A Genius That Only The Stupid Can Have

Hey folks: think I found the best one.

“Well if this happens and is successful, then this Kirby guy can go suck on an egg for pulling this money grubbing bitch move. Personally, maybe its time for Marvel and DC to create new heros and throw the problem ones away for good with the suing families. Its time for change.”

Strangely, I couldn’t agree more — kind of — with the latter sentiment. By all means, let’s have Marvel and DC throw the problem heroes away with the suing families, and create new ones to replace them. LET’S SEE THAT. Oh my God, I’d buy those comics. What do you suppose they’d be like? “Successful Business-Man and his sidekick Loving Father, in final combat with the evil Starbuck Nosering and her Unsuitable Boyfriends!” I rather think her power may be to make Bad Decisions, don’t you? My God, it’s be like “B-12″ all over again (and I still solemnly promise you, that episode’s worth seeing…the most bizarrely satisfying hour of bad TV I have ever endured), just raw, raw, bloody-handed thoughtless self-exposure, pure mortification with red-white-and-blue diapers on it, mess splattered all over the bed for everyone to see. IT WOULD BE WORTH A FORTUNE IN A WEEK, if you could hide it from the helicopters that long. I mean, I think I know a little something about embarrassment; but I’ve never until this day imagined embarrassment at quite that earth-shattering, dare I say cosmic, level. Rarer than anti-hydrogen, more cancerous than plutonium…like a huge unknown galaxy, slowly and majestically spinning in the endless night, made entirely from cat-shit.

Do you ever yearn, nameless message-board commenter?

I never did.

But then — I confess it! — I saw the light.

The light at the end of comics.

“The Legacy Of Superman, Ten Centuries On…”

Guys, Matthew’s beaten you (and Grant Morrison) to the punch, in his typically Matthewish way…I remember back when I was doing the “What Comics Blog Are You” v.1, one of the questions was “are you all about the superheroes?”, and Matthew’s answer was something a lot like

“YOU HAVE GOT IT DAMN STRAIGHT THAT I AM ALL ABOUT THE SUPERHEROES, BUDDY…!”

I have since concluded that there is sometimes an unusual amount of clarity to be found in that position, and I think Matthew demonstrates that again here.  Matthew, I think you better read “The Pact!”, though.  In fact I’d be very interested to see you review the Fourth World, and besides the way they reprinted them is worth the price of admission alone.  Anyone else want to hear what Matthew thinks about Vykin The Black, or Big Bear, or Billion-Dollar Bates?

Matthew, do we gotta take up a collection plate?!

“Maybe I’m Just Too Ugly To Quit…Too Dumb To Know When To Lay Down And Die…!’

Hey, Bloggers:  check out this post today from our old pal Marc.

Now I know some of you have scanners.  Don’t lie.  DON’T TRY TO CONCEAL YOUR THOUGHTS FROM ME

…!

It’s interesting:  Bully’s doing his “365 Days Of Ben Grimm”, and CSBG’s doing “Ten Iconic THING Covers”…but seriously, who cares about THAT?!  I only care about the stuff that made my Dad allow me to buy my first FF comic in the first place, even though the hero was a monster:  the “you might have the power to kill me…but you’ll never have the guts to beat me” stuff.  And of course such is the nature of the superhero comic that if you don’t as a villain have the latter, well then you’ll never have the former either…because Ben Grimm’s cry of “It’s Clobberin’ Time!” doesn’t mean “I’m stronger than you”, but rather it means “you don’t know from suffering“…and they don’t, these villains.  In fact it’s the one thing they can never know:  they don’t know what it’s like to sacrifice. They take shortcuts.  And THAT’S from whence the knockout punch derives its force:  from their shortcuts catching up with them.  Morally, Ben Grimm beats the living daylights out of the villain in one climactic blow…because since this is superhero comics, morality is the ultimate power, and this is the character who’s gone up the ultimate learning curve of morality, and he’s not been allowed to skip any steps…as villains, or more crucially anybody, would wish to do.

And I can think of ten iconic Ben Grimm panels easy — including at least two covers that are NOT “This Man, This Monster”!  CSBG relies pretty awfully on Ron Wilson at the beginning of his career…and it breaks my heart.  It’s like they don’t care.  Or like they’re too young to know.

So scanners, be scanners! Gimme some pictures of Ben Grimm being too ugly to quit.

Sean Kleefeld, this includes you.

Oh, folks:  I drank a ton of beer while composing this email, SO!

