Spring Review: “Project: Ballad”

Let’s see…where to begin, where to begin…

It was a while ago, Bloggers, when I was privileged to be asked to read a script from Project: Ballad by its author, the illustrious Michael Peterson. It struck me as a rather curious thing, all about a fandom (and a powerful cultural current!) that I’m not part of and not familiar with: the gamer world. And also it was set at a convention, and conventions are things I generally don’t go to.

But, the boy in the Prologue seemed familiar…

All stories set at our sort of conventions owe a strange and somewhat hairy debt to Larry Niven, I think — the man who chose to make a mini-career out of writing cons large across the cosmos, adolescent concerns cosplaying on luxury space barges, interplanetary trade missions, and chatter in the bar elevated to grand Galactic drama. The blasted hookups in the elevators all dignified and dignifying, the panels all Algonquin Round Tables…the outcome never in doubt. Such legendary beings. These are the times, and we are the people! Though the world may not see us yet, and our miraculous gallimaufry is hardly even heard of. Inside the bazaar, representatives of alien cultures meet, and just as in a science fiction story they secretly know one another to be of the same kind. Play-acting; but then what’s wrong with play-acting? To step into a role is a common enough sort of thing for people to do, as soldiers, students, and CEOs…and these are just more imaginative roles that we’ve got in here. Often, in the outside world, social roles are tremendously confining, sources of terrible hurt and want…

…But in here, they’re recontextualized. In here, your role sets you free! And so all the message-board stuff, that cheap substitute for expensive community, is mere build-up…the private obsession with one’s own world and one’s own desires, one’s own imperatives locked in a screen in the palm of one hand, the hard work of gaming, of figuring out puzzles and puzzling out identities, that liberates us from a solitary confinement to another but better sort of solitary confinement, this too is mere preparation. Hmm, and maybe I do know this stuff, better than I thought…

…But being just a bit too old to have entered into the gaming world as I otherwise might’ve, I’ve never seen it this way before. What a strange window, giving out onto such a strange pastureland! It may be all second nature to Michael (well, that’s the idea, isn’t it?) but I can sense his second nature making the story as special to him as it is to me: to him it’s distillation, concentration, the hard winning of theme from a life of personal experience…as to me it’s exploration, comparison, the extraction of things I hardly know I know until I recognize them, but either way something is going on here that’s important to both of us. And I suppose we’re both equally a little bit surprised, in our own separate ways, across the gulf of time that separates those born into gaming from those who just missed that boat? Surprised at just how effective all this metatextual stuff is?

How relevant?

Thirty-four years ago, a boy is lost. The Prologue did, I have to say, hit me oddly — so oddly that for a brief time I wondered how it was bloody well possible for Michael to know my city so well, as it was when I was young! And of course as it turned out that was all just a mistake on my part, but still the associations linger because it’s all…to be honest, it’s all pretty close to something real. Those deserted half-woods, in my city at that time were places with very long histories indeed, filled with strange deserted totems left over from the War long ago, and my father’s childhood…marks and signs of other fugitive inhabitants seeking escape, too…and from way back when, the history of the people who originally owned that land in the part of Vancouver I thought Michael was somehow able to talk about, and who still own it now, but it’s very different now from then. And then lying over all of it, invading it from the fringes, this eternal patch of waste and escape-hatch Never-Never Land, the steady creeping cloud of second-stage suburbanization, that most Seventies of things…bulldozers and culverts now abandoned totems too, but not for long. So, about the gaming I may not know, but there’s definitely a world here to which I’m not an alien…

But, enough about me. As it turns out, Michael is quite a fine writer — the ancillary material at P:B (the P:B Apocrypha?) is more than worth your time, and there’s every indication it’s also part of the story, and also part of the “game process” that suffuses every aspect of this thing — with a nice ability to juggle talking-heads ensemble-cast scenes with sufficient adeptness that you’re never forced to recall that this sort of thing kind of irritates you, actually. Well, Hemingway said “never confuse motion with action”, and the long period of introductions to the cast shows that the reverse is also true: all that’s happening here is introduction, but it’s more than just ticking boxes, more even than just trying to jazz up the ticking of boxes, but the process itself is an enjoyable one that comes with a side-helping of meaning…meaning that extends beyond merely understanding the various persons and their various relationships. Because this is a webcomic, and therefore one among thousands if not tens of thousands, we might be forgiven if we don’t notice the craft — at least, not the craft in the writing — because we are probably not meant to fixate on it for good solid commercial reasons. And, maybe even good solid artistic ones? As with a game (one assumes), the top level of engagement with a webcomic is light diversion, mild interest, a reason to come back that you don’t have to think about too deeply…you know there’s a mystery here, and you can even roughly sense what you think is its shape, but on the surface it’s tropes and twists and snazziness, so the one thing you are not being especially primed to notice is the pacing. Michael would modestly say that’s all Kevin Czapiewski, the artist of the piece, and seeing the quality of Kevin’s work you swiftly get used to giving him credit for things…but some pacing is always in the script, too, and Michael manages (in my opinion) a deft and tricky job with it. To compare the ancillary material to the comic is to see, for example, that he’s got a whole different set of chops than what he’s showing out the front of the store; Carla Speed McNeil is recalled to me here, the easeful gabfest and the light play with tropes and reader attention concealing something much more meticulously worked-out than it would appear at first blush…and something a bit more serious than it appears, as well. I am just old-fart chauvinist enough to have been surprised that a story about some swords-and-sorcery game possessed any hint of philosophical depth, myself…psychological depth is something I think a good writer can find anywhere, manufacture out of anything at hand, but philosophy takes a bit more work and a lot more obsessiveness, in my experience. And yet game play, game design, game immersion, this is all very fit meat for philosophers; it’s just that we haven’t seen much of that philosophy in fictional form.

So…is it an ambitious project? At least…having only gotten through Chapter One (the big introductions!), is the rest of it as ambitious as I suspect it is?

Well, look: it must be, or Kevin wouldn’t be working on it this hard. On the P:B Forum, when urged to think of a new thread to start, I fancied myself very clever by bringing up the matter of Colour! in comics…and boy, am I feeling sheepish now, because the boys were already miles ahead of me on that one. I had talked about the colour in Asterix, the gripping blue of a wave, or the green of a meadow…the joyous lunacy of The Big Fight and its Druidic slap-fight polka-dots. But Kevin had more of a STERANKO ROMANCE COMIC in mind here, it seems…(!!!!)…and that’s a kind of colouring we haven’t seen in a good long while. I think Steranko himself got it from Toth, actually? But in the modern field of comics it’s not been seen much for a while, and to return to it is a very welcome thing indeed. So many PINKS! So much YELLOW! For a certain value of just plain exuberance the last thing I saw that seemed to be in this same mood was the (for my money) unjustly-maligned Daytripper by Ba and Moon. And quite plainly, this approach is very carefully chosen…not just the colour but the looseness of the line that confines it, the casualness that wafts you past Michael’s artfully-strewn hints, flowers on the lawn that you step across, drinks at the bar that you’ve not yet ordered…because there are other places where the look is slightly different, because the tempo is different. It’s so easy to forget about that boy, lost thirty-four years ago! By the time Chapter One ends, the pace has ramped up enough that we are carried away from him, even though we are still aware of him all around us as the excuse for everything…as the context of everything. But we are distracted from seeing him, not just by Kendra and her friends but by the big DMMM that inaugurates — twice! — this, our just-slightly-askew adventure into Tropeland.

And, you know what else we are distracted from?

Well, if you look, it’s right there; so go look. This one’s more than it seems, which is just the way I like them. And it’s part of a larger corpus of inquiry and interest, which is the way I would like them if only more of them came that way. And I’m not even the only one who thinks so! But Peterson and Czapiewski are wiser than to think comics are just about ideas, and that really forms the main selling-point here…the thing that’s really keeping me coming back, and the thing that’ll probably keep you coming back as well…

…Which is that it JUST. LOOKS. BEAUTIFUL.

And it’s a real smooth read to boot.

Anything else that’s in there, you don’t really need me to tell you about it, you know?

Because if you’re interested in finding it, you’ll find it.

So…to close it all out…

Larry Niven might’ve made a tidy mini-career out of the fictionalization of SF conventions, but I think I like this twist on it much better…because what’s available to be fictionalized from the con world is something a bit more developed than what once was, and to be honest Larry’s adolescent chest-puffery just made me mad, after a while. Such a confining space, in which there really isn’t the room for anyone to discover anything! Or at least, not anything they weren’t already sure they knew. He always dressed it up very nicely, but it was always still a mannequin: a dummy, just there to hang things on. Heinlein manque; super people in a super world, whose effort was just something they always talked about but never did. I should say — and maybe when I write that Warren Ellis post one day I will say — that it isn’t even the problem that your basic Heinleinian hero is a super person in a super world, but that instead that they’re an ordinary person in a super world…a world where superiority is just that easy to have, that bartenders and taxi drivers and even SF fans all have it, indefeasibly just have it, because the rules of a superworld simply make it inevitable that they should. And in this way even Niven’s conventioneers are just terribly well-defended people, to the point where even their hangovers are cool…and if I sound like I grew to hate that geeky triumphalism of his it’s because I did, I really did, I hated the idea of the Geek as much as I hated the idea of his Triumph, and so thank God none of that is on evidence here. Because there’s something so much more valuable about the fictionalized con culture of today, isn’t there? I think even an old fogey like me must admit that the gaming stuff makes it all different, deeper, more searching…I mean, I’m sure I’m missing a lot more than half of the, ahem, “political” commentary of the thing (by which of course I mean the whole thing, the whole site), but even I can see that things get a bit more teasingly metatextual when you don’t just have an identification-figure in your fiction, but an actual avatar…whose choices you script, so thoroughly (or at least: diligently) that “identification” barely merits thinking about. Does Wotan think about how much he “identifies” with Siegmund?

Does Thor think about how much he “identifies” with lame physician Don Blake?

So it’s much better now, than it was in Larry Niven’s day: this play-acting doesn’t have to mean escaping into a juvenile fantasy, at all…

So to the gamers, so long disdained, I can only say…

Dude!

I tip my hat to you. This is so clearly the next wave, you know? Of pop-culture analysis, I mean. And to think I used to believe games were a more limiting environment for story…well, clearly I have some catching-up to do…

…So I guess I might as well begin at the beginning.

…

LOADING…

The Reboot Of The Villain Lex Luthor, By The Wastrel Blogger Plok

Aha, what fun!

I’ve tried this a couple of times now, and Richard especially keeps me on my toes — on top of all his other enviable qualities, he also has refreshingly strong opinions about Lex Luthor! — yet so far I have not quite cracked the nut. I’ve thought up a Lex Luthor who badly needs a Superman whether he’s willing to admit it or not, because (as I said before, saying that I said before) “in the country of the blind the one-eyed man is King, but the two-eyed man is BORED…!“, which is about as near as I think I come to a true Elliot S! Maggin Luthor, a guy who could almost be you, a guy who knows what Johnny Carson said in his monologue last night…and just a couple of days ago I had Comrade Luthor, the hardworking and principled ultratalented total failure, who aims to remake the world as one where “meritocracy” means more than just good looks…who analogically is the darling of the Movement, but who then gets thrown over by the world for bloody stalwart lantern-jawed Superman, a real man with real prospects in the classic bourgeois formulation…

And this was my, hrmm, “social realism” Luthor, the rival of Superman who didn’t need him, didn’t want him and wishes he’d never been born…who sees Superman as having blocked his own opportunities. Both of these Luthors are, I believe, constituent elements of the “real” Luthor…that remarkable fictional individual who (as Richard so acutely pointed out to me) has managed to maintain a thoroughgoing consistency of character over the decades, sometimes in spite of the efforts of his writers…

And one day, I promise you, either I will make him write a post called something like “<Choke!>: Emotion, Empathy, and Sophistication in Superhero Comics”, or I will write it myself…but better for us all if he writes it…

…However neither of my slices of Lex Luthor, as interesting (at least to myself) as I’ve tried to make them, can quite cover for the absence of all the other things that make Luthor “himself”, even though in my opinion the man really could use a little updating. Refreshing? This sounds more hubristic, really, even than saying Superman himself needs rebooting…Superman can fall out of touch with the times, sometimes, but is Luthor really subject to the same clock-creep? As a villain, and thus not our identification figure even if he’s got some attractive texture on him (because who in the world would be crazy enough to take the villain as their identification-figure?), he’s pretty much guaranteed to run like a top, isn’t he?

Well…

Maybe so, but it isn’t like Luthor himself hasn’t done any changing. Remember Luthor the mature man, portly, sedentary, and of a likewise immovable disposition? And then we’ve also had the youthful and sprightly Luthor, the star athlete of super-villains, quick-witted and facile. I tried to get at that one too, in my Comrade Luthor take, with “Lex Luthor: Scientific Adventurer!”, the man who tested how Superman can possibly do the things he does by stealing a march on Lois Lane as far as getting into super-rescuable scrapes goes…all to a hidden purpose…and also stealing a march on Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal, whose 70s sobriquet “Mr. Action” I also had Luthor claim first for his own dark purposes. And something about that does appeal to me, in a rebooty kind of way, because aren’t reboots generally exercises in tightening-up the associations that’ve accreted like old cobwebs around such decades-old properties as Superman? Not that these associations just “happened”, we must remember — they were consciously and carefully embroidered on the existing work by many artists, thinking hard about what had gone before — but if every reboot is a consolidation of what’s already there, it means simply drawing firmer lines of cause and effect between already-connected elements, and it pleases me to have drawn on something so trivially everyday as the “getting into scrapes” thing, so to have made of it a tiny continuity. In the heady morning of the day of Superman, Luthor finds worthy things to screw up at in order to test his enemy, and thus makes Lana Lang’s attempts to expose young Clark Kent as Superboy look embarrassingly imitative — not her fault, it’s just that Lex tends to sow bad feelings in the people he’s around! — but when Lois Lane, Investigative Reporter, tries the same thing on it is like she’s the real version of what Lex only pretended to be…and likewise Jimmy, but then Superman gives him that signal-watch just for the purpose, doesn’t he? The Daily Planet staff is clearly a tonic for Clark Kent, nobody lying or dissembling…in the version I outlined, Smallville starts to look a bit like Lumberton and Twin Peaks: there’s always something sneaky going on! And, as I said, it’s kind of a trivial thing, but that’s why I like it…in the TV show Smallville, too, there is always some deceitful tomfuckery going on in that damned town! As in small towns everywhere, but big bright and clean Metropolis is too fast-paced and important for mere petty deceit to reign, and also I flatter myself that “Lex Luthor: Scientific Adventurer!” may recall the falsely-reformed Luthor of an older and greater day…

But anyway: many Luthors, from the fat old spider to the lithe prison boxing champ, but what interests me most about those different Luthors is how they were seen by their writers and artists and readers, in the days they were created. Not too long ago I mentioned that if you look at the rise of the American television sitcom, and if you squint, you can see that these are stories by, for, and about the scant survivors of a terrible war…half the men of America were killed, right?…but I confess again that throughout most of my life, I have only thought of them as things that help to explain who I am, not things that explain the people of the times they were made in, who actually made them, and watched them. And, it’s pretty dumb, but didn’t the generation before me make the same mistake, in thinking that to understand them you had to understand Howdy-Doody? All in neglect of understanding Howdy-Doody’s makers, and what their motivations were. So, I grew up in an age where references to the Partridge Family and the Brady Bunch gradually became de rigeur in social settings, largely because they didn’t start out that way…were not seen as connecting influences of any deep social worth by the Establishment, maaan, until my peers and I made them so…

Uhh, in youthful frenzy, and as it turns out that’s a frenzy that only youth can have, because holy crap I must tell you that as you get old then so does that remember-when connection stuff…! Because let’s face it, you can only establish that other people also remember Danny selling Keith’s pickle so many times, before you start insisting there must be more to it all, that if we’re going to exalt this stuff then we ought to be able to reason on it a little better, that there must somehow be something to say besides just “yes, I remember that too”…

(makes note on calendar: “today explained for the benefit of exactly no one why I like writing about comics on the Internet…”)

But, lost in all that frenzy were some peculiar facts, such as: do you know that for decades I thought American TV sitcom families described normativity? WOW, yes, I know…! Lucy and Ricky didn’t have a child ’til they were in their mid-thirties (with Lucy being the older spouse), Shirley Partridge was a widowed mother of like seven kids or something, the Brady Bunch is a frankly insane set-up that should shake off dark prequel plots like a terrier shakes off water, and I do have to tell you that it isn’t even just the “family” stuff, but the workplace comedies reflect it all too. Yes, the workplace comedies with all their painfully-single people…and what do you want to bet that Mary Richards didn’t come to Minneapolis from a smaller town?

Looks a bit different when you think of it that way, doesn’t it?

And don’t even get me started on Dick Van Dyke and Andy Griffith…or, actually, do, but just not right now…because weren’t we talking about Lex Luthor?

Oh, indeed we were! Because all villains look like something, you know…they look like the frights of their times, and more importantly they look like the frightful people of their times! Lex Luthor, long in advance of John Byrne’s 1980s businessman-reboot, looks fat and soft and arrogant as only a true plutocrat can, his meritocratic pretensions revealed as deliberately self-serving lies…and, sure, he doesn’t own factories yet, but in my opinion it’s kind of the point that he doesn’t, because when Superman is cleaning up a world of corrupt mine-owners and slumlords — criminals, with a veneer of repectability — then doesn’t Luthor make sense as the same sort of criminal only stripped of that veneer? From jail, Luthor sends out implacable waves of hate at Superman…he does not choose to be rehabilitated, and he will get out, and we will keep doing this dance over and over again, because Luthor doesn’t even care if he goes to jail…! But he is just hell-bent on his bad behaviour, and Superman can throw him in jail but he can’t make him stop, and he can’t polish him off either.

Because the system is not prepared to pay the cost it would take, to cease encouraging criminality?

We see the same thing in the NHL these days, with all the talk of the problem of head injuries. But if they were prepared to pay the cost of getting rid of the problem, then there wouldn’t be any talk…

However…

Maybe that’s a subject for another time. Anyway! Some of the stuff I am not getting about Lex Luthor in my re-renditions of him is, I know, the stuff which is some of my very favourite stuff about Luthor, which is the stuff that is extremely time-bound. <choke!> In older Superman comics Luthor’s thought-processes are interesting, even though they’re always about the same thing, because they sound a bit strange today, weirdly simple and dated and insufficiently lugubrious…where are his ruminations on mortality? Where is his neurosis? Where, his self-reflecting inner commentary? Where is his big confessional moment, for heaven’s sake? Well, but he’s not stamped out of the villainous mould of today, so none of those things are there. None of the expected beats of extravagant introspection that modern writers use as lure to hook the readership’s, or audience’s in the case of movies, sympathy. I’m not saying it’s a crutch, you understand, this business of the extravagantly introspective beats…but it’s a style of our times: motivation, motivation, it must be all the time motivation, and so “simple” just won’t do, because you get to the end of it too quickly. But if you were a reader of the 40s or 50s Superman, you wouldn’t need it all introspected for you, because Luthor looked like a particular sort of bad guy, back then: the sort of guy you used to see sometimes, who is just a very, very hard case. Tough, dogged, and thoroughly unsympathetic! And for the most part unconcerned with the appearances of virtue, because always with his mind on the calculation of what he wants, and simply how to get it. Mind you, I really like the physical-culture Luthor too: the self-improvement guy! The dick at the health club who always wants to beat you at racquetball! The showboater, whose every microgesture is a sophisticated put-down of all those not as superb as he, whose pretensions he mocks by pretending them better. And the cool non-perspiring Luthor in a businessman’s suit, well, he may not be to my taste…but I can see the appeal? As well as the continuity he partakes in with those other Luthors, though I would suggest to John Byrne that the corpulent dude in the charcoal pinstripes, the sweaty super-glutton who seems always on the verge of a temper-tantrum, well that might just be gilding the lily a bit…

Or whatever the opposite of lily-gilding might be, I guess, but I suppose it’s fine too? Hmm, though it’s interesting to roll around just what implications there may be, in changing an out-of-shape scientific genius to an out-of-shape corporate raider…because, you know, what then the import of Superman’s physical excellence, in contrast? I guess that’s why I like the trim and athletic Luthor, myself: his commentary on Superman’s physical excellence is like the commentary Bugs Bunny makes on Elmer Fudd, with the only discrepancy being that Elmer never beats Bugs, but Luthor never wins against Superman…and anyway he isn’t really that insouciant and mercurial guy, and actually maybe that’s why it doesn’t happen.

Really, if you think about it Lex is more like Elmer…!

But maybe that’s one for another time too. Anywhere, where was I? Oh yes:

The stuff I can never manage to get into my thinking about How To Do Luthor. Well, let me make another stab at it today, anyway, even if I can’t shoehorn in that tough nut of the Forties…at least, not directly as what he was…

(ahem)

So here, perhaps, is the deal with the “real” Lex Luthor, branching out from what I said in the comments in that last Superman post. That in his Superboy origin, Lex is not jealous of Superboy, not one bit! But he’s just really happy to have a friend…and really crushed when he discovers that Superboy actually wasn’t his friend, but was secretly always jealous of him! Now, of course Luthor is wrong about that, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t sour him, and most importantly it doesn’t mean that he really was jealous of Superboy, because he totally wasn’t! Perhaps alone out of all the people Superboy ever met, young Lex was absolutely absent of awe where Superboy was concerned, because Lex could do incredible things too. Especially when someone believed in him? Over in Batman, Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face not because of an encounter with fantasy but because of an encounter with reality…and goes just as wrong as Lex does, and for the same reason: not because he’s inherently evil, but because he isn’t inherently evil. And over in perhaps my favourite re-envisioning of Lex Luthor at Tom Strong’s place, Paul Saveen proves in “Crisis In Infinite Hearts” that he doesn’t have to go bad either, being given just one friend. Though, notably, when he cracks he cracks ugly, just as Luthor did, and you really never can tell about people, can you…?

What they will do.

