Why I’m feeling better all the time!

Listen, Bloggers: can you hear that? Out of the West, here it comes, the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse…

…TIME!

Boy, have I ever been losing time lately. And I think I’ve got to chalk some of that up to Twitter, you know? I mean, I’ve been kinda logy around the keyboard for a while anyway, I start but I can’t finish, I’ve looked but I just can’t find…but just as my friends might tell you that my usual torrent of e-mails dwindled to a trickle #torturedphrasing as soon as I got a blog, I think I must tell you that since I started abusing Twitter my level of blog-posting’s gone down for exactly the same reason the e-mails got drier and drier. Because you can’t leap to the keyboard over something the same way twice, can you? Posts used to boil up in me, I would see things and be shaken but not necessarily moved, I’d itch but I wouldn’t scratch, for as long as I could, but then…some final piece of the puzzle would come along to break the camel’s back, some phase-shift would crop up #badlymixedmetaphor #methodtomymadness to turn a string of random annoyances into an arrangement of facets on a crystal of complaint…and then, BOOM!

Just like that!

A turgid three thousand words would be born.

Twitter tends to inhibit that sort of accumulation, though; or at least, that’s how it works for me. Strands of thought that might’ve knit themselves into cloth, are so easily plucked away one-by-one, and given over to the volatile world of Fast Diaristic Slippage…instead of Slow Diaristic Slippage, obviously, because SDS can’t really tolerate twenty-word installments, not that anyone knows much about such a new form but I think we can at least know that: that there is such a thing as a post that’s too short to publish. Which is a somewhat odd thought, I believe, but then it just shows how we’re not really thinking this thing through very well, as though deep down we’re just convinced, all evidence to the contrary, that we already have all the answers.  But maybe it’s time, finally, to wake up from that particular dream? Oh, who was it who said it, Toto? What was it? “The Internet is the first thing that human beings have made, that human beings do not understand”, I think that was it. I actually think I got that off an endnote from a Criminal Minds episode, which…

…Which by the way, have you noticed that show is made by people who devoured Claremont/Byrne X-Men comics when they were younger? I mean look at it, it couldn’t be more Eighties X-Men if it tried, Thomas Gibson’s portrayal of Cyclops is like Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, absolutely indelible, and there’s a Kitty Pryde, there’s a Wolverine, there’s a Storm, there’s a Professor X…hell, Jean even dies, you know? And not to mention that they fight evil mutants. Who are all basically serial killers anyway, let’s be honest…and how do you get serial killers?

Well, you screw up the natural pattern of their development, don’t you?

And this may not be immediately apparent, but it’s actually a very interesting sort of line to take, this Criminal Minds one. Bold, even. Because you see the study of psychopathy can be, as so many other things, roughly divided into two camps: nature and nurture. This is either something that happened to you, or this is something that you are…and in our contemporary climate of neo-materialism, the latter controls most interpretations both fictional and academic: the horror of the monstrous child is an irruption out of some primal vein of chaos, the warped human being himself emblematic of the limits of human control…of helpless frailty in the face of vast chthonic forces. Which is an oddly religious posture for materialism to drape itself across, huh?

But then it’s as Lucretius said: all man’s religions begin in the fear of lightning.

But although we see this peculiar, reactionary, really oh-so-Eighties interpretation of psychopathy over and over and over again in our popular entertainment, we actually do not see it in Criminal Minds…and yet, we don’t see its opposite either. The terrible, soul-chilling responsibility of every village for every child, even the monstrous ones…the frighteningly-contingent nature of human sanity…the awfulness of the reaping and the sowing, well that’s all not quite here either, because the rough division of the study of psychology into two camps really is rough, and not actually real: but just a simplification, in service to a viewpoint.

Which is, not to go off on too long of a rant, the viewpoint previously identified as the controlling one, the Manichaean world of the materialist in which the dirtiest word isn’t soul but transactionalism…ah, transactionalism, the process-driven high ground of the filthy hippies of the twentieth century, and not just the seventeenth, which necessarily sucks a host of other issues into its complicated, perhaps ultimately unresolvable, philosophy…and is harder to attack, too. Sure, there are “good” mutations and there are “bad” mutations, but it isn’t Moses that defines those qualities — no, it’s Gaia, and furthermore for all we talk about the X-Men as a story about minority oppression, from the very beginning that was only the secondary kick: because the first metaphor was environmental, all about damage and remediation, destruction or salvation, thin idealistic hopes versus waxing threats of practical comeuppance.

Wasn’t it?

And so of course the first lesson of ecology is that ecology itself is a throwback to nineteenth-century science: where the truest of all subject-object dichotomies is found in the observation that objects only exist in the mind, not in the world. Hey, I really should point out that you folks don’t have to just take my word for it all, you know? Because that the twentieth century’s conceptual bias has been to look for Plato in the garden instead of the mirror is eminently look-up-able! But nevertheless this is not actually the first lesson of ecology, that this twentieth-century bias is in fact a bias…no. That’s not what I mean to say.

Because the meaning of ecology’s first lesson is that objects exist only in the mind, only because everything outside it is a subject.

A thought you can easily locate in Plato too…obviously, since it’s only in the twentieth century that anyone ever thought the world was primarily quantitative, instead of qualitative. So neo-materialism isn’t such a particularly good word for it really, since the materialism of today is harder than that of yesterday in much the same way that Barack Obama is a much more conservative politician than Barry Goldwater ever was…and we simply don’t notice it, or if we notice it we don’t think about it, or if we do think about it then we still try not to, because who wants to have to notice that the baseline of the graph is curving upwards at an accelerating rate?  It isn’t, you understand, that it’s a ladder to Heaven we’re climbing…it isn’t that Moore’s Law is bending all spatial dimensions into alignment with the dimension of time, so that we fall up into a black hole of angelic perfection …that’s just another one of our friendly symbols for how frightening all this real acceleration is. And…so am I saying you can find another of these friendly symbols in the deceptive Claremontese of Criminal Minds? If you look at it the right way, it’s Neuromancer: the sins of the father are visited on the child, but the child doesn’t know it because the father’s long gone; the tragedy of the commons is also the tragedy of twisted human individuals, but they can’t see they’re twisted. They can only feel it. Sure, it’s just another cop show, and the good guys with the badges always win their standard Pyrrhic victories — it’s an inherently-conservative pinhole camera view of life, meant to be anodyne in its narrowness, and it shields us from the true facts as well as any thing-made-of-convention does. But…

Hey, did I ever tell you that story about The Commish, and how his son wanted to get an earring to impress a girl in his class? So the Commish sits him down and tells him the story of how once there was a little Susie in his class at school, and he wanted to impress her by getting a tattoo, and BLAH BLAH BLAH STANDARD SITCOM BOILERPLATE…and that’s when I realized it, Bloggers!

That the Commish’s advice to his son was totally wrong!!

Let the cry fly ’round Shropshire, the Commish is not attuned to modern methods!

Because of course eventually all the old boilerplate goes out of date, and this is where the one-about-the-tattoo foundered, because it certainly didn’t matter in nineteen-ninety-five or whatever if little Bobby got an earring before he turned sixteen, right? And anyway an earring’s not like a tattoo, you can take it out…and anyway the tattoo thing isn’t even that big a deal anymore. So the Commish was wrong, but what was interesting about that was of course that it wasn’t him that was wrong, but whoever was writing him. Or…

Was it, really? Because all these conventions are just conventions, and writers don’t make ‘em, they just have to live with ‘em. But: slippage. Because as all genre fans know, it’s just when the conventions are strictest that the nature of all their -versions becomes more -sub, and whatever has the awful power to centralize also has the same power to decentralize…because you have to hang the human interest in story on something in the end, don’t you? And ultimately it can only be on what human interest is interested in, so inevitably all the poisons that lurk in the mud must hatch out. Everything in real life that gets excluded from what the conventions permit discussion of, comes out anyway sooner or later, even if it’s just in the case of wise father suddenly looking like a bit of a reactionary blackmailer, someone who has the power and thinks he uses it wisely…but doesn’t, and so it’s not too surprising that things go perversely wrong or sideways or uncomfortably close even in such a commercial product as Criminal Minds, because it really is an ecological fable above all, because that’s what people want to know about above all, whatever they may say when queried by an agent of the government…and after all, there’s nothing so new about this, either! I mean I dunno if Plato ever thought too much about it, but the questions of soil and growth and gardening have always been buried deep in the urban context of the American Crime Drama, as indeed they were buried deep in the context of its precursor the American Western, and the whole thing is just pretty inescapable really, and so honestly it just must come out from time to time, even in the unlikeliest places. Or maybe, especially there? Which is pretty much the real reason why you can’t find a cop show today that doesn’t slow down and get a bit lugubrious about the little matter of why the cop became the cop, which is largely a very silly thing because it largely doesn’t matter at all…except if the cop is Jeff Goldblum…oh, Raines, how I miss you still…

But in Criminal Minds, you see, this question not only matters, but it really matters. Where did these good mutants come from, what kind of homes did they have before they made it to Xavier’s? These teasingly-elliptical matters are as important to this show as they are unimportant to Star Trek: TMZ…

…Oh, you know that one, right? Starfucker Kirk, Black Dreads Spock, Surfer-Dude Worf, Snide Blonde Uhura? Off-Colour-Joke Geordie, Frosted Tips Chekov, Combative Guinan?

You’ve seen that one, haven’t you?

So you know it doesn’t matter where they’re from; they’re from anywhere they need to be. They’re from the backstory. They’re actors who play actors — the guy from Georgia plays the guy from Ohio, who came to Hollywood just like he did, but got a different job. It’s the madness of the Method, the tree with two trunks, and one branch…

…And we’ll get back to it in a minute, but first: diaristic slippage. Have you ever wondered why it must be, that there must be so much of it in our online lives? I’ve mentioned it before, in occasional slight lamentation: the wealth of brilliant (truly brilliant!) comments that this blog has accumulated, that probably no one but me will ever see again, and even I don’t look at them all the time. Blogs are great, but the slippage is real, and no matter how we turn the sidebar links to our own Greatest Hits purposes it will never be anything more than a kludge. Hmm, but maybe this is not the time or the place, to get deeply stuck into Big Media Theories? And anyway I’ll tellya, I’ve been living with this one Big Media Theory for about a year now, and it’s grown to include so much I’m not sure it even really is a Theory anymore…honestly, it’s just gotten way too big. I could dramatize it, maybe; but I’m not sure I could ever just explain it, at this point. Well, maybe I’ll just have to get around to that one day! However in the meantime, diaristic slippage doth make unnoticed victims of us all, because there is just no adequate way to constellate all the stuff we put up on the Internet, whether it’s on free blogs or properly-rented sites…we can make feeds, but that’s about it, and that isn’t enough. We haven’t yet found a way to use a screen as a setting for informational content that grows increasingly deep and detailed; like the five hundred channels, you can have them but you can’t easily know them. Sure, you can search for them or link to them, but who even looks at blogrolls now anyway? When it is beginning to become apparent that the only links that really work are the ones that live INSIDE POSTS…the only search-strategies that are at all effective are the search-strategies of the writer, not the reader.

Which, as you may now notice, was pretty much exactly not the way they told us it would be?

And not really what it was ostensibly designed for, this World Wide Web of ours. But the hell with all of that for now, can we please get back to the point, Bloggers? I mean: pretty please? So Twitter is a slow reverse-IV-drip vampire that sucks away my impulse to write, well that doesn’t even “suck” it but simply allows it to seep…because it is a good thing, of course, in that it delivers a way to leap to the keyboard and see instant results from ordinarily-inadequate input! It’s just that, unfortunately, it delivers this way, at the occasional cost of the other way. For those of you not on Twitter (and I would never ask you to be on it unless you strongly felt the urge, because it may well become really horribly evil at some point in the future, and besides it is the first thing the Internet has made, that the Internet does not understand!…) I can tell you that it’s a fine way to connect with friends, it’s an unusually egalitarian way of starting conversations, it’s a frankly superior news-feed to what I can get on TV, radio, or indeed most of the regular web on an average day…but then I guess I might also tell you that the only reason I’m still using it is because I found a third-party Twitter client that was designed for people with visual disabilities? Because Twitter has — already! – gone and got itself all fucked-up, due to its makers’ tremendously un-self-perceived Judy-Garland-ism. Well, it is perhaps one day going to be axiomatic that social-media websites will always choose features over functions, because their designers don’t see any difference between these two things — and because they are in a bit of a panic, you see. They made technological applications that succeeded by accident, and so naturally they wish to consolidate the gains accident made for them, before accident takes those gains away again out on the tide. So they can’t stop fucking with something that already works, you know? Me, I’m lucky enough to be an aging curmudgeon at the right time, so I’ve kept my Twitter feed spare and lean and seen the benefits mount in inverse proportion to the rate of growth of my personal network…

But then again, that’s only because the people in my personal network have let their networks grow and grow…

And so, finally, at long last…let’s get to the point.

Let’s talk about Dollhouse.

You may recall that I was very disappointed in Dollhouse, the Chalkeresque show from Joss Whedon about blank-minded personality-transfer subjects hired out on black ops that ranged from espionage to prostitution (if by “ranged from” I mean “mostly prostitution”) for wealthy clients who could afford to hire the software of a human individual without bothering much about what hardware it was running on. And I thought that when Joss Whedon made this show he had experienced a creative renaissance by making some pretty adventurous X-Men comics for a while, and letting that record of comics successes and comics failures come into his TV-making mind, and decided YOU KNOW WHAT: NO! I’m going to push my own envelope a little, here. Working in comics has taught me that you always have to be chasing new techniques and new ideas, you can’t play it safe! I won’t lie, I thought Joss was going to take a hard look at his involvement with nostalgia and his evident skill with the obsolete form known as the teleplay, and make something both tough, and truly imaginative. I thought, as I said, that Dollhouse was going to be the 21st century version of The Questor Tapes. But…

This is where this post gets complicated, Bloggers. Where do I begin?

Always at the same place.  In perhaps Dollhouse‘s best moment, Patton Oswalt’s software billionaire looks at the male lead and with a sigh tells him “the toughest part of my business, is getting people to accept the change that’s already happened.” On the surface, he’s talking about incredibly poorly-worked-out mind-control technology. One level down, he’s talking about computers: digital automation, and its unstoppable centralizing/decentralizing power. And then one more floor and the elevator opens on a fairly exact replication of Neuromancer‘s chief irony, emblematized for us in this most aggressively normal of men, who’s nevertheless utterly failed at normality and consequently must purchase its seeming from somebody else. Or, is “seeming” all it ever really was? It is, of course, that new favourite of community-college Philosophy courses: the Transporter Problem, from Star Trek. Is Captain Kirk killed each time he’s beamed-down to a planet’s surface, and more importantly is that really any different from what happens to him at every moment anyway when he isn’t being beamed-down? Just sitting in his chair, turning from one thing to another. Well, we know what Patton thinks about it, and it’s a certain shade of heartbreak hearing him tell it, it is in fact the amazing opposite of Gene Roddenberry’s positive-if-querulous odd-couple story of android and human…and as you might expect (except if you’re like me you foolishly dared not to), Joss sells it out so far down the river that it ends up in the middle of the sea by the time he’s done with it, and it develops that I guess writing X-Men comics didn’t really make him want to push his boundaries at all, because actually it gets pretty incredibly anodyne by the end, why it’s such scheiss it makes MEDICINE taste nice…

But…

One more level down from that…

He’s talking about phones.

Not that he intended to, probably, at least not quite so specifically. But in the end, that thing he wanted to analogize, that he knew-not-where it would land…that turned out to be phones, actually. Because we like to think we understand phones, because we’ve always understood them up ’til now. What they are. What they do. What they’re for. We like to think we already have all these answers.

However, that we probably don’t is — finally — the essence of the change that’s already happened, that we haven’t yet decided whether or not to accept. The Internet is like a quantum seed in a classical system, you see: you can have fun exploiting its weirdness to cheat time and space for just about as long as you can get away with it…but then no longer, because when it finally bites you in the ass it doesn’t ask you what you think about it beforehand. Because you can’t stop a snowball from rolling when it’s already at the bottom of its hill! And in fact you can’t stop it in the middle of the hill either. Hell, you can’t even necessarily stop it at the top, but you have to stop it before it starts rolling. But we don’t see this, basically because we don’t want to: hey, they’re just phones, relax. You know phones. Ah, but they’re not just phones. Because nothing subject to the fey contamination of Internet Time is “just” anything. Bit by bit, it insinuates itself into our tissues…we no longer have fully non-Internet time, things don’t just speed up and slow down, but their clocks speed up and slow down, and that’s quite a different thing even if it looks the same. The world is ever-more mediated by this alien praxis, this…visitation. Internet space spores drift lightly down, landing on the tree, the rock, the car, the job, the date night, the shopping spree, the sidewalk outside the theatre and the ceiling in the dentist’s office. The bus stop. The mountaintop. The old curiosity shop.