If this were a Yahtzee game, consider this my “Chance” score.

Okay?

Where You And I Will Be Spending The Rest Of Our Lives

Hola, Bloggers.  Just wanted you to know what was coming up in the next two weeks or so, here on “A Trout In The Milk”…and, “TBH” (as the Brits say) wanted to make sure I remembered it all myself…

So here’s what’s in the pipeline:

1.  Indiana Jones and the Comforters of Job:  or as you might call it, “House” 101.

2. Sex, Psychedelics, and the Single Superhero:  BIFF!  BAM!  Classics Illustrated presents the works of D.H. Lawrence, now with extra fannish genital-strapping.

3. Im In Yur Wheelhouse, Reding Yur Seaguy:  a response to Sean Witzke, four months late.

4. I’m Bruce The Shark, Dig-A-Lig-A-Lig-A-Lark:  “Jaws” as the first great SF comedy movie. And this will be a MEME, people…!

5. “You Can’t Script This!”:  in which Plok gets PLONED, DUDE…!

And further on into the fall, these titles too:

Forgotten Comics:  Fantastic Four

The Importance Of Being Victor Borge

Death Wish For QWERTY

The People You Fleece In Dreams

…And a couple I can’t reveal just yet, but I hope to have it all done by January, in time to clear the decks for whatever new obsession Panel Madness is bound to mutate into this February.  Sean W. will tell you I’ve been beating my brains out about what it should be…forgetting that the last time it all came in as pure starlit inspiration, and so it’ll have to come in that way again this time around, if it’s to work as well as the last one did.

In other words, you can’t force it!

But now, folks…I left three posts out, of all that list.  Two ought to be obvious for people who’ve been reading along for six months or so…and one is newer, but obvious if you just think about it.

First one to name all three gets RAB’s home address for purposes of Hallowe’en pranking!

Or, if RAB gets it first…he gets to pick one of YOU for the same thing!

Oh, let a hundred flowers bloom.

(And by the way, I just want to point out:  over on Geoff’s blog, Andy the Fourth World reviewer may’ve said some things I don’t agree with, but you know what else he said?  That “The Pact!” was awesome.

I got really excited about that.  Because often we’re all coming from different places, different perspectives (maaaan):  but it cheered me immensely when he said “I care about Izaya now!”, and with the “Darkseid Thing” looming, I just wanted to acknowledge his great reading of that crucial story.  I think Kirby would’ve been pleased to see that even if everything else in his saga lost affect over the years, that story’s still got the power to move people.  Because that was a really personal one, eh?

That, and “The Death-Wish Of Terrible Turpin!”

…And while I’m here I’d also like to say what no one else seems to be saying, and God knows why they aren’t (WHAT THE HELL!?!):  that David Aja’s MAGNIFICENT story in Daredevil #500 has a wonderful callback to Krigstein’s “Master Race” in it.  I think that guy reads his Eddie Campbell.  Honestly I truly and sincerely could GIVE A FUCK about Matt Murdock: “Daredevil” at this point…I am not interested in reading any more Miller-derived DD stories EVER.  Just don’t care about ‘em.  No Kingpin story is ever going to match “there is no corpse”, in words or pictures…no story of DD going through the belly of the beast is ever going to touch Mazzucchelli.  It’s honestly time to move on.  It is.

Except I LOVE!!! David Aja’s work, there.  And if you see what I mean, it makes me not give a shit about the story.  The story could just be random typings.  I don’t disparage Ann Nocenti, she was my very favourite Assistant Editor for God’s sake, I wanted her to move up to full-on scripting…but in terms of old tired mood, old tired atmosphere, old tired post-Miller DD…I think Aja shows the way, and the script could easily just be “jkjlthbgfkktessweh…kklenxbatyejfndfi…!!!”.  And if it’s going to be done, then bloody well DO it.  This is Marvel’s “Batman And Robin”, and it has a nice awareness of influence…and now it’s over, which is a shame.

…But oh Lord, how I do go on.)

Stage-Whisper To Dave Fiore

(PSST…!

(Hey, DAVE…!

(…So I tried to leave this comment on Geoff’s site in response to Sean [thanks Sean, Andrew, Justin, Marc, and Geoff Himself for commenting!  More to say on that very soon] but Blogger got all pissy with me about comment-length, so instead of chopping it down I’ve decided to put it here, because it leads into a Roy Thomas reference…and by the way if you don’t want to do the “Darkseid Thing” you too may choose a surrogate…

(But anyway here it is!)

