The Buddha Of Objectivism

First things first.  Let’s get this clear.

Ayn Rand was always supremely full of shit.

First of all, friends of mine whose familes are in the railroad biz were actually offended by the way she portrayed it in Atlas Shrugged.  Ivory tower bullshit! is what they called it.  And secondly, if nothing else is logically necessary in this world it is logically necessary that should all our billionaire CEOs withhold their labour we would be, materially, better-fucking-off overnight.  In Ms. Rand’s own words:  pity for the guilty, is treason to the innocent.  In the days we are living in, when corrupt plutocrats are raining on the earth like cometary fragments, when Friedman has ridden us into the trashcan and everybody is up in arms and suddenly John Galt’s speech makes sense once you understand Ayn Rand was tripping on speed when she wrote it, and when there is no longer any question but that private vices frequently make for public ACCIDENTS and that being “virtuously selfish” makes no one want to talk to you anymore and that…and that…and that…

Well…

She was kind of a bitch, right?  That Ayn Rand?

And everything she said turned out to be a big, fat, lie.

…

But, that wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

Do you know the story about the Buddha who wasn’t really a Buddha?  But his follower turned out to be one.  The real Buddha, yeah…sometimes a lie is all it takes, to meet him on the road.  And of course when you meet the Buddha on the road, you are famously required to cut his head off and then take a piss in…!  Sorry.  What I mean is, you’re the only Buddha that you’ll ever meet…so if you never meet the Buddha, that’s on you.

And not, strangely enough, on Ayn Rand.

So enter Steve Ditko.  Because you know I think he’s the only one who makes it make sense?  He won’t take a penny of Spider-Man money, not a red cent — if you have chosen to act in this way it is on you that the moral consequences must fall, and I will not not absolve you! — I mean I really thought calling Peter Parker’s landlord “Mr. Ditkovitch” in the movie was both horribly insolent, and also like a kind of moral crowbar, a self-flattering “gee please join us Mr. Ditko, join in our comics-are-great singalong!” kind of a thing…well, we’ve seen it before, haven’t we?  “Please say the Watchmen movie is going to be awesome, Alan Moore!”  You guys know I love Alan, but he’s not a patch on Ditko.  In a way he’s a copy of Ditko, eh?  After he left Marvel, Ditko did simply amazing work for about twenty years or more…and I will come back to some specifics about that work before long, don’t worry…and now he does Dodgem Logic.  He does outsider art, now.  But if you look at his compositional skills, the subject may be something you think is nutty but his command of mood and gesture is even more expert now than it was before.  Cripes, no wonder Dave Sim is so interested in him!  Both Alan and Dave are pale shadows of the master.  Steve Ditko was uncool before uncool was uncool.  Look at Mr. A…have you ever read it, comics folk?  You know what?  It’s good.  Alan Moore and David Lloyd are straight-up comics geniuses, but if you want to know who got to the question of “what sacrifices does your morality require of you” first, in superheroic form…well, do you really even have to ask?  Ms. Rand has got nothing on Mr. Ditko — he’s no hypocrite, even if she is!  I think it entirely possible she’d take the money;  after all, for all her protestations, does she not seem a bit more amoral than moral?  A bit more self-less, than self-ish?

And Steve Ditko doesn’t seem that way at all.  Ever read “Shade, The Changing Man”?  It may be the most purely trippy comic I’ve ever read (part of the reason why I always rated Peter Milligan’s reinvention of it second-best — damnit, I still want to know what is beyond the Meta-Zone!), but trippiest of all is what grounds the thing:  Ditko’s hero simply will not give an inch, because it would be wrong.  You want your black-and-white stuff?  Ditko’s heroes are all about cost, above all:  who will pay it?  And if they can’t pay it, then who will step in for them?  In the seriousness with which he tackles these questions, Ditko is probably the only truly ethically-oriented Objectivist I’ve ever heard of, read about, seen, or imagined:  because he puts his heart and soul into it, his work is intrinsically heroic in a way few others can match.  Ditkovian heroes get as lucky as any other kind, maybe even luckier — like Robert Heinlein and A.E. Van Vogt, Ditko breeds Sufferin’ Supermen, not average joes! — but they don’t know that, and so their luck’s usually commensurate with their effort.  The classic Dr. Strange stories, irreplaceable treasures of the modern age of comics no matter what country you come from, never feature any magic power more important than bravery…bravery!  It is the one superior quality that Ayn Rand’s spokespeople lack, because they never need it.  Black and white are simply given to them, Objectivism’s princelings.  But I can almost believe in the whole mess when following the adventures of Rac Shade, or Stephen Strange, or Vic Sage, or even — yeah, it’s true! — Mr. A.  Because I really feel it, you know?  That anyone can have a great soul.  Still it’s odd to think of how many great artists there are, who create wonderfully open-minded work and yet seem to personally believe crazy locked-down things.  Dave Sim made Jaka come to life, and he actually denies it, you know?  But the skilled hands have their own knowledge, and if they’re skilled enough they’re fair.  In Ditko’s The Djinn with Steve Englehart, he presents a classic Marlowesque anti-hero, a conflicted loser with an ironically-beating heart (although Ali’s more Bogart to me!) who isn’t morally-perfect by Randian standards and whose side the writer is not on…it sort of reminds me of G.K. Chesterton a bit, a great writer who very nearly spoiled every one of his own books for me by being overly committed to me converting to Catholicism…!  And yet that king of paradoxes was sufficiently paradoxical himself to give his opponents the most sterling ripostes.  Oh, where is that damned David Langford bit about “The Ball And The Cross”…?

Ah.

“[D]espite Chesterton’s bias Turnbull gets some splendid lines — as in the early vow to fight that duel, no matter what. MacIan spends a whole paragraph swearing this by everything in and under heaven. “The atheist drew up his head. ‘And I,’ he said, ‘give my word.’”

For sure.  And, can you feel it?  Well, just give Chesterton time and he will explain to you why the person who’s an atheist is the person who most believes in God…but whatever, he may have the argument but we have the dialogue, and you know what trumps what.  Hell, I didn’t ask the guy to put his heart and soul into his work, you know…!

And in just such a way does Ditko show a storyteller’s compassion to his characters, that can’t help but come through the characters.  His version of Kirby’s Machine Man (and why is it, exactly, that Ditko could always manufacture such strangely-suitable takes on Kirby characters?) is all about the secret value of human foibles;  the main villain in Shade, while inarguably bad (“yes, bad and rotten, as all proper villains should be!” – Zom) is nonetheless a villain whose ethicity we get — not that there aren’t chaotic cackling bad ‘uns aplenty in Shade, but interestingly the main villain does a bit more than mere cackling, is a bit more caring, is a bit more…heck…

Sympathetic?

