Archaeology

Please visit me at my new home, here.

Whew! I knew Blogger would have to switch on eventually. Okay, let’s make this quick:

So I heard from Blogger Help, and they want me to change my browser, re-set my firewall, all these things. But, I don’t think I will: if, as they say, it isn’t their problem but mine, then I need not concern myself with questions like “when will the problem be fixed”…it will never be fixed, unless I fix it. So, off to the new digs! Sadly, WordPress informs me that it can only import posts and comments from Old Blogger and not New, but what the hell, I’ll just have to work around that.

Okay! See you soon!

A wise man (in other words, me) once said that writers are only carpenters, while readers are architects.

Which is a nice thought, I think, but even so, you’ve got to be a half-decent carpenter, if you want anyone to come and draw your hammering and sawing into a structure.

A roundabout way of saying: I’ve fixed that post. I’m much happier with it now. You may be, as well.

Second time I’ve done this! I’ll try not to make it three.

It’s creeping up, slowly…

So welcome, finally, to the crossover between the Dynamic Defenders and Howard The Duck, in many ways the capstone of The World’s Longest Graphic Novel, as written by Steve Gerber for Marvel Comics over roughly the course of the 1970s. No, we’re not actually finished talking about it all, but the end is in sight now, anyway…

You can tell.

Marvel Treasury Editions, for those who don’t know, were oversized “Greatest Hits” packages of Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Hulk, Thor, The Avengers, etc…reprints of the earliest or most significant or most representative stories featuring their title characters. Consequently, any appearance of an original story in an MTE was a bit of (you’ll pardon the expression) an odd duck; in fact with the exception of a handful of pages slipped in as framing sequences for Christmas MTEs, I feel on pretty safe ground saying that the only place to find one of these is in Howard’s own Treasury. And, what an elegant story it turns out to be! After the extended unhinged blowout of the Headmen/Nebulon arc in Defenders, and the runaway existential faux-climax of the HTD Presidential campaign in Howard’s own book, Gerber finds an opportunity to cook down the perspectival themes of both books into a thick, goopy stew of…

Uhmm…okay, maybe a bit less of that stuff, this time around. Okay? This is satire, after all, so it won’t help matters if I overbake the analysis. Like any satire, this one has something definite, and serious, that it wants to communicate…but, again as with any satire, tone and message are of a piece, so even if I can’t capture the tone, at least I shouldn’t outrage it. Or, to put the whole thing another way, this is a Howard The Duck story, so if I can’t get along with the way Howard looks at things, then I might as well write about something else.

Whoops! But, it’s a tall order, there…

Anyway, to get started: somewhere in Central Park, a team of absurd supervillains (well, are there any other kind?) hook up under the leadership of “Dr. Angst”, an cacklingly puerile analogue of Dr. Strange who styles himself a “mystic of the mundane.” Well, evil is banal, as we’ve been told…anyway they all meet. Roasting marshmallows. Yes, roasting marshmallows. Over a campfire. In Central Park. The fiends! Tillie The Hun, angry Teutonic ballbuster with a mace and pigtails; The Spanker, private school headmaster dismissed because of his predilection for corporal punishment…a sort of Hannibal Lecter with a ping-pong bat; Sitting Bullseye, ex-CIA agent with…oh, the hell with it, ex-CIA agent with silly (yet deadly) joke arrows and a giant red target tattooed on his chest; and the Black Hole, guy from Brooklyn who was the victim of the very dumbest of dumbass cosmic accidents, which left him with the self-described “extremely gross power” to suck things into a cavity in his chest. All clear? And Dr. Angst has gathered them all together because they’re the most pathetically ridiculous bunch of mediocre nobodies who ever had a pathetically ridiculous origin story…or, scratch that, they’re barely even ridiculous actually, they’re just kind of dumb. Derivative; unimaginative. Put simply, they’re bad ideas. Who would even bother ridiculing them? The thing is already accomplished. What’s the point.

Naturally, to Dr. Angst, all this glorious, glorious soul-deadening averageness makes his wannabe-supervillainous heart positively…well, sing, if it could carry a tune. And he promises to rid them all of their PAINFUL lameness of theirs, if they will just band together with him to KILL THIS DUCK.

Holy crap, excuse me, I just realized I’m dying to re-read this story! Back in a tick…

Oh my God, that was funny. Ahhhhh. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. So Howard and Bev have just been thrown out of their hotel room after the failure of his Presidential campaign left them without any money to pay the bill. And after bumping into Mary-Jane Watson on the street and getting really bad directions from her, they wind up – where else? – at the Sanctum Sanctorum of Dr. Strange, where the Defenders are hanging out, doubtless having some sort of tea. Nighthawk, ever irony’s plaything, opens the door.

KYLE: You…You’re a duck!

HOWARD: No offense, pal – but you’re hardly in a position to criticize.