Though his reasons, Luthor’s always got. They’re perfectly fine reasons, they just happen to be based in egotism and they just happen to be wrong…and Lex turns out to be not that nice a person when push comes to shove, and the one thing about all versions of Lex Luthor is that there never is a time when push doesn’t come to shove. For some reason, he just has to have it that way; and you’re not smart enough, even if you’re Superman, to keep him from taking it all to that level. Not smart enough, even if you’re Superman, to chill the guy out. Because by the time you get there, even if Luthor’s still to all appearances a nice young man with a full head of hair, he’s already outgrown any authority figures in his life who might’ve been able to balance the scales of injustice for him, on his behalf! I think I mentioned something recently about Marvel’s great villain, Dr. Doom, always insisting on living in the past, or at least in a stuck present: a present that can never get any better because he won’t be there in it. But Luthor’s exactly the opposite, and refuses to spend any time in the past…he won’t change, simply because the clock doesn’t go backward: he’s got nowhere to go but on. A real tough nut? In All-Star Superman, Clark Kent practically hollers at Lex while he’s in prison, “for Christ’s sake Lex, I’m tired of doing this dance with you!” But Luthor barely notices. Because Luthor never looks back. His thoughts are always interesting, but they’re always about the same thing: always stuck on the bubble of the eternal present, never looking anywhere but to what he wants…so the one thing he never sees coming, is anything he didn’t already know he wanted, that it turns out he actually does.

So!

Therefore!

My Lex Luthor, from the story of Black Hole Superman, who has a Smallville origin as my last go-round at this lacked one…and it’s a complicating thing, the Smallville origin! Because you have to start with Good Lex, the helpful young redheaded boy. In an origin without Smallville, Luthor simply notices Superman one day along with everybody else, but in a Smallville origin without Kryptonite it isn’t clear how he and Superboy become friends…so what the hell, let’s go with Lex Luthor, Scientific Adventurer, after all! And it isn’t a lie, at first; and Lex is not jealous of Superboy, so that’s no problem either. But if Superboy can do something for Lex (like saving him on an occasion when he overreaches himself), then there will always be something Lex can do for him, and in this case that means becoming his confidante. What does Black Hole Superboy know of his origins? We won’t have any magic green crystal here; the rocket ship arrived, and the baby came out of it, but there’s very little else in the way of information that young Clark Kent gets. Possibly the Navigator of the rocketship carried a little artificially-intelligent Jor-El-in-replica, who was able to tell Jonathan and Martha a thing or two about his son — or maybe not! — but either way, if you want to get all kings-in-disguise about it then the one thing the foundling boy never gets to know until later, is where he came from and what his inheritance is. So Young Lex actually makes quite a good friend for Superboy, because only a genius like himself could hope to reason out anything about Superboy’s origins, simply starting from what Superboy can do.

But, that’s before he knows Superboy is a liar, right? And it is indeed an odd coincidence, that Kal-El should happen to land right in the town where the only universal genius on a par with his late father lives…just as odd, really, as being landed in the outskirts of the Orion Spur, just one step short of being lost forever in the interstitial gulf that lies before the Perseid Arm. If you look at closely, it just seems like an awful lot to ask, for all that to be happenstance! Not that anyone knows about it yet, but just give Lex time and he’ll get there…and when he gets there, will it not give him just that much more justification, for doubting his former friend’s honesty? Lex begins by toying with the idea that Superboy is some kind of evolutionary fluke, then he considers the possibility that Superboy may be the product of some kind of genetic engineering…but as more and more time goes by, all of that seems less and less likely, and eventually he reveals his conclusion, that his friend must be some sort of alien life from elsewhere in the cosmos, fallen to Earth like a star. This sits very poorly with Young Clark, as you can imagine, and the poor fellow flies off somewhere to grapple with his feelings…so in the meantime, Lex feels like he’s got to pick up the slack for his disturbed friend, therefore Mr. Action springs into just that! And what a job he does, too: it’s really impressive.

Meanwhile Superboy is starting to feel a bit guilty about neglecting his responsibilities — has he been yelling at Ma and Pa, has he been talking to Legion members during this, his first crisis of faith? Lex has done a great job, but Lex is only…<choke!>…human…

…And maybe he’s been leaning on him a little too hard, so he sends him a message. With super-ventriloquism? The details don’t really matter all that much…Lex is on a big case, and can’t be reached by ordinary means, but Superboy reaches him indirectly, places a message where he can find it, and tells him he’ll be back on the job tomorrow, apologies apologies…I dunno, maybe he’s in space, and that’s why he’s setting a time for when he’ll be back? Anyway, Lex counts on it; these new villains he’s chasing, they’re really tough to catch, and he’s about at his wit’s end. They have some really weird technology, that he doesn’t understand, and though he’s been a real thorn in their side he just can’t seem to get to the centre of their operations. He’s been sneaky, he’s been undercover, but it’s all just taking too long, and after all he is only human! Superboy, with his weird powers, could do what Lex can’t, and penetrate to the heart of the conspiracy…that is, if he knew about it what Lex knows, which he doesn’t. However…

…Superboy, his pal, is coming back tomorrow. Lex knows the exact time of his arrival, even. And wouldn’t it be something, to have a little “glad you’re back” present all giftwrapped for him? So Lex allows himself to be captured by the conspiracy, because he’s got a secret weapon they don’t know about…and just as they’re lining him up for the big kiss-off, he does whatever crafty thing he’s thought of to do in order to let Superboy know exactly where he is…

But nothing happens.

Lex Luthor is in the tiger’s den, he’s allowed himself to be stripped of all his gizmos in an all-or-nothing gambit, and it’s worked…but where’s his secret weapon? He’s out there without a net, deliberately without a net, he’s about to take the real plunge and he’s relying on Superboy to catch him, and Superboy is nowhere to be found…!

…And meanwhile out in space (or wherever, but probably space), Superboy is trapped, unable to make it home to save Lex. Maybe he even hears him calling? But whether it’s Zod or it’s Mxyzptlk, or it’s naturally-occurring Kryptonite, or it’s Brainiac or it’s Terra-Man or it’s some other damn thing…or maybe it’s that he has to go to the future with the Legion!…he’s not able to be where he said he would be, when he said he would be, and so Lex realizes that he’s totally on his own, and only human after all. Naturally he thinks fast and gets out of it by some lucky chance, but that’s the first moment when push comes to shove, for him, and he’s not going to forget it. Superboy, no doubt jealous that Lex was about to bring in a mutual crimefighting victory for them that neither one could have accomplished alone, sabotaged him by giving him false information…no doubt he was jealous at just how well Mr. Action was making out, even without superpowers…

(Say, Lex could’ve been the one to name those powers, couldn’t he? “Super” powers, powers that don’t seem to work in accordance with the limitations of physical law…and maybe the name “Superboy” could’ve been a riff on that coinage?)

…And so that’s it for Lex and Superboy, even if Superboy doesn’t know it yet, and even if he feels bad about it and has a good excuse that he can talk about…which, you know, if it’s the future or something then he probably can’t talk about it, can he? But even if he could, it wouldn’t make any difference. Through relying on Superboy, Lex came this close to being killed, and was lucky to get away just being permanently balded…Lex may now have an advanced form of whatever that real disease is that causes your cilia to lie flat, only in addition all the hair on the outside of his body is just gone…but seriously, that disease is serious business, it affects your protection from environmental contaminants, it affects your breathing, it affects your immune system…people do manage to live with it, but it’s dicey stuff, and let’s just say it’s a good thing Lex is a genius? It’s a good thing he’s a genius, because otherwise from this condition he could die anyway, despite having cleverly escaped the clutches, and set back the plans, of…

Oh, go on. Take a guess.

Anyway it is not just that he’s bald, all right? Heck, he might’ve gone prematurely bald anyway, for all he knows, and anyway what kind of a crazily petty person would he be, if he swore eternal vengeance on somebody just because they caused him to go bald?

(Well…the petty one that’s in the shaving mirror, maybe?)

But the point is, even though he got away from the dangerous choke-point of his young life, he didn’t get away unscarred, he didn’t get away scot free, but he got TAGGED…and Superboy’s probably laughing about it right now, that inhuman bastard, but it’s no joke! Why if he hadn’t invented a treatment for that follicle condition (which of course he is not in much of a mood to share at the moment!), his life expectancy would be seriously in doubt, and anyway he’ll still have to live with the fact of the condition his whole life, because you know what? You know what? Some of us aren’t fucking invulnerable, Superboy, and oh boy what a laugh riot it must seem to you, you stinking alien, and what was Lex thinking ever believing they could be friends…

…When Superboy probably doesn’t even know the meaning of the word.

But though Lex would totally blow his cool at Superboy if Superboy was around, since he’s not around then Lex thinks twice, and decides to keep his change of heart under his hat for a while, while he tests Superboy not in a friendly helpful way, but more in earnest. Before, you see, he was just looking for an explanation; now, he’s looking for weakness. And for Lex Luthor — any Lex Luthor! — vindictive motivation is what really turns on the old I.Q. Motivation, motivation, that’s always been Lex’s problem, you know? Because in the country of the blind, and so on…I mean they say he could’ve cured cancer, and he could’ve, but when your mind is always going everywhere at a million miles an hour then focus becomes a real problem. Befriending Superboy helped to clarify Lex’s genius wonderfully, and now that he’s un-befriended him it’s clarified it even more. And, look, the truth is that Lex is not 100% wrong even though he’s 100% in the wrong, because Superboy really never was honest with him. He didn’t tell him he was really Clark Kent, for example. And, he didn’t tell him why he couldn’t make it in time to save him, when Lex laid it all on the line for real in (mostly) the name of do-gooding and altruism. In fact Superboy’s life in Smallville is a rather interesting sort of growing-up story, right? He tells Pete Ross who he really is. He lies to his best friend Luthor every single day about who he is. He confides in Luthor about the nature of his abilities, and how they freak him out. He loves Lana, but he won’t make a move, so he ends up making her look like an idiot. Oh, Lana! Lex really does hide his motives by faking some “Mr. Action” scenarios in order to more thoroughly examine the Kryptonian power-set, and Superboy never suspects…but Lana is made to look like a fool because of it anyway. Meanwhile she’s the only one who ever puts two and two together and comes up with “Clark Kent is Superboy”, even freakin’ best-friend universal genius Lex Luthor never does that…and Pete Ross just sort of finds out one day, but Lana is the only one to suspect the existence of such a thing as the “secret identity”, and she’s dead on the target, and she can never prove it because Clark Kent is a coward when it comes to women, yet she never gives up on her reasoned conviction. You think she doesn’t know that if Clark were Superboy, then he could use his powers to make it look like he wasn’t? Talk about your scientific adventurers, Lana is all over that action…!

And in the end, Superboy builds Lex Luthor a lab, where Lex invents Kryptonite and tests it on his secretly-former friend…but Lana saves him, because she knows Clark is really Superboy, so when he goes missing she goes looking for him, that’s all. And she finds him, and he’s in trouble, and so does she really need any more proof than that? Lex’s grand plan of revenge is foiled, just after he’s revealed how much he HATES Superboy for what Superboy did to him, and so all the cats are out of the bag, except of course that Lex still doesn’t suspect that a “secret identity” is a thing…and Superboy gets away, but he’s weakened, so Lex seizes the opportunity to make his own escape, and now he knows about the 5D connection for sure, and it’s only a matter of time until he starts to reason out the rest of the story. Not the whole of the rest of story, mind, but that there is a “rest of the story”…

He’ll be there soon.

No one knows what Superman can do, like Lex Luthor does!

No one understands him more, and no one understands him less!

And that’s the whole sad story of it, and thus concludes our little play. And if we shadows have offended…!

…

Oh yeah, and one more thing. Just a thought, really.

About that time-travel business…

Suppose for a moment that the Legion can’t easily visit the present day (whichever present day we happen to be talking about) in a physical form. They can do audiovisual projection all right, but actual physical manifestation…that’s hard. Even to bring someone from the present to the future, is easier than going from the future to the present! And perhaps on certain occasions it is harder still. Brainiac-5′s intellect is certainly equal to the task of solving time-travel — he is the Third Universal Genius, after all! — but working the time-bubbles, that’s another story. Intellect is not in charge of that; that’s a practical matter, not an abstract one.

Physical laws still do apply, you know! Why if Brainy’s work wasn’t within the strictures of physical law, then he would really be a scientist at all, would he? But some sort of magician, instead…

But anyway. You will notice I never did get to the “tough nut” Luthor, but that’s because he’s a lot harder to get to these days, than he once was. However, to the Luthor who has to do with labour relations I think I may actually have gotten. Luthor is the disillusioned one here, you see, in the story of Superman as Marxist mirror…he believed more in the Movement than the Movement believed in him, or so he thinks. Absolutely Comrade Luthor, the revolutionary rival of Superman! But it isn’t that Superman pushed him out…

But rather, it’s that Superman let him down. Which, if you think about it, he sort of did…

Because he’s the only person, that Superman never saved.

There Are Many Superman Reboots, But This One’s Mine

Let me take you back, Bloggers, to a past that never happened…and a man who never existed. This is comics, moving with the times!

(Though I guess there is no particular reason why comics should move with the times…)

And so this is my Superman reboot, with thanks to beta readers Richard and Nate! And we’re going to get rid of a bunch of stuff. The red sun? Gone, for reasons already covered at some length…

Krypto the Superdog? GONE!

Kryptonite, the broken pieces of the crust of Superman’s home planet?

VANISHED! Though with an explanation…

And X-ray vision and super-hearing and even flying, all gone too, disappeared without trace. Don’t even mourn their passing! Just consider them to have been raptured up into that big fictional multiverse in the sky, along with super-cats and super-horses and even Mon-El of the Legion of Super-Heroes…which, maybe it exists somewhere, in some Superman’s milieu, but it doesn’t exist here. Alternate universes? Sure.

But a big fat ol’ Multiverse?

As you will see, in this case it turns out we can either have a Multiverse or a Superman, but we can’t have both.

But, we do get Superbaby out of it as a compensation.

So… shall we begin?

*

Once upon a time, long long ago when the Mathusians were off in some other galaxy still learning how to knap flint, there was a fabulous star-spanning empire that spread throughout the Milky Way. This was actually not too long after the Milky Way had formed, when galactic centres were calmer places, and thus the first sites of life. In most of today’s galactic centres, you understand, life is not possible: the supermassive black holes of active galactic nuclei appear to be highly-correlated with the appearance of life, but just let those giant entropic engines run for a few billion years and their waste products scorch all the space around them into an uninhabitable desert. The theory is that this correlation has to do with metallicity, by the way, in the fortunate accumulation of that dust that fled the hard light of the very early quasars: very difficult to fertilize a galaxy without that intergalactic pollen, but it also gives you black hole bestiaries, all the cages in the zoo so closely jammed together that they can’t help consolidating themselves into just one big cage, over time. Not that you will always find no life in a galaxy without an active nucleus, but it’s just far more rare…”dark” pinwheels spin more slowly in this sense than bright ones, which is why there aren’t many different Guardians of the Universe dwelling on odd central planets, but only the ones we know of: the longshots that came off, the incredibly ancient ones who got unimaginably lucky, way back at the dawn of time…

…Or rather: the early morning of time, since development like theirs was slow, in their old dim elliptical, low and slow like they say about barbeque on the Food Network. But as it happens, our beloved Milky Way did host a true Dawn Culture, a bright fast regime that knit the whole place together and helped younger cultures to advance themselves. And maybe it was not all exactly what we’d call “philanthropic”, but at least the Dawn Culture was not rapacious…well, actually that would’ve been quite difficult for them, you see, because at that time there was only one world that really was a world, and it was their own. Only one rich world, in a galaxy as yet still very metal-poor, and thus resource-poor. And star travel, even for them with their wonderful “gravitic” drives that shrunk and expanded the space around their ships, takes a lot of energy. So if you were only interested in being colonialists then the costs of Empire wouldn’t be balanced for you in the early universe, and you wouldn’t do it; but they did it anyway, so we can only assume they did it for other reasons. But it was all so long ago that it’s tough to speculate on their motives — even the Guardians barely remember the Dawn Culture, mainly as rumours and legends, and the galaxy was so different then. In fact the only way we have of actually knowing the Dawn Culture existed is in the common theoretical framework that supports most everyone’s stardrive technology…secrets handed down, often lost, sometimes rediscovered, very rarely independently invented, over eons of time. Well, and a few extremely advanced civilizations use wormholes, stargates, fancy stuff that verges on or doubles as full-bore time-travel technology…which is very dangerous…but mostly where you find somebody piloting a ship from planet to planet, they’re using the Dawn Culture’s special magic even if they don’t know it, or don’t remember it…

And they don’t remember it, because long ago — long, long ago! — the Dawn Culture disappeared. Hid themselves, as far as the other people in the galaxy knew…which explains why every race that remembers them, calls them pretty much the same thing:

The Hidden.

So on Earth, if we remembered them, their semi-mythical home planet would probably be known as “Krypton”, to us…if we remembered them, which we don’t. Because we’re just too darn young. But oh, how the early peoples of the Milky Way searched and searched for a trace of their Kryptonian benefactors, after their disappearance! But they never could find them, and they never will…

And here’s why. Out at the fringes of the Kryptonian Empire, their ambassadors began to notice that the homeworld was moving, in every one of their subjective frames, slower and slower. And why this was happening was not exactly tough to figure out: the big shadow of Sagittarius A, the Milky Way’s central black hole, was gradually drawing Krypton into its umbra. Soon, very soon, it would slip over the event horizon and be lost forever…for one instant finally matching the speed of light, the gamma factor hitting unity just as the universe’s door bangs it in the ass and it’s gone. So the overwhelming majority of Kryptonians chose to return home — to the only world that was a world! — rather than tragically out-age and out-live all their loved ones in their relativistic slowdown. And only a few recalcitrant ones, rebels and outcasts, chose to stay where they were and survive, usually under false names and dark clouds of secrecy. Thus all the ships went home, and the galaxy went very quiet almost overnight, and in time Krypton did indeed slip silently out of the main parlour of the universe.

Billions and billions of years ago.

Except.

Inside a black hole, time’s not the same thing as it is on the outside. So for the Kryptonians who fell in, it was — or rather, is — not billions and billions of years ago, that this all happened, but more like “just a little while ago”.

Here’s where it gets speculative. Inside the black hole, “time” just means the direction of space that points inward to the singularity, and “gravitic” drives DON’T WORK…because inside a black hole, spacetime isn’t shrinkable or expandable, it just IS. But that isn’t all that’s going on, with that internal space; because there’s another component of motion inside the event horizon besides just “in” and “out”, which reveals the previous conception of “spacetime” as being slightly incomplete! Stars that spiralled in, logically (well, logically if you’re Bob Haney) continue to spiral down, and though “time” is only something they experience on the one vector of motion, on the other they experience something somewhat like time, without it actually being time. Hey, outside the black hole you would be very hard-pressed to experience this “other vector” stuff, since outside the black hole it is actually aligned with time! But once inside, it becomes apparent that there is a fifth dimension that’s been there all along, lurking underneath time. Inside the black hole, things are very different in a lot of ways, but you don’t necessarily just die instantly when you pass into one’s interior; a black hole as big as Sagittarius A is quite mild when it comes to tidal effects, and you wouldn’t automatically know immediately when you had crossed its invisible boundary, especially if the strange conditions inside made it so you were tidally-locked forever behind your star, with its ameliorating bulk forever between you and the singularity’s siren, though still very far-off, gravitic call…

Though you’d soon start seeing some very strange stuff, for sure! Inside a black hole, cosmological history goes in reverse: all the forces and dimensions are neatly frozen-out and separated, then stepwise they’re recombined at higher and higher energies as you fall inwards. First, light goes: electromagnetism is smashed into the weak force, fused under pressure to become something else, and whatever photons are “free” simply fall up to the border of the event horizon, there to circle endlessly, timelessly, spacelessly…always just not quite fast enough to escape into the outer universe. So light — light qua light, if you know what I mean — leaves you, is peeled away to find its own level, as the electromagnetic processes it used to mediate become other processes, that electromagnetism wots not of. Matter isn’t the same; and energy takes different paths from A to B, along different highways…lost highways, overgrown these 13 or 14 billion years now. Further down, as energies mount, there is a “stratospheric” deck of W bosons, that are similarly peeled away to seek their own level as electroweak force fuses to strong force. And below that, presumably a “tropospheric” deck of gluons, and down at the very bottom, at the Omega Point itself, gravity joins them in their widening wading pool just in time for the whole mess to simply pop out of the universe completely, back into the unknown topological register of pre-Big Bang Space…whatever that is.

Except obviously there’s a fifth force too, though what it is we won’t know until Jor-El figures it out. Down in the black hole, along the “other vector”, experience continues to accumulate, and the power of life gets concentrated and reconcentrated, denser and denser living in every measurable inch of “time”. So the Kryptonians are pleased to discover that, far from dying, they’re becoming a bit, well, “super”! And it seems as though this will just continue and continue on down to Omega, where they will become…er, “protonauts”? Popping out of reality into whatever came before reality? Just as their “superness” reaches an ultimate. So everything’s cool, and God’s got this, so in the meantime why not have some fun: there are no rules down here, and the energy-density of everything is mounting all the time…hey, why not become super-criminals and petty dictators? In this fascinating, ever-more-lively-and-tumultuous, exciting environment of possibility. How about a little war, for that matter, eh? Just harmless fun to the superpeople, right?

But Jor-El doesn’t think so, and he’s not alone. Employing his own concentration and reconcentration of the powers of life — his special thing is scientific genius, by the way — he repurposes the old stardrives in such a way that they can liberate light from a Kryptonian body, or rather turn the material of a Kryptonian body into a mess of massless particles (“Q Rays”, maybe?) that behave in a way very like light, whereupon they all peel off and seek their own level in the eternal “phantom zone”: the ring of light that orbits Sagittarius A just inside the Schwarzchild radius. Poof! No more war criminals! And now we can all get back to business…right?