Perhaps that’s a bit over-strong.  Being that it’s Ditko, it gives one a shudder to think it.  And yet it remains true, that…well, the villains could have great souls as well, if they only chose them, and so even if it really is all their fault (and it is, oh it is!) it’s still something of a human tragedy that they choose so deliberately poorly.  To feel too sorry for them would of course be to choose poorly ourselves — they knew what they were doing, the bastards! — but to fail to acknowledge their potential, their human dimension, wouldn’t that just be another way of absolving them of responsibility?  No Ditko villain ever gets to evade the cost of his or her choices;  if the heroes aren’t allowed to do it, then why should they be so privileged?  But everybody always pays to play.  No one gets any convenient excuses.  The heroes may always win, and get better breaks than you or I would, but that’s only because they’ve sweated buckets to get them.  They’re better, but it isn’t by accident.  Without the luck, they wouldn’t survive at all;  but then without the bravery, they wouldn’t get the luck either.  It’s a pretty far cry from Ayn Rand, really!  And maybe “sympathetic” isn’t entirely the wrong word for it, because your sympathies do get involved;  they just don’t get confused, is all.  They go to their targets properly.  Even the contempt, is somewhat healthy and well-nourished.  Clean-limbed, or at least well-limned.  Hell, because these are comics, you know?

And we know what kind of ethical presentations are appropriate to this form, don’t we?

And so to deny that knowledge, to pretend we don’t have it, would surely be wrong.  Wouldn’t it?

But that sword cuts both ways, of course.  And in fact it’s just what cuts off Ayn Rand’s head, when Ditko meets her on the road.  For her, Objectivism seems to have been a convenience!  But Ditko doesn’t play that game.

Well…

The heroes never do, do they?

Morte D’Atlantis

There are all kinds of reasons why the American space program is important.  Some of them are some of the best reasons I know for anything.

None of them are sufficient to convince someone who doesn’t want to be convinced.

Still it is not really up for debate:  the American space program, as it lately was, was a truly remarkably good thing both for America and the rest of the world…a good thing for the future.  And though I personally happen to think that several very large and implacable forces will combine to push America back into its space mission, pretty much just as it was, even such a cock-eyed optimist as myself has to admit that it might not happen, now…simply because there is now the possibility that it won’t, if you see what I mean.  Private enterprise in the Western world is now as untrustworthy as it’s ever been;  public-private partnerships (much evidence suggests) usually turn out to be far more expensive than purely public projects…not to mention more unreliable…and perhaps even more threatening than all that is the spectre of resources being thrown open to more unfettered market forces, that were once reserved to the management of governments accountable to the electorate.  Because when the market speaks most clearly of all, it usually says things like I don’t really care if things turn out well and where’s my piece and foresight is for suckers, and of course this does not bode well at all:  back in the bad old days I was really quite worried we would not get any space shuttles, nor ever a space station, since it was clear to me even then that if government couldn’t do it then private industry didn’t have a hope in hell of even wanting to…I grew up being woken at four to watch rockets take off in Florida, smoke blending with the living room carpet, sky against sky against my window, but by the time I was old enough to think about thinking more than I felt about feeling I realized that things looked kind of bad all around me…the words “spiritual malaise” fit America and Canada from the late Sixties to the late Seventies pretty much just as well as they’d fit England in the twelfth century, and what was wanted was much the same kind of cure.  Some kind of story, some kind of narrative — any old kind, really! — that was capable of turning out well.

This story was actually a pretty good one.  But now, it’s over.  Up in space, there’s a lot of science for the twenty-first century to find:  a lot of changes to what we think we know.  Not coincidentally, there’s a lot of money, as well.  But it’s the hard kind to get out, if money’s all you think of, because what space really offers is simply answers…answers to questions, and answers to problems.  Two things that the United States is not going to be running out of anytime soon, of course, which is why I think they really will be pushed back out there;  but then again, the States is also pretty chock-full of people at the moment who do not want answers, to either of those things, and so the only question is which pressure will prove the strongest.  I guess I don’t need to remind my American friends that their loonies on the farthest right will not be scaling back their efforts to gitcha any time soon — they will try anything and everything they can, they’ll turn every procedure they come across into a crisis and they’ll keep doing it! — this is the real problem, you see! — and where they can’t achieve their larger material ends (which thankfully they can’t) they’ll be happy to settle for smaller symbolic ones.  But from small things mama, big things one day come, and America has enjoyed a privileged position in space, and in the world because of space, for a pretty long time…

And if that’s ending now, they might find they want to get it back after a while, but though I don’t need to remind you about the bloodthirsty partisanship of your right-wing nutjobs, maybe I do need to remind you about what happens when you start to break up things that have been around for a long time.  Getting them back is twice as hard, then.  Pioneering new ground is easier than re-pioneering old ground, and getting back talented people who’ve moved on is tricky.  Rome survived Hannibal because their primary agricultural crop was soldiers — they conquered half the known world because they loved to go to war.  But America, despite its unique-in-history military might, is not a conqueror by nature anymore than it’s a trader by nature:  their primary agricultural crop has never been soldiers, nor even salesmen, but technical people.  Scientists and engineers, and backyard enthusiasts who want to be them when they grow up.  That’s where their money has always come from.  It’s never going to come from anywhere else.

So what do you do with all those people, if you reduce their level of occupation?  At that point they’re wheat stored up in the barn;  they can’t last forever.

You have to start exporting them.

Well, or stop planting them in the first place.  When I graduated high school, unemployment was very high, and the only jobs that were freely available were ones in which the work didn’t matter — I remember puzzling this out:  surely what you were supposed to get paid for was the work you did?  The work that needed doing?  Because if it didn’t need doing, then what justified the money?  Already by the mid-Eighties it didn’t work that way, though:  money didn’t ride on the back of work any longer.  Instead work rode on the back of money, and so what I was doing was just a detail.  There’s actually a name for this sort of thing, as it turns out:  they call it a pyramid scheme.  If you get in early then you make money for yourself, and if you get in late you make money for someone else, but it pays the bills temporarily, usually very temporarily but it does pay them.  The money makes money, for a few minutes anyway.  Because where the goal is money and the tools are also money then money can certainly be made;  getting labour at next-to-no-cost always means you can do something profitably, even if the something is really nothing, because the labour itself can be treated like a commodity…for as long as that works, which as any decent economist can tell you is actually not that long.  But…

…“Oh, well?”

