Cosmic Deadlock, Psychic Shamrock, Golden Gamecock…Here Comes Ragnarok

Ah, there we go…done.

And done?

Not quite done.  Good evening, Bloggers, and welcome to the last stop on this rather boring tour ’round the superhero story.  As you may recall, we were discussing what they’re for.

What are they for?

I have so gone around and around this and blabbered on like a fool.  I ineptly asked about good new original superheroes, and got some crazy, crazy answers.  Bobbing and weaving like a punch-drunk perfesser I asked about new rationales for “new” superheroes and got some crazier, crazier answers.  And oh my Lord, the sloppiness of my speech while I was doing all this…!

But my seven dwarfs came through, and saved the day.

So now I gotta try and turn these days of theirs into a week.  Okay, we were talking about about a superhero universe…and how the superhero and the universe are sort of one-and-the-same…but, the question on my mind is, how realistic is it to think you can have a wholly new “superhero universe”?

I mean:  isn’t every superhero universe basically the same when you get down to it?  Are there such things, really, as new superheroes without an old universe?

Can there be new universes, without old superheroes to populate them?

Today I wanted to get truly well-spoken and serious, tie it all together, and ask semi-serious questions about just in what exactly does a fictional universe consist, and how much can it guide the creation of characters…when strictly speaking there is no “universe” part of any given superhero comic, but only the panels and the pages and the dialogue.  As much as saying:  superhero universes aren’t just unreal, but actually non-existent, so no wonder they’re all kind of the same!  All dependent, perhaps, merely on the broadening of a known space…perhaps even uniquely dependent on that.  Not that novelistic literature doesn’t similarly rely on new addresses, new buildings on known streets where previously-unseen people can receive mail and visitors and intimations about their lives…but that’s an attempt to embed fiction in a real landscape the better to explore that real landscape, and in the superhero story this is not the point, anymore than the point of Holmes and Watson’s rooms being located in Baker Street is to show people something they didn’t know about Regent’s Park.  Angel Pavement may be a story aimed at Londoners, but Sherlock Holmes’ front door leads onto another plane of existence as surely as Doctor Who’s front door does…and so it is with Gotham and Asgard, as Krypton and Kamar-Taj…and Central and Coast Cities, too.  (Ah, my second-most-resorted-to link!) Indeed, I was fully prepared to argue that it’s in the superhero story in particular, that these expansionary geographies benefit from being both not-entirely-novel, and not-entirely-fantastic:  that once you throw a superhero story into a less-grounded imaginary geographical space you tend to get a different sort of fantasy no matter how you hew to the more obvious conventions (and seriously, one of these days I’m getting to that!), and once you commit to a space more grounded in the real world you get a different sort again…but if you stick to the middle it’s sort of always the same middle no matter what you do…

So, at any rate, I was prepared to ham-fistedly argue.  And then de-argue.  And oh Lord it was going to be a very boring merry-go-round, so you may all thank Jonathan for anticipating me by a mile, in one stroke, by giving us something new to work with right off the bat:  Iodyne.  He describes her in the comments here as a planetary avatar made of and all about pure Design, plopped down in the middle of the Marvel Universe to challenge, and change, the premises of its conversation with itself.  Which is a wonderful thing, but damn it I’d planned to get there a lot slower…!

Then again, maybe there’s no particular virtue anymore to be found in going slow.  Certainly superheroes have gotten pretty durn dull, in the places where they chiefly congregate…not that no one is doing the superhero thing well, and not that the only place to find ‘em is at the Big Two, but if we’re talking about what they’re for, we might as well talk about that in the context of where they mostly are, and for better or worse that’s Marvel and DC.  Who do seem to have lost the plot somewhat.  Like, a long time ago.  In Andrew’s excellent latest issue of PEP!, our friend Colin makes an interesting point about the creative musical ferment of the Sixties being grounded in nasty business practices and brutal competition…you should probably read it…and by doing so got me thinking, today, about how cost affects risk.  Say you have an industry full of these big businesses dedicated to pumping out product at a pretty breakneck pace, and the problem with it is the same as the cause of it:  that all the products are one-of-a-kind, and you have no idea what’s going to sell from one day to the next.  Now, given that businesses would always like to minimize their risk in the marketplace, they can basically do two things with themselves in a nervy situation like this:  concentrate primarily on hitting targets, or concentrate primarily on taking chances.  Of course whatever they do will be a mixture of these two things, and so risk-management will essentially come to mean getting the mixture to some kind of optimal state on a graph somewhere…but cost changes what that balance is.  If it doesn’t cost much to take chances or hit targets, you can afford to take a lot more chances;  if it costs a lot to do either, you can’t.  Similarly, if everyone around you is taking lots of chances and you’re not taking any, you’re probably going to get buried in the long run…just as when you’re the only one taking chances you can probably start drawing up the bankruptcy papers before you even open your doors.  So when the costs are low, competition accelerates:  in a way it’s riskier to bank on a sure thing than a flash in the pan, particularly when the payout in either case is relatively low as well.  So, it seems sensible then to burn up the flashy sensations fast, and then go out and try to get new ones:  thus every year’s a short race to the top fuelled by luck and throughput.

But when costs rise, the race gets longer.  Innovation flags, because you can’t domesticate a gamble, especially if it isn’t one you’re actually willing to take in the first place.  Copies of gambles, not even pastiches, barely lookalikes, rise up to guard previous investments and make the circle smaller.  You get sold the same old stuff, only more slowly and for a higher price, with less action.  The style of play is conservative:  the spaces in question, whether musical or narrative, cease their expansion and begin their contraction.  Embroidery replaces novelty, and “universe” stops being implied and starts being implicated.  And in that process much is lost.

Well, it’s the same everywhere, and it’s not new.  But, it also doesn’t really change anything.  What are the superheroes, and their universes, for? They’re for what they’re used for, nothing more and nothing less.  You could use them for anything, if you wanted to.  So it isn’t their fault if at the moment (and it’s been a loooong moment!) they’re used to perform a pantomime of astonishment at how serious the latest meaningless thing that’s happening to them is…how very must-buy it all is!…or used to show that the most important thing in the world is redefining cool or showing that you can be sad, or indeed simply being recognized.  No, because that isn’t down to them:  that’s just business.  I mean…

All those things could be quite decent to read, anyway.

If they were real.

But the problem is, anytime “universe” is conditioning character…then it isn’t real at all.  It’s a kind of question-begging, instead:  the space is the space is the space, and the characters are only the local expressions that prove it true through being proved by it.  Aesthetic reinforcement becomes the order of the day, but it’s a very top-down aesthetic — people want what we give ‘em, so let’s give ‘em what they want.  Everything’s contingent on everything else;  and the soul of the creation flees, because there just seems to be no room for it anymore.

Which is part of why Iodyne‘s such a nice little thing, because I take it to be all about something that’s really quite important, but that somehow doesn’t get much attention:  autonomy.  And if autonomy’s not a necessary component of being real, or vice versa, or even both-at-once, then I must’ve got ahold of some old outdated manual for this world…because as far as I can see, it’s a conjunction that everyone worries about, practically all the time.  To have one’s entire identity devolve from membership in a system that serves another’s needs (which as far as I can see is pretty much the current superheroic code of virtue), is fairly contrary to everything these fantasy-figures were made to do in the first place, and yet it works well enough to protect the brands, and so it keeps on going…even as the charge of these things drops and drops because of it.  Superhero comics are frozen as stiff as a modern Event Crossover splash page, for the most part — earlier I wondered aloud why there are so few new characters, knowing (of course!) that a big part of the answer was “why should anybody bother making ‘em up”, but the real answer, the answer of which that answer only partakes, is that new characters simply aren’t wanted.  Heck, even old characters are barely wanted!  What are wanted are role-players, plot-points, nostalgia-triggers…photo-ops, if you want to be completely cynical about it.  Ideas about ideas about what characters can do, and a property that can lock into all that with minimal fuss.  It’s just target-hitting, that’s all:  you already know what stories you’ll need to tell to hit your marks, now you just need the right kind of pedestals to sit them on top of.  At Marvel in particular this has all gone beyond formula, into full-on automatism…a life-cycle of stories that relies on a Cosmic Chessgame, a War, and a Wild Card to keep pushing it around and over and up again.  Sometimes they make up Wild Cards just to throw ‘em away after, sometimes they dredge up old characters to thrust Wild-Card-ism upon them and burn them up, sometimes they squash a name-brand character awkwardly into the Wild Card suit and then make a great show of getting them out of it again…it doesn’t matter how the sacrificial stage-business goes.  The cycle goes on.  And on, and on, and on and on.  It worked so many times in the past, you see.  It’s what people want.

