"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - July 2o25

Previously, in Wuxtry...

[ Welcome BACK to the Continuity Comics Incoherence Crusade!

That's right:  MONTH TWO.  Buckle the fuck in. ]

Armor & The Silver Streak #1-8 (1984-1990) - "written" & "illustrated" by Neal Adams; dialogue by the son-in-law, Peter Stone; inks & professional polish by Rudy Nebres; guest-starring Bart Sears, Trevor Von Eeden, Brian Apthorp, and even Kelley Jones

This one is legendary.  It was supposed to be four issues.  "The Secret Origin of Armor & the Silver Streak", that is.  But, as it hit the stands, something kept... happening.  We'll address that in a moment.  Maybe; I might need more than a couple.

What's longer than a moment?  An interval?  That sounds nebulous enough for Continuity.

We'll address "The Secret Origin" in an interval.

What *I* want to address, up top, is how fuckin' goofy this sad sack of space opera is.  The alien designs are straight-up 70s, post Star Wars, full-on Barlowe's Field Guide To Extraterrestrials design wank.  There's nothing you could call 80s about any of it, unless you're talking about the character of Armor himself, kitted out head-to-toe with martial arts weapons that're almost entirely japanese in origin.  Whatever Neal's original intentions were when he debuted his "The New Heroes" portfolio, by the time he's paying a printer's bill, Armor's own series has become a full-fledged Sci-Fi cashgrab.

Cynical?  You say that like you've never read a Neal Adams comic.

There's nothing in "The New Heroes" portfolio to suggest The Silver Streak & Armor are brothers.  Apart from their shared name.  They became brothers, by the time they featured in Revengers #2, which (one assumes) was in production alongside Armor & the Silver Streak #1.  But it's hard to say?  Because a hallmark of Continuity is a tendency to burden a single title--  such as 'The Revengers'  --with the necessity of launching one flotilla after another of supporting titles.

Example: from Ms. Mystic we got Shadowhands, which would be reverse-engineered into Samuree, and Urth 4, sensibly re-trademarked as Earth 4.  Well, maybe that's a terrible example.  Almost sounds like Neal didn't quite have his shit finessed.  Whatever.  It was Pacific Comics.  Do over!

From Continuity Studios for real:  with the launch of the Zero Patrol, we got Megalith and Shaman.  Five page, self-contained backups.  Of the two, only Megalith's could be considered a legit push, since I don't for one damned second believe Neal saw commercial potential in Shaman; he spent the entirety of Continuity Comics' span as a publishing entity scrambling to discover a single practical use for the horsehair-mohawk-that-walks-like-a-man.  Shaman's not that dissimilar to Dr. Strange in that he isn't a compelling character, he's a hairstyle with a handwave function for unwieldy plot.

Typical.  In attempting to make a point, I'm drifting away from my actual point.  Okay.  Here:

From The Revengers flows Megalith, Armor & the Silver Streak, as well as the goddamned Hybrids; from Hybrids you get Valeria the She-Bat and (am I the only one fist-pumping?) Knighthawk.

Continuity's deck of characters is like an STD that never stops suppurating.  That's the point.

It's rude--  downright unfair, really  --for me to assume that I have any insight into what Neal's master plan was.  I do simply because there's little evidence to the contrary.  Armor & Silver Streak are brothers, we are told via omniscient narrator caption, and their parents are either abducted or dead...  Yet abducted-or-dead was also the fate of Jacqueline, a.k.a. Scarlet, a.k.a. the Scarlet Streak, so named because her hair has one.  Jacqueline did not exist in 'The New Heroes' portfolio, and feels like a very post-post-hoc addition to the team dynamics of The Revengers.  A stylin', hard-rocking, blade-wielding chick to leaven the all-dick energy of a makeshift team of make-do heroes.

(No, I have not forgotten about the honorary Revenger, Samuree.  But it would be easy to.)

Jacqueline a.k.a. Scarlet might even-- and it pains me to admit this, because it's giving undue credit to Peter Stone --be an invention of someone other than Neal.  As in, "Neal, did you forget about the sister in issue #1?" and Neal being like, "Whose sister?"  And then Peter pushed a character sheet bearing Kevin Nowlan's signature across the desk.

Pure supposition.  Flim-flam.  I don't have the foggiest, and neither do you.  That's the magic of these books.  The reader looks at them and has to inquire why?  Why is there a banner atop every Continuity title strictly to recycle the logo of the character(s) featured in any given ish?  Why does Armor #1 have that little i.p. push at the very top for ARMOR & THE SILVER STREAK, directly atop Armor's chunk-as-fuck logo?  Why did The Silver Streak cease to receive that redundant li'l push on the very title that contains his Secret Origin, with issue #5?  Why was his name stripped from the covers, despite the fact that every issue of "The Secret Origin of Armor & the Silver Streak" maintains a splash-page appearance of his dopey-ass, Ice Capades-looking logo?

The answer would seem to be popularity.  Nobody ever wanted The Silver Streak, nobody thought he'd make a keen toy, nobody cared about his confusing (& dubious) family relationship(s), nobody even cared to ask why he's a straight-haired Cali blonde while his brother's all brunette & curly.  All anyone knows is Neal insisted.  If you do Armor, the Silver Streak must ride along.

So we all rode bitch, on a Secret Origin of initially four parts that spiraled off into...  what, ten installments?

This could have been understandable, if Jacques Keaton (a.k.a. Silver Streak) had equal time in his own Secret Origin.  That's two whole characters who need explaining!  But Jacques was fated never to be a main character.  The main character is Jack Keaton (Armor).  If Jack loses a hand like Luke Skywalker, Jacques will be there to demonstrate how both his mitts detach.  If Jack loses an eye and has it replaced by a ruby thoughtfully donated by a space computer, Jacques will be there to gawk, awkwardly, and the words To Be Continued will be appended to the base of the page, and then we won't find out any more about The Secret Origin of Armor & That Lesser Character for at least three years, while Neal hustles together some fill-in issues, all the while making big loud promises to draw the epic conclusion.

Hey, let me be fair.  Maybe Neal did.  I haven't gotten to issues 11-13 yet.

You want me to talk about something else now, don't you?

Tough.

Armor #9-13 (1991-1992) written by blabbadyblurfenhurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr1r1r1NO CARRIER

[ ed. note:  we may be experiencing difficulties.  not technical ones.  technically not difficulties at all.  just, coping.  these comics are a lot to cope with!  holy nutsweat, batdog ] 

I SAID, written by Peter Stone, pencilled by Frank Springer & Brian Apthorp; inked by Rudy Nebres and STAN DRAKE, also, Ken Bruznenak, what're you doin' here?  i thought you were at DC...  coloured by John Floyd, Eva Grindberg, & David Marcus, you a baller

Let's get the compliments out of the way.  The covers stop sucking once Nowlan walks on.  The cover design is finally, rationally, refined & the fonts modernized, somewhat.  The books start to look GOOD, with an obvious debt to Giffen, McGuire & Hughes' JLA / with maybe a side helping of Love & Rockets.  Like I'm saying these are actual contenders for GOOD COVERS, something this series has seriously been lacking.  And I'm not even getting to sucking the dicks I want to suck because I have to complain about the covers, and the content, of issues #9-10.  The covers are terrible because Neal made these the covers:  the covers are terrible because there are gratuitous clowns.  Now mind you the clowns are all being violently dispatched by young Jack Keaton, Armor, a Ten among galactic gladiators, a teenager with an alien, artificial hand, and an alien internet uplinked crystal in his right eye socket:  these clowns don't have a chance.  In theory this cover is great, perhaps even one of the greatest covers Neal Adams has ever had a hand in: it's certainly dynamic as a dervish dance, and all the central figurework is done by My Man, Kevin Nowlan, so we're talking carnage.  Clowns cowering in fear for their lives.  Clowns strung up and left to discharge their bowels one last dark time.  It's not a pretty scene.  So in theory this cover should be great!

But then Neal follows it up with some weird hacked-out last minute shit where Armor is being clockwork oranged by Kracky The Klown, who is all up in the comic reader's grill with his greasepainted melon skull leering out, shouting--  Neal Adam's abominable hand-lettered yakking crammed unpleasantly into every square inch of negative space to either side of our central figures of Armor, who's literally having his eyeballs forcibly exposed, & Kracky, shouting  --WELCOME TO KRACKY'S KRACK HOUSE!  It's All It's Kracked Up To Be!

This has the reverse effect intended, of making me want to read it.  In fact it makes me hate the previous cover, for having ever allowed clowns into my life.  I am sad and alone and it was Neal Adams who made me this way.  I want to repent of my sins.  I can't live with my conscience like a dog pillow saturated with piss.  This comic is clown scabies, and it has retroactively infected the previous cover with clown scabies.  I bought these, god damn my soul.  I LET CLOWNS INVEIGLE MY LIBRARY'S PROSTATE

Ahem.

What I am saying there are a couple of things we regret, before the covers actually show up to throw down on the newsstands alongside Kevin McGuire & Adam Hughes, or Los Bros.

The comic goes for it, in the final stretch.  We just had to get past a story starring way the fuck too much Silver Streak, learning he has the superpower of eavesdropping through a fucking window, getting his ass kicked by clowns.  Fuckin' clowns clowned the fuck all over Silver Streak and Armor, then engaged in wacky heavy-handed messaging hijinx about the hyporcisy of the Reagan era's War On Drugs, all the while krackin' wise about how the people selling the drugs are also running the rehab clinics, mannn.  And I'm pretty sure Kracky gives a cop a tugjob, on teevee, in the final three pages of the book.  I mean these issues really haul back and kick my will to live square in the nuts.