And yes, it’s all very science-fictional in the way I put it, here. But just as in the Transporter Problem, it is not the technology that makes it that way: because things were already that way. The indispensible Fowler’s gives my favourite definition of irony, as the condition of an utterance that is intended for two audiences…whether or not the second audience dwells within or without the skull of the first hearer, which rather neatly makes science fiction our most ironic literature, since nothing in it fails of a duplex meaning. That’s right: one branch, two trunks. I’ve talked about this before, but I’ve been thinking about more examples of it lately…one I’d nearly forgotten about was that common Nineties artifact, the story about genetically-engineered superbabies. Such a clever thing, that was…because of course it really is not about the genetically-engineered superbabies at all, is it? Because we’re not going to have genetically-engineered superbabies: it’s just not going to happen. Income inequality just isn’t going to produce a subspecies of ubermenschen whose financial advantages are transmuted to physical ones, because, well…

We wouldn’t know how to do it!

And I mean that quite literally. Because it isn’t just that we don’t have the technical skill (although we don’t), isn’t even that we don’t have sufficient knowledge to predict the effectiveness of the technical skill we may develop (we don’t have that either!), but it really comes down to the unalterable and epistemic fact that we just aren’t ever going to have an unambiguous and non-contingent definition of “superness” anyhow, anyway, anytime, no matter what we do. And this is science right here, you understand: this is science itself that’s telling us that we’re never going to have that. For example, in ecology, the organism is part of the environment that shapes its development, and shapes it in turn. It’s a feedback loop, or rather several feedback loops…or rather, an uncountable number of feedback loops all meshed together. Context is everything, even content…and context is a content too. I mean, we can’t even agree on the merits of IQ tests, we can’t even agree on the measurability of the merits of IQ tests, we don’t even know if tests are good for determining intelligence, due to the fact that we do not have a good working definition of what intelligence is in the first place. So, genetic superbabies? Not going to happen, and even if it were there’s an easier way to do it: just get a few billion human beings together and make reproduction easy to do, eventually you’ll get some Einsteins out of it. Of course you won’t know if you’ve got any Einsteins unless they do something kind of…I don’t know, “Einsteinny”? Whatever that means, anyway but if you just kind of decide that some kind of “good Einsteinniness” can be demonstrated by an increase in some other metric, like…hmm, maybe “happiness”?

Uh…

“Standard of living”?

You know what, let’s not overthink the design. Let’s just get the human beings together and see what happens. Focus on making it popular, worry about monetizing it later…

So: superbabies are out. Which is why it’s shocking to hear people, even apparently people with the job title “philosopher”, still discussing it as though it were a Thing, an issue in ethics like: what are the social implications for having all these genetically-engineered superbabies running around in the boardrooms of multi-billion dollar corporations? When, as SF writers of the Nineties know very well, that just isn’t the philosophical issue at hand. There is a philosophical issue at hand, and the superbaby stories do in fact point it up very well, but it isn’t the issue of what to do about the ubermenschen…

But rather, of course, it’s…what to do about the untermenschen.

That irony, yeah: she’s a harsh mistress. As long as we’re talking about bulletproof Einsteinian Rockefellers, things are nice and safe and anodyne; but if we just flip this thing inside-out, we’re in serious fucking trouble all of a sudden. Because suppose we take the technical skills we already have, and just remove the barriers to access that money represents? Give free pre-natal assays to every pregnant woman on Earth, and suddenly the future just comes rushin’ at ya…

And so you have science fiction in a nutshell. The utterance intended for the double audience, it’s everywhere. Even in Atlas Shrugged, where for all Ayn Rand’s total ideological commitment she just couldn’t shake off the duplex nature of the form…and so Atlas Shrugged actually makes a darned good recipe for the revolution, I mean just look at this Peter Thiel guy, he’s clearly never been more than thirty feet from shore on a rainy day, with his fellow libertarian software billionaires he’s somehow managed to read every cautionary tale written for the last hundred years and more and somehow miss the cautionary part of it all…and this is the guy you’ve got driving your Internet for you, by the way, so…basically as soon as I get a little extra money in hand I’m going to donate it to him for his seasteading cause, you know? Because if I learned nothing else from Atlas Shrugged, I learned that putting guys like him on an ice floe with a bucket of caviar and pushing it out to sea can result in nothing but bliss, pure bliss…

Even though this was the exact opposite of what Ayn Rand wanted me to learn from it all, but then I guess that goes to show you can’t escape science fiction’s ironic character even with a tiger in your tank, you can’t bury it even with a shovelful of speed, nor certainty. Because the poisons that lurk in the mud will hatch out, you can’t control them, you can’t build enough fences to block all the avenues of freedom nor grow enough tentacles to catch all the subversives. Which turns out to be a darned interesting fact-of-life for Joss Whedon and his Dollhouse, actually! Because although that show sucked, it sucked for a reason…a “Commish reason”, if I may make so bold as to call it that? Or, a Criminal Minds reason? Which is to say…

An interesting reason. PHONES, people. Because we don’t really need the Transporter, if we have the Communicator. The Transporter is superfluous, just a symbol, an ironic misdirection, an absurd inflation…the Communicator is the thing to think about. And the world of Dollhouse is a world wherein that thought is succesfully thunk, even if it’s imperfect in its thinkitude when all’s said and done. It wasn’t too long ago that I was thinking of how the next George Romero zombie movie ought to give up bloody brain-eating shopaholics in favour of slowly-starving ultra-preoccupied street-crossers who’ve never tasted brain in their unlives…because I could poke an iPhone user in the eye at a crosswalk and be three blocks gone before he even noticed, right? And the “fast” zombies, those are just slow zombies in cars, who can’t react fast enough not to mow anybody down…

But Joss Whedon was well ahead of me at that point, and my imaginary George Romero too. Because if you’ve got the phones already, then the zombie thing’s just superfluous. Irrelevant. No point in adding it in there. That wouldn’t even be the scary part, that the cell-phone users were zombies; the scary part comes in when they’re not zombies. To have them be zombies is a pinhole solution, anodyne, and not really what the whole thing is about. “The toughest part of my business, is getting people to accept the change that’s already happened.” The real story’s with what happens to the people, when identity is made fungible but awareness is not erased by zombiehood. Remorse and doubt in a world where the self is an illusion that’s terrible because it’s necessary — where the self is a prison, because objects can only exist within the mind, and never outside it. The world a-boil with nothing but subject…so if The Questor Tapes’ concern was with how to get the individual out from under a strict definition of “humanity”, and what to do with that freedom once you found it, then Dollhouse‘s concern was to show the terror of that freedom made absolute, the same in every direction and always the same distance away, choiceless and formless and perfectly isotropic. Someone’s been quoting Adorno on it, recently: closeness is the death of intimacy. Pattern grows in the parts of the net that aren’t connected, and dies when there are no such parts — isolation is as easily achieved by universal linking, as by no linking at all. Society becomes a hot plasma, a quark soup: no more people but just bits of people, people busted up into packets and routed down different wires to their temporary destination. Everywhere: the present. The end of history. The other side of history. The skin of the bubble, expanding forever, accelerating out into blackness.

And it’s happening now. Is, in fact, comin’ at ya. So Dollhouse itself may have been crap, but the doomsday scenario it presented was prescient, and all its utterances were impeccably ironic: it starts so easily, you see. You think nothing of it at first; it’s just convenient. Guilt-free prostitutes, well who wouldn’t want that? It’s a human, but it’s not a person; heck it isn’t even a robot with feelings; so there’s just nothing difficult to deal with, and nobody gets hurt. Your regular boon to mankind, but it’s just a app, it’s only a toy, it isn’t like it’s gonna destroy the world or anything…and indeed when the nightmare finally lands and the mind control goes portable and viral, when the fungibility of souls is taken to the logical end of its implications, the world is not destroyed: only replaced.

By a surveillance state. That’s what the Dollhouse technology’s quantum seed is finally about, you see: surveillance that alters what it touches. Active surveillance, where to observe is to change, where to know something you must take it completely apart into its constituent particles. They say Modernism is like a tall, tall building: a skyscraper, a structure that would be as alien in scale a million years from now, as it would’ve been a million years ago. So it’s natural that one day this monolith should come crashing down and be broken into bits by its own horror, but after the moment of modernity there can also be no going back to a pre-modern way of looking at form and function, so everything made afterwards is cobbled together out of the stuff in the collapsed building’s footprint, and the art becomes how to do the collage, how to put the pastiches together, to create a post-modern way of living through which the powerful urge to be un-alien to oneself can be safely channelled. And yet the thing to remember is that Modernism is not dead just because this happens — the skycraper still towers in the imagination, a ghostly finger accusing the sky — because the moment of modernity was still real in a way that the stitched-together world that follows it never can be, and thus it too is but a pigment on the palette of Art, because it must be. Because it happened. And in the acceptance of that fact is, perhaps, finally a reconciliation…

But we’re not there yet. PHONES. We still haven’t recognized what they’ve become. We know about the surveillance now, because of Wikileaks, but it isn’t like we didn’t suspect it before…it was just that we didn’t want to hear about it. Because it would make us all sound like conspiracy nuts to confess our suspicions in the open, wouldn’t it? But perhaps this will be Wikileaks’ greatest contribution, that it will make it so we can openly confess our belief without worrying about whether it will get us cast out of society. I was having dinner with my father the other day, and I told him I was nervous about feeling like he and I now lived in two completely different worlds. He gets his news from the TV and the newspaper, and I now get it from Twitter, so in a way we were being made silent antagonists, warring embodiments of viewpoint and belief, just by sitting there…but only I knew it. He had not even heard of the riots in Oakland at that time, thought the Occupy movement was in a mere half-dozen cities worldwide…meanwhile I felt like I was taking crazy pills, stalking the streets of my hometown like a shade, disconnected from the earth. I showed him a graphic from the Guardian online, pockets of protest squeezed into the map of Canada, and the world, like seeds in a pomegranate. He was astonished. Astonished. Because he had simply not been told, you see. No one had thought the matter important enough to mention to him. He was out of the loop; unaware even that things had changed, because someone else in charge of his newsfeed hadn’t wished to accept it, because someone higher-up from them wished to continue profiting by (and, undoubtedly, from) that state of complacency.

So the Internet worked pretty well there, as a decentralizing power…but my point here today is: that doesn’t mean any kind of war’s been won. Far from it. Hell, we haven’t even made it onto the battlefield yet, because what my Dad learned about how “classical” media work today is a lesson not yet taken up by people like me living with (dare I call it) “quantum” media…and that’s not good news, because it’s here that the war will be fought. It’s here, that surveillance will get active; the methods of control that worked well on my father were fairly passive ones, and so they were fairly innocuous, but against you and me much bigger guns are about to be trained. Are being trained, even as we speak. Or what do you think it means, that you are now being invited to blog from Twitter, tweet from Facebook, and if you want to find something then just Google YouTube? I freely admit that I sound just like the Establishment oldsters in the Sixties and Seventies, lobbing crude derision across the Generation Gap at their revolutionary offspring: you talk about how silly they sound, you call them clownish, and you try to keep it all from happening…first you ignore them, then you laugh at them, then you fight them, and then they win. So okay, I know how it sounds. But these recombinatory Internet trans-platform acts aren’t actually part of any youth revolution; they’re not meant to open things up, but to shut them down. It’s the centralizing power of automation in action that we’re seeing there, not its beautiful other face: and every time someone wants you to Yelp from Klout, they want to own you, not set you free. The Internet is too big and too useful to be successfully transformed into a fully-corporatized space, but if its callow Western users can be encouraged to access it through intensively-corporatized portals, then the wider fields can be hidden from them effectively enough. Which all sounds…I don’t know, maybe just a little like conspiracy-nut talk?

Or it would…if not for Wikileaks.

Because now we know, really factually know, about the surveillance industry that surrounds us. Not long ago, I was unlucky enough to stumble on the transcript of a computer security talk given by a senior editor at Wired Magazine to a roomful of powerful CIOs…like Ganymede bringing Zeus another daiquiri, said editor made much of the scary prospect of data falling into the unauthorized hands of cyber-thieves. Which made me laugh, because…really, O Ganymede? You think the very great danger of the 21st century will be personal data falling into the hands of unauthorized people? And also we should watch out for dinosaurs lurking in the bushes, I presume. Oh, he had a lot of quaint ideas, this guy. I mean, he even thinks that young people answer calls on their cell phones, why can you imagine? So if there’s a dinosaur lurking in the bushes, he’s it: trying with all his might not to notice the flying saucers in the clearing. Until as far as he’s concerned, the safest thing in the whole world is that home is never more than three clicks away on the ruby slippers…!

And so he doesn’t know, doesn’t suspect, that the world has already come and gone while he stood there.

When fears become facts, that’s when we’ll finally move past them: the modern moment just another colour on the palette. We’re not there yet, but we will be. Mind you, until we are, things will only get scarier and scarier, sheets of lightning falling down around the mouth of the cave. Really, the double shame of Dollhouse is that it not only failed at being an update of The Questor Tapes but also at being a much-needed update of They Live…all that intel-led policing, “threat-assessment” security models being applied even in a whorehouse…I mean, it’s crazy, right? It’s spookily suggestive, of something else going on…something nasty curling around the edges of the broadsheet. This shit looks harmless. But it’s not. You thought you were in love!

But it was really just Stockholm Syndrome.

The toughest part of the job, is getting people to accept the change that’s already happened. Okay, so let’s say we’ve made that particular psychological breakthrough, pushed through the veil of that denial. So then what? What’s the next step after that?

And so we return, and begin again.  The world doesn’t end, it just changes when we start to think differently about it. Accept how things are, then see who that makes you; then figure out what your job ought to be. A lot of our popular entertainment is awfully slack about this sort of thing, I’m talking “Commish-with-the-earring” slack, and so things get twisty around the edges sometimes, but shouldn’t they eventually have the chance to come out, too? I could talk about comics here, just as easily as movies and TV: mainstream comics are pinholes too, now, failing spectacularly to be about what they’re about, even when “what they’re about” isn’t exactly any exalted literary aim. I mean, these are the genre literatures, this is the slop-bucket, this is about the only place in the world where they’re not watching…you think maybe we could manage something, it doesn’t have to be terribly earthshaking, but at least something honest? I mean, something past how Dr. Strange sleeps with co-eds now? This is a bit of a tangent (aren’t they all), but if you want to know something fairly radical, that superhero comics can still achieve, after reading our old friend P-Tor  discussing once again how disappointing modern reboots of Dr. Strange are, I think I feel a bit moved to tell you. And this may sound a little bit like an odd noise, when you hear it from inside the tent of modern storytelling, but I think it’s worth thinking about…

That you don’t have to be able to identify with every single character you see.

Eh?

Dr. Strange doesn’t have to be just like you, except with magic, and his job just like yours except with Dormammu. You know? It isn’t necessary. You don’t need that constant level of validation and comfort in your life, that everything you see needs to shout your pop culture back at you. Because actually, these entertainment artifacts with the incongruous pop references in them, they’re supposed to be critiques, right?

Uh…right?

…Okay, never mind. That’s probably better left for a different post, since this one’s getting too long for tangents now anyway, and do you know I have yet to get to the payoff of it all? As in: so what do you do, once you return and begin again, and accept the change that’s already happened?

What stories are relevant to that reality?

Well, here’s one, and this one kind of is the update of The Questor Tapes that I’ve been waiting for all this time. Or did you think all that business about the skyscraper of modernity falling into its own footprint was just for show? You know we say it all the time: “the world changed, after 9/11″.

But do we ever really think about that, when we’re sitting down to catch up with what our old entertainment media’s been doing this week? Ten years ago: the end of history. We don’t have much insight to show for it, though. I mean, we have to live here now, so why aren’t we telling more stories about what it’s like to live here?

Well…

There is Person Of Interest. And you know, it’s perfectly okay to look at it as “just a show”; although I don’t know the last time I saw a show that was actually made properly, and professionally, as this one is. Why do you know I was beginning to think we’d forgotten how to make ordinarily decent television shows? The TV people of today take the wrong lessons from cinema, as the comics writers of today take the wrong lessons from Watchmen: it’s supposed to be about seeing, not sweating. Everything strives for tactility, now, like an advertisement does — how close it gets, is what’s deemed to matter. How enveloped you are in it. Perhaps it is, again, a sort of misplaced zeal for identification? If we can just get people in through this portal, we can tune what they’re interested in, so they never even think of wanting to look for any wild fields outside this enclosure. And I really don’t want to conflate too much, here; but Christ our TV is boring as shit most of the time, isn’t it? And even the mainstream, full-network stuff should not be quite so boring, I think. Do we really need this many pinholes, is nature vs. nurture really still such a hot-button issue, is this really knowledge? For real, is this what passes for it now? Dollhouse may have started badly and ended badly, and been pretty frankly for shit in the middle, but at least the idea was beautiful…and at least there was an idea there, whether it was beautiful or not.

But this idea’s a little more up-to-date. Mr. Finch’s machine sees everything, everywhere, but keeps the vast bulk of all that seeing to itself, like Google’s search algorithms. The algorithms know everything about all of us, you know? But they assemble all that data for a very simple purpose. They’re not gods, they’re not aspects of Fate, they’re not even SF’s old superintelligent computers…they’re just simple forces, set loose to interact automatically and bring back what they’re told to. What hidden processes and interactions and exchanges are involved in the wish the djinn grants? We don’t get to know that, because we haven’t asked to know it. How many steps really lie between one node of the system and another? We let the daemons worry about that, so we don’t have to. In the old days of SF, sometimes when the Total World Government put everybody on punchcards, the hero would be the one left out of that database — and indeed, the “man who does not exist” became so much of a thing that they even (senselessly!) used it for Knight Rider, right? — so all this is nothing particularly new, but consider the inflection of it: when the database is the only one that knows about the hero, but it doesn’t matter because no one even realizes the Total World Government is here. Well, it sort of is, you know…I mean, a Total World Government is just a sort of machine, that’s the whole point of it. So…”government”, perhaps not, but there is a machine out there, of the requisite size?

