"Wuxtry, Boy Commandos!" - November 2o26 (updated)

The Demon (2o26) - written & illustrated by James Harren w/ colours by Dave Stewart

DC Finest - The Demon: Birth of the Demon (1972-74 / 1978 / 1979 / 1981) - written & illustrated by Jack Kirby w/ inks by Mike Royers + arcs w/ art by Michael Golden, Jim Aparo, Steve Ditko, & Dick Giordiano

Gone, gone, form of fan...

So, I've got the new Harren Demon from DC, plus a slab edition of Kirby era Demon to chew on like a zesty hell-flavoured dog "toy".  No point-by-point bullets yet, because the Big Reading is happening n-o-w.  Mike Royers' inks are something else, man.  I was always a fan of Etrigan, dating back to when I was a kid, but the Kirby era stuff I never hit--  because it was never around?  Seriously.  Kirby Demon is a thing that I have never seen In The Wild, in thirty-odd years of dedicated longbox archaeology.  According to Duin & Richardson's 'Comics: Between The Panels', Kirby's inspiration was a bald swipe from Foster's Prince Valiant--  December of 1937 to January of 1938.  Val was running a con on the Ogre of Sinstar Wood, using the skin of a goose(!), quills for tusks, and webbed feet for ears.  It worked:  he scared the ogre to death.  Kirby was so taken with the design he adopted it in 1972.

So the Demon is either fifty-four years old, our time...  FOUR YEARS OLDER THAN MY ASS   ...or he's a sprightly eighty-nine years old, dated from Foster's inception.  Basically fucker is more ageless than Jason Blood--  who's had a rough time of it, if the Harren revamp is anything to go by.  And I adore the Harren revamp.  Blood is essentially Hellboy now, and what a righteous look for him:  tore-up trenchcoat heavy with arcane oddments, iron bar topped with a magical pinecone, and a pocket full of gnomes & fae friends.  I adore this shit.  Much as the Demon & Blood's appearances in Ennis & McCrea's Hitman charmed my balls off, *this* iteration feels 100% Right.  As in righteous.  It feels like there's a place for these boys on the racks.  Which I couldn't even say for the Matt Wagner iteration, a book I have encountered In The Wild, in longbox archaeology, repeatedly.  Weird, honestly.  Nobody really rolls for the Wagner miniseries.  It's competent.  But it's not Matt Wagner, to me, any more than it's Demon or Blood.  This?  This, I am hella eager to see where Herren carries us.

The first & final pages of this single issue hang in my mind like weathered tapestries from a castle wall.  Supergood to have new, current comix in my veins.  I BURN FOR MORE.

Nemesis (2o1o) - written by Mark Millar w/ art by Steve McNiven

(blink, blink)  Reading time required: ten minutes.

Not the stupidest thing I've read this year, tho def contender for most mindless.  Mark Millar could have written this in the time devoted to his morning shit.  An appalling thing to consider, as I assume coffee factors in.  I picture the man in classic Spider Jerusalem pinup mode, laptop on his knees, his fingers an impossible blur:

"NEMESIS MURDERIZES NINETY-SEVEN PRISON GUARDS IN RIOT GEAR WITH CRUEL, EFFICIENT CELERITY.  IT WILL BE THE ONLY ENJOYABLE PART OF THE BOOK, AND EASILY THE MOST PORNOGRAPHIC.  FANS OF MY WORK WILL EJACULATE LIKE THE MEDICI FOUNTAINS OF LUXUMBOURG, ONLY THE SPRAY WILL BE MORE WATERY AND YELLOWISH, AND NO-ONE WILL EVER VISIT THEM, EVER, MUCH LESS VOLUNTEER FOR PHOTOS.  SUCH IS MY FAME.  SPEAKING OF, MAKE A NOTE TO INVEST IN HANEBISHO BOG ROLL.  CURRENT WIPES SUBSTANDARD & I NEED SOMETHING WITH MOISTURIZER."

Have now spent longer shittalking this comic than Millar did scripting it.  'Decompressed comics' were such a mistake.