Well…

Jor-El isn’t a genius for nothing, you know, and he knows that the whole universe runs as it does because the principle of conservation is the highest law of the land. Even inside a black hole, it has to be observed! So nothing is destroyed, but only changed; and nothing is changed, except it leaves some product behind it that balances the books of mass and energy. The Kryptonian felons who get turned into “liberated light” leave something behind them, for instance: gravity showers, perhaps in the form of Higgs bosons, that make a flat plain behave gravitationally more like a mountain range. Everything inside the black hole can’t get out, not as information and not as anything else either: from the outside, a black hole reveals nothing whatsoever about what may pass inside it, only getting bigger the more external stuff it swallows. So everything that happens inside just stays inside, in order that the mass and energy budget of the universe entire may balance. That’s why there’s no way to escape the black hole, you see: because it can’t shrink, no matter how your fancy stardrive used to work on the outside of it. At best, it can not grow for a millisecond or two…but conservation, the parent of Time, gives you nothing more than that. So the Phantom Zone Projector, that magical device (Higgs field manipulator?) that only works inside a black hole, is maybe quite a risky piece of gear to have used so much…Q-Ray sprites leaving the surface of Krypton leave a particle cascade behind them, that changes their planet. And perhaps they’ve already used it too much: when Zod was finally dispatched, last of the super-warlords, strange tremors shook the capitol…well, tremors are always shaking the capitol, as energy reconcentrates itself within inanimate objects too, but this one was different. And Jor-El is worried. Krypton’s survival may teeter on a knife’s edge, the protestations of the “newly”-formed Science Council (“but Jor-El, as time goes on we are not using the Projector as much, so these are probably just aftershocks, that we’ve probably already seen the worst of!”) notwithstanding…

…And especially they are notwithstanding because of the thing Jor-El knows that no one else wants to hear: that Krypton is not going to make it down to Omega anyway, but is doomed to break up and smear out and fizz off into nothingness, whereupon the Kryptonians will all finally die the real death, long before they are transported into the realm of the protonauts. It’s the difference between stars and planets, you see: stars aren’t made of much that’s different, and what is different in them is constantly being recirculated, the different energy-reconcentrating profiles of the different elements smoothed by solar convection. But planets are different, never mind that they’re held together by the same force of gravity that will apply all the way to the bottom: Rao may soften the singularity’s tide, but it can’t do anything about the other vector, that gradually makes uranium into super-uranium, that makes iron into super-iron…that eventually will create super-elements capable of causing their own disassociation even over the objections of the force of gravity. One day, all of this will reach escape velocity! Including the stuff of your own wonderful body, which after all has noplace to put its reconcentrating energy either…!

But Jor-El is still a bit worried, that the past use of the Projector has brought escape velocity even closer. Perhaps it is just around the corner: gravity showers causing weird differentials to mount up in unseen and untrackable places. Until just a nudge here or there, in the right location, might be all it takes?

Might be all it takes, for Krypton to be doomed sooner than later.

However…

However…

Here’s what will happen at the end of the universe: long after heat-death has claimed everything with absolute thoroughness, there will be a brief reintroduction of order as the black holes all finally and explosively pop, once their evaporation via Hawking radiation has whittled them down in size so much that they can’t remain stable. Smaller ones first, then bigger ones later, and supermassive ones last, but in that epoch they will all go, and the information long stored on their surfaces will come free as a sort of “death bond” into spacetime. The prisoners of the Phantom Zone will be freed at this instant, too, though there will be nothing for them to do, and no mischief they can make…well, in fact they will be loosed as anti-Q Rays according to Jor-El’s calculations, travelling backwards in time on a very long loop through the black hole’s increasingly-powerful gravitational field, and finally nudged back inside it by the gravitic weight of time-reversed Hawking radiation at the exact moment their Q-Ray sprite counterparts were sent up from Krypton’s surface, to meet and annihilate, and keep the matter/energy budget of the universe intact. That’s what’s going to happen: in negative time, their masses will then descend — have already descended, if you look at it the right way — back to Krypton’s surface, as the meeting of Q-Ray and anti-Q Ray produces mass in the same way that the meeting of electron and positron produces energy. And this is all enabled only by the fact…as Jor-El suddenly sees from his amazingly privileged position as an experimenter…

…That the universe is fundamentally time-asymmetric. And the only reason it doesn’t look time-asymmetric, is that the residual fractions of energy that would indicate its asymmetric nature are being bled off into the fifth dimension.

But two can play that game, if one of them is dead, and so Jor-El has — Rao help him — an idea. As long as conservation isn’t violated, then part of Krypton can live on. One last use of the Phantom Zone Projector — he thinks it may be enough to finally cause Krypton’s ultimate disassociation — simultaneously with the use of what we might crudely term the opposite of a Phantom Zone Projector, a stardrive repurposed the opposite way in order to produce an anti-Q Ray sprite. I have it all worked out, I promise you, but to explain it all would make even this overweight blogpost too long to be read! So suffice it to say that if these two sprites, Q and anti-Q, were to meet one another exactly at the event horizon of the black hole…then the product would be mass, exiting the event horizon at nigh on the speed of light, though getting slower as it goes. Because the anti-Q radiation will pass over the gravitational fence just as though it wasn’t even there, in exactly the manner that Q radiation can not…since anti-Q radiation is ordinarily born to cross the event horizon from the other side, but inside the black hole it has anomalous properties…is programmed, so to speak, to get onto the other side in order to cross back in. And its anomalous nature is paid for in the only way it can be paid for, which is by sucking a bit of energy out of the fifth dimension back into the four we know of, there to dwell in the black hole as part of its mass/energy budget until the Hawking Epoch at universe’s end sets it free again. So for a moment, the black hole will cease expanding, just long enough for…

…A rocketship about the mass of a man to escape it, and inside the rocketship an infant. Jor-El’s son.

Well, can you blame him?

And Krypton dies forthwith, as soon as it’s done; just a little bit ahead of schedule. No, he most definitely doesn’t tell the Science Council! He just builds the rocketship, and builds the machine. He doesn’t even tell his wife, until…

Until…

Horribly, he realizes that he’s made a miscalculation. It will all work, and the gimmicking will get little Kal-El through, but in order for the gimmicking to happen, Jor-El himself must operate the controls of the sprite/anti-sprite assembly. But then who will take the very last one-way trip into the Phantom Zone, to be the equalizing quantum of energy that kicks the rocketship out?

There is only one person who could do it…only one person who would do it. But it’s awfully hard, isn’t it? Kal-El’s mother Lara will be spit out at the end of the universe in the Hawking Epoch along with all the other Phantom Zone prisoners, there to realize that everyone and everything dies eventually despite long shots, just before arcing away on the long loop back through time to be reabsorbed by Sagittarius A at the moment of her previous self’s original banishment. But her son will live, so that makes up for it all…one hopes…

And so Lara gets into the Phantom Zone Projector, a last-minute change in plans that’s recorded nowhere and known to no one (you Bloggers are the only people in the whole Universe who know about it), and Kal-El is lovingly placed in his rocketship, and the masses balance. With the closing of a contact, 5D energy will strike the match that lights the fuse that ignites the dynamite that blows apart the house Jor-El built…and for a moment he hesitates…and then he resolutely pushes the button…and…

About forty-five thousand years ago by our reckoning, about eleven billion years ago by Jor-El’s, and just last week by his infant son’s…

…The planet Krypton, or whatever its inhabitants actually used to call it, is gone.

And little Kal-El’s rocket speeds away from the catastrophe, first at so near c as makes no difference, then slower and slower…but still it will be a long time before the ship is travelling slowly enough for relativistic time-dilation to cease isolating it from its surrounding universe. The ship’s navigational system is programmed sensitively by Jor-El to look for planets in a certain favourable band of velocity and trajectory and gamma-factor-match, that also support a biosphere favourable to humanoid life…a wish-list to be filled out as best the navigator can, in the relatively short amount of time that Kal-El has before his life-support systems peter out. Earth is basically the first planet that fits the bill, a very lucky close approximation! Because if it hadn’t been us, out past the Orion Spur is an awfully big gap of inter-spiral space, a passage that the Last Son Of Krypton probably could not have survived. In fact if it weren’t for the Orion Spur, then he probably wouldn’t have! Thus time and chance enter into all things, but faith is occasionally rewarded…down onto the Kent fields crashes the little rocketship, and the boy is found.

And what a strange boy he is! For he is not made of the regular stuff of baryonic matter that we are used to, but instead he’s made of whatever stuff is left to coagulate itself once most of the fundamental Four Forces have been re-unified. Protons? Electrons? We think — we think! — that he is at least made of something like atoms and molecules, but honestly who knows. Anyway whatever he is made of, it’s stuff that can’t be scratched by any force we know of, and so the kid is indestructible. Also, though with some effort his eyes can detect the presence of photons, it’s easier for him to see W bosons and gluons and Higgs particles and such. Neutrinos? We think he can see neutrinos, in their whore-like flexing between states…

Really, he seems to be able to see everything. Call him the obverse of Daredevil?  Sure, call him that, but as time goes on he also becomes capable of emitting his “radar sense”…with great concentration on his part, gluons stream from his eyes, capable of altering the relationship of quarks in the matter they’re directed at: it’s scarier than heat vision, but it’s more sensitive too. And who knows what other kinds of bosons his eyes might emit, as a reversed consequence of also being absorbed? With time, too, he’ll become absurdly strong, and fast, and able to leap tall buildings: not because he is “naturally” any of these things, but because as a Kryptonian he accesses the “other vector” that in the ordinary universe is hidden by virtue of its alignment with time…what is “superness”, after all? It’s merely the reconcentration of effort into arbitrary slices of “time”: Clark Kent is as strong as he needs to be because he can lift “more”…not as in lifting more weight, but as in doing more lifting! He can outrace a locomotive because the locomotive can’t double and redouble the speed it already has, but he can. When he jumps, he can sort of “hang there” in the air, prolonging what the jump is. And eventually it will look like he is flying, but he isn’t really.

Eventually it will look like he is flying through space unaided by any technology, at any arbitrary superluminal speed you care to name…! But he won’t be. It’s all 5D trickery, you see. Though people will think he is the only case of superluminal transportation not requiring some sort of technological assistance, of course it will merely look like that while really being something else…and only a few, a precious few, will notice that it’s actually impossible for him to be doing the things he’s doing.

The Guardians of the Universe.

Adam Strange.

Brainiac.

And Lex Luthor, the only scientific rival of Jor-El. Oh, Smallville happened, my friends! But in my Superman reboot the Luthor that moved there was just a little bit more aware of what was going on around him. Even for Superboy to fly, is no crazier than for him to have super-breath, and Lex sees that, sees that the one thing is no more ridiculous than the other…and, more importantly, no less ridiculous. He also notices that Superboy does not have super-hearing, but only sometimes mimics it. “My, uh…super-hearing tells me that someone’s trapped in that mine!” Because there is no Kryptonite (did you notice that?) Lex’s origin takes longer to happen; and because it takes longer to happen it is always Lex who’s putting himself in positions of peril where Superboy has to save him, and Lana Lang never even gets a chance to do so…without it looking exactly like what it is: that she’s copying Lex.

Poor Lana! Forever the object of derision, from men who should want to sleep with her yet somehow don’t…!

And as for Lex, Superboy never suspects he’s just faking, because he’s got his shit planned out. Lex Luthor, Scientific Adventurer, would of course constantly be getting into scrapes, wouldn’t he? Just as one day Lois Lane, Investigative Reporter, will get into them too. But Lex Luthor — the Smallville Daily News calls him “Mr. Action!” for a time — isn’t really a Scientific Adventurer at all, because he never goes spelunking anywhere Superboy can save him, that he hasn’t already been a week earlier when Superboy wasn’t looking. Oh, I forgot to mention…lead doesn’t block Kal-El’s W-boson vision? There is something that will block it, but it isn’t lead…

…But instead it’s the thing Lex Luthor eventually invents, once he figures out Kal-El’s implications for physics. Underneath the dimension of Time, Lex realizes, another dimension is hiding…and as well as this meaning that the universe is time-asymmetric, that there’s such a thing as true randomness outside the collapse of the wave function, and that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is incorrect, more importantly to Lex it means that a type of matter could be created that resonates strongly with the energies of the fifth dimension…so much so it almost is energy rather than matter…and actually if you placed a 5D energy “tap” near this hypothetical substance, this material that interacts so strongly with the hidden dimension…this “Kryptonite”…then the effect would be almost as a Faraday Cage? So, sure, you could use Kryptonite for all kinds of things, but there’s only one thing you couldn’t use anything but Kryptonite for, and that’s for killing Superboy…

…Which is what Lex is working on in the laboratory bunker Kal-El builds for him by the lake outside Smallville, though he says he’s working on something else: Kryptonite. 5D matter-energy hybrid substance, capable of supplying inexhaustible energy and driving perpetual-motion machines and doing God-knows-what else! But how do you know when you’ve got it?

Well, you test it.

By using it to kill Superboy.

I mean, Superboy’s not a bad sort, but we all have to make sacrifices for science?

Thus the scene in the laboratory bunker, and Superboy escapes, but in the course of his escaping Lex is rendered bald — like, five-dimensionally bald, which means “incurably bald” — and boy is it a sad day for Superboy when he discovers his former friend, the guy he actually looked up to (as a Scientific Adventurer, natch!), was actually faking it the whole time. Faking everything, even his own feelings…

…And now this guy is going to be constantly after him, trying to trap him to experiment on him some more, as Kal-El let him do back when he trusted him. Not the Scientific Adventurer getting into scrapes anymore, but the Super-Criminal trying to pull off elaborate bank robberies! It’s the same thing, really: “Superboy, come get me!” Oh, I don’t want you to think Lex Luthor is a psychopath, though, because that’s not the real nature of his villainy; actually, there’s nothing wrong with him except the choices that he makes. He thinks and feels just as you or I, Lex Luthor does, and he’s motivated by the same things…truth be told, he’s not really even that petty or selfish, it’s just that he was an abject failure everywhere he went, before Superboy befriended him and believed in him, and do you know what it’s like to be a person as smart as Jor-El and yet fail miserably at everything, not even be able to help your poor mother out with rent as you bounce endlessly from town to town because instead of making friends at new schools you always make enemies? OF THE TEACHERS, not even of the kids…but when you’re a kid, if you have a part-time guardian as an enemy then you can’t beat them; and if somehow you can beat them anyway, then you have to leave the town they’re in. Lex Luthor would be a sympathetic character, I dare say, if it weren’t for the fact that as hard as he’s had it Superman’s had it harder and still manages to be a good person…Lex never had one break except for the fact that he’s a naturally-occurring super-genius, well Kal-El never had one break except that he’s a 5D tap-site, a naturally-occurring physical marvel. Same?

…Yet Luthor is not the only person who’s interested in the 5D spigot known as Superman, and his implications for the Standard Model. There are another couple of enemies he’s got. Closest to home, there are the ex-prisoners of the Phantom Zone, already several billion years in the future cut loose and driven back through time to eventual annihilation at the event horizon of Sagittarius A…except that when the Q and anti-Q sprites went up on the last day of Krypton, as Kal-El flew over the gravitational fences like a human home run, the essences of the Phantom Zone prisoners who had been “most recently exiled” were themselves changed into a vacillating Q and anti-Q state…doomed to re-entry of the event horizon, sure enough, but occasionally able to assert the positive-matter side of their nature, and live in space and time as tangible entities for short periods of time, on their way back through time. It’s a route no less sure, but it’s weirder…longer…and, it occurs to the brighter ones among those who get to take it…

Look, the event horizon just wants a humanoid mass that’s escaped it!

It doesn’t care which one it gets!

So if Kal-El can be grabbed and tossed into the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, then Zod can go on and do what he pleases from that point, his matter/energy debt being paid by someone else. Zod, so absurdly powerful! Having everything at his disposal that Superman has, but also having his fluctuating state between matter and energy to draw on, and thus control of exotic radiative emissions that even Jor-El never foresaw! But the first time Superman meets Zod, is also the last time Zod meets Superman, since the only way for Zod to escape his fate is to find a replacement to throw into the black hole…so the first battle is fought fiercely, and Superman has the odds stacked against him! He doesn’t even know who this guy is…!

So he defeats Zod in that first/last attack, but from his point of view that doesn’t mean he can’t die later anyway…

Because the universe is fundamentally time-asymmetric, you see, but let’s leave sad old Zod for now, because he’s not the only one who’s interested in Superman either…

Because somewhere out there is a fifth-dimensional entity who because of Jor-El’s machinations has his foot caught in the gopher-hole of Sagittarius A, for the next several billion years. And how annoying this is! Eons and eons of living high off the hog of the 4D universe’s “extra” energy (they don’t really need to know there’s such a thing as true randomness, do they?), but now he’s lost status in his community, because he’s tied by a thin cord to the 4D universe, but to break the cord would cause a shocking social tumult, and so now he even has to submit to such an indignity as having a name and being a definite thing! Oh, the indignity, it is shattering. Yet he can’t simply get rid of the son of the highly-annoying Jor-El with a click of his fingers, even though he would like to, because the kid’s got a 5D shadow, a thickness, an active extension into the “other vector”…technically, he has standing in the 5D realm, even though it is abominably low standing, and that makes it difficult to vanish him away. His 5D shadow would remain, even if his 4D substance was obliterated, so for the little man with the nonsense name it just doesn’t even make any sense to blast Superman into atoms, because from his perspective that simply won’t satisfy his pique: it won’t change anything. He’s not in the same situation as the Phantom Zone criminals, we must remember: his foot is caught in Sagittarius A for a few billion years no matter what happens, so it’s only revenge he’s after and nothing more…and it’s a minor revenge at that, since he is not actually banished from his home, he just has a lot of his neighbours smirking at him all the time because he has to maintain an extension into 4D space, and manifest himself there on a regular basis. But, it isn’t even like it’s three days a week, or anything…! So, he’s a peevish little fellow, but hardly in a murderous rage, and anyway he wouldn’t do what Zod might and just kill all Superman’s friends, because frankly that’s 4D-entity thinking, even if he did want to make him “suffer” in some general sense…

…Which he doesn’t, because frankly that’s 4D-entity thinking too, the stuff that savages indulge in. In the civilized world, revenge is meaningless unless it’s proportional: if someone humiliates you, you humiliate them back, you don’t go on some killing spree or something, good heavens! Mortal vendetta against some tiny speckling from the lower dimensions?

Do you want to be even more of a laughing-stock than you already are?

And besides it isn’t Kal-El who’s humiliated Mxy, but his father, and since all who perish inside a black hole are utterly extinguished Jor-El just isn’t around to humiliate anymore…and even if he were, my God man, humiliating a corpse?…what’s happened to you…so what Mxy will do to Superman will be just a tad more complex than that, though truth be told…

…He is getting just a little bit unhealthily obsessed with the sprat?

But then it seems that must be the fate of all who are closely connected to him. More distant entities are capable of approaching the subject of Superman’s physical uniqueness in a more sensible fashion. Brainiac, for example, is no flash-in-the-pan freak like Lex Luthor, nor some tired would-be tyrant who eventually got his ass kicked by someone tougher…no. Brainiac is something of a Master Tyrant, if you like; having been in the biz for a couple thousand years now, he’s seen a lot of petty self-styled Emperors succeed brilliantly for a time through brutish force, and then inevitably get overthrown. And what was it all for? What was gained? What did anyone think would be gained? To consolidate power in your family line for a bare handful of generations, only so your line can then be extinguished when you’re overthrown, that’s…well, even for monkey thinking, you know, that’s some pretty bad excuse for making a plan. But of course, such are the inevitably rancid fruits of raw personal ambition, and there’s nothing that disgusts Brainiac more than raw personal ambition. His empire was built sustainably, for the long term not the short; his empire places a greater emphasis on persuasion than on conquest. In fact his empire enjoys nothing more than toppling petty would-be Kings and Emperors; would-be Kings and Emperors are his empire’s bread and butter, if you want to know the truth. Brainiac himself, pretty well invulnerable in his own “person”, is always the one who makes first contact with new civilizations, and no hordes of armies back him up when he does it…because he’s a lover, not a fighter. Does that sound odd, for a being at least half machine, with a computer mind? But the highest love is the love of truth, is it not? And Brainiac enjoys his exalted position for no other reason than because of all his empire’s subjects he loves truth the most, and is willing to risk the most for it. It would be so unseemly, for the man with all the power to secrete himself away in some palace, enjoying elite privileges while those less capable and less empowered go out and do the hard and dangerous work of building civilization! So he goes himself, alone and unassisted, to discover even in the dregs of the starfield the value that some more petty and personally-ambitious tyrant would scornfully choose to overlook.

For example…did you know that there’s this really backwards planet in this really insignificant little spur of a spiral arm, where a hot pinpoint of what appears to be 5D energy crisscrosses the globe righting wrongs anonymously? And the worst thing that could happen to such a remarkable and laudable kind of raw material like that would obviously be for it to fall under the sway of some unenlightened chauvinistic institution, would it not? Brainiac very rationally believes — because he holds no beliefs that are not rational — that it’s far better to intercede to preserve the good, than it is to wait until it goes bad: potential is a thing so easy to waste, you see, and that ease is itself such shocking evidence of the universe’s basic black absurdity… What if this unique energy-source, this powerful force for truth and justice (they are the same thing really), was not supported? What if it soured, and became something terrible, something that could no longer be nurtured but only done away with? Only a petty would-be tyrant waits to convince by military force when he could persuade by friendship instead…and more importantly, only a inexcusably poor philosopher (like a petty would-be tyrant) thinks the wilful squandering of resources in anything but a tragedy that we are morally-bound to prevent. Oh, Brainiac is a very benevolent guy, for sure! Like the ancient Kryptonians, all he wants is to give people the chance to improve their situations! His empire is the most technologically-advanced thing you will ever see, and all these gifts are free to every new planet he encounters! You don’t even have to join up, to get them!

There aren’t even any strings!

Just…some problems that come with a surfeit of well-being, that he can help you work out. It’s okay, every civilization experiences these problems, the trick is just to see what must be done and then to do it, quickly, minimizing the anxiety of adjustment…

But you know…Earth isn’t really there yet, honestly. Brainiac, the empire’s Chief Scout, would hesitate to put it on a diet of miracles, at this point. He’s only really interested in Superman…

And…let’s see…

Have I missed anything?

…

(thinks)

…

OH YEAH!

Something for the Doctor Who fans out there:

Kara Zor-El may still be alive.

…

There are many Superman reboots, but this one’s mine. My Superman reboot and I know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of our burst, or the smoke we make. We know that it is the hits that count. And we will hit…

…Or, actually, we won’t, but wouldn’t it be pretty to think so? A couple of other things I might mention, because they seem like obvious questions, so I might as well answer them obviously:

Yes, the Daxamites exist. No, they have no superpowers.

Yes, the Legion of Super-Heroes exists in the…uh, thirty-first century now, I guess? Although, remember: time is asymmetric…

Yes, the Justice League of America exists…Batman and Green Lantern and Wonder Woman and the Atom and the Flash and all the rest of it…Green Lantern’s power works on a very advanced form of the “stargate” technology alluded to earlier, the Flash’s power comes from a future event he calls “the Crisis” (which if you are very clever, or alternatively if I have not been very clever, you may be able to figure out what it is without me telling you), and the Atom has some bullshit story about finding a chunk of “white dwarf matter”? Hey, the Atom’s obviously a big liar…

Yes, Luthor and Brainiac form an alliance. At a certain point.