But the last three are really good looking books.  Damned good art, great colouring, solid package.  It's like the comic it was always meant to be...  for the last three issues, before the series got eaten by Neal Adams' Event Crisis Overdose.

Yeah.  But first:

[ next up: MEGALITH'S GROIN! ]

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - June 2o25

Previously, in Wuxtry...

[ Welcome to the Continuity Comics Incoherence Crusade! ]

Echo of FuturePast #1-9 (1982-84) - written & illustrated by Various + Neal Adams

Y'know what I've never noticed in a comix anthology before?  Excess language in the indicia to the effect that "Any similarities to real people and places in fiction AND SEMI-FICTION is purely co-incidental."

I have a wealth of questions.  Like:  Semi-fiction?  Is that like semi-erect?

Also:  Am I going to regret this?  Or only semi-regret it?

Yeah, this is a weird way to open up criticisms of an anthology comic.  Who reads an indicia?  

Us 80s babies, that's who.  In the 80s, almost every publisher who wasn't DC or Marvel would stuff some tiny print gag into the publisher's legalese-- if it was an indy or underground work, and you were the sort of nerd who reads ingredients lists on cereal boxes, there was a wealth of dopey jokes to be discovered.  Rip-Off Press, Strawberry Jam Comics, even Fantagraphics loved to make tiny snark in their tiny legal text.  

Now I'm not suggesting Neal Adams knew how to make jokes...  But it seemed like there were maybe two too many words in the indicia, so I gave it a scan.  Whereupon I hit the wholly needless qualifier, "AND SEMI-FICTION" and was like, doubleyou tee eff, Neal.  Like, dude had to pay a typesetter to lay out the indicia, every issue.  He could have shaved Nths of a penny off every ish if he'd just trimmed that sub-clause.  But he made his people put it in.  It's on every issue of Echoes-- and having verified that lunacy, I had to doublecheck Megalith™, Ms. Mystic™, Armor™ & Silver Streak™, etc.

Every book, every box of legal text, that meaningless, superfluous modifier:  "AND SEMI-FICTION".

Colour me semi-incredulous.  Surely a lawyer didn't tell Adams he would be in a hot cauldron of hot lawsuits if he didn't CYA each & every issue of Continuity Comics.  Surely that was Neal Adams' own insistence.  But why...?  I haven't the foggiest as to why.  Like did Neal think, "At some point my hollow earth obsession will be revealed, exposing Neal 'Man-Bat' Adams as a secret curator of The Truly Truthiest Truths, so let's dub this Serialized Graphic Entertainment for the Mature Readers crowd a piece of SEMI-FICTION!  After all, I'm going to make a wild pitch to school systems & parents & sketchy educators everywhere to provide kids with Continuity Comics™, with my boy Megalith™ perched astride a weight bench, hawking Continuity Comics™ as an aid to literacy!"  Possibly maybe.

Like the typesetting bill for the house ads in these books must have been some national debt shit, already.  Every character had a ™ hanging off their name like the metafictional equivalent of a skin-tag.  What's an extra two words in the indicia?

Hey, kids, comics!  This anthology is notable for, let's be charitable, two items.

First is Larry Hama & Michael Golden's 'Bucky O'Hare', the best funny-animal breakout of genre-blending violence in the 80s since Eastman & Laird.  Some of the first few pages of art are maybe too busy, but past that first instalment Michael Golden is on goddamned fire.  There's not one single part of one single page that feels phoned-in.  This is committed comix.  I'm not precisely sure how this piece of quality wound up in Continuity's shop, but I'm guessing Hama & Adams had a mutually beneficial agreement.  So, a Get all around.  Bucky O'Hare™ had more longevity in licensing terms than Captain Power™, that's for goddamned certain...

Did I get a single Bucky O'Hare toy for christmas?  Hells naw.  Did I ever see the cartoon?  Never.  Did I receive every poorly-articulated Captain Power figure, and accessory, and VHS cassette?  Confoundingly, yes.  My parents were poor anti-war hippy-dippy refugees from the 60s, stranded in Reagan's america, so they braved the malls and bought the latest military-entertainment fad in its entirety for their addled, barely-literate crotchspawn.

So the only time I saw Bucky O'Hare was in the spinny rack, if I could reach high enough to pluck Echo of Futurepast.  These comix were weirdly reactionary in a way that only makes sense if you knew Larry Hama was the kind of Marvel employee who'd bring an uzi to work in his suitcase.  Like, Bucky O'Hare isn't written for kids in the slightest.  It's all down to Michael Golden's lines & design, then as now.  That's the glory, that's the gold.  So it's good to finally get to read this stuff, forty-odd years late.  I mean, it's really good.  For a kid's comic not-for-kids.

But--  you may ask, though I'll never know, interactivity online being what it is  --what's the SECOND notable item in this anthology, of which I have already said several small mountains of nothing?

Why, it's Neal Adams.  Anybody who knows Continuity knows it's all the Neal Adams show.  Neal's the humble household name behind Man-Bat, and Ra's Ah Ghul, and Deadman, and Green Arrow's teenage sidekick Speedy's dramatic drug addiction, and Superman versus Muhammad Ali!  Neal's the ad hack/genius whose character design skills are renowned throughout the industry, and whose pyrotechnic reputation is only slightly dampened by his fragmentary & inscrutably leaden touch with dialogue!  If you don't know who Neal Adams is, you're just not paying attention to Neal Adams!!!

So:  the second notable item is...  some recycled Neal Adams.  Sometime in the late 70s / early 80s, Neal made a comic to go with a record.  It was a thing everybody did back then:  make a book to go with a record.  In this instance, it was a Frankenstein / Dracula / Wolfman cash-in.  Neal being Neal, he never threw anything aside, so when his Frankenstein / Dracula / Wolfman comic didn't make it to the masses--  I think the publisher, Power Records, either dropped the project, or it folded  --he opted to palette-swap some details in his Universal Monsters rip-off to prevent being sued.  Dracula ends up blonde with mutton chops & wears a bright orange suit with a skyblue cape.  Frankenstein's monster is balding and... Frankenstein's simp nephew inherited him?  And the wolfman, in a delicious twist, is a standard model hammer horror victim, a pneumatically buxom blonde chick who faints a lot.

None of this is played for laughs, exactly.  It's all played as straight as anything in a Neal Adams comic-- which is to say, as dialed up and tweaked out as any piece of exploitation cinema.

Bucky O'Hare & Neal Adams' Frankenstein are the twin pillars of Echo of Futurepast, appearing in half the issues of the anthology's too-brief run.  There are other draws:  Alex "godmode" Toth & Jordi Bernet doing 'Torpedo' in Full Colour (swoon); and some fashionably dystopian euro-comix like 'The Damned City'.  But these late-in-the-day side acts don't draw a crowd, presumably due to the anthology's other headliners.  Readers never wanted Arthur Suydam doing grossout sex comedy riffs with warty giants-- I mean, ugh! --or Jean Teulé's 'Virus', or Lindley Farley's 'Tippy-Toe Jones'.  Look 'em up for yourself.  Tell me I'm wrong.

Nine issues in two years, annnnd curtain.  Neal opts out of the anthology game in favour of Continuity going fulltime superhero drek.

Echo... is never quite as interesting an anthology as Marvel's Epic mag was, and it's never as entertainingly scattershot as Metal Hurlant-- even though Echoes is thirstier'n either one!  Ultimately Echo is unabashedly Neal, humblebragging his personal tastes & swingin' dick industry connections, straining and failing to compete with reputable, sexier anthologies.

It's a goddamned mess, and it ended too soon, and I'm still trying to figure it out.  Like childhood, rilly.

Cinco por Infinito! a.k.a. Neal Adams' Esteban Maroto's The Zero Patrol #1-5 (1968-70/1984-89) - created & written & illustrated by Esteban Maroto; remixed by Neal Adams; coloured by Polly Law, Sherri Wolfgang, Paul Mounts & Eva Grindberg

These are really great.  Neal doesn't fuck with the art much on the first couple issues.  In the main his contributions are in the re-editing / dialogue and the covers--  the covers are ALL great examples of Adams own skills as an action illustrator.  Overall he doesn't even manage to dumb the story down much, aside from the humour, which is probably best described as used car dealer wit.

Of course there's your usual groovy barbarian space princess stuff, Flash Gordon flavoured romps on worlds that look impatient for Barbarella.  That Adams picked this to translate is indicative of his tastes & personality on multiple levels.  It's a strikingly horny comic full of swinging chicks who don't believe in bras, and square-jawed men of action (with the token scruffy longhair), and it's very, very Op Art / Visual Appeal.  I'm sure the original strip is sexist as hell:  it was the 60s.  Being recycled sci-fi from the 60s meant the retro aesthetic only enhanced the psychedelic, chiaroscuro inkstyle, which owes no small debt to Alberto Breccia.  I mean it's Good Shit:  Neal knows it's good shit, and he can't do much to fuck it up, so he doesn't!  The colourists he selected are all damned fine; a particular standout who I've never heard of before is Polly Law, who does some sublime watercolour & airbrush work that ranks with the palette of Jordie Bellaire.