Or, to be slightly more accurate…it’s what they’re given to want.  People are complicated, after all;  they’re surprising.  Well, how do you think those flashes-in-the-pan succeed like success in the first place?  But you can only get what you can get, is what I’m saying.  And you only have to want it a little, to keep the wheel turning in its rut.  No one imagines people can’t want more, or want better, or want other…of course they can.  But it’s rare that someone stops into a convenience store for a cold drink and yells out “where the hell is all the plum-flavoured iced tea?!”, you know?

Universes, man:  in an epistemological sense, they’re just non-natural properties of character design.  Sensed, never seen…

…And so I love Iodyne, because she goes right at the problem, and makes new space.  Heck, I like her so much, I’d make her part of a new Defenders team…!

…Because, oh, that “new Defenders” team, it’s not even the problem in a nutshell, it’s the nutshell in a nutshell.  And they keep talking about it, don’t they?  Forever trying to come to grips with what made it work, so they can figure out what people “want” from it…I mean is it lemon iced tea they want, or is it raspberry iced tea?  Or is it peach?  So much hot air spent on the matter of the mysterious Defenders “concept”…when there’s not really any “Defenders concept” at all, of course.  No one ever gave much of a damn about the concept.  The “universe” of the Defenders…this was unimportant to the people who bought those books, back when there were Defenders books.  All they cared about was the writing and the art.  That’s really all it was.  The “non-team” idea was just a hook;  a hook for Englehart’s Avengers/Defenders War, for Gerber’s Headmen/Nebulon extravaganza.  For Devil-Slayer and Vera Gemini and “Who Is Scorpio?” and Moon Knight.  The Sub-Mariner lost his temper, Nighthawk ended up with his brain in a jar (actually a dish), Val went to jail and then she went to school.  This is essentially what you missed, if you missed it.  That’s the reason they can’t really figure it out, and why when people do wonderful things with “the Defenders concept” without it being figured out…then it stays not-figured-out when they’re finished.

Me, if I was in charge I’d not-figure-it-out some more: make brand-new Defenders.  Hey, wanna see the list of characters I’d use?

Well, here they are…!

Iodyne

Vague Girl

Doc Desavior

Myrmidon

Gobbledegook

Mr. Star

Mouse

You may observe that they are all new characters.  But, you may also observe, they are far from being All-New characters!  I’m no Dave Cockrum, after all:  like anybody else, I have to deal with the Defenders I’ve been left, somehow.

But that’s fine;  after all, dealing with them doesn’t just mean dealing with them.  It means dealing with all the other stuff they’re like, all the stuff that trades on the same stuff they traded on…or, indeed, traded on their very trading…

And, what’s all that, you say?

Okay, here’s how it works:  Iodyne you know (boy, Magneto better pray he stays on her good side!), but Vague Girl is a stranger no matter that she’s a familiar one…say her name backwards and it sounds a little bit like “Gullveig“, so she’s a seeress, okay?  And the closest thing to a Team Leader that we’ve got on hand.  I’ll admit there’s a certain temptation to make her into a certain sort of character, the kind that vibrates between alternate universes (Jonathan successfully tagged that one in an email!)…but there is something just so now about that, isn’t there?  So much low-hanging fruit in the “in my universe I saw you die” kind of thing, the ceaseless modern riffing on the time-travel problem, how to avert the post-apocalyptic future and somehow remain in the open “present”…not that I think that’s such terrible stuff, necessarily, but it’s a well that’s been returned to so frequently over the last couple of decades that I think we’re just bringing up mud from it, now.  And to be honest the idea of a future already-written that needs constant re-editing back into the freedom of possibility strikes me as rather wearying in a philosophical sense…is this what passes for escapism, these days?  Or, more to the point:  is this all that passes for escapism these days?  Talk about your aesthetic reinforcement.  The metatextual implications are so crushing, here:  the superhero form is dead, and we need to re-animate it on a daily basis…the superhero story’s foredoomed, and we have to find some way of keeping ourselves from realizing it.  Yikes.  I mean, it was interesting at one point to see what the free will vs. determinism thing would like like when viewed in a superheroic light, and it may even be interesting again, but for me — now — that bloom’s most definitely gone off that rose.  So forget using the future to talk about the present…how about using the past to talk about the present?  Knowing the flexible future, that’s really not all that big a deal anymore, is it?  But knowing the “solid” past…

So Vague Girl reads object-impressions, is what she does.  And, she reads divergences too.  However, the trick is that they’re divergences that’ve already happened:  she picks up an object and can read it all the way back to where other objects branched off differently from a common “ancestor”, and then follow the new branch of the past up all the way to the present, and in this way you might say she can know just about everything about everything.  Essentially, she maps the genetic history of objects.  But, it isn’t a godlike sort of power:  it takes a certain amount of time for her to mentally revisit all the places in the past an object was, so theoretically if she touches a lamppost in NYC she’ll be able to know where you keep your housekey in Helsinki, but in practice this is not something she would want to do:  if she has to chase the connection back a couple billion years to where the key and the post were both joined in a single mass of ore, and then all the way forward again to a different place on the globe, then she’s going to be in bed for at least a week while she’s doing it!  But given that she can’t actually stop herself from picking up “impressions”, nor stop her mind from wandering down the tunnels of time, she’s only functional to the extent that she can choose to concentrate most of her psychic attention on “simpler” things …and even so, no telepath wants to get within a hundred miles of her toxically-cluttered awareness!  So she’s spooky and she’s distracted and she’s weirdly driven, and she doesn’t read minds but she reads bodies…she reads the world…and there’s just no way and nowhere to hide from her, there’s no way to tell what she’s doing, it’s basically really icky if you think about it.  It’s so invasive, it’d be bound to freak people out…that is, if they knew that’s what she was doing.

But then that’s how she earns her name:  she’s not very forthcoming about it all.  Just comes out with stuff, or so it appears.  To a casual observer.  Who might fail to notice that she keeps herself awfully busy, for someone who’s supposed to be such a slacker…

Oh, and this being a Marvel comic, the potential for a Wolverine team-up needs preserving…so why don’t we just make her a teenage orphan?  Hmm, or maybe not:  I mean what’s with this constant pigeonholing, anyway?  Why can’t she just be in her mid-twenties, or something?  Better yet, why can’t she just be whatever age she’s drawn as being?

There, see?  Done…

And so on to Doc Desavior, and he’s a guy you also know, sort of:  some sort of (apparently) alien/human hybrid born in Antarctica (where he has a Fortress Of Solitude thing going on — it’s a million-year-old crashed spaceship), the last of his kind, he’s many thousands of years old and his mind can’t be read by anything smaller than a Cosmic Power.  He’s tough, he’s strong, he can alter his appearance and fly real fast and even teleport himself over vast distances with a certain amount of effort, and also he doesn’t need to breathe or eat, but the thing that makes him scary is that the thing we rather sloppily call a “belief system” is something utterly foreign to his brilliant mind.  And he can relieve you of your belief system just by looking at you.  He’s wandered the human world since forever, studying the…shall we call it, loosely, the “emotional orientatedness” of human beings?  And stripping them of that orientation-tendency when he feels like seeing what would happen if he did.  Changing minds, or sometimes wrecking them.  Well, the details and results of his experiments would probably surprise you, actually…!

And of all things (and among other things!) he is fully competent as a medical doctor.

Guy’s been around.