Well, not quite.  Because pretty soon, you see, the problem of what to do with this junk bond of human labour falls back on the government anyway (not that it was ever really resting anywhere else), and you can either have social spending or not, and that will pretty much determine whether or not you continue to have a pool of labour to deal with in the first place…and then you are stuck either way with either too many doing too little, or too few not doing enough.  So if your main crop is scientists and technical specialists then you have to do even more, in either case, or watch them all disappear before your eyes…

…Or just give up on raising scientists and technical specialists anyway, and concentrate on something cheaper.  Well, there are plenty of ways to go, you don’t have to concentrate on making shoes for wealthier nations if you don’t want to, and there is money out there…so America could retool, certainly.  Theoretically.  But is it going to happen?

Can it be done, if no one actually does it?

I am the lowliest of observers, but it seems to me that it can’t be, won’t be, probably shouldn’t be, and so America will continue to produce technical wizards and shelter theoretical geniuses.  And eventually they are going to want more to do.

Space.  It’s where a whole lot of the action will be.  But it’ll be hard to get back into.  Think of NASA as equity in the home:  right now the end of the space shuttle program looks a lot like taking out a second mortgage.  This is what being in a recession means, you sell what it took you years to build up, for pennies on the dollar, and then later you have to buy it back for even more than it was worth at the time.  That’s pretty depressing, I guess!  But it’s also pretty common.  Some people just give up, slide out of middle-class and stop looking back.  Others keep on punching.  I think America will keep on punching.

But it hasn’t started punching yet, because it hasn’t fully understood the choice.  If it had understood it, it would’ve tried to avoid having to make it.  SSC, PPL, STS, JKT…these things end in brain drains, that much is sure, that much is beyond question.  But if America proves to be as good at raising scientists as Rome was at raising soldiers, they may survive their Hannibal as well.  And I guess I won’t say I’m worried, but I also won’t say I’m not…because I know lots of things are not much better in this ten years, then they were in the ten years when I sat glued to the old colour set in the middle of the night looking for the capsules to splash down and the triumphant fists to be raised, somewhere out the window and far off out over the ocean, way over yonder in the minor key…

Well, why else would I be singing this song?

But it’s just ’til we can get a new one, you understand.

And you have to think that will probably happen.  I was wrong, after all, about the space shuttle — because it turns out we did need it enough, to get it, and that it wasn’t just me who was worried.  The story worked, and I like to think it’s working still.  Some stories work for a long time, demonstrate a very long reach into futurity…we can picture ourselves there, because of them.  I’m not even an American, but I know the American story and it described me too.  America, like Canada — like every wealthy nation! — is not a perfect place, and it’ll always need to be able to take a good long look at itself in the mirror:  a good hard look.  But how can any country do that, if there’s not going to be anything good looking back out at it, to balance the bad stuff?  Throughout my lifetime, America may have done a lot of things that sucked pretty hard, but America always had ideals — was distinguished by the kind of ideals it had even if it wasn’t particularly good at living up to them.  An innovative, liberal, technological advance scout for new centuries:  that’s what it’s always been.  It can’t look in the mirror without seeing that.  It must at least always be able to see that, or it isn’t going to be able to get up its nerve to look in the mirror.  Back at the turn of the century, in The Invisibles, Grant Morrison compared the American obsession with, uh…let’s call it zombie-based popular entertainment, to Victorian England’s obsession with seances and table-rapping and presumably theosophy:  each an indicator of its culture’s subconscious awareness that whatever it could get to pass for Empire before, won’t pass as it for much longer.  And as always, Grant hits the nerve dead-centre…the cosmic specialness of nations we arrogate to ourselves to explain our successes always surfaces in our death-dreams, whether it’s composed of divine right, or superior civilization, or go-get-’em never-say-die attitude.  It always bends back on us, as if to say “the vehicle has become an obstacle, and the ceremony a fetish”, and its usefulness is over and it’s time to let it go.  Twelfth-century Britain dreamt of holy relics in unlikely places, special encounters in dreamlike spaces that contained within them forgotten inheritances…and tests, of course.  Tests of spiritual worthiness, in the oneirogeographical maze of the greenwood.  And twentieth-century America had something like this too.

Star Trek, right?

So we begin with Enterprise and end up in Atlantis, and maybe that doesn’t look so good for the story, but the story isn’t over.  The story is still going on.  We are always at the end of Act Two, in these things, because that’s where the pressure of futurity comes on…how’s he going to get out of this one?  What’s going to happen next?  Every culture is always stuck in its story’s cliffhanger, once it starts to need that kind of story.  Every culture has as many authors as it does readers.  And at the end of all the testing is that last trick question.

What is it that you see, when you look in the mirror?

The question is whether or not money, America’s greatest power, will kill the love of science which is its deepest soul.  Of course some people think there is nothing to America at all except for its power, and if I were one of those people I would not expect America to be able to keep punching…to be able to change its tune…

But as it happens I do not think that all America is, is its power.

And I still think the face it sees in the mirror is an astronaut’s face.  Captain Kirk’s face?  Hey, maybe so…he was a very flawed hero, you know.

Which is exactly the kind you want, really.  Perfect heroes are so boring, all they do is translate to Heaven in the end…where they probably always belonged anyway.  And in Heaven, as we know…nothing ever happens.

Space, on the other hand, is where Heaven keeps its exit strategies.

And where the American culture has traditionally kept its Third Acts, I think.

Well, it’s gotta be keeping them somewhere…!

 

Whim. Wham. Funga.

I actually have no idea what to say about Gene Colan.  Clifford Meth knows what to say;  you should go read him.  Go read him, and thank him.

But me?  I’ve been trying to write something about Gene Colan since he died, and I’m still no closer than I was when I started.  Here’s a person who had nothing less than a formative effect on me, whose imagination and skill became part of the way I see things.  Thrilling, absolutely unique visions;  things I return to again and again, when I need their refreshment.  I don’t even know why I need them.  I mean, I know why they are good…

But I don’t know why I need them.  Everything I could possibly say about Gene Colan has been said already, by people with far greater claims on that saying than I’ll ever have, and I don’t like doing obituaries or eulogies on this blog anyway, and yet…there is the stuff I don’t know, you see.  The stuff I don’t know about it.  I don’t actually know how to eulogize him, when all I ever knew of him was in the pictures that he drew.  And I’m not exactly going to run out of opportunities to have this problem, am I?

Every day we are passing through history, and every day it’s later than we think.  I suppose the Gene Colan books I remember the most now are the ones where Dr. Strange fights the Devil, and where Howard The Duck goes quietly mad on the bus.  These are really deep and soulful things, to me — bottomless as any Hippocrene, art that loses nothing in reproduction except distance.  I used to stare at these ones for hours, absorbed in their texture.  I could still stare at them that way.

What in the hell are we going to do, without all these old guys?

How in the hell do I imagine I’m going to be able to avoid eulogies?