Yes, Terra-Man exists. And he’s actually VERY IMPORTANT…

(Hmm, these are mostly “yes” things…that’s probably good…)

Yes, Legion ’89 basically happens, though not for the same reasons. Because…

No, there’s no such thing as a “metagene”.

No, Invasion! never happens. Not strictly-speaking.

Yes, Adam Strange could probably beat Superman in a fight. He’s an extremely ingenious fellow, that Adam Strange…!

No, there really, really, REALLY is no Multiverse.

No, the JSA doesn’t exist…and furthermore never did exist, not really.

(Oh dear, some of these “no” things are going to cause problems, I fear…)

(And I thought I was doing so well…!)

Yes, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman exists, and is in continuity, with just the slightest tweak, just a sentence or two.

(…What, no one wanted to know that?)

Yes, post-Crisis, we will have the Wally West Flash of Baron and Messner-Loebs.

Yes, Jimmy Olsen exists, I just haven’t mentioned him except parenthetically as “Mr. Action” (sorry, Jimmy), and all the rest of the Planet crew exists as well…even Steve Lombard…heck, Lois even still takes pity on Clark occasionally and comes over to Clinton Street to cook him boeuf bourgignon…

Superman still has his Fortress of Solitude, too…

And, oh!  A bunch of other stuff which I mostly haven’t mentioned because I mostly forget, but isn’t it interesting how giving Superman a very specific sort of reboot changes just a whole shitload of things?

And, oh yeah, almost forgot to remind you…

…

Kara Zor-El may still be alive.

…

Hey, it’s a bit late for April Fool’s, but here I am…!

Always leaving too early and arriving too late, but I hope you enjoyed this frivolity I made for you, Bloggers! Yes; I don’t like the whole “it’s so fun to play mean tricks on your friends and family, because they’re arbitrarily not allowed to get mad, ha ha!” thing…I think we should give meaningless gifts instead. Foolish gifts.

I fancy I’ve got a gift for foolishness, me.

Well…proof enough? Fifth-dimensional petit bourgeois, Kryptonian criminal aristos…and Space-Lenin, for God’s sake?

None of them know why they can’t help but get so darned involved with that Superman…!

But only Lex Luthor knows, and is he ever jealous! Poor failed Comrade Luthor, he was so promising once at the rallies…he spoke so well…

But then the Secretary’s daughter went and fell in love with that awful Bingo Little fellow.

With his suspicious friends.

So, not really very much unlike me, then?

AS I ALWAYS SUSPECTED

Flashback! To “Push…!”

Now I’ve seen it three times, and honestly I think I love it.

Isn’t that strange?

I was just so sure, you know, that it was something like Misfits Of Science writ large and sloppy…something cheap and tawdry and full of the awful hard light that suffuses (it seems) every singly little audiovisual thing with the slightest of science-fictional components these days. And the pushbutton feelings. Not that I don’t go to the movies in order to have my buttons pushed, you understand! I may be a bit different, but I’m not that different…but these are the wrong buttons, these things that I guess we can blame James Cameron for, or something. Action movies; they oppress me, bit by bit. On the whole, they seem to me to be devoid of positive feeling, lacking something I don’t-know-quite-what, that I’m always looking for. “Positive feeling”, though, it sounds absurd…what is that, anyway? What can I possibly mean? Surely I don’t mean just “happy endings”…

Well, no. I don’t. Although I certainly don’t disdain happy endings, and it bothers me excessively when filmmakers seem to…when they’ve written a happy-ending story and then don’t want it, it isn’t good enough for them, so they invent all these tortured methods of ineptly subverting that textual expectation. All in the name of making me feel something, but I don’t feel anything at all when a non-happy ending is tacked-on…no more than I feel when a happy one is tacked-on! And so both are “negative”; both have the odour of something made by committee, even if it’s only a committee of one. And it would be so convenient to be able to stop right there, and say I’ve sorted it out: blah blah something something true to the story, whatever story it is, but that won’t cover what it is to lack positive feeling, because what about the stories that get that part right and then still lack it? Have you seen Avatar? I swear, I tried to watch it, you know? But I couldn’t stay with it, it was so ridiculously, insultingly hollow. I watched more of Transformers 2 — no, really, I did! — and to this day am often caught wondering just how James Cameron managed to fuck up his magnum opus just so, so badly, that watching Transformers 2 was a more joyous experience for me by comparison. I mean, no one can accuse him of not having the love, can they? Of not having the vision?

But I guess it was the wrong kind of love…the wrong kind of vision. The hyperreal simulation was certainly a most extravagant metatextual device, but the different things to look at business that draws us to the movie theatre was somehow an itch not even the supreme attainment of the hyperreal could scratch: Avatar was just so damned boring, wasn’t it? Boring perfection. I was talking to someone not long ago about the boringness of perfection, with specific reference to Jim Lee and Geoff Johns — one a weirdly-driven renderer of some kind of ideal Batman splash page that dwells only inside his own head, with apparently very rigorous standards that are nonetheless unfathomable to me, and the other a crazy nitpicking completist with standards of plot-tidiness I can only assume are similar. All some weird bubble of Outsider Art, fooling the eye with the trappings of legitimacy? Steve Ditko and Dave Sim and even Alan Moore can’t match that stuff when it comes to outre, you know…they’re just mavericks, who drop into and out of public respectability according to what they’re working on, not full-blown extremists. Dave Sim may believe some crazy things about what the Bible says, but say this for him anyway: he’s concerned with what’s real, even if he gets it wrong. Because there is a certain standard of representation of things in Sim’s work, you know? Which imposes a certain set of beliefs in, approaches to, the adoption of form? Whereas Johns and Lee…

Well, it reminds me of something Werner Herzog said: that he couldn’t think of any film that the new 3D technology would be useful for. Except, possibly, a pornographic film. Which I thought was quite an interesting thing to say, because…hmm, yeah, wouldn’t that be just a terrifying art film? The terror of the hyperreal! Absolute widescreen super-clarity brought to a sex act! You can practically smell the lotion, in the brilliance of the Klieg lights you can see what attention porn stars pay to personal hygiene! All absolutely beyond clinical, thirty feet tall and coming at you…yes, that ought to terrify us: the living autopsy of sex. How we’d long for Jason to come along and inject a little assuaging fantasy into it by chopping up the partners in a ludicrously comic-booky way! But one must presume that in the world of hyperreal sex-on-film there can be no thought any longer of fantasies, our glorious Ludwig Van simply ruined forever…from now on even the sight of a soft-focus Susan Oliver or Yvonne Craig will drive us to the wastepaper basket in reflexive recollection of why we can no longer have such nice romantic things…

…Or maybe not, but anyway: is there any boredom more boring than the boredom of perfection? So for me Avatar was just the pushing of dead buttons, and I couldn’t stand the thing. Because there was no positive feeling to it at all! Though I still haven’t managed to define what that is, I know, and maybe I don’t really need to invoke it when I’m talking about a crummy militarized ripoff of “The Word For World Is Forest”? Ye gods, a militarized “Word For World”, and with VR sex in it too. This is Simpsons-parody stuff, obviously…there’s nowhere to go with any of that but down…

For God’s sake, who thinks of making Ursula LeGuin stories for gearheads, you know? Positive feeling?

It never even gets a chance, in Avatar!

But fortunately we aren’t really talking about Avatar.

But we’re talking about Push, instead.

So, I figure it ought to be axiomatic, that anything that looks like it was published by Eclipse Comics has got THRILL-POWER. Well, I say “Eclipse”, which of course was only one company among many that pursued what Tom Spurgeon calls the Third Way of Eighties superhero comics, but I can’t list all of them, can I? Anyway we will get back to this thrill-power thing in more detail in a minute, but the reason I bring it up is because damn if Push doesn’t look JUST LIKE something that fell out of Eclipse in the Eighties, you know? I actually had to check to see it hadn’t been made from a comic, something around the time of The Crow, perhaps…or Mage…or even Luther Arkwright…

And imagine my delight, to find out it hadn’t been! Though it should’ve been: since that passionate inkiness, that start-again freshness, is all over it. Those lessons learned in the alternative scene, that particular kind of framing of a shot — comics-style set-pieces, Welles by way of Kurosawa by way of Ditko by way of Talbot by way of Sim, if you’re of my vintage you can’t not notice it…all that stuff comes right up to you and pushes a pie in your face, and the pie is delicious. What this is, is a black-and-white comic of the Eighties finally printed with the colouring they could never afford, lovingly painted — no, lacquered — in amplified hue. Did I mention that I thought I was going to hate it? That I thought all those tricks of hard light were going to be present in it? I should’ve remembered to say something about love, which is that if you’ve got the right kind of it then even cliche can make you feel something…because it wasn’t the hard light this time, but the other thing, the ratcheted palette, you know that thing where they fuck with the colour-balances and make everything orange and blue? That’s an awful programmatic cliche too, along with the shaky-cam of Hollywood-verite that became so inescapable so suddenly in the late Nineties, was never used right, I think they even film Jeopardy! that way now…and the soundtrack, the soundtrack, the endless music-videoness of the soundtrack, as though the best thing the committee that thought the thing up could imagine was to get a music-video director to make their X-Men cash-in product…my God, so much is the same, here, as it is everywhere else…!

And yet somehow, it’s really beautiful.

My apologies for being all scattery here, it’s just that I really do have so much to say about Push, too much to ever say in a blog-post anyone will bother to read, so I have to jump from place to place, quickly point and say “see?”, and then hop off to another lilypad. Because it is all about seeing, as it’s all about that old “Eclipse” soul. It’s all a bit half-assed and derivative, it’s Scanners cut with Lost In Translation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and The Tomorrow People…and Donnie Darko and X-Men, so it’s mod, it’s trad, it’s got all the mad cons and the retread cred, but it also has just something…something of my own little list of cult-classic movies, Dark Star and Sixteen Candles and Repo Man, things I could watch and watch and watch, because every time I watched them I found I could fall just a little deeper into their little worlds, get that much more absorbed into their texture, like becoming their wallpaper, becoming their character. I’ve never liked Chris Evans as much as I’ve liked him here, so much (perhaps) like me in the period of my twenties when I was cut loose in the demimonde. Because in the demimonde it’s all about origins, all the time: you barely know your own, and you don’t know anyone else’s, but origin swirls about you everywhere you go. Well, at Eclipse it was the same! Those breakaway Eighties artists who were still for some reason stuck on the superheroes, you know? And specifically on the intrigue of the superheroes as manifested primarily by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, made by them perhaps mostly by accident at first — that weird world of secret connectivity, subway tunnels of causation rumbling beneath the streets of apparent happenstance, the miracle of fantasy stories as disconnected as they were outrageous nevertheless being slowly knitted into a giant tapestry of extremely uneasy threads. The origin is always the most important thing, so important that you’ll notice they made a bestselling reprint book out of it, one of my top ten Christmas gifts ever…because to the comics readers who started around the time I did, the origin story was always the one you could never get, never find, only see in later versions done as summaries or flashbacks by later artists, the genuine article only hinted at, alluded to, seen through a prism and all that rot. So valuable, and I fancy the later Eighties renegades felt it deeply too: when in making up their own superhero mythos they successfully kept “origin” in some way always occluded, thus in some way always implicated, in their (importantly!) new stories.

And in Push, the same pattern is followed…and, interestingly at least to me, it isn’t a million miles away from James Cameron’s metatextual strategy in Avatar, except it’s got the one thing that movie hasn’t got!

A testimonial…!

Or, no…waitaminute…yes, that’s right, I’ve got it now…

A heart.

Chris Evans, bruised expatriate failure, is competent in every way except the one that counts…at home (if a little fucked-up) in his limbo, his island of stilts in no-man’s land, where the overlapping spheres of authority just don’t quite touch one another as they’re supposed to…youth, with plenty of time but no purpose, in a space where he can go unobserved for at least (if he is lucky) weeks at a time. Origin flows forth here, as a rising tide, as stormwater welling up from an underground lake, and we are ankle-deep in it already: so like it or not, it connects us all, though the fondest wish of youth is still to be free…

And then later on you find out that “being free” and “doing good” are really the same thing. Uh…

Spoilers?

Well, he does a really good job of conveying it, and he doesn’t even say much. “Hard light” would have him come to an onerous realization with a bowed head in a blue light, all suddenly self-knowing, but Push gives him an orange light and lets him do things he has to with no time to really think about them, much less make a confessional speech…and even less than much-less could he formulate one. Comics? It’s comics; because you know that one character who’s the girl? Dakota Fanning plays her here, somehow managing the nifty trick of fitting in perfectly with all the “guy from that show” character-actor faces…and such attractive faces they are, all of them! Some really major part of the credit must go to the casting, here, because the only person you see who looks like a movie star is the one person who’s kind of supposed to, the well-known noir Oracle visited by everyone from William Powell to Bob Hope to Harrison Ford to Keanu Reeves…and, sorry, that isn’t much of a spread, but I was going for a specific effect there? Which is going to fail, now, because I have not yet come all the way back around to THRILL-POWER…!

But never mind that now, though ol’ Ming-Na is framed just so Eclipse-like in her Oracle’s Den? There’s actually a longer movie here, one senses; or, should that be “a bigger story”? Some of what happens doesn’t really make sense, and interestingly (again: to me!) it’s in just those parts where blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-that-didn’t-add-up, that the action coheres into something you can care about. Well, was it not ever thus, with cult-classic movies? Did Brother From Another Planet never hand you a bag and say “hold this for me a minute, I just gotta talk to a guy”? At such moments is the audience truly involved, as they reason past the infelicities on their characters’ behalf. People rarely look right at the camera in this movie; everything is drenched in neon; if the building’s being shaded, she won’t be able to see it; anything with shrimp. Plate O’ Shrimp. The story has a happy ending, because it was always meant to, but there are still tortured steps because we’re missing ten minutes: ten minutes of explicated cause, for some of the odder necessary things that happen.

Ten minutes of origin.

It should have bothered me. There are so many movies that just needed that one line left in, for things to make sense, and it always bothers me, it bothers me, it bothers me when they leave it out anyway. But, those are movies in which the sensemaking is really the main thing: the perfect movies, that were not quite perfect. But, have you seen Avatar?

So maybe I’d better rethink this. Maybe a movie filled with cliches, basically composed of cliches, can’t really be about doing them “right”? After all, was not the thing I liked about Batman Begins and The Dark Knight that they weren’t afraid to make a virtue of inconsistency? The plot in Push is so familiar, you know…and the solution to the problem is familiar too, and it’s all familiar. I’ve seen this movie, this comic, before…and perhaps that’s the point. Have you ever watched Donnie Darko with the commentary track on?

“Uh…yeah, that’s another thing that was…uh, I mean originally there was a scene that explained all that, but we had that hard 98-minute limit and…uh…”

Fucking breaks your heart. Fucking breaks your heart, but consider this: Donnie Darko wasn’t all that shit-hot of a movie, honestly. The ideas that were left out were just boilerplate, I will go so far as to say laboured, SF ideas; the only really important things about it are a) the rabbit, and b) the girl riding up on her bike asking what’s going on. And the ability to be absorbed into that little world over and over again, and deeper each time (as I know many people are and have been) is probably in part down to — though it breaks your heart to hear the guy tell it, it really does! — its ultimately disheartening imperfection. Push doesn’t really suffer from as much of that, but there are enough vagueries to satisfy anyone if they care to search them out: part of it’s the setting, an aggressively non-specific Hong Kong that nevertheless looks specific as hell…all the places are intact, with all their marvellous specific gritty detail, but the sense is not, and actually the places are not either because they’re all covered in this weird wash. There is a bit where young Dakota Fanning gets drunk and talks about being “…power in my youth!” and it adds nothing at all, except it does. Hmm, I wonder how far back this thing stretches, this set of associations called up by her transgression? The bit about the 13 year-old wanting some booze is punched up a bit, as though the general principle of the rules being partly suspended in Hong Kong (though you never know how much you can count on that, or when it will work for you or against you!) is being accentuated…however it isn’t too much work to associate it with the idea of youth being a suspended state that pops up in…oh, that movie Rich Kids, maybe? The World Of Henry Orient, possibly? I don’t mean to suggest that every person who makes a movie or a comic is just so conscious of their own influences that they sit down and map them all out, you understand…I mean, probably most of these influences are just my own and no one else’s, but the thing is that I like it, and the movie frames and poses and shoots things in such a fortuitous way that it helps me to make those connections. Everything looks like something; most of the time I can’t figure out what it looks like. A while ago I was talking about how I became attracted to opera for its comic-like qualities: the production of mere tableaux, within which exposition takes place! It’s a tough trick to pull off, honestly. Because it really puts enormous pressure on the ability to deliver a performance, you know? Action movies, or the parts of movies that consist of action, are more like dance: not about tableaux, but instead about tableau’s opposite. But in those, although you can certainly fuck it all up if you don’t know what you’re doing, at least you don’t have the problem of action being decoupled from motion. But the tableaux, the tableaux, they all have to make action take place in the pose, right? And so it’s all about the quality of performance that happens when you’re stuck there.

In my opinion: some mighty good performances here. But!

Blink and you’ll miss them.

My God, how I wish now this had been an Eclipse comic, so I could haunt used bookstores and try to track it down. The missing origin. In a way it’s quite a simple thing, this evanescence of a thrill that we’re constantly seeking in all our switch-flipping and button-pushing — as I said, we go to the movies primarily to see things, to do the fine act of seeing, and so who wants to see the same thing all the time? There needs to be something in it that sings to us, and the only thing that sings is difference…mood, tone, staging, performance, a set of evoked associations, commentary, colour, sound, costumes…the glimmer of an idea, the shadow of a purpose. Remix culture is a powerful tool for the constellation of meaning, but (as I also said up above, or maybe just implied) it needs some sort of love to drive it. Without the love, it’s all just so many flashpots going off in sequence: as mere pyrotechnics is loosed upon the world. And thus though it’s pretty easy to specify what interests a person when they go to the movies, still all the parts and pieces can be in order and the thing can fail to intrigue anyway. Evanescence: it’s, like, a thing, y’know? Consider, for example, the little matter of THRILL-POWER that I promised I’d get back to: though I believe the term first arises at Martin Goodman’s Atlas Comics, and later becomes woven into the skin of 2000 A.D., if it means anything past a marketing line then it means the top fraction of a distillation process — what you get when you bring industrial pressures to bear on a bunch of talented and subversive artists, and set them to grinding out Product on the factory floor, slipping in jokes when the boss-man ain’t looking and winking at one another conspiratorially…as if there were any other way to wink. It isn’t the only kind of art, by any means; but it’s the only one that promises such a strange and nebulous quality of success. So thrill-power is really a dream, you know: a dream of value. But with a most peculiar inflection. “We can make something out of this”, or “this can be important, somehow”, are thoughts that (it seems to me) can’t help but lie at the back of the cave of industrial relations even if for most working people it’s only slumbering there — tell the truth in art, and you can change the world, even if the art is of a degraded or twisted kind. And, you can still collect your paycheque!

Because the suits will never know!

Wink wink. Alert readers may be dismayed to see a shadow of my preoccupation with the Sufis and the Grail and alchemy here, once again, but don’t worry I won’t plunge us into all that right now…I never do get all the way into it anyway, you see, because in the back of my head there is still a tiny undergraduate looking for a senses-shattering term paper topic, and he’s saving “Magic Is Green: Colour As Icon In Twentieth-Century Fiction” for himself…so suffice it to say that the promise of bringing something wonderful and artistically-significant and world-renewing out of the atmosphere of the sweatshop is a promise with an unusually intense odour of transcendence about it. BUT!

It doesn’t have to be the sweatshop, where it’s found. Take my useful catch-all stand-in “Eclipse”, for example: which had that same stuff, that same energy, but located in the spirit of competition with the sweatshop; rather than in the paradoxical glamour of the sweatshop itself, where you get away with stuff just like a rogueish movie hero whose spirit can’t be broken though they beat him. Well, okay, okay…and maybe that glamour’s real, and relatively uncomplicated, but you don’t have to live too long to realize it’s better to write the movie than to be a character in it? Especially a character who dies in the second act because he’s everybody’s favourite, and that’ll make the jaded punters feel something? Except it’ll really only make them more jaded, probably, and anyway life’s not a movie and surely there are some better endings to be had than just these old ones where everyone loses. There was a young fellow online recently who had the idea that there are some movies that are, uh, “tonal chimeras”, where there’s a slip-point in the movie’s middle: what the movie concludes as, is not what it began as. Much like any old youthful adventure of living? So what Lee and Kirby made at Marvel Comics, as it turned out (at least: for a while) was a thing that others could do as well, in co-ops or collectives that served their labour more faithfully…okay, and sometimes it stank, because the love wasn’t really there, or it was the “wrong kind” — a useful rule of thumb might be that the more it looked like Marvel or DC, the more purely spectacular it seemed, then the less respectable it was in other ways? — and no one’s saying that nobody got screwed over again just by tinier sweatshops this time, because obviously they did, but that promise, THAT PROMISE, when it was there could never be mistaken. So hard to put one’s finger on it! But then it’s always hard to put one’s finger on an aroma…

The aroma, in some sense, of reality. Positive feeling; maybe that’s all it is, in the end? Or, all it needs to be? I rather like the idea of life being like a “tonal chimera”, that starts as the seed-pod of one implied meaning and then ends up as quite another: like walnuts from the cherry tree, your old thermodynamic miracle. So many bad movies, that bail on their original conception, what they “want” to be in their soul! Loathsomely dismal endings to hopeful stories, panderingly curative endings to hard-nosed ones! Yet in art as in life, sometimes what you want from your adventure changes along the way. So, maybe that kid’s righter than he knows? Maybe this is the kernel of every good story, that the thing you want changes along the way? Maybe every movie is a “tonal chimera”?

I still don’t know what “positive feeling” is, sad to say; I’m currently entertaining the possibility that it’s nothing but the filmmaker having interests all his or her own, and influences all his or her own too. I don’t really know if James Cameron has interests and influences like that. I mean, that’s a terrible thing to say, of course he must, he’s a person after all? But I just mean, as a friend once pointed out to me, he only makes action movies?

Only makes action movies.

And the sickly thought occurs: what is it that a person does, when they only do one thing, to branch out once they start to get bored with it?

James Cameron Pour L’Homme.

People, it is probably only a matter of time…

But I had better stop hopping now. Hey, do me a favour and go watch Push, eh? I’d really like to know what you think of it.

Or what it makes you think of.

Or if I’m just crazy for liking it.

