Tracing Gould - oo9

Dick Tracy Jr. is thrown from a bridge.

Dick Tracy Jr. survives the river.

The sodden Dick Tracy Jr. races into a burning cabin to rescue his foster family.  He unties Tracy & Tess Trueheart, who flee as the structure begins to collapse...

Leaving the child pinned by burning timber.

He's rescued, of course.  It's touch-and-go.  Tess Trueheart & Tracy senior comfort each other in the waiting room.  The elder Tracy tries to storm the operating room and is escorted out, firmly:

"Now, sir, please wait here."

Swaddled in bandages except for the tip of his freckled nose, Dick Tracy Jr. calls out for his dad...

-tempus fugit-  A week later, Dick Tracy Jr., in recovery, is eager to befriend his new room-mate, a mysterious youth hit-and-run while pushing a baby carriage full of war bonds...

But in the dead of night, a pair of cads steal away with a child:  Dick Tracy, Jr.!

Realizing they've grabbed the wrong boy, the childnappers wallop DTJ's bandaged skull with a blackjack.  Chee, Tracy!

Rising from his concussion, the kid connives to swipe an adult-sized revolver.  The toughs try intimidating the kid, but a crack shot at 11, DTJ put a round clean through the grownup's pants cuff.

Dick Tracy Jr. marches them into the street, to the nearest callbox, having rescued himself for the second time in as many weeks.

I read this sequence of weeks of peril and am struck by how like Dick Grayson the "kid" really is.  He smiles like Dick Grayson.  His loyalty only exceeded by his optimism.

Putting 1933-1935 aside, I extract 'DCU: The Stories of Alan Moore' from my library and start browsing.  The very first story in the collection is 'For the Man Who Has Everything', Superman annual #11, 1985.  It's a post-crisis riff:  old shared universe, new editorial mandates.  New Robin, Jason Todd, accompanies Batman & Wonder Woman to the Fortress of Solitude to deliver birthday gifts to Kal-El... 

Only for them all to ambushed by Mongul, a horribly-named supervillain with the design signature of a Jim Starlin creation.  Moore renders all the adults in the room helpless and leaves young Jason Todd to do the rescuing.  Which he does, using only a pair of gardening gloves.

The energy Moore brings to this swift characterization could as easily be Dick Tracy Junior--  young Jason Todd has no interest in "dames" and zero patience for creeps.  Self-reliant, this is the street urchin who was stealing hubcaps off the Batmobile.  He's in the arctic, out of his element, out of his league.  He shouldn't be able to pull it off.  I glimpse young Jason Todd in Pictopia, scuttling behind a painted backdrop of chainlink in silhouette, leaving the imaginary scenery swaying...

No direct correlations today, no obvious influence.  Just familiarity: the familiarity of generations thrilling at their kinship, in shared dreams of heroism.  Of rising from the gutters and succeeding where adults struggle.  I imagine young Alan Moore, elbow deep in gore at the tannery, wondering how he'll escape the Poverty Trap, wondering who could possibly give him a leg up.  Eyes on breaking coworkers savouring cigarettes with hands encrusted in scab the colour of brick, breathing smoke across rumpled stained funnypages.  The coughing is thick with rheum.  The barely-circulating air of the tanning house stinking of shit and mildew.  It is 196_, and Alan Moore remembers being sick unto death in bed.  Eyes bleary with fever, barely able to focus to read.

He wonders, not for the first time, if Northampton will kill him.

I envision young Chester Gould, fresh to Northwestern U., stunned at the scale of Chicago's streets and nervously inspecting the scrap of address in his hand:  The Chicago-Tribune.  Thinking about his rented room, and the novelty of indoor plumbing.  A man who had never sat on a toilet before.  A letter from his mother in his pocket, begging he return to Oklahoma, nervous about what 1922 will bring.  Conscience inflamed with stories of jagged-minded soldiers smuggling machine guns back to the states, in pieces, along with their dreams.  Johnny Torrio runs the Outfit, and the devil runs the rest.  Nobody knows what the future holds.

Except, maybe, the Kid.  But it's not the kid's picture.  Not today.

Tracing Gould - oo8

"Chee, Tracy!"