Let’s see now, what to say, what to say…Doc is gonna send Howard home. “I mean, Bev’s a sweet kid, but…” “But not your species. I understand.” When suddenly they are interrupted by the forces of stupidity, which plan to kill them! Howard, it almost goes without saying, ends up wearing an unconscious Doc’s ornamentation, and casting spells at Dr. Angst in his stead; fittingly, Nighthawk fights The Spanker; Val takes on the obnoxiously vapid symbolism of Sitting Bullseye; and the Hulk tries to get away from Tillie. In other words, everybody’s got an opposite. Kinda. Then Black Hole threatens to suck everybody completely away, only to be defeated, with ludicrous (not to mention telling) economy, by Bev…just before Howard takes down the Conjuror Without Class with a bust in the chops. And it’s all over, folks! The Defenders return to their tea; Howard feels too guilty to leave the adoring Bev; Doc makes a hysterically funny joke about modern music which no one notices.

So…what does it all mean?

Well, I guess that depends on what you bring to it. With the conclusion of the Headmen/Nebulon sequence in The Defenders, Gerber has successfully pushed the straight-faced superheroic encounter with absurdity into completely new territory: baby deer, things that are not U-boats, French bozos with guns, second mortgages, elf assassins, and just a little brainwashing. Not too much. Just a little.

And – not to do an end run around Ed, so no spoilers – it’s absolutely an unprecedented existential crisis. Hell, it’s a freaking meltdown, is what it is. The absurd elements in the supervillainy might only provoke laughter here, but they don’t…because these absurd elements are in earnest, you see, and in words of one syllable they mean to mess shit up. Nagan is more impassive about human fate than a Celestial. Nebulon is so out of touch he makes Galactus look like the King of Kensington. Jerry is such a narcissist that Dr. Doom would stand in awe of him…and Doom’s met the Devil, you know. Don’t think for a minute that absurdity is cute or nice, people; absurdity’s all about the jugular, and it doesn’t stop for donuts. And Gerber may satirize many things in The Defenders, but he isn’t writing a satire…

It’s a drama, see?

Still, as Yondu observed over in Marvel Presents, no act of spirit can ever be wrong against Karanada. “When was the last time you had fun, Nikki-mote?” Absurdity may not feel so laugh-out-loud funny when it’s got its hands around your throat (in fact the proper word for what that feels like is horror) but it remains absurd for all that, and that’s its ultimate weakness: that it exists, and is absurd, and so will yield to the application of the human sense of proportion which understands it as such. A is A, if I may make so bold; a thing is itself. But then, so is everything else, too, which makes A nothing special: in fact, all the intricately-designed plans of specialness and horror that Gerber’s absurd villains absurdly depend on are just the sort of things that his moral universe takes the most pleasure in collapsing, since they’re so utterly incapable of having a sense of proportion about themselves. A sense of humour, that tells them that destiny is not so much a matter of chess, but of Irish stand-down instead…last personality on its feet takes all…

I mean, what’s more humourless, more devoid of personality, more full of horror, more sheerly implacable, than a Black Hole?

And yet, it’s something so easily pre-empted, by sarcasm…

Well, but whatever. Over to Howard, now, who knows all this better than anybody, because everything in the world of hairless apes is equal madness to him. Horror? Let me tell you, once you’ve been brushed by the ice-cold udder of a vampire cow, the word has no meaning anymore…and that’s at least part of the reason why Howard is satire, where The Defenders aren’t: so instead of the Headmen, it’s Dr. Angst and his crew, skewering everything there is to skewer about the tail-swallowing pretensions of the superhero biz (their own creators’ work not excepted), while our heroes gape at the off-beat bloodthirstiness of it all…and then retaliate with their own enlightened (if still mote-like) sense of self-acceptance. Yes, even the Hulk. Because Dr. Angst et al. are bad ideas, sure, but who isn’t a bad idea? In the end, it isn’t just about whether you’re a silly character or not, or even whether you’re the hero or the villain or not; as Doc says (maybe Luke Cage has rubbed off on him a bit?), either you’ve got soul, sucker, or you haven’t, and that’s what counts. Absolutely, there’s a yawning absurdity that underlies everyone’s everyday life…but how is that news, really? And, who should that shock? This bizarre undercurrent may be mostly invisible in the central regions of prescriptive legitimacy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there, and so what’s by turns funny and unfunny about Dr. Angst’s non-team is only what’s by turns funny and unfunny about the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, too, or (even) you and me, and so it doesn’t matter. It’s really all the same. It’s normal. There is no normal, but if there were, that’s what it would be, and surely if Doc and company have learned anything at all through Gerber’s tenure, it’s that… (“Eyes of Oshtur! Kyle!”…)