And then there’s Myrmidon, and you know him…er, her…uh, it…reasonably well too!  A living suit of armour, not made from metal but composed of a sort of indestructible frozen light…and inside the hollow shell is an Nth-dimensional Void (comics!), that the armour protects the outside universe from being swallowed up by.  But there’s a human consciousness there, too, trapped inside the armour’s skin itself…however how it got there and who it was is a mystery even to Vague Girl.  Just a couple of months ago, Myrmidon crawled out of a black hole somehow…and because of that, its causal connection to the past (at least so far as VG can tell) was randomized, severed, lost…bathed in the Hawking radiation, copied to disk, and wiped.  Just like the person “inside” is lost…and the only thing we know about the lost person is that whoever it is they’re very emotional…and oh yeah, could pretty much go toe-to-toe with any Big Bruiser the Marvel Universe has to offer.  We only pray it isn’t somehow a child’s consciousness stuck in there, you know?  Mind you, Doc Desavior doesn’t even think there’s a person in there at all, thinks it’s a program of some kind, an illusion, a ghost…since he can’t affect the creature’s emotionality.  And who knows, maybe he’s right…

Which brings us to Gobbledegook:  who really is, inarguably, an artificial being.  A creature made of what Doc calls “energoplasts”, that he hypothesizes are bound in a dense network of force-fields, if you were to ask Gobbledegook himself he’d tell you that what he really is, is an angel…or is that a demon…well, he can’t quite remember, and anyway what’s the difference when you get right down to it?  And also he would add that his “real” body is never the one that you see…that his real body is composed of virtual particles, or a neutrino swarm, or a magical essence, or the pure mathematical weirdness of the infinitesimals, and so he can not only survive any imaginable trauma suffered by his “shadow-body”, but he can control, absorb, direct, or discharge an awful lot of hard-to-classify energy through its shapeshifting pseudo-mass, so much so that he screws up information all around him unless he concentrates on not doing it.  He irritates Iodyne, as we would be irritated by the presence of a cloud of mosquitoes, and he gives Vague Girl a headache because he obviously hails from some extradimensional domain whose causality is a pain in the ass to have to think about.  Magic?  There’s every possibility that the crap he does is all down to magic, but then again maybe he just embodies the wackier side of physical theory…and maybe there’s no difference between those two things anyway.  Cheerfully anarchic, Gobbledegook himself doesn’t care what he is, or how he was made, he’s just there to be a Trickster-Superhero, and he relishes the role.

But maybe that’s just because it’s new to him.  To Mr. Star, on the other hand, it’s all been there-done that:  a career superhero in his late fifties, pretty much retired for the last few years, he’s still got the magnificent solar powers and the super-senses and the flashing fists and all the rest of it, perhaps only a little bit dimmed by the passing of time, but his famous “computer-fast brain” is hostile enough to self-delusion that even being massively superpowered can’t distract him from the realities of being, inevitably, an older man.  He’s already gone through the early team- and confidence-building period, the fall from reputation, the against-all-odds resurgent victory and the final confrontation with the nemesis…his motivating loss-of-loved-ones stuff was decades ago, he’s been through his midlife crisis, he’s read Proust and Joyce, he’s already been a tearaway and he’s already been a teacher, he’s already been a “where-are-they-now” story and he’s already reconnected with the hope and promise of life, he’s led — in other words — a perfectly normal life in developmental terms, and that means he lies a little bit outside the scope of the typical superhero character arcs for older men.  He’s not nostalgic, and he’s not weak, and he doesn’t need to make a final heroic sacrifice — he’s not a younger man’s projection of what an older man should be, he’s what younger men will be, once they figure out that there’s no way of avoiding it.  My favourite character?  Yeah, pretty much…because he’s not the leader of this motley crew, but he is their safety net:  Vague Girl’s already lived through a few million years of “virtual” time, Doc Desavior’s been wandering the earth at least since writing was invented and probably longer, and Iodyne’s a moon of Jupiter for heaven’s sake…she travels inside the solar wind, I imagine Jonathan?…but Mr. Star is an actual mature human being, and that’s almost an extra-dimensional origin in itself, as far as superhero literature’s concerned.  That’s practically another superpower right there.  The superpower of having something to say…

And then finally there’s Mouse.  Whose power is, to be as succinct as possible…finding a way in and out of places.

Oh:  what kinds of places?

All kinds of places.

And she’s Mr. Star’s goddaughter, and that’s why he’s there.

…

And so I wonder if my Defenders , though they are most certainly (definitely, appallingly) “not-new”…are possibly just new-ish enough, that they might constitute making a decent stab at taking back “their” universe, from whoever’s got it now?  Anyone who’s had the misfortune of knowing this blog for a while probably knows my “Defenders Thesis”…my own version of the Defenders “concept”, in which they exist to inhabit the margins that make the Marvel Universe what it is…those neither-inside-nor-outside spaces that constitute all that is the “bottom-up” aesthetic of that company, that culture…

And I would ask if you think they fit it, except that — as I said — “fitting” is not what superheroic characters (nor their “concepts” neither!) are especially made to do.

So…

What about your “universes”, my very eminent Seven Dwarfs?  They all remind me very strongly of that Eighties “post-Big-Two” ferment, the idea of the “superhero novel” — my God, such a truly madly deeply radical idea, when you think about it! — like the idea of a city, compared to the idea of a village! — and the idea, again, of the non-organic superhero universe, the deliberate setting…

The intercommunicating setting?

…For plot and character.

They do seem more “real” than the universes of Marvel and DC, now that I think about it.  One’s got to think that if you design ‘em right, you can escape the same-old same-old feeling of the twentieth century’s “half-real” oneirogeographies, without having to be straight-out fantasy or straight-out science fiction.  To go by steps, and become superhero fiction…

My God, what an idea!

So tell me about your universes, if you would.

Project Blue Box: Epilogue

Mystery Machines:  Trash Culture, Cargo Cults, and the Escape from Participation Mystique

Epilogue:  The Blue Surf

Well…

So…

It’s religion, isn’t it?

But let’s have the counterpoint first, before proceeding on…or in…or out…or wherever it is we end up going.

So:  here it is.

And now we can digest our food.  As previously mentioned, religion and science share both an origin, and a functionality:  i.e. each is meant to reveal order in the patterns of the world.  Now, religion gets a very bad rap these days, and so it should…but that’s largely because so many of its practitioners are so fiendishly corrupt in their own persons, rather than something morally cancerous being integral to the system.  Neither is the contextual structure of religion, any more than that of science, simply a machine made to establish social control and nothing more!  But instead religion — in broad terms — is at least as rational as any other kind of human intellectual activity, and indeed it bestows some specific conceptual competencies that science can’t match.  Look at Moore and Morrison’s comics work, and you’ll see that every particle of it is animated by a religious understanding, a scheme of education designed to appeal in rational terms to alienated adults and near-adults.  What do their protagonists fight for, and what forces do they fight against?  They fight for freedom within the meshing gears of symbolic inevitabilities, by setting themselves against the totalist character of other peoples’ explanatory programmes…and especially with regard to the history of the field they’re working in, their heroic stories are all possibilizing rather than conciliatory in tone.  Which makes an interesting contrast with most of the other major drivers of the four-colour morality play these days, Geoff Johns or Brian Bendis being only the most name-branded of these:  whose work is similarly religious in tone, but resolutely non-ecstatic in intent.  Return, return, but never to the source…only to the gallery that overlooks it.

It is, perhaps, the cargo-cult mistake in a nutshell:  what are we to do with these forms that have fallen to us, these many Mystery Machines that have washed up on our shore?  Essentially we have two options:  treat them as we would messages, or treat them as we would messengers.  Are they iconic, or are they informational?  Are they artifacts, or are they invitations?

Is there a wider world without, or isn’t there?

To the Polynesian islanders, as to the inhabitants of Attabar Teru, the question would likely have been ill-formed on its face:  surely if there is any anxiety distinctly Western in tone, it’s the anxiety of Being vs. Becoming!  But for Westerners this anxiety is so overmastering that it comes to be seen everywhere, is warped up to universality, and so the Islanders’ independent faces are quite easily reconstructed as masks that modernity can wear in its own re-enactment, in the performance of its own values and controversies to itself.  Gods, maybe;  animal-spirits and icons, the ghosts of a conjectural past.  Forces, from the world of the Forms.

