Flashback! To “Red Light Properties…!”

Not much of a flashback, it’s true…just a couple months.  And honestly it shoulda been a “Spring Review”, except I can’t wait ’til spring.

Because, man…I thought this was fantastic.

Absolutely fantastic.  For concept, for control, for appearance, for effect.  In comics, I think you’ll all agree, we specialize in doing heavy shit with a deceptively light touch:  of course you’re free to blow through it all and say “great story!” if that’s to your particular taste — in fact on a superficial level I think there are very few times you’re not actively encouraged to do that — but for the eye that loves to linger, for the thought that loves to find something uneven on the floor to catch itself on, for those things people call “levels”, nothing quite beats comics for finding a way to give you something extra: and it’s an “extra” that never exists, but that it co-exists, with a breezy “pop” presentation.  So at the very high level, to “superficially enjoy” is very close to the same thing as to “deeply think”…and perhaps this is one of the ways in which comics are not just “movies on paper”, nor even (and we’ve had damn few of ‘em, maybe even not yet really one!) “novels with graphical dynamism”, in that they can capture their readers’ attention, capture it and secure it, in a way that only music or drama or dance is supposed to have licence to do.  This, as I may have tried (though feebly) to point out before, is perhaps the ultimate foot of all the stagecraft of opera buffo — I mean I think Atom Egoyan’s got a goddamn nerve, but I was told once by a respected ship-that-passed that his staging of Salome was designed to work on “many levels” because the staging was arranged in such a way that you could not see its effects fully from the balcony, but then again you could not see it fully from the orchestra either:  light and shadow were deployed to such an effect that what the people in the balcony gave up in distance, they were given back in graphical symbolism:  two-dimensional ghosts and sigils, even the Sign of the Cross, slipping out across the stage floor, invisible to the well-to-do even as the faces of the singers were invisible to the nosebleeders.  I mean, as a Canadian I kind of hate Atom Egoyan…but in this he seems to have done a very respectable job by the less-affluent opera patrons, something I imagine as bringing a little Ditko to the god-seats, no doubt ensuring lots of chatter in the intermission, and less artistic disappointment (it must be said!) than many of the stagings that promise the avant-garde but only deliver the experimental…

I mean, really folks.  You don’t do experiments on the audience, eh?  You should probably have your results firmly in hand before someone pays to see ‘em, you know?

When what you really want, after all, is to have the audience feel as though they are the ones performing an experiment:  by being involved in the action.  It’s just the same sort of thing that I like to bang on about in terms of hip-hop vs. “ordinary” melodic songwriting and performance:  where you have to work pretty hard with the latter form to build “levels” into it, and even then it’ll likely amount to nothing but distant cleverness unless the mathematics of it all joins up with the feeling conveyed in tune and vocal tone…but rap lyrics can indulge in a wild superadequacy of detail that relies much less on measuring sensitivity, practise a different sort of economy that’s a lot less Vermeer and a lot more Jackson Pollack.  Not that one is “better” than the other anymore than one has better or more mature artistry in it, but one is definitely more casually productive of multiple overlays that can create the “aural holograms” of place and story that create a powerful musical convection in the listener’s mind!  And so in this, the one type of performance has something more immediately, experientially, experimentally of drama to offer its audience…just like opera…

And just like comics.  In many of the best stories wherever you may find them, place is bound up with character, and thus with history as well, and it all goes round and round in a rhyme:  each thing is produced by the hologrammatic overlapping of its two partners, and so each thing is essential to the process both as output and as input…just as in many of the best comics stories, drawing and layout and colour and dialogue all cooperate equally to control the eye in such a way as to make what might be a too-slight concept in some other medium, or a too-heavy one in some other medium yet, come together into a uniquely “medium-light” fascination that surprises us with both its depth and its superficial sweep.  Surprises us with the way these two are joined, I mean:  because I think we’re always surprised, aren’t we, to find that some loosely playful thing has managed to grip us deep in the hypothalamus, that suddenly our identification is deeply-enlisted in it, that suddenly we look to it to explode our preconceptions about what “medium-light” can mean? Dan doesn’t do anything you could really call “revolutionary” (not really…but maybe that’s part of the point), however he builds character admirably, piece by piece by piece, character itself involved in its own history and placement.  And along with it he builds mystery, curiosity, that fascination…grabbing and holding.  By the time I read the Comics Alliance interview with Jude Tobin, I was already deeply involved in him both as a character and as a metaphor for writers and artists…but more than either of those, I was already deeply-involved with how those two involvements were inseperably joined to one another.  Without his character as specifically-written and specifically-drawn, Jude’s metaphorical status doesn’t have a hope of hitting home to the reader…and without his metaphorical significance, his character isn’t as directly fascinating as a guy you’re interested in, that you care about, that you feel you understand. Furthermore, neither of those things exists apart from Jude’s nature as a vehicle of his own placement and history…especially because this “slight” character’s entire function is to be embedded in other people’s history and placement and character, somewhat against his will and somewhat not, like any of us.  And of course this is enormously fitting, this is extraordinarily acute design even if it is “medium-light”:  any story about “ghost detectives”, if it’s worth its salt, is going to positively depend on a sense of place, as ghosts cement the meaning of places in the setting of history, and the stories of people, and vice versa, and round the outside.  But that’s where the refreshing craziness of the “real estate” stuff comes in, you see.  That innovation of Dan’s (and at first glance it hardly looks innovative at all!) whereby the unique power of living people to move on, to wish to move on, is coupled to (and part-and-parcel with) a wish the dead can’t have:  where moving-on is forgetting, moving-on is pretending…moving-on is the escape from what may have gone before, into the imagination of a new and untrammelled futurity of their own. And thus they find an answer in the character who can serve (functionally) as a dump for all that character and history and placement they wish to be rid of, no longer encumbered by the knowledge of…free from…

