when it's finished burning, let me know

Here's how I'm dealing with the end of the american century:  I'm waiting.

I am waiting for the stupid-ass, self-aggrandizing thing to burn.  I will wait for the careers & reputations & legacies & aspirations & monuments & expectations to catch the wild spark that will carry them out of this present hell and into finitude.  I will wait, and continue waiting, and when the cinders are starting to cool, I will wrap some nice potatoes in tin foil and slip them into the ash.

There is no coming back from this.  You all know that, right?  We're never going to put every one of these malingering whoremongers in jail.  Punishment is beyond our remit, as a citizenry; we are neither actively encouraged nor permitted to actually advance our progress, as a society, and it is our economic system that's at fault for that, first, and it is our vaingloriously up-its-own-ass legal system that makes it not only possible, but certain, that we will take uncountable lives and poison our environment, for war, and the profits from war, and the potential for profit above all.

We have thirsted for a god-king to spotlight & underline the essential rottenness of the american myth, and we got the fucker.  Racist grandpa is the one.  There's never been an example like this: and america is, politically speaking, the zenith of Bad Examples.  Roosevelt dreamt like Cthulhu itself of corruption & invidious largesse, forever, but even Roosevelt's distended id couldn't conceive of the beast A.I. rampant and bloody-handed in the marketplace.  This is the one, friends.

And hey, I'm waiting for him to die.  Who doesn't like to dream a petty dream?  I'm a big fan of waiting for the inevitable.  I'm sure either Rubio or Vance will prove to be incompetent and ditzy enough to satiate the average Saturday Night Life fan thirsting for a different set of personality tics to scoff at.  My money's on Rubio getting the seat next.  But however it rolls, believe me when I say it does not matter whether the shits won or not, anymore, because the fault was all ours for believing in this thing.

This two-party thing.  This set of false binaries.  This shell game.

I was not raised to believe in it.  Like some skin tag with delusions of being Athena, I grew from the brow of a peanut farmer.  Carter was the failure that bore me, specifically, just as my parents were failures for their dim abreactions to the Nixon administration, believing Kennedy, Johnson & co had established the furtherest limits of cupidity, avarice, and war.

Every last one of these names, deluded and rotten, my parents barely elevated amongst them.  Bad hippies & intransigient dope fiends, believers in technocracy & science fiction, believers in ice magick & the power of art, my parents founded their fucked-up little fam based on a surfeit of fabricated evidence.  They thought they'd seen enough to prove they knew how it would roll out.

And then they got Reagan, and that's when we all realized we had the math wrong.  By Reagan it was already too late.  My dreams, as a youth, were founded on apocalypse.  Though I did not know it.  Everything was the eschaton, everything was gaining momentum, the fundamentalists were prepared, plans in hand when the neo-liberals were barely hatched.  The game, as some stable genius neatly put it, was rigged.  American culture & American society is predicated on there being an End Time.  To have America, one must have a decline & a stop.  There is no dream without the wakeup.

There is no false dream of revolution without rubes to sell it to.  Grant Morrison needed an audience to sell the Invisibles, and he had exactly that in millennial-edge America, with our cute need to gobble ecstasy and attend Burning Man.  Lucky fucker.  He got me.  Morrison isn't fussed about pronouns anymore, are they?  Mozzer got filthy lucre and a Big Name in lights and even a settlement from the Wachowskis.  Who could ask for more, from America?

Dream a little dream.  Dream the littlest dream.

In the 80s we all held our breath and waited for Orwell's little book to come to pass, and were relieved when it proved to only be another anniversary, another birthdate, proving only the advancement of our gilded age.  1976 was the centennial, and we celebrated it with hack songs & a country twang.  Minted a special quarter.  Whoopie shit.  At least we got an Altman movie out of it.  The 250th is a cage match for human animals with no talent beyond basic brutality, a guest list of hasbeen disappointments-- including its Special Guest Speaker & Master of Ceremonies, the gilded birthday boy his own suety self --and a case of box office theft to rival Woodstock 50.

Ahh, that number.  That special, meaningless integer.

I am fifty this year.  I grew up dreaming about Skynet, and the ruins of Great Cities, and a mechanized heel sundering a human skull.  And here we are.  Here we bloody are.

I love you.  Whoever you are, reading these words.  We had a fun run.  Set your alarms for 2027.

three glimpses thru a window

The pile on the noon lawn is protean breakup debris: dude's clothes and plastic junk the shapes of which elude the sidewalking casual eye and hangers and papers and wrappers and razors and usb chargers and I keep walking, and when I return by an hour later the only thing to disturb it is the wind and eventually it is gone, over the course of the day, scattered, dispersed, collected, gone except for bill statements wetted and hung over privet hedge to dry and flake in the sun and be carried away over two days.  The secondfloor window from whence it spilled open one hour and closed the next for rain.  Nothing much seems to happen.