And now that it’s there, it’s all too obvious that Ashby’s Law applies to it, too. You couldn’t make a government out of the Internet, see? Oh, sure, once we imagined such a thing, but that we didn’t imagine it unironically is quite easy to see now…because that machine turns out to be too big to treat as “just a machine”. That machine’s too big to be anything but an ecology of its own. Of course: and those stories were never about how one day we would have control; they were always about how we never would. The Internet is the first thing that human beings have made, that human beings do not understand. It never was about artificial intelligence, or even artificial life, anymore than today’s tales of the Singularity are about uploading consciousnesses into angelic machines. Similarly, Person Of Interest is not about tapping into the Machine’s power to perform superhuman and Fate-defying feats…but rather it’s about…

Diaristic slippage.  The river rushes on, and we can’t stop it; that is not something that can be fixed. And the operation of the Machine for its intended purpose may cause great wrong, great harm! In fact we know it does cause great wrong, and great harm…! But that’s not the issue. The issue isn’t whether it will cause some harm, or even much harm, but whether it can cause any good. Because it isn’t the machine’s role, that we’re debating.

Heck, we’re not even wondering how to fight against the machine!

Those days are over, John Conner.

And you’ll have to come with us this time, if you want to live.

Because Carthage is defeated.

And so I should probably stop talking about it.

…

1 2 3 4 5 6

And sometimes Y.

“Why not any of a hundred others?”

It’s a good question, but I don’t have an answer.

I will try to think of one by Monday, though.

Which, of course, is more than your local news will try to do.

If you’re not, you could find worse jumping-on points than this, honestly.  But never mind that now, it’s breakfast time!  Here’s what the table looks like:

And here’s the man who’s sitting virtually across from me at it:

Handsome feller, isn’t he?  Name of Dan Goldman.  And so here we go:

*

First off: is there any way I can get hold of some of that Brazilian fruit?

There’s a few exotic fruits you can get at Asian markets in the US that we have here (longan, dragonfruits) but most of the funkier Brazilian fruits like pitanga, abiú, jabuticaba, açaí, or caquí I’ve never seen outside this country. So sadly, nope.

Well, hell. Okay, let’s get on with it, then.

When RLP was at Tor, the thing that struck me most forcefully was obviously the interface, the clicking to get new word-balloons and panels, and I thought that also helped the difference between backgrounds and foregrounds slide a bit lower under the radar into the reader’s general sensory experience…gave it a bit of a feverish edge, a delirious aspect: the clicking drew me onward into the “interactive” stuff so well that I didn’t really notice at the time I was starting to think of RLP as three dimensional “layers”, background and foreground and ME! All with a slightly-different kind of “realism” to them. Hmm, I’ve actually got a couple questions here, so…

Here’s one, to start with: even though that interface isn’t happening anymore, your page layouts still seem to me to be built in the same way, as though around it. Did you just find that the layouts were enough, at some point — that you could achieve similar effects without needing the clickthrough device? Or have I got it completely wrong, and you didn’t design your pages around the device at all? (You are probably going to tell me that the old interface is still working, and that there just must be something wrong with my computer…)

No, there’s nothing wrong with your computer; the only thing I really designed RLP around was the computer screen itself. It wasn’t the first time I’d done so (see: shootingwar.com); I really like the shape of it, even if it gives comic retailers a titty-attack.

The reasons I stopped doing the clickthrough things were basically that a) it took way too much time to export each pages’ separate elements for a proprietary player that ran too slowly on too many machines, and b) the novelty of the clickthrough wound up being what people talked about, instead of the story-world, which is the most important thing. After working on building RLP’s world for years, I got out-belled-and-whistled by the interface.

So, once I subtracted the clickthrough thing from the equation, I was back to just… comics, and no one was struggling with the player or getting distracted by the toys. Finally, people started engaging with the story the way I wanted them to. The layouts haven’t really changed at all with/without the player; the clickthrough just needed to get out the damn way.

One of the things that took a while to dawn on me as well is how formally-playful RLP is — around about the first BIG exorcism I started to detect a bit of metatextuality in there by suddenly starting to think of Jude as an artist, for example…and then thinking of Ceci as a magician herself, conjuring up business, meeting mythological beasts, etc. etc. That same kind of multi-leveled meaning as the foreground/background contrast built up, the different “skins” of reality as it were…and then of course that’s what the psychic stuff is all about too, so it all starts to seem quite impressively calculated after a while, lots of extra texture if the reader’s interested in that sort of thing. So is that all just happy accident, following your nose and seeing what happens, or do you have a Big Numbers corkboard somewhere filled with 3×5 cards and arrows pointing every which way?

Yes. You’re the first person to speak to me about Ceci’s own magic; it’s not a literal thing, but she’s coming into her own as well on that level. Watch and see.

Well, Ceci takes drugs just like Jude does, when she goes into the den of the Witch-Queens of Florida Real Estate, eh? And with her familiar too. Practically Ditko Dr. Strange. I must admit, in that one I saw Morrison’s Lord Fanny going among the Aztec gods into strange gardens…God damn you, I really do want Jude and Ceci to get back together! I don’t know how you’ve made me care so much about that!

Is there a question buried in there somewhere? The road ahead for Jude and Cecilia is twisted and complicated on both sides, and I’m not even teasing about its end. I’m pleased as pigshit that you’re so emotionally engaged with them, that strokes me right under my chin as a writer… but we all know that life is never just happy or just sad (that’s for television)

I do have a giant corkboard (actually it’s in Scrivener), but that’s where my Giant Fucking Master Plan exists, and it’s something I am retraining myself to only follow organically. I’ve known the whole RLP story for a long time, all the pieces are here in my head, and it’s up to me to giggle and saunter around them, picking daisies and kicking away the wolves as the road rolls towards the castle on the horizon.

Funny you should say that!  Because there’s such a ring of old-style fantasy to RLP, the surprise when you realize the worldbuilding actually goes pretty deep, the investment of mundane things with magical attributes, the whole trompe l’oeil of it…like I was saying earlier, at first I thought it was a handful of characters and a neat idea, and now I’m starting to think “gee, this is actually a pretty big canvas here, these characters all have lots of past and lots of future to them”…how ambitious did you mean to make it, when you started? Is it just growing spontaneously, or do you have millions of notebooks on history, backstory, what’s really going on etc., in addition to the Big Board? For example when Rory finally shows up and he’s actually a bit scary, did you know that’s what he was going to be like?

Absolutely; the level of menace in Rory is a fun balancing act with a growing trust, and how once the extent of his psychic are revealed, we see him as more… wizardly, but with that comes a sense of deeper manipulation. I’ve got the whole of Rory’s past figured out even though it might never come into play in comic form, but much more of his future will. Rory’s path makes him quite important in the lives of all the Tobins, and that’s only just starting to unfold.

When I wrote the first chunk of notes back in 2001(?), I intended to create a framework I could tell any kind of story with… but RLP’s been growing inside my head for a decade, and some of that growth isn’t even conscious anymore… it’s happened in the background. In that time, it’s like the characters have been having dinner parties and barbecues without me, and every time I sit down with them, they’re already intimate with each other’s histories, have beefs, etc. Sitting down to write RLP has been incredibly easy that way. A lot of the history is already there, even if we’ve seen only touches of it in the present so far.

I do have a million notebooks though…

The shape (length/format) of the series has changed as my own path in/out/through the comic business has changed a lot: I’d wanted RLP originally to be a monthly comic book, then a series of graphic novels… but now I’m comfortable with where it’s landed and how non-committal the story-lengths can be or not be. I love having the flexibility of working online for myself only… and even though I’m not making much dough off RLP now, I feel like I’ve found my optimal working conditions. The short stories I’ve been working on have strengthened my chops with each one, and I’ll be diving into the second novel-length story MALA FAMA soon.

It’s gonna be maybe an annoying question, but: how much of RLP is based on your own life? Is Rory a guy in your own life? Is Ceci? I’m assuming you’re Jude…

I get asked that a lot, but no, aside from the acting, thank god I’m not Jude. RLP is a very personal work for me, but not autobiographical in the least. It’s more kaleidoscopically personal: aspects of myself and other people in the characters, stories true and overheard all go into the blender. Jude is a broken old part of a previous version of myself, sour and limited but really trying to grow and angry at the world for not acknowledging that and giving him a break. He’s based on how I saw my own father when I was a kid, which did or didn’t have anything to do with reality; I guess that makes Turi me… but truthfully Turi is also “played by” my cat.

Ceci is probably contains the lowest percentage of Dan Goldman; she’s more a mix of the ex-girlfriend of mine I was stuck living with in Miami while drawing down the bones of the series a decade ago, crossed with a former magazine editor I worked for for a month in 2002 and a dash of my own fuck-the-rules business attitudes. Rory is definitely also me and not-me: he springs from the same place my own webcomic character Kelly sprung from: this misunderstood sexual and spiritual being that is just so himself that he can’t help pushing other people away as he swims towards some kind of personal/universal truth that no one else even understands. Jude and Rory are very similar in that, but Rory is way more self-actualized and has turned his flaws into strengths in a way Jude needs to figure out.

Paul Pope said, after doing his Adam Strange strip for Wednesday Comics (which I thought was really good anyway!) that only after it was all done did he get a feeling for “oh, so THAT’s how Hal Foster did it, THAT’s how you tell a Sunday Page story, right of course, well I wish I had another one to do now.” So since you dumped the clickthrough stuff, do you feel like you’re more in that “whole page” world, making murals or tableaux with your compositions more than making stuff that’s BANG! beat BANG! beat, like you do in the world where you have to plan out what people see as they turn pages? Is this easier than working in print?

Not really; I think about page turns and pages-as-tableaux as well as storytelling containers still. The clickthrough stuff didn’t really ever affect that thinking either, because I’d do the finished page and then subtractively-export the pieces to build the clickthrough elements, if you follow that.

I used to earn my bread as a graphic designer, and I always loved it… except for the clients. Since doing independent work in comics lets me play with design without clients getting in the way, getting crazy with page designs has always been a good chunk of the thrill of comicking.

Related question: since on a computer images load from the top down, do you ever think of structuring pages that way? I always let your pages load in the background while I’m doing something else, but should I be watching them load to see elements descend?

Told you it was a crap question.

Yeah, that is a crap question. The answer is No.

When first got into webcomics, I did the downward-scrolling reveal with “KELLY” on Act-i-vate, and I always thought it was a really nice new mechanic. I’ve seen some other people recently get praised for doing it, like Blaise Larmee’s 2001. When I did SHOOTING WAR, the down-scroll was verboten, and what wound up being that just worked, some I am doing it still.

I want RLP to be in book format too (even though the landscape-oriented pages have screwed a lot of things up for me); I’ve been looking for the Golden Mean between web and print for a few years now, the right balance that doesn’t need wheel-reinventing when you go from one to the other. Redoing artwork instead of making new stuff is a bummer.

All the artists seem to love that “Instagram” thing. What’s up with that? It’s just for the iPhone, right? I write songs for a living, I have a little dictaphone stick, I always want to do things like lean it out a car window when a crew’s working on the highway so I can get Dopplered jackhammer noises…is the iPhone like that for you, a visual “grabber”?

Yeah, it’s iOS-only; my wife digs it but she’s an Android girl. It’s less of a grabber than a sharer for me; I take a lot of shitty pics with my iphone. I’m doing something nicer now: I bought a iphone program called Decim8, which is way more digi-punk. Instead of filtering your photos to look vintage, it algorithmically-degrades/corrupts/destroys them with selectable types of digital noise. I’ve been taking a lot of pics of Brazilian toilets, random dogs in the street, plants and such and jaggeding the fuck out of them, turning them into art. For example: this pic is the chandelier over my mother-in-law’s dinner table; once I processed it, it made me think about non-carbon alien intelligences: http://t.co/BtLG5XS

I’m still using Instagram to squirt the destructed photos to Tumblr/Twitter/blahblahblah, because I’ve got a bunch of friends on there that respond to the weird things I’m sharing, which fights back the loneliness.

Personally, I’m partial to this one:

Like two ends of a wormhole.  I’ve heard that since America is getting out of the rocket-launching business, the next Cape Canaveral is going to be in Brazil…J.G. Ballard here we come, I guess. So everyone’s going to have to know about Brazil in the 21st Century, maybe it’s going to be The Place? We see a lot of South American comics artists doing their thing these days, there seems to be enormous love for the medium there. What kind of comics are the kids reading on the street down south? Are comics big? Do they matter?

Brazil is growing at an inspiring rate; the middle class is booming here and things are better for Brazilians than probably ever before… but a lot of what they’re enjoying is bought on credit now, and my third eye sees them making a lot of the same mistakes Americans historically have. It’s scary. I think they’re gonna wind up in the same shitty place faster unless something is done to show a different way, though I have no idea what that way is.

Comics (in Brazil they’re called “histórias em quadrinhos” or “HQ”… which means “stories in little frames”) are very big here, but the tastes are different. The American superheroes are well-loved because anything American is worshipped by most people here (sadly), but it’s nowhere as massive an audience as manga. Brazil has a huge Asian-Brazilian presence that really connects with that kind of comic, and every neighborhood has at least one manga academy (dreamy, right?). I think the next generation of Brazilian cartoonists are going to be dangerously great.

There’s also the quadrinhos nacionais, comics for Brazil by Brazilian creators, which I think have a smaller audience but are smarter and better crafted than a lot else. I see the nacionais scene as being more influenced by European works and the larger national comics scene in Argentina as well… Heavy influences from Spain, Italy, Belgium here; I think they’re less commercially successful, but the students of the artform dig these more than anything else.

I feel a bit bad about not turning these questions out in a more focussed way…”is this about your life” is a bloody awful question, for example, so vague! So if we can skip backward for a minute, maybe I should just fix that by making it a bit more actually specific. Like: instead of the silly “are you Jude” question, instead I should maybe ask how and why you latched on to the business of Floridan real-estate itself, as a setting?

I grew up in South Florida, and my mother worked in real estate in some form or another down there since I was twelve. My last few years in New York, she was working as a mortgage originator, and would call and tell me war stories about how crooked the lending was down there. Now, we all know how that story ends since it’s spiralled out into a crash of the global fucking economy. I used to ride with her looking for “fizz-bo” (For Sale By Owner) signs on lawns back in the late eighties, and the whole environment just dovetailed nicely with my own fascination with ghosts, building-memories, my own strange sixth sense about things that I’ve struggled to understand much of my life.

Originally RLP took place in Brooklyn, where I wrote the very first version of the series; after 9/11 I went down to Miami to visit my mom with my original pitch in my head, and we zipped around Normandy Isle. I saw an old architect’s office there, and my pitch and Miami just clicked, and I knew it had to take place down south. New York comics are boring to me now anyhow; it’s so over-done and Miami is such a tweaky unique place.

Yeah, one thing I think you can’t help but notice a lot in RLP is the colour palette, and how it plays against the background textures, and how the dark interiors and bright exteriors are contrasted…I’d actually been wondering how early on you got interested in that, if you started from a place of “Miami is interesting, I want to draw something that feels like Miami”, rather than starting from “right, so these are the characters and this is the plot, now where should I situate them”? Of course you’ve already sort of answered that, but…I recall an interview with Steve Englehart in which he said he and Marshall Rogers made Coyote after their Batman run because they wanted a change, they wanted something bright and sun-drenched, and no more dark-blue billowing cloaks, so perhaps was it colour what made it all come together, for you?

I suppose in this sense it did: in the idea of horror-in-bright-sunshine. Death in Vacationland. Growing up in Miami, I always felt that it was energetically a dark place, even with the glaring sunshine and beaches and pastel veneer. People are cunty in Miami: selfish and aggressive and oftentimes on something… and generally pretty ignorant to boot.

In addition to that, I always felt surrounded by death all the time: we had kidnappings, constant accidents on the expressways, alligators coming out of canals behind peoples’ houses, and in my neighborhood I grew up around a lot of old Jews from New York and New Jersey (a la Rhoda) who moved down in the sixties to escape the winter. These old farts would drop dead in restaurants, at movie theaters, all the time; I got used to ambulances and EMTs rushing into places I was with my family to save the body, comfort the hysterical spouse or grandkids. It was just… around me all the time. So the sunny Florida palette hiding a deeper psychic darkness in the culture, and the climate as your end-of-life destination was always connected. I grew up where people moved to die in comfort.

Beyond that, I suppose it’s a write-whatcha-know thing… but even as a kid I was aware of how rich in “material” my surroundings were, and did a lot more mental recording of things that are only now escaping my head in comics form.