But here’s to positive feeling, eh?

Wherever she may lie, God bless her.

Universe Part Eight: Bonfire Of The Novelties

Or:  “Superhero Sex:  Skypeing With The Devil”

…

Everytime I think I’m out, I keep pulling me back in.

Best of the midwinter season to you, Bloggers — or as we call it for some reason, the beginning of winter — and though I should really be wrapping presents [EDIT: or returning them, it being a few days later now] [EDIT EDIT: or not even thinking about them at all, it now being the middle of February and thus well into the New Year], I find myself with (somehow) more to say about teh sex and teh superhero comics. But, I thought I’d covered it all already?

So, why is there suddenly more to say?

Perhaps because the topic is a more general one than I’d first thought. You see, it isn’t just about how one can write oneself into a story in many different ways, nor merely about how the value of an escapist fantasy is dependent on what one specifically wishes to escape to or from, but it’s also about the larger systems of the real world that give all escapist fantasies their general context: their general applicability to any potential reader who happens to be trapped in a world he never made. Thus all incoherent rambling about art as pedagogy must eventually find its other half (its secret identity?) in a clever Marxist analysis of art as industrial relations…and then together wind their way back to the Lawrentian root of art as psychotherapy…

Which brings us to Doctor Doom, and libertarianism. Not that I’m saying old Victor, everybody’s favourite metalhead, is himself a libertarian — heck no, he’s a monarchist! — though some libertarians, hmm, are also monarchists really if you peel away the bullshit — but to the extent that a deep seam of libertarianism runs through the political perspective of the comics cliffside in general, he is every day in more and more danger of becoming a libertarian icon. Which, I have to think, is not a very good look for him…

And perhaps more unfortunately, it isn’t a very good look for libertarianism, either. You see, the problem is that this word “libertarian” is a hotly-contested one in this current cultural moment: outside of conversation with the Noam Chomskys among us, it really has no functional definition beyond its feeling definition — is really just a convenient label for a bundle of feelings (“strength through feelings!”), an “-ism”ness that seems to put those feelings into an historical, perhaps even developmental perspective, while really taking them further and further away from any meaning at all save what happens to be found on the skin of the bubble of the present moment. Bertrand Russell’s dictum that all memory of the past is just the artificial construction of the present is here revealed as more than a mere observation: now becoming a politically-charged tool of the propagandist, who like Raymond de Seze seeks to tunnel through sophistry to an unassailably retroactive triumph of pure, implicit logic equal in effect to God saying “dude, it’s okay, I’ve got this”. And not to get too far off topic too fast, but if you want to think of this kind of thing in terms of mathematics then you wouldn’t exactly miss the target…because strange loops, as any time-traveller would tell you, can do anything at all, that’s possible to be imagined: they can make the only possible theological proofs of the existence of God, simply by invoking the paradoxical nature of His inarguable unprovability; they can stop the catalogue of total knowledge from ever being assembled, simply by reading it; they can make new things by making new words for things; they can cause even the deadest and driest list of facts to become infused with a sudden lively humour that cannot be predicted or accounted for. Heck, they can even write the plots of superhero comics, AND WHAT’S MORE…!!

…They can write computer code, too, but we’re not quite there yet. We’ll get there, but not yet! When for now all we’re dwelling on is the fact that “Mathematics” may not itself be the description of this deep principle of thought-orderliness, but mathematics is certainly the thing we’ve invented to describe it, and it describes it very well indeed…and thus even though math isn’t itself the thing it was created to describe, it is nonetheless uniquely situated within it as part of it, in such a manner as to be able to affect it in its own strange loop…the model changing the thing it models which in turn creates a model for itself…

And where we are going to get to — uh, in theory anyway! — is the place where that unique feedback is exposed as something whose specific efficiencies also are conditioned by a more general context that lies outside their ambit of comprehension…in “the real world”, as it were…

BUT!!

Thankfully, we’re not there yet. We’re just talking about the word “libertarian”, remember?

And about comics.

Speaking of which…

Some comics people on the Internet have this real serious thing about Doctor Doom, have you noticed? That great, iconic villain with the puffed-up ego…they identify with him a little more strongly, these days, than perhaps can be accounted for by his beautiful design and long history of character development. Doctor Doom is a putz, of course: a walking inferiority complex wedded to a sad genius, a tragedy of lost human potential. Everyone is better than him, largely because he wants to know if they are…but he avoids changing by living in a fantasy world in which none of that matters, in which he isn’t like that and doesn’t have that flaw, and so doesn’t have to admit a thing about a thing. A quote from Simone Weil comes to mind here, courtesy of our old pal Harvey Jerkwater:

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating. Imaginative literature, therefore, is either boring or immoral or a mixture of both.”

And perhaps that may be a bit harsh for lovers of imaginative literature like you and me, but it certainly describes the problem of the supervillains: never satisfied because never satisfiable, more than anything else in the world they need their heroic antagonists to keep their illusions of proper and dignified selfhood afloat. EXCEPT!

Doctor Doom has gone beyond this, into a fugue state so complete that every action of his at once composes its own justification. Absolutely and permanently enveloped by his brilliant armour, everything he touches turns to totalitarianism, that -ism so wonderfully enabled by technocracy…but, he doesn’t see it. Because he doesn’t have to. Because he doesn’t need honesty as his credential, all he needs is his “personal code of honour”. Doctor Doom reeks of malevolence and evil, petty vindictiveness and disgusting Satanic pride…but, he’s got that “honour” thing going for him, and you have to give him that.

Don’t you?

Well…I dunno about that, frankly. The thing prevalent among young men in my culture that I call Bullshit Honour is just so damned cheap, so ephemeral and so filled with hypocrisy, that it kills thousands on the roads each year…bearing the same relation to the real thing “honour” as the false repute of “celebrity” does to actual fame, and oh wow how vain, without the merit, is the name! So many lines in so much sand, so hurriedly drawn with whatever stick happens to be most handy! Honestly, dude, you should not drive home, you should crash on the couch instead…

But to those who have nothing else, Bullshit Honour is the most precious thing in the world, even as the positions it produces are the most precarious: I am respectable, I am good, observe me as I don the armour of my character, see how it gleams. And don’t judge me by the things I do or say…!

But judge me fairly, by my history.

Though of course history is always in flux, as any time-traveller would tell you. So, the intersection of Doctor Doom with the libertarian ideal of modern times and antiquated thoughts: a self-interested actor who can call himself good by his own lights simply because he possesses motivations, that perhaps are really not much different in nature from those the good people possess too…smart, superbly capable in his own milieu, and terribly misunderstood by the sheep around him because they can’t fathom the superior poignancy of his struggle, he is the romance of imaginary evil personified. Who is better and finer? Who could possibly have more just cause, for taking any given action? The thing proves itself, at every instant: Doom is the best.

Doom is the best.

But…we didn’t used to think that, did we?

Didn’t we used to think of Doom as the worst?

Wasn’t that, in fact, what was so great about him?

Here’s that quote again, from Blue Box #1:

“Bulliet has a theory that posits comic books as keenly accurate depictions of the inner lives and imaginations of the teenage boys of that particular era. “What distinguished the comic book industry of the 1960s and ’70s from the book publishing industry was that it was more demand-driven than supply-driven,” he says. “Stores were very cautious about what they stocked. Owners knew their stock very well, and they paid attention to what boys were buying.” The output of the industry became totally reflective of the desires, fears, and dreams of the boys who were fueling it. “You can watch, in the comics of the era, the evolution of a sensibility that is specific to a demographic,” continues Bulliet. In Bulliet’s view, comics provide a window onto an otherwise undocumented history.”

Bullshit Honour is on occasion the best honour, because unlike its non-bullshit other half it doesn’t actually require principle, or hardship. It certainly generates hardship, by using principle…! But it doesn’t require these, if you see what I mean. All it requires is a certain amount of very specific cleverness, which is good news indeed if such cleverness is the only stock you’ve really got to trade. Romance? This is not the mid-twentieth century, when everything seemed pretty well on the upswing after an unimaginable disaster had finally been gotten through, so we bloody well need romance…the strange families that dotted the television dial throughout the postwar era, and filled the pulps and the comics as well, were born from the ruin of chaos and the abyss of lost time — all those sitcoms are about survivors, people! — but they also live in a time of mass reinvention because of that, a time of (if I may say so) “mass possibility”. But not so, the survivor-fictions of today! In which the only loss figured is the loss of reputation…

But mind you, that’s not an unserious type of loss either. It’s more abstract, sure; but it also hits at the heart of human social sensitivity. We’re pretty robust creatures, and can thrive even under tremendous environmental variations and enormous physical setbacks, but there are still a few problems we have no answers for. Wars and storms, we can sometimes get out from under; but endocrine imbalances and loss of public respect drive us to our knees every time. And it’s that second one that’s the kicker currently under review, of course: peacetime anxiety, that admits of no solution but medication. Even if that medication is a bar fight. Or, on the other hand…

…You can cheat. Libertarianism. In its current feeling-form, it’s a kind of ethical fugue — these problems are too hard, so we must make them less hard. These responsibilities weigh too heavily, we must make them lighter. When Rousseau did it, it was called “conjectural history”, but today we just call it Glenn Beck’s America. And comics people love it, in an odd conjunction with dotcom billionaires who somehow managed to fail up more spectacularly than any other people who have ever lived…comics people and software billionaires both, they feel the access of a greater and cleaner world banging shutters in back rooms in their heads, calling out to them down the back hallways, promising to break through the dimensional barriers into reality, through the wardrobe’s doors and into real life, bigger on the inside, the glove simply turned inside-out. All we have to do is fix it, all we have to do is do this thing, all we have to believe is a belief without seams and flaws…a better belief, a perfect belief. All we have to accomplish is perfection.

Hey, how hard could it be?

It’s a curious age, this early part of the twenty-first century. It has a lot of uncertainty in it, bubbling away beneath the surface. So it shouldn’t be too surprising if smart people, superb in their metier, whose personal poignancy is subjectively superior to the poignancy of others around them, find themselves going Frank Miller one better: and not wanting to use identification with the villain to interfere the more strongly with the hero, and through the hero the text, but instead wanting to identify with the villain as the actual mirror of the reader, and frankly the text can get lost. I mean, Brian Bendis and Mark Millar were fine for the early oughts, but their beats seem a bit tired now, you know? Be the villain you want to see fucking the hero in this world, and all that…in 2012, it’s almost naive. Heck, even rape has gotten passe; even anthropophagic sex is still, y’know, sex. And we’re running up against the limits of how to sublimate it. Oh novelty, novelty, all is novelty! So make a bonfire of all your novelties. Once upon a time, in the superhero world, jolly and harmless violence tapped the root of libido, and by marvellous chemical transformations (aqua regia!) accomplished remarkable alchemical ends: mercury vapour transmuted into mere steam, exiting the reaction harmlessly. Even: fruitfully. Then, later, the sordid and grim sexual escapades of the superheroes reversed the equation: where once all violence coded for sex, now all sex coded for violence, and it was all very far from “harmless escapism”, like finding a way to mix milk and eggs and chocolate and sugar in such a way as to produce plutonium. I won’t say it wasn’t fascinating at first! Since it delivered a unique frisson: in the wake of postmodern appropriation of everyday instructional texts, and even more everyday para-instructional texts, superhero comics discovered a novelty that like magic itself only worked within the bounds of the fantasy kingdom, the Narnia map — as they appropriated themselves, “by their bootstraps” as it were. And, I consider it an open question…

Was this truly a “postmodern” exercise?

Well, it could’ve been, obviously: pedagogical plutonium porn, a handbook for misery that reverses the aspirational quality of existentialism. How to torture, how to sicken, how to cheat, why the superheroes have never faced a menace like this before…! And indeed I think one could argue that this has occasionally been tried on, and that it’s even worked pretty well from time to time. Er…

While literature was giving us “Tintin And The Real World”, superhero comics were giving us “The Filth”?

Regardless, in superhero comics at any rate the prime directive is that the Neovore must be fed, so quite-exactly-postmodern or not the feeding bloody well got done, and for a while the beast was satiated. But then like a Risen Doomsday it got hungry again, and not for the same old crap it had last time. So? When postmodern sex doesn’t work anymore? Doesn’t give up the same thrills? The answer was, as Grant Morrison might well have predicted, highly ritualized masturbation. Not that I’m saying that’s the kind of comics that he writes! Though I’m not not saying it, either, but the point is…

Sometimes it’s magic — partaking of the freedom of magic! — and sometimes it’s just more organized religion.

And therefore, partaking of the organization of organized religion.

You know?

Through the looking-glass, I suppose we are through the looking-glass here people…this is going to be a digressive one, almost as digressive as a Universe one, hell I should make it a Universe one, why this bloody well will be James Bond! Because magic and theology share a root, or perhaps more accurately I might say they share an intersection…and have you not noticed how the unique genius of Christianity is that it stubbornly makes every connotation a denotation? Jesus went up, up in the sky…hell, not even Levy-Bruhl’s “primitive” people believed shit like that, eh? And in fact not even Christians believe, not even the flippin’ Pope believes, in the literal Ascension, yet…

…There it is, and we can’t seem to get rid of it. So let’s return to time-travel, which is a fancy way of saying let’s return to mathematics…and the age-old problem of whether God can make a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it, and then can he lift it anyway. Ask a rabbi and you’ll get sighed at: “so, you want to tell God what to do, eh? So why ask me, how is it my business that you disapprove of God’s lifestyle?” Judaism, like most religions, is “realistic”, you see: connotations and denotations maintain separate residences until marriage, because otherwise the cousins get confused. And to be fair to the Catholic Church, on the level of the ground troops it does a most square-jawed and manful job of keeping the latrine separate from the mess hall, for such individual parishioners as may be (understandably) perplexed from time to time. Because there still are wider principles that master the incestuous possibility created by rogue axioms, you see, and in mathematics as in nuclear chemistry there are “forbidden” transactions, that are forbidden mostly because they’re just plain forbidden, but also which are forbidden because they’re, as my old Phil. of Sci. teacher had it, “scientifically possible but philosophically absurd”. Just so de Seze’s argument, that if there is no divine right but the sufferance of the People, then it goes against democracy itself to remove Louis…is a valid theorem anyway, but one that even Hobbes might balk at, not for its callback to Leviathan but for the way it outrages what he himself described as the essential character of science: “the dependence of one fact upon another.” All these centuries later, it’s still the one thing Hobbes said that’s the hardest to argue with, and perhaps as good a description of science as any we will ever have — since it neatly encapsulates the nature of science that we continue to struggle with today: that knowledge has limits which can’t be broadened just because we stand there and wish at them to be broadened, yet those limits can’t be made any narrower by any amount of wishing either. Don’t expect us to stop being puzzled anytime soon, by how the social construction of science manages to coexist with science’s goal of objective truth-seeking! Because it might be a relief of a sort if we could figure out how to say that even facts are socially-constructed, but they still are not; and yet if we attempt to cure the problem the other way, by saying that science has no social dimension to it, then we go against the findings of science itself, and look like damn fools into the bargain. Science is done in communities, and done imperfectly because of that: politics and presumption begging every question they can get their hands on, because there are wishes and wishes, and they all act together untraceably to produce the indispensible context of facts that is called theory. Yet every theory still has to deal with the reality of the world as it is somewhere along the line, and that reality is fairly wish-impervious; a thrilling argument can be made for anything, and perhaps it thrills even more when it’s so radical as to argue specifically against the need for reconciliation with reality, but in the end there is still Fact’s windowpane, that Wish’s nose must contend with one way or another, or you don’t have a model of anything but your model. Every fact is dependent on some other fact, and in the end even a “perfect” belief is no more than a belief…

…Even if it’s essential to divining what the facts are, or may be, and of course this is one of the things we use time-travel stories to explore: what are the limits, that lie outside logic? Can God make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it? The rabbi would perhaps say “You mean might he make such a stone, and so I’m here to tell you: no, he won’t.” Can anything go faster than the speed of light? Sure, lots of things can do that; they just don’t.

But, if we imagine that they sometimes do…then Elsewhere becomes available to us in our time machine, and so we can try a great many arguments out, just to see — hypothetically — what they would look like if they didn’t already happen to be impossible. What would they look like, and what would they imply, and what structural necessities (if any) would obtain once the question has been freed from the uselessness of being asked? What new or more basic reality would remain, in the hypothetical crucible that has burned the old arbitrary reality of “forbidden” things away? As it turns out, what this looks like, and what is left, is a thing not 100% divorced from what’s left in similar stories one finds in different cultures; yet at the same time there is some novelty here too, that’s quite suitable for bonfire-making, for on some deep level the modern exercise of science is bound up with a Christian worldview that tolerates the manufacture of paradox — the multiplication of entities! — as other worldviews do not, and thus it is one in which only a paradox can adequately answer another paradox, the crucial dependence of facts one upon the other still remaining even when factuality itself has been insulted, and emptied-out as a category. Consider Doctor Doom, for example, and his attempt to get his hands on the magic jewels of Blackbeard by sending the Fantastic Four back in time to steal the pirate’s chest. Well, we already know it won’t work out for him, not just because Reed Richards is smarter than he is, but because (as it turns out) no time-travel story that takes this form of argument ever survives its own arguing….in whatever culture it is found, however the unique “Western” accent here is one wherein you’re not simply barred from plundering the past because the superior mathematics of Zeus will stop you, but the reason you can’t plunder the past is that by entering it you make it as active a place as the present, indeed you can’t enter it with plunder in mind without making it active actually as the present…and thus open to the fresh sting of Necessity that can only occur where multiple outcomes are possible. And so the Fates no longer have anything to do with it; there simply becomes here, and here there, as the line of cause and effect becomes unstuck from its customary placement. So it isn’t like visiting Ajax in the Underworld! But instead the tale has rather a different moral than simply “the monkey’s paw will claw you in the end”, for that matter has a different one even than “the infinitesimal calculus has demonstrated why it is that Xeno’s arrow will indeed hit its target”: as it reminds us instead that this is not, can never be, the best of all possible worlds even in potential, no not even with time machines and magic jewels and everything…!

Which is surely, I think you’ll agree, a moral befitting the unspeakable niftiness of modernity…

But it doesn’t even stop there, you see. Because, moral or not, as long as you continue to have a time machine in this story…

…Then you can even flee that nifty modern moral in search of a niftier and even more modern one, and then flee that one too, and the next one, and the next after that, and essentially you may keep on fighting Necessity as you like pretty much “forever”, because when present and past are this sheerly promiscuous then the future matters so little that it barely exists at all. And therefore it can’t be better, as it can where there aren’t any time machines: where things in the past stay where they’re put.

And of course that’s not the only moral philosophy we farm via time-travel story in the West. But as for Doctor Doom, he’s never tried anything else but fixating on the past’s putative changeability, so…we should pity the guy, perhaps, almost. He can’t see what’s in front of his face…but he might. There’s something wrong in him, but it could be fixed; he doesn’t have to be this way! However in his distinctly Onanistic (yes!) pride, he also won’t be anything else. Why should he ever change his mind? Why should he ever condescend to acquiesce to the world, when it’s never done the same for him? Who does that damn Reed Richards think he is, the blasted boy scout? Second-rater, when did he ever invent a time machine…?!

But in a way, and naturally enough…he doesn’t have to invent one, because he already lives inside one. Because in a way, a superhero comic book is like a time machine, or anyway it can be. The planes of story, neatly-clippable into squares and rectangles, form just the sort of universe that can be ably presided-over by puzzle-piecing Intellect, by story-building Narrative, yet there’s more to this as well; for to read a comic book is to be once again catapulted into the time when one first read a comic book: the endlessly-serial storylines, the endlessly-reconfigurable postures of characters. What if, the imagination says, the Silver Surfer fought the Son of Satan? Then those scenes might be these ones. What if, the Original X-Men fought The Invaders? Or what if red fought blue, or green fought white. Part of the jouissance of superhero comics is in imagining what other set-pieces might lie behind the ones one is currently considering: what does the Thor vs. Hulk fight imply for all the other fights? What does it imply for me? The mind of the comics reader is deeply embroiled with the card-values of each of the characters confined inside the square and rectangular arenas of his seeing, rolling out the fabric of the present moment as the values multiply, and providing a pleasing alter-reality analogous to the past while still not being at one with it: eternally re-livable and re-playable, and as a consequence not binding on the reader but instead freeing. What if, Julius Caesar fought Hannibal? There’s a transgressive air to the putting-together of conflict here, a weird untethering of cause, to produce ever-more thrilling effect. Call it trash culture, not to say rap-battle, not to say promiscuous imagining: what if, Napoleon fought Einstein? Or what if the Jack of Spades fought the Jack of Hearts. In the square or rectangular windows to a time not here and a place not now, these infinitely-stackable symbolic wagers are our news bulletins and weather reports, these are our personality quizzes and Rorschach tests, this is all polymorphous eventuation not yet cemented, an alternative historicity waiting to be born…but, the significant point for our purposes is that it is nevertheless not born. Limitless potential values in the hand, tales shuffled into being at random out of the deck! But it’s all, ultimately…

…Solitaire, as the reader writes and reads his own readings and writings. Immersion in the comic book is thrilling because it is a private experience, somewhat illicit as it’s temporarily rule-free. We sport with possible fates! Things we might do! Or not do. But for the ordinary reader in the ordinary pedagogical scheme, this is primarily rehearsal — “what kind of hero do you want to be, when you join the larger social game?” — rather than advanced retrospective. The time machine that is the comic book isn’t a tool for fixing what’s gone wrong, because although it obeys its own internal logic it is not compelled to obey the larger logic of the outside world: “realistic” details of cause and effect within a comic book are confined by authorial intention instead of Fate, and possibilities and necessities external to authorial intention do not in truth “exist” to be speculated upon. Even the time machine within the story can only do so much! And of course this is just as it should be, because one is not supposed to get stuck in the comic book’s balancing act of force vs. force; one is not supposed to become attached to its re-enactments for the power they quite plainly don’t have. That the hero wins, by expressing himself or herself openly, is the only way the arrow of time gets printed on the pages, because it’s the only arrow of time that matters; it isn’t about Dr. Doom.

Except that, strangely at the current time, for some people, it sort of is.

And that’s a most curious development, don’t you think?