Instantly Sam's face flips on its vertical axis, the ray of his vision switched 180°.  Peering down into the ink-limned paperspace with fondness verging on disdain.  The edges of the single panel hovering atop the hardwood honeyglow of the floor.  "These damned p.o.v. shots give me spins so hard you'd think I was lit."  Sam's face flicks back in my direction.  "Kid: I know you're the Kid, here, but there's a problem Back Home.  It's Dick Junior."

I know who he means.  Simultaneously, I don't.  There's Dick Grayson--  the Robin of my day, freshly exported to run a supergroup of JLA junior-leaguers  --but Dick Tracy, Junior, the o.g. kid sidekick, doesn't exist in my time.  The Dick Tracy comix I grew up with didn't feature Junior much, if ever.

"So you're gonna bail back?"

"Don't let me keep you from thinking of reasons I shouldn't!"  Sam's wry smile twinkles and his freckles dance.  "Pretty sure the only reason I exist is so our man Tracy can act like a proper dad.  Always racing headlong into danger... it's a miracle Dick Junior exists today.  I've rescued that runt's bowlcut nearly as often as I've saved his old man.  'Crimestopper' my doda Tante's fat damn fanny!"

My hand sets the slowing spin of the scissors propellering again at the edge of our sunbeam, casting glints around the room.  Tracers flying across and through the dark walnut china cabinet with its mirrored interior.  The figurines of Little Boy Blue and Miss Moffett on their top shelf giving one another the sideeye.  The dustless, bejeweled styrofoam fruit display in the center of the dining room table mocking the reality of the empty memories all around.

"Dick Grayson really was a problem, for me."  My voice suddenly strange in my throat, the words overlarge.  "Like, even when he graduated to Nightwing.  I always wondered how the hell anyone could not know who Batman was:  palling around with a tiny acrobat in a domino mask.  Batman at least had his cowl, makeup around his eyes, the advantage of shadow.  That damned kid blows the cover of Bruce Wayne, instantly!"  The proportions of the room swimming like a heat mirage at my ballooning volume.  "There's no secret identity when the partner is an adoptee.  And what kind of friend, or father figure, are we talking about here?  Placing Robin in harm's way day upon day upon day.  Batman's a menace!  And the cops of the GCPD are only worse, letting Batman do what Batman does, with a kiddy cosplayer riding his cape-tails."

Sam shrugs.  "Child endangerment laws were paperthin on the ground until, hell..."  Doffs his hat and ruffles his hair, favouring his escape hatch with a skeptical glance.  "Must be two years 'fore you were born.  CAPTA didn't exist until 1974.  And wouldn't get tightened up until after the Satanic Panic ran its course."  Repositioning himself, and his topper, the panel at his feet echoing, emptily, again:

"Satan?!?  Chee!!!"

With which the vacant scrap is scooped into hand and swiftly crumpled.  Cocking my thumb to flick the pellet of pulp.  It bounces to Sam, who lifts a foot to set it down, crimping the paperwad beneath the tip of his brogan.

"Let's stick to the present," I say, my baritone vanished.  "By '88 Paw-Paw is gone and this idyll..."

"Ain't idling much longer, seems to me."

the lit bit - march 2o26

Since I list every other damned thing.  Or do, whenever I remember to.

The Steel Spring (1968) - by Per Wahlöö

This manages the pleasant trick of not being a crime thriller, exactly, even as it manages to avoid being a dystopian sci-fi thing in an unnamed european country.  In the end it's very talky & very tidy and not very rewarding, but the overall atmosphere & dissociative clarity goes some ways toward carrying the reader through a "cosy" catastrophe.  The film nerd in me aches for it to be as messy & choked with noise as 'The Element of Crime', and my inner lit-twit wishes it was closer to 'Dhalgren' or Moorcock's 'Breakfast In The Ruins'.  It's for the best that it's not those things.

I already have the n*tflix adaptation of 'El Eternauta', if I need dystopia on tap.

Per plot, it's pretty wild.  There's a conspiracy of medical professionals.  A cabal of mad, dying fascists in surgical gowns, abducting whole blocks of citizenry to procure transfusions.  There's a beatdown, depressed population, utterly unprepared for the occupation.  There's a conspiracy of politicians & technocrats & a whole lot of everyone fucking up pretty massively.  Literally catastrophic failures of communication....  Although we don't get to see most of that.  Inspector Jensen spends the whole book not solving anything, just picking through the aftermath, taking notes, caring for those who let him and nursing the damaged.  He's on a doomed mission, and knows it.  Overall a very enervated atmosphere.