Even if everybody with a brain knows:  you can’t really get away from this shit.  The real-estate witches that Ceci jousts with (as she takes her own dangerous-but-consciousness-expanding drug, before facing them!) certainly are aware that all the hopes and dreams of “new starts” from which they make their bread are lucrative precisely to the extent that they’re ludicrous, the transient output of idealistic desire…there really are no “new starts” any more than there are really “new stories” or even new chapters…but there’s just the simple matter of the waves peaking and troughing on the ocean:  energy you can capture and use, even that you can surf on, but nothing so powerful as to make anything like real change.

Which is maybe seeing it in too limited a way, perhaps…but then on the other hand, there are Jude’s old hyper-idealistic metaphysical cronies, and they’re too limited the other way!  So Jude and Ceci are inevitably in the middle, which may seem (depending on how you look at it) moderate, or may seem compromised…but then again, the middle has an attribute the top and bottom don’t — which is that it’s only from somewhere in the middle that you can figure out how to go sideways, and thereby discover new territory.  So, yeah…medium-light, definitely.  I mean you could easily read this as a story about a broken-down spaceship with a wacky crew…the pilot, the captain, the navigator, the engineer, the precious human cargo and the flickering communications net and the pirates…and it’s a lived-in universe, it’s “dirty” technology, it’s “workaday” science-fiction bound by the cold equations and the difficulty of living in confined spaces…really, if you all have any friends who were ever into Firefly, you should tell them about RLP because this is what that’s turned into…hell, even if you had friends who were into Starhunter…

…Surely they would recognize, in Planet Florida’s competitive real-estate market, their heroes’ change of clothes.

And so maybe we should talk about the clothes, for a minute.

The first thing anyone’s going to notice about RLP is the integrated webcomical fun of it:  and it’s definitely no small thing, even though it’s a very simple thing.  The flow of time is directly controlled by the clicking of a mouse, the action of navigating the thing is wedded to the reading…and so it’s full of surprises, really is nothing but surprises…I mean, if you go back to previously-read chapters the very last thing you want is to simply view an entire page “as is”, instead (if you’re like me) being irresistibly drawn to the re-living of it…this comic about the past and the present is suffused with the pressure of futurity, everything’s planned out but you don’t see it…but when you do see it, it’s you who does the seeing.  With your fingertips.  So it’s great, it’s magical, it’s fun!  It’s just like reading comics, only it’s on a computer.  Because all art is play:  and, yeah, you do feel like the experimenter here.  You’re involved, like the cutting-edge kids say they’re involved in video games.  Maybe you’re not part of the action.  But you’re part of the storytelling, and by God you feel it.

That’s the first thing anyone’s going to talk about.

But I’m interested in the second thing, too:  the delerious art.  Cartoony Jude, in his neon shirt…stressed-out Ceci posing, sighing.  They look exactly like what they are:  cartoon figures plopped down into the “real” world, like animation painted onto film…or maybe, like live figures matted in to animation?  The strange sense of moving around underwater, the bright sun shining through a clear roof.  There’s nothing unusual about that particular stylistic mixing and matching, it’s just what lots of webcomics look like, the Photoshopping thing, you know…but the question is what effect it has, and it has a stupendous one here.  We feel high, along with Jude.  It’s all kind of fucked, we’re all a bit strung out on it.  All around you is fucking Florida, the most Florida-like Florida you ever saw…and we’re stuck in the middle of it.  It’s got us.  The goddamn trees and streets and ocean and sun, it’s beautiful but it’s a stressor.  And then again comes the clicking of the mouse:  we move through it.  Is it rocket science?  I don’t know, maybe it is…but it doesn’t feel like it.  You don’t notice that it’s rocket science.  You just notice that you care about it, that the mood of it grabs onto you…such slight stuff as this!  And yet it’s as addictive as anything.  In the end, it’s the only place to be.

Because it’s the only place that it’s like…!

So if you’ll take my advice, I think you ought to go and visit it.

Singularity Sigh

Ah…the Singularity.  Yeah.

I mean, I thought I was done with it.  But apparently it isn’t done with me.  I think you’ve all heard me say that I’m only interested in the Singularity as the fearful shadow of what’s really coming toward us from the futureward direction, i.e. a diaspora rather than a unification, a splintering of science and technology into two seperate things:  a balkanization of knowledge-bases, massive theory-shock setting in as our increasing experimental power starts to collapse the ideal of Ye Progresse around our very ears.  Yeah:  quite the opposite of our machines taking the burden of science away from us, as though you could send your arms and legs to go to work for you while your torso sleeps…it’ll be more like our machines delivering too much of science’s burden to us, too many observations for our contextualizations to keep up with them.  Hey, we’ve had it easy up ’til now, folks!  All we’ve had to worry about is society keeping up with technology — “alienation”, we call it in the English biz.  But soon we’re going to have to worry about knowledge keeping up with facts, and that’s going to be, yeah…a bit of a liminal experience.