Days later going back home to finish laundry passing the cops wondering where they parked and nothing much seems to be happening on noonstreet, our foot patrol thumbs in their vests doing the slow strut up the steps to the building where the pile was, eyes on the secondfloor, calling in wondering Where she is.  I don't see their car and they don't seem on alert.  Switch the laundry out and back outside back past and the twentysomething hair up in a dayathome bun in blackshirt blackpants is explaining He's gone I put everything out But he has a key If you'll stay here I'll go up He's unpredictable.  My last walk back on the last load her head out the window one patrolman's saying If he comes back.

Same afternoon same street altogether empty except for the smoker in cloudgray wrestling taped-up gym bag 'round a sixpack gut, a standout, unfamiliar face wreathed in white cirrus as he passes fresh cigarette bogeyed to lips he busts out BRENDA behind me and I chance a look back, up, and to the left at the closed busted-out bedroom window the hole in the glass a parallellogram drawn with french curves, pieces of the whole laid on the patchy grass where billpaper mache coats the brush and cloudgray stranger shouts BRENDA, BRENDA he bawls again cigarette between his fingers and pacing the fence up and down up and down howling BRENDAAAHHH, and I'm fingering my phone but five minutes later he's gone.

what's he building in there (not comix)

 

the drawback to this paint on these found materials

is it takes forever for the wood to drink the paint

and you watch the paint change colour & texture

as it dries, thins & solidifies, bonding to the old layer

how it looks when you painted is NEVER how it appears dry

Tracing Gould - o16

"What can we expect from the 'reformed' Frank White?"

Christopher Walken smiles that nervous little needle-toothed grin, an aw gosh spasm of mirth, and the lines around his eyes are swept away by the seriousness of inspiration.

"Do you, know what I want to do to you, counselor?"

The counselor laughs, feeling glamorous as Kim Basinger cast as Vicki Vale--  there's a wallpapered poster just off Times Square covered in the Tim Burton Batlogo and she's wondering how long 'til it peels and starts to tatter and pretty soon junk ad tickertape parade for the paving over of the porno theatres  --and she jousts with the freshly showered, freshly sprung mobster.

"What's that?"

"I...  want to take you...  on, the subway."

And he does.  Because, after five years being escorted cage to cage to cage, he can.  And when the hoods come they don't come in a dozen, they're kids prowling, not real criminals.  Three to one eraserheaded cracker with a piece.  The counselor covering her bare breast almost as an afterthought.

Her eyes on Frank.  Everyone's eyes on Frank.  The grip angled like a hardon.  The lady or the tiger.

Frank pulls his money clip with an underhand toss and the wad spins into the skinny kid's damp palm.

"Come down to the Plaza.  I got work, for you."

Frank smiles his preferred Trump hotel customer smile.  Winks.  The kids backing away, eyes big, feeling the luckiest they've ever been, to be able to retreat.  Rich, healthy, pants freshly pissed.  Feeling wild and a little outta breath, not high.  Weirded out.

Thinking 'That piece was real.  This money's real.  Wazzat motherfucker actually real?'

There's no evidence Abel Ferrara ever gave a fuck about Dick Tracy.  But his little electric blue and goldlit epic paen to Christopher Walken's face, it's a Dick Tracy kinda vibe.  So this one goes here.

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.

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 I didn't.  The writing is soporific.  The only thing more flat was the cover art, which looked to be AI generated, cropped weirdly and printed cheaply.  A swing and a whiff.

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.  There's an immediacy to the emotional content created by unconventional phrasing.  There's more scuttlebutt to be inferred from this than I'd like--  speculating about whether Stipe was ever intimate with Kurt Cobain isn't something I should be thinking  --but there's also a very clear moral lesson throughout about fame and its perks.  Much as I loved R.E.M.'s music, in my teens, I find the arc of Stipe's career tediously American in a way that doesn't gel with why I loved their sound.  He became a rich drunk and drifted into film finance.  That doesn't speak to the lonesome love for life that I found resonant, as a young man.

It's a lovely little heartbroken book, and a clear warning against idol worship.  And, hunh!  I have a Douglas Martin-edited book of interviews with Kathy Acker on my shelf.  I didn't know one of Martin's books was in my library.  Going to re-read that after 'Cruising' week ends...