If there's one stylistic element that really sticks with me, it's how colourless the narrative is.  This paucity of bandwitdth--  i mean, 'The Steel Spring' is so rarely concentrated on the quality of light all that registers is its relative intensity, or absence  --this paucity of descriptive bandwith makes for an intensely constricted atmosphere, such that when Inspector Jensen has his first emotional reaction of the novel, it's 120 pages in.  That moment really lands, because there's so little light.

It speaks to this particular moment.  For reasons that barely need explaining.

The Twenty Days of Turin (1963-1971) - by Giorgio de Maria

Quick read!  Quite like the atmosphere, tho dunno if the translation conveyed the narrative tone entirely.  But it's a nicely absurd, unsettling little thing.  Has all the ingredients I like:  the quantum greasiness of Lem's 'The Investigation' with the neurotic hothouse vibe of Torpor's 'The Tenet' and maybe even a splash of 'Crying of Lot 49' in the cocktail.  A very suggestive brew.  Doesn't so much conclude as hard stop.  Bonus fun:  this american translation has appended an essay de Maria did on the fad for "screamer" rock.

Victorian Psycho (2025) - by Virginia Feito

Another quickie, but of a different order.  This one I'm *into*, for the general fuckedness.  Sometimes when I'm in a book, part of my reading mind scans for Source Code; so in 'Victorian Psycho' I scry Brett Easton Ellis, for obvious reasons, but I also detect the influence of 'Rant' by Chuck Palahniuk.  (A favourite!)  Which isn't to say there's a direct influence on the Writing, because I'm not detecting that.  The vocabulary is Feito's, as is the implementation-- she's got a real voice, and very clean, very crisp, and morbidly witty.  An excellent read.  Going to check out her first book soon as possible.

Dream Police:  Selected Poems (1969-1993) - by Dennis Cooper

Sometimes I read poetry....

Our Deep Gossip:  Conversations with Gay Writers on Poetry & Desire (2013)- by Christopher Hennessy

Other times I read writers talking about poetry.

Tracing Gould - oo7

I'm in my head because of death.  I'm into Gould, because of death.  I'm a morbid person.  I'm into grotesquery, vivid depictions of the severed nerves, the whole shebang.  Not ALL death.  But the Good Shit, the Artful Shit.  True heads know what I mean.  It's all down to the way it's delivered.  Do I have to justify shit?  A lot of people are into horror movies because they're taboo, or weird, or stupid, or funny, or "gross"; a lot of people are into horror shit because they're perverts.  Then there's that percentage that find it cathartic.  You know, the ones who identified with Laura Palmer.  Hi.  My mom collected horror comics, married a violent mad scientist, and moved into the deep woods with him to raise a child.  Nothing happened.

Just some near misses.  Run-ins.  Bad accidents.  Stitches.  Broken bits.  Nights I wake up screaming.  I mean, hey, it's not unique.  These things happen to literally everyone.

"Literally."

I don't use that word casually.

So that's the other thing we haven't been talking about, when talking about Gould:  the amount of just full-on, fuck you, death.  And how literary he was with it.  The punishments were swift, abrupt, sometimes cavalier, but rarely comedic.  Death is a solemn moment.  Sometimes a richly deserved finale got strung out a while--  Flat-Top slipped Tracy The Reaper once, but rare's the hood to ditch 'im twice.  Sometimes death was as abrupt as a bullet's passage thru a forehead; sometimes the round had to pass through a forearm or head to get there; but happy was the villain to simply bite a bullet with Tracy on his heels, because Death dogs Tracy.  If a ne'er-do-well gets away from his guns they're just as liable to be beheaded or slowly impaled by falling shards of glass or drown in the fog with a bag of money around their neck, as they are to escape to crime, crime again.

And I mean look.

Look!  Gould makes death look good.  It's awful stuff.  Absolutely horrid.  Gould lays death out with all the tact & decorum of a coroner.  He doesn't gild the lily about dying.  Gould makes the moral of his criminal capers clear:  dying is the least fun a body can have.

