the lit bit - may 2o26

Man that brain damage don't fade quick.  Wrote last month up as April, just like the comix list.

The Films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Master of Fear (2007) - by Jerry White

Not terribly scintillating stuff.  A decent read if you want a clear-eyed view of the early filmography.  The plot recaps are the snooziest part, honestly.  Not much in the way of interpretation.  Baseline competent.  I am seriously overdue to watch 'Cloud' and 'Loft'.

Chicago: City on the Make (1951 / 1961) - by Nelson Algren

Annual re-read.  Nope, not one word about Chester Gould, nor a single allusion to Dick Tracy.  But pertinent nonetheless.  One of the best poems I've ever read.  You could do worse than try to mimic Algren's voice.  The coda, written in '61, has as much snark, sting and stentorian wrath as you might desire, standing directly on the steeltoed tips of the Cuban missile crisis, freshly simmering.  I'll probably be clipping & pasting pertinent bits into forthcoming Tracing Gould entries over the next few weeks.

Outline Of My Lover  (2000) - by Douglas A. Martin

Michael Stipe's legendarily longest LTR wrote a book about dating Michael Stipe.  Figured I'd give it a read.  Quite imbibable style.

One For Sorrow (2007) - by Christopher Barzak

There's a movie, which I haven't seen.  Thought I'd taste the book first.  Not quite in love with the language.  Has a flat, wallpapery affect.  I should finish this before 'Outline Of My Lover'.  But will I?  Stay tuned!  Or don't.

Tracing Gould - o15

Cut to title card:

Behind the wheel, the weary detective in his trenchcoat races to the scene, police beacon signaling like a defective halo.  Inconstant light barely touching his eyes.

The further the D.T. influence spreads, the less identifiable Tracy becomes, the more diluted.  Gould's influence circuclates like the very air.  Coolly alive, in the flow & pulse of water.  In the spark & flicker of fire, as secret and plainly exposed as the very devil.  The influence, mutable, immutable, evanescent yet beyond transmutation, inveigling everything like a plague or conspiracy of ghosts.

He arrives.  The villain from nowhere.

"All the things that used to be inside me, now they're outside.  So I can see all the things inside you....  But the inside of me is empty."

The curious, plodding, sleepy-looking young man with wiry hair walks seemingly in place, growing ever-larger in the mind & eyes of his captive audience.  He emerges as if from the horizon itself, a swelling born from the collision of earth, sea and sky.   A point against all geometric reason encompassing, absorbing, linearity.  The enigmatic villain seems to only speak in questions, his somnolent, placid voice ever on the verge of collapse into ellipsis.

"The detective, or the husband?  Which is the real you?  Neither one is the real you.  There is no 'real you'.  Your wife knows that, too."

His only identifying trait, the name sewn into the lining of his coat.  Mamiya.

The detective knows who the Killer is:  but the detective finds it impossible to Know the man.  The killer is a missionary from an occulted past.  His methods are inferential, at best; insidious.  Involuted.  The killer may not be pursued beyond the boundaries of his crimes.  Secure in the hollow he's carved inside himself, the killer looks out on the detective with contempt bordering on transcendence.

The killer within looking down on the killer without.

Triggered by the word fate, the detective fires three times.

"Remember now?"

Kiyoshi Kurosawa pivots, abrupt as the final day torn from a calender, from gangster flicks to weird serial murder tinged with hypnotic menace.  It's 1998, and the filmmaker is bored by the philosophical quandaries of V-cinema with its inbuilt limitations of commerce and pop genre fiction.

"People like to think crime has meaning.  But most of them don't."

Nemesis frees the detective to free the killer.  The killer, freed, returns to his origins; origins he can only recognize through inference.  The killer does not know who he is, only where he is: in the world, walking up and down, to and fro.  Waiting to be found in the hearts of the men whose lives he touched with fingers stainless as unwritten law.  Waiting for deliverance.