Kirby certainly played with it, in the early days of storytelling subversion:  finding no mythological being or setting that wouldn’t benefit from a little alien technology…

…And Morrison plays so much with it today he often resembles a kid splashing in a mud-puddle:  throw off the mask and there’s another mask underneath it, throw off that one and there’s yet another mask…!  Muddy hands draw warpaint on a muddy face, that shows a beatific grin:  Pakistani Eternals, prehistoric King Arthurs, a little shit from Liverpool who’s never seen the holy name of Ixat glowing in the night…Batman and Superman, the sun and the moon, Frankenstein at the End of Time…

And where else should we expect to find him?

And meanwhile Alan Moore wonders what the pulps would’ve looked like if their guiding principle had been compassion.  But it’s all masks, of course:  that’s the precondition, that’s the deal.  Because in the Western world, every belief is a mask…

But not every mask is a belief.  Our friend Jonathan asked me, in the early comments to Blue Box #3, if the superhero comic used to be a sort of rehearsal for waking action in the same way that (I suggested) dreams are…and if it’s that still.  And the answer is that, for the most part, I don’t think it is.  Stories amounting to little more than Superhero Introspection, of which there are many, teach nothing but that the characters are ideally to be held in high regard by their readers…worth their dollars and cents simply because they are extant…and the matter of the intersection of fantasy and reality is acknowledged only in a desultory way where it intrudes at all.  So to my mind, this definitely constitutes alter-education going off the rails at last:  there’s very little you can take home from such stories.  There’s little to fascinate, there.  “Batman always wins”…it takes hard work to make that proof rather than precept, whether you’re a writer or a reader, and most people (it seems) are not particularly interested in spending the effort.  So these aren’t the days of scientific education, nor literary education neither, but they’re the days of instruction in teleology…

As in:  where the heck is this all going, anyway?

And in that question lies both a heaven and a hell, I think.  In this real world of ours, according to the viewpoint of our scientific culture, teleological causes are out-of-bounds to the rational mind…and yet the belief in them still slips around the scientific barricade and joins the crowd, wearing all kinds of plausible disguises.  The popular perception of “progress” is a teleological belief at heart, as is the popular understanding of “evolution”, and in these immediately pre- and post-millenial days those popular perceptions embody a constant conversation between science and magic.  Will we have totems out of it, or travels?  Are things sufficient to themselves, containing their own inevitable answers and outcomes, navel-gazing as the precepts of Ever-Winning Batman?

Or is there anything left to learn from this crazy superhero poetry?

Well…possibly.  Because the world inside a superhero comic is rather resolutely teleological in a way the real world outside is not, being as how it’s all thought up by somebody…and yet these fabulously extended serial narratives are made of endless deferrals and course-changings too, discontinuities everywhere — catastrophes under every rock, and hiding behind every blade of grass.  Pattern and paradox are endlessly mixed, and the superheroic discoverers inside the pages have to cope with that cosmological troubling in a serious way, even as their fancily-iconographic costumes announce the absurdity of asking such unserious beings to do so.  And there’s a lot for us to find in such a dynamic, as the Blue Surf keeps rolling in…because we, too, are in just that same position.  So the question becomes:  is there something of the Real in this, or isn’t there?  Are the superheroes figures of us, or are they simply figures for us?  In Moore’s hands and Morrison’s, the quality of admiration located on or near these Mystery Machines is precisely what gets vexed and twisted along the road to answering that question, and so in the magic they manage to find a mirror…while for other artists that quality of admiration is such a given, such a superheroic Pole Star, that “mirrors” aren’t necessary.  Why would mirrors be necessary, after all, when you already are being given something to look at? In many ways, the “bad” sort of modern superhero comic is more instructionally-oriented than ever before, because it conceals a deep vein of social prescriptiveness within it:  here is what the world is like, here is what you must become to find your place in it.  Here is what you must become if you do not find your place in it.  It’s sometimes a cruel, sometimes a brutal system:  offering comfort and belonging, but also violence and caprice.  And how can Robin The Boy Wonder survive this juggernaut?

What have precocity, and then complexity, come to?

Only a fork in the road, perhaps.  Along one path, the engagement with text becomes ever more monological in character:  this is where this was all going, this is how the story ends!  If you don’t like it too bad, we’re busy making sense here!

And along the other, a more difficult participation:  escape and return and enlightenment all writ small, in gaudy clothes, and intersectional hopefulness.  What is there to learn from these things, anymore?  The more cogent question is what is there to teach, that they can help with.  And it seems that the answer is “purpose” — more specifically, the problem of purpose.  And part of the problem of purpose is:

Does it simply arise within ourselves?  Or does it come from interaction with the larger world?

And if it’s the latter…then how do we find it?  How do we get there?

How can we plausibly imagine its possibility into being?

Like I said:  none of this is new.  But the accent is new.  The causal arbitrariness of the superhero’s world grows more pronounced every day, and the direction of its cosmic powers more vague and opaque;  what little logic things do exhibit is borrowed from other sources, pasted in as comforting familiarity…and yet, still preserving a jarring alien quality that cannot quite be assimilated into pattern.  Once, at each major company, the baroque adornments on the universe caused its ceiling to crash in…and each found an answer in the fact of the rubble, that answered the question of what they had been doing when they’d supposed they were doing something else.  But now that their universes are reassembled, the problem is resurrected along with them — as supervillains always are, aren’t they?

And so what is the point of all this?

Well, in 2010…perhaps that is the point.

“Oh see ye not yon narrow road, so thick beset with thorns and briers?  That is the path of righteousness, tho after it but few enquires.

And see ye not that braid braid road, that lies across that lily leven?  That is the path of wickedness, tho some call it the road to heaven.

And see not ye that bonny road, that winds about the fernie brae?  That is the road to fair Elfland, where you and I this night maun gae.”

Sure, you’ve heard it before.  But then you’ve heard all of this before, eh?  Everybody’s been talking about it for years, and they’re still talking about it.

Marking time ’til we see what sort of shore we land on.

I’m telling you, the wider world:  it’s out there.

A Brief Word About Twitter

Sorry, this is a little self-indulgent, but I feel bad…someone wanted to follow me on Twitter just now, and I turned them down, so that’s the first real person I’ve said “no” to, I think…and I’m a sap to give a damn but I figure I might as well say something about it.  Because even the corporate and business-based Twitter accounts are doubtless run by real people, and I appreciate that, but…

Basically I like to keep it all pretty small on Twitter.  I get a lot of use out of it that way, and I’m leery of expanding my tiny little circle for fear it’ll get less useful.  Also, for someone who’s really into something that I kind of hate…Twitter’s a bit of an “inside voice” for me, I don’t exactly edit myself a whole lot, so it’s nothing personal but I don’t want to have to start.  And yet I don’t want to put a thumb in anybody’s eye, either.  So if you’re out there, person I just gave the boot to, then please don’t take offence.  I never get pissed if someone drops me or chooses not to follow me, or decides they don’t want me following them:  everybody’s got to manage their Internet time as they think best, or it stops being a benefit.  And basically I don’t even necessarily track writers and artists I like.  Or get tracked by them.  So.

No offence taken, I hope.  Certainly none was intended.

Okay, back from sappy commercial in four…three…two…

Project Blue Box, Part Three, UPDATED

Hey, folks…

You can go here to see the updated version.  Not that I’m saying I’m necessarily so satisfied with it that I wouldn’t change it again!

But nothing so sweeping as a really big re-write like the one I just done.

Whew…that was a bit more complicated than I thought it was gonna be.

Andrew’s Superman Returns

Hey, folks…

Remember Andrew’s Superman?

If that was too far gone into geekiness for you (and I advise a quick look-see to set the levels), then you definitely do NOT want to check out THIS…!

The sad thing is, I’m still revising it in my off-hours.  Or what I call my off-hours.

As if I have any other kind of hours but…!

Project Blue Box, Part Three

Ah, September, Bloggers:  when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of theses.  Of course I don’t know if I’m really equipped, any longer, to chase one down or follow one up, but I hope at any rate even if I can’t figure out how to finish, I can at least puzzle out how to end…!

And so here’s to that possibility!

***

Mystery Machines:  Trash Culture, Cargo Cults, and the Escape from Participation Mystique

Part Three:  “Magic Mirror”

And then, finally…there was just us.

So here’s the thing about cargo cults that you have to know: apparently, like Levy-Bruhl’s “primitive mentality”, they’re bullshit.

