I'm Outta Here!

Please visit me at my new home, here.

Whew! I knew Blogger would have to switch on eventually. Okay, let's make this quick:

So I heard from Blogger Help, and they want me to change my browser, re-set my firewall, all these things. But, I don't think I will: if, as they say, it isn't their problem but mine, then I need not concern myself with questions like "when will the problem be fixed"...it will never be fixed, unless I fix it. So, off to the new digs! Sadly, Wordpress informs me that it can only import posts and comments from Old Blogger and not New, but what the hell, I'll just have to work around that.

Okay! See you soon!

The House In My Head

A wise man (in other words, me) once said that writers are only carpenters, while readers are architects.

Which is a nice thought, I think, but even so, you've got to be a half-decent carpenter, if you want anyone to come and draw your hammering and sawing into a structure.

A roundabout way of saying: I've fixed that post. I'm much happier with it now. You may be, as well.

Second time I've done this! I'll try not to make it three.

Et In Arcadia, Bird-Nose

It's creeping up, slowly...

So welcome, finally, to the crossover between the Dynamic Defenders and Howard The Duck, in many ways the capstone of The World's Longest Graphic Novel, as written by Steve Gerber for Marvel Comics over roughly the course of the 1970s. No, we're not actually finished talking about it all, but the end is in sight now, anyway...

You can tell.

Marvel Treasury Editions, for those who don't know, were oversized “Greatest Hits” packages of Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Thor, The Avengers, etc...reprints of the earliest or most significant or most representative stories featuring their title characters. Consequently, any appearance of an original story in an MTE was a bit of (you'll pardon the expression) an odd duck; in fact with the exception of a handful of pages slipped in as framing sequences for Christmas MTEs, I feel on pretty safe ground saying that the only place to find one of these is in Howard's own Treasury. And, what an elegant story it turns out to be! After the extended unhinged blowout of the Headmen/Nebulon arc in Defenders, and the runaway existential faux-climax of the HTD Presidential campaign in Howard's own book, Gerber finds an opportunity to cook down the perspectival themes of both books into a thick, goopy stew of...

Uhmm...okay, maybe a bit less of that stuff, this time around. Okay? This is satire, after all, so it won't help matters if I overbake the analysis. Like any satire, this one has something definite, and serious, that it wants to communicate...but, again as with any satire, tone and message are of a piece, so even if I can't capture the tone, at least I shouldn't outrage it. Or, to put the whole thing another way, this is a Howard The Duck story, so if I can't get along with the way Howard looks at things, then I might as well write about something else.

Whoops! But, it's a tall order, there...

Anyway, to get started: somewhere in Central Park, a team of absurd supervillains (well, are there any other kind?) hook up under the leadership of “Dr. Angst”, an cacklingly puerile analogue of Dr. Strange who styles himself a “mystic of the mundane.” Well, evil is banal, as we've been told...anyway they all meet. Roasting marshmallows. Yes, roasting marshmallows. Over a campfire. In Central Park. The fiends! Tillie The Hun, angry Teutonic ballbuster with a mace and pigtails; The Spanker, private school headmaster dismissed because of his predilection for corporal punishment...a sort of Hannibal Lecter with a ping-pong bat; Sitting Bullseye, ex-CIA agent with...oh, the hell with it, ex-CIA agent with silly (yet deadly) joke arrows and a giant red target tattooed on his chest; and the Black Hole, guy from Brooklyn who was the victim of the very dumbest of dumbass cosmic accidents, which left him with the self-described “extremely gross power” to suck things into a cavity in his chest. All clear? And Dr. Angst has gathered them all together because they're the most pathetically ridiculous bunch of mediocre nobodies who ever had a pathetically ridiculous origin story...or, scratch that, they're barely even ridiculous actually, they're just kind of dumb. Derivative; unimaginative. Put simply, they're bad ideas. Who would even bother ridiculing them? The thing is already accomplished. What's the point.

Naturally, to Dr. Angst, all this glorious, glorious soul-deadening averageness makes his wannabe-supervillainous heart positively...well, sing, if it could carry a tune. And he promises to rid them all of their PAINFUL lameness of theirs, if they will just band together with him to KILL THIS DUCK.

Holy crap, excuse me, I just realized I'm dying to re-read this story! Back in a tick...

Oh my God, that was funny. Ahhhhh. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. So Howard and Bev have just been thrown out of their hotel room after the failure of his Presidential campaign left them without any money to pay the bill. And after bumping into Mary-Jane Watson on the street and getting really bad directions from her, they wind up – where else? – at the Sanctum Sanctorum of Dr. Strange, where the Defenders are hanging out, doubtless having some sort of tea. Nighthawk, ever irony's plaything, opens the door.

KYLE: You...You're a duck!

HOWARD: No offense, pal – but you're hardly in a position to criticize.

Let's see now, what to say, what to say...Doc is gonna send Howard home. “I mean, Bev's a sweet kid, but...” “But not your species. I understand.” When suddenly they are interrupted by the forces of stupidity, which plan to kill them! Howard, it almost goes without saying, ends up wearing an unconscious Doc's ornamentation, and casting spells at Dr. Angst in his stead; fittingly, Nighthawk fights The Spanker; Val takes on the obnoxiously vapid symbolism of Sitting Bullseye; and the Hulk tries to get away from Tillie. In other words, everybody's got an opposite. Kinda. Then Black Hole threatens to suck everybody completely away, only to be defeated, with ludicrous (not to mention telling) economy, by Bev...just before Howard takes down the Conjuror Without Class with a bust in the chops. And it's all over, folks! The Defenders return to their tea; Howard feels too guilty to leave the adoring Bev; Doc makes a hysterically funny joke about modern music which no one notices.

So...what does it all mean?

Well, I guess that depends on what you bring to it. With the conclusion of the Headmen/Nebulon sequence in The Defenders, Gerber has successfully pushed the straight-faced superheroic encounter with absurdity into completely new territory: baby deer, things that are not U-boats, French bozos with guns, second mortgages, elf assassins, and just a little brainwashing. Not too much. Just a little.

And – not to do an end run around Ed, so no spoilers – it's absolutely an unprecedented existential crisis. Hell, it's a freaking meltdown, is what it is. The absurd elements in the supervillainy might only provoke laughter here, but they don't...because these absurd elements are in earnest, you see, and in words of one syllable they mean to mess shit up. Nagan is more impassive about human fate than a Celestial. Nebulon is so out of touch he makes Galactus look like the King of Kensington. Jerry is such a narcissist that Dr. Doom would stand in awe of him...and Doom's met the Devil, you know. Don't think for a minute that absurdity is cute or nice, people; absurdity's all about the jugular, and it doesn't stop for donuts. And Gerber may satirize many things in The Defenders, but he isn't writing a satire...

It's a drama, see?

Still, as Yondu observed over in Marvel Presents, no act of spirit can ever be wrong against Karanada. “When was the last time you had fun, Nikki-mote?” Absurdity may not feel so laugh-out-loud funny when it's got its hands around your throat (in fact the proper word for what that feels like is horror) but it remains absurd for all that, and that's its ultimate weakness: that it exists, and is absurd, and so will yield to the application of the human sense of proportion which understands it as such. A is A, if I may make so bold; a thing is itself. But then, so is everything else, too, which makes A nothing special: in fact, all the intricately-designed plans of specialness and horror that Gerber's absurd villains absurdly depend on are just the sort of things that his moral universe takes the most pleasure in collapsing, since they're so utterly incapable of having a sense of proportion about themselves. A sense of humour, that tells them that destiny is not so much a matter of chess, but of Irish stand-down instead...last personality on its feet takes all...

I mean, what's more humourless, more devoid of personality, more full of horror, more sheerly implacable, than a Black Hole?

And yet, it's something so easily pre-empted, by sarcasm...

Well, but whatever. Over to Howard, now, who knows all this better than anybody, because everything in the world of hairless apes is equal madness to him. Horror? Let me tell you, once you've been brushed by the ice-cold udder of a vampire cow, the word has no meaning anymore...and that's at least part of the reason why Howard is satire, where The Defenders aren't: so instead of the Headmen, it's Dr. Angst and his crew, skewering everything there is to skewer about the tail-swallowing pretensions of the superhero biz (their own creators' work not excepted), while our heroes gape at the off-beat bloodthirstiness of it all...and then retaliate with their own enlightened (if still mote-like) sense of self-acceptance. Yes, even the Hulk. Because Dr. Angst et al. are bad ideas, sure, but who isn't a bad idea? In the end, it isn't just about whether you're a silly character or not, or even whether you're the hero or the villain or not; as Doc says (maybe Luke Cage has rubbed off on him a bit?), either you've got soul, sucker, or you haven't, and that's what counts. Absolutely, there's a yawning absurdity that underlies everyone's everyday life...but how is that news, really? And, who should that shock? This bizarre undercurrent may be mostly invisible in the central regions of prescriptive legitimacy, but that doesn't mean it isn't there, and so what's by turns funny and unfunny about Dr. Angst's non-team is only what's by turns funny and unfunny about the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, too, or (even) you and me, and so it doesn't matter. It's really all the same. It's normal. There is no normal, but if there were, that's what it would be, and surely if Doc and company have learned anything at all through Gerber's tenure, it's that... (“Eyes of Oshtur! Kyle!”...)