Well, I blame irresponsible storytelling, but I did say we were going to get back to mathematics, so let’s get back to it. What is it, that encourages so many people who work with it all day to embrace the nouveau-libertarianism of the American right wing? Perhaps it’s simply a matter of prolonged exposure to conceptual shorthand: from inside mathematics (as from inside Science in general), it’s a time-saver to concentrate on the romantic rather than the real…to treat the romance as though it were real. Terms and operations become objects and relationships, and it all works on its own level: understanding is the same thing as doing, and doing is understanding. The mysteries of the really-real world — the substrate, you could call it — do not answer very readily to the powers of logic, having no particular allegiance to it: even time and space are abstractions, and the nature of matter especially is a prey hunted eternally but never caught. Don’t expect us to stop being puzzled anytime soon, by how the abstractions of our thought relate to the objects of truth we aim to find in the world! For the whole business falls into the gap between reality and romance, between model and thing-being-modelled. And, on some level that’s just getting way too complicated, isn’t it?

Because: can’t the thing just be itself?

All very well to insist that the past is merely the product of the skin of the present’s bubble, but how are we supposed to operate that way? It definitely ain’t easy, to be stuck asking questions that aren’t even proper questions, all to get answers that cannot be proper answers, and it’s all made even harder by the fact that there just isn’t any alternative…

…Unless, that is, you cheat. Because who’s to say there is a reality outside the romance? Mathematics lets you make fortunes and atomic bombs with equal facility, seems to be the only useful handle one can get on the world anyway, so what possible logical reason is there to conclude any “substrate” exists at all, except a simpler and more elegantly abstracted one that more closely adheres to the approved method of looking at it? Why can’t mathematics, indeed, just be “Mathematics”, if indeed it looks and walks and quacks like Mathematics, eh? And who cares about when Newton said that no mathematical description could every quite match the evanescent curve of reality?

Of all things, even religions, Science is the best at making reactionaries. Strange loops, you see? They produce results — they’re the only things we know of, that produce them so damned efficiently! – and the results all have a certain soothing quality of self-similarity to them, fractal patterns pointed all the way down, fractal pattern pointed all the way up, and Man is the measure…and, look, here’s the thing about the libertarian comics people and the libertarian tech billionaires, okay? They are flip sides of the same coin largely because of what the coin is made of. Peter Thiel and his damaged Randian ilk imagine impossible moments of triumph brought about by the manipulation of belief, in the standard Doctor-Doom-sized package of pure engineering…the Singularity calls to them with its promise of ultimate convergence, all knowledge joined into one point of infinite computability, a portal to Elsewhere that leads away from the necessitous confinements of ordinary time and space. But, as I think I’ve mentioned before, the Singularity is really just a fictional inversion of where the world is really heading…i.e. not to the ideational Big Bang but to the ideational heat-death, the dissolution of Theory in the ionizing light of constantly-improving technical prowess. The more we find out, the less we know! The more we observe, the less we understand! At least for now, for now…and sure, we’ll catch up eventually…

But that’s the really-real reality that the Singularity indicates to us: something not the Singularity, something antithetical to it, where instead of things self-organizing themselves until they fall right into our hands, we get them in our hands first and find it’s all too damn much to organize and hold at the same time. I mentioned before, too, that science fiction is our most ironic literature? Well, we’ll get back to that too, but Not Today…for today I’ll just point out another instance of SF’s ironic inversions (as, again, I think I’ve done before) in the 90s SF tales of genetic superbabies conceived of CEOs and oil barons, better than your own progeny in every way, because you of the underclass can’t afford the services of the high-powered neo-natal engineers they employ. Because of course this is just a dream as well, isn’t it? There aren’t any genetic superbabies, and there aren’t gonna be any, because biology doesn’t answer to politics: we don’t know what a “super” baby would even look like, we wouldn’t know how to “make” one if we did, our polarized and self-satisfying opinions about what qualities people have are ones that nature has never heard of, doesn’t understand, and thinks are too silly to waste any time on. A “better” person…well what’s that? A “smart” person, a “superior” person…

Who’s ever heard of such a thing?

But just because the idea of genetic superbabies is irrelevant, doesn’t mean the tales of genetic superbabies were (or are) similarly irrelevant…because that same technology the story uses to do its impossible neo-natal engineering, in the real world we use for neo-natal testing, and neo-natal testing on a large scale promises social upheaval and moral confusion far more profound than what a handful of upper-crust superpeople could possibly generate. It’s genetic engineering, all right, but it’s pointed down toward the bottom of the feedback loop; hey, we won’t make superbabies, but we’ll sure be able to weed out un-super ones…!

And that’s the reality that such SF tales inversely indicate, which is the reality we all must live in. Unless, that is…

…We cheat, and find reasons to believe in the inversion rather than the thing it indicates. And people who work in Silicon Valley, whose failures make fortunes, excel at this…as do comics folk whose successes make no changes to the world at all but symbolic ones, and even those more utterly fleeting than just about any other symbolic changes that can be imagined. The comics industry in North America, at least the superhero stuff and its accessory products, is dying faster-than-fast, and the wagons are all circling…and Ayn Rand is not gonna ride over the ridge with her libertarian cavalry. It’s a pretty brutal reality, for a field of such light and reassuring fantasy! Wherever the heroes are, they’re not here…!

And down in Silicon Valley, is it so very different? At some point the realization must become unavoidable, that all this is the product of merest chance…that you aren’t better and smarter than those around you, nor even (if we put down the bank statement for a minute) more successful, and all your victories go only as deep as the skin on the bubble of time-travelling memory. Well, naturally enough! After all, do we really expect billionaire twentysomethings who eat ramen over the sink to discover new social realities by anything but accident? In the Marvel Universe where Doctor Doom lives, even anthropologists can build giant self-aware robots…but that doesn’t mean the real world supports software engineers who can do world-class anthropology! We’ve had bubbles before, and they’ve burst, but all we need is another carefully-narrativized illusion to conveniently forget it…hey, for that matter, remember when the Dow was just going to keep climbing and climbing forever, after having passed through some veil of possibility that ensured scarcity was left behind in another, smaller dimension? The Financial Singularity, how well I remember it! We were like angels then!

Just: not angels on the winning side, as you might expect when our leaders are all people who read 1984 and came away thrilled with the utopian promise of really cool interactive TV; when what they took from Huxley was the joy of being able to scientize Plato’s Republic. So what of the bottomless concurcopia that is social media, what of the endless celestial procession of apps that all our phones-that-are-not-phones promise? Every time Doctor Doom makes a plan he is convinced that it is the best plan, but it turns out really to be the worst…then he makes another “best” plan and it fails too. But is he to be judged by this? Of course not; after all…

…His history’s not finished being written.

And he has his Personal Code Of Honour.

And, damn it, he thinks he’s going to win!

But, we might ask…why does he think he’s going to win? What makes him so sure? Well, maybe it has to do with the fact that he lives inside a universe that’s in a constant boil of possibilization, where the liberating power of magic’s ability to let Lesser affect Greater is always at hand. In a fictional world, to figure out a different way to say something is to make that something differently-actual, and so comic-book science always has an answer for everything. Mathematics! The lines between the model and the thing it’s modelling are so thoroughly, fatally blurred that mere genius becomes an Archimedean lever, sufficient to any task! Doctor Doom never repeats himself, so never learns from any of his mistakes; but then why would he, when all is novelty where he lives? Meanwhile up here, all is repetition…or so it must seem, to Weil’s “real” evil…and even the allure of magic becomes not so much about freedom but about order. Oh, if there was only a bit of order to our lives!

Oh, if only wonderful, marvellous ME could be set loose from these chaotic constraints imposed by the irrationality of others…!

And yet that isn’t the way the world works, as we continue to discover. The structure of spacetime masters all, establishes all basic symmetries, creates both Number and Relation and — yes — forbids the impossible, in some strange way that acts to drag us down from the lonely mountain of identity outside the world, into the messy archipelago of complexly-interpenetrated substances. Consciousness chops continua into antinomial categories, but the only thing that’s “natural” about such chopping is that it’s consciousness that does it…the categories themselves only tenuously bound to the substrate of the really-real world, and at constant risk of breaking loose and becoming conceptual flotsam, drifting aimlessly to-and-fro across…

What else?

The surface of the present moment.

So what “window onto an otherwise undocumented history” are comics providing us with today? In these swirling 21st century times, our escapist fantasies have become like counters in a public game, that we used to play alone…belief in what’s inside the pages has gained a peculiar resonance it never had before, even as the enterprise producing the pages spirals ever closer to the drain. Different notions of escape — who escapes, and from what, and into what — become more important as clues to the external factors that condition the “need” for escapist fantasy in the first place, and the morals of the stories become more weirdly transportable to the outside world as their kinds proliferate…it’s not about learning how to build a crystal radio set anymore! Nor is it about becoming acquainted with the general atmosphere of a technosocial culture, and (sadly) it isn’t even about how sex is the opposite of death. All that stuff’s been emptied out, it seems: its factuality insulted even as the abstract necessity of factual relations — let’s call ‘em pseudofactual relations, eh? — maintains its insistent force. So what’s left? Well, I guess when you take away the instructional aspect of these odd little four-colour dreams (did you know that we use dreams to rehearse waking actions that the brain figures are necessary to our survival?) (it’s true!) (but that’s Not For Today either), what you’re left with is an instructional format without any significant instructional content, and so…

The reader just has to supply that out of their own pocket. “Doctor Doom works in secret, and talks to no one!”, Steve Englehart once declared from second-person caption-space…

Doctor Doom, alone in his castle with the apparatus of masturbation all around him. Only faithful Boris to make sure he keeps his annual appointment with the Devil. And to the Devil, might not all these annual meetings seem as just one? The same meeting, over and over, in temporally-detached higher (or lower) space?

…

You know, I take it all back: maybe “libertarian icon” is a good look for him!

Moving Ahead Of The Weather

“Grab a shower.”

Sheep roaming on the green hills of Mortehoe. Blue sky. Clean, cold wind out of the west.

“No offence, mate, but you smell like a Frenchman.”

Thus, Bloggers, with the single most incredibly English remark I have ever heard IN MY LIFE, my November adventure began. And all the time I was moving ahead of the weather, though I didn’t know it.

One way or another.

So it was off to Sunny Devon, to Ifracombe and Woolacombe and all the other little -combes, to the jutting chaos of Morte Pointe, rambling all over it with a hyperextended knee like the guy in the movie where the ankle turns and the fog comes down, but…rocky coastline, cold water, lots of weather? EXACTLY MY TURF, and when you grow up on episodes of The Beachcombers you know all about turned ankles, you think about them constantly. So many people caught in Jack London scenarios not five miles from their homes, in that show! Stranded in the backyard. So maybe it wasn’t the best show we ever made, but HOO BOY the cautionary tale-ness of it for those who lived in Howe Sound! Because when the fog comes down and you’re thirty feet from shore, suddenly you might as well be thirty miles from it…if you’re not exceptionally mindful of your business…

So things went well, and I saw shows and played ping-pong with kids, enjoyed a civilized eating and drinking culture (GOD but I miss that when I’m back at home!), and I went to Wales. Such a pleasure to be back in a bilingual nation! And I had Proper Welsh Cheese, and Proper Welsh Ale, and Proper Welsh Rarebit, and got Proper Welsh Food Poisoning and had to take some Proper Welsh Codeine on the four-hour ride back in the car, but when you’re five thousand miles from home every point is the same distance away as any other point, really, and so then it was Off To Manchester, where they keep Dead Sea Scrolls in the public library. No doubt they have the King Tut exhibit going on alternate Wednesdays at the…

…Tattoo parlour across from Shudehill bus station, too! An important city in an important country, with an important history of pilfering stuff from other countries…so maybe the Dead Sea Scrolls came on loan, but still I was shocked to discover what I’d forgotten: that there’s noplace in this country where you might not happen upon archaeological treasures.

And then it was Glasgow again — Sunny Glasgow! — and the whole place quite mild enough to walk around it in a Hawaiian shirt and tablecloth-coloured shorts, and never did I come close to seeing any hint of violent tendencies wherever I went in the UK, but maybe that’s because I basically looked like a cartoon bear walking down the street, thus the street toughs (if such they were) no doubt took me for an hallucination, and thought it better not to appear disquieted just in case no one else could see me. So, y’know…

God bless the weather.

Though in Glasgow, that insouciant city, it does seem (albeit to a mere two-time visitor) that irreverence is the virtue most highly-prized among the people! “No act of spirit can be wrong against Karanada,” and all that: in Vancouver nobody likes a wiseguy, but in Glasgow everyone IS a wiseguy, and so if there’s nothing about you of the merry cosmic Go Fuck Yourself then you might’ve come to the wrong place, Traveller. And so I might have expected to do as well with the Hawaiian shirt even in colder weather. A guy on the bus tossing me the most enthusiastic thumbs-up I’ve ever seen…girls in coffee shops throwing in a little extra flirty sarcasm with the foam in the latte…kind Scottish ladies giving me directions on Garnet Hill, fareweel and adieu oh you ladies…well, what can I say, I really like the place. And for a while there it felt like scouting locations for Astro City UK, it really did…because surely there’s room yet, in this wide world, for a robot superhero named Irn-Bru?

Irn-Bro?

(Also, if you find yourself in St. George’s Cross, you could do a lot worse than to visit the William Bros. pub…)

…Aaaaand then it was back to Sunny Manchester, to continue my delightful stay in Levenshulme, then once again off to Sunny Leeds, where they had some sort of a comic book convention going on.

A few things to say:

1. Nobrow Publishing is like my new favourite publisher now.

2. There was some lovely poetry there.

3. I bought some quite nice things:

4. But didn’t get everything done that I’d meant to, because of all the places I might’ve chosen to go see Kate Beaton (which was my whole intention: I wanted to thank her for her bracing comments about the War of 1812, and also ask her what she thought of Chester Brown’s Louis Riel), this was the place where I had the LEAST chance of doing so, as this appealingly female-friendly con (so many girls who look like they play ukelele on YouTube!) with its gratifyingly VERY LONG lineup for the “Women In Comics” panel, was made for Kate Beaton fans. Seriously, I’d have a better chance if I just went to Cape Breton and sat on a bench ’til she turned up. Of course, I could have tracked her down at the afterparty…

But I was too busy playing chess with Steampunk HAL. Actually this party was quite amusing, as I got a chance to explain to Bobsy Mindless of the Clan Mindless what a “Gangnam Style” was — in the process reminding him, just as I’ll remind you, that we all agreed the Macarena must go, we all wanted it dead, so now we must live with the consequences of that decision — as the liquor flowed and the inhibitions dropped, and the comics folk that at the beginning seemed to feel a bit daunted by the space began to flood the floor in what I took for our own little Dance of the Saudi Princes, very heartening stuff indeed. “We belong here, in a room like this; we are the coolest of the cool now, and this is our time.” God is great, and only the Princes shall elect the King! Hah-ha, we used to be kings of sand, kings of nothing, but now look at us! It’s quite true, if you think about it…Janis Joplin pointed it out in the late Sixties, when it was true for musicians: “What’s the coolest city? San Francisco. And what’s the coolest neighbourhood in San Francisco? This one. And who’s the coolest person, in the coolest house, on this the coolest street, of the coolest neighbourhood, in the coolest city of the coolest country in the whole wide world?” ‘Cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train, tomorrow never happens, maaaaan…

So: fun talking to Bobsy. But it didn’t stop there! For as the evening wore on I also got to see The Beast Must Die’s eerie teleportation powers at work, as he mysteriously shimmered into view — not unlike a boozy Jeeves — at odder and odder spots throughout the techno-zeppelin in question. Relocated on the supersphere! The Time-Traveller’s Drinking Buddy! Of course the beer at these things is always too pricey, and the bass too juddering for ears as ancient as mine once midnight rings, but it was worth it to see the genetically-engineered superbartenders and wait staff zip through the crowd on what must’ve been wires, because where I live we do not get that, we simply don’t get to see the effortless physical prowess of so many extraordinarily agile Spider-Women in clean white shirts and flat black pants practically pirouetting through the air to deliver drinks and remove trash! Where do these people really come from? How did they get so very, very good at this particular job?

But eventually one gets too tired for admiration, so off the Beast and I drifted, him to his hotel room and me to the hotel room of Messrs. Volume and Attack, where upon waking I beheld sunlight filtering through:

A bottle of Irn-Bru, naturally; in that momentary lull before the hotel started to fold itself down into a fourth-dimensional sinkhole, toilets and elevators first…oh, you Lovecraftian Leeds!  And then it was back to the con.

And then Manchester again, and then on a bus to Sunny Somerset. Manchester was just starting to get tremendously grey as I left it, but it wasn’t just that weather I was ahead of. You know how in the States, when they make a movie about aliens possessing peoples’ bodies it always stands for Communism? Well, that happens in Doctor Who as well, but it isn’t about Communism.

It’s about the FLU. My God, I asked myself, is there nothing people in the UK are prepared to do about the onset of the flu? All around me on the train from Levenshulme, the tram to Shudehill, and all over the Northern Quarter, like the pitter-patter of tiny rainy feet: cough-cough, cough-cough. Cough-cough as they get on the tram, and cough-cough as they get on the coach, and the density of the sound always rising, like a chorus of frogs as night falls. Night falls, and in the morning we may not be the same as we were. Zombies, too, when seen through a British lens lose a bit of their philosophical heft for an altogether more quotidian sort of horror: cough-cough, cough-cough, you may be faster than us but you can’t outrun us. Aim for the head…

And then Exeter at last — and I should stress that each one of these cross-country trips was a lot like being mailed, another little glimpse of a science-fictional reality of the Galactic Empire kind…as Planet Manchester, so obviously the Trantor-like centre of the Galactic Empire we call the history of the Industrial Revolution, takes a good long while to get to from the Outer Planets, and a good long time to leave as well…for in Galactic Empires, even with hyperspatial people-mailing technology, the planets are still NOT VERY CLOSE TOGETHER if you want to get anywhere besides the very next planet over, so the thing works but it still isn’t easy, it works but it still demands exceptional effort from the individual to get along with it…as time and space still matter, and their proportionality still matters, even in the presence of transformative technology. The proportionality of space and time is not done away with by the miracle of rail line or motorway, only the impossibility of moving goods through it with any speed is done away with…and that doesn’t necessarily make things much easier on the people who have to do the moving, only on those doing the sending and receiving. But anyway only the courier, the soldier, and the spy move around as recklessly through time and space as the tourist does — perhaps because only to them is “home” so ludicrously distant as to make all locations as-good-as equidistant in the mind. Myself, I’m wont to travel with nothing but a knapsack — well, you would too, if there was no labour peace in your country anymore! — and my brain folds itself up in trains and buses and airplanes and ferries like a sweater long used as a pillow: anywhere you can recline is “home”, on a strictly provisional and temporary basis. So you don’t think about home, you think about where the knapsack is, and you just build a lot of contingencies into your plans, so you always have a Next Place to go to even if your Plan A screws up. But, Exeter…

Exeter was my one untethered leg of the trip, with no contingencies built onto it. What a strange place, is Exeter! Half the women in shapeless jeans of some apparently local manufacture, and the other half in tight leather pants. The other HALF in tight leather pants, just let that sink in. The strangest of places, in many ways by far the strangest place I’ve ever been. Exeter at night after the alternator belt blew on the bus, with time getting skinny for making it across town to the train station, from thence on the very last train to the station near my cousins’ house. The rain chasing me all the while, it should be said; as though when the rain caught up with me so would the space and so would the time, so would the flu and so would the shortcomings of the plan. Down, down to the Underworld! Out, out to the Galactic Rim! If there are many places in Britain that haven’t lost something they used to have, then I didn’t see them; if there are many places that haven’t chosen to take that loss on the chin and then keep on keeping on, somehow, then I didn’t pass through them. Everyplace you look, there was once a sturdily-anchored sort of wealth, that’s now gone…but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone, at least it doesn’t seem to be capable of stopping them forever. Down in Somerset at last, the sort of place people like the people in my family (including me) go to escape the frictions of a passing, possibly worsening time — such a talent we have for making cozy houses! — there was nonetheless a kind of weather beyond the kind that falls out of the sky at you and floods the roads…

Although my God, those roads! It’s been raining extra-heavy for a YEAR in some of the places I visited, and the modern infrastructure isn’t built to take it. Helicopters over the M5 certainly show that it doesn’t take any global-warming-driven hurricanes to lay the works of man low…even in the country, ten extra millimetres of rain a week will get that job done. So imagine what it’s going to be like in the cities! Those finely-tuned instruments, those meticulously-turned systems pressed into laminate…you don’t have to take them very far out of their operating parameters to get them losing money, and then it doesn’t even matter how much they lose, if they lose it year-over-year…

Yet even in Somerset, this still is: the chalk river in Dorchester flooding the nearby fields, while not too far away Prince Charles’ massive folly of a Model Village seems to be only missing Rover bouncing down its empty streets to signify a perfect horror. Machine-like, horrendous, it’s more Doctor Who villainy: the ghastly looming buildings only staying put while you’re looking at them, and when you look away off they go stamping out dreams of a livable life. Wind screams over the plain outside as you shop for little tidbits in the Waitrose in advance of Christmastime, inside a massive upended cereal box of cold brick — it definitely looks and feels like something, and unfortunately I’m only too well-placed to tell you what that something is: it’s the Arctic. Model town now; twenty years from now a place where Helen Mirren goes to convince people to testify about a murder, as all fiction is doomed to collide with reality at the other end, one day…as man is born to trouble, as indeed the sparks fly upwards! Last time it was impossible War-Of-The-Worlds windmills on the way up to Scotland, this time it’s Prince Charles as a villain whose grandiose plans Steed and Mrs. Peel have to foil. But back in Dorchester, back in Coker Marsh, and back in the rest of the non-Arctic UK generally, people still manage to keep ahead of the weather somehow, fictional and otherwise. I once said that London seemed to me like a place where people navigated shoals of fakery: new fakes that chafed, old fakes that soothed, and real things both new and old that every fake might be preferable to, except for the odd time when they were not. A hive of emotional activity, is London! is what I said then…

But perhaps that’s also true more generally, as clouds of all sorts threaten to roll in, and then out again, everywhere you look. People in specific seem quite capable of dealing with it all in good faith, even if people in general seem to lack this ability: the alternator belt blows, and driver and dispatcher execute a comedy routine with effortless grace over the radio — and everybody manages to get where they’re going. The man up the road in Coker Marsh digs out the old ditch that carries the water away from the flats, and the homes survive. Around the corner the goose farm has all the emergency provisions one could want, as doubtless back in Devon it’s not too hard to find a reason to stay out of Barnstaple for a few days. Perhaps the pub?