But not a Singularity.  Although the feeling will be much the same:  in that it will be an antipodal feeling, a feeling very nicely matched to the feeling explored in “Singulatarian” SF, by being its exact mirror image.

You can see its first stirrings all around you, if you look.  Discoveries in Discipline X rely on yardsticks supplied by Discipline Y, which rely on the consensus figures delivered by Discipline Z, which gets its benchmarks from Discipline X again…but the more exciting our scientific times, the more the yardsticks are all in flux, and these are indeed very, very exciting scientific times.  So you can’t really do Discipline X in glorious isolation anymore…not that you ever really could, except the “brain” of Science was large, and its neural firings intermittent, and its emergent thoughts slow, so you had time to work within a provisional conceptual framework, maybe even spend most of a career there, before the cogency of new information caught up with you.  Time between thoughts:  beautiful, beautiful interval.  But it’s not like that anymore, and it’s going to get a lot less like that as time goes on.  So right now to be a really good specialist, you need to have good interdisciplinary skills as well…at least, you have to be a good interdisciplinary reader.  Which is a tougher job than it sounds!  But you don’t yet have to be a specialist-level cruiser of X and Y knowledge, just to do some fruitful Z…and thank goodness for that, but make no mistake, these are the good times, and we’ve already passed Peak Interval, and it’s all uphill from here.  The days of being a standalone “X Specialist” are going, and soon they’ll be gone…and then the days of being an “XYZ Specialist” will go.  And the prospect is certainly like that of a Singularity, isn’t it?  As all disciplines seem fated to become one discipline, and all knowledge one knowledge, it seems we approach a miraculous unity-point where a sufficiently-intelligent being or being-grouping could know everything all at once.  And okay…so we know that intelligence won’t be us.  But maybe it could be a daughter species of ours that contains some vestigial “us-ness” to it, enough for our own agency to be plausibly displaced into it…enough so that we can imagine being carried along, somehow, into those unsown fields that bear ripened fruit.  Where the children of men and the children of gods too, will see Baldr come again to the war-god’s fane.

So the Singularity, you see, is a solution.

And that’s the problem.  Except, it isn’t the problem critics of the Singularity think it is…and that’s another problem.  Because what use is it, to argue the nature of technological change with Singulatarians?  It’s quite beside the point:  as absurd as arguing biology with Creationists when they could be so much more easily brought low by arguing astronomy with them.  The fact is, to get right down to it, the Singularity is bunk.  It’s pie in the sky.  It can’t withstand the facts.

Here are the facts.

There is no strong AI.  There isn’t going to be any strong AI.  What we have here is a definition problem, to which the tools of engineering (“reverse-engineer the brain!”) have already proved inadequate, and will continue to prove inadequate.  The belief that we can produce conscious self-awareness simply by throwing complexity at a system, is a primitive one;  not unlike to the idea that we can produce “life” by throwing electricity at a bunch of dead tissues.  Surely we would’ve already created life, if that was the case?  Just how complex do systems have to be before they acquire self-awareness?  This isn’t the enlistment of natural forces, it’s the blind invocation of them:  stand the thing out in the rain and God will touch it with heavenly fire…probably.  Of course if there’s anything more improbable than something working in accordance with our wishes based on our lack of understanding of its principles, then the word “probability” must surely acquire a new meaning before any amount of metal and any amount of current can acquire what is popularly referred to as “intelligence”…I mean, we might as well wish to induce salt to taste sweet by cutting out our tongues, as assume that Moore’s Law will deliver strong AI to us without us even doing anything…!  Ah, the metaphor of the “electronic brain”, how powerful a hold it has on us!  Only build it, and consciousness will come…!

But what is “consciousness”?

See, the “electronic brain”…that was a literary solution to an existential problem too, right?  “Man will be discovered to be nothing but a machine!” Okay, fine…but what if a machine can gain a “soul”?  Dwell for a moment with me on the word “animal”, if you will…what does it mean except “objects that move around without the wind blowing on them”?  Objects with behaviours instead of properties.  Yes, once we thought of them so.

So why shouldn’t we think of robots the same way?

You see what I mean, it’s a cool idea for a story…but it really isn’t how real robots work.  And it actually doesn’t solve our existential difficulty, just to say “if it moves without the wind blowing on it, it must be as alive as anything else!”  If that were the case, windows would be more alive than doors, and fires would be more alive than foxgloves.  It’s a definition problem.  We don’t know what constitutes “life”.  We don’t know how to tell if something’s intelligent, unless it’s made outta carbon compounds and has a face.  All of this “life” stuff, all of this “inanimate” stuff, it’s all just atoms and molecules…and nanotechnology’s the same.  I’m not going to be the one to say it’s impossible to make a pencil with a stainless-steel tip instead of a graphite one, but I am going to suggest that no amount of trying to fool the pencil-user into thinking steel is really graphite is going to make any difference toward being able to write with it, unless the “fooling technique” consists of coating the steel with graphite.  I mean ultimately, what’s the difference between a thing that moves on its own, and a thing that only moves when the wind blows on it?  Energy is energy, right?  Reaction is reaction, right?  Processes are processes, surely?  Why should we ever think anything is not alive and conscious, if we think we are?