The gun fires five final exclamation marks.  One for each finger on his healing hand.

Eight bullets, total, to kill a man beyond life.  Snuffed by an abundance of fortunate death, the dying arc of the murderer's bloody finger paints a ceremony in the expectant air.  Evokes something where there is nothing.  Falls, use extinguished.

The detective looks around the space of the shrine, mute, his curiosity at its end.

Inner peace restored, the detective takes his dinner.  Opting against his trademark trenchcoat, for a change.  Retired to the dry cleaners, to exorcise Mamiya's splatter.  Leaning away from his table the detective looks spiritually sated.  Coffee the perfect companion to a postprandial smoke, he orders from a nearby marionette.  The waitress stiff and formal as her uniform.  She does not walk so much as obey an invisible mechanism, faultless, guiding her toward the cutlery.

Plate clean, appetite restored, the detective extracts a cigarette and lights it, drawing the smoke into his lungs.  Ember tip flaring like a caution signal over the industrial heart of Tokyo.

Wipe to credits.

from friedkin to delany (with love)

In the space of a single morning.  Discussed 'Crusing'-- the book and the film adaptation --with my husband, as well as the Situationist concept of the dérive, and what Samuel R. Delany meant by "contact" in 'Times Square Red, Times Square Blue'.

We also covered how transvestigators have this dorky overlap with racist schmucks, and how often sexually paranoid individuals arrive at conclusions like "the Rothschilds secretly funded a satanic plot to make Emmanual Macron fuck his own brother".  Which seems like a lot of work for a satanic inversion of values, if you ask me.  Surely there's a cheaper way?

Ultimately with this biz Sig & I are like, One Yarn Board Looks Very Like Another, and maybe it would be less mockworthy and personally isolating if these dinguses would revert to blaming Satan, imps and goblins for giving them failboners.

Chuchy shouty type who claims the devil incited their toe fungus looks remarkably less foolish than the average Content Generator who has to create a seven-part Youtube essay to unpack their "investigation".  

The average churchy shouter is also less likely to be sued by the president of France.

But what the eff do we know.

a study in forgetting

 

i remember this being done as i was watching metropolis

do i actually remember drawing it?  no

 

 

forgotten sketches for a script i don't remember writing

(which i later found in my desk drawer)  pure vapourcomix

 

& just now, failed to recognize this sketch entirely...

because i'm so accustomed to the finished render

my husband, at least, remembers when i drew "bananass"

Tracing Gould - o14

These dreams are shared.  Dreams of stark primary colour and furtive perversion: dreams of weakness manifested in impotent rage: dreams stolen from little boys, given to those starvelings not yet men.

"You must be curious to know. But, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you not only not to tell anybody about your find, but also not to ask more about the case. One day when it's all sewed up, I'll let you know all the details. Right now, though, I can't."

"I understand. I'm just real curious, like you said."

"I was the same way myself when I was your age. I guess, that's what got me into this business."

"Must be great."

"It's horrible, too."

David Lynch's 'Blue Velvet' surely shares in Gouldspace.  Influence is manifest everywhere, in unwise love of mystery and tears for fathers stricken; in little agonies, femme fatales & mutilated victims.

The pattern is Crime, and Lawful Wrath, and the Kid inbetween.

The man in yellow teeters, a bullet to the head.  One false alarm and the reflex is murder.  And where is the villain of our piece?  Why, he's queer as a well-dressed man with a gasmask apparatus on his belt.

The kid crouches in the closet and remembers a dream he had, of wanting to break into a stranger's room and watch them unrobe.  The kid holds his breath, wondering why there is so much trouble in this world.

The prowling, growling, gray murderer huffs, ridiculous in his fake mustache.  "I shoot when I see the whites of the eyes."

It is 1986.  The scene is a staged multiple homicide, and the boy who sees it believes he is a man when he is able to say, to himself, with confidence: "I'm going to let them find you on their own."