I just found that out: apparently they’re not real things that people do…at least not for the simplistically irrational — “primitive” — reasons that we think they do. I’ve been hearing about them my whole life, but apparently in the real world they just don’t happen. Not that technologically advanced societies never create a ripple when they interact with pre-industrial societies! But the character of the ripple does not necessarily go unreflected-on by the people who are in it. The Gods must be Crazy?

Is it just another way of saying the People must be Stupid?

We in the West, all too aware of the relative failure of our scholastic methods to educate deeply (we hear those scientists talk and think whoa I can’t follow that egghead jazz, man, but if we can’t who should?) find things like the so-called “Clarke’s Law” very comforting I’m sure…since all science-fiction is really about the present time-and-place put elsewhere, eh? But is any sufficiently advanced science really indistinguishable from magic, after all? In the anthropological sense, the word “magic” is far from a catch-all; instead it’s a name for a certain type of pre-rational intellectual practice, a name for a series of perfectly-comprehensible mistakes that form a rudimentary edifice of explanation that remains valid even if it’s incorrect. It is not “pure irrationality”, but instead it’s a precursor to rationality, in our conceptual scheme: and even in the most “primitive” societies it’s a species of reasoning distinctly juvenile in tone…and yet useful even so, on its own merits. Very, very useful. Even to adults.

Superstition…!

Like comic-book literature, it isn’t what we think it is. It’s true, when I see a seat on the bus shaking and dancing as though some invisible force was yanking it purposefully to and fro, I’m seized with a momentary fear that can only be called “superstitious”…but what makes it so, that it can be called only that? Just the absence of an apparent cause that fits into the scope of my general knowledge…that implies the context of that knowledge may have to be overturned, with nothing to replace it. Ghosts I might speculate on, and aliens too: in the technosocial context they are both possible, just so long as they are natural in character. But natural things must behave “naturally”, must be explainable at least in potential, even to a religionist — indeed, isn’t that the purpose of religion, as it is the purpose of science? To explain away the horror of superstition, which (we might say) is in essence the fear that Lesser will affect Greater, in such a way as to overturn that relationship’s proportionality for good? And then in the absence of cause, just chaos…and back we go into participation mystique, only we go deeper still, down into the stratum in which we’re at the mercy of events neither effected nor caused. Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic…now that’s a comforting thought for sure, but not in the way we usually think of it: since what it’s really saying is that pattern may still be perceived even if agencies aren’t known.

I mean, you look at crop circles: those were mysterious to the point where aliens did it became pretty much the most logical explanation most people had ready to hand. And ghosts were next! And neither of those was really any wronger than the “ball-lightning” explanation (and did I just read somewhere that ball lightning’s bunk too? But you see even I don’t believe that!), which frankly seemed like a hell of a stretch at the time anyway…and in the end most everybody missed people did it for fun as an explanation, because…well…

It actually wasn’t a “logical” explanation!

Because its cause didn’t arise in logic!

…And that’s how you make a good hoax, but forgive me, I don’t want to get too far off track, or in a minute I might be saying something really wild and irresponsible, like “superstition is pre-cultural”…and that might in turn lead me into still looser suppositions, like “if superstition is the same everywhere, then it must take the same form everywhere, like a kind of psychic noise“…and then before you know it I’ll be back at what I’ve been told is the “cargo cult mistake”, which is to assume that a pre-technical society that has a lot of gods and spirits in it, that has a lot of magical practices in it, will be prone on encounter with our trash, to make it their culture…

…When really it’s just us who do that sort of thing, and there are differences from culture to culture that are important and study-worthy in themselves, and it isn’t all about uncovering universals. Who takes the trash of the Western world and makes culture from it? The Western world does — because though you always arrive over the bridge from participation mystique as an adult and rational human being no matter what society you belong to, as mentioned before the bridges aren’t all the same: they do have some cultural specificity to them. The technosocial culture we live in has, as mentioned, a problem with education: there’s too much of it to go around, and even the factory-style system of education can’t spread it out there fast enough for everybody to learn everything they probably “should”…so we’ve developed other ways of teaching, other viewpoints on learning, to supplement our orthodox instructional methods. “Trash” is, in this sense, a freewheeling educational ethic that has value specifically to us: we take bits and pieces and throw them all together, we play with our different rational contexts, we mash it all up to see what happens, we superficially rebel against large-scale forces of abstract authority and coercive instruction in order to finish the mission…

And I think we always have done so, at least for the past couple of hundred years, which is why “trash” is a bit of a misnomer. The existence of a truly “trash” culture, in the sense of there being some degraded form of culture that you can just find lying around all over the place, something “just for kids” in the sense of being essentially devoid of intellectual nutrition (why, because play isn’t as important as work?) simply doesn’t exist…at least, not without a truly massive industrial plant. Contrary to (still, unfortunately!) popular belief, it takes lots and lots of work, and lots and lots of money, to produce a cultural artifact without a use, and without a meaning…I believe I may’ve quipped once before on this blog that Twinkies and french fries are the lark’s tongues in aspic of our day, and it’s just a measure of how much accumulated wealth we’ve got that such empty calories can be located and acquired with such ease. Meanwhile our cultural elites dine pretty much exclusively on the real food of the human past, and the more natural it is the more they’re willing to pay for it: meat, vegetables, fruit, milk, poetry. Well, culture can be the same as the Twinkie, but to be that way it has to ride on the back of the same monumental infrastructures: you can have “worthless” art, but you pretty much have to put your heart and soul into making it so, and it isn’t cheap to do. You can have “worthless” science, and for that matter worthless educational tools, but you have to work hard to achieve the possession of such fripperies. And perhaps that’s what led Werthem astray, that he didn’t quite understand this? Didn’t quite understand how rare “degraded culture”, culture not in conversation with context, really was; or mistook the fierce intention it requires to create it, for something clever people might do by accident.

Himself a victim, perhaps, of the technosocial education’s thinness! That warns and warns against making rudimentary mistakes, but fails to disclose the intensity of the hubris — or the sheer mixed-up-ness! — necessary to do so. Yes, maybe the “primitive” people have a story about how some god or other gave a special food to them, but to expect God to come down and tell you what mushrooms or berries are safe to eat when you don’t already know…well, that kind of extreme cart-before-horse-putting takes a decidedly modern mind, doesn’t it? And even then you gotta work at it, when even such dubious instructors as Robin the Boy Wonder and whacko nutjob Reed Richards are constantly reminding you that even the most magnetic conceptual gloss is always to be questioned, challenged, and related to some reality or other…and that even in a mad world of anti-logical technobabble, limits still determine knowledge. Especially there, even: as “critical mass” becomes a Melvillean metaphor in place of a properly-technical fact, and yet if you run against it right it still does a needful job, education-wise, because to embrace this “trash” is to discover the magical merit in illegitimacy that makes it so it doesn’t really matter where you pick up your lesson, whether it’s from Sleeper or Sartre or Spidey…but to paraphrase the great philosopher it’s what you do with it that counts…and there is always something you can do with it, so even the midden is still a location of meaning…

…As for example what happens with that old Anti-Earth of Jack’s, the Great Attractor of the Negative Zone.  Superheroes and supercostumes, yes, but one look at Kirby’s adventurous collaging tells you that we are not going to learn much about the Grade Nine science curriculum here! Because the medium’s most definitely the message, and the message is most definitely about art, instead of science:  most definitely about ungoverned collision and juxtaposition, the mixing of techniques and the crossing of traditions — the symbolic trangression that defines orthodox symbolic boundaries as nothing else can.  You want another quote?

Here’s Samuel R. Delany (with thanks to David Golding):

“The abyssal split between literature and paraliterature exists precisely so that some values can circulate across it and others can be stopped by it. The split between them constitues literature as much as it does paraliterature. Just as (discursively) homosexuality exists largely to delimit heterosexuality and to lend it a false sense of definition, paraliterature exists to delimit literature and lend it a false sense of itself. Indeed, since both were disseminated by the explosion of print technology at the end of the nineteenth century, the two splits are not unrelated.”