As I continue with this thing I'd sincerely like to learn more about the women working in the colouring dept of Continuity Comics.  During research I stumbled across an assertion from Trevor von Eeden (who did a little time on most of the major titles:  Megalith, Toyboy, Ms. Mystic, Urth 4) to the effect that Lynn Varley started her colouring career at Continuity, as one of their staff.  Being a colourist at Continuity in the earliest days meant the individual was a girlfriend of some poor schmuck stuck drawing Neal's capeshit.  That was the relationship between von Eeden & Varley, until Frank Miller skulked in, twirling his weasel mustache, to spirit Varley away to slave over cels of Ronin & The Dark Knight Returns.  The fink!  I guess Miller felt mighty white about it because later he offered Eeden a job drawing some stuff, but Eeden was like "I'm good."

Not a lick of the above says anything about the WORK these women were accomplishing, keeping Continuity coloured-- one of the principle reasons I'm pursuing this project is to study the hand colouring on these books, as Continuity was producing some of the best-looking books on the racks,  starting here & carrying on throughout Echo of Futurepast.  It's a damned shame there's so little written about the production end of these comix, beyond the catty mockery Continuity received at the hands of Brian Hibbs & The Comics Journal.  There's got to be a ton of good backstage chatter about who inked what when, and under what deadline conditions...!

Anyhoo:  Zero Patrol was a cool book, and I didn't expect it.  I think Neal was using it to prove colour printing tech for furture books, like Megalith & Shaman, both of which were being pimped with backup comix drawn by crazyman Adams hisself.  Groovy all around.

Revengers™ featuring Megalith,™ Armor™ & the Silver Streak™ #1-4 (1984-85) - written & illustrated by Neal Adams & probably two or three of his flying monkeys

It hits different, this book, this year.

Not because there's any substantive difference between now & the last time I browsed--  last year.

As my husband will cheerily confirm, it's still an ugly book.  The art is ugly.  The lettering is kludge incarnate.  And the syntax of the dialogue could splode the tread on a halftrack like a landmine, if you leaned a smidge too hard.  These are comix that are hard to love.

For instance:  issue one of 'Revengers™ featuring Megalith™' is, near as I can figure, 100% Megalith™ #1.  It's actually your meat & potatoes issue number one origin ish.  About the only things that don't get explained are:  (1) where Joe Majurac's stylin'-ass costume came from, between panels, and (2) why the Canadian military looks exactly like the United States military.  My answer to both?  Cutbacks.

Revengers™ featuring Megalith™ #2 gets re-titled Revengers™ featuring Megalith,™ Armor™ & the Silver Streak™', because Neal is a pressure cooker of marketable ideas which must be fussily established and huffily hustled past-- unless you're talking about the secret origins of Armor™ and the Silver Streak™, in which case be prepared to spend 7 grimly distracted issues learning about the ins-and-outs (mostly outs) of gladitorial space slavery, educational betterment torture & superheroic bodily mutilation body modification.  That little publishing epic-- which never saw completion, by the byeeeee --precedes both Megalith™ & the Revengers™ doing their saucy little strut down the catwalk of Hot Titles.

But am I reading this shit strictly chronologically?  Fuck to the naw, I like it raw.  Of all Continuity's dumbass books, the only one I actually dug was Megalith.  It's a good name, both for the character & the comic.  Nothing to improve upon.  I like the Megalith name so much, I'm going to cold stop the ™ schtick, because it's a cheap, pointless shot to take.  Like, Megalith is simply Flex Mentallo, minus Grant Morrison's metatextual wit.  He's so strong he bends reality & physics, and he does it for his mom & dad, whose first names I'm not sure we ever learned before their sorrowful but essential disappearance from continuity.

That is to say, Continuity Comics continuity.

Let me explain some Continuity Comics continuity:

Technically Megalith's parents aren't in issue #2.  A space alien pretends to be his mom, only to be revealed & swiftly vanquished by the arrival of Jack & Jacques, those unlucky Canadian-born alien abductees turned space gladiators, who somehow returned to earth between issue #7 of Armor™ & issue #2 of Revengers™-not-Megalith's-official-solo-title.  Which only sounds confusing, if you're paying attention to publication dates, since Armor #7 was published in 1990, and Revengers #2 was 1985.  And really, what could be confusing about that?  Especially with issue #3 opening in media res with some toyetic villainy that takes a third of the ish to establish, before cutting back to the scene of the cliffhanger that concluded last ish-- a cut which, helpfully, reminds the reader that the carnage Megalith & his fresh besties are standing in was the remains of an alien invasion from... the previous year?

Why it's important to know that Joe Majurac's parents' farm was destroyed by an alien invasion is never quite made clear, since young Megalith left the farm at 13, and didn't return until he was 17, by which time our glorious Growing Boy looks an extremely non-GMO hormone-fed thirty-two.

All this hand-waving mystery is even further undercut by the fact that, for all the shapeshifting, mind-controlling aliens flitting the fuck around the Canadian border, extraterrestrials aren't actually big players in the Continuity realm.  Nuclear-powered wizards, vile capitalist stooges and prehistoric monsters from the hollow core of the expanding earth:  that's where all the actual accursed dick energy in Continuity's continuity stems from.  I'm sure it's all perfectly comprehensible if one reads the 'Deathwatch 2,000™' and 'The Rise of Magic™' crossovers chronologically.  Right, Neal Adams' impoverished ghost?

"...."

Don't answer too fast, you ectoplasmic crank.

Annnnnnyway, yeah.  Megalith has a bitching costume, and a positive attitude, and barely any tragic backstory.  He can catch bullets barehanded and HURL THEM BACK WITH PENETRATING FORCE, he can flex so hard his muscles can stop projectiles from completely rupturing organs (but they'll still break skin), he's so strong he can deadlift himself free of gravity, and he really loves his poor farmer parents who gave him great investment advice while he was being prison-trained by sneaky krauts & commies to compete in an olympics.  He has a secret mountain base, he wears white pants, and they never get dirty!  He's basically the best, and I'm really hoping one day he'll figure out where his parents went or at least why that busty zip-a-tone whore Ms. Mystic™ gaslit him into thinking they were dead in issue 0 of 'Megalith-just-Megalith' vol. 2 (a.k.a. 'Deathwatch 2,000™' chapter 1).

Like I say.  Megalith hits different.  Especially when you've found enough issues to read a proper chunk, which wasn't a thing that happened where I grew up.  These books published on such an inconsistent schedule that you couldn't FIND four sequential issues, let alone piece out that there's no story.  Shit just happens in these books.  If you're a fan of cause-and-effect, then reading Continuity is like falling down a manhole only to wake up in the mushroom kingdom with a turtle twerking on your face.

Hey.  Kid.  Comics!

Samuree: Year One #1-9 (1987-91) - written by Neal Adams, Elliot Maggin, and Peter Stone (mostly Peter Stone); illustrated by (deep breath!) Neal Adams, Mark Beachum, Rodney Ramos, Mark Texeria, Dave Hoover, and Steve Geiger (who you must remember as the talent who brought the classic Marvel graphic novella Sectaurs® to four-coloured life)

I want to know why Tom Savini is featured so prominently in these.

The Revengers™ crossover is whatever.  I guess Samuree is an honorary Revenger™?  I mean, The Revengers™ needed a chick to round things out, and it wasn't like Jacqueline had her own book.  She didn't even have a superhero name, much less a ™ to attach to one.  She barely had a costume!  She had some sorta, uh, space armor, and some punky disco clothes, whenever she wasn't just lounging around the house with her step-brothers in violet lingerie.  It looked like more of a pain to draw than Armor's armor-- Jacqueline's space armor, not her violet onesie.  Shee had these Krull-style swastika-shaped blades, as well, which can't have been even remotely weird for any Crusty Bunker working on these books...

Point is, move over Jack & Jacques' sister: Samuree is the onesie fans remember!  She had a good old fashioned all-american katana, and a sai, and a headband, and thigh-high leather boots with stilleto heels, and no room for underwear.  Like she is vacu-sealed into those jazzercise togs, you don't even know.

So.  There's Tom Savini in four issues of this, mostly one-panel cameos, heavily photoreferenced-- except for the one panel that's clearly a touched-up xerox  --and Neal, as we've already established, is really anal about legal text.  Like there's a whole "resemblance to persons fictional & semi-fictional" thing in the indicia, remember?  Since Tom Savini is a wholly non-fictional entity, I have to assume Neal, at some sci-fantasy convention just dripping with nioctine, made contact with the man.

Which elicits a vivid skit in my mind of Savini reeling back from a frothy Neal, jabbering a mile-a-minute in his syntactically-challenged runon way:  "Heyja evah read 'Superman versus Muhammad Ali'?  Nobody was doing photorealism in comix before me!  I could make you a household name.  Y'like ninjitsu?  Those turtle boys are making a killing!  Only problem is, Eastman & Laird, there's no SEX in that book!  Now lookit," [shoving a hardcover, spiral-bound, black leather portfolio into Savini's hands, the Continuity Comics logo glinting silver & gunmetal blue; Neal promptly yanks the portfolio out of Savini's hands before he can look inside] "Lookit, a lady ninja!  Nobody's ever done that!  Right?  Samuree:  Mistress of the Martial Arts, trademark, what a humdinger, hanh?  Truly!  A title that zips!  You're in movies, right?  Sure!  Kids love zombies.  Who doesn't love movies?  I'm alllll about the kids.  Just between you me and the open bar, Samuree has cameltoe like you only see in magazines held with one hand!  Tom, earnestly, I think you'd be great in this book, sincerely:  Samuree, co-starring Tom Savini, god of grossout!  All you've gotta do's sign this release says you're semi-fictional and we could print tomorrow..."