Billy Bat vols 1-2 (2oo8) - written & illustrated by Naoki Urasawa w/ art assisted by Takashi Nagasaki

I don't know.   The prospect of another meander into mystery by Urasawa initially thrilled me-- I quite liked 20th Century Boys, and Monster was sick fun...  But maybe I'd rather have more Master Keaton or straight up revert to Pineapple Army.  Pluto was by far the most concise & cogent manga I've encountered from this team, but it's not something I need to re-read.  And if I'm honest with myself, the reason I drilled down so thoroughly on 20thC.B. (every time a volume dropped, I did a front-to-back re-read of the entire series w/ the newest volume as a chaser) was because, at the time, I was unfamiliar with the author's tendency to pretty much bluff everything.  I believed there was a master plot ergo nothing was necessarily insignificant.  That's not how Urasawa actually builds, though.  He has to keep himself interested & invested, so he would only have rough goals, big notes, and let the little stuff develop as it occurred.  He has to keep himself interested; and as a writer / artist, I can appreciate the desire for surprise.  Nothing grinds the joy out of creation quite so thoroughly as a watertight script.  But with this series, I just don't know.  The prospect of 24-26 tankubon, and a multi-generational saga of Who Is The True Baddie, maybe it's my recently found mortality has me impatient at the outset.  I am curious how it develops, but there isn't quite the fire to figure out the big mysteries in me, these days.  Also it feels like Urasawa is self-consciously recycling character designs from 20thC.B. here...  Though that could simply be his training with The Master, Osamu Tezuka; could be Naoki Urasawa developed his own Star System for peopling the work.  Why wouldn't he?

I'll give it one more volume to properly hook me.  But if not, no worries.  If I need to work at a jigsaw, my husband has a collection.  That's way more fun, and it doesn't toy with my faith in a finished product.  The short version is this ain't bad.  But Billy Bat ain't got me, yet.

not to go full pinko or anything

but sometimes reading is required

good morning

The dream, I can't bore you with details.  It was a classic emotional blockage thing.  I wanted to make peace with my father.  Was trying to make art.  He initiates a fight, it gets physical, but I'm adult and can actually defend myself, so end up taking him down.  Which makes me miserable.

Wake with my chest muscles knotted and my ears ringing.  Sit up, gasping, and the next thing I or my husband know am sobbing.  He reaches out, asks if I'm okay, what happened.  "Emotional blockage," are the actual words that float out, unbidden.  Even in my sleep I'm trying to problem solve.

I tell Sig the essentials of the top paragraph, specifically, "I wanted to make peace with my father."  Which is a hell of a thing to utter.  As it's impossible.  It's like believing in capital-G deus, for me.  It's irreal.  He tried to strangle me when I was four years old.  Which is what I confronted him with, in dream.

I've always been vague on the date, consciously, but clearly my psyche keeps a calendar.  We moved back to Alabama in late 1979.  So it was 1980 when everything happened.  Fuck, I might as well blurt it here as anywhere.  The last three hours have been spent walking, trying to think everything through.

My mom was trying to give me a bath.  I was too young to totally behave, so I thrashed, I guess.  Fighting taking a bath, who knows why.  Someway I kicked, caught her in the solar plexus.  She doubles over, and my father, in the next room, rushes in, asking what happened.  Mom manages to say, "Kicked me" and dad was immediately on me, hands around my throat, throttling me, drowning me.  Screaming my dad's name (my name too, by the way) Mom manages to pull him away, and it's reality reset.  She tries to calm him, and I guess they do their best with me, and put me to bed.

The next bit is less clear, but at some point I wake and see a thin strip of light from the hall, where the bathroom is.  Mom's in there, crying, and my father's trying to calm her.  Because she miscarried.

The next thirteen years, you might gather, are hell.  I was raised in relative isolation (i.e. no resources, no close friends, only seeing family or friends of family outside of school) by a semi-rational man with a tendency to try and enforce his will with a hand to my throat, or a belt to my back, etc.  He flew into rages.  I didn't know why, consciously.  Didn't know I was going to have a brother.  No-one talked to me about it.  We've still never talked about any of it.  It's something I eventually pieced together, as repressed fragments of memory eventually drifted back into configurations resembling a whole.

I killed my brother.  My father tried to kill me.  Everyone in the family knew what had happened, and was happening, and no-one did anything to help.  Failing to murder, he did the next best thing and turned me into one of the countless billions of broken and generally fucked humans who drift through life, a little half-there.  I could have become an alcoholic, or a fiend, or an abuser.  I could have become any species of monster.  And did not.

Instead, you get this.  A blog, with occasional art, and much maundering over things beyond my grip.

Hell of a start to the day, hunh?  Sorry 'bout that.

the lit bit - october 2o26

Breakfast In The Ruins (197o) - by Michael Moorcock

A weirdly cozy one.  Maybe it's a cis-het pop trash artist exploring his inner queer that draws me in.  His use of genre & popular form as a means of examining class divides, mayhap.  Or it could simply be that there's a part of this book which Knows The Gutter, as a creature of cities, and from such earthy vantage is clear-eyed enough to see up our collective trouser leg.  This is a book that knows what's what-what & when's never quick enough.  Lost track of the number of times I've read it.  Like its deadened (dead-end?) narrator, I'll keep coming back.

