin" pieces, as The Daily Show informs us - coexisting with equally regular spaces of absolute blackness in a single, tortured, appealing form. Ultimately, it's all about contrast: Ben's figure is loaded with a clear-cut drama that's unequalled by any other pen-and-ink creation...all he has to do is stand there and we see ourselves in him, see the local expression of all the cosmic conflicts that comprise a human soul. Kids can see it, too: he's so extremely stylized, and yet so immediately human, that he's almost a funny-animal character like Donald Duck or Bugs Bunny. Almost. Except there's a real sense of pathos (as Stan said) to him, too, and kids are not immune to that either.

In fact, they find it limitlessly attractive.

Feet of clay?

Ben is clay!

Hah! And once again, I beat RAB to the punch. Great meme, Sean! Please feel free to repost this response of mine on your site if that seems like a good idea to you: a visual meme like this deserves pictures as proof of its assertions, and unfortunately I can't supply those with my set-up.

Can I contribute again, later on? Because I have a couple of other ideas...

Hey, RAB! You're it!

Crisis Versus Opportunity

You know, I never saw a Marvel crossover I liked.

Never.

I'm not talking about “The Avengers Take Over”, here, you understand. I'm talking about Atlantis Attacks!, Inferno, Fall Of The Mutants, The Evolutionary War, Acts Of Vengeance, and everything back to the appearance of the Beyonder (gak). Marvel characters can and do meet, without it being horrible...in fact they do it all the time...

But company-wide crossovers, they just don't work. Big Marvel Summer Events are always useless and boring, unwanted interruptions, wastes of time.

And why?

I'll tell you why. Because they're redundant. Why can't Marvel do crossovers? Because the whole point of Marvel is that it's already crossed-over! The tight-centred crossover plan of a Big Event, that justifies the still-novel mixing of DC's innumerable little title-worlds, actually detracts from novelty when applied to Marvel, whose universal structure is set up to make small, parenthetical details the building-blocks of continuity, revealing the edges of the same Grand Design in each book...but only its edges. Arguably, no title is as central to Marvel as Superman, Batman, and the JLA are central to DC (although perhaps the Avengers comes closest); by and large the Marvel heroes have “misfit” written all over their souls in big block letters, and to make them less than misfits is usually to make them less than interesting. They should only be able to get glimpses of the Pattern they belong to! Because although they're made to be part of a single, coherent universe, they're also made to be partly excluded from it, too, existing first on the fringes, and then on the fringes of the fringes – as I and others have pointed out elsewhere, the Marvel universe relies on being reinvigorated by stories operating on its outermost edge so much more than DC does, that when feeling ceases at the fingertips it ends up robbing the heart to compensate. On closer examination of this, one sees that consolidation in a simple sense was never what Marvel was about; its infinite logical expansion was always more interesting than its ultimate logical collapse, and the charms of its continuity lay mostly in the way they were pitched outward, navigable only in the hypertext-style one-step-at-a-time linking of issue to issue and book to book, that never could reveal anything like a whole pattern even as it walked ceaselessly around and about it. The pattern was mostly implicit, and deliberately made to be that way; existing primarily as rumour, as a hint of order, it aroused a thirst for more, instead of slaking it...as it also made drinking one's fill an impossibility, because every book that explored (or even revisited) Marvel territory, also changed it as it marked it out. The web of interconnections never drew tighter, only got bigger.

That is, until recently it did. In my “review” of Annihilation: Prologue, I mentioned the annoying sense of smallness and triviality that communicated itself to me as soon as the galactic expanse of the MU began to be summarized in a single chart, instead of remaining as an aggregation of rumoured spaces explored quite independently by different titles, and registered by the whole primarily as implication. By contrast, DC, with its infinite variety of casually-bizarre extra-natural environments, doesn't have this problem of smallness to contend with. Its universe is so multifariously big that its parts can never be fully or permanently interpenetrated, even letting alone the intrinsic separateness shown off in the worlds of its heroes, that requires the forging of very explicit connections if it's to be overcome believably. Crisis, not opportunity, is the watchword of the team-up here, because Aquaman and Flash and Wonder Woman really don't need each other's guest-star support to bring texture to their stories, and (again arguably) such guest-starring roles even detract from the texture they already do have, that they create for themselves: in DC's fractured mosaic of superheroic fictionopolises, every hero is a centre already, and thus the frontiers of any one hero's as-yet-untold stories has little to do with the borders between books. But in Marvel, the story frontier is on those borders! Thus, to see Green Lantern appear in Flash, to read World's Finest or The Brave And The Bold, is to encounter a tension quite apart from that which is on display in MTU, MTIO, or the million-and-one “spin-off” episodes of Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four (though perhaps not The Defenders) – it isn't so much a matter of dissolving barriers to create a larger shared space, as it is a matter of meeting in a neutral location, or going on an embassy to someone else's country. Marvel Team-Up is a Spider-Man book, and it plays by Spider-Man's rules, but the purpose is always to reveal just one more connection of Spider-Man to World; BATB, on the other hand, has a mood that's significantly more up for grabs than that, because its team-ups aren't for exploring different perspectives on a common terrain, but different terrains. As in the classic Flash/Green Lantern team-ups, the question is not so much about how these perspectives are to be rationalized, but about how they're to be used cooperatively – and sometimes it's even just a plain old comics version of Iron Chef, and mostly about whose cuisine reigns supreme. This is character comparison, not universe-map comparison, so ultimately it's about powers and costumes and colours...and that doesn't make it superior (that's a matter of taste), but it does make it freer to parse differences inventively: at DC, the characters themselves embody different methods of schematizing circumstance, but Marvel's decoding strategy exists outwith (always wanted to say that!) its characters, by being vested primarily in their common location. New York City, even the New York City of Marvel Comics, is not Gotham or Metropolis, or even Opal: it isn't attached to character. Character is attached to it, and then on to the universe at large that serves as its suburb.

Understandably, then, Marvel's continuity would normally turn on matters of opportunity rather than of crisis, and so it quickly loses its appeal whenever that opportunity is gotten rid of. The extravagant redundancy of Jim Shooter's Secret Wars is probably the most obvious example of this: what point is there in taking all the Marvel heroes away to somewhere else just so they can interact, when they're already interacting in the place you took them from? No point, obviously; unless what's desired is to change the style of the interaction from opportunistic to critical.

And that's ambitious stuff! But unfortunately, crisis-based interactions hang poorly on the Marvel characters, and so Secret Wars disappoints. Inevitably. Lavishly. Boy, does it disappoint! It's practically claustrophobic, it's so walled in with disappointment. And what is explained or illuminated about the shared universe, by making every hero a party to the vast, overmastering action of Crisis? Nothing; the titillation of the parenthetical, opportunistic continuity is simply cashed, here, to secure a temporary “must-buy” status for every title in the line, and after that the bank account has to be laboriously built up again, penny by penny. Meanwhile, the DC characters easily survive having gone through crisis events, whether or not they're stupid events – well, if you think about it, every mission of the supergroup JLA is a crisis event! Marvel has nothing to compare with that, for all that the Avengers band together to fight the threats no single hero can blah blah blah. That the Avengers are less than a supergroup is obvious even in just picking up the long-awaited JLA/Avengers book by Busiek and Perez: there's Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman, and a couple second-stringers...and there's Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch, Wonder Man, the Vision, Yellowjacket, the Wasp, Quicksilver, and a rotating cast of extras, only augmented by just three bigger names. Don't get me wrong, I love the Avengers. But a supergroup they ain't. Because Marvel doesn't have these. Because Marvel just isn't about big names meeting over Crises! Even among the undeniably crisis-oriented Big Four Defenders (who can't carry a series, by the way), there is only one bona fide big name, and the non-Big Four Defenders (who have indeed carried a series, thank you very much) didn't meet over crises so much as they met over tea and cookies in Doctor Strange's parlour.

So you see, it isn't about the all-stars.

It just isn't!

So what DC can do in this way, Marvel can't, but Marvel seems to have (unfortunately) forgotten that. I've said before (though I can't remember where) that the point of any comics Event is not relevance but reset, and that for all practical purposes these Events exist outside continuity, even as they claim to be more about continuity than the regular non-Event storylines. And, it must be so: the coy looks that Events toss at the truncation of seriality are there for no other reason than to be coy, but if they were truly in continuity they'd just be silly.

And since almost all of what's going on at Marvel now is silly, in just this way...

Well, it must not be in continuity, then.

You know, except for Deadgirl.

So pencil me in for after the crisis, Marvel! Maybe I'll still be around...

I Never Do This...

But, oh well. Just this once.

Like everyone else, I've seen a lot of weird visitors come in from Google searches. Some are interesting; some are stupid. But never have I seen a question thrown up to the Oracle as plaintive as this one is. Whoever you are, Traveller, I hope you find your peace one day...

"What can be done to get rid of trout?"

Brother, sometimes you just gotta pack up and move. Know what I mean?

Pop Art, Found Time, And The Beatles

They had a Beatles documentary on TV tonight, one I'd never seen. I gobble those things up, let me tell you: the Beatles' life as a band may only have been about ten years long, but it was a lot more than ten years deep, at least to me. Yes, there is no end to the time I can spend diving into it, and there seems to be no end to what I can find down there. The Beatles Story is like my Torah, my Talmud, my Sutras: inexhaustibly productive of meaning. In at least some ways it is central to my world-view. At least, it always tends to recall to me the basics of what my world-view is.

Isn't that odd?

But maybe it's more natural than it seems. Being born in 1966, my knowledge of the Beatles was at first a kind of inherited knowledge, because I was surrounded by it before I understood it, and therefore the sense of time that attached to the Beatles in my head wasn't historical so much as it was mythic. In a way the time of the Rooftop Concert was like the time of Zeus overthrowing Cronos (or Odin fighting the Fenris-wolf? More apt, in this case), a fact that created historical contingency rather than partaking of it; because semi-legendary facts like these were like seeds that patterned the time around them, ordinal yardsticks that told you where 1962 was in relation to 1969 without having to actually consult those numbers to prove it. That made 1962 be thus-and-such to 1969, by making time be timelike. Following this (perhaps because of it?), the time before the Beatles became (naturally) like the time before the world; a time of ultimate nascence, and ultimate possibility, and secret origins, and participation mystique – a sepia-toned time of plenum, pleroma, and prehistory. And that time still draws me, almost magically, as it's become a figure for my own secret and sepia-toned prehistory: the really real Penrose-tile time of streets and schools and cars and boats, adults and grownups and teachers and parents. Places and things. Impressions of colour. Lawns. Blocks. Somebody else's schedule. The punctuated whirlwind of a child's first experiences and memories, when everything's huge, and a little strange, and yet familiar for all that, because there's nothing else to compare it to.