The kid is not Dick Tracy Junior.  The kid is not me.  The kid holds his breath, wondering.

"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - May 2o26

Last month managed to go a full month w/ my April stack titled 'March'.  Bloody brain damage.

King Tiger - Comics' Greatest World: wk. 3 (1994) - written by Mike Richardson & Randy Stradley, and illustrated by Paul Chadwick

Here we go:  action comix, wuxia style, by P.C.  A thing I had forgotten exists!  Brief, but a lovely little fight comic.  I coulda gone for a full-length run of this.  Didn't know there was a two-issue follow-up in '96...   At any rate.  If there's a single drawback in this ish, it's how Chadwick never clearly renders the tats on K.T.'s wrists.  Not that it matters.  Just curious.  The binding magic circle King Tiger draws in this ish is fab.  Grant Morrison browsed these, I feel like.  What my parents' generation useta call eyeball kicks...  A wild li'l 16-pager.

The World Below (1998) - written & illustrated by Paul Chadwick

Never read, this is yet another entry in the scintillating saga of ebay orders which turfed out because the seller misplaced the item.  Seems to be happening with Chadwick, lately.  Still haven't gotten my DHP #18.  At any rate teething to read these.  This is a placeholder.

The Autumn Kingdom, vol. 1 (2o25) - written by Cullen Bunn & illustrated by Christopher Mitten

Freshly arrived at the shelves of the Edgewater branch of Chi's library system.  Random selection on the strength of the title / cover design.  Should have browsed it first.  Not enchanted by the narrative choices:  fantasy author father's kids discover the occult "truth" about themselves & how they relate to their father's fiction.  Namely, they relate to it with big silly swords and friction-free battles with Mignolaesque monsters.  (Apparently Christopher Mitten was a BPRD artist?)  I didn't properly read so I sha'n't be cruel.  This book was not for me.  Returned.

Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (2o25) - written & illustrated by Mike Mignola (& coloured by Dave Stewart!)

Not done here, but completed the titular tale.  'Bowling With Corpses' is the first Mignola comic I've enjoyed w/out reservation since 'The Screw-On Head'.  Absolute joy.  Thanks for un-retiring, Mike!

I suppose it bears saying, but I tapped out of Hellboy & BPRD when the big art changes began.  I didn't want to read anybody else doing the main Hellboy tales.  Obviously I've gone back since & done the Corben stuff--  a major oversight, on my part  --and I've read the first half of 'Hellboy In Hell'.  Hard to see such lovely art and admit I aged out of the character, but I suppose it was inevitable.  Hellboy began printing when I was in high school, for chrissakes.  BPRD became an ongoing when I first landed in Atlanta!  Some stories age like dandelion wine:  certain ongoing comix do not.

All of which to explain:  the commercial success of HB was what killed the comic, for me.  Mignola felt unable to provide interior art on a schedule commensurate with the franchise expansion, so he stepped away and gave the book to Fegrado for a bit.  Which was bad enough, as the existence of the book, its very foundations, were in Mignola's ability to enjoy the medium.  He became super OCD about his own polish, after the movie-linked sales surges.  And, to be honest?  I didn't want to see Fegrado aping Mignola--  I need Fegrado to be Fegrado.  As for BPRD, the title ran off Guy Davis--  speaking of artists I've been following since high school.  A franchise can't frustrate its primary visual creators and stay gold, in my experience.  So I dipped on everything.

But selah to all that.  Bowling With Corpses is a fresh start, for me & Mignola's thing, that magic he's been pulling off since the Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser adaptations with Chaykin.  For me, that's when Mignola's aesthetic clicked.  Man's had me hooked ever since.  This new thing is the purest distillation of the creative ecstasy Mike expresses via his deeply atmospheric pacing.  Nobody draws skulls, clocks and mounds of dusty manuscripts like ya boy!