Like I said:  what is consciousness?  Is this consciousness, only consciousness with an even slower thought-process than Science?  Sure, it’s “wind” that sculpts it and causes its changes, but it isn’t “real” wind…or is it?

Can the electrochemical processes of the brain be considered “wind”, by some definition?

You see…it’s ridiculous.  Because of course the electrochemistry of the brain can be called “wind” (by the way, did you know that Odin was originally a Wind-God?), but that doesn’t help us to make machines that can pass the Turing test.  Just like, if you’ll pardon this brief digression, you can’t discover Einsteinian physics from quantum-mechanical postulates:  because the first is physical reasoning based on visual apprehension of systems, and the second is physical reasoning based on auditory apprehension of systems.  Yeah:  I’ll say it.  The barrier to any GUT is in essence a sensory barrier.  Bear in mind that from a very strict evolutionary perspective there is no difference between sight and hearing — both are equally based on physics and chemistry, the properties of elements and media, the fact that from a certain perspective there is no difference between an organism and its surroundings…or, sorry, is that evolution talking, after all?

Because it sounds like philosophy, doesn’t it?

Except it doesn’t:  because philosophy doesn’t even exist without the supposition that there are differences in the field of existence, that are capable of categorization.  And understanding.

So where is the understanding of consciousness, in the world of AI research?

Well…

There is none.  Not since Alan Turing.  And by the way have you read his famous test?  To this day there is no computer that can satisfy its conditions.  We have computers that can beat Grand Masters in chess…we have computers that can “learn” from their environments, backed by a speed of thought unimaginable to the human physical structure.  So why don’t we have thinking machines yet?

For heaven’s sake, how long do we have to wait?

That’s how you know the Singularity isn’t coming, friends.  Because our technologists may be fully of the twenty-first century, but their philosophy’s strictly of the nineteenth.  Possibly even:  the eighteenth.  Because that’s when John Locke coined the term “consciousness”, eh?  And meant it to mean:  that which can be used to determine a person’s responsibility for their actions.  With “consciousness”:  responsibility.  Without “consciousness”:  by definition, no responsibility…

…Hey, what were we talking about, again?

OH YEAH THAT’S RIGHT.

Singulatarians do not know what they are talking about.

There’s no strong AI.

There can’t be any strong AI.

Because we don’t even know what it would look like.

None of our yardsticks for the thing popularly known as “intelligence” may be right.

In fact they may always have been wrong…and we’re only just now finding out about it.  And, how unfortunate that would be!  What a problem for the progress of human knowledge!

Oh, if only there was some solution to it…!  Preferably an easy one…!  BUT THERE ISN’T.

Sigh…

Seven Soldiers Strike!

Oh my goodness, Bloggers…out of nowhere, our friend Mr. C. Lue Disharoon has gone fully above and beyond and offered a new (or, to be accurate, two new) marvellous additions to the Seven Soldiers Of Steve project…additions I had once considered as superfluous, but which he makes brilliantly clear as being absolutely necessary, absolutely indispensible…

It’s a natural mistake on my part.  So often in defining marginality, that state of being neither fish nor fowl, one is tempted to look only in towards the centre for contradistinguishing forces…but of course one can never get a complete picture of “what liminality is”, in that way.  Because outside the concentric circles of belonging also lies a Void that no circle can encompass, an irruptive creativity possessed of its own centre…

…Or, at least:  locus.  Lue asks:  “from whence does the will spring?”, and I think I must concede that it’s the one thing the central regions cannot answer by simply manufacturing their own domesticated shadows, their own self-secure opposites…outside all the circles of predictable consequence, outside all the enclosures of pattern and reason, the ruin of Omegaville exerts its amazing attraction, that bends the outmost borderline of causality away into something elliptical and strange, uncertain, and perhaps even possibly doomed.

But what’s “doomed” anyway, except the state of playing by the central rules and losing?

Hey:  don’t wait.

Go click those links, and get yourself some fewer answers.

Wonderful job, Lue!  And thanks a lot.

Where The Bread Was Baked And Sold

(Sorry, that’s a private in-joke, Bloggers…)

But hustle on over, won’t you, to the land of the Mindless Ones, there to peruse a whole lot of perambulations around a point by me, fortunately bracketed by some straight-to-the-mains let’s-get-tucked-in evaluative action on the part of all our usual go-to analysts!  My piece is a little screwed up [EDIT: BUT THEN VERY RAPIDLY REPAIRED, THANKS MINDLESS!], but that’s only lucky for you…everyone else’s is pretty much perfect.

And while you’re at it, and just for dessert, why don’t you revisit PEP! and PEP!2 as well?  Why did you know you can even take a piece home with you?

Whither Wonder Woman?

So…here’s a problem, and a solution.

I was going to write a million words here, seeing as how this all connects with all the stuff I was saying before, all the Mystery Machines and Made-Up Superheroes and like that…but as it turns out, a million words is not necessary.