I suppose the thing about real estate is that it always involves going into other people’s places while they’re still living there, too…either that, or going into places where you expect to find people living, but instead find NO ONE, just an empty box. RLP’s quite brilliant about that (if I may descend into pure flattery), about how in either of those cases, in real life, you’re naturally confronted with ghosts: either the ghosts of the “living” or the ghosts of the “dead” — either people who have left no trace, or people who will shortly be taking their traces with them. The “hauntology” thing, maybe. So to me this is the essence of the more abstract, elegant, meta thing — everything visual that I know about Miami is either from postcards or TV, and has nothing to do with people’s backyards or swimming pools or breakfast nooks, or with the weird people who work in stores selling odd drugs…or with scruffy Santeria guys or reptiles coming inside the houses from the swamp…or any history and/or presence of culture deeper than an MTV reality show, really, so I guess I don’t know Miami at all, without knowing that stuff. So reading RLP feels a bit like that ghost-viewing activity itself to me, an effect that’s neatly doubled by the strip’s conceit…

So how did all that coalesce, in your mind? Did a whole bunch of different things just suddenly collide inside your skull, and there it was? Or did it grow bit by bit from a brain-seed?

The echoes-of-places always weirded me out: I’ve always felt the echoes like layers of paint in nearly every place I’ve ever lived, and RLP is my platform to talk about that, in addition to a million other things in the soup. As far as it coalescing, it’s the connections of things, some conscious and some not… but I used to refer to RLP as “my tumor” as it would grow and swell in my head during my not-so-productive dope-and-chicks years. There were times I’d lie in bed and “work” on it without writing anything down, but it’s all there, still. Remember, I’ve written versions of the stories and tinkered with the characters’ entire life histories for the better part of a decade before drawing the first page for Tor. RLP always stood in my mind as a when-I-get-there point with my writing/art chops while practicing on other projects… until suddenly in 2009, I just woke up one day and felt ready. My agent called with some new book deal opportunity and I turned it away, telling him THIS is what I am going to do next, and probably for many years as there’s a lot of material in mind, and we’d need to find a paycheck in here somewhere.

I don’t think I answered this directly, but I answered in pieces in previous questions, yes?

Most definitely yes, and anyway we are skipping around a bit here as I edit our conversation into something hopefully a bit more streamlined, so all the answers to questions are probably going to seem a bit more distributed than in a perfectly straight Q. and A. Like, here’s a skip: now I’m reading the Shooting War webcomic in fits and starts (and how insulting of me that is! a good interviewer would’ve read it thoroughly backwards and forwards before asking Question One, goddamnit!) (darned good stuff though!) , but something that struck me very powerfully right away, specifically as a person who read RLP first, is how the more photo-ey backgrounds are strongly textually-justified pretty darn quick. “This is what the video camera does, it makes these pictures. That’s why this looks as it does.” So right away what’s in the background isn’t really just “in the background” at all, but it’s got an important storytelling function that is quite wonderful to see. And if you came to it from RLP, I dare to say, that storytelling function is quite an eye-opener too! Because it makes it plain as day that you weren’t just hallucinating the importance of the rendered backgrounds in RLP, which, ironically, always seem intended as hallucinatory elements anyway. As I said before, with the clickthrough stuff on top in the Tor version, the conventional drawing of the character figures in the middle, and the photo-ey backgrounds on the bottom, after a few pages that stuff all gelled to say “right, there are different levels of reality in this strip, and all of this is intentional, and you’re meant to notice it.” But now I think if I’d read Shooting War before RLP I would’ve already been in possession of that crucial information, and wouldn’t have needed the clickthrough stuff to clue me in to it. But maybe I just say that because I did end up reading RLP first…?

So is there a question here?

Yes, and not only that but it’s a follow-up question: you say you dumped the clickthrough for practical reasons, but you also say you dumped it for aesthetic ones (and that the two are one, really!), and what I would like to ask you is…

(And this is a long shot…)

Was it that you were using the clickthrough to draw more attention to the backgrounds — to the different intentional layers of visual elements — but then realized that people would probably get it anyway? That the “comicsness” of it was already delivering that letter, and therefore so what if it didn’t get there overnight but took another day or so to arrive?

(You see what I was saying about the clickthrough interface getting more play in interviews than the story?)

Yes, I was (and am) confident that I didn’t feel I needed the clickthrough at all. I never really thought about the backgrounds being separate from the foregrounds (once the comic is done). Of course, during the creation of it, they’re different worlds, but once I bring everything together into its own reality, it’s all “the art”. That is, if I’ve done my work well; there’s a lot of the earlier pages that I want to go back to and tweak as I think the variance between character and setting is still really visible… I’ve gotten a lot better at unifying the scenes with color and switched 3D programs so the renders aren’t grainy behind precise-looking figure drawings. I do a lot of wincing with the first 100 pages of RLP; it’s gonna be much better when I have some time to touch them up.

I wish I was thinking “layers of reality” there but in truth, it was far geekier, all about experimenting with what you could do on a screen that a printed comic couldn’t (while still keeping a comic and not a quasi-cartoon). That’s really it.

I was thinking of you as like this guy who was all about the backgrounds as super-integral, the “backgrounds in a comic are like basslines in a song” guy…

Well, the backgrounds provide context and information for the story in any comic; the fact that mine are generated using virtual sets primarily doesn’t really change that. For example, the family photo of the Happier Tobins that Jude stole from Ceci’s apartment in the very beginning… it’s back in her apartment in the current “A Series of Tubes” story. I dunno if anyone else will ever notice that, and there’s a story there that’s minute and doesn’t need to be told in a comic form, but it does contain a nugget of story and a subtext. Does anyone notice that at 72dpi amidst whatever else digital noise is calling to them from their desktop? I have no idea, but for me, it’s in there and it’s deliberate.

Okay, I promise, no more clickety-click talk! And reading A Series Of Tubes as it goes along, one gets the sense that maybe that device after a time would just function as an unwanted constraint anyway? The comics couldn’t fly as free? But to get really off that topic now, I mentioned that what first made me really connect with RLP past all the devices was the time-delayed realization of Jude as an artist, in a way a writer just like me — a occasional freelance editor maybe, and I’ve been that too! — and like I said, it made me laugh to recognize that in him, I felt a little bit like…maybe like people feel when they’ve known me for a little bit, and suddenly realize “oh my God, this man-child has a job, he does real work and has actual responsibilities, well it all makes perfect sense now…”

Yeah, I think of Jude as an artist too, and Jude would definitely tell you the shiniest piece of his soul is the part that can pass through the “membrane.”

Indeed, it’s a lovely trick, and snuck up on me nice. But the other realization that came along with it was that I was looking at characters who were similar to me in another way, which was…I’m not sure how to put this…you know, they have actual age to them, how old they are matters, they have more than just three or four chapters in their autobiographies, they’re looking at problems of direction and decision, freedom and stability, that only really acquire force with increasing life experience and page-turning. That sounds snobby, but I guess what I mean is…I remember in my early twenties carrying around this sort of prejudice that I’d get all my figuring-out of stuff done in that time, I knew there were things I didn’t know and hadn’t done but I also thought I had a pretty good grasp of what kind of field they lay in, I thought of them as (though I really do hate to quote Rumsfeld) “known unknowns”. But as you get older, you don’t end up just gaining greater and greater mastery over the same ground, do you? The world just keeps getting bigger, there are odder things in it, “unknown unknowns” that you never saw coming and have to figure out what the hell you’re going to do about…and that’s a much more interesting learning curve, and that hooked me pretty good too. That’s the real good serial-storytelling stuff, for me — like I said, I do care if Jude and Ceci solve their more obvious problems, but at a certain level that’s something I’ve already done a million times in reading and viewing experiences before, from waiting to see if Cyclops will ask Marvel Girl on a date or something all the way along to…well, everything, I guess. Most things in popular entertainment, at any rate. They’re all about the “known unknowns”.

I think RLP would be a lot less interesting to me if it was a straight slog through a case like one of those mystery-of-the-week TV shows, “let’s bust this ghost, sell this house” sort of thing. The real grand story of RLP is the connective tissue holding the “family” together, how they’re all feeding off an aspect of each other, and how it’s starting to change them all into something else, “known Unknowns” even.

So how much of this story forms itself around ideas of freedom and possibility vs. stagnation, how deep does that theme go and how stable is it? Or is it more of an “arc” that we’ll get done with at some point? That it all starts with Jude getting a blog, which fits with how he looks at first but then seems a bit weird after you get to know him better and understand just what his pressures are, and who he’s got to talk to…well, getting a blog just seems like the dumbest possible kind of solution to all that! And then they’ve got the business together, and maybe the book with Zoya is supposed to be a way out of that trap, an escape plan, but it seems more like an out-of-the-frying-pan thing? People trying to exert greater control over their situation, rather than really going with the flow that’s presented to them? Trying to duck the unknown unknowns…

I agree with you about the blog being a dumb thing for Jude to do, given he has all these ghost-confidants… unless on some level he needed to put those thoughts somewhere that Cecilia could conceivably find him. The blog is anonymous, but it’s also out there for the world to see, subjects and strangers alike… so sooner or later, something is going to come back to him. We might not’ve seen the end of that, if you’re reading closely.

The ghost photography “book project” with Zoya is definitely an escape route for Jude, not just from his crumbling marriage to Ceci but also from anonymity and zero-credibility. Of course, in American society where spiritual house-cleanings are thought of as parlor tricks, Jude’s got a chip on his shoulder because that shiny sliver of him that can do the Great Work IS incredible, exceptional, even if the rest of him is a bumbling, schmucky mess. That book is going to SHOW THEM ALL that what he does is real. It’s also a convenient and frustrating excuse to spend more alone-time with Zoya, who gives him something Cecilia doesn’t anymore: respect. And the reason Cecilia’s not been included in the plans is simple: it’s a quiet safe zone for them both to appreciate each other’s artistry without the boss throwing crap at them.

It’s just marriage, isn’t it.

Sure, but it’s not just marriage. A marriage is an autonomous zone between two people, so even if that zone is all-good, that shared space still has to reconcile the possibility-vs-stagnation struggle outside itself. So for Jude and Ceci, I don’t think that struggle would be absent if they were happily together, it would just be easier for them to face The World At Large together if they were a team. And that’s what marriage is about to me.

I was actually very surprised to see Rory, letting alone how menacing he is, because…I guess I got the picture that there were some things about the past we weren’t going to really get into? That were just going to stay dark, stay distant? And then he shows up and basically says, or implies, that there is no such thing as the past, and no such thing as “distance” either. Is that why Jude resists him? More to the point: can we read Rory as another one of Jude’s encounters with “spirit guides”? Maybe his first?

There’s so much left untold yet about Jude’s past; I’m going to get heavy into that part of his life that in the third novel, HURRICANE MELODIE. Major psychic self-surgery in that story. I never intended to keep his past untold like Wolverine; I wanted him to be approachable, knowable, relatable in that I-knew-a-guy-like-this-I-didn’t-totally-like way… and he suddenly stands 100 feet tall when he’s doing his thing.

Rory definitely reflects a different way of dealing with the Great Work back at Jude: he celebrates himself regardless of what anyone else thinks. Jude resents him because his own experience is heavier, full of obligations and drama and the drug aspect of it basically ruins him for anything else. Jude and Rory go back a ways too, and I see Rory as a mentor turned rival than anything else. They’ve each got a philosophy and an agenda backing their skills, and the two are definitely at odds.

Where do you get the trippy stuff from, especially in terms of the cosmic beings that Jude encounters? I don’t want to make it seem like it’s all about Jude! But…do you just pick that stuff up, or make it up, or has it been in your head a long time? What’s your reading in psychedelia or mythology like, or is it all secondhand for you like it is for me?

I definitely don’t make it up: the “beings” Jude encounters are manifestations of Yoruba orishas, deities from West Africa who traveled via slave ships through Cuba and to Miami. The religion in Miami is known as santería, and many of the names and chants, indoctrinations and coming trials come from that tradition. They are real spirits to many people, and I’ve brought them into my life using RLP. The same Yoruba traditions crossed the Atlantic on different slave boats bound for Brazil and have become several other faiths down here using the same source pantheon; let’s just say, I’ve opened that door using comics and have some work of my own to do off-panel now.

As far as the psychedelic-vison part, I took a lot of hallucinogens during my twenties trying to destroy some parts of myself I didn’t like, breaking some eggs to make lovelier omelettes, I suppose…

…So some of what Jude sees is rooted in things I saw or felt or touched or stories friends told me, etc. These experiences I’ve had always left me thirsty to understand what I’d seen or felt, always sent to me the library/bookstore/internet. It’s always something I knew I wanted to write about, to have a platform to talk about in a never-easy but definitely-positive light. It’s scary to kill a version of yourself and come back different, but in the end, life is easier when you’ve less useless old crap to drag behind you.

My reading list, especially during my trip-heavy summer of ’96 where Possibility continually unfolded in my mind, combined my first-ever reading of the New Testament (the Jewish parents were not happy) with books on Hindu deities, Tibetan death rituals, Stephen Pinker’s books on cognitive function, theories of Reich and Jung, writings of Robert Anton Wilson, Frank Herbert’s DUNE series, a lot of doors opened via the author-curated letter columns in the back of Grant Morrison’s THE INVISIBLES… I’d even started going to a Lubavitch rabbi once a week to read Talmud, looking for “answers”. I studied with him for a year and a half, but on my very first day with him, he told me I would never find the answers I was searching for, but if I studied Torah with him in earnest, the questions wouldn’t bother me so much anymore.

So: I’d been a big reader my whole life, but this time was different. This time I knew I had touched things outside of myself that no one I knew could put into words that made me question everything and I had to make sense out of it to construct a new lie to live inside of. I was out of college and waiting tables at shitty tourist restaurants, spending my money on drugs and raves and comic books, and I felt goopy and liquid, sliding out of society. Jude Tobin was probably born from that feeling, even though I wouldn’t write him for years to come. I had some rough nights with myself and decided there were better directions to grow in, clearer ways to see the world with my infant eyes. Not long after that, I started writing and drawing again (it had been a few years) and next thing I knew, Miami spat me out and I moved up to New York.

Is there anything in the comics world that you draw on/are inspired by for this element? RLP makes, I think, quite a big thing of mixing and contrasting the tripped-out world with the mundane one…is there a specific comics influence that you’re tapping into, for that? Do you think it’s an American/Brazilian thing, or an American/European thing, or is it neither of those things at all?

Honestly? No. I think I’m the Ol’ Dirty Bastard of comics, my style has no father. I love trippy comics, but I can’t point to any comic off the top of my head that I’m echoing visually. Maybe it’s the way I work, collage and 3D and such, that I feel it’s unique. Maybe there’s some of Brendan McCarthy’s RGB-freakout in my comicking DNA, but I’d give a testicle to be able to draw half as well as he does.

By the way, I LOOOOOVE the Santeria dude. That was by far my favourite “mini”.

Kako? He is one of my favorites too; I continually crack up as I write his dialogue. I grew up hearing that kind of broken Spanglish, working flea markets with my dad; Kako’s my love letter to that, but he’s also very much the Eleggua in the series, standing at the crossroads for Jude, guiding him deeper into a world of mysteries.

How early on in RLP’s conception did Turi start to be an important character? I’m an adopted kid, so I always zero in on Adopted Kid stuff…Moses, Jesus, King Arthur, Superman…

Turi got more important the more I wrote him; in earlier draft I always felt there wasn’t enough for him to do. I realized I hadn’t gotten his voice or his guts right; once he clicked, I just liked him a lot and started seeing all kinds of interesting place for him, and his role in the overarching story just grew and grew. He’s a blast to write. It was the same with Zoya; once I figured her cadence, her attitude out, I wanted her to be in all the scenes.

Yeah, Turi now seems like a very important character in the dynamic here, to my eyes anyway…and not just because he represents “something at stake” in terms of other characters’ needs or in terms of the plot, but because he counts as a character too, in his own right he’s part of the web of relationships, though since he’s just a kid he understandably doesn’t take centre stage in that way. I was a bit curious about this, on two levels: one is, I suppose, the level of mechanics…how to make characters interesting by themselves, how to give them texture, that sort of thing. Turi’s a kid, so how do you give him agency of his own, a status of his own in this world? Well, one way’s exactly what you’ve done, the imparting of special talent and special status. I don’t mean this to sound like what you’ve done is some kind of fantasy-story boilerplate, just that in a way it’s textbook mechanics: because that is what you can do, to give a character a reason to exist…you just in fact give them a reason to exist! Something to do, something that concerns them as well as other people: private interests, the implication of a somewhat-equal point of view. Why else are there so many “chosen one” stories in the world, after all, except that you can make a kid’s perspective explicitly a privileged one by giving them a special access to experience or talent or whatever…kids see what they’re not supposed to see all the time, but if the kid is Merlin or something then that seeing is valorized, elevated, codified…

Yeah, Turi is central to the whole RLP series… I don’t want to spoil things, but you’re going to see this even more so in MALA FAMA. As far as “agency of his own”, to me kids are just small adults the same way adults are just full-grown children, so I am writing him the same way I write Jude/etc. I get to have fun and make him cute, but he’s just as touched as Jude but way less fucked up (thus far) by it. Both Turi and Rory reflect a different way of dealing with the talents that Jude feels feels have “ruined everything”. So, a counter-point, as well as the future of the family.