Buff Soul (2o22) - written & illustrated by Moa Romanova

A library pick purely based on aesthetics.  Decadent!!!  The story is a charmer.  A lovely portrait of friendship & party-lifers, and recognizing priorities.  I'll check out more Moa, for sure.

Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt - Watch (2o2o) - written by Kieron Gillen & illustrated by Caspar Wijngaard

At some point it became a project to read as many Watchriffs as I could get my hands on.  This riff had eluded me, until now.  I like that this is a Big Gay Comic about capeshit.  It amuses me that the artist is doing an Eddie Campbell impression.  It's in the mail & on the way.  It should be a kick.

The New Statesmen (1988/1989/199o) - written by John Smith & illustrated by Jim Baikie, Duncan Fegrado, and Sean Phillips, + Brendan McCarthy, David Hine, & Shaky Kane (uncredited)

Refreshing my reading.  This time it's the business.  Finally, at last, I'm familiar enough with the story to be impressed with the plotting & pacing.  Unlike other John Smith jams, this one is structurally a stone cabin:  every piece has its place, and all together they form a structure that refuses to tumble.  If there's a drawback it's needing to keep notes, because the cast is bloody massive.

Since the last time I read thru, those horsechoker editions of 'The Boys' came across my desk.  I'm finding it a little hard to not think about that stupid, stupid comic, and the stupid, stupid, stupid teevee version.  Because everyone talks about how Watchmen was grownup, serious, etcetera-- but what always stuck with me, from my earliest exposure, was how British and bloody-eyed the tale is.  There's some grotesque violence spilling off the page in that book-- but Watchmen, for all its cred as an adult tale of sex and violence, contains strikingly little of either eyeball kick.  If you wanted that (and every teenage boy did, even us gayboys) then you had to march on over to Marshall Law.

But Marshall Law is a revolting-looking book.  No disrespect to Kevin O'Neill, who's a titan, but ugh.  The bodies and the blood are both repellant.  So if it's eyeball kicks and gratuitous, perverse chuckles you wanted, well-- we all kind of had to wait for Ennis and The Boys to happen.  Didn't we?

Turns out we didn't.  Because there was 'The New Statesman'.  A book with nothing nice to say about superheroes, or american politics, that idiotic national pasttime which has somehow come to engulf all of culture, art, and sport.  A book which begins its action proper with a hate crime, and the hateful reaction engendered by it.  A book that does not like power fantasies because of the power imbalances baked in.  You have to be disenfranchised and marginalized and Know It to enjoy american politics and pretend the commentators believe their own chirpy commentary.

This is a book about lies of all sizes.  Theirs, and ours, and the world's.

Here we have a power fantasy comic by a gay writer, about being gay, angry & depressed by the status quo.  'The Boys' couldn't manage that, not least because Ennis can't stop laughing about how embarrassing queer sex must be for the queers.  This is not to say 'The New Statesmen' is humourless; merely that the laughs are grim'n'gritty laughs, for an audience who feels none-too-secretly bruised by the ceaseless politicization of their sexuality.  Here we have a book all the colours of bruising.

The first, foremost moment of fantasy in 'The New Statesmen' is of a queer american victim-- who will never admit he has been victimized --taking out a swath of white christian fundamentalists, in full view of the world.  It's the second fantasy, in truth, second string to the actual first fantasy, that of a closeted, queer brit who once did something publicly terrible he can't quite remember.  He wants to be Out, to Love, but he's too secretly crazy and filled with rage to have that happiness, and so he accepts his lot, as a bought-and-sold instrument of Empire.

If there's an allegory in there, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the writer's personal position on these matters.  Or his position in the culture, working with patient fury (as he once did) to gain entree into American comix, staffed directly behind Morrison & Millar, all of them with eyes further up the line, observing Ennis cutting in somewhere after Mills, all of them at the gate, jealous eyes on Gaiman catching up with Moore as Wagner helps sort the baggage claims at customs.