I'm just putting these thoughts down here, on this subject, at this moment, because that's how I'm treating the Gould fixation generally.  As a lens through which to view the preoccupations of the day.

Sometimes the obsessions are sonic.  Sometimes they're contextual.  Frequently it's whatever I'm reading.  And other times...

Sometimes I hear an ex from 30 years ago passed away.  My second boyfriend.  First sweetheart I had after running away.  I loved him.  We read a lot of comix together.  Sunshine had ALL the Sienkiewicz New Mutants...  And I was a bitch to to him.  And I don't know why we broke up.  But we did.

That's all I'm fucking writing today.  Selah.

Tracing Gould - oo6

Traveling, bouncing faster than can be perceived, echoing ahead of itself and backward again, the reflections finding purchase in the present.

The essayist sets his dogeared paperback aside.  The bookmark at the halfway point.  Page 127, the witness under cross-examination discusses printing leaflets with a mimeograph.  "We had a duplicating machine and produced a little news-sheet for distribution to members."  A spirit duplicator...

1968: Per Wahloo publishes 'The Steel Spring', chronicling an unnamed nation in the grips of a self-inflicted crisis, made possible by prohibition.  "Inspector Jensen gave a shake of his head.  He had always thought the plainclothes patrol slipshod & imprecise in its actions."   Was Dick Tracy being syndicated abroad, in Scandanavia, in 1968?  During the space period, was Dick Tracy translated into Swedish?  Why not.  The 1940s strips were being translated into Hungarian in the 90s...

Any influence is possible.  Passible.  Communicable.  If Dick Tracy (1933) contains Batman (1939), and Batman contains James Bond (1953), then Dick Tracy (o.g. G-man) contains James Bond (oo7).  Everything flowing from wartime, crosstime, informing points in a constellation which may only be read from without.  Every influence equal to pastiche.

Now.  Cut to then.

"But Kid," says Sam, frame slipping free from the Sunday page, freckles scintillating around his wry smile.  He pulls himself bodily from the two-dee space by the narrow black bar of ink, hauling up and out, into memory's atmosphere, thin as the moon, and stands there hands on knees, panting, cartoon cig clinging to the corner of his winded grin:  "You can't just draw any old constellation, if ya can't project what the myth is meant to encompass.  The story has to map true."

"True," The child echoes.  Setting his scissors aside.  Studying the fifty year old face he finds reflected in them.  "The story has to encompass the imaginary shape; the myth isn't cut to fit the story."

The essayist in his fourth-dimensional window winks, a glint off steel shears.  "Sure.  But what do you imagine the shape to be?  Forty years of dailies.  Forty years of work.  What kind of silhouette does that provide?  Is it flat?  Flat, hell: is it even opaque?  Can it shade, block, obfuscate?  Or is it only an outline, a profile, a précis?"   Eyeballing the diminutive Sam as he cocks his derby back with a derisive sniff.

"What's the topography of our myth," says Sam, giving the tip of the scissors a light kick, setting them spinning.  "Izzat what you're asking?  An implausible ask for an impossible question."

The scissors spin, spin, spin on their axis.  Images old and new flashing.  Forgotten to the child, immemorial to his quinquagenarian self.  Olden anew.

what if

i shaved all the hair

except the happy trail leading into my bum cleavage

and i called those my "booty pubes"

the wasp's dying crawl

Twenty-eight-- perhaps twenty-nine, perhaps thirty years ago, I watched Chris Neal make a painting.

 

The fine arts building, late nights.  Spring?  Or was it summer?  The two of us juked on caffeine from The Coffee Banque, just across the street.  One of four, five pieces I watched him make.  A curious, dusty-looking thing, craggy plaster worked into the canvas for texture.  A bit of Arizona map from the floorboard of Neal's car, embedded in the sky.  Charcoal slashes forming the skull of a cow, marking the ground.  Hooker's green and yellow clay and umber red beneath it all.  A bold, squared-off window into road trips forgotten & unmade.  Those were brilliant, exciting nights.  The room thrumming to Pigface, watching Neal dance around the canvas, a happy parody of Pollack.