…

“Well, when “great man” replaces the name, obviously it’s an ellipsis, so the next step is:  what’s its purpose in leaving the name out?  And, fair warning, this may be a little too much like killing a joke, but…

In my Mentalist example, what the ellipsis does would be like a joke itself:  a question raised in one context is answered from another one (heh, stole that from Eddie Campbell) — there’s a high-faultin’ way of saying something and there’s a poppy lowbrow way of saying something, but that something (life, I guess) is profound in any case, relevant in any case.

But that’s a pretty specific use of the strategy of elision represented by “great man”, and I think not actually typical…well, not exactly.  I do think sometimes, suivre Justin, unquestionably it involves self-congratulation for the reader/viewer/whatever…but Sean’s example is the sort of thing that’s more thick on the ground, where the “great man” thing and the name, used together are meant to make a crossing, a chiasm (a kenning, if you will!) of history and biography which is flavoured with the absurd:  since us moderns don’t think of ourselves as historical, or at least we don’t think of ourselves as deeply historical.  Heck, and that was a lot of Ginsburg’s trick, wasn’t it?  But anyway…

…And there’s a little Graves in that too, you’ll notice…!

…Anyway, where “great man” replaces a name conventionally, I think it’s intended to communicate another sort of crossing, of humility and grandiosity:  the speaker of the “great man” business is being tremendously showy about his/her humility, not even daring to speak the rarified name…a callback to religion, I think, where the speakers set themselves up as priests.  “Those who pray”.  To just throw out the absolute weirdest example I can think of:  in the Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason movie “Nothing In Common”, Hector Elizondo is Tom’s boss, and when Tom has a breakdown he tells him about how the relationship with his own father got all screwed up…Tom says, “gee, Hector, I always thought you woulda been the perfect son,” and Hector replies “nah…near as I can figure, there was only ever one of those guys.”  And the efficacy of this passage lies in how the coarseness is decomposed into piety, because right up until this moment Hector Elizondo’s plays the part of the most perfectly amoral materialistic go-go-go businessman, so it too is a question raised in one context, resolved in another…and the “heck y’know, one’a those guys” thing doesn’t exactly hurt either.  My other favourite example of this is the classic filmic version of “grace” delivered in Capra’s “Meet John Doe”, where Gary Cooper moves to comfort the child whose hopes he’s betrayed, and effortlessly walks between the raindrops to do it…heartstopping stuff!  But more often I think we see a “priestly” invocation of the name-not-to-be-spoken, the name known only to the initiates, the holy elision, in spoken form…the prayerful invocation of the “great man” that identifies the one who delivers the prayer as “worthy”;  in other words, entitled to priestly authority.

It is a sort of religious remark, anyway, in that form…and in the context of the Mentalist example…eh?  Eh?…terribly obvious absent-God stuff, I think.  But my point (if I have one) is that in our trashy bathtub-gin culture the “rarified name” stuff must coexist with the “kenning” stuff that takes a different road to reverence, so in mixing these two impulses up there’s some good opportunities for heavy, sonorous implication that isn’t quite as simple as it seems.

And so is open to instructive misuse, as well as creative misuse:  because it becomes a technique.  My third favourite example:  Roy Thomas’ horrendous dialogue for the Wasp in an Avengers story from way back when, in which Jan schools a villain…

(I paraphrase somewhat, but not that much)

“And if you didn’t see through our little scam, bunky, remind me to tell you sometime about a little story called “The Purloined Letter”…

“…By a fella by the name of POE…!!“

Oh, Roy.  So intensely clumsy.  And yet it isn’t like his intention wasn’t plain, in that dreadfully-distorted failed ellipsis…

…Because he too was trying to get a little bit of that priestly English on that ball.

…Wasn’t he?”

…

You know honestly I sometimes think I have too much time on my hands, people.  Clearly I’m lost.

Find me.

Darkseid: Call For Papers

I’ve been spending a lot of time on Geoff Klock’s blog these days: where it has recently been said that the JLA Animated Darkseid is a streamlined and modernized version of Kirby’s Darkseid.

I said, over there: Kirby’s Darkseid seems to me extremely “modern”. So how to modernize the modern? I wanted to say: Kirby’s Darkseid seems to me modern as hell, in fact far more “modern” than just some interchangeable idea of a generic “Big Bad”.