What, the story?  I think Tom Savini is at this dinner, and then zombies in gimp suits show up and ruin the evening, and then the Revengers bop in right as Samuree is doing some ninja splits, subduing armed guards with her vagina, how all-american superheroic masters of the martial arts do.  Then Samuree has a flashback to being a blonde orphan on Epstein's an island, and I guess some PTSD really flips her shit out because then she fights the Revengers?

Hold on, I got to hit this blunt.  FFFFFFFFPPPPPPpppppp shiiiiiiiiiiit yes.  Comix, bruh.

Anyway.  Tom Savini is in these.  I wonder if Adams cut him a cheque.

The Rise of Magic™: Shaman™ #O (1993) - written by Neal Adams (with a 5 page intro) & illustrated by artgod Alex Niño

It's 16 pages, I hear.  A promotional only piece.

The deadass-end of Continuity Comics, this book was.  Shaman was introduced in Neal's legendary Continuity Portfolio®.  [ed. note:  Last observed in Tom Savini's corn syrup & spirit gum spackled hands, above, in 1978.]  Shaman™ made his official entry into print with Zero Patrol #3, in 1984.  He'd show up anytime Neal wanted a Doctor Strange analogue to do some wiggy, gimmicky, fourth-wall-breaking shit on the page.  There was absolutely nada demand for him, except from his creator.

Now, it seems, there is.  Or at least Alex Niño's fully-painted art.  I've tried to order this book twice already, and both sellers flaked.  One couldn't find it in their stock-- at which point I'm like cool listing, bro.  The second seller was some n00b with a storefront of wack trading cards & a meagre handful of comix they bought back when they thought they were "into" comic books; that scenester has apparently forgotten they even HAVE an ebay booth, so they haven't gotten back to me about cancelling my order, three days later.

Third time's the charm!  Maybe!  I've ordered it again, alongside the non-Revengers Megalith™ #1 by Mark Texeria, and a couple issues for filling in holes in my run of Armor™ & the Silver Streak™ (& their oft-forgotten foster sister, Scarlet™).  So who knows, maybe I'll re-write this "review" and fill in some vital details regarding Shaman™'s role in fighting off (em kcuf) Cigam K'Calb™, dog ot reaws i, in The Rise of Magic™--

But fuck me backwards, I still don't understand Shaman™'s role in CyberRad™'s entry to The Deathwatch 2,000™ because of how Shaman talks about it:  "Strewth, the Deathwatch 2,000 is launched upon us, like flaming gobbets of semen fired from the ululating urethra of Dagon.  Today we feast upon meteor bukkake, my brothers!"

Seriously, that's how he talks.  I'm not making fun.  I don't have to read this book to know that.  Zero Patrol #3, his first words are BY THE BALLS OF DAGON.  When he opens CyberRad vol. 2 #2, guess what he's saying?  BY THE BALLS OF DAGON.  Neal has a hard-on for the balls of Dagon, he's not letting an appearance of Shaman go past without his probably-actually-trademarked catchphrase.

CyberRad™ wasn't exactly the title to introduce a magickal-mystical badass of Shaman™'s stature, and that's actually where the Big Push to promote this z-tier apocalyptiwizard with his biker 'stache began-- but hell if I understand the first thing about either of these sprawling line-wide "crossovers".  Because our three-body-problematized Shaman is simultaneously giving astral mouth-to-mouth to Ms. Mystic--  who seems to need a hell of a lot of rescuing in her own book, if you'll pardon the editorial aside  --at the same time as he's literally tearing CyberRad loose from his own storyline, where everybody's favourite 80s teenage cyborg is in the middle of being dissected in a lab...!! 

All I actually know is those two crossovers ATE THE ENTIRE PUBLISHING LINE, and the print runs were so stupidly vast that either Deathwatch 2,000™ or The Rise of Magic™ are usually the very first thing one finds in back issue cheapo bins.  But you never find ALL of them in quarter boxes.  Leaving the weird collector with what feels like the Schrodinger's catbox of comix: this vast litter of not-dead, not-alive, half-collapsed waveforms of i.p.s, flailing as their entire printrun ends in bankruptcy.  It's a Pompeii in print form, and I'm looking at it.

At some point in this dumb fuckin' project I will have enough of either Deathwatch, 2,000 or The Rise of Magic, or both, to be able to sit down & take notes--  a businessman who cosplays as a Dragon™ from the expanding hollow earth® tries to dick Megalith™ down, but the Revengers break it up, then some demon crap happens, like who gives a shit what the reasons are, this is a universe where nuclear power is the exact same thing as witchcraft, i am NOT kidding

...But! For now the crossovers loom at the shallowest topmost ridge of this archeological dig, whereas I've dug straight down [to 1982, Pacific Comics ((requiescat in pace)) & the dodgy origins of Ms. Mystic™] and am now working a broad spiral back up, like some sort of mole with a lesion on its temporal lobe in Minecraft--  a game I have never played, only studied, over my sexy husband's shoulder, much as I have never read Shaman #0, having only discovered it on The eBays, on The Interwebz.

Which overall says a fuck of a lot more about Neal Adams' marketing prowess than I could ever possibly document with my feeble bloggery-pokery.

Have I mentioned Peter Stone, the "writer", credited throughout these books as a sort of pigeonshit-streaked bulletproof windshield for Neal Adams' ego, has been recently promoting the Continuity Character stable?  Like he was doing a lot of hype & press for Neal, in memorium, supposedly, but from an armchair perspective it sure sounded like promotion for his substack.

My vapourwave sense is tingling.  Is Shaman, somewhere, yet alive?

BY THE BALLS OF DAGON, MORE BUKKAKE!!!

[ next up, Jason Kriter: Toyboy™, guest-starring Trevor von Eeden, & the ever-popular CyberRad™, introducing the hyperpenciled stylings of one Richard Bennett, badass latecomer to the Image Comics stable & later, Wildstorm Studios.  But first I have to ignore the dosages on this bottle of sleeping pills... ]

dream - o52525: gift from out of time

A day trip back home.  The old homestead has been bulldozed, dust still settling.  None of the libraries have survived.  My grandparents' house, altogether gone.  The tiny pond, filled in; the towering magnolias in the front yard, vanished, the bases of their stumps scorched out of the earth.  Back at the campo sancto, the family land, there's some vestiges of the past-- the quonset hut I helped my parents erect remains due to the concrete foundations, but the wooden ends of the vast, corrugated steel drum have been burnt out.

Despite these minor erasures, the land itself is rich, verdant, flowering.  I note the freshly turned clay at the edges of our old dirt roads, the evidence that the bulldozers have been here, too.  The barn still stands, but it's completely vacant & coalblack within.  The clean, subtle sweet scent of dogwood, clustered by the rotted pens to either side, their bleached paper blossoms with punched-tab leaves trembling in the breeze.  The land has never seemed so vacant, nor at ease.

In what remains of the trailer, some piles of old books.  The front porch remains level, but the interior of the trailer is as buckled by collapse as the last time I saw it, fetid with the scent of black mold, my mother's collection of vinyl fallen forward into the pit in the floor, every gatefold sleeve sick with mildew.  I remain on the porch, at the threshold, uncertain.  Turning to the Bally 'Old Chicago' pinball machine to the left of the washer & dryer, I thumb through the books stacked on the glass.  The top volume is a collection of E.C. Segar's non-Popeye cartooning, something I've never seen before.  Tucking it underneath my arm, I step off the porch...

Tempus fugit, and I'm seating myself at a table with Rob James, mom's best friend from Anniston high school.  His Lennon frames glint as he nods hi, and he peers with interest at the threadbare canvas cover of the Segar book as I slide it over.  A forgotten part of mom's collection, it seems.  We both appreciate the clean bubbly arcs of Segar's pen, the pages upon pages of warmup sketches & practice lines, and I ask him if he likes it.  He says he does, so I say, "Merry Christmas."  Rob looks good, not the slightest indication of M.S.; no tremors, no hesitancy in his hands; and he smiles with genuine affection, the radiance of his appreciation sweeping in an upward arc from the art on the page to my adult stranger's face, like a sunset in reverse.  "Thank you," he says.

I do not tell him he's welcome, for the dead are always welcome here.

radio melltfaace [playlist] o52325

mick jagger - invocation of my demon brother

mount vernon arts lab - the black drop

rachel's - some things never happen

sbwy - broadcast

cousin silas & glove of bones - nightjar blues

new york rivals - coup d'etat [circle jerks]

ryuichi sakamoto & alva noto - duoon

carter burwell - blood simpler

oni sakti - don't do anything (i wouldn't do) [angelo badalamenti]

do say make think - winter hymn winter hymn winter hymn

doppdopp & minayeva - lipstick [sbwy remix]

scott walker - nite flights

joan bibilioni - doble volta

graeme revell - love theme

gil scott-heron - new york is killing me [chris cunningham remix]

promiseland: struggling w/ omniscient skies

UFOs.  Another aura in background radiation, growing up.   UFOs were everpresent.  Not an issue of OMNI mag passed without some perversely sexualized mention of alien abduction; my school's book fairs were littered with baby UFOlogist pulp; unidentified flying objects were a favourite of Time-goddamned-Life books & Forteana; weekly, Robert Stack would intone that They were In The Skies, Waiting, Watching.  "WHEN WILL WE FIND OUT?"