Well, it's part of why I didn't like “Backbeat”, I guess...somebody forgot to write all that stuff in...

In opposition to this, the Super-8 time of Beatle holidays and concert tours (to say nothing of the records) shrank things down to a more manageable size, and thus became the time of history for me, the watershed moment of the universe's original pattern-breaking, when all the forces, though still bound together, were beginning to become distinguishable one from the other. Primal symmetries, catchy harmonies: light, matter, gravity, decay...the smart one, the cute one, the quiet one, the other one. And my memory, my reaching out and grabbing facts and sorting them into a pile where they became events. So the Beatles Story wasn't real time, but in a way it was a commentary on real time – it was an analogue of my own world-making power of assembling the things that lay all around me into some kind of mental order.

And therefore, should it be surprising that consulting Beatles documentaries is for me like consulting my own original prospectus for creating a continuity of person? Not that there weren't many things in my life that helped me consciously accrete a sense of self besides John, Paul, George and Ringo: I had comics, too, you know. Well, same difference! Because they were also a world of not-quite-real events that told time how to drape itself around them, and showed its elasticity. And they too could be plunged into again and again, in an order that could occasionally – sometimes! – defy the strictness of seriality, and open up a found space and time that was supplementary to the real stuff. Like that Beatles show tonight! It's all real history, but at the same time it isn't: like Chinese calligraphy, it's both real and unreal, representational and non-representational, simultaneously. I eavesdrop and spy on 1965, but also “1965” is only a word for the location of the famous import of Shea Stadium, an incantation that summons a still-potent, ever-youthful perception of immediacy into the mind, and as I slip once again into the bottomless bath of Beatles mystique I feel myself rejoining the story already in progress, rejoining the skyscrapers of laminate that convert into vast and endlessly-revisitable volume that tick of a moment when the Beatles were at the hotel, at the beach, at the pool, in the car, on the plane. Flying over oceans, and into different worlds, again and again, over and over: constantly arriving, in thousands of feet of film, yards of news copy, transcripts of interviews, piles of books, tapes of bootlegs. You could almost live through the Beatles experience yourself in real time, at this point! Wow. As far as creating an immersive fantasy world goes, that's the top: you can almost know George Martin and Brian Epstein, almost visit the Cavern Club, almost see John and Paul trying to convince Mia Farrow's sister to come run around in the sunshine with them. Almost take that cap off of John's head, and put it on your own. You could spend a year on a minute, if you wanted to, probably. A century on a second. You could almost be there.

Well; but not so mysterious really, is it? Everybody gloms onto something as they're growing up, and it doesn't necessarily mean as much as I seem to make it, here. Sure, because I'm only talking about it, and talking is already a step behind experiencing: in the Zen of Beatles appreciation, this little essay is an overblown mistake, and wouldn't be worth the paper it's written on, if it were written on paper. But that's okay. Because this isn't an essay on the Beatles. It's an essay on comics, and the Beatles and I will both survive if I've used us roughly to write it.

Look, I think they're showing it again!

I'm gonna go watch...

"How Vain, Without The Merit, Is The Name!"

What an actor.

You know it's a sickening, soppy thing, this million-dollar fifteen-minute-fame disease that's sweeping the Western world - almost as sickening as its fraternal twin, the confessional celebrity interview, which in all this world is the media experience most like a very public gynecological exam. And the syndrome in general isn't all that fascinating, either: as much as I've wanted to wax all trenchant-like about the displacement of psychotherapeutic goals into TV appearances in America for a long time now, I've always held back from it because I sensed it was kind of stoopid to do so. Because, what's the opposite of gilding the lily?

Whatever it is, it would be like that.

But that was before "Show Me The Money", with William Shatner. For the luvva Mike, how compelling is Shatner in this?! The way he plays it, it's almost - almost! - profound: effortlessly inhabiting the by-now-mandatory catchphrases, the old Hamosaurus makes it (much more than any of his predecessors) about the contestant, and the contestant's epic grapple with Fate and Will. Regis Philbin, Howie Mandel, even Jerry Springer or Ricki Lake could tell you, that it's no easy task to bring a sense of gravitas to the exhibitionist parade of childhood memories and bi-curious homewrecking and trivia knowledge that these shows trade on. But Shatner...Shatner makes it all look easy. Fun. Almost, meaningful. Almost, dare I say it, validating. "Show Me The Money" may be no more or no less a cultural car-crash than any of these other shows, and at least as superficial and cringeworthy, but because of William Shatner you can at least appreciate the trauma of it all a bit better: shockingly, there is drama here, at least of a sort, and between the energetic performance of the host, the moderation of the sense of Colossal Importance (Shatner wisely lets the money speak for itself, most of the time), and the winsomely self-conscious accentuation of tawdriness that helps to lighten the mood - I refer here to the "dancers" who reveal the dollar amounts - what great girls they probably are! - the whole thing is a testament to the fact that crap, too, can be done right.

I eagerly await the English version of this show, starring your host, Sir Ian McKellan. I would watch a show like that every single night. Not since Kate Beckinsale abandoned playing the third sister in Pride And Prejudice in favour of PVC catsuits and ass-kicking have we seen such an informed sense of noblesse oblige on the part of our great actors. And it's long overdue, I say!

Bravo, Bill!

...And you know, the weird thing is, I'm not even being sarcastic.

William Messner-Loebs

Over at Monitor Duty, somebody's been kind enough to post eight minutes of interview with William Messner-Loebs, who's the person I most want to see write Fantastic Four...you know, since I'm talking about Fantastic Four lately...

But, who cares about what I'm talking about? Hop on over, and listen to a great writer chat personably about his most famous work. Me, I'm going to dig out that Epicurus The Sage I've got lying around here someplace...

William Messner-Loebs!

I love that guy!

"Lucky Pierre Style"

Well, I've just read something I've been putting off since April because I couldn't find the right sort of time...and, wow, what an interesting read.

The writer is of course Internet-famous, and so I'm sure everybody who'd like it has already seen it...but just in case...

Go here (edit: thanks for this permalink, David), and scroll down 'til you get to this title:

Clobberin’ Time:

Escapism, Engagement, and the Dialectic of Excitement in Marvel Comics, 1961-1966

It's kinda really worth it.

This Fan! This Fic! This Film!

And now we're done. If you've read the first part, and the second part, then here's your third part. Notional FF movie #2, with special treat at the end.

Can you stand it?

Personally, I'm glad it's over...

Okay, here we go.

...

...

...

...

SECOND MOVIE:

ACT ONE: A comet hurtles toward Earth.

A young girl, very attractive, sneaks out of her room in the middle of the night. She steals up to a fireplace, in front of which (though we can't quite see it) reclines a large – very large! – dog. “Come on, boy,” she whispers. “Come on, Lockjaw...”

The comet hurtles toward Earth some more.

An explorer on a South Sea island is excited to finally stumble upon what the natives have been telling him about as long as he's been there: an underground tomb of some sort, where all their tribal secrets are buried. He can't believe his eyes.

And still the comet hurtles toward Earth.

And now we see Johnny Storm, on a cool Manhattan evening, sitting with his girlfriend Dorrie Evans on a park bench. She's talking about her college application, and trying to get some information out of him about his own. He doesn't really want to answer, and things are getting strained. We sense that this conversation has been being avoided for quite a while. Finally she just asks him: “You're not really planning on going to college anymore, are you?”

And Johnny is as surprised as anyone to hear himself say that he isn't. But, he isn't. Not now that he's the Human Torch. And that's weird! He always intended to go! But now he isn't going to. Dorrie is pretty cool here, she's asking him “Is that it?”, is that all you're going to be now, you're not going to grow old normally, go to school, meet a girl, settle down, have a career, make your mark, be a real boy? He says, meet a girl? I thought I met you. Dorrie says maybe you did, but that was back when you were in the world. Johnny tells her that being the Human Torch is a full-time job, and he can't just leave it...besides, he says, hanging around with Reed is just like going to school anyway...but aha, he knows he's lying when he says that. It isn't the same at all. Dorrie says she can't fit into the FF's world, she doesn't even know what it is, it's all weird and alien to her. Johnny says, like it's so normal to me? Aliens from outer space...Mole Men... But Dorrie counters with the thought that all that doesn't make a difference, because Johnny isn't just in that world, he is that world now. He's science fiction now, and it's the real world that must seem filled with aliens to him, and how could they ever bridge that gap? It's like marrying into some bizarre Royal Family of Weird, the FF are like a different country in the middle of Manhattan: they're not from here, and their world works by different rules. Johnny protests: but I am from here! I'm from here! Dorrie says sadly, not any more.

And she dumps him!

Crystal (the attractive girl from the prologue, natch) has been watching this. She's been spying on Johnny for quite a while, actually! Because being a member of the Inhuman Royal Family, she hears things. Things about the outside world, and the Fantastic Four. But, we're getting to that. First, as Dorrie is walking away from Johnny, she uses her elemental powers to make a little rainstorm over Dorrie's head, and giggles to have done it. Dorrie wheels around and blames Johnny for it. Johnny says, what? How could I have done that? I burst into flames, I don't...don't control the elements, or anything! But Dorrie takes off anyway, pretty angry. Crystal giggles again, giving herself away. Johnny chases her. She escapes with Lockjaw.

Okay?

Back at the Baxter Building, Reed is in his lab, and Ben is nowhere to be seen, and Sue and Alicia are sitting around having a coffee, just chatting, waiting for the boys to be ready. What's going on today? Reed is going to try and cure Ben. The talk turns to the FF's powers; Alicia wonders aloud about their symmetry, wonders what might have happened if, say, she had gone into the saucer too. What would her part in the symmetry have been? What power fits with her? “Fits?” Sue asks. Yes, fits: somehow the FF all got powers that seem to fit their personalities, that almost are their personalities, only writ really large, and flashy, and dramatic. The powers almost make them more like themselves, in a way. Uh-huh. Sue nods over her cup: obviously Ben hasn't told Alicia everything yet. Maybe (Alicia goes on) maybe her power would be different because of her blindness. Wouldn't it be interesting if it was? Sue has the power to make things invisible; maybe Alicia's would be to make things visible. That would fit, wouldn't it? And wouldn't that be even a neater power, in a way? More potentially interesting? With a wave of a hand, to make people see what they're ordinarily blind to...