Because it’s just this:  when I showed my Wednesday Comics around to my non-comics friends, the biggest hit by far was Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman, that beautiful and slightly-hard-to-read YA off-model WW…I mean, here is a strange thing, okay?  They were interested in reading it.

Let’s chew on that a moment, Bloggers.  Both girls and boys:  interested in reading Wonder Woman.  Not merely interested in Wonder Woman!  But interested in reading Wonder Woman.

When’s the last time you were interested in reading Wonder Woman?

I think Ben Caldwell must’ve seen the same kinds of things online that I did, a few years ago.  Independent WW reimaginings, in various styles…things done for the love of it, things for teenage girls and not completist dudes in their late thirties.  Not complicated things, mind you!  Not even uncommon things.  But just, you know…

…Relevant things.

And you might be surprised (or you might not!) to learn that it doesn’t actually take much, to make relevant superhero-fantasy entertainment.  Because the relevance is sort of baked-in, see?  Being that it’s all a matter of what the idealized figure does:  how the problems of identity and society are worked out, and in what environment, and to what purpose.  “Being grown-up”, for example…that’s a big fascination in this sort of thing.  Every child’s number-one object of fantastic flight, whether it goes over in disguise or is put right there on the page so that no one can miss it…is nothing but that most mysterious world of motive and action and instrumentality, the world of the adult:  keys jingling in pockets, change on the dresser, a job involving a special hat, watches and calendars and bad dating experiences and transcendent freedom.  The self, reconstructed as important.  The wider world, reconstructed as a home…and without the need for water wings.

But “being grown-up” is only one kind of maturation-based fantasy;  as great as it is, there are others as well.  For example, not being grown-up, but growing up, that’s a mysterious world of adventure too!  Every adult enjoys the fantasy of “being an adult” in the same way, which is pretty much the same way they enjoyed it when they were a child:  sure, that important self stuff, it’s great! James Bond, Jack Ryan, Ellen Ripley…Bruce Wayne and Hal Jordan?  But then on the other hand you also have the pleasures of Peter Parker, Harry Potter (yes, Harry Potter)…Dick Grayson and Kyle Rayner?  Relevance, folks:  it really is quite easy to come by.  It’s natural.  And — in my humble opinion, anyway — it’s what sells comics.

Just:  not Wonder Woman comics.

And to be honest, it’s pretty easy to see why.  “The Mission to Man’s World”, I mean okay…so what is it?  Once it was something, perhaps.  But now, who knows.  Seriously.  WHO KNOWS WHAT IT IS.  Oh, individual writers may have their ideas about it, but individual writers don’t last long…and apparently it is now an article of editorial faith that Wonder Woman must not only have a mission, but be all about it, no matter who’s writing her…and okay, she’s in the JLA, but so what?  What can that be made to mean over the long term?  Aside from her just being in it, that is…which is, y’know, great and everything…but still…

…It doesn’t make her more than a bit player, just because she’s there.  You know?  No, the only thing that makes her more than a bit player is that she’s Wonder Woman…but the problem with that is, I submit it to you, that no one can make much in the way of heads or tails of what being Wonder Woman should mean.  In other words:  why anyone should read her.  Hey, don’t look at me — I’ll read anything, under the right conditions.  I collected a Batwoman comic just recently, for heaven’s sake.  I’d collect a Ben Caldwell Wonder Woman book too.  Boy, would I!  But the only problem is…

As far as I can tell, that book’s just not going to be made.  Is it.  I mean, you could have it, but it could never be “real Wonder Woman”.  Because real Wonder Woman has to hang out with real Batman and real Superman, and that real Wonder Woman is boring no matter what else you do to her, because by and large she’s turned into nothing but an exercise in her own self-justification.  “Why Must There Be A Wonder Woman?” It’s a question every writer/artist team at least since the mid-Eighties and probably since the mid-Sixties has been at excruciating pains to answer, and in the end — like that other, related perennial “Who Is Donna Troy?” — the answer has come down that there’s just no there there.  Hey, no one asks why there must be a Batgirl, you know?  Batgirl’s anything but lacking in justification:  Batgirl’s just plain awesome, and everybody knows it.  But then Batgirl is more than just a token;  Batgirl has stuff to do, besides proving she can be “real”.  A million Batgirl miniseries can’t damage the usefulness of Batgirl, she’s an active fantasy-identification character who can tell any story — can tell all different kinds of stories — without ever diluting her “iconic” appeal.  But Wonder Woman is constrained by her own “iconic” status:  Wonder Woman is not an active fantasy-identification character, but a passive one.  Everybody knows her — she’s on lunchboxes, she’s in cartoons — but the real Wonder Woman is static, so wherever she’s in motion she’s by necessity just a riff.  Real WW is a posed figure: just an idea, not a character.  You’re not supposed to identify with her anymore — you’re just supposed to admire her, as the “icon” she is.  Who knows what she’s really about?  Many talented writers have tried their hand at bestowing some lasting characterization on her, but with the best will in the world it’s never stuck, it’s never crossed the blood-brain barrier into real WW.  Sure, throw a real live human actor into the mix and you’ve got something!  Hey, concentrate on her creator’s original intentions and you’ve got something too!  But whatever that is, it’s all you’ll ever have.  Because if you had a Special-Imprint Wonder Woman you could make her work, probably — Vertigo Wonder Woman — but then do you really want to put yourself in a position where “real” WW is hated by the only people who like to read WW?  Well…