Yes:  and so here’s the leap from scientific context into literary context, here’s what filled the Seventies Boys with such subversive fire! The controversies in science are distant ones, out of the ken of the non-specialist — immune to casual inquiry as perhaps they must be, if the social order is to be preserved — but they are mirrored by controversies in the arts, through which that distance can be broken down.  The notional science it employs to make its points scents of the fantastic, of course;  but when real science is scented that same way (through its distance, natch) it can’t very well object to destabilization on the grounds of lack of realism, can it?  Especially when all the logic is essentially the same, all human logic:  through the Radical Cube and on to the Crossroads of Infinity (if you can stick it out through the Distortion Area), you arrive eventually in the very realm of opposition itself, on its own home ground, and you mean to get in, get the job done, and get back to “normal” reality, your “normal” Earth…that is, if you can just avoid the one confrontation with opposites that will end your story.  Which is tough, you know, because all the gravity bends that way…

And the kicker of it all is, that not only may Anti-Earth be nothing more than “normal” Earth just seen from the other side, but additionally — and notably! — the only reason the FF find danger in it is because they attempt to choose an assiduously moderate path through what is clearly some pretty transcendental territory.  Eschewing the path of the saint, who might abandon himself to Oneness’ reward in the infinite profusion of different universes…and equally pushing past the more complex realizations in the Distortion Area itself, the great cloud of unknowing, the static where all the discarded signals are found…the ground of the figures, finally…finally, because they stubbornly continue tumbling on into worldly confrontations, a worldly (illusory?) confrontation is just what they get.  The collision with Anti-Earth awaits…the collision of matter and anti-matter that produces, well…

Light…

…And so maybe it isn’t so bad as all that really, just another path to the same place as all the other paths, but the problem is that they still don’t want to wind up at the vanishing point no matter how insistently inevitable it becomes…and how elusive the path of moderation is, in this trippy psycho-Buddhist collage!  Where the laws of physics do not apply…

…But then, suddenly, they do:  and the lesson comes clear again.  Well after all, what is it Reed Richards is always saying?  “Don’t go too far, kids”?

“Come back”?

“Be careful, Ben”?

Or you’ll overload; you’ll attain “critical mass”, possibly. You’ll overflow the limits of the enclosure, and you’ll have to leave the story.

And so the image of superhero-as-teacher here becomes complexified:  becomes the image of superhero-as-boddhisatva, the orphic superhero, and isn’t it a most curious transformation?  Don’t you think it carries a most peculiar instruction along with it?  The superheroes, battling up through the incarnated oppositional reflections to Truth, crash towards the White Light, the Black Hole, whatever you want to call it…but then find an improbable timelike path turning back from it again, and in that improbability find their heroism as they find, once again, the status quo…

…Of the trash-heap.  Like so many messages-in-bottles washed up on the shore, or fallen from the sky, but let’s just step back a bit — like the heroes from their apotheosis — from the easy conclusion that the enclosure must be either an Eden or a Gehenna…instead to consider once again engagement with text: since that’s what this is really all about, and has been all along. Science.  Philosophy.  Education.  Subversiveness.  Complexification.  Ownership.  Participation.  Trouble.  It started at DC, with the intersection of logic and reality: the bridge to adult thinking, if you recall…but it was a bridge for children, most definitely “kid stuff”…just because it was far from meaningless, far from wasteful. Well, but then things got a little more complicated, because of the unusual position of Marvel Comics: they got a little more abstract, and they got a little more stylized. Sure, horror and SF…maybe even some romance…but that wasn’t all Jack Kirby was interested in, nor Steve Ditko neither. Nor, let’s be fair, Stan Lee. There was a fair amount of ambition at work there, I think we can reasonably be forgiven for assuming:  Jack was the official sci-fi nut and the avid reader of mythology, but Stan was a manic little logovore too, and you don’t have to look too long at Ditko’s trippier compositions to see that the mind behind them was pretty nimble when it came to texture…and after all, where does texture come from?

Not that I’m saying these guys were especially erudite, or especially interested in applying erudition to their four-colour creations. “Erudition”…that’s the wrong word. But “texture”, yeah…all teachers love texture, and they’ll sock in as much of it as they can manage into the little parables they tell. Things just work better that way, you know! And you can see that they do, in this case because it was just that greater texture, that more wrinkly storytelling surface, that attracted the imagination of Marvel’s readers…to the point where eventually they got all the new writers who were busy soaking up the literary obsessions of their own time (that Marvel itself was a part of too!), and preparing, though they may not have known it, to break away from the teaching of one worldview, to the teaching of another. The literary influences, the philosophical influences…the destabilization of the technosocial narrative.  The path through the Distortion Area, that shows both hyperbolae and parabolae to be inadequate solutions to the plot of story. The times, right?

Well, we’re in them right now too, as it happens!

And they don’t stop.  Consider Dhalua Strong’s vision quest in the Blue Surf, where she’s invited by Bala-Sibbi to touch his forehead and part the veil between herself and Great Chukulteh…and then she doesn’t do it, because she too is a hero rather than a saint, or a god. And these are still instructional tales, even if they’re a bit more complex…even, indeed, if they’re a bit more knowing about where they come from, than Superman was. Not that Superman never gets to know all this either: as Grant Morrison arranges for him to be told that “the gold in us, will survive in you”…

Thus the valour of the individual, beset in the field of symbols, is cemented.  And, other sources of authority undermined?  Well…yes, definitely.  They are undermined.  And yet…

…It isn’t quite so cut-and-dried a relationship as that, between us and our authority-sources…no matter what Werthem might have thought.  So let’s think a bit more about Moore and Morrison for a bit here, since I bring them up and draw them out:  Morrison, whose invention (or should that be codification?) “magic mirror” is…and who is pretty much continuously playing with various ideas of the value of the “cargo cult mistake” to the culture that invented it.  Kirbyesque:  like, Bruce Wayne met a UFO, you know?  Magical thinking, you see?  Meanwhile Moore is playing with exactly the same stuff, but from the “other side”…and all his magical Gehennan mash-ups are distinct from Morrison’s in that they ask what we might have learned from our alter-pedagogy, instead of what we may yet learn…and, paradoxically, Moore always wants us to see something brand-new in what we already know…while Morrison always wants to reacquaint us with what we already know about what we already know…

But even Promethea‘s Kabbalistic hopscotching through the reflections of Form, and even The Invisibles‘ staunch refusal of Ultimate Conclusions in the quest for enlightenment, even these crazily subversive uses of the alter-didacticism of our society are really nothing new…as good and as nourishing as they are, “new” is not the name for them.  Back in the Seventies at Marvel Comics, the train of changing technosocial instruction that Stan and Jack and Steve had unwittingly jumped aboard started picking up steam, and drawing the attention of young bright people who found a fascination in their four-colour psychodramas, that answered their need to trouble character…not just on the level of the escape to adult rationality, but on the level of what the hell you’re supposed to do with it once you’ve finally got it, and as a result Stan got much more than his beloved (and perhaps somewhat fictitious) “college-age readers”:  he got the readers who were going to become “college-age readers” in the Pop Art of his imagination.  In other words:  just us, folks!  The fans of Robin the Boy Wonder had found something “apparently subversive” in being able to imaginatively sport with adult roles and competencies before their time, to develop precociously; the fans of Seventies Marvel had found something genuinely (and refreshingly!) subversive in exposing and exploring the shortcomings of those roles and competencies…not to “develop”, that is not to show excellence within the parameters of conformity, but instead to assert the values of the individual, and the individual’s right to be himself, that twentieth-century literature concerned itself so uniquely with.

And…then?

The maturation of the personality (as Jung would say) goes on, into encounter with forces outside itself:  forces not projected from the deep psychological reserves — whatever they may be — but from elsewhere:  from independent realms of autonomous psychic existence.  Yeah:  aliens.  Or ghosts.  Spirits of higher fictions, with naturalistic desires of their very own, that we must be willing to tolerate belief in.  How Werthem would’ve shuddered!  But we’re older now, than he was then:  we already know, surely must see, that this exposure to metaphysical uncertainty only reflects another fact of our existence that orthodox teaching scrupulously shies away from…

…Which is the fact that language itself is most mysterious for its outward-turning nature, and not its introspective self-referentiality.  The flypaper of words and images catches associations, of course:  no one denies it.  But down at the root of language the mystery of onomatopoeia survives this Principia-like view of meaning — something unresolvable in how our linguistic expressions reach out, reach up, to some meaning external to themselves.  Reality:  the problem is, you see, it’s just like our science.

