sam kieth

Another reason for not being on the internet is all the dying.

In comix no-one truly dies.

In my memory Sam Kieth looms weirdly larger than his actual presence.  It was the inking, of course.  The full-on, all tactics accepted, rock'n'roll, performative way Sam Kieth inked.  There weren't many dudes making my hair stand up that way.  Sienkiewicz, for sure.  Mike Drinenberg, maybe?  But Mike's linked to Kieth, isn't he.

I know Sam Kieth first hit my life indirect.  I came to Kieth's name from scattershot sources:  The Comics Reporter, or the Amazing Heroes annuals, or The Comics Scene.  Those magazines were the only way I was able to learn about the greater wealth of talent operating within the field, because Kieth wasn't in all that many places.  Initially I associated Kieth with Willian Messner-Loeb & a strange-looking comic called 'Epicurus The Sage', which--  if I remember correctly, at this moment  --was published by DC's 'Piranha Press'.  I'd heard of that before I ever started reading 'Sandman', for certain.

'Sandman' I came into a little sideways, because it was THE book anybody in the industry had a take for.  You might not have given a single solitary fuck about Batman but if you were reading comix in the late 80s, early 90s, you were talking about DC's biggest gamble since they first yanked Moore's beard.  'Sandman' was a strange-looking book, especially those first, ungainly issues with Sam Kieth's art.

Have you ever read something where the artist looked like their work was the product of a greasy pizza?  Like, the product of miserable indigestion.  That's what Sam Kieth's work on the first few issues of 'Sandman' was like, to my eyes.  Like it's just uncomfortable.  The work feels like a misjudged assignment.  Like every page was Kieth trying to fight it out to the next page.  And then he's out, and the hot potato is in Mike Drinenberg's hands, and he's actually able to Hold It, Properly, before passing it on.

I don't know what Kieth's next assignment was, in that time period.  He hit me next with his arc on Dark Horse's 'Aliens', and man, did that book land with me.  It fit him.  He's maybe the only artist I feel like was able to capture Sigourney Weaver's likeness on the page?  He certainly got the gigeresque stuff right, like it's full on Biomechanical noodling everydamnwhere, which was definitely my vibe in high school.  I'd scribble biomech in the margins of lined notebook paper for hours.  I was starting to itch to be able to ink LIKE Sam Kieth, though this wasn't something I could properly articulate then:  I dug the granular, textural quality of how he laid india ink down on board.  He made ink his dominant FEEL.

And then, of course, there's Marvel Comics Presents, where Kieth rocked out for a bit.  Was he doing that stuff before or after the Dark Horse Aliens run?  Did he create Cyber?  Yes?  No?  Maybe it matters, maybe it didn't.  But the Wolverine stuff Kieth did--  that was a turning point.  I was all over the style, the absurd ribboning of fabric and the macho porcupine stubble and the vascular density of the triceps.  I was in love with The Maxx before The Maxx even happened.  Because you can see Kieth's Maxx all over where he was headed.

Like I know Arthur Suydam and Frank Frazetta were the big influences on Kieth.  Most people--  cis-het people  --see the Frazetta, because of how Kieth drew women, but what I saw everywhere, over everything, was Arthur Suydam...  But not gross?  Because Suydam's vibe is kind of squishy, and dank, and horny.  But there wasn't the hillbilly leering to how Kieth drew sexy stuff.  He had that "appreciation" for the human body you hear hifalutin' art dorx wax enthusiastic about:  he could draw hips like someone who wasn't trying.  As in, Kieth wasn't drawing with a pencil tied to his dick.

You know what I'm saying.  Some artists, you can tell where their mind is at.  Neal Adams couldn't draw sexy because he got too weirdly flustered when he tried.  Sam Kieth didn't seem to have that neurosis.  Does that sound like bullshit?  It maybe should.  Because there's a lot of working out hangups about sexiness on display, in The Maxx--  point of fact that seems to be the dark pulse compelling Kieth's work throughout that era at Image.  'Friends of Maxx' and 'Ojo' and everything else Kieth did, it always came back to feelings & feminism & fumbling through whether heterosexual men in america were fundamentally broken.

