lode runners, tech chasers, & looking forward to looking back (with fondness, rather than resentment)

Is this worthy of a blog post?  Perhaps not.  Anyroad.  I was a gamer, once, in my adolescence & teen years.  Didn't really escape into my twenties & on with the real Drive or Desire to be a gamer.  I like a game.  My dad worked for Bally Arcade Company, in Dogwater, Alabama, and once smuggled out the various components & boards necessary to build his own tabletop Galaga at our house.  We also had a Bally Old Chicago pinball machine, with the hand-painted glass backboard.  These items lived on our screened-in front porch, and I'd go fuck around on 'em anytime I pleased.  Which was often.

Unlike most kids in Dogwater, Alabama, I spent a hot minute growing up in an arcade, and could play whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.  Tempest, Centipede, Crystal Castles--  you name it.  I didn't Tron often, because I sucked at light cycling, which we all know was the best bit.

Of course dad didn't work there forever.  Dogwater didn't have much in the way of gang shit, but there were some small-time crews who tried to lean on the arcades.  Dad quit Bally after some heavies showed up with a sawed-off, looking for a cut, as I understand it.  Sometime in the mid 80s he decided to partner up with a drug buddy (read: coke fiend) who was an audiophile and they started one of several electronic repair businesses.  This would, in fact, become the pattern:  the business would rock awhile, and then somewhere along the way the drug buddy-cum-business partner would flake out or fuck up the books and then it would be time to start fresh, with some other connection dad had made.

Honestly, I didn't know the coke was around.  Dad liked weed more than anything.  (I remember once he was on peyote & managed to fall off the roof of our house...)  But there was a little coke, I realize, now, and that maybe explains some of his more temperamental glitchouts.  Not all of them.  But more than could be laid at the feet of capitalism & a deep fear of Planned Obsolescence, which he attempted to embed in me.

This chasing of technology would persist, and extend to computers, naturally.  So when the first home computers rolled out, we would adopt the first of whatever.  There was an Atari, of course, ergo I played the notorious E.T. that seems to have become legendary in its unutterable bugginess.  I don't remember much about the Atari home system apart from Frogger, honestly.  Then we made the leap to the early Apple systems, and I wound up inheriting the Apple IIc from them when they got the first Mac.  Along the way I became, well, addicted to certain Broderbund games.

Namely Lode Runner.  It became my favourite.  Next to Below The Root and Cosmic Osmo, and, yes, Prince of Persia.  Games involving lots of running & climbing & eventually dead-end exploration were pretty much my cozy zone.  "What's that over there?  Why can't I reach it!?"  But there's a certain sadistic pleasure to Lode Runner in the fuckedness of blowing holes in the floor and trapping your pursuers there, which none of the aforementioned can equal.  It's right up there with blowing up all the humans on the ground on Defender, so one may rocket endlessly through the vacuum, zapping youfoes.

My inner bastard rearing his ugly head.

Sure, eventually I wound up with an NES and the Apple IIc became a dust magnet.  I had a text adventure game phase, same as all of us, but when graphics became The Thing, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Zork and all that were in the rearview forever.  It was me & Mario for a damned long time, because I was frankly bad at speedrunning but insisted on trying no matter what.  I was addicted for quite a while, and eventually bought a secondhand Playstation (& Metal Gear Solid, natch) from a co-worker.  But by the time we entered the 2000s and my art partner became one of those asshole who rejoiced in trouncing you at GoldenEye, a lot of the joy of gaming had left me.  Gaming was, in fact, part of why I stopped working with Josiah, because he became one of those insufferables who'd rather gloat over your fragged digital corpse than collaborate.  There was no teaming up in the game realm with him, and that dynamic backwashed into our art.  I got turned off games, more or less.  It was worse than watching someone turn into an addict to network teevee.