In this reading, if I find a fault with any of this, it's that there aren't any women being permitted to make a point about all the bullshit and hypocrisy.  The sexism in this book is no less than the sexism of Watchmen--  sexism is a very apt Point, in both Watchmen & The New Statesmen  --but it's not one that's made particularly compellingly, with real heart.  The sexism is more reportorial than rage-based, more passing observation than rejoinder.  The women in these stories are Used, are Useful, but they are not the subject, and their gender is secondary to their sexual utility in the dramatic webs woven.

But who wants a perfect book?  It's in its imperfections that 'The New Statesmen' is superior to Watchmen, because it's not pretending to perfection; this fantasy about power is as imperfect as the world it chronicles, and it is with no great satisfaction that I observe that the world in these pages is thuddingly closer to our present than the alternate history provided by Moore & Gibbons.  John Smith was lobbing bricks, and their gravity landed in the zone of Truthiness we Americans, regretfully, inhabit.  A stark, grubby shithouse of a comic, this.

I need to read it again.

Tracing Gould - o13

We arrive on the other side of the abyss.  Lucky thirteen.

But where are the queers, we ask?

If Tracy is, like Chicago itself, a primordial mulch out of which grows America, in all its micro- / macro-cosmic splendour and perfect fuckedness:

Where.  Are.  The.  Queers.

There's queer-ing, certainly!  Crossdressing happens with regularity in these comix.  Mostly among the dishonorable classes--  qua old Bill Burroughs,* ever notice how lingo circulates from criminals to fags and straight back around, passed like a midnight joint?  --so there's always some underling or would-be big figure hipping themselves up in "women's clothes", kvetching loudly about it, as if they donned the complete, inconvenient set and didn't skimp on the garters.  'Mumbles' was among the more successful at drag, somehow, to spite his homely, sleepy expression.  Though what he bought with his little routine was a bag of gold that would lead to his strangled suffocation...

*  "Ever notice how many expressions carry over from queers to con-men?"

There are a plethora of two-bit dastards of relatively indeterminate gender, such as Larceny Lu, who any average reader in the mid-30s must've suspected of being Other.  A figure out of Jack Black's 'You Can't Win', loathsome Lu was so strong & capable she essentially re-built Steve the Tramp like a stockcar, even giving him an accidental facelift when she sews him up, after extracting seven bullets from his head & neck.  Larceny Lu terrified Steve and every other man she meets, and even gives Tracy the shakes.

Why?  Everyone just knew...  there was something Wrong, about Lu.  The foggy subtext behind her fleeing darling London town was prostitution, possibly aiding in abortion, certainly she had been a fence for stolen goods.  Lu was too queer to be good, with her sagging eye and dockworker's jaw and strangler's hands.

Yeah.  Maybe.  But Lu saved Steve the Tramp, lousy confidence man, idiot kidnapper, and utter thug, three times running-- the first of Steve's criminal associates to NOT abandon his deadweight to the law, or leave him bleeding out from a gut wound on the side of the road.

There's something queer about that.  Because we know what a heel Steve is.  We've seen it.  And surely Lu had, too?

There is Truth, here:  criminals & queerfolk, we share the same air.  We are part of the same great american underclass of dispossessed and discarded, poor, fuckers.  We share an illegal taste for pleasure; we share the same essential disdain for staid, narrow-ass puritan pricks.  

We think it's good fun to give a cop a thrill by blowing him a kiss.  We think 'Cruising' is an all-american classic and 'The Boys In The Band' is a grim tragedy.

We think: wherefore we are.

In my early teens, 15 or thereabouts, I encountered a psychology textbook in my aunt Edwina's basement.  Edwina used to teach, and she had lots of remaindered schoolbooks.  The one I found defined homosexuality as criminal affliction, treatable by electroshock "therapy".**  Ergo from my earliest awareness of sexuality was the knowledge that some schoolteacher, cop or judge might feel compelled to designate me a nonce--  nevermind that the textbook was from the 60s, it was still in use in the early 80s, in good old Dogwater, Alabama. 