I didn’t know Gene Colan, nor do I know how to explain how he delighted my youth.  He did it, though.  I  don’t quite know what to say about it.  It may be quite some time, before I know what to say.

God bless the fellow.

The Inner Event Horizon, Part 1: Andrew’s Incomprehensible Condition

Hola, Bloggers!  Special treat today — we get Andrew giving me an interview on the occasion of his new book’s publication.  It’s called “An Incomprehensible Condition”, it’s on Seven Soldiers, and I think you’ll agree that, as C.S. Lewis might say, it’s a corker.  You can get a taste of it on Andrew’s blog, and you can also read about it all this week in various interesting places as he goes around from blog to blog dropping words of wisdom in convenient interview form.  I’ve read it, and it’s real good stuff:  highly recommended if you like Grant Morrison, or for that matter James Burke.

So let’s get started!

***
So okay, Andrew, let’s start:  I’m going to give you a bunch of questions, and then after you answer them do some follow-up questions…unless you’d rather do this closer to a “real-time” feel?  Simply the old Ask and Answer, aleph-zero way, the number-line way, rather than the aleph-one Cantor “questions in the spaces between questions” way?

Sounds fine to me.

And you can pronounce on whether you want this preamble in or not, too…

Keep the preamble. There need to be more comics bloggers who reference Georg Cantor anyway.

…But regardless, my first question is going to be:  “how long have you wanted to be a professional writer?”  And, why?  I remember the day I decided on it, it was when my Dad was asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I realized I didn’t ever actually want to decide.  So I thought:  ”writer”. Because they get to be whatever, right? They never have to decide.  I toyed with the idea of “actor”, but they’re at the mercy of writers it seemed to me, then…little knowing the consequence of it all…

It’s not writing specifically I decided I wanted to do, as much as creative work with my brain. I see computer programming, mathematics, songwriting and writing text as all being part of the same thing – finding patterns in things and finding the most aesthetically pleasing way to express them. And I’ve wanted to do all those things since I was tiny. When I was very little – like seven or eight – I used to come up with sort of cargo-cult ‘scientific theories’ that looked like the stuff I was reading in New Scientist, and around the same time I was also writing little ‘books’ about Doctor Who, and writing songs, and failing miserably to write programs in BASIC. Essentially, when I was seven I wanted to be Richard Feynman and John Lennon and Terrance Dicks (the writer of most of the Doctor Who novels) – if I couldn’t be Doctor Who himself. I still do.

You’ve mentioned your uncle Steve more than a few times, did he play a big role in you wanting to be a writer?

Probably. My dad idolised Steve (he’s his big brother) and so Steve was always the person I thought I should be like when I grew up. I also knew that Steve was a scientist and so was Doctor Who, so again that was a big influence pointing me in the direction of the sciences. But Steve also gave me books – hundreds of them, at a very young age – and back issues of New Scientist. Because of him I’d read, before I left primary school, Catch-22, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Feynman’s book on Quantum Electrodynamics, and tons of other things – mostly either 60s counter-culture stuff or pop-science. But my parents, too, did a lot – probably much more – to push me, wittingly or otherwise, in the direction of writing. They both read to me a lot when I was very small, and they had a lot of books around the house, and no matter how young I was I was never told that any book was too grown-up for me. So I read a huge amount, both trash and quality, when I was very young.

So when did you know, if indeed you ever did, that this was (as they say in the real-estate business) your “highest and best use”?  Or…do I presume too much?  Is this your highest and best use?

I think it is. Or rather, I think that the-thing-that-encompasses-writing-and-music-and-programming is. And of the various elements of that, I am vastly more accomplished at writing. (I think I’m actually a better composer than writer of prose, but I’m let down musically by my cack-handed playing).

Well, I can’t play a note, anyway, so imagine my pain.  Okay, so…It’s crazy I know, but I’m going to ask you the Alan Moore Question: “how did you get into comics?”  Pursuant to that, I want to ask you how much you were into comics as a kid, as a teen, did you find them later in life, what grabbed you,

Well, as a kid growing up in Britain in the 80s, it was the dying end of the huge explosion of comics aimed at small children that had lasted from the 50s through the late 70s. There were maybe a dozen or more comics aimed at five-to-ten-year-olds in every newsagent (now there are two, the old survivors the Beano and the Dandy, if we’re only counting actual comics).  But as for getting into actual comics, there were several independent ‘getting into comics’ events for me between the ages of about 11 and 13. The weird thing is, each time I thought of it as the first time I was getting into comics, and sort of half-forgot the previous times.  I remember reading reprint digests of old Brave And The Bold comics when I was about six or seven – of the two I remember, one featured the Teen Titans and Alfred becoming The Outsider, and another had a Flash team-up that was where I first encountered the word doppelganger. I also remember about that time reading a Superman annual which had the Jim Starlin Mongul/Warworld story in it, and just being astonished. But they were just isolated events.

Then when I was about eight, I was a big fan of a magazine called Idols, which had rather hagiographic articles on the Beatles, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis mixed in with bits on films like The Blues Brothers, Blazing Saddles and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In about issue four or five there was an article on the new, ‘dark’ Batman stories, which had the panel of Batman punching Superman from Dark Knight, and I remember it also having the “I’ve been thinking…about you…about me” bit from Killing Joke, too. As a result of that I bought Killing Joke and a few other things, and remember being confused by them, but in a good way.  Then a couple of years later London Editions started putting out British newsstand editions of Superman – the Byrne revamp, in order (with usually a Green Lantern or JLI backup) and Batman, and I just devoured those things, while still not thinking of myself as a ‘comics fan’.

And so on and so on. I really got into comics obsessively when I was about 12, though, when for some reason a shop near my dad’s work had the whole of DC’s April 1990 output for sale, several months after they came out. Just one copy of each, but I bought the lot – Adventures Of Superman, Lobo, The Demon, Detective Comics, everything. And that led me into being an obsessive follower both of DC and (when I realised that my favourite DC creators also worked on it) 2000AD.

But when you live in a small town, as I did, getting hold of American comics is incredibly difficult, and I gave up around 1994, starting to get back into it in 2001 (buying trades of things like Preacher and From Hell) and then properly around 2004 thanks to comics bloggers.

Did you ever try making comics yourself?

I did a non-fiction webcomic for a while, actually, about the Beach Boys’ Smile album. The problem is it was done in a photo-tracing, photorealisticish style a la Glamourpuss, and it was taking me about fifteen to twenty hours to do a panel, because it’s never a good idea to combine perfectionism with incompetence.

I also tried a couple of other things, collaborating with artists, but they never got past the ‘plot and concept art’ stage. A superhero thing that would have been horrible had it come out (the one ‘good’ thing in it being a fascist state ruled by a former superhero, where instead of Heil Hitler people said “Truth and Justice!” – but it was very similar to Twilight Of The Superheroes, except no good), and a space opera thing that I’m reusing some ideas from in one of the novels that’s boiling away in the back of my brain.