It’s really the same problem, you see.  Managing these corporate brands, it’s no picnic lemme tellya!  You can’t make Wonder Woman good, without changing her;  but if you do change her, then you screw up the static admirableness that makes her such a valuable token.  If this were another time, if people cared less, if comics were just for kids and you didn’t have to care what you did…well, then you could just let those concerns go.  But these aren’t those times, these are these times:  the times wherein tokens are badly needed, because they’re the times wherein respectability is of the most overriding importance.  Because you’ve got lunchboxes to move, you know?  And, what’s more:  a self-image to maintain.  So you can do anything you want to with Superman and Batman, because to roughen their edges and ruffle their feathers is to court a greater respectability:  more “literary” Batman and Superman, more “realistic” Batman and Superman, more culturally-significant Batman and Superman!  But with Wonder Woman, what can you possibly do?  Turn her “dark”?  Turn her “realistic”?  Spunky?  Scary?  Lusty?  Witty?  Witchy?

Why would you?

If you didn’t have something to teach with it.  Which is to say:  somewhere for it all to end up.

So…oh my God, is it actually to be a million words now, after all?  Is it?  After I promised it wouldn’t be?  For heaven’s sake then, what’s the answer, to all this Wonder Woman jazz…!

Okay, fine.  Here’s the answer.  And it’s an easy one.

What do you do with Wonder Woman?

Open-source her.

Ben Caldwell noticed it and I did too:  all the amateur YA WW stuff is huge fun.  Everything that departs from the current boring old WW template is a blast to read.  There’s no reason people couldn’t be reading all kinds of Wonder Woman, all over the place…if the folks at DC would just finally trying to stop saving what can’t be saved, stop trying to link up two things that no longer have anything to do with one another.  WW the brand is what you put on lunchboxes and in cartoons;  WW the brand is working fine, in its static perfection.  But as a result of that brand-imperative WW the character is about as interesting as doing community service, at least while she’s operating within the confines of official DCU exclusivity.  Hey, look:  the old Lynda Carter show, with the WWII setting…seriously, that would be off-model WW today, know what I mean?  Because it was off-model even then.  But does it matter?

Do you care?

Should you care?

What’s being saved here, in the name of more JLA comics featuring Wonder Woman?  Nothing.  What’s holding Wonder Woman back from popularity, except her placement in the “DCU”?  Nothing.  And so what’s really being added by keeping her there, what would be at risk if she weren’t?

Is it really just a matter of how “real” she is?

One of these days, Wonder Woman is going to enter the public domain.  When that happens, it won’t be like when Superman and Batman enter the public domain.  Superman and Batman will still be the moneymaking props of whatever company DC manages to become.  People will still be dying to read “real” Superman and Batman stories, and it’ll simply be a matter of getting the best possible talent to work on them.  But Wonder Woman will be totally different. No one will ever be dying to read the “real” stuff;  no one will be dying to write the “real” stuff.  The real stuff won’t be “real”.

Because it’s already not real.

Because the brand is empty-centred.  Uniquely empty-centred.  Because Superman and Batman, those two are like Sherlock Holmes or Father Brown…who wants to read the “fake” stuff?  But Wonder Woman’s like King Arthur, and it’s all the fake stuff if you’re not a scholar.  If we think of it in Lunchbox Terms, you can boil it down like this:  into a small number of very simple ways to make money.  Down one road, you license your character to someone else working in another medium, so they can strip away all the “on-model” stuff that detracts from that character’s likeability…you know, the stuff you encumber the character with in your medium.  And then lunchbox business proceeds to be done.  Down another road, you yourself strip away, in your medium, all the stuff that detracts from your character’s likeability…and then license the character anyway, hoping that not only will lunchbox business be done, but comics business as well.

But there’s a third road…

Which is, stop thinking of your character as part of a TEAM…

And start thinking of her as part of a MEME.

And set her free.  Am I saying (you must be wondering) that DC would be better off just giving Wonder Woman away to anyone who wants her?  Well, I guess that’s the dream…but journeys, thousand miles, single steps, eh?  So, no, don’t give her away…

…Just stop keeping her, that’s all!

For starters, stop keeping her from people like Ben Caldwell.  Because, seriously, if there’s one thing we’ve all learned through our adventures in adulthood is that it’s always later than we think…and people don’t have to read Wonder Woman, you know.  They don’t have to want to, and you don’t have to want them to.  If you liked, you could completely abandon any desire to have anyone read her who isn’t already reading her, and let howevermany people might read her if you did something different…instead go off and find something they like better.  I mean, that’s really easy to do, all that’s necessary is to forget what time it is.  The people who’d cheerfully read a YA WW, you can always pretend they’ll always be around if you ever feel like attracting them.  And I don’t really care if you do or not, now that I think about it…I mean, why should I?

Why shouldn’t Wonder Woman just die off and be forgotten?

What would be the harm?