Sue is smiling at this. “Says the prizewinning sculptor,” she observes. “Oh!” Alicia says, and laughs. “That's funny, isn't it? I guess I do just sort of...wave my hands...whereas you...”

“Me?”

“You. You see through things, right? You make all the little connections other people miss. Even Reed.”

“...Huh.”

Alicia laughs again. “Oh my God, I'm right, aren't I? Sue? I'm right, yeah!” Sips her coffee. “Just looove being right. But you have to admit...”

“It's a bit weird.”

“It really is, you know?”

“So...we're both about the seeing.”

“Looks that way.”

“A less charitable person would have accused me of hiding things, rather than seeing through them.”

“Yes, but I know you better than that, Sue. You're no good at keeping secrets.”

“I'm not?”

“Nope.” Alicia smiles, gets up. “Now c'mon, let's go find the boys.”

Back in the Great Refuge, Crystal returns, and is swiftly found out by Medusa, who gives her a huge dressing-down: Crystal's been sneaking out into the world, and that just isn't allowed. “But you've gone out into the world!” Crystal protests. Medusa waves that off; she goes out into the world as part of her royal duties, which isn't the same. And she doesn't get noticed by members of the Fantastic Four! Well, Crystal wants to know, what's the problem with that? Medusa tells her not to be such a child, can't she put two and two together? And then Gorgon and Karnak show up at the door, with stern faces. Crystal senses something really bad is about to happen, and her suspicion is confirmed when Gorgon and Karnak tell her that this isn't a simple matter of one sister disobeying another...this is a matter for Black Bolt, now. Oh! Crystal gasps, and they all leave to go to the main palace.

Strolling through Attilan (wow! Is it amazing, or what!), the Inhumans strategize. The Fantastic Four have been connected with aliens in the past, and you know what that suggests...to the Inhumans, “alien” means only one thing: the dreaded Kree creators, come back again to enslave them. They arrive at the palace, and see Black Bolt...the silent King...and while the grown-ups talk, Crystal keeps butting in, until at a nod from Black Bolt she is removed by Medusa. “I know you don't like it, Crystal, but this is serious, and we can't waste time on wishing things were otherwise. We Inhumans have to protect themselves. No one else will do it for us.” She leaves Crystal loitering outside the door.

Crystal: “But he seemed so...nice.”

Meanwhile, on that mysterious South Sea island, the archaeologist and one of his major backers are proceeding with the excavation of the cave...but what's all this high-tech equipment they've found beyond the antechamber? What does it all mean? Banks and banks of electronic gizmos (let's have it be just slightly reminiscent of the equipment in Forbidden Planet), fronting a massive metallic door, that they can't seem to penetrate, no matter what they do. The backer is astonished, eager, eyes agleam...no matter what this all is, there's something in it, and no he doesn't think there's any point reporting it to the local or the U.S. government, why they can barely say what it is they've found, yet, and anyway they have permission to be there...

Back to the Baxter Building, where Reed and Ben are getting ready to try the cure. Sue and Alicia enter the big test chamber Reed's set up, with Johnny coming in just a second or two later. He's in a bad mood; Sue gives him a double-take, but he shrugs. He doesn't want to talk about it. Meanwhile Ben, strapped atop a huge Kirbytech machine, greets Alicia: “Hi, babe.” "Hi, Ben." He's nervous. Reed is explaining:

“...It's really quite simple, Alicia. Ben's altered physiology may be bizarre, but in the strictest sense it isn't arbitrary; when we passed through the universal compression wave, we simply had impressed on us a record of physiological changes and processes belonging to some other universe. So there is in fact a reason, a rationale, for Ben's condition, in...well, in medical terms, if you like.”

“And this machine?”

“What, this? It's just an oversized scanner of my own invention. It turns out that to find the biological pattern that creates Ben's adaptation, I need data that goes right down to the subatomic level...”

“So you don't have to...turn it on, or anything?” (It really is quite an intimidating piece of equipment.)

Reed, blankly: “It's on right now.” He brightens: “And the good news is, it's working! With the data it's given me, I've been able to craft a specific chemical counteragent that ought to return Ben to his baseline form. Ready, Ben?” Reed prepares to load a vial of some mysterious fluid into some piping that goes up the wall and into Ben's arm.

Ben: “Uh...yeah. Thumbs up, Stretcho.”

Sue: “Stretcho?”

Ben: “Thought the boy genius here needed a nickname.” (Ben jokes when he's under pressure.)

Sue: “Uh-huh.”

Reed loads the vial, and they wait: nothing happens.

Sue: (whispers) “Reed...nothing's happening.”

Reed: “Shh!” He bends to a panel of instruments. “It's not working, Ben!”

Ben: “Ya think?”

Reed: “We'd better try bombardment, too!” He passes Sue and Alicia some goggles, puts his own on. Staring into a microscopy-type thing, he fiddles with some dials. An eerie glow springs up around Ben, who seems uncomfortable.

Ben: “Uh...hey, Stretch...”

Reed: “The agent's slightly programmable if you use the right frequencies, Ben! I'm getting some unexpected resistance here, but...(stretches arms everywhere, fiddling with components)...I'm sure I can overcome it! (a low hum is rising in the room, getting louder and louder) ...Wait!”

Ben: “Fer what? Whaddaya mean, wait?!”

Reed looks up from the microscope, tears away his goggles. A moment's pause, as possibilities run through his mind. Then: “Everybody out!”

Ben: (as they're evacuating the room) “Everybody out? Hey, I can't get out, in case ya didn't notice! Hey! What about...” Heavy steel doors close on him, as the humming rises to a screech. There's a massive CRUMP! from behind the door, and things shake. Then there's silence, and shocked faces.

Sue: “Reed!”

Reed: “Don't worry! Ben's fine! There's nothing in there that can hurt him! We just have to check and see...”

WHAM! Ben boots the heavy door right across the room, and stomps out of the test chamber. And is he pissed! “What the hell was that?!” he bellows, charging at Reed. “What the hell did you do, leaving me in there!”

Reed, dodging: “Look, Ben, I knew you could take an explosion...”

Ben: “Knew I could take it?! What the hell's the matter with you?! And why'd you bring Alicia in there if you thought something might blow up? Why the hell didn't you tell me that something might blow up? Blow up? Do you think I look cured, big shot? What is this, fun and games to you?”

Dedicated FF readers once again know how this scene ends: Ben storms off to get some air, Alicia follows him after a moment, Johnny escapes by flying off away from the harshness, and Sue tries to comfort Reed, who feels bad. So...

I'll just let you imagine that.

As the comet hurtles toward the Earth.

ACT TWO: In Hawaii, an astronomer notices the comet, is very intrigued by it. In Puerto Rico and California and Russia, other astronomers notice it. (That may not work; I don't think all those places are in darkness at the same time. Whoops! Just fill in correct placenames, please!) And on the roof of the Baxter Building, the sun is going down now, some hours later. Alicia and Ben are silhouetted against it. Sue's put a jacket on, is leaning against the wall of the stairwell/ramp looking on. Johnny touches down beside her.

Johnny: “He's still upset?”

Sue: “Uh-huh. Wouldn't you be?”

Johnny: “I would.”

Sue: (looks sharply at Johnny) "So...where did you take off to? And what happened?"

Johnny: “What d'you mean, what happened?”

Sue: “I mean what happened, little brother...”

So he tells her the whole story, and she's very sympathetic. "Oh! Johnny." Just then Ben nods, gets up, walks back toward the stairs. Alicia has calmed him down, and gotten him to go apologize to Reed. He passes Sue and Johnny, goes inside. Somewhat sheepishly, he enters Reed's lab (not the test chamber, but Reed's real lab, or one of 'em anyway), and they patch it up. Reed is looking through a telescope. Ben asks him about it. Reed explains about this comet that's just been found, very unusual spectral lines coming off it. Oh, and also something really quite strange: he just got a call from the government, telling him about this strange uptick in the efficiency of nuclear reactors, and they want him to look at it. “Izzat bad, or something?” Well, yes...potentially it's very bad, anytime anything is going on in a nuclear power plant that the operators don't understand, it's a cause for concern...and theoretically, what could happen if all nuclear reactions got “more efficient”, without anybody being prepared for that? “So why ain'tcha looking at it, then?” This is a little friendly tweaking on Ben's part: having become Mr. Fantastic, Reed enjoys doing ten things at once, is visibly thrilled by that ability. There's a counter on the other side of the room, measuring the output from a lot of recording devices he's gotten access to at various reactors, etc., blah blah blah...and he is looking at it, he's thinking about it all the time, he knows it's very serious, but where is it written he can't look through telescopes while he tries to come up with a...

Oops. Something weird. That comet's just changed course. It's accelerating. It's going to hit Earth in minutes! Over by Ben, the counter starts going nuts. The comet's through the atmosphere. There's a glow outside. The ground is shaking as the thing comes down in Times Square – it hits!

Seismometers go off, all over the world.

On the South Sea island, the archaeologist is in the vault, when suddenly all the machinery comes suddenly, frighteningly to life. Forbidden Planet homage here! And then he hears a noise behind him...he slowly turns around, to where that mysterious door is opening up...and MY GOD, IT CAN'T BE! NO...NO, IT'S IMPOSSIBLE...!

Back to NYC: the city's still standing! Reed whips out some technobabble to explain this, and lets us know that there's only one thing it could be...

Some kind of alien landing technology, dispersing the force of impact. And in midtown Manhattan, we see the Super-Skrull emerge from his ship. He's come to put the smackdown on the FF, and claim the planet, and he's been carefully prepared to be immune to the shapechanger-blocker effect, by having the FF's powers (the template for which was extracted from the tissues of the returning Skrull expeditionary force) permanently grafted onto him with that same technology.

The FF fight him, as per the comic. But with one little twist: remembering her conversation with Alicia, as Reed is talking about how it's impossible for the Super-Skrull to be doing what he's doing, she's inspired to make what's invisible visible, instead of the other way around. It hurts her head, but she does it: Reed sees the Skrull power beam shimmer into existence, and instantly realizes how to beat the Super-Skrull. Although he doesn't reveal what the appearance of the beam means until later.

Okay, again?