Of course you had found Dr. Who long before comics anyway, I imagine that’s the real source material…

Oh, absolutely. In Britain at that time, Doctor Who was a huge, huge mainstream thing – City Of Death, which was on when I was one or so, had nineteen million viewers (in a country where there were only about forty million people). Some of my very earliest memories are of watching Doctor Who. The first thing I can remember watching as a distinct episode is The Five Doctors, but I have memories-of-memories of watching repeats with Troughton and Tom Baker in as well.

…And I forget how screwed-up, maybe even annoyingly complicated (?) access to American comics and their stories probably were.  So, were you in that “British Marvel Digest” land where you saw a copy of a copy of a copy of a Hulk story in one magazine, and an actual reproduction of a dyed-in-the-wool Marvel Hulk story in another, and thought “what in the fuck is happening here”?

Not really. I didn’t do Marvel as a kid – Spider-Man and The Hulk were TV characters, not comic ones, as far as I was concerned. I remember looking at what I now realise must have been Jack Kirby art and just thinking it looked horribly incompetent, not realistic like Jim Starlin or Dan Jurgens or John Byrne. What can I say? I was a philistine. I do remember reading a Spider-Man annual when I was very young that had The Death Of Gwen Stacy in it, but I’ve always, always preferred DC to Marvel on entirely spurious grounds.

You just mean, because Spider-Man and the Hulk were TV shows to you instead of comics? Or are these other spurious grounds you’re talking about? Like, DC’s different character as a fantasy environment, etc, etc….do you buy into that stuff, the “difference between Marvel and DC” business?

No. I think it’s as ridiculous as actually having a strong preference for Burger King over McDonald’s or Coke over Pepsi – you might like one over the other, but they’re not different in any meaningful sense.

But when I was getting into comics, the best work being done at the time was pretty much all for DC – you had the proto-Vertigo stuff, Watchmen and so on, and on a lower level you had great journeymen like Alan Grant, who no-one’s ever going to call a great writer, but when you’re 12 he hits the spot pretty much exactly. While at the same time Marvel was just coming off things like Secret Wars II and starting that whole proto-Image thing with McFarlane and Liefeld and so on. And if I looked back at Marvel’s 60s stuff, which was still being reprinted all the time, it looked crude, because I had no appreciation for art then, and thought Curt Swan was a better artist than Kirby or Ditko…

So this means that I absorbed the whole DC Universe in a way I simply didn’t with the Marvel one. I know in my bones what, say, STAR Labs or Ganthet or Ch’p or Amanda Waller or the Anti-Monitor ‘mean’ in a way I don’t know about Thanos or The Infinity Gauntlet or Man-Thing or Cyclops. I still know more about those things, of course, than J Random Non-comic-reader, but I can read a competent DC comic and feel at home in that fictional world, whereas I need to read a good Marvel comic to be drawn in.  So I buy a lot of DC comics, while most of the Marvel stuff I buy is stuff like Strange Tales. Whenever I do start buying a Marvel series, it gets cancelled (RIP The Order and Nextwave) or turns crap (Dwayne McDuffie being replaced by Mark Millar on Fantastic Four), and so I never get the inertia to have more than one or two Marvel titles at a time on my pull list.  But that’s essentially a problem with me, not with Marvel. Objectively, both companies produce a vast amount of crap with the odd great comic mixed in. I don’t see that either is significantly different from the other.

You mention getting pulled back into comics through bloggers, which I always imagine is a common-ish experience.  The blogging world is interesting, isn’t it? I’m always blown away by how a readership self-selects around blogs, how topics fire themselves up and roar around, how a “comment-thread culture” develops. And the comics bloggers have a lot of interesting things to say, seem to be interested in having a LOT of conversation, and the conversation veers over some wild-ish territory sometimes…these last two books do seem “bloglike” to me, as though the form bent the writing into its own shape, a little bit. Would you have written these the same way if you hadn’t first serialized their chapters as posts, composed them as posts? Would you have written them at all? I think it is possible to learn something about writing from doing it online, I think it forces on you some kind of sensitivity to the hook, the bait…I mean, people will click away. I write 3,000 words on Spider-Man or something, I KNOW people will click away given half a chance, it becomes an interesting challenge to hold someone on the page. You write about Arius and whether or not black holes are sources of irreversibility in the universe, you’ve got to feel that too. Do you think it’s made you a punchier writer, an emboldened one…anything like that?

Hmm…if anything, rather the opposite. The first three bloggers I read with any regularity were Matt Rossi, Andrew Rilstone and yourself, all of whom produce very, very long essays which cover far more range than the typical blog. In fact writing on the internet generally gives me the freedom to be more obscure, and pull references from a more disparate set than I otherwise would. I might not be able to assume that every one of my readers is aware of, say, Arius and the arguments in the early church over the nature of Christ, or the history of the Liberal party between 1918 and 1930, but I can assume that my readers will use Google if they’re bemused enough by something (or they’ll just skim the bits they don’t get). The other thing is that my audience is people like yourself or the other people who’ve contributed to PEP!, my ‘zine. These are mostly ferociously intelligent people, and writing for that audience has made me far more aware of my own innate shallowness. The comments threads on my blog, though I don’t participate actively as much as I’d like, make me improve my writing in a myriad ways. And also, the mere fact that my blog has an audience is something I wouldn’t have expected, and that was what made me turn my writing into books at all – I certainly wouldn’t have done that without people like yourself encouraging me.

Kind words, but I think “ferociously lazy” suits me much better…although, to do laziness with ferocity is a lot harder work than it looks, so I suppose it’s all about being lazy smarter…

Can you talk a little bit about how you ethnically-identify within GB, too, and if that played any role in your having a “favourite” comics character? Okay I am just being comical now.  OR TRYING TO BE.  But actually I would like to know if you ever think much about your ethnicity as a guy living in Manchester?

Hmm… this is quite an interesting question, and one I can’t very easily do justice to. Firstly, I’m as white as they come – my family are Irish a few generations back, but basically I am ‘the default ethnicity’ in the UK.

BUT, I live in quite a poor area of Manchester, where there’s a lot of immigration, and I have a large, black, curly beard. This means that a lot of the time people identify me as being either Orthodox Jewish (I remember one woman I worked with once asking me if I was Jewish, and when I said ‘no’, saying ‘It’s OK, you can tell me, I’m Jewish as well’) or, more oddly, that I’m from the Indian subcontinent (I’ve had quite a lot of Pakistani or Bangladeshi shopkeepers ask me where I’m from ‘back home’, even though I’ve got blue eyes and pasty skin). It’s quite weird actually – people assign an ethnicity to me I don’t have, and then assume I share their prejudices. I remember once a cyclist shouting at me as I walked home “Oy, mate, you want to be careful with all those Islams around here.” (If anything I have to be careful of my own ethnicity. There are a lot of second- and third-generation Irish where I live, and I’ve been on the receiving end of more threats of violence, and had more things stolen from me, from them than from all other ethnicities combined).