Anyhow.  Games left a bad taste in my mouth for a very long time.  And since I was never great at them, I left them behind.  But lately I have been bitten by the nostalgia bug.  And the Internet Archive has that stuff, in vast quantities.  So maybe I'll git gud again.  Or maybe I won't.  But what the hell, right?

Maybe it's 'cause my husband is a gamer.  One of the nicest you'll ever meet.  <3

there is a dream new york

i will always carry within me

a comic book collage of pop

a stupid country mouse jumble

of lifted stolen & pilfered imagery

part liquid sky part wolfen

part jacob's ladder part *batteries not included

in a gripping montage Frank McRae

races up the front steps of Saint Patrick's cathedral

a dog whistle in one hand and a bullhorn in the other as

a three hundred and seventy foot tall Romberger portrait of Wojnarowicz

roundhouses the impotent ragefist of chronicling dying of AIDS

a grim hook clean through the flying buttresses and clerestory

movielit piers 'n' spires cracking and collapsing into dust

and my heart stands to clap my love an ovation

new yorrrk, new yorrrk

let me be your winston zeddemore

scrying the shelves / oracular consultation

These days-- these post-drug, post-drink, post-derangement days --reading is a straightforward affair.  Like consulting an oracle, or the "books" of the tarot.  You go to a book because you know you need something from it:  the need is yours, and the reading is For You.  One goes for divination as much as inspiration or straight-up knowledge.

It wasn't always so unmysterious.  There was a time, away & over my shoulder, in the rearview, that derangement & literacy were glove over hand.  The first time I did acid was seventeen.  With wages earned at Ace Electronics I bought a couple tabs from Layne Milwood, that band kid everyone wanted to befriend, and early one September night holed up in my claustrophobically cramped bed with my headphones on, the 'Fixed' remix by Coil on repeat as I read Al Columbia's 'Tar Frogs' and whatever else was in that issue of Deadline Magazine that perv at the CD shop, Carl, sold me.  Those were not good tabs.  It was lowgrade acid, if it even was acid.  I recall at some point that the norwegian wood paneling of my room began to flow & pulse like tides of pollen in mud puddles, but there wasn't much-if-any action beyond that.  Jitteriness.  Anxiety.  A sense of being too tightly sewn into my own skin.

To be honest, I got better results from sleep deprivation.  Which was my go-to for derangement, as it was cheap and also my natural state.  Sleep deprivation, it adds a paranoid cast to people's faces, makes how they perceive you more interesting: livens up conversations by letting folks talk loudly without moving their lips.  Sleep deprivation makes you feel like you're telepathic, and in low light conditions, really kicks out the jams.  I remember my first real dance with the stuff had me full-on hallucinating; sneaking out to the woods to study the shadows of animals gliding and pouncing through the dark...  Good times.

Sleep dep was a drag on my C to D average, though, and took too long to trigger.  I'm pretty sure the idea came from the paperback edition of 'Dale Cooper:  My Life, My Tapes'.  Insomnia wasn't my natural state, at the outset.  After a while fucking with my brain chemistry in this fashion, however, being nocturnal became a habit.  I don't think it did me any favours when it came to reading comprehension or retension, though.  Pretty sure it did the opposite.  Trying to retain information with a sleep deprived brain is a little like trying to make a tape recording with scotch tape over the recording head on a reel-to-reel: the encoding is faint as fuck if not partly absent.  So while I read anything I could get my hands on--

(and there was a lot to read, growing up, from sci-fi to horror to "adult comix" to architecture to occultism to engineering to my parents' separate, discrete Secret Libraries of hardcore smut & hippy-dippy witchlore.  My parents were the kind of people who built their own bookshelves.  Every house we lived in had ever-expanding sets of shelves, in distinct contrast to the amount of living space available.  But back to the previous paragraph)

--keeping that data available in my mind was a struggle.  It would take my developing some OCD and a tendency, in my twenties, to read every book twice in a row, to make it possible to Know What I Was Talking About.  If my memory failed me, usually, I'd bluff.  Which is why my test scores were abysmal.  Probably.  There was the PTSD nobody recognized somewhere in the mix, too.  At any rate, all the components for a half-bright artfag's development were in place:  a bibliophile with brain problems & a recreational interest in neurochemistry.