Perhaps the pub; but as for me, I managed to make it out, catching a train and then another bus when the rain briefly let up, and then I was heading east, just ahead of the weather, and just in time to see Heathrow vanish in the rear-view mirror as the plane took off and headed for Greenland…

Never to be heard from again!

At least, until next time.

Hal Jordan Isn’t Just A River In Egypt

or, “The Mirror Has Two Reflections”

or, “Sex And The Single Superhero, Take Two”

Hola, Bloggers. Well, wouldn’t you know it, as is my wont I went around and around and around the topic but failed to strike to the heart of it! As the saying goes, “as I at length debate and beat the bush, there step in other men to catch the birds…”

Though for such a bird as this, I can’t really say I envy them, you know?

Fresh Eyes

Good evening Bloggers, and all the ships at sea! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been back from Denmark and Manchester and Glasgow since June, but I’ve been caught up in plenty of other things…you know that feeling when you get back from a trip, and you want to carry some parts of the trip with you, back into your ordinary life? That was me, for sure…it’s been fifteen years since I’ve travelled anywhere much further than a ferry ride away, and it’s been a couple years now of upending all my old routines, as well as a couple years’ worth of failed attempts at crafting new routines to replace them, and oh my goodness did I ever need a bit of a change. So the blog was suffering already, mostly from what I thought was ennui but what was really preoccupation with other projects…I see that now…and, okay, maybe a little bit of ennui, but when I came back it wasn’t ennui but it was beauty, beauty, beauty what killed the beast. You see, when you’re in your twenties and you’re travelling, you can leave the trip behind you when you return because you’re not yet finished building your life back home; but when you travel in your forties and you haven’t travelled since your twenties, life at home is mapped and known to the extent that either you toggle right back over to it, or you naturally seek to — somehow — flip that switch even farther over the other way.

And that was me. I lost so many routines, you know, that I just couldn’t find agreeable substitutes for…the history of this blog is the history of a life in perpetual flux, I guess…oh, damnit, that’s true, isn’t it?…that I guess returning to routine had a hollow feeling to it. And so for the foreseeable future, I’ll be trying to act as though I’ve taken early retirement at least a couple times each year, trying to wing off to distant climes…there to see new things and be new people…

Not that I kid myself this can ever pass for routine either. For if nothing else is true, it’s true that life is discovered in tensions between warring states of mind, inclinations that can never be followed wholeheartedly without reservations, and so it is that even novelty can pale. “I miss the freedom of life in the desert.” “I miss the companionship of life in the desert.” Coyote, even Steve Englehart’s Coyote, isn’t made to be satisfied by the mere accomplishment of his wishes…for like each of us, he’s a liminal sort of a figure, with one foot in Being and the other in Becoming, and therefore destined by his character to both succeed brilliantly, and screw up hilariously, often at the same time.

But, over time…it’s interesting what comes of the successes and the screw-ups, I think. In the first book of Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder, yellow-eyed Jaeger refuses to watch a program on TV that involves all the natural tropes of TV drama, because he says he sees that sort of stuff all the time in real life, and if he’s lucky he can do something about it and if he’s unlucky he can’t, but he’s not going to sit there and watch things he can’t change go to shit for fun. And it’s a marvellous encapsulation of the sensation I always get when I return from various kinds of absences, to re-enter the routine I laughably refer to as “real life”…to look around and ask oneself, of an object or an activity previously accepted on face value, “just what the HELL is this pathologically-repetitive soul-draining thing, and why the hell do we put up with it?” Of course most of the time we put up with it because we must — because not to put up with it would be to be driven crazy by it — but every once in a while, to see it with fresh eyes…

Well, I guess I’m saying it’s salutary. Salutary to aggressively distinguish once again between shit and Shinola, salutary to be able to eschew basing oneself in the things around oneself, and instead look upon those things with a cold, clean eye…to see, to find out, what you can do-or-not-do about the parts of them that are no damn good to anyone…

…Which is not all that much of a revelation, I’ll admit it. But it’s interesting to me in the light of reading Finder, because in physical terms Jaeger’s life is not exactly mine — Jaeger stands on top of telephone poles and sleeps on girders and hops over rooftops, the sort of fellow not like me who never saw a reason to use a front door when there was a second-story window handy to a drainpipe instead — but it’s more like mine, it seems to me, then it’s like that of the real-life people I know who do do stuff like that. Mentally, it’s more like me; and I’m more like it. Because…

Finder is really all in the head. You really don’t see this stuff very often, actually: the idle construction of personal fantasy, built over years and years in stray or stolen moments, usually stays locked up in the imagination of the person to whom it is personal, I should guess. Maybe because it starts from something else, some fancy that’s in some part derivative of someone else’s work…hmm, I have more than a few of those, myself…so in a certain way more the creation of a reader than a writer, and then by the time it grows bigger than that, it’s already gotten too big. Too big to be made as itself, out in the real world! Of too complex a pattern, that just accreted around little dramatic set-pieces full of flair, that meant (to begin with) nothing really, but that dragged meaning and texture to themselves over time, and then kept doing it, and never stopped, and never became…hmm, perhaps…a proper story? Not really a proper story, maybe. Maybe something one might guiltily cannibalize bits of, for one’s other “proper stories”, once one had some of those. But not usually, in my experience, something that could in practical terms be realized as itself, in a piece of artwork. I think I can recognize these things, you see, because my own hold so much meaning for me, even though — or maybe because — in the end they’re just mental doodles. Private little things, private little worlds, private little bits of drama and humour and names just so-chosen, but never really intended for public consumption, and never really destined for it. Oh, proper stories, I have those as well…but my little solo flights to imagination aren’t about the joy that comes with doing the job, they’re about the joy that precedes the job. So likely none of you will ever hear anything about them.

And that’s what’s so special about Finder, you see: because it actually is such a world, made as itself. People talk a lot about metatextuality, stories that are about stories, and that’s fine stuff…but it’s not of the same order as the stuff that’s genuinely personal, of the person as a person moreso than of the person as some separate and secondary thing, some separate and secondary role, called an “artist”. Because stories-about-stories don’t just come in Metatextual Flavour, they also come in Psychological Flavour, and in Finder the hints and the clues are all over it, swirling all around it constantly, telling you as clearly as anything that’s clear: this is not primarily an exercise in formal cleverness. This is not just the author as writer at work, but the author as reader as well. The author as the reader of the writer? The author as the person in whom reading and writing and dreaming-up live as components of character, not subsets of aptitudes.

“Follow the path. Waking or sleeping.”

“Follow the path.”

In her copious endnotes, Carla tells us that Jaeger always dreams about mazes and puzzles. And as it turns out we actually do need to know this, as much as we need to know what picture Brig throws away (blink or you’ll miss it!), because Finder is too large to dwell entirely on the drawn page. It isn’t just a wittily-Brechtian parenthetical device like Jack Vance’s footnotes, or a Derridean cosmological experiment like Nabokov’s tunnelled arrays of mutually-mirroring hints …Carla’s internal world really is just too big, too big already, to just be simply set down in inked panels and dialogue, and (as the vivacious Vary would tell you) it’s got a lot less to do with theory than with practice. Suivre our good friend Old Albert: matter is subtle where theory is crude? Hmm, well reading it for the first time you do sense it: the complete image is far too big for you to see. There’s so much you need to know about the Clans; there’s so much you need to know about the people who move around in them and in-between them. And I haven’t even mentioned the Ascians. So, “endnotes” maybe, but hardly “annotations” as we commonly think of them…and I guess maybe that isn’t too writerly?

The story should be the story, should be the story? Self-contained?

Sure, I guess. For a writer. But not for a reader! So this isn’t what we sometimes call these days “back-matter”, it’s much more integral than that, and it’s far from being after-the-fact, far from being simple post-story schematic. And anyway why do writers have to only do it this way or that way anyway, huh Dad? Why does writing have so damn many rules…!

Finder. It’s all in the head, and it’s all of a piece. So you pick up on it, and you pick up on it, and it takes a while. Myself, I didn’t know for sure, not really for-sure for sure, what I was looking at until I read the “Talisman” story. And if you’re so unlucky as to be as dense as I am, you won’t either. But once the dominoes start to fall, they really fall, and the pattern becomes clear…the nature of this particular quest becomes clear, and more importantly it becomes clear as a quest. What are internal landscapes made out of, anyway? How are they crafted, and what purposes do they follow? The world of Finder is a very large one, unusually capacious in both space and time, a galaxy in a planet. But its capacity is not capricious…at least, not now. Maybe long ago, when Carla first thought of it, it might’ve been…

But it isn’t now, so even though you can’t see the big picture all at once, you know that’s because there is one, not because there isn’t. So obviously the first comparison that leaps to mind is Cerebus, because it most famously begins (as all great long-form comics art does, perhaps?) with simple posturing made from rough sketchwork, and immediate goals like poorly thought-out punchlines — thus what it will be about is not what it starts out as. Yet Cerebus may not be the best match, here, if we’re talking about that stuff; Carla clearly learns on the go, but the act of portraying her world is already very well-rehearsed by the time she gets to Page One of “Sin-Eater”, and the skill she brings to the performance is quite as well-developed too. So it’s a little less Dave Sim, and a little more Jaime Hernandez: as the “learning as you go” thing doesn’t just apply to the artist, but the reader learns as well — learns to see confidence and deep intent in something that only looks like it’s being assembled on the fly, and learns to discern the constant aiming at the pattern of a sculpture that was always deeply-felt as implicit in the stone. No epiphanies, but then the process of revelation doesn’t necessarily depend on those, does it? SHOCK, WHOA! is a lovely thing when you can get it, but it doesn’t all actually have to be “shock whoa”, honestly, to be a story. Not when there are more sustaining notes to be sounded. Maggie the Mechanic dances at the tavern by the dinosaur corpse while Hopey reads her letters back in Hoppers, and…you see? Already the SF conceit is emptied, and the characters have taken over, and we’ve barely begun. Like smoking creepy pot, the characters suddenly have always mattered, they’re the only things that have always mattered…somehow they’ve been the only things that matter about the story, for longer even than the story has been available for telling. So their world is very large, and full of strange unseemly familiar things, but the weird world they live in isn’t what counts: Jaeger solves a murder mystery in a minute, in three chilling frames, but it isn’t about the mystery of the unknown, but about that other thing instead. The known: that most bottomless of pools, wherein all meaning is contained, that mystery only ice-skates over the top of. For mysteries are only abstract paradigmmatic creations, after all: the locked rooms all merely indicators, pointing at things the compass misses as it spins. Negative space: it’s the notes you don’t hear, whether we’re talking about American jazz or Japanese calligraphy…and there’s perhaps a reason its creator calls this work “aboriginal SF”? Any edifice of world-building in some way is built to totter, I suspect, when it encounters not just mystery-solution but truth; therefore where this world comes from, and what exactly it is, is a puzzle, a puzzle, a puzzle…but then so is any world, and it always will be, and at the end of the day you have to allow that this is perfectly fine, or at least acceptable, or anyway there’s no point standing around and complaining about it, when you’re either capable of changing it or you’re not. Puzzles, yeah, but we don’t need to concern ourself with the puzzles…

The puzzles can wait…!

…But while we’re alive, it’s the problems that we need to deal with as best we can. And the thing about problems, is that they’re always about people. People: the cosmologies that you can touch, and on your own scale too: neither under microscope nor through telescope, but free of theoretical abstractions and displeromatic renditions and oneiratic satisfaction and cleverly symmetrical thematic direction, and perhaps awfully hard to locate the perfect consistency of a locked-room compass-point in, but real, right? Real: and even if impenetrable, still at least not distant. So no matter how chaotic the world and the people in it may be, and however defeating of plan or prophecy, deep still calleth unto deep as far as the observer at X called you goes, and so if the meaning that’s resident in our metatextual fiction is a meaning that means anything at all, it certainly doesn’t mean that “all is fiction” but instead that almost nothing is, and that training wheels are useful when you’re learning to ride, but they’re only a hindrance once the learning is done…and at some point the learning really is done.

Still fun to play with? Yes, of course.

But even play is not meaningless, though to be play it must remain play. Waking or sleeping we follow the path, but sometimes we’re thinking and sometimes we’re dreaming, and those aren’t the same things, they’re not the same kinds of activities…so God help us if we confuse ourselves into accepting that they are the same things, despite everything we experience telling us they’re not, because then the tension of opposed states in our lives is not something we can get the good from, because it isn’t something we can learn to properly flip through to wherever we’re going. I miss the freedom of life in the desert! I miss the companionship of life in the city. But city or desert, thinking or dreaming, Being or Becoming…

We follow the path.

And just so for me, when I returned from my trip. It really had been so long since I was away, you see? Like Jaeger in Anvard, before I left I had to scourge myself every so often to keep from going crazy. I had to seek inordinate stimulation: booze, women, gambling, butter and sugar. It’s like that for many, I think, and it’s far from completely unhelpful. But sometimes the therapy becomes an obstacle: out past the towers downtown is a blue sky tinted pink and purple…and you want to be there, out past the towers, over the mountains, down on the flats, to see it do its thing. You want that, but occasionally it’s hard to remember that’s what you want. Oh, and how many times in my life have I concluded that the shortest route between me and what I want, is the consumption of a lump of hash in a basement apartment with the curtains drawn at six a.m. to sustain the note of night! And sometimes a visit to the government office afterwards to pick up a cheque to keep it going, never mind that I’ve somehow gotten the basics of my desire wrong, and so am just throwing good time after bad. But eventually, I think, the training-wheels fall off no matter what you do…no matter what you do, at some point you are no more the kid in the back of the car who’s moved by nothing but the stimulation of a brand-name at the other end of the too-long highway, but you are the grown-up looking at the plaque on the side of the highway in something like astonishment at the passage of time it’s been set there to mark, and you’re content to let the road get as long as it wants to. And the hell with all brand-name stimulations! But just give me something that’s solidly nameless and real, something that goes further than the feeling of just labelling all the knots in this notional net. Hey, at the risk of derailing the derail, I’ve got to tell you that my good friend Noah B. said he couldn’t get past “the Wolverine thing” with Jaeger…but I have a peculiar notion that’s the very last piece of Wolverine that’s Canadian, that he couldn’t get past. Because surely the featureless fucker that emerges from the ecstatic D&D storm of the frustrated lives of both readers and writers that now typifies the Big Two comics biz, wouldn’t have a sufficient spattering of character to make him specifically distinguishable as “Wolverine”, as a character different from the general swarm of fan-favourite mush that’s worn the hood of some name or set of attributes associated with a name, that’s swept over superhero comics like a tide of one-minute oatmeal w/ skim milk in the last quarter-century or so? And maybe there really is no such character as “Wolverine”, anymore? Just a niche for a specific type of anger or lust, or incipient sexual frustration, or combination of all three, to lodge in: “NAME”? “SUPERHERO FIGURE X”?

And also for some reason I have to put up with that “bub” shit.

Honestly, I ask you.

But past all that, and maybe thanks to no one but Len Wein and Dave Cockrum and my own Canadian gaze (just added on to by Claremont and Byrne a tiny bit, even if an unusually effective bit), somehow there is something, even if it was only ever the slightest thing, in Wolverine that connects with my life. First he was a sawed-off little shit, who always jumped too soon and landed too hard; then he was a man with a past, that he felt apologetic for, and on occasion was rescued from by an “animal” awareness and sense of self. That “animal” stuff, by the way, that’s not really too good to be throwing around if you’re not a Native guy, and especially a white guy like me must always feel indeed faintly apologetic for even thinking of it as a Thing — ’cause it’s just too close to the Noble Savage stuff, you know? — yet the body goes on, and the wind and sky are real in a way that the chequebook and the dry-cleaning are not, and one’s physicality remains the indispensible cornerstone of identity, so an “animal” self, sure…well, everybody has to be from somewhere, right?  In Canadian high schools, we are educated (even if perhaps not very well) in the idea that our country is one whose history is all about kicking the shit out of people who got here before you: the Inuit pushing on the Thule pushing on the Dorset, the English pushing on the French and the Spanish, and the Americans on the Canadians and the “Indians” all on one another willy-nilly all the way from the time of glaciation, and of course everybody hates the Jews…so pretty soon if you’re following along you do manage to hear the bell ringing, even if it’s somewhat faint and far away at times, and what it’s tolling for is the idea that anybody in this place is empowered to disregard the fact that some sort of dirt got done to somebody else in their name, somewhere along the way, for nothing but pure territory. So nobody really owns this place; but as a general rule if your claim to it is better than someone else’s, then you probably have less of it than they do. And you get shit kicked in your face because of that.

But then…just possibly…

SNIKT!

“Now it’s my turn”. It is actually possible, to turn things around and work for the positive, or if you can’t find the positive then you can try to make it up. Wolverine was never so much a Canadian fantasy-figure as in his famous first spotlight issue — the bullshit Vegan deerstalking in X-Men #108 (?) (can’t be bothered to check right now) a run-up to that take-off — and after that it was all (uh…) downhill, down and down to being a ninja or a soldier or a cowboy or an elf or WHATEVER, but whatever he was he was never really Canadian again, but just a citizen of the corporate world, all things to one demographic once (uh…) liftoff was achieved: a slow-walking bad-ass, a warrior-poet, a pinky-swearing BFF, a Manager’s Special Philip Marlowe…an imbecile, I guess? A poseur? All things to no people?

For a moment, though, he was kind of awesome. The short runty white dude with a temper who’s always on the end of a beatdown, well that’s at least a reasonable metaphor for me and others like me…yet Wolverine’s white runtiness’ worm-turn in the sewer does carry with it some echoes from the deeper strata of the Canadian laminate, all the shitkicked people who were Here Before Whomever perhaps ham-fistedly summarized just a little in the dude who was evolved up from the woodland creature, most ferocious of the weasel family? Ah, the “animal self”, well of course the animals were Here Before Everybody, and they’re still here…

Although, yeah…it’s pretty goddamned clunky, and as even an accidental political statement it doesn’t smell so fine, no matter how it sat with me back in the early Eighties. Well, of course it comes out of the superhero formula in which character is found in Things External…which for anything thicker than a cigarette paper doesn’t work so well, is faintly horrid…because Hero-Man can have a big punch-out session with the evil Self-Doubt-A-Tron, and that’s okay, but it doesn’t work so well when you change the names of the combatants to things like Captain Blackface and Dr. Holocaust or whatever, because this thing depends on a certain amount of innocence, perhaps concomitantly on a certain amount of ignorance…

However…still…

Wolverine could’ve been a Native guy underneath that funny yellow mask, you know, or a little Quebecois junkyard dog for that matter, or even just a guy who says “eh” instead of “bub”, and the thing is that he might have been, and almost sort of was, in a way I’m sure needs no explaining to you, Bloggers, with your encyclopediac knowledge of X-history…so although he wasn’t any of those things in the end, at that moment he almost signalled them, and the externalized character things all around him did seem to spell out that sentence even if the spelling was all garbled…

But, absolutely: clunky. So see how much more authoritatively Carla deals with the very same welter of influence and possibility in Jaeger’s character, and how it makes him very much Not-Wolverine…or at least, not him as he became. This is SF and fantasy, so there are plenty of Things External in it as well, but the superhero formula of hyperaggressive externalization isn’t applied, the set-pieces aren’t so set and the politics is less unpolitical, and most importantly of all Jaeger is a person, and thinking or dreaming he has a point of view. Which is, I suppose it hardly needs saying, a whole lot more interesting than merely being a point of view…surrounded only by other points of view, that’ve been embodied in cowl and cape…

…And definitely superior by miles and miles to not even being a point of view, condemned to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other signifiers as hollow as yourself, against nothing but drearily-unspecified cosmic menace ’til un-time itself comes to an end…

Just posing, and after I returned from the Northern Circuit it did come to me how much posing I’d been wont to do back here at home, just to get along and anaesthetize the days, that I wasn’t at all comfortable with. Oh, I don’t mean to blow it up out of proportion! Don’t worry about me, Bloggers, I’m not suffering…! But I did feel a bit like maybe I’d expended some effort in avoiding the path rather than following it, and that I did this by pretending — on occasion — that I couldn’t see it. Like any of us I suppose, I’ve got a certain number of gaps in my life, that the smooth process of routine very helpfully makes invisible most of the time. Blind spots: the brain just fills in the details for you, gives the illusion of continuity when really there’s only pattern. Negative space is everywhere, but you blip over it because it’s negative space, and the whole point (so you’ve always been told) is to go on through life by drawing the knots closer together in the net, forging a plenum, approaching a singularity of convenience and reward, after the experience of desire and effort…going through the gaps in order to dispose of them. And don’t get me wrong: I don’t say there’s anything wrong with that, not anything at all. Why would I, when it’s perfectly natural, and something everybody does including me? But this year — and perhaps it’s that strangest of things talking, my age — I’ve found myself more interested in locating the gaps again, that I have in previous years papered over.

Don’t really know why?

But it seems to be working. Anyway, putting all that aside…hey, yeah, why don’t we?…and returning to Finder…

Perhaps my personal musings are a bit out of place, in a discussion of it, but it’s hard not to feel the personality of the thing. It’s a worked-out world, but it’s as much dreamed-out as thought-out in its workings: very much like a dreamscape, with damaged logic that on waking stimulates the creation of necessary connective tissue, that otherwise would never have been conceived. Well, does anybody really leave their dreams completely behind them when they wake? Does anyone simply shake their head and dismiss a lingering vivid image as “something irrelevant”? How did Jaeger get up there on that telephone pole, anyway? Obviously I can’t answer any of these questions because I don’t know the answer to any of them, but it does seem to me as though every reverberating dream-image that dogs your morning walk to work, exerts a pull as you cross the road, colours the scene as you sit on the train, also demands a tribute: a thought to equal the dream’s intensity, to balance it and resolve it, and if you are inclined in a certain way you will deliver that thought. This, I think, is the kind of interior movement that has its fingerprints all over Finder…the feet pick out the door you’re to walk through and on the elevator the fingers find the right button to push for your floor, but the mind is elsewhere, and busy, with more important matters. Things Internal? All psychology is metatextual, but not all metatextuality is psychological, and I think we can tell that difference when we see it…anyway I think I can see it in Carla’s work, which to my eyes reads just like a dream-diary…

Yah.

It reads like my dream-diary. Hell, it’s got my own dream-self in it, and everything.

…

Jesus, how does she do that?

If A Room Eats An Elephant…

…Does it still vomit up blind men, even if no one sees them?