A Million Betrayals (2oo7) - by Michael Moorcock [essay, in 'London Peculiar & Other Nonfictions']

The Third Policeman (197o) - by Flann O'Brien a.k.a. Brian O'Nolan

More comfort in dislocation.  A deeply queer text.  Perhaps merits a closer reading on the homoeroticism of hell, as conceptually present here.  Also deadly earnest in its circular humour & wit.  My first read, back in 2003, was disquietingly uncanny; the book's prose struck me as clammy as stained glass in a bombed-out church, but its absurdity & prosaic beauty wooed me, too.  By the end I was determined to own a copy for myself.  Essential.  Read every other year.

The Fourth Policeman (1997) - by Hugh Kenner [essay, in 'Historical Fictions']

The Condition of Muzak (197o) - by Michael Moorcock

Ahh, Mister C, Mister C.  Not a novel so much as a technical triumph.  Doesn't stand alone the way the other books in the Cornelius canon can...  But it does speak to me, personally, profoundly, as a little kid lost in a world that could care-- and chooses otherwise.  I never wanted to be a rock god, magic christian zillionaire, or silver screen diva.  Dandy messiah to the age of science, tho?  A tastily craven condition indeed, and this book's a shot in the arm against it.

Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors (2o23) - by Ian Penman [essay, booklength]

Obsessions & methods, methods & obsessions.  A lovely sprawling meditation.  About the only questions I had that it didn't answer were RWF's performance & wardrobe in Kamikaze 1989.

Death Is No Obstacle (1992) - by Colin Greenland, interviewing Michael Moorcock

More methodology.  Alternated this with Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors for a few days.  If I read this at least twice more all Moorcock's methods will probably be engraved on my forehead in reverse for ready reference.  Worth reflecting on, if you're like me and a dumbass autodidact.

Unstrung:  Rants & Stories of a Noise Guitarist (2o21) - by Marc Ribot

Funny.  Anecdotal.  Educational.  Bite-sized essays.  Still nibbling.

Der Sandmann (1816) - by E.T.A. Hoffmann

Let's write this bit first, then circle back to capsule thoughts about the rest of my reading.

Opening para:  Ever slept on an author?  To, like, a historical degree?  That's me, last night, realizing that 'The Nutcracker' is based off a Hoffmann short story.  Hoffmann's been on my mental radar since Grant Morrison was on Doom Patrol-- not because of a direct citation, mind, but because my magpie mind never throws any reference out!  Someway I conflated the title of 'Tales of Hoffman' (Doom Patrol #50) and the opening of  'Anyhow Stories' (D.P. #44) to suggest Morrison was using his classical education to browbeat me into reading E.T.A., someday.

Second paragraph:  I don't know Lucy Clifford's work from a gap on a shelf, but I have a strong suspicion her Anyhow Stories, published in 1882, owe no small debt to E.T.A.'s fucked up little horror parable about schizoid psychosis & the fear that we could be, are being, replaced by machines capable of every human falsity including "love".  Glossing 'The New Mother' this morning, I note motifs of stolen eyes, weird prosthesis, and mechanical simulacra.  The influence must be there...  But is influence the point?  Or is influence just the flu?  A nightmare you catch, a hiccough you can't quite shake free?

Concluding para.  'The Sandman', surprisingly to me, has rather incisive insight into the shit women put up with from men, particularly lust-addled men.  The character of Clara is the sanest figure in the entire tale, and has the most clear-headed attitude.  She's basically a psychologist, compared to the protagonist, who's a total fucking freak.  The events of the story might not actually be Nathaniel's fault, it must be said; he might have contracted some sort of brain-damaging illness in his youth, as there's reference to a childhood fever...  But whether his brain's gone soft or not, he's all in for bangin' automata, and he seems only too ready to kill & maim to get his rocks off. *

* Couldn't help wondering whether Hoffmann was aware he had syphilis, at the time of writing.  According to the timeline he was diagnosed in 1907.  Semirelevant footnote...?