…And the other way to do that is the stuff that, like I said, hits home to me as an adopted kid: the matter of what you know, or perhaps more “what you’re told versus what you know”. I was told I was adopted at a very young age, and have always thought that’s the healthy way to do such telling, so seeing the psychic kid who shares his father’s gift and his father’s “confidential” connections, so that definitely suggests lineage in a way a kid wouldn’t be inclined to question, and yet also just because of having those gifts in common…he might know? He might not know. He might know and not care? He might know but be too young to process it the way an older person might process it, into shock or self-questioning, so it might not matter. And for me at any rate, not knowing if he knows but certainly seeing that he could know without having been told, it makes him an absolutely fascinating reflector of what’s going on between all the adult characters. This kid might not be in the situation of figuring out his family isn’t like other families, but he might already know it, but I can’t yet tell! So…

…Is that why we got “A Series Of Tubes”, partly because you were growing into writing Turi, and wanted to write something that showed him more at the centre of things, less a complicating factor in the plot and more a human presence in the family? And maybe the mystery of what he knows or doesn’t know, that’s just plain part of what this family’s like too. It hadn’t occurred to me until the last page where he is, actually graphically, in the centre, you see…and that’s when it occurred to me that you could read ASOT as incorporating a theme of “safety”, or read it as an emotional breakthrough point where, not to sound too Hallmark-y, the family reasserts itself as a thing you belong to indefeasibly…and in which people have an active say over what definition of “normal” they’re going to be subject to…

Anyway I found the conclusion of ASOT to have a pleasantly defusing effect, much like Zoya sensibly pushing Jude away in the first book defused a narrative that RLP might have become all about, I mean in the sense that this could happen, this could be the story, but just because this is the most obvious story doesn’t mean we have to choose it for ourselves…there’s a movie I like, “The Barbarian Invasions”, where a son comes to take care of his dying father, and all through the movie there are points where the director shows you a possible narrative, “this is the one where it turns into the doomed romance”, “this is the one where it turns into the thing where the son gets in trouble with the mob”, and to all these possible narratives the father’s illness would just be the inciting action, the excuse, the background…but no, the director shows this possible movie and then says “but that’s not what we’re here for” and turns it back to the relationship between the father and the son. “Defuses” the obvious narrative possibilities, right? So ASOT made me think I was detecting something like that here too, yes we could have the story where boilerplate narrative gravity/destiny takes over, but we’re not going to have that one because everybody here gets to have choices…so: “safety”. Or at least: choice. When you’ve lived with a story as long as you’ve lived with RLP, does that become an interest, to prune events away from “inevitable” ends? To protect the characters from the easy temptations of their writer, by making sure they can exercise options? Or would you say instead (perhaps) “well what are you talking about, isn’t that how you write a story, by letting the characters choose things?”

Or have I got it all wrong.

The best answer I can give is that I’m finding an ebb and flow to the tension in the Tobin family as they deal with the end of the marriage and stay a family, and Turi is a huge part of that. That hug panel with Turi in the center of the page telegraphs that visually, but mostly I feel like there’s a storm of emotions between the three of them that exists behind the panels of the comic and spills out through the comics’ words and pictures in small drivets that can’t possibly show it all. Yet. Of course, I don’t ever want RLP to feel obvious… but as much as the PLOT of the series have long since been written, the emotional notes (like what’s happened here in ASOT) are happening more organically as I put the Tobins each through paces. There are things I’d planned for Turi that he wouldn’t do now, after his experiences in “Donnie Cheng” and so on. My Secret Decade-Old Plot Skeleton is an old and dusty thing that exists only to let the living meat walk around, and they don’t always obey one another. The characters do make choices, and so do I, and somewhere in the middle, what gets drawn is what makes sense at that moment and ideally makes their future less and less certain. “Safety” doesn’t make for good fiction.

Where does Ceci come from? How deep is her backstory, and how early on did you know what she was going to be like? Or like Jude were the seeds of her planted long ago in personal experience. Full disclosure, this catches my attention quite a bit because I once dated a woman from Mexico and some part of my brain goes “dingdingding! identity recognized! welcome Professor!” when Ceci swims into view…so maybe I just answered this question for you, “I just draw what I see in real life, duh”, but it is still curious to me that EVERY other major character has an “origin” or we wouldn’t believe them…“I answered an ad”…

Or maybe I am, once again, getting that a bit wrong. But anyway for me, with her particularly I find myself picking up an awful lot from an awful little…I guess this is a question of mechanics, again? Jude feels like he has a past in part because we know he has one, we’re told in so many words he has one, but Ceci pretty much starts on Page One. So during ASOT I found myself thinking, maybe her personality is more contained in the actual drawing of her than Jude’s is, and I’m just such an artistically-illiterate guy that I can’t tell? Or in other words: is writing and drawing just One Big Thing for you, or are you more likely to put elements together to deliberate/compensatory effect? “Jude’s way out there broadcasting himself all the time, and not particularly discriminately, so I can sort of open the pipe on him; Ceci’s a tougher nut to crack though, so her body language has to be just so“?

I see Ceci as the kind of second-generation Latinas I knew growing up in Miami: nice girls with bad tempers, probably went to church, wanted a husband and a good life, knew how to get flexible with the world to get those things to happen. She’s definitely a hustler in her own milieu, seeing the niche she could carve in the dying real estate market and going for it. We’re going to see more of Ceci’s past over the course of the series; of course she has one. She’s as much as a sour pickle as Jude is in a way… but they’re also different people than when they met.

The deeper history of her and Turi’s dad I’m not gonna get into here, beyond what I’ve already revealed: high school sweethearts, killed by drunk driver, luckily had donated to the sperm bank. Given that Turi is touched as well, he’s eventually going to want to meet him… and he’s got friends/family that can show him how to summon. That tale is a ways off yet but it’s a doozy.

I notice things about her like what kind of makeup she has on, or that she’s a very statuesque woman who is nevertheless not in perfect fitness-club-type shape…am I overreading, or are those details deliberate, or (instead) are they just part of a “spontaneous” mental image, as in “this is how I like to draw her, this is how she looks in my head, I’ve read all kinds of comics and know there’s all kinds of ways of doing figure drawings and I like to pick and choose: blobby elbows, knobby clavicles”? So easy to say “okay, Zoya’s drawn kinda zaftig as a contrast to Ceci”, you know? But Ceci doesn’t look just exactly like a lead actress on a cop show on TV either, she’s not drawn, to my eye anyway, as someone who looks good effortlessly…so, do you care about that sort of thing, is that why I’m seeing it, it’s not just my apophenia talking? She puts in a bit of work on her appearance?

No, those details are deliberate: I think Cecilia was effortlessly beautiful, and she’s still got it now if/when she tries. That makes her way real to me instead of some porny “comic babe” or Hollywood actress type that populate most comics. I’ve never liked working with those action-figure characters (unless I’m tearing them down); they’re horribly fucking boring to me. I don’t like mixing with them in real life either; I’m way more attracted (in every sense) to strange kinds of beauty, individual touches that are considered “imperfections” by today’s monoculture that can’t be replicated. Zoya is a great example of that; her face is modeled after a friend of mine who I think is absolutely beautiful, in her face you can see her family history, made modern. I suppose that’s true of everyone, but I wanted all of RLP’s characters to feel real.

So do you think of it like that, in that “compensatory” way? Do you have, not just a model sheet, but a “drawing scheme” for when you sit down with these characters? I suppose an easier way to have said all that would just be: “who’s your favourite character to draw, or for you is drawing them the same as writing them?”

With any comic, the look of the characters are part of the storytelling, and should transmit visual information about who they are. I do have “model sheets” that exist in my head, and a few post-its on the computer screen so I don’t forget Zoya’s star tattoos on her eyes/ass or the white glare on Jude’s glasses or Cecilia’s triangle of sexy birthmarks; there are visual tics I added to each of them probably more for my own amusement that serve a function in my eyes. For example: if you watch the white glare on Jude’s glasses, they’re used less as a lighting tool and more like an extra set of cartoon eyebrows to telegraph emotion. To me it makes Jude that much more expressive in a subconscious way.

I also make sure they don’t have UNIFORMS they always appear in, because, y’know, real people change their clothes. Yes, Jude’s striped shirt is almost-ever-present, but that’s also a commentary on his laundry habits. There are sets of alternating outfits for each of them (and more to come), and as the company starts to make more money, everyone’s look will slide to adjust.

The processes of writing and the drawing are nothing alike for me; they’re complete opposites in fact. Writing isn’t easy but it’s always joyful, never torture. I’m very free when I write and almost always walk away happy. Drawing is a daily tooth-pulling excruciating extraction, and I’m never, ever 100% satisfied with my work. I spend MANY HOURS on each page and I’m usually a mumbling, babbling, spent mess by the end, ready for wine and dinner and some quiet time offline afterwards.

Yes, every major character has an origin, and I’ve tried to have their visual design mirror that. There are types I grew up around and borrowed from, others that grew from their character skeletons and appeared in layers. My only main player that popped out looks-first was Kako, and to be honest, he’s RLP’s Wolverine. I don’t want to get into the specifics of where he comes from, tell the Definitive Origin. I don’t need or want to know that; it makes him less interesting to me.

Wolverine, eh? So, not to sound too crazy, but…on yet another design level, it occurs to me that there’s a lot of, hmm, earthiness in RLP, you can tell these people probably smell about the same as regular people in the real world, Jude probably smells like he rolled in a dead bird on the beach, Ceci’s breath is probably a bit yeasty on occasion, Zoya probably smells a bit…I’m sorry, it’s just that I have a really acute sense of smell, I’m like the Wolverine of my webcomic?…Zoya probably brings a slight milkiness with her when she enters a room…

Oh, I suppose this could be considered an appreciation of craft, but it does embarrass me a bit to say I regularly imagine how they all smell…

I can honestly say I’ve never been asked that before! I agree that Zoya would have a slight milkiness to her skin, always very clean, while Ceci would be a mix of musky perfume with cigarette smoke. Jude is dirty clothes, cigarettes and adrenaline-sweat for sure, but that’s the occupational hazard talking.

So I hope you keep doing RLP forever, I hope it’s as deathless as the X-Men. But your Twitter feed and RLP mailing list (nice touch having it be “Zoya”, by the way) seems to be full of “whoops peeps gotta go, little hiatus, many plates in the air you know, back soon love ya”. Could you talk a little bit about your workload, energy-level, busyness, sense of opportunity at the present time? Are you in that mode where you practically trip over a new project each day, and do you make your living through your art or do you have a day job? Some artists never do slow down, like Kirby it all just keeps ramping up like a mass driver until they go into orbit…but some move into other forms of art, poetry from short stories, sculpture from drawing, industrial design from graffiti…etc. etc…sometimes from gradually-changing interests, and sometimes from (I presume) not being able to make a living at one or the other thing, or from not feeling like they’ve got any freedom, or from feeling like a market for what they want to do doesn’t exist…

Thanks, man; I intend to keep RLP moving for a long time until we reach The End. These guys are very real to me. And those “whoops peeps” messages are such a badge of Webcomicker Shame to me, but there’s only so much I can take care of while producing something of quality. I know RLP is a lot more nuanced in execution and process-complicated to produce than your average daily Robo-Ninjas-Love-Cupcakes webcomic, so I ask my readers to roll with the schedule hiccups so I can keep the comics smart and slick. I certainly do the same with the series I follow, i.e. Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad; I don’t mind it being away as long as it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen when it’s on.

And yes, I do my fair share of project-juggling, but all my other babies are still fetal at the moment. I have a lot of ideas, some of them are even good, and I know I will never live long enough to complete a tenth of them, so I have to prioritize and fight for the really good ones. I definitely don’t slow down; I am working when I go for a walk in the city with my headphones on, when I’m in the shower, when I’m washing dishes. ImaginationLand is just where my brain goes on auto-pilot, and that’s why I don’t have another job: because THAT’S WHERE I’M SUPPOSED TO BE. Sometimes it’s a confusing circus, simultaneous spectacles, forgotten characters sealed up in the walls banging to get out, but I’m learning to deal with them until I can get them out. The Tobins were getting louder and louder for almost a decade before I let them out; like I say, I used to call RLP “my tumor” because it just grew and grew until my brain felt squeezed. It’s a relief in that way to actually be telling the stories now. That’s morbid; sorry.

I do not have a day job; I haven’t since late 2005, with varying degrees of competence and success. I also do a lot of freelance illustration work, but some years are better than others with that stuff. Last year was quite good; this year’s been pretty dry thus far, though I was just featured in Taschen’s ILLUSTRATION NOW! 4  so I’m hoping some new clients will find me through that.

That’s why I’ve been so prolific with RLP: for the first 200 pages, I was getting paid, when the series ran for 6 months on Tor.com. I used that money to move down to Brazil and clear as much else as possible out of my field of vision. Drawing RLP takes a huge chunk of my time and energy; if I just wrote and collaborated with other artists, I don’t think I’d have as many pauses and certainly be a helluva lot more prolific. Ask me this again in a few years; I’m curious to see what I say then.

Or I could just ask you again now! How would you characterize your career thus far, and what would you wish for it in the future, and what would you tell young people? I guess is the obvious way of putting that. But, say…how would you characterize your career thus far, Dan? The Internet is clogged with webcomickers holding forth and giving advice and making recommendations and predicting future trends…do you have any truck with any of that? I notice you don’t sell RLP coffee mugs, do you just not want to be a coffee-mug millionaire?

My career thus far has been… pretty cool, I guess? I mean, I’ve gotten to do unique things with my talents and don’t see any signs of stopping. I definitely made some big mistakes with Shooting War and “08″ and I’m happy to have made them on project that were not 100% my blood and guts. I learn a lot with every project that rolls forward to the next, and I know I’m very lucky for that. All the mistakes made too, everything rolls forward from project to project.

I try not to be the “sage old advice-giver”, partly because I don’t think I’ve earned it yet, and partly because I’d rather be making the comics than stopping, but I have done a good amount of speaking/moderating/organizing panels at conferences where comics and culture and technology overlap. But that stuff’s easy: I did a lot of debate team stuff in high school and I like speaking to crowds once in a while, but mostly I do it to meet new people. There’s a certain class of cat you meet at SXSW Interactive or MIT or whatever that I rarely happen across on Twitter/etc, and it’s nice see each other’s presentations and have a drink after. I’ve met some really cool friends doing that. Most of the time, my work has me alone in a room working in isolation, so it’s a breath of fresh humanity.

And no, I do not sell coffee mugs… yet. I don’t think anyone makes millions with coffee-mugs. I’ve been planning a store for what feels like a year already, and it’s coming soon, but it’s more intended to make some pocket change for me and give people physical mementos from something that only now exists on the web.

Editing this together now, it occurs to me that I’d like a mug with a wraparound of three or four panels cut from a given strip’s belly meat, something to make guests say “okay, whatthefuck IS this?”, so I can shrug and say “there’s a URL on the bottom, why don’t you go find out?” That, I think, would be a fun game. And…

Okay: games. Not to sound like an OKCupid quiz, but…How Cross-Disciplinary Are You? Do you have a non-artistic background, an academic background, you wanted to be a marine biologist, you wanted to be an architect…you wanted to be a musician, you idolized Arthur Conan Doyle, you were always interested in stonemasonry?

I always hated school but I’ve always been a rabid reader. I didn’t study art in college; I began as a Psych major and graduated with degrees in Film and English Literature, which have served me well in storytelling, however accidentally. Deep down, I always knew it would be comics.

And are all your air-plates comics-related now? Or are there things in other media we should be pricking up our ears for?

My first love is writing prose, and I’ve got a few prose fiction projects curling around my skull, banging pots and pans. At the moment they’re in the crib, but when they start walking I’ll have to get them out.

So as per the Interviewer’s Code, I have to ask about influences, but that’s pretty oppressive, right? Like making a Top Ten list. So let me try to spin it less harshly a bit…

1. Who do you love, who no one else has ever heard of?

I don’t know how obscure this is, but RLP was deeply influenced by the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa (see: SAKEBI and KAIRO); I also really dug Gaspar Nöe’s ENTER THE VOID that came out last year and made my cringe at my own limited abilities when I went back to work on Jude’s next drug trip sequence.

As far as comics, I’m a big fan of Michel Fiffe; he’s holding a copy of his first printed ZEGAS comic for me in New York, and once I get it, I am gonna immediately take it to a cafe and devour it.

2. How do you use the Internet, do you read blogs? Magazines? Do you belong to any weird online communities?

I read constantly, hours each day; blogs, magazine sites, my RSS reader is always full and I’m always burning it down. I’m using Instapaper as well to send longer articles to my phone to read in downtime. RSS-while-working for the short stuff and quiet time for the longer pieces.

I also play movies in the corner of my screen while I draw and listen to loads of podcasts while I work, especially comedy interview podcasts like Kevin Pollak or Marc Maron. Once upon a time, I used to want to be a comedian; maybe part of me still does, even though I don’t think I’m necessarily that kind of funny.

My main internet use, other than research, is to keep connected to people; I’m a long ways from just about everyone I know right now, and having Skype and AIM and Twitter and email have been essential to my emotional health. My work isolates me already and moving to another continent without speaking the language (at first) definitely amplified that.