And, of course, there was the big guy's big divorce movie: Spielberg hisself gave me fuckin' nightmares with that TV tuned to static as the doors shook & light poured in every window.  'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' was more of an influence on my childhood than either 'E.T.' or 'Poltergeist.'  Maybe someday I'll tell ya'll about the life-size, stuffed E.T. one of mom's friends made me as an Xmas gift.  If you thought the film version looked like a lumpy scrotum...  But selah.

In the 90s, I had my first & only alien abduction-themed dream.  The imagery was essentially ripped from The X-Files.  Though, to be fair, a far stronger-- and stranger! --influence was Murphy & Zulli's 'The Puma Blues', which felt closer to reality than any of the strained attempts by TXF to spoop me...  And as I sit here this morning, Zulli's drawings of grays have more power in my imagination than any frame of 'Fire In The Sky', or 'Communion', both low-budget, Z-grade hauntings.  There's a very personal power to Murphy's ruminations on the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence-- a sense that the main character's struggle to understand his father's obsession with the subject contained evanescent Truth.

The dream's symbolism was all swiped, of course:  in my dream I'm laid out beneath the small cedar tree closest to my side of the house, unable to move, watching a circuit-mesh of lights scroll over the wiry silhouettes of branchwork, unable to look away, strangely unnerved by the sense that I'm being watched by an animal in my periphery-- a stray cat, not one of ours.  As the hazy, glowing circuit scanned, I strained to turn my head, panicking, wondering why I was on my back in the scratchy uncut grass, wondering whose slitted eyes I sensed on my face.  There was no sense of events before or after the dream, no prologues or codas, no previous dreams nor any concluding acts to that night's mental theatre.

I had just started keeping a dream journal, at 17, not that I needed one, given my recall for imagined events was photographic.  Visually the dream was among the strongest from that phase of my life.  It nagged me with its inexplicability, because *I* didn't believe in UFOs-- I was a witchkid, inclined to fantasies invoking magick & hauntings & curses.  Little gray men were an irritant, grit in my mind's eye.  My parents didn't credit such things with reality, as amusing as it had been for them, growing up in the 50s & 60s, to imagine.  If they spoke of UFOs at all, it was to speculate about the united states government using foo fighters as a smokescreen for sketchy shit.

No, the dream's central image, of a literal Circuit of Lights, as seen through cedar branches, I knew what that was.  It was literally a circuit pattern, composited from any of the hundreds of thousands of circuitboards I had seen & studied.  Electronics & electronics repair was my dad's professional passion, a fascination he vainly hoped would inflict itself on his kid.  I saw electricity as being on the other side of Nature, a trick we had harnessed, expressing lightning in mathematics & engineering: lightning, bottled up in industry.  I didn't get the math part in the slightest.  The equations necessary for comprehending electronics, that stuff slid right off my sloppy brain.  Even as electrical components piled up in our barn, I was retreating from the profession dad was so intent on forcing me to take part in.  I could fix a cold solder joint & troubleshoot a mechanical glitch, but when it came to reading an oscilloscope or measuring resistance I was absofuckinlutely hopeless.

So it makes sense that what actually haunted me about the dream was that classic "I always feel like, somebody's watching meeee" element, the paranoid sense that some living thing was studying my (intellectual) paralysis.  The sense that I only thought I knew what was happening, beyond my field of vision, that the quote-unquote cat was not an actual cat.  Cats were mom's totem; when I was a baby, my mother was literally performing Bast worship, caught up in Crowleyana and certainly higher'n'hell.

I mean, in terms of personal symbolism, the dream breaks down dead easy.  I'd had a tougher time disassembling VCRs.  Even at 17, I basically understood what all this shit was.

Today, it's a tough road, trying to make myself pretend for five seconds that UFOs are a Reasonable Assumption.  PROMISELAND has a couple characters caught up in the then-new phenom of Unidentified Flying Objects, and that's why I'm poring over this tired-ass trope today.  I need to be able to make myself believe, on these imaginary idiots behalf, that what's happening in the background of this intersection of Hollywood & occult crap is Real, rather than irreal.  It feels kinda like a copout to make my rubes sped & too-drunk enough to treat UFOs as credible.  Because that's what was going on, fer shure: everyone's brains were fizzy with benzedrine when they weren't ripped on cheap red lush.  Like, the lights in the sky were strictly synaptic misfires, mannn.

At the risk of adding another five feet to the scroll of text above, I must explain that one of the main characters in PROMISELAND is artist, actor, and art-witch of obscure renown, Marjorie Cameron, the widow of Jack Parsons.  Marjorie was a radio operator & mapmaker, when she was in the military during WWII, and she had resigned from the war for "matters of conscience"; after she took up with Parsons, she inhaled more cocaine & peyote than possibly even Dennis Hopper, and there were more than a couple of nervous breakdowns along the way.  She wove a personal mythology involving the End Times and her own identification with the Babylon of Revelations and UFOS, claiming to have had a couple of Close Encounters of her own.  She sounds like a fun, nutty broad, right?  Like, her being a radio operator & that "matter of conscience" and the postwar invention of little green men as a coverup for actual weapons testing, that's all too perfect an expression of the period to ignore.

That Cameron would go on to live with, and star in, films by Kenneth Anger-- such as the very UFO-curious flick 'Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome' --only cements the need for an extraterrestrial dimension to this kitchen sink drama I've been writing.  That shit was just In The Air, y'know?  UFOs have always been an essential component of what I have come to term Amer-arcana.

So.  Yeah.  This one's just gonna peter out.  No big point, no smartypants cinch to this essay.  I'm wrasslin' with the omniscient skies this morning, only way I know how, by attempting a peek back to ask "WTF was that all about?"  But I can't... quite... glimpse...

promiseland: shadowfucks

Well into it now, darlings.  Reading a John Rechy I've not sampled before, the extremely catholic & angry about it Rushes, about the meat-packing-district era of paved-over, punk, drugged-up NYC.  Which has led to visiting online interviews with Rechy, and realizing how much philosophically I have (or perhaps had?-- dunno how postdated that last interview was) in common with him.

The commonality being anger, chiefly.  Anger as gleaned from reflection.

Sexually I've always resented arriving after the party had been officially Crashed by AIDS.  I've never lived in a world without the equation sex can, may, potentially-possibly-probably equal death.  Of course it's always been thus, because sex has always been sus.  You can't have sexuality without the wild variety of individual wants, and Want is what tends to make things suspect, don't you think?

In the wake of the heteroflexible--  & in terms of Pop Culture, largely cis & consequently internally conflicted (no matter how loudly the Free Love generation declaimed its proud feminism) --60s...  In the wake of the heteroflexible 60s, my people decided to get hep and claim Free Love for themselves, so the 70s were when we tried to really make the scene.  We fucked as publicly and loudly and politically as we could.  We clamored, darling, craving that Big Brass Ring, straining for it.  We wanted what the hets had:  cheap cynicism, and comic cruelty, and clone conformity.  Christ knows why.

I mean, we already had camp.  So what was there to add?  The ability to bang a rail & a stranger & wake up on a strange, slightly sticky couch?  The ability to be as fake & frail & fucked in the head as any long-suffering, highly-medicated housewife?  What were we after, in the 70s?  

Don't invoke freedom.  Freedom's just another word in a Kris Kristofferson song.

I don't know that we knew what we were after, in the 70s, any more than Hunter Thompson knew what he was invoking when he ranted about The Great American Dream in 'Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas'.  I think we know, now: in retrospect.  The Great American Dream took Hunter S. Thompson's head off, a great many decades too late to bring him any peace or sense of higher moral purpose.  Imagine waking up one day to discover you're best friends with Johnny Depp and George Bush senior's shitweasel child is the president.  That, friends, is a hangover guaranteed to end your life.

But back to the 70s:  "my people"--  what a crock of shit that phrase is --were partying, hard & fast & loose as only a strict diet of booze & cocaine & poppers can get you.  The gay world of America was wide awake & getting weird every chance they could get, even as my parents were have a meet cute in a squamous drug den.  Because everyone has to meet somewhere, so why not make a buy while you're doing it?  Somewhere around the time I was being conceived to the sound of the Allman Brothers Band--  not gonna let 'em catch me, no --John Rechy was teaching at UCLA and working on two-or-three novels even as he hustled himself for fun & finance.  Because the grindset mindset has always been a thing.

I'm looking at Rechy's 'Rushes', and I'm thinking what an angry book this is.  Righteously angry.  The anger isn't simply with catholicism & false contrition--  as I read it, both central themes of Rechy's novel --the fury at the heart of this hungry little book is with The Internalized Oppressor.  My name for it.  Rechy calls it something else, in interviews; he doesn't outright call it The Collaborator Within, but same-o, same-o.  Rechy's anger (& mine, inasmuch as we may share it) is with wanting to exist in the Straight World, with all the straight world benefits, all the trappings & illusory certitude of rôles.  Anger with wanting to believe in lies, with Needing, with being compelled to need to believe in lies.

It's anger with not feeling like you exist, as a complete creature.  One must have the status, the glamour, the trappings; then, and only IF one can afford to tip considerably & graciously, can it be yours.  For a limited time.