At that stage of my life pot wasn't really a thing.  I'd tried my parents' stash, once, and didn't dig it.  It wasn't until after running away, in my mid-twenties, that I got into that nasty shit, and even then, not habitually.  Nope, mostly it was books & being On The Natch crazy.  I developed an oracular faith in books; they became my muse & my offboard memory, part of my daily creative process.  Somewhere between that first taste of acid and the time I ran away it became common practice to read two to three books at a time.  Not that my reading tastes were particularly elevated.  I gravitated towards trash, until some sort of personal snobbery developed.

Anyhow.  Some two years after bailing from the nest, and plummeting into the depressingly workaday world of being a kitchen drudge, I tried acid again.  The tabs were free, this time, a gift from my room-mate & co-worker, Chris Beck.  By this time I was into my Burroughs worship, so after hours at our coffeeshop we all dropped.  While my idiot friends did their "Whoaaaaa" thing listening to Skinny Puppy by the blue neon of the Galleria's signage, I read The Ticket That Exploded.  At some point Chris looked over, incredulous.  "Are you reading!?  You're on LSD, and you're... reading?"  So maybe it was ever-so-slightly his fault when the typesetting spilled off the paper and into the oily fractal patterning that slid over and through every surface, from my sallow skin to the denim of my JNCOs to the checkered tile floor.  Maybe I wouldn't have developed that particular hallucinatory default, where I see words materially inveigled everydamnwhere.  'Environments speak to you,' as Ol' Uncle Bill sez.

It's happened since.  Without the influence of mindmelting technologies.  But putting that aside...

Reading is the practice.  Without chemicals for casual inspiration, the shelves are where I gravitate.  Mine, or anywhere in the world.  If there's a book I go for it.  And when I can't get myself to focus on the book I'm in the middle of--  I'm halfway through 'The House of Impossible Beauties' by Joseph Cassara  --my brain will drift onto other authors.  Usually those I've found most inspirational.  Over decades, my shelves have become a repository not simply for fiction but lived experience.  Particularly lived experiences of writers whose lives are most unlike my own.  Because I don't read just to get out of my own head:  I do it to enter others' minds & times.  It's the finest escapism I know.

Escapism, and research.  Because it's a resource!  And a necessary part of having that resource handy is making sure there will always be surprises.  If I hit a dead end with a project, I don't want to go to the fucking internet to figure out a solution.  I'd rather consult the oracle(s).  Like last night.  In the Ds, under Duras, there's a translated collection of Marguerite's journalism & essays, titled 'Outside'.  Clearly I've never sat down to read it end-to-end, because if I had the presence of an interview with Francis Bacon wouldn't have surprised me.

Most useful, libraries.

I'll post excerpts from the interview, later.  But it was revealing.  Because there's a writer who's never done art, asking the most incisive questions of a notoriously self-taught & curiously chaotically disciplined artist.  It's almost as though they were holding a miniature seminar for me.

Stating all this in light of my recent decision to go 100% sober again.  It's not the easiest road to be on, in this life.  But it's necessary for body & mind.  Because, fuck, have you SEEN Francis Bacon's studio?

Tracing Gould - oo4

Three of the four corners of the strip clipped at clean right angles, I rotated the sunday supplement and spread the scissors anew.  Paused.  Listening.  Sam's wry eyes a little uncertain.

"Kid, I'm not one to gild lilies.  Further you clip into this thing, the woolier reasoning is liable to get."

From deep in the metal throat and lungs of the house, faint chuckles, repeating.  Heat register flaps chiming, gently resonant.  The subliminal music of the family hearth.  Imp giggles.  Then:  "Neki Hokey!"

"What?"