3. Do artists look at famous actors? I’ve always imagined that they do, looking for “protagonistic moments”, a face and a bit of lighting and perhaps some mood music…some fortuitous body poses, pieces of staging or blocking, ideas for how to present a human figure. Is that a kind of influence you think of much? Or do you see other people doing that and wonder about it?

Nah; I try to shoot as much of my own photo references for RLP’s characters as possible to keep people from seeing actors in my work. Sometimes I have to use that crutch when I am under the gun but I’m never happy with it, and I don’t like it when clearly recognize actors-as-comic-characters in other artists’ work; modern superhero comics are egregiously bad in that department. They might as well list the actors referenced as “Starring _____ as _____…” roles.

4. What’s your favourite Brendan McCarthy book?

I’m really partial to FREAKWAVE for sheer nuttiness and PARADAX! for its what-superhero-comics-could’ve-been feel. He’s a huge inspiration to me, even though my work is nothing at all like his. Wait, I think ROGAN GOSH has to be in that last sentence too. See?

5. When you were young, what did you read comics-wise? How did your tastes change over time as you got older?

I grew up reading Silver, Bronze, Modern age comics all at once in literal bags of comics. In the early eighties, my dad and I used to sell blank VHS tapes at a local flea market in Florida on weekends to bring in extra money, and if I worked hard, he’d give me a few bucks to buy a plastic bag full of random mismatched comics from some other vendors’ garage, never sequential issues or even the same titles. It was like learning comics by shotgun.

I remember coming home with those trash bags full of comics and my little brother Steven’s eyes lighting up; we had a closet full of these moldy old comics and we’d sneak out of bed at night and read comics all night by flashlight together. That’s a very specific and happy memory for me and that warm-fuzzy association of comics and love probably kept me coming back to the medium on some weird bent-circuit level.

I drifted in/out of comics, way out in the nineties when things just sucked… but I found my way back into the culture through LOVE & ROCKETS, which was on the racks of a record store I used to hang out at in Miami in my teens. I didn’t know that kind of comic existed… and that was what reignited my love for the medium: the idea that I could tell any kind of stories with it. From there, it’s been a constant thing in my life.

I’m probably pickier now than ever before with the comics I read, but that’s probably because the good stuff is better than ever, and there’s so much more to sift through, and I’ve got less layabout time to enjoy other people’s work when I should be making my own.

6. You’re bilingual, right?

Yes; just about. I’m getting there; I’ve done TV interviews now in Portuguese, and it’s definitely an immigrant’s Portuguese not a college student’s. It’s easier for me to explain complex things in writing because I can edit and correct my mistakes instead of just barfing words down the front of my shirt like an idiot. I’m getting better every week though. My wife is proud of me.

7. What made you think of moving to Brazil? Was it a sudden decision?

My wife is a paulistana, born and raised here in São Paulo; we met in NYC and after a while we were both sick of the city’s energy and the changes in the US, its culture and the politics. We were going to move to Canada where people are less psychotic, and our stopping in Brazil for a few months to visit Lil’s family here and kick around for a few months while we applied for residency in Canada was supposed to be temporary… but it’s funky and interesting and inspiring here and we’ve been here almost two years now.

I really like the proximity of travel to totally different places in South America I’ve never been; we’ve had a lot of in and out of country experiences here that I never would’ve had if we’d moved to, say, Toronto.

8. What do you miss about living in the States?

Other than my friends and family? I miss proper charcuterie culture; cheese is my fucking catnip and kryptonite, and I got really spoiled by funky artisinal cheeses living in NYC. The selections of nice cheeses here are lacking and unnecessarily expensive for the quality you get.

9. What about Brazil makes it worth it?

(the food, I’m guessing)

More than anything, my level of relaxation. The Brazilian Dan is way more mellow and quiet than the New York Dan, who I was getting pretty tired of myself. There’s something about losing yourself in the Brazilian chaos that makes it harder to be such a selfish little fuck. I like that a lot.

Life here in São Paulo has a million problems, but on the whole, people are pretty sweet here. For all the traffic and pollution and poverty, there’s always people making out in the street, birds chirping, some drunk in the street doing something unintentionally hilarious. There’s a traditional, Old World charm and gentility here that the US has completely NEW-NEW-NEW-ed itself out of… and some of those good things are worth keeping.

10. Do you feel like RLP invites any obvious comparisons with other people’s work? Or any un-obvious ones? Or indeed any comparisons no one is ever going to think of who’s not you?

I don’t really think my comics look or read like anyone else’s; I’ve heard some nice comparisons that I’m too polite to repeat. I feel like my conscious influences for RLP come more from outside of comics.

I really think this may be the last one, but I can’t think of a good question. Is there a question I haven’t asked, that I should’ve? Something you’re proud of that you wanted to talk about, but I was just so damn fixated on stuff that doesn’t matter?

Nah. This is the longest interview I’ve ever done, and I appreciate the deep thought you put into all the questions.

What are you proudest of, in RLP?

I am proudest of that last story “A Series of Tubes”; I learned a lot about how to do RLP better over the course of that story and I love the way the plot wiggles across multiple narratives and pushes the core story forward by the end with just a few new dangles.

And what do you ultimately wish for it?

Ultimately, I want to be able to put out a new RLP book in print every 12-18 months until I’ve told the whole story, but the publishing market is so fucked up right now, and the comics microcosm even more so, that I’m focusing on digital strategies that I can control myself for now. But yeah, I’d love to have BIG SEXY BOOKS and a “home” for the series with a publishing house I’m proud to be a partner with.

Okay, WHEW, Dan! I think I just might’ve covered all my interview questions, anyway I tried hard. Would really like to get this up before “Mala Fama”…OH FUCK, that’s a thing I forgot to ask. “Where is RLP going from here, we’ve had a lot of interregnum pieces, what’s going to…?”

Next up is the first part of the Big Second Novel, MALA FAMA; I’m traveling to New York next week and then to Rio de Janeiro, so look for the new RLP stuff to start hitting at the beginning of November. Things are going to get darker.

Darker?

Hell, I’d better have a second helping of those dumplings, then.  Or whatever they are.

And think happy citrus thoughts!

Thanks for the grub, Dan;  this was, indeed, the most important meal of my day.

See you on the other side!

*

And with that, reader…he was GONE!

And then so was I.

Bom dia!

And the story is…I was just screwing around on the computer one day, and all of a sudden it came to me…

*

(Ring ring)

(Ring ring)

ALAN MOORE:  Hello?

ME:  Hello, Alan?  It’s Plok here, calling for the…

ALAN:  Oh, for the interview!  Right!  How are you, Plok mate?

ME:  I’m good, good.  How’s Northampton?  Some parts of it still undocumented?

ALAN:  Oh, for now, for now…

ME:  Ha.  So should we get down to it?

ALAN:  Yes, absolutely.  Let’s.

ME:  So…(cough cough)…

ALAN:  Yes?

ME:  I’m sorry, Alan, this is awkward, but I don’t know how else to say it…maybe it’s not the right note to start out on, but…

ALAN:  Go on, what is it?  You’ve got my curiosity up now…

ME:  Well…okay…uh…

ALAN:  You know there’s no need to be embarrassed, I’ve done a lot of interviews in my…

ME:  WHAT’S WITH ALL THE RAPE?

ALAN:  …

ALAN:  Excuse me?

ME:  Uh, you know…the rape?  The constant rape-imagery in your books?  The constant never-ending rapeyness?  The rape rape rape?  Seriously, Alan…what’s that all about?

ALAN:  …

ALAN:  (uproarious laughter)

ME:  Uh…

ALAN:  Oh, I’m sorry Plok, but…FINALLY SOMEONE NOTICES, you know?  Thank the great sock-puppet in the sky, I mean I was starting to wonder just how much I would have to ramp it all UP, before anyone said anything to me about it!  I was starting to wake up in the morning thinking “God, how can I ever manage to put MORE rapey-rape stuff into the next script, that I put into the one before”, you know what I mean?  I honestly thought I’d fallen into the slack of the wave as far as stimulation goes, I thought I was just born ten years too late to get a reaction, but…bless you for asking me that, really.  I mean I did understand that Swamp Thing might not leave people thinking about it as one of my central concentrations, but I thought at least Watchmen might’ve tripped a few alarms…

ME:  Hm, yes…yes, you…uh, what?  You’re saying you never heard anything from anyone about rape in Watchmen?

ALAN:  No, not especially.  I mean, a bit here and there about Sally Jupiter, but that was as far as it went, really.  Of course Sally isn’t the one who gets raped, so those were not quite…

ME:  Uh…what?

ALAN:  …What?

ME:  Sally doesn’t get raped?

ALAN:  She gets sexually assaulted.

ME:  Blake has his “only the once” line…

ALAN:  Yes, well…there are one or two Biblical-grade “improbables” in Watchmen, certainly.  “Nine Days Across Ninevah”, and all that.  What the Comedian says is an excellent line, and I’d still defend it on that basis, but it’s true that it doesn’t quite add up.  (laughs)  Well, neither does the police strike, really!  Why should the police care if Rorschach is out there dropping people down elevator shafts?  That only either makes him a criminal, or an ally.  In either case, they certainly don’t get to go on strike!  Do they go on strike when a murder is committed?  Do they go on strike when someone beats up a mobster?  But that’s just part of the, what should I call it, the sheen of realism that concerned me in Watchmen:  it was intended to form a sort of commentary on comic books themselves, so everything in it still operates in a world of comic-book logic.  Dream-logic.  More specifically, dream-history.  Which really is inextricable from any kind of superhero story, so the challenge wasn’t to make it realistic but to make it seem realistic — to give it a gloss of apparent realism, in order to probe a little bit into the classic “superhero” vexations you find in all examples of the form, really.  Even ours.  It was never intended to be an actual novel, you know, graphic or otherwise…

ME:  But…

ALAN:  Yes?

ME:  …If it isn’t Sally that gets raped, then who does?

ALAN:  Well, Laurie does, doesn’t she?

ME:  She does?  When?

ALAN:  (sighs)  On Mars.

ME:  On Mars?

ALAN:  Yes, on Mars.  I’ll concede it is sort of a metaphorical rape, but that is what Sally’s relationship with the Comedian is foreshadowing, after all.  You knew that Watchmen went rather heavy on the old foreshadowing business?

ME:  Well, yes…but…

ALAN:  It didn’t begin that way, of course.  The scene with the Minutemen’s photo-op was already planned out, but when all this reflexive pattern started emerging from Dave Gibbons’ backgrounds, and then I started elaborating on it, it began to swamp everything else in the story…so I didn’t even really try to tie it all up in a bow in the episode on Mars, it practically tied itself up, nevertheless it’s there as I wrote it.  Jon as the substitute father-figure.  Laurie being forced to remember, forced to see things as Jon sees them.  It’s a recovered memory, but it comes about because of a rape-like trauma that she lives through at the time.  Laurie is being choked, Laurie is being told not to struggle, she’s being told just to lie back and accept what’s happening to her.  In the snowglobe Laurie drops, that’s her looking in at herself in the future, on Mars.  The castle.  The “slow time”.  The breaking of a moment, like the breaking of a vessel, like…

ME:  Oh my God.

ALAN:  You really didn’t see it?  I thought we’d get hate mail over that.  The flashbulb when the Minutemen’s picture is taken, too, you know those old flashbulbs used to burn out every time you took a picture.  Froze a scene, I should say…and then there’s the conservatory dome in Antarctica…

ME:  So there are two rapes in Watchmen?

ALAN:  If you accept the “metaphorical rape” business, I suppose there are a few, really.  I mean…sexual assault, it’s a theme that runs through the whole thing.  Well, we only drop a giant alien killer vagina on New York City by the end of it, don’t we?  (chuckles)  Adrian Veidt’s idea of absolute horror, because, well…

ME:  He’s a crazy person.

ALAN:  He’s death-obsessed.  Hates life.  Embraces violence as a necessity, spurns sex out of the same rationale.  You see to me, the entire question of drama is what happens when a person’s sense of autonomy is invaded, when their path is crossed with violence.  Which by definition is something they cannot control, something that’s essentially irruptive and accidental.  I think that’s much more interesting, and much more honest, than calling what happens to your characters “fate” — call it violence, because that’s what it is.  It’s random and it’s catastrophic and it’s devastating and it’s absolutely uncontrollable…”fate” is such a nice word, so inclusive, so anodyne.  You can see how the belief in fate comes about as an overreaction in the other direction, from someone like Adrian Veidt, who responds to the illusory nature of control by trying to double down, to exert even more control…I mean, Watchmen is a nuclear fable, after all, so I thought it appropriate to include a character that represented, embodied really, all of Einstein’s famous moral cautions, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results”, “World War IV will be fought with rocks”, and so on…but Swamp Thing for me was no different in its basic thrust:  not fate but violence, not some cosmic force before which one can only shrug and say “it’s God’s will” or somesuch, but an incursion into one’s life that is not “natural”, that may in some specific manifestation be irresistible but which is not in principle irresistible…and therefore an incursion which, you know, can be grappled with, fought against, changed.  But it’s a test.  An ultimate test, sometimes.  In Lost Girls I tried to put this as simply and straightforwardly as I could, by showing war to be the ultimate form of rape, the ultimate perversion of the sexual impulse.  Sex’s dark twin, if you like:  actually I wanted to show that war beggars sexual perversion, empties out the very category, renders it irrelevant.  It’s in Promethea as well, for that matter…

ME:  But why the sex thing, though?  I mean you go over it and OVER it…have you even READ Neonomicon, Alan?

ALAN:  I’ve read it, and I think it’s very upsetting.  I don’t know what is wrong with the people who made it, they probably need some sort of intervention.

ME:  Well then?

ALAN:  But you have to understand that it is not simply about sexual violence, but about all violence.  It’s about invasion, it’s about threat, it’s about crisis.  And rape, whether literal or metaphorical, is the most visceral and the most clear way to talk about violence’s nature, given the sort of cultural environment we operate in now.  In these times we are so densensitized to plain old bone-breaking violence, it’s terribly frightening.  Murderers can seem like heroes, if the story contextualizes them that way.  People cheer it in the theatres, and not just the stuff that’s deliberately cartoonish and a device and humourous and all that, but the really bad stuff:  they cheer that too.  Because the idea that the victims of violence are always more important than those who inflict it gets lost so easily, it becomes a convention that the victim of violence is merely, in that moronic Hollywood phrase, an “inciting incident” in a story, and that the real opera is about choosing which monster with a gun to back in the denouement.  And there’s no compassion.  There’s no horror.  There’s no ability to reflect on anyone other than the nominal “hero” and the nominal “villain”.  There’s no sadness.  It’s all repulsively distorted, and the violent nature of violence gets whitewashed and domesticated, which is…I mean, I come from a rough sort of a place, I know about violence, and the truth is that in the real world you can never, ever, ever, get used to it.  It is a crippling sort of thing to see, it is a crippling sort of thing to do.  And its potential is ever-present.  It is there surging under the skin of the world, like magma, at every instant.  It is absolutely horrible, it is extremely scary, it is demonic emotional weather that we seem helpless in the face of.  Except, we are not actually helpless;  we can operate on it, we can still choose things when we are confronted with it, it is not “fate”, and we can resist it or we can find a way to ameliorate its effects, or we can assert ourselves when confronted with it, and this is what so much of dramatic storytelling is all about, in my view.  Not the struggle with fate, which is the struggle to accept.  But the struggle with consequence and assault, the struggle to not accept, but to find something violence can’t touch and can’t sully…to find a reaction that isn’t just “I got hurt so I will cause hurt, world without end.”  To find that very last inch, if you like, within which we are free…you see I have been working on it for a very long time, and I actually felt a bit guilty repeating my own stuff!  Laurie is raped by Jon in the same way that Evey is raped by V., only I thought…well, what Evey does with it is very vital, perhaps more vital than what Laurie does, but also Evey’s response, you could say it’s very conditioned by V., and I wanted to answer that back, I wanted Laurie to be freer than Evey, Evey is really a cipher who changes into a person so I wanted Laurie to be a person who resists being changed into a cipher.  Who resists becoming a superhero, at the last extremity.  But it’s all a very tricky business.  I never quite escape reacting to the culture around me, you know?  And the culture has suffered a violent incursion as well.  For example, I really do think our modern dramatic art is, shall I say, appropriately obsessed with the matter of violence and invasion…but unfortunately in that dramatic art there are so many excuses made, so many phony recontextualizations that are supposed to numb us, make us okay with the fact of violence and personal invasion, that while the obsession is probably appropriate the treatment of it becomes quite desultory.  The violence is purely symbolic, always about something else.  Never about what’s actually happened.  And so it came to me very forcefully when I was doing Swamp Thing that I did not want to be the part of the machine that manufactures those sorts of equations, and equivocations, so I suppose I looked for a way to show it as it was.  To talk about it, just as everyone else was talking about it, only perhaps a bit more truthfully.  But people still didn’t feel it, unless the violence actually took on an actually violating quality.  And that’s what I’ve ended up being primarily concerned with throughout my career, I’ve picked up the thread that lay perhaps accidentally in my early work, and I’ve picked it up deliberately:  that, if you like, is the overriding theme of my body of work, now.  How do we reclaim our humanity from these terrible episodes, these terrible irruptions of magma?  How do we avoid capitulating to the idea of Fate, and so washing our hands of the twin possibilities of responsibility, and healing?  Thus to escape being objectified by the generally-symbolic nature of a specifically-horrible violent act…

ME:  Hunh, okay…right, no.  I get it.  “The Anatomy Lesson”, that itself is a “metaphorical rape”, isn’t it?