Fine. So they beat him, but then they have to get him the hell away from the planet, because (obviously) it's the power beam that's tracking him that's causing the increase in worldwide fissionability. Reed pilots the ship up to orbit, and the rest of the FF meet him there in the Pocket Rocket, and they pack the Skrull off, and then glide down to Earth again. Reed and Sue are getting all gushy, Ben is complaining about how he always has to do the driving...

And then suddenly the sun rises over the limb of the Earth, and it's beautiful. They all go silent; it's a moment of peace, and contentment, as though they're realizing how lucky they are to be living their lives...

ACT THREE: And then the moment is interrupted, as an instrument starts to bleep at Reed. “That's odd...” The instruments are detecting a strange energy building up just beneath them, in the South Seas. They've got to change course, and investigate.

Meanwhile they are themselves being tracked, by the Inhumans. Alien energies...mysterious island-destinations of space-flights...something's going on. Black Bolt seems troubled, and his weird little electrode is crackling a lot...they have to find out about this, but they must use stealth...they (the Royal Family, that is) depart the Great Refuge in a fancy Kirbyesque airship. (Just a little note on the recurring use of “Kirbyesque”, here...that's just what alien technology looks like, all right? And the only Earthbound examples of Kirbytech are Reed's inventions. Just wanted to make that clear as a design point...)

Again, things go down much as in the comic, because this little South Seas island is of course the island of the Sentry (the real Sentry), and once the FF show up there they have a big slugfest with it. Yes, the Skrulls didn't get here first after all! And when the Sentry detected the energies of the Super-Skrull's power beam, it woke itself up. Now it proceeds to beat the pants off the FF, since its technology is so much more impressive than the Skrull technology...Reed theorizes that since the Skrulls are used to relying on their shapeshifting power, they downplay technology...something like the Super-Skrull would probably be a very special project, whereas the Kree might have had to concentrate on developing a much more aggressive and far-reaching technological base, just to compete with the...SHUT UP, REED! the other FF members yell at him. Can't you see we're getting our asses kicked? Oh. Sorry. At some point (just as in the comic) Ben gets knocked into the ocean. But before he can swim back to help his teammates, he finds himself wrestling a mysterious underwater beastie, which of course is Triton. Triton drags Ben back into the Inhumans' ship for interrogation (it's underwater too, by the way). Ben convinces them that the FF aren't the alien threat, the thing outside is the alien threat! The only alien thing about the FF is that they messed around with some flying saucer they found, and the saucer changed them: but that wasn't their fault! And that doesn't automatically make them part of the aliens' agenda themselves, heck they spend half their time fighting the aliens! Black Bolt, as you might imagine, finds this line of argument rather compelling, and so he agrees to go rescue the FF, who without Ben are doing pretty badly. The Inhumans land on the beach, and they all go to it, along with the FF, until the size and ferocity of this battle starts destabilizing the island itself. Johnny and Crystal take it upon themselves to protect the local inhabitants (and the archaeologist) from all this (and they also get to share a few moments, natch) while it becomes slowly apparent that the Sentry is going to be beaten...that is, it's apparent just until (again, just as in the comic) he decides to use his impressive technology to whip up a huge tsunami to wipe them all out, and the whole place in general...but then Johnny saves the day, again just as in the comic. And maybe Crystal even helps. Sue can't do it, a tidal wave's just too big, see? Maybe she can pass out trying, before Johnny steps in...look, if you haven't read the comic, you'll just have to trust me: this will work...

But now we go outside the comic, again: to finally beat the Sentry once and for all, Ben and Reed pin him while Black Bolt delivers his famous, if silly-sounding, Master Blow. And that's it for the Sentry! Which is a good thing, because Black Bolt's practically unconscious after all that...

Except...

Karnak senses a strange persistent humming inside the Sentry's inert body. Artfully splitting it open, he and Reed find themselves looking at a countdown...Reed swiftly realizes that it only makes sense: if a remote Sentry is defeated, it'll want to send off an emergency signal to the Skrull homeworld, saying that something's up on this planet...but judging from the amount of energy it took to deliver the Super-Skrull's powers from the throneworld to Earth, the energy needed to punch a beacon through would be enormous: it'd probably shatter this whole atoll! It'd be like another Krakatoa! (eh? eh?) He and Karnak (conveniently informed by the archaeologist) rush into the underground tomb to try and find some way to stop the broadcast. Karnak reveals a little about the Inhumans to Reed down there: not much, just that they're hidden, they were Kree experiments, etc. But it's been a long time since they left, and Karnak's had only very limited access to Kree equipment. He can't figure it all out in time. And neither can Reed! Uh-oh...

Up on the surface of the island, Johnny has tried to zap the transmitter dish that has risen out of the ground, but it's got an energy-reflective force field around it, and it's taken him out of commission. Crystal rushes to his aid. Then Ben puts on his “you want a job done right...” attitude and marches in, past a tremendous amount of resistance, special effects etc...finally he smashes the dish, tumbles down the mountain or whatever, the energy doesn't have anyplace to go and so it shorts everything out, and there's a big explosion which Sue (revived just in time!) contains. And then they look around at an unconscious or barely-conscious Ben, and find he's turned back to normal! Something in the Kree transmission energy, that hyperspace stuff again, maybe. Then he swiftly turns back to the Thing, possibly without ever even knowing it's happened, and they don't tell him. But Reed starts thinking, and he has some hope that maybe there's another way to go about curing Ben, besides the physiological. And finally, since the FF's ship was destroyed by the Sentry, the Inhumans give them a lift home, levitating Reed, Sue, and Ben down to the roof of the Baxter Building. Johnny doesn't want to go, is getting romantic with Crystal, hears how she can't be with him 'cause he's an outsider, heartbreaking moment (for him anyway – I'm not that bothered), and then he flies down to the Baxter Building himself, and she watches him go. Why is this levitating in there? 'Cause it's Kirby-ish, that's why, it's visually neat. And it makes a good individual moment for Johnny. The rest of the FF walk down the ramp/stairs, to be met by Alicia, and then the four of them walk away. Ben is telling Alicia about the sunrise he saw from orbit, and how beautiful it was. Reed is saying something to Sue about how these aliens are getting to be a real concern: Earth seems to be trapped between the Kree and the Skrulls with no way out. What they need is a way of confronting their enemies on their own home turf if they need to, instead of bringing them to Earth. But not by using the hyperspace technology, as that would only put them in greater danger since the alien races can clearly track its use. They need something else...some way of going around interstellar distances instead of through them. But, what way would that be, Reed? I've been thinking about it, honey, he tells her...it's all about the negative space...

Meanwhile Johnny stays behind on the roof, and watches the Inhumans leave. Never to return? And fade out, and that's the end of the movie. Except for...

EPILOGUE: The Latverian President (better known to us as Doom's flunky) is giving a speech to an adoring crowd. Since he's been in charge, Latveria's high-tech sector has taken off, foreign relations are good, the economy is booming, the people are happy. Isn't that great. But then he leaves the platform he was making the speech from, and his face goes slack. His movements become halting, and robotic. He removes his wig, to reveal a bare skull dotted with electrodes and wires: he is obviously just a puppet now...the puppet of Doom. He enters a room and sits in a chair, as Boris and Doom (completely ignoring his presence) continue talking about how well he's working out. But Doom is also dissatisfied. Influence is all well and good...even supremacy in the world of science is all well and good...but he needs something more. Some way to go forward. Is this all his destiny is worth, mere domination of people, and places, and things? It isn't enough.

Whereupon Boris (who's been waiting for this moment) gives him an old dusty chest full of his mother's things. Victor doesn't remember his mother, does he? No. And, he doesn't remember...the sacrifice she made. Why, no! What are you talking about, Boris? Well, the story goes like this: the von Dums have always intermarried with gypsy women from the Latverian hills, the women who (it was rumoured) used magic to secure their husbands' fortune. But Victor's father married a real witch, not a mere rumour; and it terrified him. Then, when Victor was born, his strange ways made his father so fearful of him that he decided to get rid of them both: he arranged an accident, a broken axle on a wagon in a blizzard, as she and Victor were travelling into the mountains to see her family. She tried to make it the rest of the way on foot, and died. But Victor lived. And his father let him live, sent him to America, had him master science, dreamed of grooming him to be a business-owner and petty Eurocrat...all in the attempt to erase what he knew to be his son's true nature...his son's true blood. And that's why Victor is unsatisfied: because his blood will not let him hide his true face behind a mask, but instead insists that the face and the mask be one and the same, and of his choosing, and with no more lies or cowardly blindness covering them up. His true nature is calling out to him, to discover that which lesser men fear to find, and master the whole of what the world is, rather than be content with just a part.

Doom thinks this over. He looks out the window. He sees a great future, beyond mere political influence. He sees a new world, whose destiny is unified with his own, and absorbed up into it. Richards has only seen half of what the world is, but he, Doom, will not blind himself to reality out of a fear of being superior to other men: he will see it all.

END

...

And now, as a special bonus:

A proposed trailer for the third of these notional FF movies, which I don't intend to write out as a plotline. But there's still just enough in the way of permutation from the original dream to make this worth covering, so...!

...

Trailer: Darkness, fading in on a coronet and sceptre striking the floor...Doom unpacks the green cloak.

Boris: It is the symbol of the von Dum's gypsy heritage, Master...that must never be forgotten. The symbol of your true heritage. The heritage of...

Victor: Yes, Boris?

Fade out.

Victor: Boris?

Fade in, and out, over and over: a snowstorm. A mountain. A traveller collapses.

Gypsy Voices From The Past (Boris' among them): The boy lives! He lives!

A lonely monastery. A richly-appointed room, where the traveller rises out of a bed. We see the traveller smashing the face of a mirror.

Voice: He has learned all that we can teach him...and more.

The traveller with his back to us, as an iron mask is drawn from a furnace before him by the monks.

Boris: For five hundred years, the von Dums have gone to the mountains to find their brides. You have mastered the science of the West...but that is not what is in your blood.

Victor: My...mother...

Boris: (almost a whisper) Magic...

Fade in, brightly, on Reed Richard's lab, and a mammoth hunk of freaky Kirbytech being carefully positioned to Reed's specifications by Ben Grimm.

Ben: It's a what kind of a cube?

Reed: A Radical Cube, Ben.

Ben: Ya mean it's for skateboarding?

Reed: It's a door into subspace. Negative space.

Back to the traveller and his iron mask. He beckons to the monks impatiently.