Elbows on the freed bottom frame of the panel in my hand, Sam sighed a cartoon balloon of smoke.  Hanging his head, rubbing his neck. "Just what we needed.  Comic relief."

"Neki Hokey!"  Shrill with glee.  Bouncing through the ventilation.

"What is that, Sam?"

"Fertheluvvamike...."  Heaving a sigh like a sack of dry cement.  "I thought we left those brats in the 50s!"

The haytangle haired twins tumble, a human wheel free down the sundappled hall adjacent to the kitchen, the pirate map tattooed across their soles flashing.  "Neki Hokey!"  The cackling tumblers reel across the checkered kitchen floor and through the breakfast nook, their wheel breaking on the threshold.  The pair spill against the faux-edwardian walnut chairs and come to a bruised stop.  

Massaging reddened shoulders, the comic relief critically eyeballing the leafy, dark, nubbled motifs of paw-paw's prize furniture.  "Ugly!"  "Dang!"  "Smarts!"  "Neki Hokey!"

"What the hell are they saying?"

In a snit of agitation Sam lunges, groping impotently from his pane for the blunt outer rim of the scissors.  "Just finish, wouldja!?"  The cigarette in his mouth switching corners with an audible click, sounding like nothing less than an automated turn signal in a 60s model Ford.

Hesitant scissor hand dropping.  "Do I recognize these kids?"

"You shouldn't.  But don't let me stop you..."

Tracing Gould - oo3

Forever then, there is darkness.

 

Forever, for how does one measure the duration of immaturity.  Darkness, for ignorance is as vast as the vacuum between stars.  Therefore the original constellation, the original binary out of which "i" arose, in a cloud of unknowing, an Initiate-- and in what a state, o my kin!  A state of darkness, and Mystery:

Mystery moving over the face of the waters of the subconscious.

There is no Gould.  Then there Is, glimpsed, in moments, influence, inspiration, in non-submersible units, in all those artists I love.  I'll never be quite sure where I glimpsed him first.

It's occurred to me that since Gould passed through so many artistic Modes throughout the course of his Great Undertaking--  there is no other way to think of forty-six years of self-enforced productivity, than as a Great Work  --Gould embodies multiple artistic movements.  I do not know the scope of his art before the period beginning with Plainclothes Tracy, so it is possible that he encompasses more than the (conservative) three-to-four I believe Tracy exhibits, overall.

So too, then, with the artists he has influenced:  they contain multitudes.  Gould is perhaps most cleanly glimpsed in Gilbert Hernandez, Beto having boiled to reduction, re-invigorated, and sublimated further still, Dick Tracy back-to-front.  Charles Burns' psychosexually anxious heart is shaped like Dick Tracy's own strangely beaten face.  Art Spiegleman exemplifies, even as he is my least favourite of The Influenced.  But where else might Gould have gotten into the groundwater?

Because in all that you can see I'm talking about Style.  And alchemy: infusing one's style with new shapes, methods & ideas.  Who else really shines on that technical, formalistic, compositional, workaday "live-IN-the-trenches, motherfucker" level?

Keith Giffen.  I mean everyone sees Kirby and Starlin and Buscema and Jose Munoz and Ted McKeever and Simon Bisley and Kevin McGuire in Giffen.  Absolutely.  But they don't see the In The Trenches Motherfucker who rocked at one job after another, forever refining his thing.  They don't see the iterations of Gould mastering ditto machine and Giffen mastering xerox machine in parallel.  They don't see these artists learning, through brute repetition, the music in the dancing motes of stillness as they stamp their way across the sequence of pages.

There is no Gould there, you may say, then there is.  There is Gould (the gimmick, the sales technique, the brand.  witness the example of Capp's Fearless Fosdick, the meta-joke, when Fearless Fosdick usurped Li'l Abner in popularity & brand recognition--  Al Capp losing himself in competition with Gould, losing his satire in self-parody), then there is Gould (the enthusiastic autodidact alone with his pens, paper, and Spirit Duplicator (as the ditto machine was also known) repeating his gags and polishing his schtick).