This isn’t 1941, you know.  Girls have strong female heroes whose exploits they can read, and watch, and identify with.  Heck, you can even find such heroic examples who have complicated relationships with the Greco-Roman gods, if you only look!  And so maybe WW is a great, natural fit for that role — maybe she’s even the best fit for that role — but if she doesn’t fill it, it isn’t like no one else will.  She isn’t filling it now, and others are.  This time next year, she still won’t be filling it.  Because the truth is, she’s just so encumbered with crap no one cares about, that she can’t fill it.  What might a Wonder Woman strip have to teach, to adults as well as children, if Wonder Woman licenses went far out into the wider world?  Like ripples:  and what might we all potentially have to learn from them?  Well, one thing I’m sure might be carried on the wave, is a new spin on a familiar truth:  that repression is never a good strategy for solving your problems.  “We’ve taken a mass medium and made it into a subculture”, saith Comic-Book Guy, but that can only be the most instinctive analytical posture available to us as regards the history of mainstream superhero comic-book fiction — and its readers — and its makers — because perspective always needs hindsight…

…But hey that isn’t ALL it needs, so let me just ask you all:  how often is it really that a vital fictional character comes down into the public domain from private hands?  Quick, name ten!  And now subtract from that number the vital characters whose future stories are likely to be better, than most of their past stories.  And what are you left with?

Pretty much just Wonder Woman?

…I think it’s easy for us to underestimate just how much subversive art-creation is really going on in our culture, working around the necessity of making occluded references to closely-guarded intellectual property.  Those of you who know me, will know I’m hardly a “Copyleft Hawk” type of guy…but I think even a mild-mannered fellow like myself can see that a lot of art’s been made while dodging the searchlights over the last hundred years or so.  “Conscious riffing” has made it possible for analogues to tantalize us, for illicit homages to delight us, but that doesn’t by any means cover all the learned responses of the Century Of Psychology vis-a-vis its “protected” stories…at times I feel it’s like we’re all teenagers slipping out at night after curfew, going down to the river to do all the things we’re not supposed to do, getting into all that not-really-trouble our not-really-rebellious minds can concoct…in the emulation of adulthood, of course.  And my goodness but how liminal it all is, eh?  We would hardly know what to do with real freedom, should it suddenly be visited upon us just a bare handful of years before its proper time.  After all, in us freedom inspires terror as much as desire, as we straddle the present and try to hang on…

…As we try to hang on to what is by its nature fleeting.

Because as delicious as it is, eventually we must agree to come through it…either that, or develop terrible neuroses.  Because eventually, every protest has its effect…y’know?

Eventually, everything changes.

So I guess I may’ve lied — twice! — about the whole million words thing, but finally I think we’ve gotten where it was I wanted to go.  In every way that counts, Wonder Woman is as good as in the public domain already…except in just one way that counts, and that’s the way in which people with genuinely great Wonder Woman stories to tell can’t tell them.  And I gotta tell you, for sure:  they’re fuzzing at the edges.  They’re absolutely a cloud.  And so here we are with the whole Internet spread before us, the lowest-cost distribution system ever for the priceless hours that talented people put in on labours of love…and it opens the door to anyone…but what we’re not understanding about it, I believe, is that it’s much more than just a copy of one of our old “Wild West” media scenarios.  Over in the world of quantum computing they’re making the same mistake:  assuming that quantum computation will work just like classical computation, only with more cheating.  Maybe I jump the gun on a possible future post, here, but I’ve just got to say it:  you can use quantum effects to get “better” classical results, but in the end it’s like using the Internet to get “cheaper” distribution of regular old truck-and-highway product.  I mean, you can do it!  And it’s definitely cheaper…!

But it’s a bit like pretending e-mail is just a faster way to send letters.  You see, we’re conceptually-imprisoned by all these inadequate portmanteaux — personally I think it started back in 1905 with “spacetime”, but I guess that’s really going off on a tangent — that start as jokes, and then become sales tactics, and then become orthodox perceptions.  Rigid definitions;  verbal barricades.  Iron-y bars, that do in fact a prison make.  Have you heard this one before, Bloggers?  When my brother first explained e-mail to me ‘way back when, I LAUGHED…and said “that’s hilarious, because how is this like mail?“  Because it wasn’t anything like it then, just as it isn’t anything like it now.  We’ve fallen so far away from Marshall McLuhan, eh?  We look at a piece of steel, and we call it “rock”…we look at a piece of plastic and we call it “bone”.  We look at an interference pattern and call it “computation”…

…So I suppose you can guess what sort of name I’d say that thinking goes by?

We look at a piece of intellectual property, and we think of how to defend it from exploitation.  But we are so guilty (in my opinion) of not taking things on a case-by-case basis, that we can’t see how sometimes our defence only destroys the value of the thing we’re defending.  What’s the value — for example! — of the comic-book character known as Wonder Woman?

At the moment, for the most part, as far as these eyes can see…it’s expressed negatively:  by how much money is not being made from her.  By how many people are not finding any satisfying employment/enjoyment in the existence of that character.  Yeah, you heard it here first:  Wonder Woman functions as a brake on GDP, even counting all the lawyers’ fees.

In a way, that’s what makes her special.

Because psychologically, she’s our hurdle.