Reed: It's a place where the physical laws we know don't apply, Ben.

Monk: Master, it is not yet cooled!

Reed: Where distance, and time, don't flow as smoothly as they do in our universe. Where they bend back on each other, like waves...

The monks approach, bearing the mask. Fade out.

Reed: ...And their ripples spread out, everywhere in the universe.

Back to Ben's face.

Ben: Ya mean...it's like magic.

Reed looks sideways at him, seriously. He doesn't answer. Is he...worried?

Montage: The Radical Cube dangerously spitting out Kirby dots, as Ben and Reed try to control it; flames flaring up from Victor (his back to us) as he messes about with potions and demons; Reed unshaven in his lab as the door bangs open; in the distance a huge sea monster rising up out of the river, with what looks like a human figure on it, and Johnny streaking towards it out of the foreground; Sue turning around on the roof of the Baxter Building to look in the camera's direction, as an occluded figure with bare arms and legs (and wings on his feet) lands before her, facing her, his back to the camera; Ben's body, shedding cosmic radiation as he lets out a howl of pain; Annihilus' face; the FF going through the Distortion Zone (looks just like the distortion effect from Movie #1, by the way); the Skrull capitol city; a lonely figure seated on a meteor, silhouetted against the Negative Zone's Anti-Earth; and the camera creeping up (just as if it were Sue) behind Doom in his green cloak, as the music and sound effects fade away into a moment of silence, and a breath...

Victor: (quietly) I'll wait no longer.

Momentary fade-out; audio montage of Boris, the monks, and Victor, all intoning the same words, overlapping with each other with Victor at the end of it all as the same shot fades back in:

Boris: It is time!

Monks: It is time!

Victor: (almost shouting) It is time!

Doom turns his head very suddenly, sharply towards the camera, and we see his metal mask.

Darkness, and end.

...

(Oh yeah, and Sue reveals she's pregnant at the end of the third movie. Forgot to mention that, sorry.)

Who Dares Reawaken...Fan-Fic Film!

It started, like I said, as a dream...and then it was a bunch of notes that kept drawing my eye...

And now here it is. Odd how the internal logic of a story - any story, even a fan-fic film - can keep drawing us on, suggesting consequences and permutations. This one certainly did, but maybe that shouldn't be a big surprise, since Lee and Kirby laid down an admirably tight little structure in Fantastic Four, that can be consulted at need even when you're making ludicrous or unnecessary changes. And I guess I may have more to say about that later, but for now, if you can stand the humiliation...both mine, and yours...

Here's...

...

...

...

...

ACT TWO: It's two years later. A van loaded with equipment from Stark Enterprises is approaching a castle (!) in upstate New York...yes, it was flown over by some rich foreign guy and rebuilt brick-by-brick, and guess who that is? Von Dum's flunky comes out to meet the van, leads the Stark employees into the castle, where mirrors are busily being covered, and black crepe hung up everywhere ...there's something kind of funny about these delivery men, though, something similar and just slightly off; they're simultaneously more and less curious than they ought to be...the flunky talks up the castle's history (expositing a bit for the audience), but they seem to be more interested in its layout...peculiar-looking and -acting people, they're a bit like the Agents in the Matrix, in that although they don't look identical, they seem not to know this. They insist on getting von Dum's signature for the equipment...

Meanwhile, Victor is in a hushed and beautifully-furnished study somewhere upstairs from the main hall, unpacking a large box that has been sent all the way from Latveria: his father's effects, and things he wanted Victor to have after he died. There is a painting on the wall dating from the Middle Ages, showing a von Dum ancestor clad in a thick green cloak, wearing a golden coronet, and holding a sceptre: the resemblance to Victor is uncanny. From inside the box, Victor draws out the coronet and the sceptre. His face is in shadow, unmasked – we can just see the suggestion of a look of profound distaste cross his features as he handles the trappings of his family's past, carefully, delicately, as though the past is a snake, that may bite him...

CLUNK! The hateful sceptre and coronet hit the ground, and he kicks them aside. But now he draws something else out of the box: the very same green cloak we've just seen in the painting. Victor handles it curiously: it appears to be simple woolen cloth, thick, heavy, something more of the peasantry than of the gentry Victor so despises...

A voice behind him, and he starts! But then relaxes: it's only Boris, the trusted family retainer. In rumbling but soothing tones, Boris explains that the cloak is the symbol of the von Dum family's gypsy origins, that must never be forgotten...the symbol of their true heritage...the heritage of...

But then Boris stops; shuts his mouth. “Yes, Boris?” Victor says. “The heritage of what?” But Boris won't say. Maybe he's said too much already. However Victor won't have any of that; and he's about to make Boris tell him, when...suddenly the flunky from downstairs bursts into the room. Victor yells at him: “you fool!” He hurriedly swirls the cloak over himself so the flunky won't see his face, and quickly covers his features with a flesh-coloured mask-type thing. We can still see that there must be something wrong with him, but the mask is pretty good camouflage...it's marginally expressive, flexible, essentially a flesh-toned copy of the teleoperation mask. Boris reams out the flunky, assures Victor that he'll train the young man up right, and teach him to know his place around a von Dum...and Victor, stymied, somehow now wearing the cloak, goes off to meet the Stark guys. Who aren't really Stark guys at all, of course, but Skrulls: Victor notices them examining his lab in a not-quite-surreptitious way, he draws them out with comments like “I assume you're familiar with [technobabble]?” and when they play along he knows they can't be delivery men. Oddly, they don't seem completely concerned with their pretense, the more they look around his lab (mostly what he's been able to reconstruct from memory of the saucer research) the more they seem to be coming to the point where they'll have to reveal themselves anyway. Victor orders his household staff out of the room, and confronts the Skrulls, who basically explain to him that the radiation wave from the FF's flight has drawn their attention...it represents something very dangerous, technology being applied in a way it was never intended, so they've come to investigate its misuse, and they've found von Dum, because he's still experimenting with it. At least, that's what they say: but Victor knows that what happened in the flight was a use of the technology they themselves have never been able to achieve – they want the brain-beautiful effect just as he does, and they've come to get it. Their concern for the technology's misuse is just an act. Victor lets them talk, about how there's another race of aliens out there who aren't as benevolent as they are, the evil Kree, who would be just as interested in the technology as the Skrulls, except they would simply come and enslave the planet...if von Dum trusts the Skrulls and works with them now, Earth can be protected, anonymous. The Kree never have to know that Earth is anything but the galactic backwater that it is. Well, von Dum counters this lie with one of his own, since he's planned for an alien visitation for some time anyway...he paints himself as the good guy, trying to catch up with the technology of the evil Reed Richards (by now world-famous, ensconced in the Baxter Building with the rest of the FF), and he urges the Skrulls to help him sequester the technology so that Richards can't misuse it. He's built terrible weapons and God-knows-what out of it, and he's become very powerful and popular, and well-protected...and, would he stop at anything in the defence of his secrets? Might he not (von Dum says slyly) even send out another hyperspatial signal of the same sort that attracted the Skrulls, and so draw in the deadly Kree? So the Skrulls can't attack him directly; but Victor has a plan that will enable them to get what they want in any case. If they can isolate Richards from his protections, they can put themselves on more of a level playing-field with him...

Meanwhile, back at the Baxter Building, there's some day-in-the-life stuff to get through, that makes clear that the FF are not a pack of evil geniuses bent on world domination...Johnny pranks Ben, Ben harbours feelings of resentment towards Reed but knows it's wrong of him to feel that way, Reed is distracted and Sue has to drag him away from his experiments...and Sue has sneakily kind of/almost set Ben up with her old school friend Alicia Masters. Ben has just about learned how to sketch again using his new hands, but he's dissatisfied with the result....so he's tried sculpting, which seems to go better, but he doesn't really know what he's doing. So, enter Alicia: Ben is highly conflicted about her, and about Sue, because he can't help but notice that Alicia is both very pretty, and freakin' blind...I mean, come on, Sue, do ya gotta rub my nose in it? Everybody is stepping on Ben's toes, though they don't mean to, and he really can't say much about it most of the time without looking ungrateful...but, jeez, who's the walking pile of orange rocks around here, anyway? Grr...well, but the Alicia thing actually works out better than Ben feared. She's a real artist, after all, and they connect about that; also she senses his discomfort and gives him a little standard movie-talk here's-my-position pill to swallow, in a manner not unlike:

“Mr. Grimm...”

“Just call me Ben.”

“Ben. I may be blind, but I'm not [fill in the blank here]. I would've thought you, of all people, would [again, fill in this blank]...”

And Ben feels (understandably) a bit shamed by this, but then Alicia lightens the mood. “Besides, imagine how I feel,” she says. “Oh, you're blind, say, I think I know somebody you should meet...”

Ben: “...”

Ben: “...Heh.”

Alicia: “I mean, it isn't exactly flattering to either of us, is it?”

Ben: “Hah! Yer right about that, lady!”

Alicia: “Alicia.”

Ben: “Sorry. Alicia.”

And then of course she gives him the usual movie crap about “feeling” the clay, but this should suggest something else, too, because Alicia is keenly attuned to the feeling of working with the same kind of rocky material that Ben is now actually made out of. So when she tells him to just use his hands on it, she puts her hands on his to guide him, and a strange kind of circuit is set up: Alicia's whole life is about trying to feel the life within her materials, and now suddenly here's Ben, who is alive, a psychological metaphor made real (coarse outer surface, ugly; sensitive inner person, beautiful). It's alluring to Alicia, comfortingly familiar at the same time it's shockingly strange, it's as though the artist was also the artwork, as though she can actually feel who Ben is, through her hands – oh my God, is she one weird chick, or what? Sue may have a knack for this...but of course this is only their first meeting, so she soon has to go. Then Willie Lumpkin comes in, talks to the FF about ear-wiggling, there's some showering and shaving, the FF go for a walk, everything's great. But then suddenly! Reports all over the news about the FF smashing stuff up! They're terrorists or something! They rush back to their headquarters.

