"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 (2025) - 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 (2025) - 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 (2022) - written & illustrated by Moa Romanova

Not yet read.  A library pick purely based on aesthetics.  Decadent!!!  Can't wait to get into it.

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.

Tracing Gould - o1o

“That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes thru between the bureaus, because there is always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness, spurting out like breaking boils, throwing out gobs of that un-D.T.* to fall anywhere and grow into some degenerate cancerous life-form, reproducing a hideous random image.”

* [un-differentiated tissue]

 

Exit the kid's stuff.  Enter Jenn Pennfield:  who, with her toontown leer, could be first cousin to Betty Boop.  There hasn't been much spiciness since year one, with the gratuitous Tess Trueheart bubble bath--  I'm sure Gould blushed at the Tijuana bible going around, preoccupied as he seemed to be by rearing Dick Tracy Jr.  --.but there's a hellzapoppin amount of of lingerie & boudoir stuff going on in this kid's adventure strip now.  And catfights.  Keep it classy, Dick!

You nasty mans.

No wonder Dick Tracy Junior ran off with Starfire and started the New Teen Titans.

"Think Clean Thoughts, Chum."  Batman smirks over his shoulder at the confounded Jason Todd--  in german, tod means "death"; in morguetalk, T.O.D. is an acronym for time of death  --as young Robin gawps at demigod Diana sauntering in her star-spangled bikini toward Superman's Fortress of Solitude.

Sex, that world behind the world:  The Fortress of Solitude--  stolen wholesale from Doc Savage, and used, like Savage, as a weapons cache, a cabinet of curiosities, a lair for speculation  --hidden at a northern, arctic remove--  north being in many traditions, the land of the dead  --only accessible through interlacing an immense lock & key.  Only Superman can open that door.  Or Alfred Jarry's Supermale.

And what rough beast, its keyholder shredding contract to nofap

edges towards Tijuanabible.org to be horned?

Although I've got to say, it's rare I see Tracy bricked up for anything other than machine-gunning racketeers.  Sex is that side of things you don't really see represented in Tracy's psyche.  He cares about puzzles and protecting orphans and solving murders, and maybe he gets off on the death traps-- we're all grown-ups here, if it takes being tied by the neck to a burning log to get you off, hey, we don't kinkshame.  So long as it's consenting!  Dick Tracy doesn't seem to have one of those nonconsensual consent kinda minds.  Unlike Tess.

 

The Jazz age indeed.

I'm not just posting this in celebration of the o1o that tops the page:  I'm posting this because it's entirely possible that THIS IS GOULD.  There are a lot of Tijuana Bibles featuring Dick Tracy, but this is the only one that has all the earmarks of the style & general linework.  It's the cartooning of Gould, and the lettering, and the word bubble format & placement...  The storytelling, the "action", etc.  I've not seen any Dick Tracy tijuana bible that could pass for the man, except for this.  I'm really given to wonder.

If it wasn't him, then maybe an art assistant?  Did Gould have art assistants before 1950, and Dick Lochner?

Anyway.  What were we talking about?

 

 

Oh yeah, "action".

Well, let's stop calling this entirely an essay.  There's obviously some journaling in the mix.  The Gould Thing that you've been listening to, for nine episodes-- or not, and no-one could blame you, least of all the poor bastard who has to inhabit this skull --is also Research into how to reverse-engineer a webcomic out of my obsessions with science fiction, and sex, and william s. burroughs, and clive barker, and michael moorcock, etc. --and the mechanics of how to machine a slow strange sprawling fucker like that out, especially now, in this era where any content goes.  God help who-ever reads it, but I want to write & draw a cautionary queertopia, and I'd like to use the daily strip format to explore it.  Sex should be part of the exploration, I firmly believe.  But drawing sex, lighting sex, framing sex, staging sex...  That's difficult business.  Not for the faint of hard.

It intrigues me to speculate, today, that Chester Gould authored one of his own tijuana bibles.  He's the only one who credibly could, I think.  So yeah.  Filing this here:

Eddie Campbell made porn, Carla Speed McNeil made porn, Alan Moore reinvented himself as a pornographer, and my husband makes the cutest smut, too.

It's only lines on paper, folks!

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.