So my ‘real’ and perceived ethnicities don’t necessarily match up.  But on top of that, being from the North of England is, in the UK, something a little like being a member of an ethnic minority anyway, in that so much of the cultural, political and economic life of the country is based in London that my day-to-day experience probably has as much in common with a Muslim of Bangladeshi origin living in Bradford as it does a white person living in London.

(Which is not to abrogate the privilege I have, of course. I am a white male and look like a white male.)

Do you think ethnic identifications, or ethnic substitutions, play a role in the appeal of the superhero or adventure comic or story?

I’m sure it does, but I have no sensible answer to that that wouldn’t just be a set of cliches about Siegel and Shuster being Jewish and so on.

An odd thing to say when you’ve just done a whole fat book connecting Robert Johnson to Galatea, perhaps! Hmm, I don’t exactly know what I was fishing for with that one, I must say…could I ask you if you were drawn to 7S by Morrison’s evident interest in diversity? I don’t really think I could, could I? You would’ve been drawn to it anyway. Although…

I wonder about how embedded such issues are, in the stuff I enjoy and that I know you enjoy, and I wonder how big a part of that enjoyment it really is. Would I *really* be as drawn to 7S, were it not for the engagement with diversity? Come to think of it, isn’t that a central concern in every one of Morrison’s books? And Alan Moore’s books as well. So, do you see that in there as well, and does it draw you because it relates powerfully to your own experiences or beliefs? I’m pretty much the default ethnicity in my home town too, but my experience is slanted just a *little* bit towards the “difference” side…and superheroes are supposed to fight for the underdog, but who are the underdogs in comics anymore? “People getting robbed”, I guess…

But maybe Morrison’s superhero ethics have a bit more of a realistic politics to them. Would you agree with that at all? Or am I way out on a limb?

No, I agree absolutely. I’m just reading Morrison’s book Supergods (which I wish had come out *before* I wrote this thing, but hey ho…) and he talks about how Superman started out as a socialist crusader, and talks about his own experiences as the child of hard-left pacifist political activists (saying to the Scoutmaster who visited his school “I refuse to join any paramilitary organisations!”).

I think all good criticism, and all good art, is political. Maybe not party-political in the sense of toeing a party line, but definitely in the sense of articulating a view of how the world should be, and how it differs from that ideal. Most comics really don’t have that aspect – in fact most comics aren’t really about anything in particular. Morrison does articulate a political worldview. Not necessarily a coherent one, but one based on a fundamental human decency.

[ED. - If you think we're probably gonna get back on this topic in Part 2, you're probably right...]

…

You’re self-publishing a lot, these days.  Putting things on Kindle and etc.  All on your own dime, I take it?

Doesn’t cost a penny. The only expenses I have are paying for my own domain name and buying physical proof copies of my books, neither of which is actually essential.

So is that just something you felt you HAD to do, “I need to write something and get it out there”, is that just what that’s all about…

Oh, absolutely. I write because I have to write. I’m like the Marquis de Sade in the film Quills, where at the end he’s writing in his own blood and faeces on the walls because he just has to get it out of his head and is denied normal writing implements. Except I’d be writing about Alan Moore or the Beach Boys, not sadistic pornography, but that’s just a minor detail.

…Or do you see yourself, is it possible for a person even to see themselves, as ONLY self-publishing now?

Oh, it’s definitely possible for people to do that. I know of people who’ve sold a million or more books that they’ve self-published on Kindle. It can be done.

I mean if they asked you to write a DS9 novel, would you say “no thanks, I’m making myself happy right now and don’t care to trade happiness for money, I am breaking even”?

Right now, I’d take the money. I have a day job, after all, and while it’s a job I enjoy quite a bit, if I had the chance to turn what is now a hobby that gives me a tiny bit of cash on the side into a way of supporting myself, I’d jump at it.

Were I a full-time writer…a lot would depend on the situation. I wouldn’t take a DS9 commission, probably, because I have no great feel for the show. But if someone asked me to write a Doctor Who novel, or a run on Batman (like that’s ever going to happen), I could see that kind of thing being fun enough to make the inevitable editorial interference worth it.

For example, Simon Bucher-Jones asked me to write a story for his Obituaria anthology, which should be coming out early next year, and I did so gladly, because I like Simon, I like the idea, I like the work of the other people involved, and it paid a small but real amount of money up front. There were editorial constraints, but nothing that wasn’t worth it to be involved in a genuinely interesting and exciting project.

And there are things I’d submit to for those kind of reasons, but I’m not going out looking for a publishing contract, no. At the moment I can write whatever I want with no consideration for market or length or genre or anything, and just stick it out there. Why would I want to change that?

Feel free to answer at length, Andrew!  I have more questions than these, but I’m gonna have to ask them tomorrow or something.

I’ve answered at far, far too much length. Please feel free to edit my answers mercilessly.

I think you know that isn’t the way things work around here.  So is “Sci-ence! Justice Leak!” your “JLA: Classified”?

Ha! If this book is my Seven Soldiers, I suppose it is. But I’m not sure this is my Seven Soldiers. I think it’s a good piece of work, but I think I’m going to do better.

Well, this one’s quite good, in my opinion.  And you just keep motoring along, so I’m really eager to see what you do next.  Hey, speaking of that…

…When’s PEP!3 coming out?

…

Andrew?

Oh, I think we’ve got a runner, here.

***

I jest with Andrew, of course!  It isn’t like he’s sitting on The Last Dangerous Visions or anything.  So…tune in next time for more writing, more politics, more everything, and for heaven’s sake go pick up that book of his…!

And I’ll meet you back here after the commercial break.

Interlude: Hieros Gamos Out The Yin-Yang

We’re getting there.

But first we go back here:

So what’s an “holistic cause”?  It’s a strategy for

“…Exploring relationships in the bigger system, and even effecting changes in them. But we have to get our heads around this: what does it mean, to try to operate a system that we can never know everything about? That we can never even know how much we don’t know about? The small system gives us little mental consoles where all the causal relationships are drawn together. Picture yourself standing at it: it’s pretty big, but you can see that if you just bash away randomly at the buttons there is some possibility of getting something right, because anyway you are standing in front of it, you know where all the key activators are, even if you don’t know what they do. And one way or another there are only so many of them, which means that even if that number is quite large all the connections the number governs are still internal to the console.