But, and also, this: somewhere on the various SSoS comments threads I recall mentioning that, just as the Defenders originally played the role of outsiders to the outsiders (and therefore, if you see, the protectors of the protectors), characters like Howard and Man-Thing have always served as indicators of an essential fuzziness about the meaning of such outsider positions, that exists at the very furthest fringe of the marginal existence that all superheroes symbolically represent – and thus they're Virgils, to these various spandexed Dantes, that show up to demonstrate for them that beyond the world where good people grapple with madness, there's another world where the madness and the people are all part of the same thing, in and of themselves quite undifferentiated...a realization that supercharges the psychological meaning of the flashy capes and cowls, precisely so that it may step beyond their power to encapsulate identity as trait. To put it another way: the revisitation of superheroic identity-symbolism that takes place at the fringes and the margins serves to refresh the relationship of symbol and identity in the centre spaces too, inasmuch as it reveals the marginal space to really be everywhere, and the central space only its invention...a revelation that therefore causes everyone, in every space, to become deeply involved with the exploration of boundary that's usually farmed out as the fringe's own extra-special concern. And of course, one need not even be a super-person to explore these boundaries, once the revelation has taken hold: as I've mentioned before, in The Defenders superpowers may stand for the question of what to do, but never for the question of who to be, and (as Howard knows) whether it's superheroes, regular joes, or whatever, in the end people are all just hairless apes mired in self-delusion anyway, and therefore no different from one another. Gorko isn't any different from Ultron; the Space Turnip isn't any different from Dr. Spectrum. Well, think about it! Thog, Kang, the Kidney Lady, Dormammu, the Melter, Ego The Living Planet (!), Thanos, Stilt-Man, Magneto, Stiletto, J. Jonah Jameson...Holliman, Pennysworth, the punks Charlie-27 scares off in the alley, Dr. Bong. Bob Doom. Eelar. Loki. The Green Goblin. Winky-Man. It really doesn't matter.

(Although I like Winky-Man...)

So that we get the satirical villains instead of the straight ones, and Howard as the team-up instead of (say) Hawkeye, means only that our Defenders have finally arrived at the point of transformation that can accept all this for what it is: in other words having realized that their ridiculous identity as costumed hero-types is something they can't simply ignore or gloss over, but just have to accept, embrace, take on faith, work with...whether it's absurd or not. Because the thing is, if you've got soul, then you've got it, baby, and so what're you gonna do with it? The state of being ridiculous is an unfortunate one, but since it comes with the package there's no use kicking against the fact...

When one can use it, instead. “But we don't laugh,” say the desperate comedians of Beckett's masterpiece...however, Howard does laugh, or at least he could if he chose, and so that makes him more than just a prisoner of reality's capricious pattern. And the Defenders, too, are free in this way, at least as free as anyone can be...because soul accomplishes a lot, in the Gerberverse. With it, the problem of costume-silliness fades away, to be replaced by a firmer originality, and Truth - at least a truth, as Gerber's later HTD series under the MAX imprint will tell us - becomes something that personality can retrieve from madness after all.

And so, finally: why does Howard elect to stay with Bev, in the ceaseless craziness of the world of hairless apes, when he could just as easily go home? We shouldn't wonder, really: we'd stay with Bev, too, because she's as real as the world of "central" spaces, "home" spaces, is not. We might as well ask why Bev stays with Howard! Which is a silly question, itself.

Because as Douglas Adams put it: no matter where you go, there you are.

Complete with all your ridiculousnesses, too.

But, it isn't as bad as all that.

I Just Realized!

I'm back in Vancouver, with a broadband connection!

So I've turned the comments moderation back on. I hope it doesn't appear untrusting of me...it's just that Tom Foss just left me a comment, and I couldn't find the bloody thing he commented on for twenty minutes!

Also, Studio 60 is a horrible, horrible show. God, I hope it shambles on forever. I'm quite enjoying this now. Call me sick.

The Bee-Loud Glade

So, notwithstanding my attempt at drunken arithmetic the other evening, today (Jan. 25^th, Robbie Burns Day – gee, hope I get this all posted before midnight) is the one-year anniversary of A Trout In The Milk.

Thank you all for coming. It's been an interesting, not to say addictive, exercise.

Beyond that, I hardly know what to say. My first post still sums up my blogging philosophy pretty well, and the experiment that tests futility is still ongoing...however, like the universe I think I'm content to ride the edge between expansion and collapse, there, content to be mysteriously flat so that I may cause myself to speculate endlessly about the reasons for it. I dunno, it's interesting. I seem to be almost perfectly poised between “futile” and “not-futile”. I will say, since I've got the floor, that my inspiration for blogging ultimately came from three things: one, the CSBG article “Mark Waid's Fantastic Four: World's Shittiest Comics Magazine”, probably by Joe Rice; two, whatever article his buddy Alex wrote that established his mad manifesto of L*O*V*E for early Green Lantern comics; and finally a long and tedious essay that I myself wrote about “Batman Begins” for Jim Roeg's site, that Jim was kind enough to say he liked. And I guess all you Bloggers had a similar experience? One day you wrote a huge giant (possibly beer-fuelled) comment on a thread, that made you think “well, crap...why don't I just get a blog of my own, and stop peeing on somebody else's carpet?” Yes: I never knew I cared. I never dreamed I had something to say. I mean I'm a lousy journalist, really, because I never believe my own bullshit generalizations – I can never write more than seven hundred words without thinking “this guy doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground!”, and then writing another seven hundred words against the point, before inevitably concluding “this guy doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground!” I have a file folder marked “Essays” which gets stuffed full of ideas and ideas and ideas that I can never follow through on because they'll eventually disgust me. I suffer, in other words, from what the Catholics call scruples; God's own forgiveness is not enough for me, if I've written something I judge to be crap. In fact some of the worst writing experiences of my life have involved me naively giving somebody something to read (aspiring writers out there: never do this) when they've asked for it...only to hear them say something like:

“It was good.”

It was good?

How in the fuck do you imagine I was asking you if you thought it was good? What I want to hear is whether or not you liked it, or you hated it, you want to read more, you think I suck, you want to sleep with me, you're gonna get your boyfriend to beat me up...

But...good? PAH! I spit on your good...

Anyway...

Where was I. Oh yes. I was going to say: thank goodness for blogging! And not just for the swell people you meet, but for the ability to finally all but empty out those “Essays” files, to have the freedom to write in (as Jim put it) a raw and diaristic style, that (as I put it) bridges writing and performance...well, it's great.

Whoops! There goes the midnight marker! I've officially screwed up...

But to continue: me, I've mysteriously found that I can make the occasional piece of coin as a songwriter. Well, who knew? It was never in my plan, or even my self-image, to be a person like that. I always envied musicians, because they could write a song, then BANG! perform the song, and immediately know whether or not people thought well of them. Writing, as I'm sure many of you know, is really different from that: you write the story and then BANG! you rewrite it and then rewrite it once more, and then you rewrite it again, and again, and then finally BANG! rewrite the goddamn thing again, because you sense there's something wrong with it...and then BANG! you get depressed as hell, and BANG! you start sulking, and BANG! your girlfriend meets a guy at her work, and then BANG! she moves out, and then...

Gee, I hate to be repetitive, but...where was I?

Oh, yeah.

BANG!

You get a blog.

But good for you: it's healthy. Bloggers, the whole world thinks this is unhealthy and sad, but I say unto you: there ain't nuthin' healthier. You get feedback right away; you move yourself to write something you think is good, or funny, or at least something that you care about; whatever anyone says, you're out there. You're cutting it. You're making something from nothing. Take me: my revelation last month was that this humble blog of mine has actually acquired some sort of an overall shape, one that I didn't expect when I started it. And in it, my voice – which is not quite my real voice, but it's a voice that belongs to me nonetheless, and I'm not sure I owned it before – has gotten to the point where it has something serious to say. Yea, and it is even here, among the comics fans, that it will be said. For lo, where else could I have been so bold as to put up terminally-embarrassing things like Fan-Fic Films and abortive Morrison JLA fill-in scripts and aimless psychosexual meditations upon Vance Astro and Yondu, except here? And where else could I have successfully deluded myself that any of it mattered?

And lo: yea. And furthermore: forsooth. And lo!

Only here. Only with you people. Hey, thanks. I really appreciate it. And let me just say, specifically, thanks Joe and Alex, thanks Jim (is it all right with you if I abstract that Batman Begins comment of mine from your site and post it here?), thanks Thomas, thanks Shane, thanks Jon, thanks Johnny B., thanks RAB, thanks Tom, thanks Sean the Elder, thanks Sean the Younger, thanks David, thanks Matthew, thanks Dave Fiore, thanks Willow, thanks everyone I've forgotten because between one sentence and the next I just spent three hours swilling delicious beer, there, and oh am I all gooned up...thanks Prof. Fury and Gorjus for voting, see it really did pay off like the City Fathers said it would, thanks Marc Singer, thanks Chris from 2 Guys and Jake from Ye Olde, thanks to everybody.

To everybody.

The buzzing in my beard, the scent of skaldic mead on my fingers, the sound of the linnet's wings, hovering like ravens 'round my eyebrows...it's all down to you folks. I lied to myself when I started this blog. I told myself it was a good place to store ideas for copyright purposes. I told myself it was a good place to empty my “Essays” file. But really I just wanted to meet you all, 'cause you seemed kinda cool.

And I apologize if I've left anyone out.

Hey!

I'm sure I'll remember what I've forgotten, as soon as the bee-loud haze stops buzzing about my ears. Buzz...buzz...time for bed.

I leave you with my own personal supremely brilliant fortune-telling trick. It works like this: say there's four major textiles.

Silk

Cotton

Polyester

Linen

And furthermore say that there's four major types of cooking fats:

Oil (you may say it's olive or canola, as you like)

Lard

Butter

Margarine

Now...match them up. What works with what? I guarantee you that some incredible secret truth about you will be revealed by this. Those who participate...and prove to have the right attitude...