** Shades of Lou Reed.  Electroshock is what drove Lou to self-loathing, self-destructive alcoholism.  'Kill Yours Sons' indeed, Lou's own mother had him committed.  Which is the complement to my lesson about queerness being equated with criminality-- anyone might fink a body out for being a fag, even one's own family.

But back to Tracy:  where are those queers?  Vitamin Flintheart's a queer character, and not just for being a pillhead.  He's a thespian, given to histrionics and bitchy rejoinders and a great admirer of feminine Talent in song & dance.  And what of Pat Patton, who as near as I can tell, from all my research, is a confirmed bachelor in addition to being the butt of all the big jokes in the strip.  There was the flapper & writer Jean Pennfield, who tried-and-failed, repeatedly, to turn Tracy's head from the magnetic north of Tess Trueheart's normativity.  There's not much to suggest Jean having a lesbian streak, yet it's hard for me to read her obsession with upstaging Tess as anything other than queer.

But maybe that's the Tijuana bible talking.

These are not Drawn Conclusions, "properly" speaking.  I've got another thirty-odd years of Tracy to wade through.  This assessment is nowhere near complete.  So take us away, Sam, sling us in stir, that we may rest unmolested and Think...  about Dick.

Tracing Gould - ooo

Let's take it back to zero.

This fixation, the Tracy thing, started with my great-grandfather.  Right?

Andrew.  Andrew Edward Patty, senior.  First of the Patty line to be born in the united states.  I saw a picture of him on a log cabin porch, from when he was about four or five, along with a half dozen other gray fuzzy faces, all repressing the urge to pick nits or give the finger because it took near a damned hour to get a picture taken.  We paddies took the first fuckin' name they gave us, coming off the boat--  we coulda been McCrackens, or Williamsons, but no, no, we opted for the three-leaf clover of fuckin' names, PADDY, Patty, an absolute cowpie in the face for self-respect, roit?  Fuckin' hell.

Andrew had a high mechanical aptitude, and he was co-founder of the first major garage in Anne's Town, recently re-named Anniston, on the maps.  He earned enough to buy a few modest parcels of land, and we worked them as gentleman farmers, making just enough produce & fruit to be able to say we weren't speculators.  We never really did much with any of it, as my grandfather's generation would be the largest our little clan ever grew, really.  Andrew and Elizabeth, his wife--  about whom not much is said, for she was a very religious and generally joyless woman; she developed stomach cancer in her forties and stopped eating; as family lore phrased it, "She turned toward the wall," and starved herself to death  --A.E. & Elizabeth had two children, A.E. Junior and Edwina.  Edwina would never show any interest in men, beyond taking care of her father, the widow, who retired comfortably and was, as far as anyone can recollect, a very kind, gentle, god-fearing man.

Who loved Dick Tracy comix.

And, lest this whole episode get too teary-eyed, also taught me the N-word.

We'll circle back to that, don't you fret.

So A.E. Junior meets and woos and marries Mary, and they have David Edward and Mark Edwin.  David Edward meets Patricia Shea Williams, marries, and they begat my ass.  Mark meets Jean, they marry, ten years later Jean realizes she's a lesbian and Mark moves back in with his parents, for a minute.  And that's about as big as the family ever gets, right there.  By the time I've entered the scene, the numbers start whittling back down.  Paw-Paw, as Andrew comes to be known, dies in 1988 or 1989.  I run away in 1994.  My mother leaves, later that year.  Edwina dies, like her mother, of stomach cancer & self-determination.  When I come back--  theoretically to see Edwina, before she passes, but she dies as I'm on the road to return, in mid-'03  --I find there's not much left of the various family legacies.  Mark's new wife has picked all the things of Edwina's she wants.  I'm curious about Paw-Paw's things, but I find they're not really around anymore, Edwina having purged the house of memories in the decade following my midnight disappearance.