Then there was Chester Gould, the illustrator and ad hack who pitched sixty-five failed gag strips over ten years at the Chicago Tribune before landing Plainclothes Tracy:  

"I'll change the name."

"That's all to the good.  I want two weeks of pages.  Your deadline's Monday.  I want 'em Sunday.  And lose the straw hat, fer chrissakes, he looks like a fag."

That's the true substrate of all these ruminations on Identity & Style:  Deadlines, and Pages.  No time to really plan.  Big plots only trip you up when the editor's got other ideas.    Pass the hat, take requests.  Stay fluid.  Fuck style, use a ruler.  Hack it out.  Keep it current.  Work the crowd.

Dance, dance, dance like the face of the waters of the subconscious.

I don't know that Giffen actually dug on Dick Tracy.  But we're talking about a guy who drew a double-page spread of every player in the Legion of Super-Heroes like it was a Sgt. Pepper's album cover and he worked fuckin' Garfield in there.  Everything was in Giffen, ergo everything that had been in Gould would be in Giffen, too.  That's kind of how this art & influence stuff occurs.

Gould, in the Great Darkness before I knew him?

Because I really latched onto Keith Giffen, before Los Bros Hernandez or Charles Burns or Jose Munoz--  because Aleck Sinner grew from a grafted cutting of Tracy, no mistake  --before any of the Hep Names I'd check for myself.  I'd scan the Sunday funnies when I was at paw-paw's, impatient to catch a ride with my aunt when she went to Get Her Hair Done so I could sneak off to someplace that Sold Comics.  Didn't matter if it was Big B's stuffed-to-choking with unsold comix spinny rack or K-Mart's magazine aisle or some dusty hobby shoppe.  My mission was always comix.

Maybe Gould was in Giffen.  Maybe he wasn't.  I'll never catch up with where-all Gould's influence was felt.  That's not what this is about.

What is strange to me is the near-religious Recognition I feel, now, examining this comic strip, and seeing its influence refracted throughout my pre-existing enthusiasms.

Where Gould was not, Gould always was.

"Kid, you gonna use those scissors?  Or just find your reflection in 'em?"

Tracing Gould - oo2

Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette.

Retinas gliding across the surface of his whites with ice-skate, stop-motion celerity.  Suppressing a shiver of the uncanny I force my focus in, down, onto the rustling newspulp.  Sam's rheumy gaze locked outwith the frame beneath me, making contact, he raises a hand to cock his plum-coloured trilby back.

"Kid," he says, "you're on the level."  The cigarette clicks from one side of his freckled mew to the other, almost audibly, as he turns, looking up.  "But what level?"

The waxen glow of the hardwood beneath me is gold as sunlight.  Redounding off the cut glass corners of the candy dish on the mirrored tabletop, misting butterscotches wrapped in their crisp whispering cello with particulate rays.  It's always afternoon in the front living room, by paw-paw's recliner.  I'm on my stomach on the floor, elbowpropped, and Dick Tracy's back at war with Big Boy.

"You remember that?" raps Sam.  "I mean, actually remember."

"I believe so," I answer, pulling legs beneath me,  "Like, I think I recall Paw-Paw telling me Big Boy was a Tracy villain from when he was a kid."

"Interesting," not sounding interested at all.  Testing the border of the panel he's speaking from, little exploratory taps with nicotine-stained knuckles.  "Think you can help me outta this rig?"  His cynical kewpie eyes sliding to the scissors beside my hand.

"I believe so," I answer, admiring the sheer glint of forever afternoon all around me.  The reflections off wood and glass and steel all caught and sponged up by the Sunday supplement.  The loops of the heavy scissors immense as trigger guards to my adolescent knuckles.  "I believe so."