Because Kirby’s Darkseid to me has a personality that I find by turns chilling and admirable…and is that weird? Well, Darkseid is really a kind of comic-book Mussolini, isn’t he? He lets the Forever People go precisely because he is a committed fascist…doesn’t he?

Well.

It is my own personal opinion that even such a great stylist as Grant Morrison misses that thing Kirby nailed, that maybe only Kirby could’ve nailed, being his creator: that Darkseid has a personality. Darkseid is a person. That’s what makes him extra horrible. A lot like Craig T. Nelson’s character in “The District” (callback for longtime readers!)…

…IF HE’D TALKED ABOUT BEING THE TIGER-FORCE AT THE HEART OF ALL THINGS…!

No one really talks about it much: but this is Kirby’s famous “word-jazz” being turned very powerfully towards a purpose, and a subject. This isn’t “Mister Mind has no RANK! And needs to go to a BANK! Because he CAN’K keep BORROWING…!”

No, this is actually deeply-felt and deeply-damaged shit Kirby is saying to us, with Darkseid.

AND THEREFORE I CALL UPON THE SOURCE, THE UNI-FRIEND…!

That I call the Internet…and I call upon YOU, Bloggers…to write an essay on Jack Kirby’s Darkseid. Wait, I will actually NAME you…

David Allison.

The Mindless Ones.

Marc Burkhardt.

Prof. Fury.

RAB. (if Rab is too busy he may designate a pinch-hitter)

Dave Fiore.

And Andrew Hickey.

I know, it’s an old-style way of doing a meme…we ourselves are almost out of DATE, aren’t we? It should properly be organized on Twitter, now.

But let’s make this the last gasp, the last gawp…!

Of our weird world.

If we have to lie, let’s lie in STATE…!

The Summit Of Verbosity…

…I has reached it.

Into Hot Air…

…It seems I will always be disappearing,

So catch me if you can!

The King Of Overwritten Mountain…

…Yep, that’s still me.

And I pity the fool who tries to knock me off!

Star Destroyers, Part II

Okay, that was the easy bit. Here’s the tougher material.

Winnow it down to ten things Star Wars screwed up. For me these are all just little things, little sour notes…I mean if I talked about the BIG screw-ups I’d never get it down to just ten, would I? But beyond that, you can criticize mistakes (as I did during Attack Of The Clones when I was chanting “Die, Jedi, Die!”), you can criticize things that weren’t mistakes, which gives them no excuse for being as useless as they are…but what about the things that just sort of hover in the middle, being uncalled-for? I’ll let a lot of things slide, with Star Wars…I don’t really feel it’s polite to point out that if the Rebel base at the end of Empire is that far outside the Galaxy, then the Rebels probably have a significant technological edge over their enemies…nor would I dream of making a fuss over how come they’ve got all those towers all over the Death Star, or anything like that…

But there are a few things that really bug me unreasonably.

1. Luke’s new lightsaber. It’s green, you know. But for the life of me I can’t figure out why it should be green. The thing about the old lightsaber he had…this lightsaber was a big deal, you know? His father’s lightsaber, ancient relic of the Jedi…blue, in my eyes, for a damn good symbolic reason. And then he loses it, and it is not even an issue…except it ought to be one, it’s a heavy-duty part of his symbolic adornment and he needs it. And if he doesn’t have it, or he gets a new one, or he gets the old one back somehow…however you slice it, and howevermuch weight you want to put on it or not, that’s a story right there. You could cover it in a scene, or you could cover it in a sentence, but that it isn’t covered at all seems to me symptomatic of something Star Wars got drastically wrong…which is, attention to its own symbolic apparatus. Suddenly everybody just stops paying attention: Luke’s lightsaber is swept away and we don’t even see it fall…he gets a new one and we have no idea where it came from. It doesn’t represent anything anymore; what it used to represent isn’t important anymore. Replacement hand; replacement weapon; the focus is suddenly, radically elsewhere as developments just get magically “healed”, fixed-up…we re-set to zero, without explanation, and things just stop happening, but somehow no one notices. Luke’s story ends with him looking back at the galaxy, flexing his fake fingers: he’s failed his Campbellian quest.

It should mean something!

But it doesn’t.