The dedicated FF reader will have realized what this is: Skrull impersonation, from FF #2. But added to it is von Dum's own efforts in whipping up a mob, a storm of anti-FF sentiment in the Mighty Marvel Manner – what's Richards working on in there? Isn't that stuff dangerous? Who are the FF anyway? Victor fulminates against the FF on TV and everywhere else (as himself or disguised, either is good) and sure enough, things soon get bad enough in the city that the FF have to leave it. Reed locks up the lab so no one can get in, and away they go in the Fantasticar. We see, briefly, von Dum talking to his flunky about trusting the Skrulls, which of course Victor doesn't...we see that he has the bodies of the original saucer's crew locked away someplace, that he's been studying them, he knows the Skrull's true biology and thus is equipped to take measures against them...in fact everything here is going according to his plan. He uses the Skrulls to whip up discontent in their FF guises, and then dramatically he zaps them with some kind of shapechanging-blocker he's concocted, leaving them to the tender mercies of the mob. They run; he enters Reed's lab, since unlocking it is child's play to him.

But, once inside, he's actually shocked to discover that there is no saucer-tech lying around! Furious, frustrated, he rants and raves and smashes things up...and then is attacked by the bogus Mr. Fantastic, who has somehow eluded the mob and come back for revenge. They struggle; the Skrull hisses vengeance; a cop who had followed “Richards” into the building comes in and arrests the Skrull just in the nick of time, takes him off to jail still believing he's Reed. Von Dum leaves, but he's dropped the shapechanging-blocker in the struggle: it lies on the floor of Reed's lab behind him, unnoticed.

In the countryside, the real FF find that trouble has followed them: strange sights and noises from the old So-And-So place...the farmer-folk whisper, “could it be that awful Fantastic Four? I hear they've gone bad...” The real FF go and investigate, capture the Skrulls as per the comic book. With proof in hand they go to the local cops, get the manhunt lifted, throw the Skrulls in jail...but when they reach the Baxter Building they're informed that the Reed-copy was released when the manhunt was called off...hey, they didn't know, nobody said anything about a double! Reed finds the shapechanger-blocker, thinks...he starts to realize the entire plot now, the Skrulls and what they're after, von Dum's involvement, what Johnny saw in the future, the whole thing. 'Cause he's so smart, see?

And then suddenly TVs and radios all over the world go funny, as Skrull ships shimmer into view in the sky above New York. Their subterfuge may have failed, but they will have the brain-beautiful effect, or blow up the Earth to make sure the Kree never get their hands on it. Over the commandeered TVs an ultimatum goes out: the Fantastic Four must surrender. A countdown begins. Panic starts. Reed is just peering at von Dum's shapechanger blocker in a trance, and then he says something like “Of course! It's the only answer! Come on, there's not a minute to lose!” Mobs gather once again at the Baxter Building, although this time they don't know whether they love the FF or hate them, but then when after a few minutes they see the Fantasticar take off from the roof and head out of the city they despair, in classic Stan Lee-isms: “If they're leaving...Earth must be doomed!” “I allus knew they were bums...” and so on and so forth, True Believer! But then after a little while longer, as the countdown is nearing its end, the Fantasticar returns. Then the FF's Pocket Rocket takes off, up to the Skrull fleet, in your basic fist-pumping action moment, complete with emotionally manipulative horn music. The crowd, naturally, cheers.

The Pocket Rocket docks with the Skrull flagship, which is peopled by bland-looking avatars of the sort that first entered Castle von Dum as Stark delivery men. They surround the FF, and in the middle of them is the Skrull Reed Richards, still locked into his human form. Reed and his partners are seized roughly by Skrull soldiers, and then the Skrull Reed gives his saucer-tech ultimatum. But the real Reed not only insists he doesn't have it, that he destroyed it all long ago, but he also tells him that the Skrulls have much bigger problems right now, saying something like: “Having trouble changing back to your true form, aren't you?” The Skrull commander sneeringly replies that his shapechanging ability will reassert itself in time, but Reed tells him he's wrong about that: a plague has been introduced into the Skrulls who were on the surface of the planet, and unless a cure is found, all Skrulls will succumb to it, and lose their shapechanging abilities forever. The Skrull commander says that's impossible: the Skrull's mutable genetic structure is immune to all disease and contamination and plague, it's one of their strengths. Reed says no it isn't, not anymore; not since you've dealt with Victor von Dum. Because the mutable genetic structure itself is what's going to spread the plague. Did the Skrull commander really think von Dum would just hand over the saucer-tech to him? Did he really think von Dum wouldn't have a double-cross in mind? Why, just look at your fellow shipmates! And of course, the ones holding onto Ben are changing into copycat Things, the ones holding Johnny into copycat Torches, etc. Because it isn't really the rest of the FF at all, it's those other Skrulls, hypnotized or something to keep quiet and maintain the illusion that they're the real FF. But now the illusion, and the hypnosis, break, and the Thing-Skrull wails that it's all true, somehow the human von Dum has found a way to cripple them, by turning their chief attribute against itself! “No one touch anyone!” the Skrull commander orders, but then Reed replies softly that he mustn't touch anyone either...in fact he must never leave this ship, never return to his homeworld, never even see another Skrull again. So what will he do? The technology he came for doesn't exist; his ship is a plague-carrier; the rest of the Skrull Empire is going to be pretty unhappy with him. Probably blow him right out of space, if he doesn't order his ship's destruction himself, as a sacrifice to the greater Skrull good. Yes, it looks pretty hopeless. That is, unless...

Unless what?

Unless Reed and the Skrull commander can come to an agreement. Reed has developed a treatment that will return the affected Skrulls to normal, but he'll only give it to them if they agree to leave Earth. The commander says, what if this is a trick? Reed smiles, spreads his hands...

Shortly, we see the commander ordering the immediate evacuation of the fleet. They take off in a burst of hyperspatial light. Then Reed administers his treatment to each Skrull on the flagship, cautioning that it will cause them to fall into a deep sleep while it works to return their genetic code to normal. Once they're asleep, he'll send their ship on its homeward course, and go back down to earth in his rocket. The Skrull commander is the last to be inoculated; just as he's going under, he says, “How, Richards? You and von Dum are only two men...primitives by Galactic standards...you don't even have the technology we thought you had, or you would have used it...and yet even without it, you mastered us so quickly. So easily. We Skrulls have fought the Kree for a thousand years, on a thousand worlds...and never have we been so...humiliated...”

He drops off to sleep. We see the Pocket Rocket detaching from the Skrull craft, which takes off for parts unknown, and then Reed descends to New York. He exits the rocket, is greeted by the real FF.

Ben: “So, big brain...did it work?”

Johnny: “Of course it worked, Ben! The Skrulls are gone, aren't they?””

Ben: “Yeah, that's great, kid. But are they gonna stay gone, is what I wanna know.”

Reed: “I think so, Ben. I'm pretty sure I managed to convince them we don't have the technology they were looking for, and by the time they come out from under the sedative I gave them, the effects of Victor's gene-fixative should have worn off...”

Ben: “Plus your little “extra improvements?””

Reed: “Yes...(Reed pulls the shapechanger-blocker from his belt, snaps off a module that he clearly whipped up specially to attach to it)...those too. So there'll be nothing to show that there wasn't a plague, and that we didn't cure it.”

Ben: “Lucky the Skrull head honcho's fixation didn't wear off early...”

Reed: “It's fixative, Ben...and yes, it was lucky...” End ACT TWO. Although I'll be the first to admit, that ending falls a little flat...well, it's the end of FF #2, it's a notoriously flaccid conclusion anyway. Basically, that's why we have to have:

-------------------------------------

ACT THREE: It's Fantastic Four Day in NYC, and there's a big parade scheduled. Ben is sulking, and doesn't want to go: he's gotten a package from the Yancy Street Gang, and it depressed him. He's complaining about how hypocritical the parade will be, look, the rest of the FF all have these great names everybody calls them, they're universally loved by everyone, they should go...but you know what they call Ben? The Thing. How lousy is that? Sue tells him the name just stuck, really it's meant affectionately now, no matter how it started up...no, says Ben. I'm “The Thing”. That's not affection, that's just...aw, what's the use talkin' about it. And there sits the Yancy Streeters' package, and it sucks. Because he's a monster, doesn't Sue get it? He's always been a monster on the inside anyway, damaged goods, but now everyone can see it, he can't hide it, and he can't even belong to where he came from anymore, he can't even belong to the human race...

Sue makes him go anyway, of course. She's very supportive.

...And then they all end up on a big float to be thanked for saving the city. “This all musta cost a fortune,” says Ben. (Hint: it was paid for by anonymous donation.) “Maybe...they do appreciate me a little, after all...” But! Off in the crowd is a “Thing Sucks!” banner, and the Yancy Streeters start hucking garbage at him. He flips, jumps down off the float, chases them away, roaring with rage. The parade almost turns into a riot. But then! The screaming and shouting starts to plainly be not about Ben having a tantrum: he turns around to see a ray stab down from out of the sky and teleport the FF away.

Cut to the interior of von Dum's castle, some little time later: the FF are prisoners, and in exchange for their lives Reed is being forced to replicate the hyperspace time-machine tech right there in front of von Dum. Well, it's his research anyway! He found the saucer; he was the first one to divine its secrets! And then Richards made off with it, destroyed it, robbed von Dum of what was rightfully his! He owes him this! We'll see Victor rant and rave a little more in a minute, but first we go back to Ben, who's trying to figure out how to save his partners. We see him back at the Baxter Building trying to figure out how to work Reed's machines, but with not much success. Alicia comes by, because she heard what happened over the radio, and they get to talking...Alicia says, “Just imagine, if you hadn't rushed off the float, then you would've been snatched up along with the others,” and then Ben says “Hey...yeah. I would've!” So he tears off to City Hall and discovers the thing about the anonymous donation. Aha! But nobody at City Hall knows anything more than that. Ben goes down to the site of the parade to look for clues...talks to people cleaning the mess up, asks around, hears about somebody who somebody saw talking to some guy, who was maybe with the Permits department, oh no wait, he wasn't with the Permits department (hint: it was von Dum's flunky), you'd have to ask Dave...hey, where is Dave...

Ben looks around for Dave, can't find him. “He was just here...I dunno, maybe he saw you coming!” Ben looks around some more, ends up following fleeing feet down an alley...follows the trail away off from the main street, until he's almost in a little Old West tumbleweed ghost-town scene, only with tenements...the diehard FF fan surely knows exactly what's about to happen...there's a noise; Ben spins around.

“You!!!”

Cut back to Reed and Victor for a while, for more of Victor's ranting. We see what restrains Reed (my guess: some kind of shock-collar thing) as he tries to go for Victor, and then ZAP! You know the drill...