(Bad news for you, Kieth, where-ever you've gotten to...  Jury's out on that.  Like, at lunch in a greasy spoon, and probably not coming back unless it's with the shits.)

Anyhow, Kieth got all that stuff down, coherently or not--  I'm no judge, I'm only Your Average Fan  --Kieth got it all down on paper, without seeming like a creep or a cretin.  To me.  Kieth's art had an honest power to it.  He made drawing look fun.  He made me want to hold a brush.  He was there, early as any of the Big Names that hooked me, and he seemed like a weirdly humble dude.  And he made Image a better place?  Of all the names that jumped onboard during that second-to-third wave of 90s Image, Kieth was one who really CHANGED how the brand landed with my generation.

Because McFarlane, let's be honest, the only reason to read McFarlane is the kind of cartooning that came perfectly naturally to Kieth.  The excess, those noodling repetitions of heavy metal signifiers like shredded & wind-whipped fabric, etcetera, the tensed coiled clusters of muscle--  yeah, McFarlane sold himself to the world as horny for needless detail, but what he was celebrated for, his silly-ass "style"?  Sam Kieth was the original gangsta.

Tell me you wouldn't have read Sam Kieth's Spider-man.  Tell me you wouldn't have actually loved Spawn if he'd been a little less Al Simmons and a lot more Maxx.  God-damn.

Anyway.  Sam, my man.  You made it look righteous, and you seemed righteous, and does any more need to be said?  Selah.

promiseland: shadowfucks

Well into it now, darlings.  Reading a John Rechy I've not sampled before, the extremely catholic & angry about it Rushes, about the meat-packing-district era of paved-over, punk, drugged-up NYC.  Which has led to visiting online interviews with Rechy, and realizing how much philosophically I have (or perhaps had?-- dunno how postdated that last interview was) in common with him.

The commonality being anger, chiefly.  Anger as gleaned from reflection.

Sexually I've always resented arriving after the party had been officially Crashed by AIDS.  I've never lived in a world without the equation sex can, may, potentially-possibly-probably equal death.  Of course it's always been thus, because sex has always been sus.  You can't have sexuality without the wild variety of individual wants, and Want is what tends to make things suspect, don't you think?

In the wake of the heteroflexible--  & in terms of Pop Culture, largely cis & consequently internally conflicted (no matter how loudly the Free Love generation declaimed its proud feminism) --60s...  In the wake of the heteroflexible 60s, my people decided to get hep and claim Free Love for themselves, so the 70s were when we tried to really make the scene.  We fucked as publicly and loudly and politically as we could.  We clamored, darling, craving that Big Brass Ring, straining for it.  We wanted what the hets had:  cheap cynicism, and comic cruelty, and clone conformity.  Christ knows why.

I mean, we already had camp.  So what was there to add?  The ability to bang a rail & a stranger & wake up on a strange, slightly sticky couch?  The ability to be as fake & frail & fucked in the head as any long-suffering, highly-medicated housewife?  What were we after, in the 70s?  

Don't invoke freedom.  Freedom's just another word in a Kris Kristofferson song.

I don't know that we knew what we were after, in the 70s, any more than Hunter Thompson knew what he was invoking when he ranted about The Great American Dream in 'Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas'.  I think we know, now: in retrospect.  The Great American Dream took Hunter S. Thompson's head off, a great many decades too late to bring him any peace or sense of higher moral purpose.  Imagine waking up one day to discover you're best friends with Johnny Depp and George Bush senior's shitweasel child is the president.  That, friends, is a hangover guaranteed to end your life.