ALAN:  That was my first one, though at the time I didn’t know it.  Oh dear, that sounds like something a serial killer would say…

ME:  What about ABC, though?  Tom Strong is certainly an, I want to say, overwhelmingly positive, old-school take on the adventure story…

ALAN:  Is it?  But the threats are constant.  And they’re very, very dire.  The meaning of everything teeters on a knife-edge in every conflict.  Tom, for example, may be a benevolent fascist…

ME:  …

ME:  …OH MY GOD, ALAN, IS TOM A BENEVOLENT FASCIST?!?

ALAN:  No, don’t worry.  He isn’t.  But that’s the thing, isn’t it?  He could be one.  Oh, he definitely could be.  All the pieces are in sufficiently correct order, that it could be just a matter of perspective.  But he isn’t, so…I mean the whole point of Tom Strong was to ask, “why isn’t he one?”, and I hope that by the end of ABC it’s a question I answered.  But you were definitely supposed to be thinking of that.  Old pulp stuff, old sci-fi stuff, it’s big on closet fascism, is it not?  (laughs)  This genre I made my name in, the adventure-story comic-book, it’s the most morally-hesistant literary genre there ever was, I think.  While of course simultaneously being the most morally-unreflective.  But either way it is, if I can put it this way, importantly moral.  Everything is sublimated, everything is deliberately avoided, the whole thing is one big fugue-state half the time, but that’s what makes it such interesting clay to work with.  It’s like noir without the contrast:  it resists the negative.  It resists it and resists it, but it’s there.  It resists it and resists it, but it will come out.  There is always magma rolling under the skin of the world.

ME:  And yet, speaking of fate…can we talk about From Hell for a minute?

ALAN:  I’d love to.

ME:  It’s a bit odd, because I always compare you to Quentin Tarantino in this way…

ALAN:  (laughter)  Oh my goodness.  How so?

ME:  Well, I saw Pulp Fiction before I saw Reservoir Dogs.

ALAN:  Erm…yes?

ME:  Have you seen either of those?

ALAN:  To be honest, no.

ME:  Okay, so Quentin Tarantino, you may know, is like a sinkhole of influence, his movies are all about influence.  He has these hit-men talking about what regular pop-culture-obsessed slackers talk about…

ALAN:  Foot massage?

ME:  You have seen it!

ALAN:  My daughter liked it quite a lot when it came out.

ME:  Anyway, the thing is…when Reservoir Dogs came on the scene, that was the first time you had gangsters in a movie making pop-culture references, obeying the rules of how pop-culture-aware people associate with one another…it was the ridiculous and the sublime, it was gangsters who were so banal they weren’t even really evil, couldn’t grasp “evil” as a category, never did a bad thing where they didn’t feel the camera was recording them?  All we saw was their cool version, if that makes any sense…only then that sort of breaks down…but anyway after Reservoir Dogs was such a success, Pulp Fiction amped the thing up, was even more that way, more pop-culture-y.  And everyone told me I had to see it, so I saw it.  But then when I finally saw Reservoir Dogs a couple of months later, I felt like the shock of that banality, gangsters doing a singalong of the Brady Bunch theme song or whatever…without the shock of never having seen that before, I thought Reservoir Dogs was kind of soulless, and I never got from it what people who’d seen it in the theatre got.  So…

ALAN:  Yes?

ME:  …So I kind of felt the same way reading From Hell?  I’d already read Watchmen, I’d already read Peter Ackroyd…and so I felt like Gull’s temporal-architectural explication was a bit…um, “after-the-fact”, maybe?  But that isn’t what I wanted to ask…

ALAN:  It isn’t?

ME:  I wanted to ask about, you’re talking about how you dislike “fate”, but in Watchmen and From Hell both you go a bit whole-hog on supersymmetry, inevitability…don’t you?  Huge polygonal edifices of string-pulling Fate, people without choice living inside a crystal diagram…Watchmen has a slight accent of freedom, but in From Hell there’s really nothing, is there?

ALAN:  And that’s your question?

ME:  It is.

ALAN:  Well, I’m surprised you didn’t bring V. into it…the burning buildings, the dropping of acid in the Waste Land…so yes, actually, I have an answer to that.  The question of inescapable pattern, right?  Except it isn’t inescapable, and that’s the whole point.  If one is obsessed with the past, then one is by definition obsessed with what’s already happened — and you can find endless postmodern implications, endless pattern-proliferations, in that dissectable body.  That’s detective work, finding the pattern in the past.  And a supreme detective might even think, if he were not sufficiently humble, that the particle-tracks of the past could be drawn-out to incorporate the future, just get drawn-out and drawn-out forever.  But that isn’t what happens in From Hell, for instance.  Gull has an antagonist, which is to say the patterned crystal-solid notion of Time I present has its antagonist, and from within the story at that.  William Blake knows it, if you look carefully:  he doesn’t watch the time-traveller passively move through, but he responds on the instant, and acts positively.  People who are conscious of their freedom can always respond.  People who experience real feeling can always resist implacable forces.  You’ll forgive me for saying so, but this is what magic’s about, really:  there is no such thing as control.  Things are not controlled.  Things cannot be controlled.  So it’s actually a psychosis to think everything is laid-down and mapped-out and inevitable, without any freedom of the individual in it…well, and isn’t Gull psychotic?  He sees the magical world, but from the wrong way ’round, and if you look close:  he can’t function, and can’t succeed.  He is most definitely in there, and he causes some damage, but in the end he will not be what he thinks he will.

Er…you’ve read the League books, right?

ME:  Yep.  And Kevin O’Neill, WOW.  It just gets more gorgeous every time.  Such facility!

ALAN:  My scripts are bone-dry at this point.  Just schematics.  Kevin does it all.  But there’s a constant reprise of the freedom vs. violence theme that I still manage to get in there somehow.  If you like, it’s my attempt to make a more mature survey of the terrain I’ve already covered, hopefully a slightly more enlightened one if I’m not fooling myself.  Because everything is at risk, all the time, for my hero — dreadfully at risk.

ME:  Mina.

ALAN:  Mina, yes.  Her identity is constantly and directly challenged, and it never ends, not because the resolution of these typical tensions is constantly deferred but because resolutions are coming all the time, advancing on her every minute.  And, you know, at this point she’s immortal, so they’re just going to keep coming.  And how can she continue to fend them off?  Oh, well, I really have to apologize now;  there’s my tea.  I’m sorry, this isn’t really what you wanted to talk about, is it?

ME:  I had thought maybe we’d talk about some other things, yes…but hey, thanks for taking the time, anyway!  I’m the one who should be sorry, I completely disregarded the questions I had prepared, you even had to talk about Watchmen for heaven’s sake…

ALAN:  No, no, it’s all right.  To be honest, it’s an unexpected pleasure to clarify all that, a bit.  I was beginning to feel slightly inaudible, as though people were saying “oh that Alan, he’s formally-inventive but he has no heart”…and to be honest, I really don’t think I’m all that inventive.  I thought what people liked me for all this time was my heart!

ME:  Ha, well…maybe next time we can talk about Big Numbers, and straighten that out too!

ME:  …

ME:  Uh…Alan?

C*L*I*C*K

So, in an interview a while ago, and apparently in some other places I know not of, Grant Morrison gave the impression that he was one of the distressingly many people who seem to believe that Superman belongs to the world, as the creation of Human Imagination, and not to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster as their own creation. Though I still think the interview question at any rate was a bit of a trap — after all, through having spent years building up this massive thing about how superheroes are noospheric entities with some sort of independent “reality” of their own, Morrison has certainly made himself vulnerable to sneak attacks on the subject of creators’ rights, particularly from the de facto PR arms of the Big Two — nevertheless if he was not at least skirting the issue when he answered it then I’ll eat my hat, you know? And indeed it ain’t exactly hard to make the jump from his (arguably prudent) “well, I wasn’t around then” reply, to a (definitely odious) “they knew what they were getting into” stance. And so you can’t really blame comics fans too much for not giving him the very strictest benefit of the doubt, can you? And so many people online got exremely pissed at Mr. Morrison and his position: how dare he not stand up for the men who singlehandedly created the sandbox he plays in? How dare he play the company stooge? Morrison is nothing if he’s not a man who always has his finger on the cutting edge: as stories of DC haranguing Jerry Siegel’s widow come out, as Marvel bites back at Jack Kirby’s heirs, as Steve Bissette calls for a boycott…Grant Morrison seems to wash his hands and say “not my problem” even as he trumpets a Superman comic that takes the big S back to his common-man, unionist roots. And, you know…

It makes a splash.

A fairly instructive splash, actually. Now, I don’t know what Morrison actually thinks about all this (though I’m more than a little inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt as a private individual, you understand), therefore how to reconcile his public statements with the content of his art is a reasonably taxing problem, but I’ve been thinking recently that perhaps there’s more to be found in the vexation than there is in its reconciliation, no matter what residue is baked out on the one hand or the other. Morrison always leaves gaps in his stories for the reader to fill in, and I guess it’s a habit he can’t break even when the story is his own — because if he had said that what happened to Siegel and Shuster was disgraceful, what would’ve been the consequence for him?

Nothing, I’ll bet. There would have been no consequences. Nobody would’ve been mad. Everything would’ve been peachy. And I probably would have continued to read Marvel and DC comics, at least for a little while longer. But instead, my own filling-in of the gaps in Morrison’s story has led me to not wish to read them…with the notable exception of Morrison’s own Action Comics, which still tempts me. Possibly, it tempts me even more than it would have otherwise.

And is that strange?

Well, maybe I’m just naturally contrary. But consider: just a little lip-service from Morrison, and we would’ve had a thoroughgoing non-issue. The comics would’ve been the same. The lawsuits would’ve been the same. Nothing would have changed, except comics fans wouldn’t have been outraged. They wouldn’t have been outraged, and they would’ve kept on buying the books. A very interesting comparison with the recent state of affairs in which they were outraged, but kept on buying the books. Don’t you think?

And if Morrison had denounced DC, even done something as outrageously impossible as calling for a boycott himself? Would all the people recently outraged by his disrespect have, instead, followed him out the door and into the hills?

No, probably not: because I rather think it isn’t the injustice that outrages us, but the lack of lip-service. Because lip-service makes us feel better, salves our sense of responsibility for the injustice we see around us, and symbolically “settles the issue”, sort of like when Cliff Robertson gets a Lifetime Achievement Award. Well, but that’s the purpose of lip-service, right? To keep the money flowing in as smooth and uncomplicated a way as possible, by removing the rocks of objection from the stream. Think about it, there are so many things that Morrison might have said, that would’ve been both true and a salve: that the work of artists who have come before him needs honouring, and that it can’t be properly honoured merely by treating it as an economic transaction, but only by also continuing to breathe life into it as an artistic creation…that it’s a hell of a balancing act, but for all those who love and respect that work there’s no choice but to keep trying to make it work…that we must struggle with this responsibility in much the same way the superhero struggles with his responsibilities. Grant Morrison is a very clever man, whose fiction-suit these days is a distinctly reflexive superheroic one: he’s here to save the superheroes, so they can save us. So, would temporizing lines like these have been too much for him, seeing as he’s already wearing those clothes, and probably even has stuff stashed in their pockets by now? So it’s a bit of a shock that it didn’t get said, when you get right down to it…

But, the question then becomes: how is the shock constituted? What kind of a shock is it? A great deal of Morrison’s work is and has been founded on the problem of intentionality, so it’s always difficult to say he’s ever “meant” to do some particular thing, though he unquestionably means to do some things…and you can’t go by what he says, either, because: you know, it’s a suit. So what he meant, what he didn’t mean…that’s a little bit secondary, to the larger issue of how we took it, and why we took it that way. Morrison, an asshole? Some kind of traitor, or something? Well, let’s not get too carried away with the business of the Comics Capital Crimes: indeed, let’s try to remember that Grant Morrison’s never raped anyone, never murdered anyone…never even called for people to be shot, as far as I know, and so when we feel like burning him in effigy we should probably ask ourself why it is that we’re giving him such a rough ride, and letting worser others slide. Because, what inclines us to such judgements? Is it just personality, that makes that difference? Cults of personality are always bad, at least in part because they privilege aesthetics over ethics — they make of ethics an aesthetic sub-category, right and wrong not a difficult matter of acculturation and choice but a simple one of personal taste. And we should know, because comics blogland is primarily a battlefield of taste, isn’t it? Every messageboard flame war begins in the assumption that people are wrong because they’re stupid, rather than the other way around, and this obviously, evidently, frequently leads to an equation of stupidity with wrongness, where to be one is to be the other because they’re both the same thing. But of course this isn’t true. This isn’t how we measure these things. Actions and intentions, correctness and stupidity, are both important…but taste isn’t important at all.

Taste isn’t important at all. That’s a hard one for people who are interested in taste to get their heads around, but it’s true: taste is individual, but it isn’t, itself, individuality…and it isn’t group belonging either, when push comes to shove. Trust me, I wouldn’t give up my taste for the world…but then again it’s always changing anyway, and everyone else has got enough of their own that they’re not even asking for mine, so the question doesn’t properly arise in the first place. And thank goodness for that, because if taste mattered to anyone but the one who has it, then everyone’s would have to be good or else it’d be shit, and then distaste would matter too, and…you know, if there’s anything that truly is an obstruction to the pursuit of happiness in the real and genuine scheme of human life, it’s other people’s distaste. Because if that did matter, then the whole world would be a messageboard…

…And nothing but, but fortunately that’s not where we’re at. So let’s leave taste and distaste to one side, and instead look at Grant Morrison’s sin against lip-service, and think about who is disadvantaged by it, and who is encouraged. Who was the offence committed against, and in whose favour did it work? What did it impede, and what did it enable? If you read this blog then you know I’ve been completely soured on all the work being made on the backs of past artists who were treated unfairly, whose families are still being treated unfairly. Now, I’ll admit this attitude gives me a slight shiver on occasion, because sometimes even in my own head it seems to decompose quite easily into the symbolic hollering of “SCAB!” at the current artists who are producing that work…even though that is not, most definitely NOT, what my own personal sourness is all about. Quite the contrary. Because as I’ve said before, I’m angry at the corporations for making this my problem, my own personal little ethics-based cognitive-dissonance moment, when it should’ve been their business to deal with it. So do I buy the comic, see the movie? Aren’t I hurting and/or demonizing perfectly innocent people if I don’t, isn’t like this being angry at the miners instead of the mining company? Well, actually it is the mining company I’m angry at, and it’s the miners I’m with, but cognitive dissonance is a powerfully-confusing thing, it turns things around on themselves in a sort of internal auto-spin…that’s where the “dissonance” bit comes in, natch. In the very nature of the ethical quandary, right in the logic of it, there is pressure on us to blame the current artists, just as there’s (inevitably) pressure on them to question how much they support the system in which they work to earn their daily bread. So, y’know, we all just go ahead and we do what we can when we can do it, but it’s the pressure that makes it a pressure-cooker, not just the heat. But then suddenly there’s Morrison, you see: and he said something that changes the balance of these forces.

So we can blame him, can’t we?

And maybe that’s it, maybe that’s the thing that works, the place where advantage and disadvantage lie. Morrison fails to play along in the way we expect him to, and it disadvantages us by making us think about what good it is to play along…but in the same gesture it advantages us by giving us a target for whatever dissatisfaction that self-knowledge creates. Morrison has stood up, so he is going to be hammered down…and hey! Better him than us, right?

But here’s the problem: it isn’t right. Not unless we’re prepared to do something about it. I mean: any of it. You know what I mean?

And that doesn’t necessarily mean “boycott”. It doesn’t even necessarily mean “protest”. But it does mean “reaction”. Take me, for example: I’m not engaged in a boycott, and I’m not protesting anything. But I am having a reaction, in that I’ve just stopped buying shit — even good shit — that leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. And I’m not saying I’m any better or worse than anyone else because of it, but that’s the reaction that I’m having because I’m having one. Of course there are any number of reactions a person could have to the injustice on display in Marvel’s actions toward the Kirbys, DC’s actions toward the Siegels, if one is not actually predisposed to take the side of the companies. “Not caring” is one of these possible reactions. “Making excuses to oneself for still needing the job/wanting the comics” is another. And personally I’ve got no problem with people in the “making excuses” mode; I make excuses for things I do that don’t sit 100% right with me, just about every day. So I know that it is a reaction, a perfectly valid reaction. And you know it’s a little bit like work, too? It’s a little bit like work…

So you pay for the privilege, of making excuses. And that’s fine. But in my case, I don’t feel I have to pay that way anymore. And, in some way do I have Grant Morrison to thank for it? It was Steve Bissette calling for a boycott on Marvel that made me think of it, but maybe it was Morrison’s comments, and the reaction to Morrison’s comments, that finally made me feel like acting, made me feel like I wasn’t stuck with the situation as it was. So, lots of the people who are angry at him are people who buy and read comics from DC, but I’m not angry at him, because I’ve stopped buying and reading those comics. I can’t even let off steam at him, because I haven’t got any steam: there’s no pressure in this cooker, anymore. So the lip-service is nothing to me, whether it’s there or it isn’t. I don’t care about lip-service. Lip-service isn’t important at all. After all, how can you get mad at someone for not saying something should be done, about something you yourself have no intention of doing anything about? If you wouldn’t follow him into the hills if he said the right thing, then how can you be incensed about him saying the wrong one? When what you’re willing to do doesn’t change in any event, no matter what he says. To be sure, I am a little disappointed in Grant Morrison, because it would’ve kept me superficially happier to have him dole out a bunch of bumf about how it’s all about respecting the creators…I mean, in my own private opinion I think it probably is all about respecting them, to him, but I’m left in the uncomfortable position of not really having anything to back that opinion up with, and much to undermine it. So, disappointed: yep. But it isn’t like Morrison was any righter or wronger when he wrote All-Star Superman, or Batman & Robin, or New X-Men, or FF: 1234…and it isn’t like I was any righter or wronger when I read them. We both knew the score then, as we still know it now. I’ve known for decades how creators have gotten screwed by Marvel and DC, and I never felt moved to do anything about it. Morrison knew too, and he still went to work for them, and Morrison is not alone. I’m not alone either. Neither of us is alone.