(looks around)

Will be favoured with the Disney Tarot, if they deposit their email addresses in the right spot. Suitable for vanity T-shirts, mousepads, and card decks. It's all I can give, people. I don't have much.

Did I say thanks?

Thanks.

You've been really great.

And I do regret forgetting the people I should've remembered, but...isn't it enough that's I'll be working hung over with a sledge and a wedge tomorrow? For whoever I did wrong by, I won't wear earplugs.

Okay goodnight.

Blogaround Challenge 2007

Hey, everybody: fun game. Hot on the heels of the new comics blog update, an invitation to review three blogs not currently on your sidebar, all in the name of that thing only available by Internet, free gloriously FREE comic books.

My sidebar's pretty outdated, of course, so I'm also going to eschew blogs that I've pointed to in posts, as well as bloggers that I frequently correspond with...and, a review? I don't know if I'll be quite capable of turning in anything that lives up to that name, but...

Here goes!

No Time To Explain. Did you know Peter B. Gillis had a blog? Well, he does...and it's great. Nothing against any of the other creator blogs I like to visit, or even feel I should visit more often...but Peter's long-form, free-wheeling, well-crafted rants are just to my taste: funny, eclectic, free of bum steers, and sparkling evidence of a nimble mind at play. And, updated regularly! Other creator's blogs delight for the way they allow access to an already well-known voice and personality; No Time To Explain is simply a blog I would read anyway, that (weirdly) just happens to be written by a creator I always liked.

John & Belle Have A Blog. I'd almost forgotten about this one, so congratulations, Guy! This challenge has already been a huge success, at least for me. Jeez, John & Belle...I used to come look around here when I just wanted some down-to-earth yet still academic commentary in the Marc Singer vein...but there's more to see here than that. First off, I love the look of this blog! It invokes the voyeuristic pleasure I remember from the mid-Nineties, of surfing around just to see what the different people are like (“Hello, my name is Ryoko, I am from Osaka, here is my resume and a picture of my cat” – how I preferred this early style of autobiographical webpage to the early style of its “content”-rich cousins!), while also offering as much in the way of high-powered topical analysis as you could wish...and I suppose this became the template in my mind for other blogs I would eventually visit much more frequently, like Pah! and (probably nearer) Pretty Fakes...”project” blogs, you could call them. Art-blogs? Well, John and Belle are clearly as much the cool kids as Gorjus and Prof. Fury are...the principle of design looms large on their spiffy magazine-like pages, accurately informing even the casual reader of what it is they can expect to encounter there...just as if they themselves were a kind of laid-back brand, their lives a sort of two-person cottage industry all about taking time to think, reflect, read, write, and do things properly. I'll admit it: I'm envious of those two. So pardon me, I just have to go look them up again...

The Fate Of The Artist. I know, I know...everyone knows about this blog already! But I can't help it! You get Alan Moore scripts; 23-year-olds' magnum opus notebooks; thanks for roning. I cannot leave this off the list of three. And you (whoever you are) cannot avoid reading it any longer, if that's what you've been doing.

Ahhhh...

Say, that was kinda fun.

Here's hoping I win the prize!

New Comic Weblog Updates!

Over here.

Thanks, Chris!

Falling Apart, Falling Together: Jim Roeg's "On America" Revisited

Howdy, folks. Just getting ready to unload another essay on you for Seven Soldiers of Steve, this time on the Howard The Duck Treasury Edition, guest-starring The Defenders...

But suddenly I've realized there's something else I ought to cover before I get to it.

You know, this thing has gotten so large over the last eleven months or so that every time I think of working on a new entry for it I have to first do a fair bit of review...because no one who has put fingers to keyboard on this project has done so without bringing up something riveting about it that would never have crossed my mind otherwise. And: thanks again, everybody! There's no doubt in my mind that I've read this stuff over a lot more than anybody else, and I must say the interconnections are quite illuminating...which is something I plan to make much of in my final wrap-up post.

But, there is the odd illuminating thing that I don't intend to jam into the wrap-up, but which still deserves a closer look, and one of these is Jim's second Marvel Two-In-One post. Now, at the time he wrote it I was working off of a limited number of dial-up hours, and also much engaged with ditch-digging, swimming, and replying in the affirmative to party invitations. Boy, that really sounds great, when I put it like that...

But anyway, because of all that I didn't manage much of a reply to Jim's post then. However, it seems it made quite an impression on me regardless, since certain of his observations somewhat slyly made their way into my voluminous posts on the Guardians of the Galaxy later on, probably chief among them the notion that Steve Gerber's non-team American families are so bound up with ideas of difference that they resist totalization, which is to say that maintaining the diversity of the parts is the only way to maintain the value of the whole. It is, as we say in Canada, more of a mosaic than a melting-pot. Furthermore, the ad hoc symbolic families of the FF, the Defenders, and the Guardians find an even more fractured reflection in MTIO, with substitutions both simple and complex: as Jim points out, there are many “Fantastic Fours” in MTIO, formed and re-formed out of many different perplexities of origin, election, and adoption...and as I've had occasion to note before, the truly compelling thing about a chosen identification is not in the choosing at all, but rather in the choosing again. Well, you can take that one all the way back to Robert deBoron, if you feel so inclined...just as with Perceval and the Holy Grail, even to choose is to in a sense be naturally moved by events and qualities – because even to make a free choice is sometimes an erogatory act, that can't conveniently be avoided – but to choose again is to experience a rebirth: a reformation of identity that is supererogatory in nature, because it is required by nothing at all.

This stuff goes deep, mind you. Very deep.

And so, on second reading, it reminds me forcefully of my contention in those Guardians posts that one of Gerber's main topics is the way narratives often fall apart under their own pressure to achieve completion. Or, should that be “collapse”? To collapse is also to implode, of course, to fall in on oneself instead of apart. To fall together? And then to fall apart as a consequence, to disintegrate. Mind you, you can have it the other way around, too: falling apart to fall together, falling together to fall apart...that's forty-five years of FF stories in a nutshell, really...

And, the formula holds for the Guardians too. The human race shuffles two steps forward, one step back...the bloody catharsis of the crowd waiting to tear the Badoon apart is forestalled by Starhawk just as the liberation of the future by the past is forestalled by him as well...an interesting complexification of Jim's argument about Gerber's “looking back” to heirloom ideals...and thus, that things only repeat and reiterate and fulfill symbolic patterns in order that those patterns may be broken seems to emerge as a major theme in all this. The Guardians save the Earth, but are cast out; Vance and Nikki sacrifice themselves to save the galaxy, but live...and everywhere the old comic-book editorial logic of a necessary return to the status quo is reimagined, as a more philosophical insistence that victory, salvation, and redemption come through the deferral of expectations rather than their fulfillment. Through defiance, if you will, of all that “return to the status quo” promises, at least in its simplest and most non-reflective form.

So an important freedom from destiny is seen in the action of character, which is perhaps itself the action of a type of fate that looks on destiny as an enemy...I reverse the usual maxim that “character is destiny” on purpose here, you see: making destiny a tragic force, that will trample every character underfoot in its rush to level its story's terrain...while making fate something else, that this destiny can't quite enclose or comprehend. Fate as the old unpredictable Necessity, that even the gods must answer to: the inevitable fly in their ointment. And maybe this little fancy of mine is even true! After all, it is the existential hero Ben Grimm who thwarts a cosmic scale-balancing that would otherwise doom humanity, but he doesn't do it for humanity, or even for existentialism: he does it for Val, whom he sees as a person even though the larger cosmic forces swirling around him presume her a cipher, and therefore no more than a means to an end. Likewise, the rhythmic fluctuations of cosmic power that comprise Wundarr's existence imply destruction, until they are diverted into other activities more human and less harmful; whereupon Wundarr becomes a pleasing and well-beloved child, instead of a strange, threatening visitor from another planet who is merely plot's prisoner. Because every plot contains its own quota of destiny, perhaps; but if that's true, it also seems (at least in the Gerberverse) that every character contains a fate of his or her own that can force destiny to bend aside, into a new shape. A non-totalizable shape, that sustains itself (paradoxically) by continually frustrating itself, unnaturally maintaining its many internal frictions and divisions against the pull that would collapse them all into a singularity.

Well, but what else, when even the mindless Man-Thing's character is not a prisoner of destiny? You could see poor Ted Sallis as the epitome of the non-negligible character, in this way: unable even to have a thought, he still manages to act, and changes the balance of fate every time he does so. If you like, he's just as free – as well as just exactly as constrained – as Dr. Strange is, or Reed Richards, or the Silver Surfer. So, no: to get away from this kind of fate in the Marvel Universe (and I would argue: in our own, too) doesn't seem to be possible. Bear in mind that the Marvel Universe is positively lousy with destiny: everywhere there's a superpower, there's a destiny. Well, what else is a superpower? But because of this, the election of destiny actually ends up counting for very little, because destiny is so ubiquitous that it's as much chance as choice. One person gets a power ( a purpose, a personality) and chooses to become a hero, another gets it and chooses to becomes a villain...and if we only stopped here it wouldn't matter what the names are, because all this destiny is just the precursor to freedom anyway. Sure! Because how many Eschatotrons has Reed Richards built, and forced his family to step into, only to discover that the immanentizers haven't been properly calibrated? How many final enlightenments have come, how many apocalypses, armageddons, Ragnaroks, satoris? Destiny is summoned every other hour in the Marvel Universe, and confrontations with “ultimate” power seem merely to mark the solstices and the equinoxes; hardly any story exists, that isn't seeking to rush in on itself and finish.