But back to the 70s:  "my people"--  what a crock of shit that phrase is --were partying, hard & fast & loose as only a strict diet of booze & cocaine & poppers can get you.  The gay world of America was wide awake & getting weird every chance they could get, even as my parents were have a meet cute in a squamous drug den.  Because everyone has to meet somewhere, so why not make a buy while you're doing it?  Somewhere around the time I was being conceived to the sound of the Allman Brothers Band--  not gonna let 'em catch me, no --John Rechy was teaching at UCLA and working on two-or-three novels even as he hustled himself for fun & finance.  Because the grindset mindset has always been a thing.

I'm looking at Rechy's 'Rushes', and I'm thinking what an angry book this is.  Righteously angry.  The anger isn't simply with catholicism & false contrition--  as I read it, both central themes of Rechy's novel --the fury at the heart of this hungry little book is with The Internalized Oppressor.  My name for it.  Rechy calls it something else, in interviews; he doesn't outright call it The Collaborator Within, but same-o, same-o.  Rechy's anger (& mine, inasmuch as we may share it) is with wanting to exist in the Straight World, with all the straight world benefits, all the trappings & illusory certitude of rôles.  Anger with wanting to believe in lies, with Needing, with being compelled to need to believe in lies.

It's anger with not feeling like you exist, as a complete creature.  One must have the status, the glamour, the trappings; then, and only IF one can afford to tip considerably & graciously, can it be yours.  For a limited time.

There was definitely a limit on the 70s.  For Rechy, you can read it in the first chapter.  On page 16:  "....a heated gust of wind shoves loose trash against the curbs, where plastic bags overflow with packed garbage.  Piled to be picked up, the bags are like corpses after a deadly plague.  New free-form sculptures on the landscape, [he] thinks."  In the New York Rechy describes, the garbage strikes are coming.  The city, about to declare bankruptcy.  The party, at its nadir.

It's in these shadows Rechy fucks around.  He's writing a stage play.  Or is it a novel?  Whatever, Rechy reasons: no reason to not combine the impulses.  Isn't that what all this art shit is about, anyhow: combining impulses?  Understanding sex, explicating sex, expressing sex?  Art and sex live & die on the same altar, he seems to be saying, and I dig that.

Of course all this stuff is the 70s, and PROMISELAND is about the 60s, five minutes after James Dean died, but it's all the same snowball, toward the center.  The outer layers of jagged ice and accumulated filth as the generations tumble down, down, bearing ever more heavily down, that's just what your grandparents & your parents added.  For decoration.  The cold dead center of my thing, that's James Dean's much-denied sexuality, the hard-rockin' rebel who empathizes with his sissy friend.

The 60s weren't friendly to "my people".  You can see that all over Rechy's work.  I first read 'City of Night' in '95, pissed off to have only then learned about Sachenhausen & the origin of the pink triangle, and what I encountered in that book staggered & awed me.  The idea of a world before the STD that decimated the gay population of New York, the idea that you could just, y'know, hook up.  Of course the life of the hustler wasn't glamorous:  I'd already learned that from Burroughs, and Wojnarowicz.  But it was luminous, nonetheless, blackly lit as the streets of 'Taxi Driver', and enticing, oh, so enticing.

The idea that you could share a cigarette, and then a kiss, with a stranger, and find something more actual & alive than cityCityCITY all around you.  The notion that a passing conversational & physical connection could re-shape your world so much more thoroughly than some tacky drug.  The possibility that if you fucked in the shadows it wasn't mundane, or morbid, or moribund.  The shadows might fuck back, and moreover, the shadowfucks might even be... fun.

That's what Rechy brought me, with 'City of Night'.  And I value that.

But more than that I value what Rechy has in 'Rushes', and that's the anger one experiences in looking back on a Scene and discovering that the good-time-had-by-all was not only not-shared but also mainly not-accessible-to-the-majority, because THERE WAS NO MAJORITY, in the gay scene or in the straight world or anywhere else, for that matter.  The consensus is, there is no consensus.