There was definitely a limit on the 70s.  For Rechy, you can read it in the first chapter.  On page 16:  "....a heated gust of wind shoves loose trash against the curbs, where plastic bags overflow with packed garbage.  Piled to be picked up, the bags are like corpses after a deadly plague.  New free-form sculptures on the landscape, [he] thinks."  In the New York Rechy describes, the garbage strikes are coming.  The city, about to declare bankruptcy.  The party, at its nadir.

It's in these shadows Rechy fucks around.  He's writing a stage play.  Or is it a novel?  Whatever, Rechy reasons: no reason to not combine the impulses.  Isn't that what all this art shit is about, anyhow: combining impulses?  Understanding sex, explicating sex, expressing sex?  Art and sex live & die on the same altar, he seems to be saying, and I dig that.

Of course all this stuff is the 70s, and PROMISELAND is about the 60s, five minutes after James Dean died, but it's all the same snowball, toward the center.  The outer layers of jagged ice and accumulated filth as the generations tumble down, down, bearing ever more heavily down, that's just what your grandparents & your parents added.  For decoration.  The cold dead center of my thing, that's James Dean's much-denied sexuality, the hard-rockin' rebel who empathizes with his sissy friend.

The 60s weren't friendly to "my people".  You can see that all over Rechy's work.  I first read 'City of Night' in '95, pissed off to have only then learned about Sachenhausen & the origin of the pink triangle, and what I encountered in that book staggered & awed me.  The idea of a world before the STD that decimated the gay population of New York, the idea that you could just, y'know, hook up.  Of course the life of the hustler wasn't glamorous:  I'd already learned that from Burroughs, and Wojnarowicz.  But it was luminous, nonetheless, blackly lit as the streets of 'Taxi Driver', and enticing, oh, so enticing.

The idea that you could share a cigarette, and then a kiss, with a stranger, and find something more actual & alive than cityCityCITY all around you.  The notion that a passing conversational & physical connection could re-shape your world so much more thoroughly than some tacky drug.  The possibility that if you fucked in the shadows it wasn't mundane, or morbid, or moribund.  The shadows might fuck back, and moreover, the shadowfucks might even be... fun.

That's what Rechy brought me, with 'City of Night'.  And I value that.

But more than that I value what Rechy has in 'Rushes', and that's the anger one experiences in looking back on a Scene and discovering that the good-time-had-by-all was not only not-shared but also mainly not-accessible-to-the-majority, because THERE WAS NO MAJORITY, in the gay scene or in the straight world or anywhere else, for that matter.  The consensus is, there is no consensus.

Do gay men want love, or do they want their fuckparty exclusive, no bitches or sissies allowed?  Do queers want acceptance, or do they want political power?  Do we want art, darling, or do we want the artifice of eternal adolescence?

Shit if I know.  All that's certain is this book is where my head's at today, contemplating a whole lotta chaos & context.  Somewhere in the middle of trying to type all that tripe my husband asked what I was writing, and I didn't say "Read my blog."

promiseland: gentle hackery

Look, we all know I'm not a writer.

What I chase are impulses.  The impulses in this case are, well, all the dumb hollywood trivia I've been stockpiling since 2007.  Because I wasn't a filmbro before Atlanta.  Not really.  I had a tiny VHS collection, for fucksake.  I didn't memorize directors or actors or anecdotes about flix.  Movies weren't that big a part of my life: they weren't "part" of my mind much at all.

So, in the spirit of crucial advice I received from an old art partner, I'm "writing out my education"-- purging the tanks, flushing all the acquired (& likely erroneous, largely anecdotal) associated bilge.  All the satanic panic stuff that was going on in the b/g of my childhood, as AIDS burned its way into the pain & pleasure associations of a society which refused to accept sexual liberation for women & queerfolk...  All the post-'Nam, soured hippy drek that formed the basis for my parents' tastes in movies as I was growing up...  That's what this thing is being built from.

Some of it is true.  Some of it is blarney.  A lot of it is instinct.  Structurally, that's where the instinct is most at play.  Since realizing that this project isn't like PAINLESS, or AZURE PANTRY, or DENIZEN (inasmuch as PROMISELAND isn't as fixated on historical truths as emotional ones) I've been trying to make sense of the stew it has become:  there's a vast cast of real names up front, playing bit parts, but only a couple of those "actors" or parts are there for any real purpose beyond my weirdly specific aesthetics.

Like, why do I need Vincent Price in this?  Because he was Dennis Hopper's friend in real life?  Or because he was an art collector, and got Dennis Hopper into art collecting as an investment strategy?  Or because Vincent Price is, was, shall always be, a walking talking symbol of where Queer meets Cinema?  Vincent Price is camp as a boy scout jamboree, and about half as scary.

This sort of bullshit has been building in my head for a long time.  Long before I settled on Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell as the main characters in this offroad-movie about Amer-arcana.  For the last five years I've been pretty fixated on Val Lewton & Curtis Harrington & Donald Cammell & Marjorie Cameron & the fact that Jack Parsons blew himself up bootlegging nitroglycerin for the film industry, after he was blackballed from gov't work for being the kind of screwball who fucked too much & too publicly for the squares funding the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Like, Satanic Panic was this dumb dumb dumb meme that meant exactly one thing to xtian fundamentalism, when I was a kid...  But I don't believe it was exclusively projection from a bunch of deeply neurotic, sexually repressed eschatologists.  I think there was something of the return of the repressed actually at play in & around Hollywoodland, and it had disguised itself in discordant, bizarre, clangorous drag.  Sometimes it was called a UFO.  Sometimes it was called Free Love.  Sometimes it was called in the dead of night from a payphone on the strip, and the breathing we heard from the other end of the line was labored with phlegm & tears.

Of course the Mansonoids had something to do with it:  the mansonoids emerged from beneath the semen-crused fringes of our national subconscious.  They were products of the Process Church as much as the Scientologists, as much products of The Family as a twisted-up, paranoid, frustrated hippy substrate of an America which knew the nuclear family was less than ten minutes from midnight.  But Manson himself was a cheap little no-talent hustler, a drug dealer & pimp out to revenge himself on the arts & recording industry, using stupid, abandoned kids.  Manson was a nothing, a null, a nobody.  Manson wasn't important the way the movies were important; he knew it & he resented it.  Manson was little better than a walk-on.  He wasn't a speaking part.  I mean, have you heard him talk?

No, this story has never been about Manson.  PROMISELAND is about the dumb teenage runaway who, decades after James Dean had been & gone, decided to live in the desert & obsessively edit his own little epic about how people confuse film with fact; while Dennis Hopper was binging on cocaine & booze & fucking around trying to get Jodorowsky to bless 'The Last Movie', he felt compelled to interview Manson.  He was dressing & living as close to the Mansonoid standard as he felt comfortable, for a few years, clearly out of his tree on a diet of speed, getting his ego spoonfed by groupies & hangers-on.  But how did Dennis Hoppper, the bright young new face, arrive precisely there?

How could Dennis Hopper see the word PIGS in blood on Polanski's door and conclude, "Manson understands me"?

That's what this story is supposed to be about:  how did Dennis Hopper go so wrong?  How did he wind up being Billy, the lame-o sidekick in 'Easy Rider', the hairy burnout clearly not in control of himself or his filmmaking?  By having the wrong friends, seems like the obvious answer.  By inserting himself into the Wrong Narrative.

Which of course inspires the question:  What's the correct narrative? 

Well.  There isn't one.

[looks around]

Is there?

mine eyes have seen the gloryhole

 

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - May 2o25

Previously, in Wuxtry...

[ They say 'paper chase' means pursuit of vital docs.  Try telling a collector that doesn't equal a complete run of Giffen's 'Legion'... ]

No.5 (2ooo-o5) - written & illustrated by Taiyō Matsumoto

Curiously atonal & off-kilter action manga about absurd assassins with some resemblances to 'The New Statesmen'.  Viz published two volumes in the early oo's, then cancelled the translation.  These are the remastered reprints, and the whole thing; hard to believe I've been hanging fire for a couple decades, waiting for this.  The art is why I'm here-- a superslow build to the Real Business of brutal fightscenes, in vol. 3.  Easily as intense & punishing as the elevator fight in Ales Kot's 'Zero', and fourfold as visually exciting, Taiyō gets goddamned savage with a brush.  Total trashure!  The final volume is GLORIOUS, visually, even as the narrative bow that gets tied at the end makes me wish the story had been less decompressed...  There are reveals in the final half of the fourth volume that make sense of the infuriatingly inchoate narrative that runs through the first three.  But selah.  Matsumoto took his time because he needed to take his time-- what right do I have to bitch?

Cats of the Louvre (2o16-17) - written & illustrated by Taiyō Matsumoto

Thought I'd like it, purely for the pleasure of watching Matsumoto do stylized reproductions of classic pieces of art.  But it's a strange, airless thing.  There's no real feeling to the characters, and the motivations are as basic as could be.  It feels like a paycheque gig.  An overlong, twee, slightly Murakami-flavoured paycheque gig.  Dunno.  Award-winning, but not from where I'm sitting.

Wolverine: Enemy of the State (2oo5) - written by Mark Millar & illustrated by John Romita Jr.