Paranthetical coda:  there's a structural curio here in that the story starts off in epistolary fashion, with three letters, then descends into the voice of a minor character to start the story anew and recount events with an omniscient eye.  There's a tidy device introduced at the opening of this middle third, to explain things, essentially saying that "The Sandman would be an interesting story, told normally, but it's more edifying to explain events out-of-order," arguing how informality & unfamiliarity should be enough to draw a reader in, the way someone in a heightened state of emotion should be interesting to the casual observer.

To wit, reading this short hot on the heels of Moorcock explicating the mechanics of his storytelling was choice.  Totally forgot Todorov wrote about Hoffmann's 'Sandman' in 'The Fantastic', too.

The Little Friend (2oo2) - by Donna Tartt

It's been two years since I finally read 'The Secret History' (1992).  Overdue.  Cracking it now.

it's boner. james boner

Spy shit is something I can't quite quit.  Spy-fi is maybe my coziest zone, particularly if there are actual spy plot mechanics, and the "spy" part of it doesn't get glossed over in favour of big fancy gimmicks.  I suppose that's why I keep re-watching Tenet, despite feeling it to be a deeply flawed & alienating thing-- it's not Inception!!!  Inception is pure gimmick, whereas the gimmick of Tenet directly informs & sculpts the spy elements.

The problem with all this is being a north american cold war baby.  I'm gen X.  Our understanding of espionage is almost wholly sculpted from birth by bad (satirical, or absurdist, or entirely too self-serious) television and James Bond.  The realities of it, the Tinker Tailor Spyworld Sucks of espionage, that stuff doesn't trickle down to us unless our parents were turbonerds or spooks.  It took me half my life to learn to like James Bond anything.  And if I'm honest I'm only into the Daniel Craig ones because my flavour of film dork appreciates 'em.  I like the Craig Bonds because my people like Craig Bond.  As a whole?  Bond is unredeemable, as characters go, about as sexy as saltpeter.

But the villains...

Raoul Silva is super sexy to me.  Him feeling up Bond and discovering 007 being perfectly willing to fuck him was a delightful moment.  Imagine 'The Americans' only instead of our heroes enduring a depressing & joyless Russian sexwork programme as part of their training, it's 007 realizing his inner Frank Boothe:  Bond will fuck anything that moves.  Because nothing means anything except his loyalty to his handlers, and in espionage the shortest distance between two objectives does tend to be sex.  That's not a terrible premise to start from...

Which is why I was charmed by Desolation Jones, by Warren Ellis.  It's about the spy community cannibalizing itself.  Most of the big shit spy yarns I'm into are about that specific thing.  Technically that's all the BBC's o.g. 'The Prisoner' is about.  Just spies being absolutely awful to one another in every way they can, and being massive pervs in the bargain.  I'd like to write & draw something along those lines, someday.

Sure, at the end of the movie you still have to explode the houses of Parliament or something.  But instead of onerous rooftop chases or basic-ass car-on-car violence or trying (& usually failing) to reinvent Bond being tortured in a chair, it's just bumper to bumper boning.  Mm.  Yes.

face f/ radio, soul f/ podcasting

Today in mental health:  there was much clearing of plates & scraping of cutlery.

Decided, last week, to keep a weather eye on the jobs report.  In eight months I better be working somewhere else, or I'd better be in a position of barely working & commanding an army of smurfs.  Baby needs these hands to draw.

Also came clean with Sig about a quickly faded crush.  I met an artist, realized I doubted their motives, and didn't do the obvious thing when a cool individual wanted to smoke weed & hang in my studio, because I was too myopically focused on, dunno, being friends first.  Consequently it was a bit of knock when they asked to "unsubscribe to my newsletter" i.e. go 'way boy, ya bother me.

Sketchy is as sketchy does, and sketchy didn't want to actually talk about making lines on paper.

Hey, I don't make friends easy.  Never have.  Fuck 'em.  Or rather, don't.  Because men are sluts.  :3

Great part is my relationship with Sig is stronger than ever, plus I don't have some terminal flake humouring me & stringing me along w/ an eye on some unknown angle.  

The only thing that matters as much to me as my husband is art, and I've had enough of friends who simply don't wanna talk art.  That's most every friend I've had for the last decade...

As a weirdly influential, no-good canadian misanthrope once said, "Never fall in love with a bar."

And what of the o.g. crew, the peeps who were there when my alien spacecraft landed?  They all fucked off to work for the evil empire & establish tax havens for Google in the UK  (that was The Writer), or abandoned painting in favour of opening fad restaurants & scamming creditors (that was The First Artist), or abandoned drawing comix in favour of becoming a tenured poet at a prestigious college & marrying a zionist (The Second Artist + Art Partner), or fail to become an architect in San Franciso and do what, exactly?  (He was more of the First Artist's friend, anyhow)...  Etectera.