Tracing Gould - oo1

In my psyche there is a direct association between my great-grandfather & Dick Tracy.  He used to collect them.  His daughter, my aunt, found them appalling & violent & disgusting, so as soon as he died she threw them away.

I did not know this detail until after my aunt's death.

Throughout my childhood, I spent Saturdays "up the drive" at my great-grandfather's house, the hearth of the Patty Family.  That place is very imprinted on my subconscious.  In my dreams I revisit it, though with significantly less frequency at this distance of decades.  My great-grandfather died in 1988, I believe.  He found the intensity with which I pored over the Sunday funnies, which they collected for me, amusing, and I know he watched me really grapple with the 80s incarnation of Dick Tracy.

I was fascinated by the faces.  Sam Catchem was particularly striking, to my child's eye.  But I didn't really know what I was ever looking at, what the stories were, who these characters were.  I had inherited the Max Collins / Kurt Lochner era of the thing, the attempted "modernization" of D.T., and it was completely impenetrable to me.  I understood Peanuts, and Garfield, and Calvin and Hobbes.  Dick Tracy was just thing full of talking about "cases" and "criminals" and I was just a kid who stared at teevee passively trying to understand what the fuck a Brady Bunch was and why it looked exactly like the Partridge family, and why did adult stuff seem so fucking stuck in the past?

But this was the 80s in Dogwater.  It was a bubble.  I didn't know who Chester Gould was.  I didn't see the effect he'd had on the culture I came to love because I didn't read the creators of my favourite comix lauding Gould, y'know?  I'm sure los Bros were talking about Dick Tracy but I didn't read those interviews.  I just didn't hear people talk about the effects, the influence.  I was a Bat-Fan like anyone who got secondhand toys and books and grew up with Adam West.  I didn't know how rooted in D.T. Batman was--  because DC made an editorial POINT of not talking about Gould, or the debt owed.  Crime fic writ large owes to the popularity of D.T., and the determination of Gould to bluff & hack his way through producing a daily strip for forty-six years.

I feel like I've spent my entire life tracking influence & interpreting the greater historical context of all this mishegas, catching up with the past, in an attempt to understand & accept the present that we've all been borne into.  Surely cooking my brain in the process.  Ah, the joys of being a human, walking to & fro, up & down this wired-ass world.

The point is, there's no one good reason I've discovered the Need to learn more about Gould and his work.  It's what I'm supposed to do.  It's an alternative to the deadspace that daily comix have become, in my attentions.  I grew up reading dailies.  In a way comix are an integral part of how I learned to read.  And probably why I was so credulous and literal-minded in my adolescence.  Not to diss on dailies.  But the stuff kids dig on?  Oof.  I'm not revisiting fucking Garfield, even ironically.

But then Sam Catchem casts his sardonic eye my way and says "Kid," around his perpetual cigarette...

on woke comix & the dream king

In my habitual blog perusal I discovered the Gaiman chapter of The Last War In Albion, and had a nice cozy two-day reading.  As I approach 50 (and we are counting down all the time, now) it has become ever-more important for me to understand the cultural forces that resulted in me-as-I-exist-now, & my attachment to the medium of Comix.  One of the influences I've always glossed over is Gaiman.

Because of course Sandman was an influence.

 *  *  *  *  *

I got into it for the pull quote.

There was this record store owner who was your typical sleazoid, naturally named Carl--  beware all Carls!  --who liked my mom, and my mom was into comix, and I'd read all her favorite trash.  She had the o.g. Heavy Metals, and had taped the animated movie off HBO* (which we were pirating).  I grew up reading a diet of horror & violence & rape, because my parents were the Dr. Spock generation of childrearing where the m.o. was stay near-but-stoned & let Nature figure that shit out because Nurture is refilling the waterbed.  