Because I disappeared in the middle of the night.  No note.

Have I ever mentioned that?

Well.  There's a lot I haven't mentioned.  But let's stick to the stuff that matters.  Namely, what was that shit about sweet kind jesus-loving Paw-Paw teaching his stupid great-grandson america's #1 racial slur?

Andrew and Elizabeth were gentlemen farmers, you'll recall.  Lace curtain Irish, basically, though we'd not have called ourselves such.  But we were.  We were doing our level best to pass for American.  So Andrew did what americans did, to get a leg up in the community:  he became a joiner.  He joined local organizations.  He joined the Freemasons.  He also had black housekeepers.

And, when I squint at the silver nitrate memory of child Andrew on some ancestor's knee, him being barely big enough to pick out of a family portrait, I wonder how old he was when he joined the Klan.

Because that's a big fat missing piece of this whole Tracy thing I've not been talking about, in this hailstorm of amer-arcana and dropped names, and that's the racial politics of the strip.

They're not terrible.  For the era.  They're not wonderful, either.  Dick Tracy Junior's father has a black housekeeper, who nearly gets framed up into a murder attempt; and of course she dies and there's a deathbed speech, and it's all uncomfortable as hell because the housekeeper is a Mammy caricature.  She was a kind of stereotype, but she wasn't a villainous character.  The Dick Tracy strip seems to avoid that, overall--  there aren't evil black people.  They're just too credulous, generally.  When injustice occurs, the black characters that one encounters in the 30s and 40s are its victims.  Victims of the cartooning as much as anything...

And there's all kinds of racism, of course.  So it's not like we should focus on strictly the aspects which haunt me.  My banshee's a pipsqueak, comparatively speaking.  My great-grandfather wasn't klan by the time he had kids.  From what I know, his membership was never a point of pride; it was compulsory, expected, by the time & environment.  I have no idea what he did when he was with them.  

I will be honest and say that I do my best not to speculate.

Paw-paw tried to ensure his children were wiser, and kinder.  Perhaps we were.  But perhaps we were also stupid, prideful, self-deluding potato-eaters.

I say this about myself, because my grandfather taught me the N-word casually-- and curiously.

Do you know what woolly bear caterpillars are?  They were a plague on our family's pecan trees.  Paw-paw had trimmed the afflicted branches and we had turned them into a pyre.  As the fire spit and the raspy webs became soot, Paw-paw remarked, "Watch those _______ burn."  He must have been 75, or 76, by the time he said that to me.  I thought he would live to be 100.

In any event.  This is the subject I zeroed in on, today.  I'd meant to dig into it, weeks ago, but I needed to read a little deeper into the comic strip's run before I drew any conclusions.

There's a whole raft of racial issues we can dig into as this series runs on.  The stuff with the hillbilly comedy relief should definitely be a focus.  Because whitefolk, man.

We're nought if not neurotic as sin.

Tracing Gould - o12

The chronological reading pauses.  Two volumes, four years, and all the pieces of Essential Tracy are laid like tile.  The portrait, as a whole, is a curious work:  Tracy himself now bears little resemblance to his pre-cop, gentleman incarnation.  Success has marked him, made him changeless.

The strips I'm reading now skip around.  The art mutates, decade to decade, in increments, in technical adjustments.  Upscale syndication equals downscale production.  Chester Gould learns to work smaller, simpler.  Learns to work with help, accepting Dick Lochner as a partner.

The war is over.  The war never stops.  The enemy concedes.  The enemy adopts fresh disguise.  From bootlegger to racketeer to car thief to art thief to commie spy to terrorist infiltrator.  Tracy duking all comers.  Tracy is less the star, contrasted with his cohorts, the villains.