When 'they' say the people you meet in college will be your friends for the rest of your life, 'they' are spitting Recieved Wisdom, and speaking from a model of friendship that predates the bicentennial.

The point here is, my focus is refreshed, I am sober as Carrie Nation's little ax, and there is work to do, on every level.  No more pretenses of authority or aspirations of fame or inclination to podcasting.

Shit gon' get done.

parenthetical: & sometimes i flatline

2nd time in as many weeks, in a depressive slump.  Just in time for the work weekend.

It's the numbness & flatness & falsity of my Being in this world that's doing my head in r.n.

I have exactly one close friend; one close friend from my Old Life; and I can't seem to form any other attachments.  I'm having bad dreams about self-harming & being in a schizoid war with my own self.  I overslept by an hour today and it's pretty much ruined my brain.  Tried getting out, drawing, reading, walking, etc.  But everything is a slog and I can't stop thinking about the dream.

I wish I could afford therapy.  I wish I believed therapy would be of any use.  As it is forcing myself to follow my own program, my own regimen of activity & health, is something of a battle.  Thank fuck I'm not an alcoholic or some other kind of junky or this would intolerable.  Because I know a pill or a smoke or a drink isn't going to do anything useful.

Fuck, I dunno.  Every day I wake up in a country where the highest office in the land has decided people like my husband & I are the enemy within, and to paint targets on people like us.  How can we not be depressed in a culture where the president wakes up and signs a bullshit slip of paper meant to define gender?

But anger isn't the emotion, right now.  Right now I don't even have that.  I'm just exhausted, flat as a toothpaste tube slit open and rinsed clean of its contents.  I don't want to be fifty.  My brain is younger than this.

i have flashbacks (four)

Could simply be brain doing brain things.  Soaking my knees in the tub, flashed on the time I went up Stone Mountain, five-nearly-six years ago.  Saw the climb, with the bike on my shoulder (like a freak, or a moron, or a freaking moron) and saw the turn once I reached the summit.  Above the treeline, up In The Blue, overlooking the curve of the earth.  The fear is what I remember, the panic, the hammering pulse, the need to get as close to the ground as I could.  Begging for someone to help me, terrified for my life, totally unreasoning.  Of course I made it down, by walking, like a normal person.  Of course the panic attack ended and I was fine.  As I watch the reel play, my heart rate does nothing:  it's a memory, and I know it.  The association is strictly one of panic, and anxiety, and fear.  So while I'm like this and my brain chemistry is fucked up, of course it's going to yank index cards filing similarly existential woo-woos.

Yesterday and today, I note, flashes have been while my eyes are trained right.  Pertinent?  No clue.

i have flashbacks (three)

Nothing too cinematic.  In the pit at work, as usual.  Classic Saturday.  No call no show turns out to be a message from yesterday that was never passed, but either fuckin' way it's me until close.  So I grind, listening to podcasts, trying to ignore my co-workers, and focus.

Somewhere in the middle of the shift, 3-4 hours in, the wall to my immediate right wasn't exactly there, and I was looking at the woods by the graveyard where I useta sleep.  Could feel the plastic trashbags I'd laid across the grass crinkling through the clothes I'd been sleeping in, my right side aching from how cold & hard the soil was/is, and it's late April, early March, 2021--  it doesn't get earlier than 3a.m.  I hear the happy camper out there in the dark, his manic hyena laugh scarpering up the creekbed & thru the trees toward me.  It's just past a full moon, for which I'm thankful.  Light so bright outer space is darkest navy.

Then I'm back at work.  That was before the accident.  It's a strong sense memory, so strong I could smell the grass.  Visuals weren't the best.  I didn't have my glasses then, so everything was a trifle furrier than I prefer.  But yeah.  This is a thing that comes and goes on me.  The last time it happened, I wasn't stressed.  This time I was.  So not a stress trigger, necessarily?

The "happy camper" was an enigma.  He was out in the middle of the woods.  I'd only hear him late nights, on three occasions.  But he made it hard to sleep easy.  It was not hale, healthy laughter.  It was cracked laughter.

it may stop, but it never ends

R.I.P. to a true pen.  Matt Howarth passed.  72.  You've read enough obits to know.

Never met him.  Just mainlined his work from the moment I ran away.

The most important things Howarth's comix taught me:

never turn yr music down

break lines where lines bend

say what you mean & say it mean

abstraction is the main attraction

no pun too dumb