Back to Ben, who is (what else?) deep in conversation with the Yancy Streeters (the street sign is right there for us to look at) who've decided to help him out, hey if the Fantastic Four get hijacked off of Yancy Street, that's gonna make the neighbourhood look bad, you know? Turns out there was a lot of funny business going on while the parade was being set up, some extra work being done, some weird stuff...Ben goes back to the street, at the Yancy Streeters' direction discovers a metal plate hidden under camouflage cover, right on the centre line...so he knows this was the trigger for the teleportation beam, and it's all making sense. Ben asks some guy how it got there, somebody had to bring it down there, right? Was it a buncha guys, was it one guy, was it a helicopter, a submarine, what? The guy says, submarine? Look, you know how these parades work? It's only City guys who can come in, while they're getting set up. Trucks come in, drop stuff off, then more trucks come in and drop more stuff off. You gotta have ID, you gotta be driving what everybody else is driving...that's how it works. He thinks he remembers: it was this guy he knows, Louie or something. He lives around here, as a matter of fact. And naturally it turns out that the Yancy Streeters know Louie-or-something...

Yeah, Louie-or-something says, he brought that thing down. Hadda go all the way out of the city to pick it up at the last minute, to some creepy place Dave sent him to...like a real castle, y'know? I mean, who's got a castle? Donald Trump, or something. I mean it was weird-looking, right outta Dracula...I kept looking around for hunchbacks...

Ben says, can you tell me where it is? The guy says, hell, I can take you there! Ben says, I tell ya what, buddy, I'll take you there...

Back at the castle: Victor starts ranting and raving about how hard he's had it, how every bad thing that's happened to him is somebody else's fault, beginning with his own father and his backward aristocratic dreams, for example the only reason Richards ended up at von Dum's institute at all is because his father thought he needed him to help place Victor on some stupid anachronistic throne, but Victor refuses to be a prisoner of anybody else's actions or their plans, refuses to be a prisoner of fate, and once he has his technology back, that rightfully belongs to him, he'll break away, he'll do just as he pleases, no one and nothing will ever hold him back again...

Ranting and raving about this, Victor is starting to get up Reed's nose, and playing for time Reed lashes back at him: Ben was right about Victor the whole time, Reed sees that now. He's a mediocrity, maybe not of intelligence, but definitely of will: always looking for some magic shortcut to greatness so he won't have to commit to earning it, and risk being proved undeserving. Far from rejecting his father's primitive ideas about aristocratic destiny, Victor embodies them: as far as Reed's concerned, all that impotent railing against them is just a way of wishing they were true, but fearing that they aren't. It's pathetic. Victor wants his due; but what makes him think he has a “due”? Even this experiment, the lusting after the “brain-beautiful” moment, is just a fantasy of being able to get something without earning it, or paying for it! But the irony is, you can't really even pay for anything anyway: because there is no fate, there's only chance. Von Dum thinks the brain-beautiful effect is the magic key to all his problems, but that's a laugh, because he doesn't even understand what it is. News flash: it wasn't the technology. It wasn't the time travel that made it happen. It was only something that happened during the time travel, something totally unpredictable, totally irreproducible, unique, because it was Ben who was the technology von Dum's looking for! Ben's piloting, Ben's mind, Ben's actions...it was all the different versions of Ben Grimm coming together in a one-time only combination, that made that dancing EEG-pattern thingy von Dum's so fascinated by, and good luck bottling that!

So, fate?

That's just an excuse!

Victor is shaken. But what about the Skrulls, they wanted the brain-beautiful effect too! So that proves it exists. But: no, Reed replies. That doesn't prove a thing. In a thousand years of having hyperspace technology, the Skrulls never once chanced upon the secret von Dum's looking for, because there is no secret. Damn it, it isn't a secret! It's just a fluke! And if Victor doesn't believe that, he can take the engine Reed's building and go and look for the secret himself, and see for himself! In fact, why doesn't he? Why doesn't he just fire up his unearned magic technology and go, and run away from reality just like he always does! Because that is what mediocrities do, isn't it?

Victor is quaking, shivering apart with rage. What will he do? Has Reed just signed all their death warrants? Or has he bought himself an opening, to possibly escape? He waits, tensed for action...

And then Ben finally arrives in the Fantasticar, and he busts his way into the castle. (I guess he sets the F-car to take Louie-or-something home, and bails out without a chute, right through the roof. Action!) Big fight scene ensues; many robots. Reed seizes the opportunity to free himself, and then Sue and Johnny, and then they all confront von Dum, but he whips up his patented force-field and pushes them away...he goes to the newly-built time machine, curses Reed, and then says “could a mediocrity have conceived of this, Richards?” He is not talking about the force field: with a couple of deft movements, he sets the machinery to overload (of course!), and as it begins to whine and hum and crackle the FF flee, leaving Victor to shout after them (perhaps distantly echoing something his father told him 'way back in Act One):

“You talk about Fate, but you know nothing of Fate!” His Latverian accent is reasserting itself. “I will show you what Fate truly means! Inescapable! Implacable! You think I run from it? No, I welcome it; it's you that runs! Chance, indeed – that's only your excuse, for not seeing what the universe really is! Fate is inside each of us, Richards; it is born into us, as we're born into it. Fate brands us; shapes us; names us. And chance? Chance is only an illusion! Chance is cowardice! You say I'm fearful, but you're far more afraid than I; you can think of nothing more than to try and stop Fate, and contain its energies. But, they can't be contained! I will let them loose! Yes: because I am Fate! I am Inevitability! And you can't outrun me, Richards! Because I...am...Doom!”

The castle blows up, spectacularly. The FF escape just in the nick of time, thanks to Sue and Johnny, and they have a little leaving-Monster-Island FF-style wrap-up. And then it's time for:

EPILOGUE #1: The FF all go their separate ways when they return to the Baxter Building, and then we get a scene between Ben and Alicia, as they mildly canoodle for the first time. Far from horrifying her, his lumpy touch thrills her – because the sense of strange encounter with another person is, once again, amplified: to Alicia, it's as though Ben is a map that only she knows how to read. A landscape, that only she can explore. As I said, she's kinda weird! But Ben doesn't mind: in an instant, his whole life is changed. For the better, and if he were honest he would admit it's actually better than it's ever been, because as we can't help but understand here (even if only subliminally), his transformation into the Thing has in the end been therapeutic for him. His personality issues have leapt right over the need for talk therapy by being externalized into facts that he, and everyone around him, can't help working on: because where once he was blocked by the idea that his handsome exterior masked an inner monstrosity, now things have been turned right-side-up, to show that the handsome man inside is the “real” Ben, after all...

Just as Reed is no longer frustrated by being unable to work to his fullest potential, and Johnny is liberated by a sense of independence and power, and Sue gets to subtly encourage everybody toward harmony...

But anyway.

EPILOGUE #2: We see the ruins of Castle Doom, then pull back to notice this is just an image on a bank of viewscreens. The image goes to snow...the one next to it resolves slightly to show von Dum's face lying on the ground, wires and diodes hanging out of it...this too goes to snow, and another screen resolves, then goes snowy, and it's happening all over the bank of viewscreens as we pull out further and further (yes, I admit it's an Ozymandias homage), until we can see a shadowy form unplugging himself from his teleoperation rig, which is pretty well fried. His flunky rushes in to help him, but gets waved off. This is the real Doom – not “von Dum” any longer – detaching himself from the device that was his last attempt at distancing himself from the consequences of action...the device that failed, in the end, because Reed Richards was able to reach him even through that protection; the device he no longer needs, since he's had his own “brain-beautiful” moment at last, and therefore is no longer interested in Ben Grimm's. Beyond wishing for magic shortcuts, he is fully committed now, and will never be anything else again...his flunky is touchy around him, because he thinks Doom must be pissed that Reed has beaten him yet again, his ancestral home with all its treasures has been destroyed, etc., however Doom reveals that he's lost nothing that matters: his remote sensors stored a complete record of all the time-tech data. The flunky is elated: then Doom's won, isn't that wonderful, he's finally beaten Richards, and now he has the technology to crush him forever! All he has to do is go back in time and wipe Richards out of history...

Doom flies into a rage, at this suggestion; it is the one thing he absolutely will not do, and he's furious that the flunky would even dare to contemplate it. He doesn't need to change the rules of the game to win! He is complete in his own person, and needs nothing! Besides, there is no “changing” anything, anyway: everything is as Fate has decreed it, and Doom is not so weak as to wish to flee from his destiny. Why would he want to do that? Why should he wish to go back to who he was before, now that he's finally Doom? It's inconceivable. The flunky unwisely opens his mouth again, and it looks like Doom's going to kill him; the flunky trembles. And, this is important! This is a sense of menace from Doom that we never saw from von Dum, he is (as mentioned) absolutely committed now, which means he could kill quite casually, and without the slightest regret. So the flunky's had it, we think...but then the iron hand around his throat loosens, and Doom tells him that although in the normal course of things he would have to die for his insolence (Doom needs no one!), he's gotten lucky this time: as it turns out, Fate still has a use for him. A very special use. In fact it's a privilege, really...because Victor von Dum is no more – he died in the explosion of Castle Doom, and he won't be coming back – but that doesn't mean the destiny of the von Dum family has been wiped out along with him. It's just gotten bigger, that's all. From Doom's position atop the mountain of Fate, he can see it marching across the plain of time, like an army. Because the first law of time and space is that nothing is ever created, and nothing is ever destroyed; things are only transformed from one thing into another...changed from what they were, into what they should be... just as the past is changed into the future, and can never be changed back. And that's what the von Dum name has been changed into now. The future.

And every future needs its footsoldiers, doesn't it? Doesn't it, flunky?

Not waiting for him to answer, Doom calls for Boris. “Yes, Master?” “Take him away, and prepare him. As we discussed.” “Yes, Master.” Old Boris grabs the flunky in a surprisingly strong grip, and hauls him away, as he calls out things like “But I've served you faithfully! Please, have mercy!”

Alone in his teleoperation chamber, Victor speaks softly to posterity: “Mercy? There is no mercy. There is only...what will be.”

And then he laughs, like a supervillain.

END

...

And believe it or not, I've got one more coming. Ouch!

Madinkbeard!

I'm an idiot for not spending more time here!

I think...

Well, I've only given it a cursory glance, but it looks fascinating...

I hereby resolve to read it!

Bloggers, what are links or sites you see, that you think about looking at, but then don't? What are the blogs you wish you were reading, but find you're too lazy to plough through? Where are the rich but stagnant spots in your list of bookmarks?