We can’t really know it.

We can only approximate tools with which to touch it…tools that fall just short of contact, every time.

And maybe — the thought occurs — we will never have any better tools, than these.

And so what are we to do then?

Perhaps, only:  answer the question.  I always say that from about the late Eighties or so DC worked hard to remystify itself as an aggressively metatextual space: fictions about fictions, all carefully nested inside one another and wrapped prettily by the reader’s own self-knowledge…well, then, suppose that’s all true, then what’s such a marvellous object supposed to show, or emblematize? What and who is it supposed to teach, and what’s it supposed to be teaching them about? Possibly, the answer is: that refreshment is always possible, because “return” (like Judaism!) is baked right into the superhero conceit…but, isn’t that another Very Odd Thing, when you get right down to it?

That the same storytelling mode that aggressively teaches heroism as a sacrificial return to the world, might also conceal a countermovement that teaches a return to contact with the divine as enduringly possible?

Odd or not, it’s there:  the strange inculcation of alter-belief that says so long as one is willing to embrace the right sort of rationale about playing with Forms, one may avoid collapsing in a mere orgy of nostalgia and achieve an actual renaissance. Which is rather a bold thing to teach, I’m sure you’ll agree…!

Because there’s no evidence whatsoever that it’s true…!

But it is certainly a very desirable sort of technosocial instruction, that is if you can only get enough mustard on that ball to get it over the plate…and so those people who rejoiced/complained at the “Marvelization” of DC Comics may have sounded distressingly tribal when they did it, but then Werthem also sounded like an asshole when he said his thing, and he was Kind Of Right too. DC went subversive to itself when the Seventies Boys followed Jack Kirby’s path and showed up at its door, for the first time allowing in a truly literary contextualization of its comic-book science…and not only did it work, but it worked because it carried some DC-typical pedagogic charge inside it: still “kid stuff”, after all, in its astonishingly optimistic, radically anodyne message! Superman, very possibly, would’ve been proud…

…But meanwhile, over about the same span of time (as I also always say), Marvel was coming to the end of its ability to teach anyone anything at all…cluttering its universe with violently non-technical and (for the first time!) anti-logical symbols, the psychodramatic significance in their conflicts was being lost…and not just lost, but emptied-out. You could certainly still talk about the moral context of knowledge from within a Son Of Satan story, you see, even if you were a lot more interested in philosophy than Stan Lee was…but it was a lot harder to wring that stuff out of Onslaught, or the Clone Saga, or (perhaps most shamefully, given the ostensible subject matter) The Evolutionary War, because essentially these were all janitorial exercises, “tidying” actions…ideas based solely in the ability of tinkertoy story-logic to be introspective, rather than intersectional. And thus as far as engagement with text went, well…perhaps the kindest thing we can say about Marvel’s biggest failures is that they were just a little too onanistic to satisfy even a nostagic urge. Though there’s nothing wrong with playing with action figures, it doesn’t mean playing with action figures is equivalent to all other sorts of play…because as mentioned before, play’s not a worthless activity anyway, even if it isn’t work. And so then, out of little but necessity, came a series of reboots for Marvel that were (interestingly, at least to me) not designed to render an airtight metatextual storytelling space (a hermetic space?) so much as an openly participatory one: one in which (with the exception of the “Ultimate” line, which followed much more in the DC “Post-Crisis” line of renaissance-repetition) the reader was not just enlisted by implication, but explicitly invited in with a great deal of Stan-style hand-pumping and back-slapping and exclamations of how wonderful it was to see them again, and how they’d been missed. “Marvel-typical” stuff; and again it worked, and again (not coincidentally) it carried a profoundly engaging (and pretty darn metatextual) didactic charge — to wit, “the talent is everything, as far as this teaching stuff goes, and you the reader are part of the talent, so let’s break out the good whiskey and start talking about what kind of lesson plans we’d all like to get going!” In essence it was like going from Camper to Counsellor…as DC had staked out its resuscitative territory around the idea of going from Reader to Rememberer…

…And unfortunately, now that I’ve laid all the groundwork and finally gotten back around to talking about some kind of point that there might be to all of this…

…I find that the clock on the wall says our time is up.

So, pencils down; turn in your papers.

So I guess tomorrow I’ll be posting the grades.

Whew.

Dorsal Portal Mega Mortal

POST!

And hello again.  If you were looking for the non-geeky version of Me, you just missed him…he went thataway.

If you hurry, you might still…!

…

Right, they’re gone.

So let’s try this again, a couple times.

So we’ve got the superpowers, and we’ve got the milieux…of course my little “Kinetic Lad” idea disconnects these a little bit, and plays with their diminished relation, which is (I note) not a mistake any of you on the last thread made, though it’s a big part of how modern superheroes are built, and I daresay a big part of how modern people fantasize about building them.  How do you fit a “cool” superpower into the worlds of Marvel or DC?  It’s a question Kirby never had to ask himself, or Ditko…both of whom I mention in this context because we can absolutely see that their ability to create a “superhero space” not only made Marvel’s universe in the first place, but also reached a point where it couldn’t mesh with it anymore.  The Eternals, or Speedball…I’m fond of saying that if Jack had introduced the Eternals in an issue of FF it would’ve all worked just fine (though the universe would’ve looked a little different by now!), and Speedball could’ve come out of 1963 and looked a lot less like it was riffing on Nova and Firestorm, but it didn’t.  The “pure” intent was there, no doubt!  But it was just that purity of intent that made these later creations by the original Marvel architects function as faultlines in their still-developing universe, faultlines that to this day have not quite been adequately addressed as the elements of world-building that they both are, and must be.

Although maybe Dragon Lord would be a better example of a Ditkovian faultline in Marvel’s “universeism”…

…And even though Kirby’s New Gods were explicitly made a part of Superman’s milieu, and still don’t work as community-property toys…!

But in any case, what these guys didn’t do, is just what every young fan of their creation did do…or does do, perhaps, even now?…and so you folks are either a bit advanced or a bit slow, I can’t tell which, but it’s certainly a different sort of design problem altogether you’re onto:  a character-design problem such as the kind Kirby and Ditko traditionally interested themselves in, whereas my “Kinetic Lad”, with his lame Nineties nickname, his ostentatiously “mutantish” power, and his reflection on Spider-Man, isn’t much of a character at all…but he is nevetheless something of a commentary, and these days that counts more…

…And now we will have a brief digression.

On the Spider-Man supporting character called Will-O-The-Wisp.  The mystery man, the one who moans about “what’s been done“…always attractive, but consider the placement:  what’s more alien to a supremely native New Yorker like Spider-Man, than a ghost of the pre-urban past?  Ghosts in general, Spider-Man’s antithetical to ‘em — creatures of the deep past, or symbolically in touch with the deep past, of Manhattan Island, must freak him out.  Especially if they help him.  In a word:  there must be some logical explanation…!

But what if there isn’t?

This is how attraction gets formed, or used to in the Seventies.  Magic, outside the realm of Dr. Strange stories…after all, no comic-book explanations are “logical”, are they?  They’re all only pseudological.  Psychological?  Think of Luke Cage for a minute or two, and consider how strange it is for him to get together with the tattooed white boy in the pointy yellow shoes, from the different dimension, over the frozen bridge.  Two Marvel Universes clash together, here, and that was always what was supposed to be the appeal.  There he is, the kung-fu elf, sitting on your windowsill.  “Hi, Luke.  Need your help.”

Well, doesn’t everybody always need Luke Cage’s help?  Isn’t that the whole point of Luke Cage?

Sorry, I’m meandering, and besides that was the Eighties…but I think the point’s the same:  how do you create attraction in a superhero concept that is all about fitting into an arbitrary milieu instead of carving out new space?  Power Man and Iron Fist both had their respective days as “new space” creations before they were so cleverly collided into “new” new space, or is that new old space…well, it’s hard to tell which thing Marvel needed more, at that time…but there was never going to be a private raison d’etre for Will O’ The Wisp, just as there was never going to be one for the Rocket Racer, even though they were both quite functional original supercharacters of their day, and they did manage to mean something to their context at that time.  Something simple:  which was a virtue another of my Eighties superhero dreams didn’t have (that one I just called “Tap”, and his thing was that he could take advantage of distortions in “energy fields” other characters used for their superpowered effects, piggyback on their energy-sources/effects…I know, at this point “Darkblade” starts to look good), pretty expressly didn’t have since he was little more than a walking explanation of comic-book physics…and a virtue that another sorta-kinda character I liked actually did have, whose name was “Seven” and whose origins and powers were radically unspecified.  You see the difference, I guess:  it’s imposition, or perhaps more charitably puzzle-solving, versus integration of concept and setting instituted right from the get-go.  I mean, believe me I could supply more embarrassing examples…but these ones work reasonably well, don’t they?