The villains cannot stop, any more than America can, with its endless enthusiasms and failed fads.  One week it's the Summer Sisters, the next it's the cruel and terrifying Brow; each saga seguing into its successor through a chain of co-stars and joke characters.  Gravel Gertie, a bizarre compulsive doodle worthy of Basil Wolverton, emerges from the dust-up of the Brow's final, fatal hours.  Vitamin Flintheart, gentleman addict and uncanny ham, pants and pops a diet pill and dons his cook's apron.  B.O. Plenty hawks a spit of tobaccy over the fourth wall straight into the audience's face.  Here comes the neighborhood.

Tess Trueheart returns from WWII, herself reborn into success, a graduate of the WAC.  Tracy's life partner and long-suffering admirer becomes an architect.  Designs the house they will come to inhabit, in the 60s--  the house itself, in my reality, drafted by Gould's own daughter.

Dick Tracy Junior adjusts to being a teenager, finding himself fresh place in a temporal medium where Little Orphan Annie is never allowed to grow up.  Falls in first love, finds the emotion as beautiful, blinding and bittersweet as the funeral service where it will be entombed.

And Pat Patton, half-bright sidekick and jokeman, accepts his place in things as Dick Tracy refuses a promotion, becoming chief of police.  The future is coming on fast, and nothing but nothing can keep progress at bay-- not even the law.  Booze is legal.  G-men have replaced gangsters as folk heroes, and John Dillinger will not be remembered for much other than the reverence with which his mourners dipped their handkerchiefs in his cooling blood.

"Snappy summary, kid."  Flatly displaced, Sam's voice does not vibrate, cannot reverberate, shall not echo anywhere except in the mind of an aged / aging / ageless Southern runaway, still too young to hear the music, much less the muse.  "But whatcha forgot was--  whatcha forgot!  Ya can't formulate 'One' if you don't start with Naught.  C'mon.  Let's zero in..."

Tracing Gould - o11

"Childhood.  Education.  Art.  Sex.  And death."  The freckles on Sam's phizz all but glitter.  "We leave anything out?"

Our scissors stopped spinning a forever ago.  The house is infinitely silent:  fathomless stillness in the ventilation ducts, each as wide around as the boy I was.  Staring into the ducts elicited a curious sense of coded time--  time suspended in light as perfectly as motes of dust performing a tarantella, the room tone of eternity preserved pristine as pearls of air in honey.  Sam won't stop staring at me.

"I'm..."  It's impossible to say why I'm nervous.  "I don't quite know."  Standing, my right knee seems to catch.  Favoring the enormous irish-pale scar center outboard of the joint with a glance.

"Yeah, I don't remember you getting that one either."  Catching a glimpse of himself reflected in the catatonic eye of the floor model wooden paneled Panasonic, Sam gives a subtle start.  "Cripes, Kid.  What'd ya picture me as, Ringo Starr in 'Shining Time Station'?  C'mon.  Shoes the sizea filberts, when I got corns the sizea walnuts, already?  Christ!"

"So..."  Words stretching and distending in my mouth as the captive afternoon strains to synch with my present.  "Sooo...  Whaatt ddd

But my words stick and hang, starchy and forfeit, in the bottled moment.  Sam is three times my size and height, at the side entrance door, opening it.  Kinetic blue discharge escapes, sparking from the hinges, freezedried momentum rasped free.  Turned toward the field of red clover, pecan boughs frozen midruffle, adult back to me, Sam clears his throat.  Cigarette clicks from left to right, right to left of his profile, visible just beneath the lobes of his ears, and Sam hoists a captain's lighter:  the impossible flame there bejeweled in a painterly hash of nib marks and shards of letratone.  The precise photo negative of fire.

"My young friend, I dunno whatcha do with whatcha got."  Sam tokes, and an ellipses of french curves wafts out through the screen door.  He opens the screen door, stepping out onto the creamy faded limegreen porch, heel of his brogan hitting the concrete with an inaudible crack.

The waveform collapses.  Memory imploding abrupt as a soap bubble.  And what's left...

"And what's left?"

Sam's voice a beacon in the black hollow beneath our dreaming.