How would DC Comics suffer, if “Wonder Woman Licenses” were available starting at one dollar?  And going up from there.  I am not sketching out a blueprint for corporate predation here…in fact I’d fight like hell against predatory WW “hereinafter named Licenses”…but how would DC take a hit, any kind of hit, if they simply abandoned the “empty-centred” strategy of that character’s development and exploitation?  The folks on Whitechapel could donate their Ctl-Alt-Cover designs to worthy charities, and ask DC to waive the dollar.  Online YA WW strips could split their coffee-cup and T-shirt take with the copyright-holder.  And Wonder Woman would be out there.

Heh.  “Out there.”

Hey, let me tell you guys a story about a music video shoot I once attended.

I can’t give many details.  But it went approximately like this:  a day of shooting on a Big Idea, and at the end when everybody was just about dead beat, one of those “hey, fuck it, let’s try something” moments…that resulted in cries of “that is so funny!” and “that is so annoying!” and “that is so stupid!”…and then it went on up to be presented to the record execs alongside the “proper” version.  And the proper version got (I thought:  far too cavalierly) shot down, and so then the funny/annoying/stupid one came out, and it didn’t actually get “shot down”…

…Because it didn’t even get graded on the same scale of dismissiveness.  Because instead of “I’m not sure this is good enough” the prevailing thought seemed to be:  “this makes our company look stupid, this calls our good name into disrepute, this isn’t worthy of us.”

And me, who’d just that day encountered the ugly remnants of the English will-to-classism and found it quaint, and cute aw like a self-important kitten, and well if you don’t want to be ridiculed by random log-sawing Canadians who’re getting on a plane in a week anyway maybe you shouldn’t chase the puerile power-dreams of the schoolyard monkey-bars into fucking ADULTHOOD YOU SAD BASTARDS…I guess it goes without saying this was in downtown London?  And I met some of the swingin’-est people I ever met in my life in London, but there were also some, oh what is that convenient English colloquialism…cunts…

Anyway, me:  that’s when I saw the back of the will-to-classism hand, even (yea verily!) among the tragic America-worshippers.  Because these executive folks cared what people thought of them, more than they cared about money.

And I knew, because I’d grown up with America like John D. grew up with Tom D…that in America they would’ve said “yeah, let’s take the annoying one that makes us look like fuckheads, that’s AWESOME…!  People will grow to HATE IT…!” And then they would’ve gone straight to the hot tub and the speed-dial.  I mean I’m not saying it’s better…

I’m just saying that one group of people cares about something that conditions their choices in the same way that ethics ought to condition choices, except it isn’t actually ethical, it’s only something that co-opts the calculus of ethicity in order to tranquilize the conscience…and oh my God, why don’t we talk about going off on a tangent…!

…And the other group just plain doesn’t give a damn about anything but money, and they’d tell you so.

And it’s true, both groups suck so much black and corroded shit that it almost seems they must be drawing it from some sort of Darkshit Dimension…

…But the point is, if one truly understands that one is only in this for the money…I mean if that is one’s position…then one should not have a problem doing something with potentially beneficial social results, if there’s money in it.  And yet even in America…!

Bad people are leery of making good moves.

But what if one of the licensed online Wonder Women was bisexual or something?

Yeah, well…what if? I’m sorry, when did this become the 1950s?

But there are lots of Wonder Woman purchasers out there who aren’t comfortable with different…

Dude, that’s YOU who’s not comfortable with it.  Hey, wake up.  Try, if you can, to pretend to be American.  Ever hear of “pink dollars“?  Oh, you have?  Well fuck you, I hate that expression, eh?  Dollars are green, you idiot.

But…!

But me no buts.  Are we really relying on the Republican Midwest Moms who voted for Osama Bin Laden over John McMerica because John wasn’t sufficiently anti-gay, to buy WW lunchboxes?  Jesus, I thought you guys had facts and figures at your fingertips.

But now I see the quantum future is passing you by.

It is completely possible that the judicious use of Wonder Woman in sex-education materials in high schools could lower the suicide rate, boost the economy, hell save the oyster fishery…I mean you motherfuckers think so SMALL.  Wonder Woman could be a global phenomenon, don’t you understand that?  She could actually save real human lives.

She could give a voice, to the voiceless.

That “all the superheroes admire Wonder Woman” thing you’ve got going over there, DC Comics…well it’s been a long time since anyone could apply the term with any force, but what you’re doing there is called sexual inversion.  And it’s not healthy.

But you know what’s always healthy?

…

I’m sorry, Bloggers, I think I’ve gone way off the track.  It just makes me so mad, eh?  I mean, what in the fuck is WW’s famous “mission”, anyway?  Go at it like a satellite from orbit, forget the mere bird’s-eye view, what’s her goddamn mission?

Why was she created?

What’s she for?

She was supposed to help undervalued people realize some dignity.

Boil it down, cook it up, however you want:  that’s what it’s all about.  The Mission To Man, so much more ambitious than the Mission To Mars.

What’s always healthy?

What’s always an adequate solution to problems?

EXPRESSION is.  Like, the opposite of repression.

Open-source Wonder Woman.  Think of it as some good PSA action you don’t have to pay for.  Somewhere out there is a troubled teen who does not yet know our 21st-century society actually will support and value them…because that shit will take time to trickle down all the way to the basic social-instructional level of schooling.  First, you know, they self-medicate by reading.

Then, oftentimes, they self-medicate by writing.

And lucky us, that they do.

Okay, one more after this, you talked me into it.