(A wasp crawling across the surface of the still-wet piece where it lay on the floor.  Neal, in a snit of inspiration, leaving it there to become part of the work.  The next day, daubing black & yellow & white in an abstracted, dotted line across the wasp's dragway until there are enough individual accumulations of dots for the wasp to echo forward & back across the rosy desert horizon, motion captured by life.  "That'll finish it.")

An old mate held onto that untitled work a long time, a prized piece.  Neal by then having given up art.  Then the painting resided in storage a while.  Then he offered it to me, for safekeeping.  I kept it relatively safe.  Somewhere in the moves, the original wasp had fallen away.  In an emergency change of address, had to de-frame the canvas.  Rolled it for storage, moved into a new place.  Soon as I could, had it re-stretched and framed again.

It dominated my kitchen around nine years.  Mute witness to all my worst cooking.  Then covid arrived.  Lost the studio.  The painting went into storage, again.  Into a garage, for about a year, I guess.  Then into another storage unit, for about five or six months.  We downsized the storage, so it moved into a lesser corrugated metal closet space.  Another year living in the dark.  Then it moved with us, here, to Chicago.  Arrived before us, point of fact.  No room to display it, and besides, I'd fallen out with all the old Auburn crew.  So it lived in my closet.  A year and a third again.  

Today it's in the alley, waiting next to the garbage.

I dunno.  You keep signal fires burning for as long as the signal's good, then you let them gutter.

There were people to whom the painting had meaning.  I was definitely one.

classic

Mental health day.

Tracing Gould - oo5

The reflections are something else.

There's the obvious:  Dick Tracy & his orphan partner in crimestopping, Dick Tracy Jr: 1933.  Bruce Wayne & Dick Grayson I940.  Easy parallels.  Deathtraps.  Shared (stolen) villains.  The fetish for grotesquery.  The influence shines clear.  But change the angle of the shears in your hand...

There's a weirder, narrower resemblance:  Dick Tracy & Joe Dredd.  Lawmen who've survived countless deadend hells.  Witnessed the devil's worst, climbed over corpses wracked with torment, had the soles of his feet flayed, been starved, blinded, shot in the head and abandoned down cravasses in desert wastes.  Dick & Joe, refusing promotion in favour of staying On The Prowl, On The Streets, forever in syndication, applying the law to scum.

These likenesses neither begin nor end at the chins.  There's an unholy implacability to these characters, a momentum of moral force, that marks them, now.  It was never there in the beginning.  But fifty years on, the characters carry themselves differently.  They are marked by their villains.  They have shaped themselves against their stone & steel & forgotten future metropoli and become celebrated, for better or for worse, as reflecting Us.  We're the cutouts.  We're paper dolls, dressing ourselves to match... 

I'm trying my city on for size.  D.T. contains Chicago, as Wayne contains Gotham, as Dredd contains Meg-1.  Each its own ironic tweak on the times they inhabited.  Tracy, emerging from the ruins of the white city, through the flames of prohibition into the electric light of our present/future police state--  his own creator a kid raised without indoor plumbing.  Of the three the most winking invention is probably Batman, that mob-busting vigilante-cum-rich kid, whose multi-billion dollar likeness was owned & printed by a mob front publishing outfit, looking to launder money--  here's looking at you, Johnny DC  --with Bob Kane's vainglorious signature stenciled atop art he never saw let alone touched:  I'd say Gotham is New York and Manhattan Island and New Jersey in the bargain.  And then there's Joe's sweet Mega-City One, America's terminal Sprawl, a nubbled & mushrooming coastline, as imagined from the Firth of Tay...

The scissors close.  Reflections fall away.

apropos of sweet f.a. except for it's on topic:

Richard Corben gave the Queen all the best fight scenes.

Sincerely.  Corben's a guy who I read a Fight Comic for.  There's a bloody-minded intensity to the fights he stages for her.  In 'Muvovum' the Queen breaks all the limbs on an old man, bites off his finger, and throws him out a window.  She's terrifying.  But that's small potatoes to the HALF-A-GRAPHIC-NOVEL-WORTH of fights he gives Kil, in 'Children of Fire'.  I'm exaggerating because I always do, but for serious, nearly half the page count in this book was Kil curbstomping a murderously stupid lizard man.

GLORIOUS.