Damn.  A classic Millar romp through other creators' IPs.  It shouldn't be good.  But it is.  Is it smart?  Does it need to be?  You want giant purple mecha cop-stomping zombie ninja satanists?  Check your brains at the credits page!  John Romita Jr. reminds us that he was one of the main guys-- along with Paul Smith --to give us Wolverine-as-cinematic-action-star.  Elektra, who's dead to me because she's not dead to Marvel, makes a compelling co-star, as Millar sock-puppets her with a dead-to-rights Miller impression.  Oh, and Baron Strucker gets remodeled to resemble the Prof from Weapon X, for reasons I don't quite understand (but may be related to the Prof being BWS's expy for Claremont?) is portrayed as a gormless cipher and a cuckold. 

Look, I never said it was art.  I said it was a romp.

Arséne Schrauwen (2o14) - written & illustrated by Olivier Schrauwen

Delightfully deadpan joke generator.  Also a sublimely pretty printjob.  And an all-around delicious book to hold.  My first go-round with Schrauwen, but won't be my last.  Have 'Sunday' queued with my local library.  Can't come quick enough.

2oo1 (2o11-15) - written? & illustrated! by Blaise Larmee

Since I'm having a day where my tinnitus won't let me rest, got up and rinsed my ears with hydrogen peroxide.  Does it help?  Dunno.  It's psychological, maybe, probably, a stress response; I interpret the physical phenomena as the hammer of my eardrum spasming, slipping, striking erratically.  The more I focus on it, the worse it becomes.  Cleaning & flushing my ears feels like I'm treating the problem, and so it recedes.  Sometimes palliative care is a cure.

Of course now I'm awake, and it's three hours until I have to be at work, so there's nothing for it but to read 2oo1, again, seated on the toilet lid, not leaving the bathroom, waiting to be sure that I don't want the reassurance of another cycle of hydrogen peroxide fizzing thru the chambers of my skull.  It seems like the right place & time to consider this enigmatic little artwork:  this puzzlebox of problem & solution, with its fractured pacing & inscrutable assembly, a little gallery of years of thought & work, yanked from the internet and placed, with parental loving concern, into the physical world.

I know--  knew, still don't know  --much about Larmee.  Their ethnicity, their sexuality, their identity, their morality, their ethos.  These fractions paper the book, and these details are peppered all around the spaces where Larmee used to terrorize the art-comix scene online; everything exists in its original contexts even as the work & the artist persist outside that context, having removed & recontextualized themselves & their work from these spaces.  These details are germane: these details are not their interpretation, and their interpretation is not, necessarily, meaning.

The book is filled with junk.  There are junk scribbles, castoffs in the process of enfleshing imagery, alongside scraps from the spare and lonesome world Larmee inhabited: there is junk theory, abstracted thought folded origami-like within the landfill of language that is English, expressed haltingly in scrawl & repetition, secreting itself in the folds of the binding and launching itself across double-page spreads: there will be junk preserved, forever, in the scanned & photo-composited scraps of paper and plastic and metal, receipts, account balance slips, notes to self, observed phenomena like the passage of a slug across a rippled and abraded printout of Larmee's most famous & well-regarded comics work, the titular '2oo1', a centerpiece of overheard conversation atop observed movement (perhaps dance); Larmee, observing their existence in its totality, records it, producing this fractured record of anti-narrative perfection.

2oo1 is an album.  It's music.  In hearing Larmee's mind dancing, I dance alongside.  Unmoving but moved.  It's not-comix.  It's not any One of Larmee's comix-- it's an anthology of All their comix, over a span of years.  It's everything about & around & surrounding their comix.  It's a little sliver of the internet, bound in time, entombed in ink & pulp, a bit of deathlessness chronicling the struggle & demise of an observed, incomprehensible personality.  It's not Blaise.  It's David Hockney & Davison Middle & Hall Hassi-- it's all the stage names & rabblerousers they've been, talking with / to us, recording the record they'll be forever known for / within.

I pause over certain pages, looking down into them, wondering at how, from my perspective, Larmee is wholly visible, yet they'll never be able to see out.  From Larmee's perspective, they're still there, in the work, inextricable.  They've left bits of themselves all over it-- defunct addresses, pieces of costuming, props & jewelry placed atop the scanner bed and imported.  These things have nothing to do with the story, but then, if THE STORY IS THE WORK, what may be deemed actually peripheral?  Theory?  Theory is the throughline, the narrative thread which binds this thing as manifestly as the stitching in the book's spine.  Blaise taps an imaginary microphone and dictates their process, ruffling hair, acting/embarrassed to be called upon in such a public way.  Does it anyhow.

Blaise explains 2oo1.  With calmed ears, I read.

RUNE (1994-95) - written by Chris Ulm(?) & Barry Windsor-Smith; illustrated by Barry Windsor-Smith (with additional colours by Keith Conry & Albert Calleros)

Dawg, did I ever under-rate the amount of gay panic Barry Windsor-Smith had going on with this book.  This is really...  Like, between 'Monsters' & 'Paradoxman' and Rune?  Barry had issues.

I'm not saying he hates gay people, just so we're clear.  It's just evident that he has a particular perspective on us, and it's a little, well, fraught.  As a long admirer of his work, it's not a major mark against it--  the gay nazis in 'Monsters' are well-developed, for villains, and the suggestions of rape in 'Paradoxman' are played well enough, as such things go.  These aren't Bad Things: but there's a specific aura of menace to the homosexual tropes at play in this here vampire comic, and while I think Barry loves nothing better than to fuck with tropes, it's--  it's a curious place for it, is all.  This book was not designed to be a success, in a line of comix that were super thirsty for any 90s mainstream sales, and Malibu went so far as to make a special cut of Rune #0 so they could give it away with SPIN music mag.  I mean, SPIN is a weird place to push your "vampires are abhorrent parasites and also, uh, queer" epic, isn't it?

I found the SPIN giveaway today:  it was published in September 1994, when the regular series, as drawn by BWS, had just published its 5th issue, ending Barry's regular contributions.  Everything in the SPIN promo had been serialized as part of Ultraverse's flipbook promotional stuntage in 2-3 page increments (except for instalments I & J, truncated here for space purposes, since this promo copy is chock fuckin' full of full-page ads).  So Malibu knew Barry was out, and wanted to give the book a boost, because this was maybe the only viable title they had?  Barry Windsor-Smith was a huge get, and they knew his name had pull...  But this is what they got out of him.  A curiously homoerotic tale about the nastiest, ugliest vampire Barry could draw, because Barry was sick of capeshit.  "You want capes?  I'll give you fuckin' Dracula, bitches."

Barry was the johnny appleseed of graphic novels in the 90s:  dude drops Weapon X on Marvel, serializes 2/3rds of his Storm graphic novel, talks a lot about his Hulk and/or Captain America graphic novel (which ultimately becomes 'Monsters'), and dips.  Drops Solar: Man of the Atom at Valiant, an entire volume of X-O, and that dopey-ass Archer & Armstrong series:  three graphic novel length projects in total; dips.  Seeing a pattern?

And then he lands with Malibu and does-- this?  Just bizarre.  Anti-commercial is underselling it.

I dunno.  It's cool to get to read it all again.  Nothing was coloured like this:  these comix are, ultimately, why Marvel bought the Ultraverse.  They coveted the colouring dept, they needed the software & the specialists, and they by god got it.  Which means that Marvel owns Rune, which is why there's a Silver Surfer / Rune crossover comic.  Technically, Rune is part of the Marvel U, and every once in a while some smartass pencils him in the background of a group shot.

Someday, some waterbrained watcher of trends will propose a Northstar x Rune event and the resulting singularity of taste will collapse the entertainment-industrial complex on itself like a dying sun.  And that will be it for OUR universe...

Sunday (2o24) - written & illustrated by Olivier Schrauwen

Clearly I am converted.  'Sunday' is a day for worship.

Swimming In Darkness (2017) - written & illustrated by Lucas Harari

This is one of those graphic novels where the art itself distracts me from reading it.  I'm constantly more caught up in browsing the stark & shivering imagery than the text and I keep dropping the narrative thread to lose myself in the labyrinthine & foreboding architectural dream of the bathhouse, wandering its torrid corridors, watching steam rise against the falling snow, shielded by brutalist arms of concrete, laid down to funnel one along the building's body toward its foundations.  I always stop shy of actually reading the thing and just get lost in the dreaminess of the imagery.  Rilly good shit, this book.  Harari's art & colours get you higher than any hash.

Coda:  I never finished reading this, because the font choices SUCKED.  At the end of it all, the font choices looked so artificial & clangorous it made me wish for hand-lettering.  The dialogue shouldn't look pasted in by a computer-- irrespective of how the rest of the b.d. was drawn, the spoken narrative needs to feel like it's attached to the art!!!  Otherwise a reader like myself won't hear how the characters Actually Speak:  I'll only hear subtitles.

("Hearing subtitles."  Honestly.  Only a mental patient or an asperger's case talks like this...)

Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (2oo6-25) - written  Eiji Ōtsuka & drawn by Housui Yamazaki 

Perfectly profane.  I've been reading these off-again, on-again for years, never quite pasting together a Whole Story-- which is great, because these are little mystery stories, one-off "cases", and the comedic cast of misfits are sitcom gold: they're bad at business, and their business is charity to the dead.

Another total trashure.  Eiji's got a goldmine in this serial.  It's a real treat to watch Housui Yamazaki grow as an illustrator, too.  May it run forever, and Big Mysterious Plot be damned.