Do gay men want love, or do they want their fuckparty exclusive, no bitches or sissies allowed?  Do queers want acceptance, or do they want political power?  Do we want art, darling, or do we want the artifice of eternal adolescence?

Shit if I know.  All that's certain is this book is where my head's at today, contemplating a whole lotta chaos & context.  Somewhere in the middle of trying to type all that tripe my husband asked what I was writing, and I didn't say "Read my blog."

on politics

New year, new scars, new me.  Same project pile, same obstacles, however.

So let's knock one jenga free from the tower & see if it sways unto collapse, or-- as I suspect --the essential structure remains stable and may be built upon.

Politics have always been a side-of-the-eye fascination.  I grew up baffled by the Reagan thing, and every four years since that applesauce-brained rapist retired I've been distracted with tracking the endless litany of crimes & malfeasance: the names, the missteps, the overwhelming mendacity.  I'm not a fan of any of it.

I am also, it must be noted, not a registered voter.  Because being a citizen of the u.s. is complicity enough, thanks.  Don't make me party to things like, say, empire, or violations of the Geneva conventions.  Include me out of the death march of civic responsibility that leads to where we are now.  It's impossible to countenance any of it.

As of today, I think it's safe to say, it's over.  There's no sense in pretending.  We got where we are because we were always headed here, and it's been a merry little tromp to this precipice, but I'm going to just step aside and watch the rest of ya'll lemming it.  The two-party system in America is at an end.  There's no good guys.  There are only evil drooling shitbirds in banker drag.

I'm not saying the final straw is / has been Gaza.  Or the war on queerness.  Or the great betrayal of women.  Or the fact that this nation has race issues which cannot be comfortably, safely resolved without Clockwork Oranging at least a cool million evil white gun hoarders.  Because there's intersections & overlaps of all this stuff:  it's all final straws.  It's been thirty-plus years of Final Straws.  So many final straws you have no hope of detecting the camel beneath it--  because that swayback ol' camel had his eye on the Final Needle the entire time and is in fact strung out & having a nice Final Nod, somewhere well the fuck away from this barn-sized haystack of insults to human endeavor.

Politics is over, in America, and you have no-one to thank for it.  There's no-one to thank, no-one to be grateful to, no-one to fete or appease.  That isn't to say resistance is over & done, but as far as the great game of chess tiles, of red & blue states & pills, it is ended.  There's no point in pretending this thing has anywhere to go, or any goal, that isn't directed toward death.

Politics is death.  The republican party wants the physical, material deaths of anyone it doesn't deem worthy, and the democratic party wants the metaphysical, metaphorical death of its unprincipled opposition-- but you and I know who's winning.  It's the guys who want to resurrect conversion therapy & ownership of women, the shitbirds who know waving a gun will get results, and the only result that matters to them is Fear.  And, yeah.  They've won.

I'm afraid.  So are you.  So fuck it.  I'm going to stop being afraid of what I can't control-- and I can't control politics.  Some fools once said "Politics is the art of controlling your environment," but that guy didn't believe in global warming.  At least I'm fairly sure he didn't.  Therefore I'm going to let the people who Believe In Politics be afraid.  Let 'em.  The republicans are plainly terrified out of their minds that they've been outed for all eternity as unfuckable boors, and the democrats are afraid once everything collapses they won't be able to monetize it, and I'm afraid, just as you're afraid, that the great american experiment is Game, Set, Match.

So why fear?  The time wasted memorizing the names of climate denialists & sex monsters & chucklebrained techbros & memecoin hucksters, that could be spent on art which DOES afford control.

At the end of the day--  at the end of days, oh day of days  --art is all.  Art is a record of civilization.  Art is an encoding, an overcoding, of sense on insensible endeavor.

Art is what I'm supposed to be here for.

I don't know what you're here for.  But I know it's not fuckin' politics.

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.

*  *  *  *  *

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.

*  *  *  *  *

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.