And yet as well as being very deep, this stuff is very old, too; world mythology is rife with stories in which destiny foreordains that a given character will be a “Chosen One”, and makes it impossible for such a character to elect against his role...but frequently (we can look back to Perceval again, here), being a Chosen One does not just mean having the power to fulfill prophecy, but it also means having the power to defeat it as well. Culmination is defused, to create an unqualifiable futurity; the predetermined footprints are filled up by Chosen feet, but somehow what they mean is changed, along the way. Necessity derails the train, upsets the timetable, uses its last cigar to burn through the rope...and as a result, events are pruned away from the direction of destiny, and destiny never really arrives, though it still hangs there in the sky overhead, like a sun.

I could ramble on for a long time about this. Character...fate...divinity (what all supervillains are dying to achieve, don'tcha know)...the history and significance of the Individual as a topic in literature. Don't worry, I'm not going to ramble on about it like that! I'm almost done, in fact. But just before I go, perhaps I should say that even though (as Jim has noted) Gerber's run on MTIO has much to do with the silly and the scattershot, it may be that very sense of ungoverned playfulness which caused “On America” to strike such sparks in my head. These team-up books often seem like natural vehicles for picaresque storytelling, and Gerber is undoubtedly Marvel's pre-eminent picaresque storyteller...and the Thing himself seems like he'd make the best picaro to be found anywhere outside the Everglades, or the Cleveland city limits...except that part of the fun here is that Ben isn't the picaro at all, but instead everybody else is. So if you will, America takes a somewhat loopy tour through his life (instead of the other way around), just as if he were playing the part of the road in this road story...and in that capacity (which we might easily meld together with the idea of Ben as Existential Everyman) he's privileged to see the kaleidoscopic reconstruction, the continual rearrangement and re-sorting – the endless re-choosing – of the American non-team from its many discrete pieces.

And therefore I'll agree with Jim, and say that Gerber's political (and philosophical) ideal here is indeed “something like democracy”...but how compelling, how numinous, is that “something”! Unlike life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, unlike equality and freedom and all the other cardinal American virtues, it isn't part of the corpus of American law, but it seems to me to be no less an irreplaceable part of the essential American aspiration than anything that is written down. We could call it a crucial part of the American persona, if we liked: something that only becomes real in the perception of it, as it falls apart to fall together, falls together to fall apart.

Ah. And now I'm out of coffee, at last.

Yeesh, what a relief!

The Wire Of Eustace Cranch

For shame!

Bloggers, be Bloggers!

Yes, you're off the hook for my one-year bloggiversary that's coming in two days, you Bloggers who (thank you!) read me regularly...but won't you say hello to my friend Merrie? She's a person who has every reason to think we're the most terrible nerds that ever crawled out from under a geeky rock, and yet she came here, and yet I mean to show her that we have access to some stories that she needs to know about.

She's very funny (very goddamn funny!), and she's very smart (very goddamn smart!), but no one she knows is telling her about Alan Moore, or Steve Ditko, or Jack Kirby, or Steve Leialoha, or Gil Kane. That world of storytelling is totally alien to her.

So Bloggers, join me in recommending a TPB for Merrie, that adaptable and intelligent friend of mine, who wants to like modern comics, but doesn't know it yet, because she hasn't seen any. Bloggers, Merrie is a real person. Bloggers, Merrie is smart as shit. Bloggers, her mind is open to ideas and to media, and I will buy her a TPB or something based on your recommendations. You may suggest three things, three different TPBs, to ignite her interest. I'll start you off:

Vimanarama
From Hell
Beanworld

Hey, you got a better idea?

Good: I'm calling for it.

And also you must preface every entry with the words "Hi, Merrie!"

Or, if you could extemporize a little bit on what I've given you, I may give you extra points.

Oh God, is it that late?!? Why didn't one of you stop me?!? Jesus Christ, next you're gonna tell me you were so irresponsible that you let me publish thi

Merrie, Girl Of A Thousand Gimmicks

Not what you think, Bloggers: I have a guest today, and I thought since she's here I might as well point her to Jim's fabulous essay on comic-book existentialism. Much more useful than Mark Kingwell's articles for Saturday Night...you know for a while there I thought he was going to start asking questions like "How come in Scooby-Doo it's always Freddie and Daphne who go down one tunnel, while the lesbian, the asexual guy, and the dog go down the other?"

I confess it: I did.

Oh, To Be An Engineer In The Springtime!

Well, I've posted about this before, but there's no reason not to post on it again. Read at a discussion of copyright and digital devices:

There existed a time in human history when people in western societies were so bogged down with the labour of survival that it was necessary for society to subsidise creations of the mind if there were to be any of them, and the machination of that subsidy was the root of intellectual property law.

By the way, the person being quoted is against excessive extension of/enforcement of copyright, and I agree with them about that, whoever they are. But their contention above is WRONG.

You come across this fallacy quite often, in high-tech circles: that governments created patenting, copyrights, trademarks and such in order to spur innovation by granting monetary rewards for it. However, this is only Adam Smith and John Locke by way of Ronald Reagan and Bill Gates, and it isn't so. Obviously, the "labour of survival" was itself a sufficient spur to innovation in the form of "creations of the mind", throughout our long human history: everything from basket-weaving by the Black Sea to astronomy in Africa helped us, materially, cope with the circumstances of our lives. The lesson being, I suppose, that knowledge is good to have for all kinds of reasons, as are devices and techniques. Farming, metallurgy, medicine, art, literature, music, none of these innovations came to be through the gentle midwifery of state-administered intellectual property rights. It simply didn't happen.

And I'll tell you why.

Suppose I am a technician with a secret process. If other people desire its benefits, all I have to do to be a Rockefeller or a Carnegie is to keep it secret, and sell products that are made with it. And I will be a millionaire, sure as you're sitting there staring into that screen. But, suppose my process would be of more general benefit to the world if it weren't a secret? Well, that presents more of a problem: as much as I may want to help the millions, I'm not sure I'm willing to give up my security to do it. What about my fine feather bed? What about my children's education? Etc., etc.

Patents are the answer to this. That way everyone can enjoy the fruits of my genius, without me having to impoverish myself (or worse, make only other people rich) along the way. So patents, in this sense, are very clearly compensation, but they are not stimulation. I can be a rich man whatever happens, with my secret process; patents only encourage me to loosen secrecy's strings. As an added bonus, it also screws up my competitors' efforts at industrial espionage: ha! ha! They can use the process all they want, but not without having to pay me for the privilege! Suckers!

So that's patents. Then again, there's copyright. Applied by government as a tool to improve society? Quite the contrary: that the U.S. Constitution (and not uniquely, either) sets limits on the duration of copyrights, in the name of "ye Progresse" or whatever, that is the instrument that promotes the commonweal. Not the copyright itself. Naturally: because how on Earth does it benefit the government to merely tolerate a special someone's exclusive right to make money off something for all eternity? No, no, I'm not a communist or anything...but the benefit to the government in granting copyright, what is that? We can dismiss the "spur to innovation" argument right away, I think: if you are a novelist or a composer who cannot make money on the recirculation of your work by a publisher, then that is all the more reason for you to write another book, or another symphony, because in that case you will need to get paid again, and soon, or you'll fall back into ditchdigging. All the jobs you create and taxes you pay as a copyright owner can be created and paid instead by whoever it is who buys your literary labour cheap, whether they be Marvel or Microsoft, and so there need not be anything so special about you in this regard. But, you'll be paid at a higher rate than a ditch-digger, and you might very well end up being celebrated by an adoring public, and living in a nice house...and isn't that enough? No, perhaps it won't be fair, but remember the argument is not one of fairness but free-market efficiency: if granting copyright is a spur to innovation, and in everybody's best interests, then "fair" hardly enters into it, right?

So much for the carrot. How 'bout the stick? I think we can all remember the Intellectual Property-Owners' Revolution of the mid-nineteen...

Oh yeah, I forgot! There never was one. What there was, instead, was only a bunch of wealthy lawmakers, and a bunch of wealthy judges. No matter, though: as I got it from Chesterton, an average person is quite capable of doing average justice, or we wouldn't let Psychic Phone Friends sit on juries...and we do. Even an aristocrat or billionaire industrialist will do average justice, probably most of the time...unless you hit him in the sweet spot and ask him to answer whether "wealth is morally good", in which case he'll go running for his Smith and his Locke and (in the worst case) his Reagan. Me, I think wealth is pretty much morally neuter, but I'd rather have it than not have it, if you see what I mean...after all, somebody's gotta have it. Why not me? But there's no point kidding around about how one deserves it; the most you can probably ever hope to have someone say about you if you have it, is that maybe you don't totally not deserve it, and in my opinion if you're looking for higher praise than that, you may want to consider employing a psychiatrist.

Or a PR firm?

Or an architect.

Or just start bribing people, or perhaps enter politics yourself, or take the King down to the river and have him sign the Magna Carta, and then wait a thousand years or so for it to simmer...

Or, start your own country?

Because I lied, of course, when I said the Intellectual Property Owners' Revolution never happened. Clearly, it did. Because what is intellectual property? It is simply the principle that a thing belongs to the person who made it. Which is really not too different from plain old property, drop the "intellectual", and as soon as we can see this, we can also see that we have had revolutions over this, and not just a few of them. Call it philosophy in action: if a thing is true in fact, it ought to be true in law, as well. If you make a thing, buy it, build it, invent it, occupy it, save it, salvage it, harvest it, draw your daily bread from it...it's yours. Only if you stole it, is it not yours. All else is window-dressing.