Except…

What if it is so large that it covers every inch of the room you’re standing in, floor ceiling and walls?

What if it covers every inch of the whole building, that contains the room?”

But having said all that, I admit it…it’s reaching a bit, right?  I mean the idea is that I start with some system and say its workings aren’t reducible, so we have to operate it “holistically”, and that’s all fine but what does it mean?  How does one do it?  And what could ever serve as a nice neat convincing example of such a system anyway, I mean this business of “pretend you couldn’t know”, that isn’t exactly the real pure Socrates…why not just pretend you can know, wouldn’t that make things easier?  And cost half as much?  You cannot give me a concrete example of operating a system “holistically”, that isn’t just a cheap superstition easily replaced by actual, real, tangible, and effective scientific knowledge…!

Oh…

Can’t I?

Let us suppose, just to see what we can knock out of it, that the studies showing married people live longer are not just a bunch of crap.  Of course, they may be:  they might be riddled with selection bias, they could be totally untrustworthy…but then so might studies showing that grandmothers like to drink tea, so let’s just say we’re willing to believe them, and then see if we can zero in on a reason to believe them.  I mean, this is actually not too hard to do:  if you spend half your life sleeping next to the same person, it seems pretty reasonable to say that they might notice when you have a massive stroke in the middle of the night, and so in the ordinary course of things might call an ambulance for you.  So in this light, saying that married people live longer isn’t any more controversial than saying hikers using the buddy system die less frequently than those who don’t…although really that isn’t what we’re measuring, it bears pointing out:  we’re actually measuring with what greater frequency non-buddy-system hikers die, right?…and the rest is just conjecture…

But acceptable conjecture considering the plain and immediate fact that saving a person’s life is easy, because sometimes all you have to do is be around.  And then we could go on from there, you see, once having got that all sorted, and maybe also say:  well, being long-lived actually means living longer into old age, doesn’t it, so maybe if you crunched the numbers a bit more you would find that it’s being married when you’re ninety that increases your odds of extending your lifespan, and being married when you’re thirty is actually pretty irrelevant to the statistical pattern.  So it isn’t “being married” that even does the trick then, is it?  Because studies would probably show that old people in nursing homes tend to live longer than old people who live in garbage dumps, too!   So, okay, maybe “being married” isn’t even a thing, causally-speaking — it’s just proximity to other people that counts, and the lifespan it adds is like a year, two, five, basically however lucky you get that’s how many years it adds, and these aren’t even the good years so it isn’t the statistician’s fault if it just so happens married people spend more time around other human-shaped objects than unmarried ones do.  Right?

Well…

But maybe not, of course.  Because is it not a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of the good fortune to have gotten himself a wife shall be in want of a glass of whole milk from time to time, and unable to find anything but skim in the fridge?  So although we probably can’t prove a whole lot about how this person or that person is failing to die because their eating habits got slightly modified a half-century earlier, we can probably allow as how more people with crap diets fall before the scythe at younger ages in general, than ones who get the right amount of, let’s say, at least Vitamin C.  So these statistics work from youth up as well as age down, inevitably…even though at first glance it may not look like it…and also I mean there are statistics, but then there are also specific facts that are facts:  like you should take care of yourself better, get some exercise for God’s sake, stop eating deep-fried Coca-Cola for breakfast.  Because no one denies that it’s superstitious nonsense to say walking under a ladder is bad luck, you know?  But if you keep making a point of walking under those goddamn ladders, pretty soon you’re going to find out that there are worse things than bad luck, and that one of ‘em is being a bloody fool.

So…maybe diet?

Sure:  diet.  Why not.  Diet, and proximity to people and phones.  See, we’re making progress.  We don’t need to talk about “being married” as though it could lengthen your life…we don’t even have to talk about it as something that really, so to speak, “exists”!  If all we have to do is make a list of what changes about your life when you get married, then we can call those things factors in your longevity and just let ‘em stand on their own.  Right?

So what does change about your life when you get married?

Well…

For one thing, you’re fucking MARRIED, aren’tcha?  I think the married guys in the crowd know what I’m talkin’ about, amirite guys?  Marriage?  It’s sort of a lot like being married?  Not too much like not being married?  And what changes about your life is pretty much everything.  Everything in it.  Where you go, what you do.  What you think about.  How you eat, sleep, and generally carry on.  Taxes.  Public transportation.  Toothpastes.  Spending patterns.  Legal arrangements.  Contents of spice racks.  Location of spice racks.  Sometimes, existence of spice racks.  Relative preference for things made out of stainless steel.  Exposure to different kinds of varnishes.  Holiday destinations.  Familiarity with soy products.  How much change in jars you have lying around.  Frequency of minor colds and flus.  Skill with deploying eyedroppers.  Knowledge about articles of clothing.  Colour.  General likelihood of arguments about dinosaurs.  Reading material.  I’m not being sexist here, even though I started out talked about married men, nor am I being hetero-elitist or something, the fact is that the difference between being married and not being married is just that over here was a whole big EVERYTHING when you were not actually completely sharing your life with another person, and then over on this side over here you totally ARE, so the everything is DIFFERENT.  It’s a different everything altogether.  So…wanna take a shot at living longer?

Find a nice significant other, and settle down.

But of course, if you want to take a shot at living less long…

Uh…

Find a horrible significant other, and settle down?

At a certain point the whole thing is very very hard to reduce.  Find love, and live longer?  Well, okay, maybe…but you can find love and still have a hellstorm of a marriage, can’t you?  I mean, “love”, what’s that?  It’s not a real well-defined concept.  And anyway maybe love is just a long, long laundry list just like marriage itself, something that isn’t really anything…”sleep beside” “prepare food for” “bandage” “listen to” “remember quirks of”…seriously, how long could you make that list, if you wanted to, and still never include a non-essential item on it?  Love as the comic-book character who has every superpower you haven’t thought of…

“Recount violent dreams about boss to”, “deeply mistrust old boyfriends of”?

Uh…

“Make live longer”?

Okay, we can’t spread the net that wide, or pretty soon we won’t be talking about anything.  So maybe the thing to do is to separate out the “make live longer” stuff (whatever it may be) from our overly-simplistic (or should that be “overly-complicated”?) love-laundry list.  Surely there are notionally longevity-prolonging aspects of a massively changed routine that we can categorize generally, even if we can’t necessarily specify them as the ones we’re looking for, the ones belonging to the “good for longevity if married to” subcategory, the “good” ones, the “right” ones.  And if they go along with certain people rather than with certain other people, then we could call those people the “right” ones…so…

Find the “right one” to love, and live longer?