Just a quick note, Bloggers:  I am off to see Aida tonight, as you know the most sheerly spectacular of operas…but Aida has already proved me a liar, since I promised my young opera-going companion some papier-mache elephants, and as it turns out there will be none. And I can’t quite understand this.  After all, you can crowdsource papier-mache to elementary schools.  When I was young, our brilliant-yet-imposing music teacher had us all learn to sing The Toreador Song, then arranged for a boxing ring to be built in the school gymnasium, then arranged for two chicken costumes to be made, then put two students in the chicken costumes and then put them in the ring with a whole choreographed boxing routine, and then put all of us around the boxing ring with betting slips in our hands like it was Guys And Dolls or something, and had us all explode into ruinous song.

Parents weren’t even invited.

As far as I know, none of them even knew it was going on.

She would’ve arranged for each elementary school in Vancouver to work on a part of a papier-mache elephant’s body — foot, trunk, tail! — hmm, it’s like an elephant, only missing a trunk! — tail! — foot! — and then at the end arranged for all the parts to be delivered to the opera company, only wanting a bit of twine to tie them together, in exchange for a bank of cheap seats at each performance…

…Because nothing is more delightful than seeing little kids attend the opera and not hate it…what you do is, at intermission you buy them all five-dollar cookies from the concession…

…But unfortunately, she retired from active subversion before this show ever went on.  And that’s a shame, because…you know, elephants.

It just isn’t the same, when they’re not in the room.

Okay…

…So let’s talk about The Avengers.  It opens this weekend, so this’ll be the last good chance to talk about it.

I’m not seeing it.

You should see it if you want to.

BUT!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the advertising campaign on this one.  It is a BIG advertising campaign, have you noticed?  It’s beyond impressive, it’s…er…well, the only word is, it’s positively TITANIC, you know?  It’s all over the place;  it’s everywhere.  I’m stunned at the total media penetration that’s going on with this one, can’t think of a movie in my lifetime that’s had such a full-court press going on in the ramp-up to the opening weekend.  The energy being expended is fantastic, and so the aim is clear: this movie can’t be permitted to fail.  This movie is receiving the full attention of the parent company, in terms of marketing.  I wonder if even Gone With The Wind was so heavily, ubiquitously promoted.  I mean, it really seems to have become a big deal, somehow.  Everybody’s talking about it, somehow.  In the customary lingo of the old-time record industry, it’s clearly set to debut at Number One.  The fix is in.

And one really has to wonder why such effort has been expended, to make sure that’s the way things go.  Or…does one?  Everybody knows about comics, but no one knows what comics people know about comics, and that’s what has kept — and still keeps — the comics business from scoring massive PR heat from a public at large that is quite prone to look at business practices of the type routinely practised in comics, and give a big ol’ SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND BULLSHIT to it.  I mean, seriously, it’s pretty politically-charged stuff everywhere else it happens that people notice it, right?  But the comics biz has long enjoyed a low enough public profile, that no one with a big CBS eye behind them ever felt moved to opine, Keith-Olbermann-style, that at long last sir have you no sense of decency.

And so, that this lowness of profile is changing is both a good thing and a bad one, for the large corporate superpredators that now control, and wish to make hay from, the irreplaceable and now-irreproducible IP stables of the comics business.  Big blockbuster movies, YES!!  They can be had, out of this.  Merch receipts dropping from the skies.  A glorious nostalgia inspired among an increasingly-jaded populace, for the half-remembered sharing of the things of youth.  You could see a perfect storm in that, if you had half a brain:  a return to the marketability of superhero comics properties that hasn’t been seen in fifty years, and as the businessmen say in their most deleriously-exuberant moments, it’s win-win-win-win…!

…With just one small defect in that colossal heavenly lens, which is:  what the fuck are regular people going to say when they find out how all the creators of said beloved nostalgic properties got fucked, when they were making them?  What are they going to say about how the health insurance couldn’t be found, how the skinniest percent of a percent couldn’t be liberated to help somebody keep a home, or put food on the table?  Real people do care about such things, you know;  there really is a presumption out there that if you made something worth millions (let alone billions!) then you damn well get proportionally-compensated for it.  No one cheers for the guy that screwed the guy who made him his fortune, they really don’t.  Why I do believe they even make movies about how they don’t.  So, it’s a bit of a problem, I’m sure you can see.  But thankfully, there’s already a solution to the problem available, that’s been most thoroughly tested.  On a small scale, to be sure, but in principle the thing is extensible…and actually it’s all real simple, right?

As we all know, don’t we?

What you do, is you make the people who might object to the poor treatment of creators complicit in that poor treatment.  You get them liking the stuff, see?  You get them boosting it.  Then when the truth comes out, they’re implicated:  they’re shamed, they’re guilty.  And this provides a most powerful motivation for them to turn their back on the issues at hand.  If I talked up the Avengers movie, and then found out how Marvel treated Jack Kirby, then my only choices would be a) to walk it back, or b) to push it ahead, and guess which of these is easier?  Out of “I was wrong”, and “I don’t see what the problem is”?  Well…there is always the danger that the whole thing will backfire, that somebody somewhere will find a way to build a more successful soapbox because of the increased visibility of the superhero stuff, the heightened sensitivity to the hypocrisy of the superhero business…but then what are the superpredators supposed to do:  not try to make blockbuster movies and giant merch-showers out of the IP they now control?  And if the worst-case turns out to be the actual case, then of course there will be damage control to be done, but when you consider that what “damage control” means in this case is only making a few retroactive agreements, possibly shaving off just a few tenths-of-percents of profits, then as long as the snowball keeps rolling you can afford to lose a few flakes, right?  And if it ever stops rolling, then people will stop caring so it won’t matter anyway, and in the meantime what you can do to ameliorate this potential equitable-payment disaster is get your public attached to your properties, just as the comics public got so attached, and thus give them a motivation to scuff their feet and drive those guilty consciences under the carpet.  Beat the implications, by getting people implicated first, before they even know what’s going on.

And if worst comes to worst…well, so you pay the people!  And say you’ve fixed it.

And then everybody’s happy!

But then again…

It may never come to that.

And it probably won’t, but you know there is something you can do, and I can do, and we all can do, even if we do want to see the movie…even if the ending of this story is pretty well predetermined…

That is:  we can just skip the opening weekend.

Just the weekend.

That’s not too hard to do, right?

It may not seem like much, sure.  Well, it really isn’t much!  But the small thing that it is, is at least a very definite thing…

…In that it at least the elephant keeps on existing, even when there’s no one there who wants to see it.

Which is, you know…

Not nothing.

So why not just give it a try, Bloggers?  Close your eyes and just visualize that elephant, eh?

That’s what I’ll be doing, tomorrow night.

What fun it’d be, if we could arrange to do it together!

Sex And The Single Superhero

I’ll be honest; I’ve been sitting on this one for a while.

Well, there was never any particularly pressing need to get it out, you know? It’s always there, always available, always hyperrelevant…even if there are those among us for whom “talk about comics” seems to be practically synonymous with “find reasons to pretend this is other than it is”. Holly said once, to a visitor on Andrew’s blog who was trollishly insisting on the perfect innocence of the superhero, something like: “man, do you really expect people to politely avert their eyes from the fucked-up sex shit that’s in play here?” Of course that’s just what he did expect, for some reason…

…Which I thought was a bit crazy, because after all, if you take out the sex then what point is there in having all the violence? The special violence of superheroes: tamed and anodyne violence, where nobody gets really hurt and everybody comes back from every beating hale and hearty after two issues…what’s the point to it all, what does it all stand for, if not for sex? All the painless punches, it’s all about an effortlessly joyful physicality, physicality as an ideal without consequences…the sensual thrill of pure bodily expression. Healthy, nourishing stuff, straight out of D.H. Lawrence: Batman and Superman naked to the waist, wrestling on the rug before the fireplace after an invigorating tromp across the moors, good clean brisk manly stuff, hearty laughter and honest exertion, while the stormclouds roil outside in an intimation of mortality that one can still, as long as one is on the rug, ignore for a time. Then afterwards the cigars and the port and the grave, but for the moment of sensual pleasure in physical expression one is freed from time…and thus one is always present in that time-free moment somehow, even after one has left it. And…that’s all pretty gay, I guess I hear some of you saying? But that’s where you’d be wrong. Thor is gay; but this stuff’s too unselfconscious to be gay. Hell, it’s too unselfconscious to be straight! Because this is just how it is, in the human world where all psychology is sourced in meat: sex, though many would deny it for some reason, is such a basic fact of incarnate existence that it seeps into everything. Hey, honestly, you don’t have to be Freud, or even William Moulton Marston, to believe it! I’ve talked before at some length about the typical trials of the superhero, and how the superhero story is in my view primarily about identity and agency, but I guess I haven’t really put those two perspectives together very artfully…

And I won’t promise any art now, either, but at least I can try to slap those two things together, collide them briskly and manfully at any rate, and this is pretty much how that shakes out: the fall from reputation as impotence, the appearance of the super-rival as cuckolding, the introduction of the arch-enemy as gendering, the creation of the evil duplicate as the confrontation with appetite…or kink, if you prefer…and the usurpation of power by the non-entity as rape, of course, but maybe we’ll get back to that in a minute? We’ll get back to it, if hopefully not in the way you think, but in the meantime the point is a simple one: all these different types of physical conflict stories can be read as sexual allegory by the superhero story’s own criteria, and it doesn’t have to be overt, it doesn’t have to be unpleasant or even particularly weighty, it is essentially froth…as everything in the superhero story is froth, really, because these are all stories that remain essentially pubescent in tone, and so the sexual reading of violence in them is also a soothing, decomplexifying reading. A fun reading! An exaggerated and at some level a comical reading, and what’s really wrong with that? There’s plenty of time, and plenty of ways, to examine more…ah, unyielding readings of all this stuff, but honestly if you can’t ever locate delight in them too, then where are you? So it isn’t necessarily immature, even if it’s got an undeniably juvenile bent to it. Sexual identity, in the real world, is a central part of identity in general; the discovery of capability and independence, of strong wants and likes, of a justified selfhood, is in the real world deeply enmeshed with the fever of adolescence and its sexual and quasi-sexual issues. Competition, opposition, the finding of ground upon which to be friends or enemies with others, in the real world is powerfully associated with the growth of sexual desire as a motivator of behaviour. Sometimes the association is causal and sometimes it’s only parallel, but in the story of any real person the one thing it can never be is left out…or even pushed back to a role of minor importance. Oh, it can be deadly serious stuff! But in the comics, being playful with it is exactly the art of it: put the sex stuff out in the open and defeating Lex Luthor doesn’t mean a thing to Superboy. Well, and that’s okay! I mean, what’s wrong with that? It’s not a dishonest form, the superhero story; that’s not what I’m saying. The sex does get talked about…!

It just gets talked about elliptically. If there’s tension in the air as Superman breaks the time barrier to save the world, as Batman ascends to the top of the bridge to save the city, as Green Lantern musters all his willpower to save the Guardians of the Universe, it’s from the same kind of source that makes horses neigh and church bells toll in Lawrence…and behold, in the beginning was the Word, and the word was DUH. And I’m no Wertham; I’m not talking about any kind of squidgy repression that needs even more repressing, nor am I saying that if the Hulk would just get over himself and ejaculate already maybe he wouldn’t have so much to be pissed-off about…although, you know, there’s probably a lot to be said about the Hulk as the most anally-fixated of superheroes, despite his veiny super-erectness…oh no, God, not here! NOT HERE! Banner silently prays, but it’s too late: off he goes ashamed on the mighty THOOM of his uncontrollable bowels, out in the desert hiding and collecting, collecting and hiding, why don’t they just leave Hulk alone…!

No, this is not what I mean, either way, at all. Sex is the bleeding edge of Time and Change, at least as human beings mark such things it is; sex is the most liminal thing we’ve got, it’s everybody’s superhero Secret Origin and Final Crisis all in one, every time it goes down…Kirby dots and Ditko ribbons exploding from the pressing moment, big double-page centerfold splash. SHAZAM…! Nothing like freezing the moment, so people often remark on the superhero as a defender of the status quo, but we hardly ever discuss what kind of status quo he’s a defender of — somehow a strict political analysis of superheroic action always seems just a bit out of place? Amusingly out of place, perhaps? Not without the power to illuminate, but humour in the same jugular vein as Mad Magazine: transgressive, puncturing, illicit, irreverent. That’s actually a fairly deep root, that stuff, as we shall see: the tongue-in-cheek evaluation of the superhero story according to criteria not its own, that probably it’s never even heard of. Lots of people have tapped that root, and no less authentically if it wasn’t straightforwardly: Larry Niven famously asked if Superman’s climax wouldn’t blow the top off Lois Lane’s head, but then again I got quite a good mark on my Shakespeare paper comparing Olivier’s Richard III to Star Trek…oh, it was a fine time to be an Eng. Lit. guy in the late Eighties, let me tell you! Postmodernism may have closed the door on authorial intent, but it opened a window in the same gesture: wanna bring ephemera to the centre of your analysis? Perfectly okay, even encouraged. Want to indulge in a little Miltonic Allusion? Hell, you can’t pass this class without doing that! This won’t be the last time Geoff Klock comes up in this little essay of mine, by the way, so you can look for him lurking in the wings and behind the windows in the sets…I once complained that Geoff’s blog exhibited a level of contemporary bias that I wasn’t comfortable with, in that everyone seemed to speak of the cultural past as a mere adornment to the present aesthetic, but I see now it was my mistake to never ask why that might be…I mean, why would Geoff’s blog be so magnetic to the particular pop-culture crowd that could easily see Jack Kirby as being “like” those he influenced, yet not nearly so easily seeing them as being “like” him? The answer perhaps lies simply in subtleties of tone, communications invisible and untraceable to the conscious apprehension: Miltonic Allusion, after all, is what it’s all about. Wild readings that recontextualize their sources, like magic. Art in the transciption error, felix culpae like faces in the trees, gargoyles on the cathedrals. Well, maybe I shouldn’t have complained so much: I also got rather an impressive mark by doing a feminist reading of Titus Andronicus, didn’t I? So it isn’t like I’m any Galahad as far as the contemporary-bias game goes. Mind you, I still think they were taking it a bit too far…!

But then I am old, I am old. Trousers, peaches, overwhelming questions, etc. You know?

So back to Superboy, defender of the status quo…only this isn’t Mad Magazine, so what exactly is that status quo? It can’t be politics, this isn’t “Carl Barks And Karl Marx”! But rather it’s an argument for the idea that you can do the sexual reading of the superhero material because the sex is in there, even if it’s emblematized exclusively by the physical conflict. Therefore what’s the meaning of it all, when Superboy beats Lex Luthor? Well, the only thing that even makes it difficult for him is that he has to preserve his secret identity while he beats him, you know. This is the real reason why Lex never suspects Clark is Superboy (or, later, Superman), because as long as Superboy’s only job is to beat Lex Luthor then at least Luthor can say he and his enemy are pretty much evenly-matched…but if Superboy’s choosing to foil his schemes only with judicious applications of super-breath and X-ray vision in order to keep pretending that he can’t break out of a pair of handcuffs, all while maintaining his act, then if Luthor knew that he’d also know that he never could rise to the status of “problem” for Superboy, but instead could only be a complication to his real problem…which is, if he gives away his secret identity then he’ll probably have to fuck Lana Lang.

Pardon my language, but I think it’s to the point: for about fifty years, Superman’s never-ending struggle was pretty much against the evilly-particularizing forces of sexual operancy, was it not? Which is no more a bad thing in the Superman stories than it is in Peter Pan…in fact it’s as much a relief for the hero as it is compensatory for the reader, even if for Lex Luthor it’s a frankly hellish state of affairs. Oh, man, imagine being Lex Luthor! Who would probably like to move on every bit as much as Lana and Lois would, but can’t…

Because he himself happens to be the particular thumb in that dike. Hell, if Lois and Lana knew, they’d put a bullet in his head! But, well, we’ll come back to that too, sort of. Outside, the stormclouds roil just like the terrifying, uncanny symbols that they are…in Lawrence’s world, as I once claimed in a paper that did not do so well when it came to the marking, the problem with the symbols is that they also disturb the world inside the reading, their dire import is actual within the fictional reality of the book and not just in the association of the reading, and so they really do mean all that stuff they’re about…hah, bet you wondered where Grant Morrison got it all from, didn’t you? NEVER STOPPED TO CONSIDER THE LAWRENTIAN ROOT OF THE SUPERHERO STORY!…outside they roil away in demonstration of the horrid presence of meaning, but here before the fire, on the rug, simplicity and expression are still guiltlessly in charge for the time being. The status quo?

The status quo, and it’s definitely a status quo with compensations…but outside the fictional world, it can’t last forever. It does last a good long while! But eventually the relation between the story and its reader changes. Because the reader, much as Lois and Lana and Lex (if they only really knew it!), desires something new.

Of course, he said darkly, this “something new” can take many forms.

It all comes down to fan fiction, in my opinion. How often do we find ourselves saying that we don’t like the administration of a venerable superhero title because it’s no better than “fan-fic”? Everybody talks about it, yet no one seems to be able to define it, and the nature of the calumny is…problematical, at least for me, because I don’t hate fan-fic; I think it’s got a perfectly good reason to exist, and find it endlessly cheering that people have taken their desire to participate more completely in their fiction into their own hands. So, that’s not really what I mean when I say, derisively, that something “reads like fan-fic”…although the desire to increase participation in the fiction is, I think, a component of what I mean. A bad Avengers story (for example) is routinely, even ostentatiously emptied of character-memory in a way many of your Star Trek or Harry Potter fan-fics are not; where we might expect to find, in a “fan-fic” kind of narrative, characters that are gifted with a sort of institutional memory of their histories and their milieux — and a consequent chattiness about the details of their past that “official” characters in serial entertainment rarely exhibit — clearly in a Brian Bendis or Mark Millar story or something of the like we encounter a sharp disconnection from any established continuity, and sometimes even from consistency with the preceding page. No “hey Spock, remember when we found that big amoeba in space” passages, you know? And yet these are not un-chatty characters, in these comics: far from it. So it makes you wonder what they are spending so much time talking about, and indeed referencing (since superhero dialogue remains the most exposition-oriented in all of literature), if not the histories that confine their plots…!

But we’ll get back to that, too. Well, actually we’ll get there in reasonably short order, as no discussion of fan-fic can be complete without discussion of the ubiquitous “Mary Sue” character, the writer’s stand-in. Even in a story where the characters all possess a comprehensive reader’s knowledge of themselves and their world, the Mary Sue goes them all one better — not only remembering more, but connecting more, and reasoning more openly on those connections. And not only that! But also creating connection where it wouldn’t otherwise exist, by hyper-aggressively writing herself into the plots and histories and relationships of times past. So it’s here, I think, that we encounter fan-fic’s own fine line, as distinct from the fine line between “official” writing and fan-fic itself: the fine line between the writer as greater participant in the fiction, and the writer as entire point of the fiction. What is this Mary Sue character, in her essence? Simplistically, she’s a way to carry affection for the story into the story, an embodied reader/writer, a voice from outside the text. Even to write in a God to your story is not to confront its characters with such an Outer Voice and Outer Purpose, as a Mary Sue! Who truly has no in-story justification, and whose powers of perception cross the ultimate line of the surface of the page itself. Mary Sue knows the hero of the story in a way no other character possibly can, admires and understands them, and can bring harmony to their life, in a way no other character can imagine. Is it love? It may be something like love, and like all love it depends on communication between subject and object…

…And, the critique resulting from such communication. So, to my mind this is very interesting, the subject of the Mary Sue as critique. It explains a lot, about the changing position of reader and identification-object and about the recontextualization of comic-book sex and violence. The astute reader of comics will have noticed it: that there are so many comics these days, where it isn’t that all the violence codes for sex, but that all the sex codes for violence, and that’s the source of the seamy slickness of our current-day nostalgic disease. Superhero comics are different because the sex that lies beneath their surface is different: the violence isn’t anodyne because the sex isn’t harmless. And in the end, that’s what the characters are all so busy talking about: every conversation is imbued with a certain subliminal prurience, a titillating whisper of dirtiness…of uneasiness, of danger. People complain about Alan Moore linking up rape with beloved children’s characters in Lost Girls…well, this is much the same thing, only the goal isn’t Art.

Don’t believe me?

Here comes Geoff Klock again, as promised, with his excellent “How To Read Superhero Comics” and its take on Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. I won’t quote, but I definitely agree (and it’s hard to miss!) the sexualization of the Joker. Wertham got it wrong! Frank seems to scream in DKR…the relationship between Batman and Robin is totally healthy, it’s the relationship between Batman and the JOKER that you should be worried about! Well, or maybe not worried about…maybe, “conscious of”?

Because what it is — to my way of thinking, anyway — is a critique. Mary Sue’s extreme romantic identification with the hero has a predecessor, which is the supervillain: for who else is concerned with watching the hero, studying the hero, bringing the hero to a greater state of harmony and self-understanding through gentle correction? Who else stands there and quotes and quotes the hero’s past to him, explains his universe, expresses his love in pages and pages of monologue? Maybe you can’t see it so well on the surface…it’s a bit twisted, a bit distorted…but Frank, that one-time great comics professional and non-crazy person, got to its heart so you and I wouldn’t have to. As the reading gets more fraught, as the readers get older and the companies don’t really keep up with their interests, the reader identifies less with the hero and more with the villain, and so what the reader desires comes into alignment with what the villain would, if only he had access to the reader’s godlike knowledge. And so the non-entity who steals the hero’s power is a rapist Mary Sue of the writer’s design, you know? The ideal of villainy as warped affection reaches its summit in the non-character, the character who doesn’t have a reason to be there, except to do something to the hero that the laws of superhero comics technically forbid: not just to assault him sexually, but to assault his sexuality — to assault its health.

So…it isn’t all about the wrong lessons being taken from Watchmen, you know? In fact it might be as interesting to compile a list of all the post-DKR mainstream artists who have actually managed to get the thing right, as it would be to compile a list of those that have gotten it wrong…if only to see how many artists fall on both sides of that ledger, and what we can extract from that correlation. Maybe that would explain Wonderdog killing Marvin and eating him?

Maybe as a writer, when the business realities of the status quo repel your assault on the seriality of their properties, you resolve to try again in a different place, with a different plan? Maybe you become obsessed, and lose the thread of what you were doing; maybe it all turns subtly from critique into vandalism. The superhero should not live after his core foundational principle has been demolished — after the hearth and the rug have been lightning-struck, there should be nothing left. Shouldn’t there?

And yet the desire is frustrated just the same.

And that’s when love gets complicated.