And none of it more dressy than the contention above, which I take as a claim that the money made or protected by patents and copyrights (and trademarks, though I failed to mention them) is justified because it is good for society, and therefore must have been created through some Smithean homeostatic free-market principle that ensures whatever the winners get, is what winners deserve. But, engineers working in the software industry (yeah, I'm singling you out), now is the time for all good men to abandon the notion that they are doing the Important Work that props up the best of all possible worlds. Seriously. Because when you invoke the tale of society rewarding you for your innovation (I should mention that I recently heard the results of a study showing that the proliferation of "strategic" patents in the high-tech sector has not resulted in a corresponding increase in "innovation", so parse that as you will), you only reinforce the trickle-down point of view that enables your opponents to claim copyright should be eternal, that patents create processes, and that trademarks are ideas. And this is precisely the point of view that, slowly but surely, is poisoning the well you drink from.

Once I asked a lawyer friend of mine to apply his signature to an envelope, inside of which was a story. Sort of an early attempt to get as much mustard on the copyright-protection ball as I could. Well, I was still learning. Anyway, he said:

"I think you have to apply for copyright, don't you?"

I just looked at him. "I HAVE the copyright," I said.

"No, I think you have to apply for it."

"No...I HAVE IT already. I made this; this is mine. I own it. It's MINE. The right of copy belongs to ME."

"But...I think, for it to be legal..."

He was still learning too, I believe. But anyway, if you see, his way of looking at this was a rather dangerous one, because if society granted copyright to people it thought were super-cool on account of their excellence as an act of validation, instead of simply acknowledging the principle that ownership inheres in the act of creation, then we would all be in a terrible, terrible pickle. Because it would be as much as there being no right to property at all! Except at the discretion of the powerful.

Which, as I hope it's plain to see, really would be a spur to innovation. Just, not the good kind.

Weird!

Here's something strange: I just read this totally brilliant parody of Civil War #6, somewhere on the web, with new snarky words over Steve McNiven's art. The pictures are, indeed, very pretty ones. Mr. McNiven is a talented fellow.

But!

You know, I'm being totally serious when I say the pictures failed to fascinate me. They just didn't grab me. In fact I was conscious of slogging through them to get to the funny words.

Isn't that awful?

I mean, like I said, Mr. McNiven is unquestionably a very talented guy. So why don't I feel any interest in what he's drawn? I mean, I like comics art as much as the next idiot. It isn't about my anti-Civil War prejudice. I sometimes look at lettering, for God's sake! I can distance myself from what I think of as bad writing to look at the art as craft alone, in fact I do it all the time!

Don't I?

Hmm...

Trying to whip up some theory to cover this (strange and unexpected!) datum, I suspect what I fail to find engaging is not so much the artist's work, but instead the current Marvel house style. Somehow; although it isn't much of a trick for me to find examples of that style that do draw my eye, I think maybe that can be attributed to me having a special liking for particular artists' particular quirkinesses, that come through subliminally no matter what style they're working in. Or, maybe it is the scripts? Maybe these scripts are being written in a way that doesn't require...you know, whatever it is that interests me visually on a comics page.

I honestly don't know for sure. I think it's probably a little of both. Unless those two things are actually the same...

But it's weird, huh? I don't like the art. Oh, I don't actively hate it or anything, and I'm quite aware of how really impressive it is...but I guess I just never thought to ask myself if I enjoy that kind of "impressive" so much that it's something I can't get tired of.

Turns out, I can. I guess. That is, if I'm not wrong about the whole thing...

Anybody else share this feeling? Or am I simply an evil bastard for dissing McNiven this way? I admire his work, for sure. But the admiration is kind of a distant one, I'm realizing...

Okay, late-night noodling over! I've had this blog too long, I'm just starting to write down every damn thing that flits through my head...

On Delurking

It isn't absolutely necessary: you could do this, instead.

You're welcome.

Days And Dollars

Whoops!

It seems Sean got there first...and, may I say, with considerably more concision.

In other news, the Rich Buckler Swipes people are back. I know it sounds weird, but I kind of missed them while they were gone...

Oh, of course! It was the holidays!

I've Had An Apostrophe

Hey...

Let's dump Marvel.

C'mon, why not?

You know, during the Nineties I was not an X-fan. Everything Marvel was doing with Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters pissed me off and bored me. So I didn't mind not reading any of it, because...well, it sucked, and I wasn't the audience for that crap, and they didn't want me, and I didn't want them, and so...

This Disassembled/House Of M/Civil War/The Initiative thing is obviously going to go on for years to come, and I'm just not interested anymore, like at all. Characters I like have been all messed up, characters I think are stupid have been promoted all over the place, NuMarvel is gone, Speedball is Penance, Onslaught's coming back, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Jesus Christ, time to leave. What the hell's the point in staying? I am the fan that Marvel is willing to sacrifice for what they perceive as their current audience, you know. They've already decided they can live without me, and you too, if they have to.

So...

Think I'll let them!

How long do you really think it'll be before the plotline begun in Planet Hulk finally winds up? Before Nick Fury resurfaces? Before somebody locates The Scarlet Witch and decides to do something other than sleep with her and then sneak out? Before the Inhumans get their Terrigen Mists back? Hell, before "Ultimate Conspiracy" begins? Oh my God, folks, it isn't looking good as far as timeframe goes, I'll tellya. It is gonna be a long, long time indeed, and that's even supposing that all the books come out on schedule.

So my recommendation to you is, hey, if you like a standalone book, by all means buy it. But as for Marvel as a line? Probably not worth it anymore. I wouldn't bother, if I were you. Most of it is being made for somebody else, now.

AAAAHHHHHHHHHH! That feels better. A little bit of truth, in all the hype. Marvel Comics: not for you anymore.

They're not, you know.

Responses To Watchmen

You've heard this one before, I might as well warn you.

Watchmen as “postmodern”.

I don't really think it is, naturally, or I wouldn't bother writing. Oh, it's a tapestry woven almost entirely from motif, yes; a commentary on the fundamental insolidity of perspective, time, space, genre, reading...yes, sure. But “postmodern”?

We won't get too crazy with definitions, if you don't mind. It costs us nothing to affirm that there can indeed be “postmodernist” works of literature, and that they can be good or bad, enlightening or unenlightening, as the case may be. You've got your pastiche; you've got your writerly capacity to bring matters of theory into the narrative; you see I am being very slapdash about the whole thing, and I think that's probably okay. Having read not-too-widely on the subject, and having few lit-crit credentials I can use to prop my overheated arguments up with, I think it's best not to attempt a whole lot of precision. I can decode (but, perhaps that should be “encode”?) the World's Worst Writing as well as anyone, but as to generating it...nah. So I won't be doing much tapdancing, is what I'm saying.

And so there's your disclosure!

And now back to the show, in which I will commence arguing that postmodernism doesn't own the patent on clever experiments with form. As an old professor of mine once put it, what about James Joyce? Is Ulysses postmodern, just because it's fucked in the head? Is that the definition? Or can we not say, “fucked in the head” is an attribute also belonging to the peak of modernism, as well as what came after it? As with Einstein and QM, there's an argument to be made against a “natural” distinction between progenitor and inheritor theories – today's most celebrated QM prestidigitators really aren't carrying on in some grand channel of quasi-biological difference that yields historical distinctiveness, but rather they're continually inventing a history for themselves intellectually, in a feat of retcon worthy of any cape-and-tights book...and therein lies some significant limitation, because the schools and the schisms are all just stories when it comes down to it, stories we made up for our convenience, because history isn't the record of successive trends, after all – we can admit that, surely – but of successive events whose succession we try to characterize, to naturalize, after the fact. Which means it's all just high-level language, the sexy way it's talked about. Pareidolia. Hype. GUI. Crap, to say so. The kind of crap that leads to the Muchmusic maven who claimed that the Sex Pistols “started the debate” over class consciousness in England. Really, you can look it up. She said that.

And: what a supreme tool, but then that's rock journalism for ya...

Meanwhile it's Einstein himself who developed the quantum theory of light, just as (arguably) the fruit of postmodern theory only dangles from the branches of the modernist tree. These things need not be separated, is what I'm saying! They are not warring armies meeting on the plain, to decide something awful, and decide it forever...

Well. A reading of Watchmen certainly makes for some very fertile ground for postmodern analysis...but then so does a reading of Humphry Clinker, and so that isn't the point. Because Watchmen, for all its astounding formal brilliance, is more like Clinker than it is like (even) From Hell...superficial appearances to the contrary, it is not a story of the familiar which is artfully torn to bits, and then reassembled and reified into a new structure, but instead is the story of the familiar as itself, before any of that takes place. The story of what the familiar really is, and really implies, on its own. That's the tragedy of the whole thing, in fact: as Dan Dreiberg's essay on owls points out to us, something has gone wrong in the modern quality of the world, and can't be mended, or even stopped; the spirited youthful dabbling with sex and power and freedom and identity has soured into something unpleasant and obscure, and is rolling inevitably downhill to an apocalypse that must destroy the whole world and everything in it. And none of that constitutes the discovery of a new or hidden meaning in the text of superhero modernism, but is only evidence of the arrival of the genre at modernism's summit, at long last: the clock ticks down its final minutes; the climb runs out of “up”. It's the end of everything. It's the shadow of the Bomb. It's all right there. Right in front of us. Naked.

Contrast this with, say, Astro City. Busiek's masterpiece is all pastiche, all reassembly and reification, a cleverly and appealingly self-conscious toying with genre elements that quite clearly aims at resuscitating the form's “spirited youth”, overleaping the countdown to midnight to land in a new, post-apocalyptic (literally post-revelation) world, that is really the old world's Elysian afterlife, where the old clothes can be put back on again, only this time more deliberately. And this is as good an example of “postmodernist” fiction as we could wish for: decentred narrative, the erosion of distinctions between the character types that show themselves in capes and masks, and the discovery of new meanings and new possibilities in the artful collage of old stories. I don't mean that shallowly, either: anyone who read post-Watchmen superhero comics got a pretty good sense of how little there was on offer there, a sense that the reins had been dropped and that the number of storytelling possibilities left available in the genre were dwindling towards zero. Well, it's still going on, actually! But the realization that there is still room to move among these tropes and types, if one only cares to, is a very postmodern one. Astro City was a positive reading experience for the superhero aficionado, that many of us despaired of ever having again until we picked it up. So I mean it just like it sounds, and “discovery of new meanings” is not a put-down or a here-or-there phrase. It's real.