2. The problem of the Sith. Back when Darth Vader was just Darth Vader, it didn’t matter who the Sith were…they were bad guys who choked Tarkinites with their minds. Awesome, thankyou, that’s all I needed to know! But as soon as Vader becomes Luke’s father, it’s inevitable that one of these days we are going to have to know what in the hell this “Sith” business is all about. BUT THEN THAT DAY NEVER EVER ARRIVES, and that’s pretty much unforgivable. I had to go online to figure it out, because George Lucas apparently left that key element of his story for people on the Internet to work out amongst themselves…and brother, what a mess they made of it all. Shocking. This story got straight-up abandoned by the side of the road, it’s a horrendous screw-up, it simply defies explanation and I am aghast at it.

3. The dilution of sense of place. Honestly, was I supposed to find all these dumb planet names that are now stuck in my head cute, or something? They are way too fucking cute, and along with the samey-samey names go the undistinguished appearances. Locations in the first Star Wars were simple and few, and they popped out at you, unfamiliar and fresh. In the last set of comments, the old standby of the “used universe” was brought up, and rightly so…but part of the deal with a used universe is that different spaces in it get used in different ways, neither world nor tech is meant to be interchangeable with other world, and other tech. It’s part of the reason I had such high hopes for the prequels after seeing The Phantom Menace: at least Padme’s spaceship looks as clean and sleek and fancy as it would have to, Coruscant is noisy and Tatooine is back again thank goodness…and sure, Naboo has no character whatsoever to it, but two out of three ain’t bad, and at least there are some buildings. Well, it didn’t really work out, actually…but it already went wrong in Empire, as somebody made the mistake of wanting me to care about Hoth because it’s an “ice planet”, care about Bespin because it’s a “cloud city”…and I didn’t, and I don’t. In the first movie I accepted an alien playing a fucking clarinet, damn it, I don’t think I’m being all that nitpicky, I just want some kind of sense of place in these nonsensical places…but Hoth is just a bunch of ice-caves with people running around in them, Bespin is just white plastic walls and sliding doors, and the only thing about Dagobah worth mentioning is that Yoda lives there. Why does Dagobah even have a name, and why are we subjected to it? The name isn’t the place unless the name is just right…and “Dagobah” is a dumb name, it sounds like a kid mispronouncing something. So cute; in fact it’s worse than cute, it’s twee. What happened to R2 and 3PO standing in a desert, what happened to texture? Gone, gone, gone, like Anakin’s old lightsaber. Never to return.

4. Yoda is wrong, but nothing comes of it. He’s totally wrong about telling Luke not to break off his training…wrong about Luke’s fear, wrong about Luke destroying everything his friends have worked for, he’s even wrong about there being “another”, since who’s gonna teach her? How will she ever know? And Yoda doesn’t even want Luke to go and save her in the first place, eh? Ben is rather pissy too: if you go, just consider me no longer your private Jedi ghost, oh Ben you bitch. This is foreshadowing that goes absolutely nowhere, and it’s the end of Yoda but the movie forgets to tell us so…there he is in that great light from the X-Wing as it takes off, it’s just magnificent, shoulda hit like a ton…but phfft! No business resulting, oh well too bad…

5. Luke the badass talks like he thinks he’s goddamn Hamlet. Now this is interesting, because correct me if I’m wrong…but Luke didn’t actually learn too much down on Dagobah, did he? No he did not; in fact he failed every test. Remember that? Guy was a washout. So, how did he get to be such a badass? Where did he learn to talk in that crazy supervillain way? Where’s all this coming from, Ben and Yoda are both dead, how’d he complete his training? And why is he talking like that? “Then alas! My father is truly dead…” Oh shut up, farmboy…

6. No more models, no more Muppets. I ask you, does George Lucas hate me or something?

7. “Younglings”. He does hate me. But seriously, if 6. is “abandoning your cool design principles for CGI”, then 7. is “hire a writer”…because without a good script, the car crash isn’t taking place in slow motion anymore. By the time Empire is finished, so’s the attempt to do anything more than wrap it all up…and by the time Attack Of The Clones hits, the pressure to wrap it up has become so intense that it doesn’t even matter what the words are anymore, the important thing is to cross that finish line any way you can…and so we get such amazing wastes of time as finding out how Naboo elects its teenage Queens, things are randomly tossed in and then randomly tossed out again, and it’s a dog’s breakfast for nearly four whole movies, which is a screw-up of such colossal proportions I’m not sure it’ll ever be equalled.

8. I don’t have the heart to do 8. at the moment. It’s actually rather depressing, when you list ‘em all off like this. Just gonna post anyway…sigh… and fill in the rest later…