Consider it a meme! If you give ten, I'll give ten, and I bet my ten will be more embarrassing than your ten!

Ooooh...maybe that last beer was a mistake...

Forgotten Comics: Coyote

One day (not too long after cancellation) Coyote was out in the desert, when he heard a strange noise. So he climbed to the top of a ridge, and looked down, and there he saw the Internet wandering around, poking its nose into holes in the ground, then drawing its nose out, then shambling over to other holes and poking into those too, and then pulling its head out again and shaking it.

“What are you doing?” Coyote asked it, laughing.

“I'm looking for the Eighties,” the Internet growled at him.

“The Eighties?” Coyote smiled, a sly smile. “You mean like the Bronze Age?”

“Not the Bronze Age,” the Internet said huffily. “I found the Bronze Age already.”

“Well, then...?”

“I'm looking for the Eighties. It's not the same thing.”

“It isn't?”

“No.”

Coyote spread his arms wide, taking in the vast expanse of desert, the vast expanse of sky. “Don't you think you would've found it right away, though, if it were out here? I mean it must be awful big, right?”

“It has to be here,” the Internet said distractedly. “I've looked everywhere else.”

“Everywhere?”

“Everywhere.”

Coyote laughed again. “But that's ridiculous!” he said. “Look, if it were really out here, I would've seen it by now!”

“Oh? You...you live out here?”

“Sure.”

“And you haven't seen it?”

“Nope.”

The Internet looked at Coyote suspiciously. “I don't believe you do live out here,” it said.

“Why not?”

“There's nothing to live on out here.”

“There isn't?”

“No.”

Coyote shrugged, at that. “If you say so,” he told the Internet.

“Wait!”

“Yes?”

“Where are you going?”

“To get something to eat. Why?”

“I'm...”

“Yes?”

The Internet looked up at him sheepishly. “I'm a little hungry.”

“Been out here a long time, have you? Looking for those Eighties?”

The Internet nodded.

Coyote sighed extravagantly. “Okay, then,” he said. “You can come along with me.”

And he smirked to himself as the Internet got up on its haunches and lumbered after him. “This'll be my best trick yet,” he thought...

Consider this, reader: once upon a time, all the non-Big Two comics that were out there were superhero-makers. That was how things were going, you see: outside of the underground, if you wanted to say something, superheroes were what your forum was going to be, at least in America. Weird? But looked at historically, not so weird...after all, it was superheroes that came to dominate comic books...it was superheroes that reinvigorated comic books...it was superheroes who bewitched the hippies with their overblown claims to being “pop mythology”...and it was superheroes that nurtured all our great contemporary comic-book talents...okay, not all of them, you've got me there...but most of them...

It was superheroes. Always, always superheroes. You know, outside of Elfquest and the Freak Brothers and R. Crumb and Flaming Carrot...but for every one of those worthies there were ten Nexuses, ten early Cerebuses, a Badger, a Paradax, a Phantacea for God's sake...superheroes, superheroes everywhere...

So, what happened to the superheroes?

Not that Nexus and Phantacea were ever going to change the world, mind you!

But seriously, what happened?

Well. What the reader probably can't be blamed for forgetting, is that there was a point at which it was possible to push superheroes out of their standard paces and formats, and make their symbolic compass needles point towards different things and places. Don't believe me? Well, look, when we talk about the best of genre fiction – whether it's crime fiction or science fiction or Westerns – we acknowledge that there are things to say there that are at least potentially of interest to the average literate person, that may perhaps be better said in that genre than in any other...tropes that include the style of speech, constraints of plot, etc., all become comprehensible as the tools of art instead of merely the requirements of trade in these high-value, outward-looking efforts, and their value as exploratory instruments is manifest to anyone who cares to look at them...

And right now we don't have that going on at all in superhero comics, sad to say, but that doesn't mean that superhero comics are the one genre which can naturally find no application in the concerns and the world of “real” literature. Alan Moore at least has proved the falsity of that; however, since Moore we have had not too many other creators attempting to push the genre around and make it grow, or force it into focussing on what it really would like to do. And that's not something that just happened by accident, reader! No, there's a reason for that! Sure, you and I like superheroes, and we even know of a few good ones; but superheroes are a literary ghetto still, those good apples notwithstanding, because they're supposed to be a literary ghetto. They've been made to be, for one reason and another. So it's the non-superhero comics which are where the true literary action is, these days, and that's great...but in another way it isn't so great, because it means that although the medium is growing ever more healthy, our genre is being left behind that growth and health. We're excluded.

And it wasn't always so, of course: any of us could point to times when the genre was quite capable of making its mark, if not necessarily quite holding its own. But! You know also, if we wanted to, we could consider that it might not have turned out the way it has: the superhero genre might have blossomed, instead of decaying, and its tropes could have become a source of enlightenment and clarity in the literary world, instead of drowning in the mud of would-be subculture. It could have been Umberto Eco, instead of Tom Clancy. Superheroes could have owned the place where the action was, instead of ceding it to non-superheroes.

It could have happened!

So why didn't it?

Answer: because it might've.

But enough with the mystery: let's take a look at Steve Englehart's Coyote, the very symbol of the Eighties that could have been, that then wasn't, because it could have been. I remember coming in on this comic in its full-colour Epic days (speaking of colour, what a glorious palette it had! Who coloured this beautiful thing, anyway? I await your answer, RAB...), and realizing immediately that it was something special: the astounding, breathtaking Steve Leialoha artwork (to be followed more than ably by the pencils of Butch Guice and then Chas Truog – thank you, you geniuses!) announced it as a labour of love no less than Englehart's effortlessly brisk, sensitive, stimulating language did, and as a result it was clear that both these creators were (though you wouldn't have thought it possible) taking their art to a new level in those pages. Ed keeps the original Watchmen pamphlets out of the communal longboxes as part of his one or two items of personal stash...and I keep Coyote, because I can't bear to be parted from it. Those who know me, know that I think Englehart's greatest strength is the unique voice he finds for himself in the universe of caption-boxes and thought-balloons, and Coyote is where he shows that there are more possibilities to be found in those enclosures than anyone ever suspected. Coyote may be a superhero, but Englehart's language makes him bigger than the superhero world, just as Chandler's language made Marlowe bigger than the world of crime fiction...in fact I'd argue that here Englehart achieves precisely what Chandler achieved, while still never copying him: skeptics may dismiss Steve as mere Chandler-Lite, but although the world is (make no mistake) pretty full up with extremely good Chandler-Lite, Englehart's specific lyricism sets him apart from that...uh, tradition, and the rumbling of an altogether different Universe beneath the Chandlerishly felicitous phrasings – good thing this is just a blog, because otherwise I couldn't get away with “Chandlerishly”, could I? – puts the lie to the word “copycat”. Because this isn't just the clever idea of porting in Chandlerisms (there I go again) to different genres, nor even the kind of panache and skill that allows the trick to be brought off; this is something else. Something of its own.

“In the desert, the sky is pure blue!

The air is pure air!

There are few secrets!”

No doubt there are better students of language than I, who can tell you how that passage falls flat, but for me it simply soars off the page. Well, but I have the page right in front of me, don't I? And in context with the page of artwork that it belongs to, this really does soar: not like Chandler but like Wordsworth (“Half-hidden from the eye!” I always felt there was a paper in that “!”, you know), but, yes, not really like Wordsworth after all, of course. Ludicrous flattery isn't called for, here. Englehart's a comic book writer, and the thing is what it is, although you know who would disagree with the assumption behind that statement? Raymond Chandler would...

But anyway. Sometimes things are possible within the constraints of genre that aren't possible anywhere else, but sometimes the genre itself gets pushed, by what's being done inside it. And as I said, Coyote was a superhero! But, he didn't have the rhythms of a superhero. He had his own rhythms. He was an experiment, if you like, that showed the versatility of the superhero genre within the comics medium, and he was there to break new ground, and he broke it.

But, weirdly – and here's the point – no one seemed to notice.

The Internet has found the Bronze Age, but not the Eighties, because it's missed the creative ferment of the Eighties, because it's overlooked what could have happened, if only the superheroes had lived up to the opportunities they'd earned. I'll mention Dreadstar again, whose chief virtue was plotting that was ridiculously, indeed almost needlessly sharp...for all Dreadstar's many failings, there's nothing I've seen, in any medium, that can match it for this. And “The Prize”...

You know, I love The Prize, but I'm getting sidetracked. How can I talk about The Prize, when I haven't even talked about The Djinn? Ahh, The Djinn...

Never mind. I'll get to it. Again, thank God this is just a blog! But what I was going to say was that we might have had a different Nineties, if the promise of the Eighties had been allowed to be fulfilled. That revelation should be nothing new, of course: by the time the Eighties rolled around, there was already a long list of missed – or squandered – opportunities in superhero comics. Jack Kirby never got to finish his New Gods; Ditko's mad genius got shuffled from pillar to post (damn it, what does lie beyond the Meta Zone?!?); Steve Gerber was taken away from Howard, the one-and-only real character that a superhero publisher ever produced, and his ambitious Omega (I'll explain just why I think it was so ambitious when we get to the last SSoS post – hah!) never got the chance to bring the outside to the inside (and to make matters worse, I never found out what happened with Vance and Nikki, either); Alan Moore, comics' own Einstein, had already been driven off by the naked face of avarice numerous times (and he keeps being driven off again and again, and it looks like this time it's for real); and even Englehart himself, though indisputably a sales success everywhere he went, found all his new directions thoughtlessly reversed almost as soon as he was hired to supply them. Oh, superhero comics are great at cutting off their noses to spite their faces, you better believe it! How Grant Morrison was ever allowed to complete his Mister Miracle series, I'll never know! The market (as we're told) is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and why?

Why?

Well, for God's sake, isn't it obvious?

Okay, never mind. Steve knows what I'm talking about. Hell, John Byrne knows what I'm talking about! Though he often gets it wrong...

So...hold on, gotta get another beer...

Coyote. Coyotl. Coyote. Sly Santangelo. This was superhero comics in the Eighties, as well as by the Eighties, and for the Eighties. Because no one knew what the Eighties were going to be, yet. Because the book had not yet been closed on the Eighties, and so there were many possibilities still likely to be born. Good possibilities! And there was a lot to talk about. And there was a lot of excitement. From our privileged historical perspective, Epic seems like just a blip; other things (we now know) were at work, and Epic would fail, and be forgotten. But no one in the Eighties knew that at the time, because it