How do you make a “Marvel” or “DC” superhero character?

How do you make a “standalone” superhero character?

How do you make Marvel or DC “good” again, without reference to one of the tired charcters they’ve already got?

Or…with that reference?

And how do you make a superhero character (or book concept) that resonates somehow with the times you’re in?  Well, that’s the tough question, really…because it is, as Matthew correctly points out Michael Chabon already said, the why.

“What is the why?”

Either the impositional approach or the integrated one will serve to produce a fair answer to this all-important question, if it’s done right.  But without a “why” it doesn’t matter what else you do right, the character — or the concept — is just not going to work.  Because the attraction will have been left out of it.

Thus the problem of “alternative superhero universes” — well, there’s a reason we think about them a lot more carefully these days, build in those universes to the background of the new superhero IPO.  You don’t like Marvel?  You don’t like DC?  Fine;  but just as the Marvel heroes, villains, costumes, origins, and what-have-you were composed of pretty much constant allusions to Superman, so too the “superhero universe” is practically mandatory, these days, in the placement of a new supercharacter.  And so even to practice the “integrated” technique is to do a little bit of “impositional” riffing, because there are no such things anymore as superhero contexts that grow organically together from different titles into a single macro-environment for serial storytelling.  And since whatever you’re doing you’re not doing that…

…Then everything you do that isn’t it, counts as a commentary on it.

And thus we come to Image Comics…but before we’re done we’re going to touch on something a bit stranger:  Jerry Siegel and Val Mayerik’s “The Starling”, the back-up feature to the Gerber/Kirby Destroyer Duck mag from Eclipse…

By going back to “Kinetic Lad” for a moment, and doing him differently.  Because…

…Say, who is he, anyway, if he’s not Marvel Comics commentary?  Or rather:  who could he be?

Here’s one possible answer.  He’s from a little town on the Colorado River.  He’s a lifeguard there.  He’s a really good lifeguard, because he’s a spare term in all physical equations, and therefore no matter how evil the swell, he simply cuts right through it:  he can get anybody back from anywhere, even from the edge of a waterfall.  It looks like “super-strong swimming”.  But of course it isn’t.  It isn’t anything like that.  If our boy was shot at, the bullets would bounce off his chest (though not very far!) and they’d call it “invulnerability”…but they’d be wrong about that too.  And maybe at some point somebody might realize what his superpower actually is (or at least:  how it behaves) and explain it by reference to an extradimensional transfer of energy, mass, whatever…

And they’d be even more wrong!

So let’s give him his super-name, in this “non-milieu” milieu:  it’s ZERO.  And here’s his origin, torn right from the incredibly wise “what is the why” mind of Jerry Siegel himself:

He’s the son of a single mother.  She was a guide in the Grand Canyon, when one night the meteor showers got so intense they felt like water raining down on her and her charges, light practically splashing off them, and they all fell asleep…except for her, and she saw the flying saucer come down.

Nine months later, the fatherless child is born, out in the wilderness.

So it’s basically “The Starling”, okay?

Which is to say:  it’s basically everything, that any of this stuff has ever been…from Moses to Superman to Invincible.

Right?

But now hold on, I’ve got a Ditko one…which is to say, a “Batman” one. Or, a Capt. Marvel one?  This one’s name is ALUMINUM…and it’s the story of a boy who discovers a blob of alien metal (somehow) and finds that he and it have a strange telepathic link.  The mysterious metal soon takes his shape, when he moves it moves, it’s a mimic.  It’s flexible, it’s extensible, it’s strong, it’s heat-resistant…and it gives him a strong biofeedback sensation.  Over time, he learns how to mould it into the shape of “guy wearing suit”…over time, he learns how to close his eyes and “inhabit” it by teleoperation.  It’s hollow but it’s powerful, and it’s stretchy too;  it’s just a tube shaped like a man, but he gives it life.

Shaped like a man…

Perhaps partly in response to his wishes, while he’s a gawky seventeen year-old it’s a husky twenty-five year-old.  And as time goes on it attracts the romantic attentions of a “girl reporter” who’s twenty-seven or so.  Though some sixth sense tells her to feel disquiet in the presence of the man-in-silver-suit she takes Aluminum to be.  So it’s screwy for her…and it’s screwy for him!  Because this is fantasy taken too far, this is an avatar too easy.  The toughest thing about it is that the writer’s not nearly as much on our boy’s side as Green Lantern’s writer is on his side…thinking of new shapes for his “body” is half the problem for our lad.  It’s a real learning curve…

…And there’s another problem, too.

Domino.

Wherever he goes, if he stays there long enough, people start putting on domino masks and behaving with coordinated mass violence towards him.  It just happens.  He can’t explain it.  It definitely seems weird.

Spider-Man to Iron Man to Batman to weird Japanese Robot stuff, to Son Of Satan to Thor to Alpha Flight’s “Box” and even Sasquatch, to Venom and Carnage…to the Metal Men and Cliff Steele and Mike Moran, and of course ultimately back to Billy Batson.  Sorry, I’m not claiming much for “Aluminum” here, I’m just drawing out lines as far as they’ll go…there’s the hidden hero, you see, and then there’s the transformed one.  There’s the thing where the costume matters, and the thing where it doesn’t.

And most importantly, there’s always the question now, whatever we do, of what the milieu is to be.  I’m sure you’ve noticed one important, very important, antecedent of “Aluminum”, and really that’s what his name’s supposed to remind you of…another Eighties effort, it’s Concrete of course.

And Aluminum’s supervillain is like a Concrete-ized Lex Luthor, obviously:  a creepy Ditko mad scientist.

(But he better have someone else super-powered to fight, too…hey, any ideas?)

You’ve gotta forgive me, Bloggers:  this big loose megaproject of mine has sort of run away with me a little bit.  Yeah, make up a superhero!  Exactly!  But what are “superheroes”?  Like irony, we may not know how to define them, but we know ‘em when we see ‘em…but seriously what are they?

They’re the powers.  But also they’re the world.  When you make up a superhero, it’s as though you wish to tweak the world slightly;  every superhero deforms the world they live in.  Every superhero’s existence corrects a minor injustice, right?

So what’s yours?

Stay with me here, this is going to get a bit wobbly:  I told you already that my Big Plan may not work.  Of course I hope that it will.  It is not just about having people participating who are capable of coming up with a character called “Dolphinex”, the advance scout of an alien invasion fleet who (like that other Captain Marvel) has been empowered to draw on mass, energy, telepathy, just as he pleases…

…But it’s about people who can answer the what is the why question, for their creations.

My two creations here have a huge “what is the why” debt, from their superpowers.  ZERO‘s “why” is retro in aspect:  can the world stand an actual superhero, like Superman?  I mean it is a question that must be asked:  what happens when he ceases to be a simple lifeguard?

Just as ALUMINUM’s power is not retro at all:  because the costume is all-important.  How will superpowers change an ordinary person, if they’re mysteriously given efficacy they haven’t earned, or couldn’t have earned?

O Readers, you have surely noticed:  ALUMINUM tries hard to be “relevant”.

And ZERO doesn’t.

And a lot of your superhero suggestions flow from a world that is already tweaked.

So…

Tell me what the tweak is!

What correction-of-minor-injustice is your own superperson a stand-in for, an advocate for?

And hopefully this will all pay off three posts from now.

But if it doesn’t…boy will I have some egg on my face.

Where In The Heck Is All This Traffic Coming From?

It’s like one of the popular kids linked to me or something.  Very tempted to put in a link to the webalbum…

But then that’s not really what blogs are about, are they?

Seriously, is WordPress’ stats counter broke?