Well, kind of real. Don't get me wrong, I love Astro City, but it's no ABC – where we saw Moore revisiting superheroes in the post-Watchmen era (after doing some true postmodern comics in From Hell, as I alluded to earlier...but maybe I'll just leave From Hell for another day) and demonstrating that a postmodern creativity wasn't limited to decoupage...and in fact this washed out a lot of the bad taste left in the mouth from the whole previous experiment. Because it's the story of history again, you see: apres le deluge, what? The question can be very vexing. What do you do when history ends? What is there to do? Even Astro City, as good as it was, only followed in the wake of the collapse of expectations...in the large-but-finite possible number of recombinations from the bits of history's flotsam and jetsam...

Except, of course, as I was saying before, history isn't as natural as we think it is. It's made up, mostly. Characterized. Naturalized. So all that post-apocalypse stuff is really out, illusory, a lot of worrying over nothing. Because it's only a problem of too much perspective, you see. Too much drama: art and science and history aren't ever at an “end”, and in fact not even Dr. Manhattan says they are. I mean, we think he's fucking with us in Watchmen #12, but he isn't...because in Astro City it may matter a great deal that The Confessor is built on Batman, but over at ABC it really doesn't matter at all if Tom Strong is built on Doc Savage. Why should it? There is no escape from repetition of form, but then again if you think about it, no escape is necessary; this is genre fiction, after all. And, how did we ever convince ourselves that it wasn't? When genre, I humbly submit, is perhaps the one thing that's immune to the corrosion of this “history”, anyway...

Well, all the better to comment on it, I suppose.

Boy, if I ever wrote a post I expected someone to disagree with me about, this is it. I should probably take some time to carefully expand/edit it before I push the fateful button...I really should...

Oops.

Good Lord What A Peevish Man John Byrne Is!

Oh, hi. Wasted some time tonight reading over a thread on JBR about Alan Moore, Lost Girls, and propriety.

I don't advise you doing the same. Head-rotting stuff. My goodness, but Byrne is a bully, though! Astonishing! Deplorable! And truly maddening. I mean, let's face it, it isn't any kind of news; still, when one sees the man in action, one's blood can't help but boil.

Meanwhile, of course - and it really goes without saying, but I'll say it - Alan Moore continues to break new ground for everyone with his valuable, enlightening work, and shows no sign that he's yet reached the apex of his considerable storytelling powers. I haven't even seen a real live copy of Lost Girls yet, and I already think of it as an impressive victory over the forces of darkness. So cheers to the Mad Wizard of Northampton!

And jeers to this rusty tailpipe.

I Don't Want To Write Superhero Comics

I know, I know...it's a terrible admission to make. I mean I've dreamed all my life of writing them; they form a deep and dark and dense part of my ideas about what genre fiction can do. I love them. Hell, I adore them. But, I don't want to write them. Honestly.

Why, you ask?

Just take a look at something I did for fun. I actually posted this not too long ago, but I had to take it off within an hour. It gave me a sort of a quiver, you see. It's the first fifteen pages of an Atom script, in the Morrison/Porter period. I should probably mention, too, that it's a part of an imaginary twelve-issue...

Well, just take a look at what I had planned to post.


...


Submitted For Your Disapproval

Oh, hi there. This is going to be a little embarrassing. For you, if not for me.

A while ago I was thinking about how difficult it would be to come up with comic scripts on a monthly basis. Now, I complain about bad comics as much as the next guy, and that isn't going to change, but I wondered: could I even come up with reliably half-decent FF scripts month in, month out? Could I even write a script that held together at all?

So I decided to try it out. Of course I had to come up with a story first...but fortunately, I had this old idea for a twelve-issue mini-series featuring The Atom kicking around in my head, so I thought “what the hell”. And this was cheating a bit, I guess. I mean I'd had the idea quite a long time ago. I had many, many lines of dialogue all figured out well in advance, so I was quite prepared to write them down.

But, screw it, I reasoned; I'm just playing around, so who cares? I glanced briefly at somebody's sample script on the web, got some beer from the liquor store, and sat down to type. And then a funny thing happened: I didn't get to use all my carefully-crafted lines after all. Everything up to the third-page title of my little story went according to the script in my head just fine, but then right after that I found I had noplace to go.

So I opened another beer!

What follows was the result of that beer. Readers please note that the JLA used here is from the Morrison period, and that I mostly picture them in my head as being drawn by that same great Porter/Dell team; and I hope it's obvious that everything written here is no longer at all compatible with DC continuity, which is why I throw it out there.

In fact you don't even know the half of how incompatible it is with current DC continuity!

Holy Mackeral, is it ever not compatible!

And so now...you've been warned. It's quite long. It's my first try. It's entirely likely that it may be a huge pain in the ass to slog through. It will be amateurish. You don't have to read it!

But if you're absolutely determined to read it anyway...

Then I guess I can't stop you.

So here it is:

...

...

...

...

PAGE ONE SPLASH

The Atom falls wildly, face first at the page. Behind him we see wild swirly inter-molecular Ditkoesque jazz going on, but Ray's face is calm, determined, as he reaches out for a strange spherical device that has apparently fallen from his grasp.

Ray: (capt.) Have you ever had a secret?

Ray: (capt.) I mean, a really big one?

PAGE TWO AND THREE SPLASH

Big view of crazy subatomic world as Ray tumbles through it, shrinking, trying to catch up to the sphere...he strobes through Steranko-like vertical panel divisions from left to right as he gets smaller and smaller, the little glinting speck always just out of reach.

Panel 1:

Ray: (capt.) When I was a young man, I discovered a secret. Right out of a clear blue sky.

Panel 2:

Ray: (capt.) And it changed my life.

Panel 3:

Ray: (capt.) At first, of course, I thought it was my secret to tell.

Ray: (capt.) Then, a little later on, I thought it was mine to keep.

Panel 4:

Ray: (capt.) It took me years to realize the truth. Which was, I didn't really keep the secret at all.

Panel 5:

Ray: (capt.) It kept me.

[TITLE: “IMPROVISATION”]

PAGE FOUR

Panel 1:

Ray catches up with the shiny globe and gloves it, removes a module from it and tucks it in his belt...this was how it was shrinking without him holding onto it.

Ray: (capt.) My name's Ray Palmer. I'm a scientist. Or at least, I used to be.

Ray: (tht) There. Managed to stop the runaway shrinking, anyway...

Panel 2:

He pulls the globe apart into a sort of open spherical cage, affixes it somehow to what looks like a fuzzy, glowing ball of light, so it's clamped around it like a football helmet.

Ray: (tht) Now, if this works like it's supposed to before the damn thing blows up...

Ray: Okay, Wally...I'm set. Do your stuff.

Panel 3:

Flash: (voice over communicator) Uh...yeah, okay. So do you just want me to, uh...?

Ray: Just do some kind of super-speed thing. It doesn't matter what. Anything that'll give me vibrations I can measure.

Flash: You know, Ray, like I said, I don't know if all this is really necessary. I mean, I could just tell you whatever you want to know about the speed force...

Ray: Wally...who's the Ph.D. here, anyway?

Panel 4:

Flash: Uh...well, that would be you, I guess.

Ray: So...?

Flash: So I guess I'll get started, then.

Ray: Great.

Panel 5:

The “atmosphere” around Ray starts to brighten up, flashes of yellow energy spitting everywhere as the speed force energy starts to flow. Particles rush into the crackle, and then finally the sphere zooms off into it too.

Ray: (capt.) I shouldn't really be sharp with Wally. Maybe strictly speaking he isn't a scientist like Barry was, but it isn't like being the Flash has nothing to do with physics. I mean, I happen to know Barry Allen's doctorate was in chemistry...

Panel 6:

Ray: (capt.) ...But when you can run zigzag patterns at the speed of light, you're pretty much a walking thought experiment in relativity anyway. So even Wally probably deserves an honorary master's degree in the subject.

Ray: (capt.) And it's not like I even know what I'm doing half the time, myself...

The light from Flash's speed has been getting brighter and brighter, and things around Ray more and more dynamic, like almost scary-dynamic, a Negative Zone-type thing. His body is silhouetted against the light, where the sphere's gone.

Ray: Okay, that's great, Wally. You can ease off, now.

Ray: Wally!

Ray: Wally!

PAGE FIVE

Panel 1:

Close up on Ray's face.

Ray: Oh, for God's sake...

Panel 2:

Pretty big horizontal panel: Ray dives into the maelstrom of speed energy, and grabs the sphere.

Ray: (capt.) ...In fact, to be honest, most of the time I'm just making it up as I go along.

Panel 3:

Still partly silhouetted against the Kirby dots, he unhooks the device from the particle it was attached to (which zooms off), and starts fiddling with the sphere's control panel one-handed, trying to upload his data...

Ray: (tht) Tricky, tricky...well, the uplink's working...datastream's a bit sluggish, though.

Panel 4:

...But it's starting to spit weird crackly static at him, and the energy of the speed force is still swirling all around him. Partial close-up as the energy sizzles around his ears...he's still not completely out of the hot zone, and it's getting hotter.

Ray: (tht) Although, what can I expect, right? All new technology...all new tolerances...