So let’s call a spade a spade, shall we? If you work on or read Marvel or DC comics, you work on or read something that was largely wrested from its creators for pennies on the millions, and either you care about that enough to do something about it — any of it — or you don’t. And hey, if you don’t, that’s your business; if you’re on the side of the companies then I’ll cheerfully call you an asshole, but if you just meh it about caring then who am I to judge you? But then if you just “meh” it about caring, then you shouldn’t really give much of a damn about Grant Morrison paying “proper respect” to Siegel and Shuster either, should you?

But if you do care enough to do something about it…any of it…

…Then I ask you: is losing respect for Grant Morrison all you’re willing to do?

Because that seems like a funny place to start, and then stop.

If the only TV news you watched was on CTV, you could be forgiven for thinking that the big deal about the riots in England is how they might affect tourism during the Olympics.

Couldn’t you?

Yes, yes I think you could.  Also you might find yourself magically in possession of the opinion that there is ABSOLUTELY NO LARGER CONTEXT FOR ANY OF THIS, it is purely and simply a ZOMBIE PLAGUE TRANSMITTED AMONG THE GENETICALLY-CRIMINAL POPULATION, and that the really, really, REALLY overwhelming question about ALL of it…

(Barring the stuff about the Olympics of course)

…Is what its implications for social media are.

How will it affect Twitter.

That sort of thing.

Yeah.

…

Pardon me while I go throw up.  In the meantime, here are some views that contrast sharply with those of the CTV mass-mind…(and I could find you more, many more)…even if they do not really answer the question everyone is asking, the question that mystifies everyone, the question that mystifies no one.

What’s going on?

But if the only news you got was from CTV, you might not even recognize it as a question.

And this disturbs me.

Good luck to all our friends in the UK, and indeed around the world.

It’s more of a boycott.  Call it a boycott?

Actually it isn’t really a boycott either.  After all I’m not looking to negotiate.  I don’t have any demands.  All I’ve got, are consequences.  And maybe they’re not even big ones.  We’ll see.

Call it a PR disaster.  I gave up buying all Marvel and most DC comics because I stopped liking them.  But I bought trades, I saw movies, I reviewed stuff, I spread word of mouth…you know?  I’m all my friends’ local comics geek, I’m always being asked about comic-book movies.  That’s not going to change.

But my answers are going to change.  “That movie can rot in hell for all I care, Marvel and DC are such goddamn unethical companies and always have been, and I’m finally just plain sick to death of it.”  That’s gonna be about how it goes.  Not gonna go to the movie theatre, not gonna go to the video store, not gonna buy the comics, not gonna review any of the above.  Marvel and DC have both had plenty of chances to become more progressive organizations.  Marvel and DC have both had plenty of chances to do the right thing.  Marvel and DC have had a good long run of me not altering my buying habits because of their more odious business practises.  But as I think I may have mentioned before, you can’t rely on spin forever.  Eventually the apathy you’ve thought to make friends with will be something you need people to cast aside.

And that “eventually” could certainly be now.  Marvel’s making movies all the time, even making new movies from old movies, “relaunching” franchises.  DC is about to relaunch their entire line, a dicey proposition even under the best of circumstances.  And so these things could fail.  At least:  these things could underperform.  You know?  That might happen anyway.  That’s always a risk.  Will people sit still for another Spider-Man movie, or for an Avengers movie?  For another crappy Superman movie?  Is New New Teen Titans a lock to sell well?  All this would be up in the air anyway.

But now…at least as far as I’m concerned…it’s not just up in the air, it’s out of the atmosphere.  I will tell you a funny thing about unions, that I happen to know.  Well, two funny things:  one being that comics creators don’t have one, obviously.  But the second thing is that unions are, by and large, pretty good for business.  For one thing, the existence of CBAs preserves labour peace.  For another, it prevents PR disasters like the one that has just snapped the lid shut for me on Big Two-related products.  Hey, and where I find it convenient to cut out Time-Warner and Disney I won’t mind doing that either!  Which maybe, you might say, is an unreasonable overreaction, but then if that’s what you think then you should also probably realize that unreasonable overreactions are exactly what PR disasters create, and that’s why corporations have to watch out for them.  Why should DC suffer just because I’m mad at Marvel?  Aren’t they competitors, anyway?

No.  Not in this, they’re not.  And let me remind you that since I am the mob I don’t have to care about stuff like that anyway.  Hey, if there was a CBA in place this would totally have been avoided, right?  Complicity could’ve been nicely bounded, and excuses could’ve been nicely floated.  But Marvel and DC have always had a choice about that.  Comics creators have never had a choice about that.  So, who should be blamed, for PR disasters such as these?

Is there one of us who is cool about, say, the way Jerry Siegel’s wife was treated?

Boy I’ll tell ya, it would’ve been a treat to read some of those comics, see some of those movies.  But there are plenty of creator-owned comics out there, so don’t worry about me, I’ll be JUST FINE without DC and Marvel.  All that will really change is that I’ll save a bit of money, and have less to say.

But, having put it that way, let me also put it another way:  what if we all, suddenly, had less to say?

No more questions for Didio, Quesada, Brevoort.  For even a small amount of time.  Say a month?  For me it’ll be longer, but let’s say a month.  A month without online reviews of Big Two Product.  A month without interviews about them.  A month without coverage.  Would it make a difference?  Think about it…

…Would it?

We don’t really know if it would, do we?  How do we know what kind of influence these informal “lettercolumns” of ours have, anyway?  If the Big Two know, they’ll certainly never say…and anyway how could they even get the numbers?  How do retailers know how many people are coming into their shops because of some recommendation they got online?  Well, one fairly easy way to find out (because all the other ways are difficult!) would be to stop providing that coverage.  Just give the tree a kick, is what I’m suggesting, and see if the branches move.  It’s not like the Big Two are paying us to talk about them, after all!

That’s more like the other way around.  We pay, and then we talk.  Sometimes, then, others pay.  And then…?

It all stops here for me now, until and unless some day comes when I feel like Marvel and DC are worth going back to.  Right now, though…

I wouldn’t waste my breath on them.  And I won’t.

This is my five hundredth post on this blog, and I don’t think I could be much happier with it.

Maybe it’s time.

In a way I can hardly believe I’m saying it.  I mean, where have I been?  But I think it’d be foolish to call this anything but a difficult, we might call it a hard-to-get-to, decision, so I guess if I want to be let off the hook for it, what I’m saying is that I still think I can be.

But, being let off the hook of the hook?

I’m not sure that one works anymore.

Let me explain what I mean.  Because I’m not a lawyer, I know I’m incredibly handicapped as far as…well, handicapping the Kirbys’ legal battle with Marvel.  You know?  I mean, I wouldn’t even know where to begin with assessing just how out-of-touch my attempted handicapping would be.  All I know is what everybody else knows, or ought to know:

It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

That’s pretty much why we don’t call it over before it’s over, right?  Because it still isn’t over.  So of course I continue to hold out hope that the Kirbys might make a successful appeal, I hope they can afford to go to the Supreme Court if necessary, why if I had any money I’d be very happy to donate to their war chest.  But maybe it’s because I don’t have that money, that I feel the cognitive dissonance starting to set in.  To hold out hope, you see, is in the same gesture to hold off conclusion:  at least in my experience it is.  And the more you feel like you’re doing on the one hand, the more easily you can balance what’s going on with the other hand.  Because sometimes feeling virtuous isn’t so great a feeling that you can’t afford to live without it, if you have other and more pressing needs.  Because sometime’s virtue’s greatest value is balance…

But don’t let me get ahead of myself.  Here’s the thing:  I’ve seen a lot of these movies.  I’ve bought a lot of these comic books.  And I think you’d have to be hard-hearted indeed to say that all of them must count as ethical black marks against me.  After all when I was a kid I didn’t know who Jack Kirby was, or Steve Ditko for that matter…and it took me years to find out that they may have been mistreated.  And the same is true for Siegel and Shuster — why I couldn’t even identify them as readily as Kirby and Ditko.  By the time I’d heard of Jerry Robinson, which was a few years after I’d heard of Bill Finger, which was a few years after I’d heard of Bob Kane, I still didn’t know about their mistreatment, or at any rate hadn’t taken the idea of that mistreatment inward to my own reckoning of things.  And you know, even after that, maybe sometimes it takes a while for the penny to drop.  And then after that too, you find yourself curious about whether it always lands butter-side-down, or if that’s just a perceptual illusion.

What I’m saying is…it can take a long time.  And I have felt deeply invested in these comic-book things for most of my life, honestly.  The story of Kirby’s unreturned artwork was something I first made out in terms of what it meant to me — the story of Ditko’s departure I knew, even as I bought re-issues of his Dr. Strange.  I know I am losing some people right away, here, and so to those people I would like to say:  HEY!  DON’T GET LOST!  Because I’m just like you.  I saw TDK.  I saw Spider-Man 2.  I knew all about Kirby’s story with Marvel when I rented that extended-version DVD of the Fantastic Four movie…which by the way was totally worth it for that Kirby mini-doc in the Special Features, because seeing Len Wein and Marv Wolfman reminisce about visiting Jack at his home in California probably changed the way I see comics forever, seeing Mike Royer talk about inking Jack probably changed it the same way again, seeing some of the sketches he did for fans actually changed my conception of the “rules” of illustration…seriously I am not different from you.  I loved the Iron Man movie too, you know?

And let’s not forget, even if I was thoroughly disposed to be virtuous for its own sake (which I’m not) I would still be conflicted about that Captain America movie, right?  After all, Joe Simon liked it.  JOE SIMON!  And what am I supposed to do, not take Joe’s satisfaction into account?  Hell, I saw the crappy Superman Returns movie I think within a couple months anyway of walking around for two days beaming about the Siegel decision — and I didn’t have any problem with it, and it wasn’t even much good!  Meanwhile the Cap movie is supposed to be awesome!

I’m just like you.  Really.  I have my own needs, about the things I care about.  Just like you.

And I’m predisposed to hold off on making a decision just like you, too.  The Siegels, it seems to me, are NOT GOING ANYWHERE — eventually their fair share of the money I spent on that crappy Superman movie will make its way to them.  Which is good:  because they’re entitled to it.  Warner Bros. is behaving badly, but the Siegels have the law on their side.  I don’t have to take a stand right now.  I don’t even have to think about what kind of stand I would take.  I don’t even have to think — right now! — about there ever even eventually being such a thing as a stand, that I might take one way or another.

And just one more pause, please, for a further butter-side-down complication.  Because what about my beloved Gerber Defenders?  Dr. Strange was in that, and the Hulk too.  And it wasn’t just Dr. Strange and the Hulk, nor even the Sub-Mariner and Silver Surfer neither…it was Nighthawk, Valkyrie, Luke Cage.  And who remembers who created them?  In a way, though we have no say in court proceedings, we are more unlucky than lawyers or judges or even the jurors that we potentially might be…in that we have no institutionalized roles we are responsible to, that must morally constrain our actions…

…But there I’m getting ahead of myself as well.  Because this is an open letter to anyone who’s ever been conflicted, even a little bit, even one way or the other, by being so invested in beloved stories or characters that it’s uncomfortable to contemplate your responsibilities to their creators…as in:  contemplating whether you even have such responsibilities, or can be said to have them.  You know it’s funny, originally this was going to be a blog-post touting a Marvel comic.  Such a strange thing, for me to be doing!  I don’t buy Marvel comics anymore, mostly.  But I really liked this one.  And I wanted to talk about it.

But the question now comes up:  how much am I inconvenienced, genuinely, by simply not talking about it?

The problem is, that it really is the tiniest thing in my life.  Whether or not to say “hey, this was good!”  So how much do I really need my in-between ethical state, that I might rebel against not refraining from commenting on it, and comment on it anyway?  Steve Bissette, an artist I greatly respect, has put it right before me about the Kirbys, and whether you agree with him or not (oh, those weasel words!) you must admit it is a legitimate question he brings up.

“What are you willing to do?”

It’s a question I think I’ve been avoiding answering for quite a long time now.  And if you’re like me, it’s a question you feel like you ought to be allowed to still avoid answering.  I don’t have to answer Mr. Bissette’s question.  He can’t make me answer it.  I can simply turn away from it, if I want to.  I don’t have to think about the Siegels, even if I have hopes for them.  I don’t have to think about the Kirbys, even if my same hopes for them are a bit more vexed.  The Kirbys haven’t even succeeded in court as the Siegels have;  moreover, the Kirbys have a hope the Siegels don’t have, that I can hope along with them:  the hope that they’ll succeed later.

So I don’t have to answer Mr. Bissette’s question.

However — and I think this is true — I think I cannot avoid answering the question of whether or not I will answer his question.  Which is a much smaller thing.  But also — perhaps — a much tougher one?

Because as I said:  as “unofficial” people, people not acting within the constraints of some vested authority…

…There is nothing out there to restrict the scope of our self-questioning.  Will I talk about the Marvel comic I so enjoyed?  What does it cost me, not to talk about it?

And more importantly…

…Is it possible for me, at this smallest of scales, to choose to “not choose” about it?

And I don’t want to lose anyone still:  but to choose that is to choose, isn’t it.

I mean it is just so small a decision, that it’s un-unmakeable…and yet in making it, a host of other decisions are implied, and must flow therefrom.  The court cases are just about the Siegels and the Kirbys…but we are not the jurors, we are the public.  And so nothing protects us from our own logic, one way or another.  Who created Venom?  Who created Wolverine?  Or Lana Lang?  Or Steve Lombard?  OR BULLSEYE.  OR THE JOKER.  I asked how I could go against Joe Simon, but I’ll never know him any better than I know Jack Kirby, even though Joe is alive and Jack is dead, and so…can I consult what Joe would want me to do, a purely theoretical matter, without consulting what Jack would want as well, which is only an equally theoretical one?  What if they made a movie of The Eternals, and what if Jack’s family were to get paid for it, but they wouldn’t get paid for any Hulks or X-Men…would he want that?  I mean I would go with what his children wanted, but that isn’t the point.  There’s no website out there saying “Kirbys say THIS ONE’S OKAY!”  And it’s no easier for me than it is for you.  We seek and we seek for logical cordons, conceptual divisions that will protect each of our enthusiasms from the other.  They are just not there, once that hull has been breached.  You can’t stand off any longer from cutting into the balloon, once the tiniest incision’s been made.  And what about all the other families, of all the other creators, who will never have a chance to attract such attention?  They are getting older, and they’ll need proper health care too.  Their families will need them to have proper health care.  And maybe the Kirbys would want that.  You know it’s funny how Grant Morrison is, once again, ahead of the curve in all this.  Wasn’t it just a little while ago that this guy, whose entire schtick is that the superheroes are modern mythological figures that therefore have (in echo of Kirby, and for want of a better word) a “real” aspect in the world, was handed a loaded question by a fan-friendly site’s interviewer, and asked to put it to his head?  “What about Siegel and Shuster?” he was pretty much asked.  “If Superman belongs to the world, he can’t very well belong to them, can he?”

Grant Morrison, in other words…

…Was asked the same question you and I are being asked.  Right now.  And not by me.  And not even by the estimable Steve Bissette.  But by pure necessity.

“What are you willing to do?”

It is hard to answer this question.  I think it’s probably damned hard.  But maybe it’s time.

This industry will never fix itself.  And it will just get sicker and sicker until it dies for good.  Jack Kirby created about 90% of all the Marvel characters, mostly in the pages of the Fantastic Four.  All of them are potential movie deals.  All of them represent big money.  There will never be this kind of leverage again.  Christ, I hate making this decision.

But it’s my decision that Steve Bissette doesn’t go far enough, for me.

And so I call for a GENERAL STRIKE.

Movies, comics, action figures, everything.  Even reviews.  For God’s sake, especially reviews!  After all that’s what the blogosphere brings to the table, isn’t it?!

And God but I’m sick of this in-between life.  Aren’t you?

So like the man said:  let’s change the way the future goes.

If we can help it.

Well, let’s just see if we can.