*  I got suspended from school for "trafficking pornography" because I'd loaned the Heavy Metal animated movie to a friend.  And when I say friend, I mean my best friend, Ira Johnson, a stringy unpredictably violent kid.  First to break my nose.  Fun guy.  We liked all the same shit, including the rising tide of paramilitarized superhero dreck popularized by Marvel & the Image kids.  I loaned him a lot of mom's comix.  Got most of 'em back.

Comic book people of my parents' generation were also Record Store People, and everyone had a waterbed.  We were not advanced.

I am saying welcome to Dogwater, Alabama, and the hangover that was the 80s.

My dad did record shop shit because he was an audiophile, the kind who hand-wound the coils on speakers himself, and an electronics repair specialist, and my mom was a musician / artist who worked at the radio station, so when Lenlock CD opened suddenly we were best friends with this fat balding bespectacled hustler who owned a couple record stores.  We were over at his house-- because surely he wasn't trying to put the moves on my mom --and I was doing what I always do, going through the libraries.  And he had a Sandman softcover collection: 'The Doll's House'.  

 

And it had a pull quote by Clive Barker on the cover.

That's how easy I was.  Clive Barker thinks this is the business?  Lemme taste & see.

Mom loved Clive Barker for all his gothic viscera & sacriligious anger, and I think I did, too, but in those days I lacked the vocabulary & emotional cognition to articulate WHY anything appealed to me.  Usually the appeal was the tease of sexuality mingled with danger.

But you know...  There weren't many women in my mom's libraries.  She read a fuck of a lot of Stephen King.  Sure, she had Shirley Jackson.  We Have Always Lived In The Castle, The Lottery & Other Stories.  Baller.  But mostly I was surrounded by Dude Shit.  And mainly straight dude shit.  (Lovecraft is straight dude shit.  Don't be lulled into believing otherwise.)  Not too many queer artists, no.  Barker was the big exception.  I don't think mom knew I was into the queer parts of Barker.

They say mothers always know, but mom was kinda surprised when she walked in on me sucking dick.

Anyway, my worldview was predominantly defined by dude shit.

*  *  *  *  *

That's what we're talking about, right?  Dude shit.  Record shops.  Sketchy ponytailed would-be-motherfuckin' Cool Guys.  All-american dude shit, bruh.

Like I said, my mom had hundreds and hundreds of Warren Magazines.  Loaned lots of 'em to Carl.  So Carl was totes down to pass on this sensitive new work of "horror" being published by DC.

You may have gathered from my general environment & media intake, I was not accustomed to writing in the particular emotional register that Neil Gaiman maintained:  that sensitivity resonated with my own closeted struggle with becoming a fully-formed human being.  Mom seemed relieved to see me taking an interest in something as subtle and slow-burn as Sandman because it didn't go hard the way Wetworks or WildC.A.T.S. or PITT wanted to.

Suddenly I wound up getting the collected Sandman volumes for chistmas & birthdays.  My mom bought me a limited edition Death watch, for fuck's sake.  I was given a first edition of Angels & Visitations.  I really fell into it, for a minute, not gonna lie.  I would read & re-read those volumes just to feel the feedback ringing in my skull: soaking in Kelley Jones' inks, poring over Vince Locke's lines, pining to make woods sing with life the way Charles Vess could.  Arguing with myself over whether Jill Thompson was actually good.  Lusting after Drinenberg & McKean's verisimilitude & ability to capture the feeling of AIR on paper.  And letting Gaiman affect me, calmly & philosophically, finding pleasure in the Tone his books had, the uncannily welcoming way he had with words.

Signal To Noise became, in fact, one of my all-time favourite graphic novels.  That book really rocked my fucking world.  McKean & Gaiman knew the music of the medium and they really knew how to be sorrowful & still elicit a smile.  Violent Cases kinda hit me the same.

And I'm pretty sure somewhere in the time I became addicted to Sandman & nearly became a statistic by having a black boyfriend in backwoods Alabama--  if I wasn't bucking for my father to actually kill me, I don't know *what* I was thinking  --the notion of running away from home started to form.