Flash: Uh, Ray?

Ray: (tht) Still, if I can just tweak it a little to handle this extra flux...probe can't last much longer before it...

Flash: Ray?

Panel 5:

Long horizontal panel: the probe explodes; Ray is sent flying.

Flash: Ray!

PAGE SIX

Panel 1:

Ray: (shakes it off) Wally, I thought I told you...

Flash: Look, Ray, you better get up here, man...

Panel 2:

Close up on Ray's face.

Ray: Why? What's going on?

Flash: Well, let's just say...

Panel 3: TWO-THIRDS SPLASH

Ray returns to visible height, riding Flash's shoulder, we see things through his eyes. Big fight scene in the Watchtower with the Morrison JLA and the fully space-armoured Weaponers of Qward. There's fire everywhere, especially a huge amount of it surrounding J'onn J'onnz, who is practically out of commission, and who has reverted to his original freaky pterodactyl-form. Green Lantern is behind a circular shield that is fraying at the edges under an attack by some kind of big yellow energy-beam. Batman is protecting Connor Hawke, who's shooting flame-retardant arrows into the fire. Flash is circling the attackers at high speed. Superman, Aquaman, and Wonder Woman are absent

Flash: ...We're having a fire drill.

PAGE SEVEN

Panel 1:

Ray: Who are these people?

Flash: Do they look like friends of mine? Ask Kyle!

Panel 2:

Ray: Right.

He jumps off Flash's shoulder...

Panel 3:

...And out into the path of a blast aimed at Green Lantern's faltering shield, shrinking as he does so, while in the background Flash steps into some kind of mine-type device or freeze-inertia ray or something. Long horizontal panel: we just see Ray's trajectory as he shrinks toward it, the Atom-effect symbol flaring up about two-thirds of the way along so we know he has just vanished into the subatomic. Despite the fight, it's almost a quiet scene, because since Ray's no longer visible there's no figure in the centre of it.

Ray: (capt.) No one ever notices me doing this, for some reason.

Ray: (capt.) Too bad. It's a good trick.

Panel 4:

Ray is shrinking right into the energy of the blast, feet first. It's like a river of swarmy yellow particles, like squash balls with spikes on them.

Ray: (capt.) I mean, why waste time guessing what your enemy's throwing at you, when you can just take a look?

Ray: (capt.) Why speculate, why theorize...

Panel 5:

Ray shrinks down small enough to land on one of the squash balls.

Ray: (tht) ...When you can just go and see?

Ray: (tht) Hmm...that's odd. Something coming from the “ground” here, like...

Ray: (tht) A humming noise?

Ray: (tht) Some kind of resonance pattern...and Green Lantern's ring isn't vulnerable to yellow anymore anyway...

Panel 6:

Ray jumps off the golf ball, gaining size as he flies upward through the “air”.

Ray: (tht) Of course! These aren't just particles...

PAGE EIGHT

Panel 1:

Ray expands out of the particle stream and over Green Lantern's quickly-fragmenting shield, to land first on his shoulder, before bouncing off and onto the wrist of his outstretched power-ring hand. Old-time DC art action!

Ray: (tht) ...They're machines!

Ray: Kyle!

Panel 2:

Close up on Green Lantern's face, breaking a sweat. Ray is in foreground, on his wrist.

GL: What up, Ray? Little busy here...

Ray: Uh-huh. What would you say if I told you this energy blast you think you're fighting is really a stream of billions of nanomachines designed to set up stress harmonics across your shield?

GL: What, really?

Ray: Really.

GL: Well, I guess I'd say...

Panel 3:

GL: WHOO-HOO!

Another big horizontal panel, this time incorporating a diagonal shot from in front and overhead: as Ray leaps away, GL turns his shield into a gong in the blink of an eye, and conjures up the guy from the J. Arthur Rank movies to strike it. Show his patented ridiculous imagination here: as the nanostream scatters into bits under the pressure of the gong's vibration, he also whips up a huge batch of Arabian concubines doing the Dance of the Seven Veils, green drummers surrounding them, and a squad of harem eunuchs with gigantic scimitars that attack his opponent. It's a whole B-movie in itself, pointlessly elaborate, lots of action.

GL: J. Arthur Rank presents me kicking your butt, Weaponer buddy!

Panel 4:

Ray grows to full size, lands on the ground next to Batman and Green Arrow.

Ray: So...what's going on?

Batman: The fire-suppression system's been disabled. Everything else is just a feint, to stop us from dealing with it.

GA: (firing arrows) Classic misdirection. Tie up Lantern and Flash with attacks while the fire spreads, and then when the oxygen's all eaten up...game over.

Panel 5:

Ray: Huh. Kind of a low-tech solution, though, isn't it?

Ray: So what about the rest of the Watchtower? Fire-free?

Batman: No idea.

GA: Uh...guys? I didn't exactly make a million of these chemical-foam arrows...

Panel 6:

Close-up of Batman's cowl and ear and eye, looking spooky.

Batman: We need J'onn. Now.

PAGE NINE

Panel 1:

Long horizontal panel, in which Ray is sitting atop one of GA's arrows, preparing to be shot. Connor holds the bow sideways, which is probably incorrect, but what the hell.

Ray: (capt.) Anyone will tell you that physics is a young man's game.

Ray: (capt.) Usually, if you haven't broken significant new ground in it by the time you're thirty, you never will.

Panel 2:

The arrow is loosed; Ray clings to its head.

Ray: (capt.) When I was in my early twenties, I broke ground so new that the rest of the world hasn't even started to catch up to it yet.

Ray: (capt.) And almost every day since then, I've discovered something else that builds on it. But, I can't tell anybody about it. What's more, there's no point in me even trying to.

Panel 3:

The arrow flies through a bank of fire; Ray shields his head.

Ray: (capt.) No one can reproduce my results. No one can review my work.

Ray: (capt.) I should be living in a mansion built entirely out of Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals by now, but I'm not.

Panel 4:

Ray leaps off the arrowhead and through the flames.

Ray: (capt.) Crazy world, isn't it? Where you can either be a scientist, or a superhero, but not both?

Panel 5:

Ray lands by J'onn, in the midst of the flames, at full size. Fishes around in his belt for the shrinking module he used on his probe earlier on.

Ray: (capt.) This is going to be tricky.

Panel 6:

Ray pulls out the shrinking module and sticks it on J'onn, programs it swiftly.

Ray: (capt.) But hey, it's all tricky.

Panel 7:

They shrink away in the Atom effect.

PAGE TEN

Panel 1:

In the Ditkoesque microverse, beyond reach of the flames. Ray “swims” over to J'onn.

Ray: (capt.) At this size, we're actually in between the photons that carry heat. So J'onn should start recovering almost right away.

J'onn: Uhnh...

Panel 2:

He removes the module.

Ray: (capt.) I've just barely figured out how to make this module shrink inorganic material without destroying it, so this shouldn't work at all...but as long as we can maintain physical contact, J'onn's Martian molecular structure should protect him, at least for a little while...

Panel 3:

Another long horizontal panel with diagonal view: more old-time DC action, man! We're looking up at Ray as he starts to grow. So does J'onn, but Ray stays big enough to hold J'onn in his hand.

Ray: (capt.) And, well...

Ray: (capt.) Maybe it's not quite science as we know it, but it gets the job done, and that's all that's important...

Panel 4:

Ray reaches normal size, pitches the still-growing J'onn over the flames.

Ray: (capt.) Because some things are worth all the Nobel Prizes in the world.

Panel 5:

J'onn is full-size, or very close to it, as he flies over the heads of the Weaponers, and somewhere past Batman and GA. Weaponers point up at J'onn, very alarmed he's free.

Weaponers: The Martian! The Martian!

PAGE ELEVEN

Panel 1:

Long horizontal panel: J'onn lies behind Batman and GA in a heap; they take dramatic, serious-as-hell defensive positions in front of him.

Batman: Back.

Panel 2:

J'onn's eye opens blearily, obviously still in pterodactyl mode.

Panel 3:

His eye changes to his normal quasi-human mode as he comes fully alert.

Panel 4:

Long horizontal panel: the Weaponers, staring at our heroes, suddenly freeze rigid as J'onn turns his telepathy on them off-panel. He addresses the others through his thoughts.

J'onn: (tht) Somewhat simplistic, these creatures.

J'onn: (tht) Lantern. Flash. We should evacuate.

J'onn: (tht) Immediately.

PAGE TWELVE

Panel 1:

Reasonably long horizontal panel: the JLA is on the lunar surface, protected by one of Green Lantern's constructs. Not a simple force-bubble, of course, but something more elaborate, like a Mexican beach hut bar, with attractive waitresses and tropical cocktails all in green. The figures of the JLA are in silhouette: nearby, a smaller green bubble holds trussed-up Weaponers to the lunar surface, also silhouetted. In the background, the Watchtower is depressurizing ostentatiously. What looks like a shooting star is in the sky, far away. Of course there's no such thing as a shooting star on the moon.

Batman: Aquaman set up an emergency oxygen-hydrogen splitting system in the reserve water tanks for just such a situation. It's only a temporary measure, though. We'll need to replenish our nitrogen/oxygen mix as soon as possible.

Batman: And the water, of course.

GL: I can do that as soon as you're all back inside. Shouldn't take more than ten minutes.

Flash: It took you twenty, the first time.

GL: I tend to pick stuff up.

Flash: Really, new girl? 'Cause from where I sit...

Panel 2:

J'onn interrupts, points to the shooting star.

J'onn: Look.

Panel 3:

Long horizontal panel: Superman streaks in from space.

J'onn: Superman.