Supreme: Blue Rose (2o15) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Tula Lotay

[Gonna cut'n'paste feels from my private comic chat thread, because I am not fucking awake enough to be updating my reading list:]

Yesterday visited the largest comix library I've yet encountered-- the seventh floor of the Harold Washington Library has three whole aisles of nothing but GNs.  Alongside Brandon Graham's 'Rain Like Hammers' and 'The Gull Yettin' by Joe Keller (who i've been swiping colour palette ideas from lately), I picked up 'Supreme: Blue Rose' for a re-visit.

Back in 2o15 I read this title impatiently, month-to-month.  Each month I'd re-read the entire series before devouring each freshly dropped issue.  I'd also fuck around with configuring & reconfiguring the covers on my worktable-- of course, stoner that i am  --and even read SBR while wearing League Of Extraordinary Gentleman official 3-D glasses so as to savor Lotay's outtathisworld colouring.

I profoundly enjoyed SBR as it was happening, thinking hard about the comic-as-informational hyperlink-ridden essay form.  I was really plugged into Ellis' approach to art & comix.  This title was like the dead tree incarnation of a webcomic, it blinked & blinged with banner ads & pop ups for products that didn't exist.  Add to that Ellis' own particular aesthetic fixations, as a superfan of Enki Blial...   If you've ever read 'The Woman Trap' or 'The Beast Trilogy', 'The Black Order Brigade' or 'The Hunting Party', you can immediately see why Ellis selected Tula Lotay to interpret his script.  There's this dissociated, mundane psychedelia endemic to Bilal's work, how he draws his not terrifically expressive characters hallucinating like Vogue models: that's what Tula Lotay improves on here, with her curated chaos scribbles.

Per the bling-y nature of this work-for-hire, with the writer taking the stage on a character untouched since Alan Moore was last thirsty for funds, Ellis namedrops in multiple media formats, hyping 'I Am Sitting In A Room' by Alvin Lucier because he needs the audience to hear the speaker of those words to enunciate with degraded overdub resonance.  It's a nice touch.  The whole book is Nice Touches, swiping bits of David Lynch's symbol kit, for instance.  Sets & props from Twin Peaks & Mulholland Drive blip in & out of focus-- cut & pasted here to make a Morrison-style argument for the gratuitous rebooting of looted I.P.s, sure, but also to justify the man fuckin' with some genre-mashups like a master of the turntables.

Ultimately SBR is ellis is playing coolhunter like he's living the art life in a Wm. Gibson novel, scrapbooking all his favourite influences in one place to provide a compelling Aesthetic Argument for why reboots happen: so big cheque stars can drop something that looks like this, a comic that reads like New Wave science fiction-- only it's talking about doughy power fantasy shit "created" by Rob Liefeld and Alan Moore.

As is not uncommon with Ellis the book kind of loses steam after the fourth issue and by the sixth issue i am like shut the fuck UP, but glory be this was a beautiful & weird little piece of work that went nowhere & did nothing new, really.

SBR looked SO good at the time Image was dropping it, man.  Ellis was on fire at that moment, with me. I'd always enjoyed his flash fiction schtick. Now I know he was just using Moorcock's basic conceits for how to grind shit out; Ellis was studying what Dennis Cooper & Blake Butler's generation of internet writers were doing; and Ellis was savvy enough to know his tastes were Popular Tastes. People liked Moore's Supreme for the same reason people dug on Twin Peaks, because audiences dig art that's All Potential.  Which is why afro-futurism will never die, because it's about pure potential, about improving upon reality.  It's about breaking codes (& overcoding) and generally hacking the fuckedness of the mundane.

Sci-fi bullshit about the universe being information is a recurring favourite fixation of Ellis', it's his Ideaspace, really, and as a conceit I shit sure prefer it to this cheap-ass Bleed, which is basically Roddenberry's warp speed for the comix literate.  Like it's just a hacky way to explain away a cut.  Whatevs.  Point being this was solid Ellis, and some evergreen art out of Lotay.

Like, Ellis asked Lotay to draw some booooooollshit, man.  Like an assassin with a splintered & collapsing wireframe topography for a face?  I mean, Ellis.  What a cruel cunt.

The Gull Yettin (2o23) - written & illustrated by Joe Kessler

Wild, kinetic, careful work.  Windowpane is a joy of my bookshelf.  Adding this too.

Yeah.  I got nothin'.  There's an interview where Kessler remarked that after his mom read it, she was like, "You're done, right?"  And he knew how she meant it, like it wasn't negative, it was just, "This is it."  This was the one that does everything.  What else is there for a talent with a toolbox like this to do?  Windowpane was the exploration of all the possibilities Kessler saw for full colour printing:  process determining content & content determining process; it was Kessler's gym, where he sweated it all out.  The Gull Yettin is the artist discovering his myth as he made it.  It's so lovely & deeply felt & understood:  it's all exploration, and it's a very sensory read--  as a silent work it's the LOUDEST and vividly expressed, with such youthful energy!

It's one hell of a work of beauty.  Me, I don't think he's done.

Anti-Gone (2o17) - written & illustrated by Connor Williumsen

This, too, was one hell of a thing.  Utterly gorgeous.  There's nobody better at manipulating the cartoon ikonography of comix than this, is there?  Yes, hyperbole.  Gilbert Hernandez isn't dead, and Osamu Tezuka's spirit is deathless.  I dig all that.  But holy shit.  This is what I always kind of wanted out of Brandon Graham and never quite got-- that cooler-than-thou in the ruins of the future thing.  This is some deep shit, right here, slim & tight & high frequency.  

Buying a copy as soon as I find an affordable one.

Rain Like Hammers (2022) - written & illustrated by Brandon Graham

Thought I wanted to read this.  There was a period where Brandon Graham really excited & interested me.  But I think that's kind of stopped?  I wanted that Matt Howarth vibe, where the stories are full of non-terrans, all shapes & varieties of life.  But this is just a story about boring hominid body-swapping & general future avarice, shades of 'The Long Tomorrow'.  It's fine for browsing, but there's nothing to draw me in.  Graham's colouring doesn't even interest me, here.  It was exciting, seeing a B.G. book I didn't recognize on the shelves of the Harold Washington library, but holding it back here in the studio at home, I'd rather be reading a cut'n'dried b&w mystery formala like Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service.

Sorry, B.  I know everything I said sounded bitchy & disappointed.  I don't mean it like that.  Maybe it's a vibes thing.  Rain Like Hammers is not my vibe right now.

I've never really mentioned this, but Brandon Graham was why I started using felt-tips.  I was obsessed with a certain kind of line you could only get with a crow-quill pen or the very microscopic tip of a calligraphy brush, and there Brandon Graham was with that collection, 'Escalator', which had everything but his porn comix.  I liked what he was doing, and I realized he had just taken up what Matt Howarth had been doing for decades:  using the pens & markers that were around.  Graham used felt-tips for most everything, and when I picked them up again I re-discovered the versatility of an instrument I'd never really appreciated.  I'd liked felt-tips for their line more than rollerballs but rollers were dominant usage & utility in my part of the U.S. at the time, and felt-tips were...  I dunno.  Easier to fuck up?  I was hard on my tools in my youth.

Anyway, Brandon Graham's comix & his enthusiasm for comix (akin to Paul Pope's) really fired me up.  He had a graffiti / skater rat influence that vibed with me, because that was where I was from, and I liked the fearlessness of some of his art where I could tell he was just making shapes & didn't have solid pencils beneath them, how he was just going straight to pen, like Tezuka, or Howarth...  That he could DO that, with a felt-tip, made me re-examine how I approached linework, for a time.  I liked the design of Stadler's felt-tip cases, I appreciated the basic size range, and how really three pen sizes could do everything you needed that wasn't brush, because I will ALWAYS be a slut for using a brush.  Brush is where I live & breath & rut.  It's my favorite implement for art.  But felt-tips are a close second, and Brandon Graham was what turned me there, back in 2005.

I followed him everywhere, from the NBM porn years thru the TokyoPop implosion to Image all through the Prophet / Multiple Warheadz era and then I just... dropped off.  Like the world ended basically.  I lost my studio, I didn't have the internet, I'm stranded in a strange town trying to hold down a new job & there's covid rampant & I'm sleeping in a graveyard & zowie, I have a cracked skull and a fucked hand.  When life comes at you you don't have as much time for comix as you used to.  But I try.  And I have this dumbass blog to help me remember the Good Shit.

Brandon Graham is the Good Shit.  Even when I'm not all hyped about a thing.  'Rain Like Hammers' feels surplus to requirements when we've got, like, official Blade Runner sequels and Ghost In The Shell is a franchise that cannot die.  I want bizarre robots & peeps which aren't hominid bipeds w/ attendant humanoid fixations--  I want aliens & weird shit, right now, is all, and so I'd be better served going back to Prophet for the Weird Alien Shit, or reading Matt Howarth's Konny & Czu stories.  Humans and technology are tres grossing me the fuck out r.n. and I don't wanna be thinking about how we'll all be porting into remote sexbots in the next few years because the Supreme Court will be having an opinion about i,...

Like if that's where my head goes when I pick up a book by one of my bros, then shit is too grim.

It ain't you, B.

Spiral & Other Stories (2004) written & illustrated by Aidan Koch

Beautiful work.  Quite elegant comix.  Aidan works in broad strokes.  I want to read more.

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When The Wind Blows (1986) - written & illustrated by Raymond Briggs