Well, okay…as a general principle, all right, though it doesn’t bring us any closer to being able to say anything useful…but then suppose you do find some mysterious “right one”, then what if they die or something and you end up throwing yourself off a bridge?  Okay, well then you have to be the right person too, maybe…someone who will be capable of carrying on if they…

Or…?

Don’t walk under any…?

Pah!  This is hopeless!

Every new subcategory just creates a new list of necessary factors that can’t be identified without creating another subcategory, with more new factors!  If we can’t define the TOP layer any better, how can we possibly define any of the ones beneath it?  We don’t even know what we’re looking for!

What the hell is marriage?  BECAUSE IF IT ISN’T COMPOSED OF ANYTHING DEFINITE, THEN NEITHER CAN BE ANY OF THE LISTS OF THE FACTORS IT YOKES!

And yet we know those factors exist, because we know the statistical pattern exists.  Worse yet, we know we can have a reason to think it means something.

“You want a shot at living longer, find the right significant other and settle down.”  It does seem, on the face of it, that it would probably work, right?

But to follow that instruction to the letter is impossible, without attending primarily to its spirit;  and the kicker there is that the only way to attend to the spirit of the instruction is to adhere strictly to its letter.  So where we at.  Where we at.  For God’s sake where we at.

We are back at the beginning.  Where Cosmic Eros (not the little fellow with the bow) encourages Earth and Sky to separate.  And why?

Well, so they can get back together, of course!

Holistic causes?

Consider that if we took on board the above reductionist bias (I just made that up, and fully expect to get yelled at) (for God’s sake, I sound like an old hippie lady enthusing about crystal healing) we would I think be forced to conclude that betting people in a game of Long-Lived Marriage is at best like betting on Red or Black at the roulette wheel when the “0″ slot has been taken out.  There is no good reason for picking either one over the other.  You can’t know where the ball is going to land.  You can “feel lucky” all you want, but most people only feel lucky when they are lucky, which is to say only when they have been lucky, because who feels lucky when they’re losing?  And all else being equal, finding “the right one”, not to mention also being “the right one”, just seems like…

…I mean if we cook all the above down, don’t we get into a situation where the only sensible thing to do is not clump people into categories of “right” or “wrong” or “almost”, or any other category we can think up, but instead just to treat the whole thing sheerly as a numbers game?!  Each person is JUST ANOTHER PERSON, you cannot really know them, you cannot really predict them!  Love can be a mistaken intuition!  Circumstances are not fated, but random!  The more you bet, the more you stand to lose!  “If you want a shot at lengthening your life, pick the right person and settle down” is bullshit advice!  Like saying “if you want to win, bet at the table instead of putting your money in the bank.”  I mean, can’t you change your own life, can’t you replicate the Massive Routine Shift of marriage without actually having to get married?

Yeah, well…

Sure you can!  Like I said, I’ve known many people who’ve desperately wanted to change their lives, and who took action on it.  And they all started by not having the faintest clue how to do it.  And they all ended by not having the faintest clue how to do it.  And to be perfectly truthful it really doesn’t seem that hard a business.  Married or not.

But there is still that statistical study, isn’t there?  And at a certain point it does seem as though playing the music is more than just striking all the correct notes in their correct order.  But…

What more it actually is, I really couldn’t say.

Can you?

And so we are back at the beginning.  And maybe we had a bit of a selection bias ourselves?  After all, if it’s all about a failure of description at the TOP level…

…Then what was it, exactly, that we failed to describe?  “Studies show that married people live longer.”  Well they do.  They do!

The studies, I mean.

…

Okay, come back.  That’s enough for today.

I think you’re getting the hang of it.

We’re Gonna Need A Bigger MEME…!

Oh, why hello there, Bloggers.

So, suppose you have a job at Disney, and the name of the job is “development”.  And just you never mind knowing about things you don’t need to know, but we’re going to make a movie THIS YEAR, understand?  And it’s got to be good, it’s got to be a hit.  An unexpected indie hit.  And it can’t be a movie involving our “highlight“ characters, it’s got to be something we don’t have to officially care about, but listen lemme tellya kid…but it’s gotta be a goddamn HIT, right?

Because let’s get this IP Bank moving, if you know what I mean.

By which I mean:  give me a summer hit, out of the Marvel properties we’ve just acquired, that isn’t something we’re going to want for one of these goddamned AVENGERS movies that are going to cost us an arm and a leg.  And I don’t wanna hear from any FF or Spider-Man either, get me?

Just give me something quick, fast, dirty, excellent, that we can put the banner “A Marvel Movie” on top of, something to build the brand while we’re waiting for Peter Jackson to say yes to Dr. Strange.

So okay.  You say it’s a rich field for characters.  Let’s see a couple.

Hand over the movie.

EVERYONE MUST LOOK AT THIS NOW!!

…Fuck it, apparently I can’t get HTML to work on this one.

Oh no wait, maybe I can!

Well, that’s great!

And you should click on that!

Because I feel strongly that it will be awesome for you.

Fetching A Starfish For Zoe

Happy Canada Day, Internet!

This is the first year in…maybe twelve years?

I don’t remember?

That I haven’t spent Canada Day in the little cove of my soul, doing ecopoesis everywhere:  straw-hatted, just out of the range of the postcard picture, and liking it that way.  Teaching kids to dive for shells, throwin’ axes, hauling chain and cable (that’s what the header-picture is, by the way), down on the moss with a beer yelling at the geese, a shirt that smelled like grease, and rust, and salt.  All in bare feet.  It is, indeed, a change of life not to be there now;  a new chapter in the ol’ autobiography.  Years ago I did stay in Vancouver over summer, down-at-heel on the curbside, racing through the park to the pay phone;  being driven by strange girls, to strange far municipalities…playing snooker in ninety-degree heat, taking time out to go and drench my shirt in the bar sink, coming back to hollering booze-and-chess animals, boulders in the stream.  Now, however…I am making it all up again.  Everything’s different.  Well…

…But maybe not that different.

Because there really are no “little coves of the soul” — I’ve lived on this coastline my whole life, gone all up and down it, and I can truthfully report that it’s really all one big place.  Everywhere you go, you always somehow think you’re at home.  I used to say to my mother and father on boat trips, “I’m so glad we’re back here, I love this bay!”  And they would say:

“Uh…we’ve never been here before.”

And I’d say “of course we have, look there’s the big grooved rock that’s like a chair, over there’s the flat place where we cooked the salmon…?”

“Uh…”

“The tree with the crooked arm, where Stu put his tent?”

The truth is:  they were right, but so was I.  We’d never been there before.  But all this place is just one big place…!  So you can’t help but recognize it.

Because that’s how big the soul is.

…

…What, don’t believe me?  Think it sounds too Oprah?

Look then, I’ll prove it.