Panel 4:

Reasonably long horizontal panel, again: a few seconds later. Superman is standing just outside GL's artificial bar environment, in the lunar vacuum, completely comfortable. Never mind how he manages to talk: he's Superman.

Superman: ...And that's it. So as soon as Arthur and Diana and I took care of the Weaponers...

Superman: ...Although there's something funny about that, they didn't quite act like Weaponers...

Superman: ...We tried to teleport up to the Watchtower, but got an error message saying it was an unsafe environment. And no word telepathically from J'onn, so...

Batman. Hm. It was...

GA: Planned. They weren't Weaponers.

Panel 5:

Just GL and GA.

GL: Dude, you don't even know the Weaponers!

GA: I don't have to. You do.

PAGE THIRTEEN

Panel 1: TRIPTYCH PART ONE

Batman in left foreground, Atom in near-left middle foreground, Superman beyond the green bubble in middle-right near-background.

Batman: He's right. It's too much of a...what did you call it, Atom?

Ray: A low-tech solution. Weird, for a bunch that prides themselves on their technological superiority...

Superman: Hmm. Yes, they usually rely on...

Panel 2: TRIPTYCH PART TWO; BUT DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE, AS IF ROTATING AROUND SCENE

GA: ...Tactics...

Flash: ...Instead of strategy. Right.

GL: (to Flash) Dude, now you're doing it?!

Flash: Doing what, grasshopper?

Panel 3: TRIPTYCH PART THREE; ROTATED OUT NOW TO SUPERMAN'S PERSPECTIVE – HE STANDS WITH CROSSED ARMS AS THE LUNAR SUNSET ARRIVES.

J'onn: We should get inside, now. Batman?

Batman: I agree.

Superman: Me, too. (So maybe he's a little cold, or tired of holding his breath, or something.)

Panel 4:

Long horizontal panel, again with the diagonal-from-above thing: inside the Watchtower, everyone is relaxing a little. Superman and Batman stroll off down a hallway off the main meeting room, deep in conversation (hey, it's not like it sounds...!), GL, Flash, and GA are goofing around at one end of the table, J'onn and Aquaman and Wonder Woman are conferring intensely around the other...meanwhile Ray floats above it all, close to us, notepad in hand in his Atom-chair, tapping his head with a light-pen.

Ray: (capt.) Some people do how, and some people do why. Usually, the superhero game is all about the action: high-speed detective work, high-speed engineering. In other words, problem-solving.

Ray: (capt.) But those are all hows. Whys take longer. For whys, you have to try to see problems that don't exist yet, problems that sometimes don't even really matter...

Ray: (capt.) The first thing that comes to my mind is a tracking device, for their unique anti-matter signature, but the fratboys are probably right. This isn't standard Weaponer behaviour.

Panel 5: ANOTHER TRIPTYCH, BUT SKINNY, ABOUT HALF NORMAL WIDTH

Superman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman fighting dimly-seen enemies on Earth...somehow we know this is Ray's imagination, based on what he overhears from one end of the table. In at least the last panel, the moon figures prominently, maybe over Superman's shoulder or something.

Ray: (capt.) No extra-durables on the moon, except for J'onn. No telepaths on the moon, except for J'onn.

Panel 6: ANOTHER TRIPTYCH, SLIGHTLY SKINNIER

J'onn immersed in flames, in pterodactyl mode. Batman and GA standing in smoke; GL and Flash caught by super-scientific weaponry.

Ray: (capt.) J'onn and fire – so easy to think, in the heat of the moment, that it's to cover their real attack...

Panel 7: ANOTHER YET MORE SKINNY TRIPTYCH

Lunar landscape, with flaming Watchtower in background. Lots of black, like symbolic darkening that tells us what would have happened had things gone wrong.

Ray: (capt.) When really the attack itself is the cover...

Ray: (capt.) But then there's the antimatter...

PAGE FOURTEEN

Panel 1:

Close-up on Ray in his chair, tapping his head with the pen, legs crossed, going into physics professor mode.

Ray: (capt.) And why antimatter, at all? Why the Weaponers?

Ray: (capt.) Why not something else?

Batman: (off-panel) Ray.

Panel 2:

Batman looking up at Ray.

Ray: Any new information?

Batman: Unsurprisingly, no. Our “Weaponers” were all conveniently teleported out before J'onn and I could finish interrogating them. Superman's gone to track the teleport signal to its source...

Ray: ...But you don't expect him to find anything.

Batman: Not really.

Panel 3:

Ray: You know, Bruce, the people we fight...

Batman: Yes?

Panel 4:

Reasonably long panel.

Ray: Well, they're not usually big on subtlety, are they? It's always superpower against superpower: whose power is the best, whose power beats whose. Even when they have a plan, the plan's all about the powers, ultimately...

Batman: Of course.

Ray: Because that's the point of it all, isn't it? The whole reason a super-villain is a super-villain is because he's a megalomaniac, too. So using his powers is the way he flexes his ego.

Batman: That's occurred to me.

Panel 5:

Ray: So given that...what kind of megalomaniac wants to use his powers to distract, instead of to defeat?

Batman: Isn't that obvious, Ray?

Ray: No. Should it be?

Panel 6:

Long horizontal panel: Batman talking while ghostly images of famous villains muralize themselves behind him...Luthor is in there, as well as R'as Al-Ghul, but most notably the Joker is at the right-hand side of the mural, as a kind of summation of Batman's point.

Batman: Well...in my experience the most dangerous madman is the kind that doesn't just want to defeat you, but convince you somehow. Which means he needs to impress you. With his cleverness, or his morality, or his ruthlessness...as long as you remain unconvinced of his superiority, he can't really win, because he can never really be the person he thinks he deserves to be unless he can get you to admit it to him...

Batman: So powers are immaterial, in that case. It may be a conflict, but it's not a competition, and that's why the most dangerous super-villain is the one without superpowers, because he has the most to prove...

PAGE FIFTEEN

Panel 1:

Ray: So...what's this one trying to prove?

Batman: (almost off-panel) At a guess?

Panel 2:

Again, the close-up of Batman's spooky cowl, eye, ear. Irony!

Batman: That we're ridiculous.

Panel 3:

Batman and Ray regard each other silently for a moment.

Panel 4:

Batman turns to go.

Ray: We're not, are we?

Batman: Actually, no. Maybe we should be, but we aren't.

Batman: What we are, is needed. And there's nothing ridiculous about that.

Panel 5:

...

Aaaaand...sorry, folks, that's as far as I got! I ran out of beer, you see, and then later I had to work on other stuff. And it was just an experiment, anyway. Very instructive, actually! But since it can never be a real script, I don't see any reason to turn it into one, so...

I suppose it's faintly possible that somebody out there wants to know how it ends. Well, as Buddy Baker was to say to Ray Palmer in about issue #4 of this imaginary series, "I'm not going to tell you how it ends." How it ends isn't the point! I post this because I'm curious about whether I did it right, that's all.

So...how'd I do? What's clumsy? What wouldn't work, and what would? Is this remotely similar to what they call “full script”, or was I writing Marvel-style? And most importantly, was this way, way, way too long? Because that's kind of when I stopped, when I realized it might be getting that way...

...

And that was around the point, dear reader, when I realized I wasn't being entirely straightforward with you, or with myself. Because I didn't want to know if I'd done it right. I knew I'd done it right. At least, right enough. But, it was still wrong.

Because I just can't have my voice say what Ray says to Kyle when he's perched on his wrist. As comic-booky a guy as I am, something in me rebels at it. It feels phony. It feels forced. It feels...

Silly.

And so now I have an even greater respect for those immensely skilled creators who can push past whatever phoniness they may be forced to deal with, and on into something good...and even less respect for those that don't see it, or don't care, and don't bother pushing past. This is a terrible razor's edge, this genre writing. It really is difficult; it really does take a special sort of mind. Looking back on this little experiment of mine, all I can think of is the bit from Countdown To Infinite Crisis (or whatever it was), where Blue Beetle confronts Shazam about the lightning bolt that killed Booster Gold. Because the first time I saw that dialogue was not in the context of a drawn story, but just as words on a page that someone had abstracted, and it sounded obnoxiously stupid to me. Something like:

"The lightning that killed your friend was not of magic. It only laid claim to be."

And Ladies and Gentlemen, I submit to you that that piece of dialogue, read on its own, is a brick that the whole building must founder on. It's bloody horrible. It's as clumsy as a man with three elbows. It's everything we don't want people to think of us when we say we read comics. It stinks. And yet in the context of a drawn page it doesn't seem horrible, though that's just exactly what it is.

And I, I've just realized, can't do that. I think I could just about manage a Stan Lee: "Gosh, these web-shooters I whipped up work great!", and I think I could manage a James Robinson: "Ultra, the Multi-Alien!" "Surprised, huh?", but somewhere along the line contemporary superhero comics writing for the most part seems to have fallen between those stools of naivete and irony that Lee and Robinson exemplify, and I don't think I've got the guts to help it up from where it lies. I never was embarrassed of my comics until I read that line, and then watched myself write a line just like it, but now - as the original post warned! - I am. And, possibly, you are too.

And, well, thank God Steve Gerber's writing the new Dr. Fate, is all I can say. Because make whatever remarks you want about those old Seventies pros, but they don't write clunky. Their dialogue never contrives to fall between those two stools, as mine did. Somehow they manage to stay realistic, no matter how ludicrous their subject.

Oh, and did I just write around and around a major point, without ever picking it up and pointing at it directly? My, my, how metatextual of me. Why I feel positively Morrisonesque...

Yes?

No?

You got all that, right?

Well, thankyou for that. For the catch. For everything. As Derrida says, you know: one can always write a letter, but sometimes the letter does not arrive...