Cruising: An Intimate Study of a Radical Pastime (2019) - by Alex Espinoza

Research.  It's true!  [Reading now.  Will update afterward.]

Cruising (1970) - by Gerard Walker

The copy the library sent me was a first edition hardback, added to the Chi library system in November of 1970.  Shortly after publication.  Now I'm sure--  I am certain  --that William Friedkin had a copy all his own.  I know he didn't need to check this out of a library...  He got a studio to pay rights to adapt it, for fucksake, it's not like he would've been hurting to pay for a copy.  Yet I can't help but wonder if he read this book I'm holding, because I'm living in a city where Honorary William Friedkin Way is only a few blocks from my house.  These are the tendencies of this broken brain, forever bending reality to in some way reflect on my lived experiences.

But, like I say, research!

Rilly looking forward to cracking this.  I've been a fan of Friedkin's film for decades.  It will be revealing to see what the source material looked like, after fielding years of critical disdain & speculative scuttlebutt--  which even Alex Espinoza's book indulges in, going straight for the story about Paul Bateson working on The Exorcist, and Blatty feeling so weird about that... he made a movie about a gay serial killer?  I've never quite bought that story.  So we'll see if it's the book that provoked the film, or if Friedkin's film was a provocation aimed at the public.

After Kathy Acker (2017) - by Chris Krause

Found in a l'il free library, just next door.  Sometimes a book is waiting for you to read it.  You specifically.  Because of course I'm an Ackerhead in addition to all the other nonsense my brain has sponged up in fifty years of being a mutant born to this tortured century & continent.  Because of course, me specifically, I'm the person who is supposed to hold this.

I identified with Destiny of the Endless, back when I was a Gaimanfag in high school.  Have I ever mentioned this deeply mortifying thing?  It's better than when I was censured by every peer on the playground in elementary for pretending to be Diana Rigg doing a Wonder Woman transformation pirouette.  Yep, I read Sandman comix, and I really liked Destiny.  How she spoke, her punk thing...  What I didn't know was, who Kathy Acker was.  What I also didn't know was, who Kathy Acker was in relation to Neil, nor why he'd stuntcasted her in his big weird comic confessional of being a serial adulterer and shitty lover who feared the day he'd be called to account for his fuckery.

Can't say that I've quite figured that out yet, either.  But this book could go a ways towards unpicking that snarl, maybe.

Anyhoo.  Kathy kind of had a hugely belated impact on me, in my thirties, when I finally started killing some of those ubiquitous, unsellable tomes Grove Press ground out throughout the 90s--  My Mother: Demonology remains a favourite, as does Florida  --and some of her lit theory stuff, and by then it was too late, the Black Tarantula had her vagina dentata in me, deep.

It's the dada thing, the Burroughs thing, the Rimbaud thing, the aging punk thing.  Probably why I'm into Delany at this late stage, when I was too stupid to read him a decade ago.  All this is white aging male intellectualism anyhoo, who gives a rat's ass.  These are the games we play, amusing ourselves with Figuring Out References and building arcane yarnboards to garrote ourselves with, in the least autoerotic way possible.

Kathy made me look at art different.  For real.  I did make an aborted attempt at reading her, once, right after I ran away and was too brainfucked to comprehend anything more complicated than a comic book.  I think it was 'Portrait Of An Eye'.  But she didn't hit for me until around 2011.  I stumbled across 'Hannibal Lecter, My Father' in Atlanta's famous, now-forgotten dragon's hoard, a little store known only as BOOKS (r.i.p.), and the little book with the red cover made me think, "It's used, and Semiotext(e)'s always good for a chuckle."  And that was it.

She formally introduced me to the concept of antinominalism.  Consequently I found her many & varied ways of theorizing about art so beneficial I crawled up my own ass and pulled my legs in after me, in zen tribute:  Kathy Acker is how I became a blog.

True story.

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 enough 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.

Rice Boy (2oo6-o8) - written & illustrated by Evan Dahm

On my husband's suggestion.  What a delightfully expressive style Dahm has.  The line I liked on Doug TenNapel--  whom, I was not aware until this morning, is an outspoken homophobe; I had wondered why TenNapel had all but vanished from the popular comix landscape  --has a better home here.  This is a book drawn & inked by hand, carefully & lovingly with brush.  You'll not find better cartooned dropshadows anywhere.  I'm still reading, right now, about a third of the way through, so I can't speak to the story beyond being charmed as hell by the whole thing.  It's a nice fantasy landscape Dahm has hewn out, and the colours are rich & vibrant & earthy.  Quite a lovely change from the grimness of 'New Statesmen'.  Looking forward to finishing this, on such a gorgeous and calm day off.