Because, as Elizabeth Sandifer cannily notes, child abuse & the need to escape violence in the home underpins the majority of Gaiman's writing.  Those elements constitute the baseline of sympathy, and probably why there was / is such a large feminine / genderqueer fanbase for Sandman.  The reader who has survived child abuse & violence in the home can *hear* genuine pathos in a text, and Gaiman knew his strengths.  He seemed earnest in his desire to express stories for womenfolk, and children struggling to become adults in a world where only adults have power, and then only a select (but arbitrary) few.

Neil Gaiman was (let's not be uncharitable) THE writer for an audience that would now be termed Woke.  And he seemed clean.  He had a stable marriage (as far as most of us cared to investigate) and he had friends everybody liked (I was a teenage Tori Amos addict too) and he was making Real Art and not just capeshit.  Neil Gaiman seemed wholesome in a Tim Burton but more roundly-read way.

So of course my mom encouraged my becoming a Sandfan, for the season it lasted.  I went to my first comic book convention with only five bucks and what did I walk out with?  The John Bolton volume of Books of Magic.  I fucking LOVED Books of Magic...

*  *  *  *  *

After I ran away Sandman ceased to mean shit.  Signal To Noise stayed top of my pop charts, and I still rolled for 'Violent Cases', but the rest of that stuff stopped having any real meaning for me.  I'd reread the Woke Classics every few years--  the Invisibles, Sandman, Finder, Love & Rockets --but as time ticked on Gaiman faded from my life because he'd kind of left comics, too.  I mean he'd do a stunt like write two whole issues of Batman or whatever but who gave a shit?  His comics were all weak sauce, really.  They didn't chart any specific new weird waters, and all they had to offer, ultimately, was competent visual storytelling with a clean grasp of narrative form & formula.  He worked with queer creators, and he seemed like an Ally, but other than being Nice To Gay People what has Gaiman ever done for me, really?  None of my boyfriends were ever into Gaiman.  They didn't like 'A Game Of You' at fucking all.  So it's not like Gaiman ever got me laid.

I think Gaiman got a lot of dubious guys laid.  I think Gaiman's popular art has provided a lot of cover for a lot of questionable dudes.  I think that's the sum total of the cultural impact we're talking, here.  Gaiman got a lot of people laid, of all persuasions, because books get people talking, and usually at one point or another, the other thing happens.  So if we're looking at Gaiman's private fascination with women being degraded & humiliated & harmed and his apparent need to experience that, in complete contradiction to all his anodyne Woke cred as this sensitive author who's besties with Tori Amos, then we're looking at that in the context of Dude, Where's My Boner Gone.

Nobody talking about the Gaiman thing wants to really talk about that:  the fact that there was an eroticism adjacent to his production of the written word, and now that has been more than spoiled: it has been revealed as a swollen to bursting carton fuming in the fridge in a puddle of fetid curds.  The Gaiman lawsuits are just gross to think about.  The story of Sandman and most especially Dream's women problems are gross to think about.  The DC machine being as fueled by Gaiman's IP as it is by bloody Batman is pretty goddamned nasty to think about.

Like basically Neil has taken a rather public private shit on the medium itself and it's a turnoff because who WANTS to talk about this stuff?  It's depressing.

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Every time I pick up 'Only The End of the World Again' by Troy Nixey & Neil Gaiman, it's for Nixey.

I wonder if anybody's thought to ask Troy Nixey how he feels.

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I wasn't surprised when the murmur of criminal sexual behavior became a sewage backflow of revolting details.  The deviance was always there, in the text.  The hypocrisy is offensive.  The human cost is what truly bothers me, inasmuch as my moral hackles can be raised by something as cheap & tatty as Gaiman privately being a sex monster.

Anyway.  That's all my thoughts, & memories, related to that pile of nonsense.  I don't see myself ever revisiting the misty Gaiman realms.  Once it was Woke.  Now it's broke.  Bah-dum-tish.