But, and also, this: somewhere on the various SSoS comments threads I recall mentioning that, just as the Defenders originally played the role of outsiders to the outsiders (and therefore, if you see, the protectors of the protectors), characters like Howard and Man-Thing have always served as indicators of an essential fuzziness about the meaning of such outsider positions, that exists at the very furthest fringe of the marginal existence that all superheroes symbolically represent – and thus they’re Virgils, to these various spandexed Dantes, that show up to demonstrate for them that beyond the world where good people grapple with madness, there’s another world where the madness and the people are all part of the same thing, in and of themselves quite undifferentiated…a realization that supercharges the psychological meaning of the flashy capes and cowls, precisely so that it may step beyond their power to encapsulate identity as trait. To put it another way: the revisitation of superheroic identity-symbolism that takes place at the fringes and the margins serves to refresh the relationship of symbol and identity in the centre spaces too, inasmuch as it reveals the marginal space to really be everywhere, and the central space only its invention…a revelation that therefore causes everyone, in every space, to become deeply involved with the exploration of boundary that’s usually farmed out as the fringe’s own extra-special concern. And of course, one need not even be a super-person to explore these boundaries, once the revelation has taken hold: as I’ve mentioned before, in The Defenders superpowers may stand for the question of what to do, but never for the question of who to be, and (as Howard knows) whether it’s superheroes, regular joes, or whatever, in the end people are all just hairless apes mired in self-delusion anyway, and therefore no different from one another. Gorko isn’t any different from Ultron; the Space Turnip isn’t any different from Dr. Spectrum. Well, think about it! Thog, Kang, the Kidney Lady, Dormammu, the Melter, Ego The Living Planet (!), Thanos, Stilt-Man, Magneto, Stiletto, J. Jonah Jameson…Holliman, Pennysworth, the punks Charlie-27 scares off in the alley, Dr. Bong. Bob Doom. Eelar. Loki. The Green Goblin. Winky-Man. It really doesn’t matter.

(Although I like Winky-Man…)

So that we get the satirical villains instead of the straight ones, and Howard as the team-up instead of (say) Hawkeye, means only that our Defenders have finally arrived at the point of transformation that can accept all this for what it is: in other words having realized that their ridiculous identity as costumed hero-types is something they can’t simply ignore or gloss over, but just have to accept, embrace, take on faith, work with…whether it’s absurd or not. Because the thing is, if you’ve got soul, then you’ve got it, baby, and so what’re you gonna do with it? The state of being ridiculous is an unfortunate one, but since it comes with the package there’s no use kicking against the fact…

When one can use it, instead. “But we don’t laugh,” say the desperate comedians of Beckett’s masterpiece…however, Howard does laugh, or at least he could if he chose, and so that makes him more than just a prisoner of reality’s capricious pattern. And the Defenders, too, are free in this way, at least as free as anyone can be…because soul accomplishes a lot, in the Gerberverse. With it, the problem of costume-silliness fades away, to be replaced by a firmer originality, and Truth – at least a truth, as Gerber’s later HTD series under the MAX imprint will tell us – becomes something that personality can retrieve from madness after all.

And so, finally: why does Howard elect to stay with Bev, in the ceaseless craziness of the world of hairless apes, when he could just as easily go home? We shouldn’t wonder, really: we’d stay with Bev, too, because she’s as real as the world of “central” spaces, “home” spaces, is not. We might as well ask why Bev stays with Howard! Which is a silly question, itself.

Because as Douglas Adams put it: no matter where you go, there you are.

Complete with all your ridiculousnesses, too.

But, it isn’t as bad as all that.

I’m back in Vancouver, with a broadband connection!

So I’ve turned the comments moderation back on. I hope it doesn’t appear untrusting of me…it’s just that Tom Foss just left me a comment, and I couldn’t find the bloody thing he commented on for twenty minutes!

Also, Studio 60 is a horrible, horrible show. God, I hope it shambles on forever. I’m quite enjoying this now. Call me sick.

So, notwithstanding my attempt at drunken arithmetic the other evening, today (Jan. 25^th, Robbie Burns Day – gee, hope I get this all posted before midnight) is the one-year anniversary of A Trout In The Milk.

Thank you all for coming. It’s been an interesting, not to say addictive, exercise.

Beyond that, I hardly know what to say. My first post still sums up my blogging philosophy pretty well, and the experiment that tests futility is still ongoing…however, like the universe I think I’m content to ride the edge between expansion and collapse, there, content to be mysteriously flat so that I may cause myself to speculate endlessly about the reasons for it. I dunno, it’s interesting. I seem to be almost perfectly poised between “futile” and “not-futile”. I will say, since I’ve got the floor, that my inspiration for blogging ultimately came from three things: one, the CSBG article “Mark Waid’s Fantastic Four: World’s Shittiest Comics Magazine”, probably by Joe Rice; two, whatever article his buddy Alex wrote that established his mad manifesto of L*O*V*E for early Green Lantern comics; and finally a long and tedious essay that I myself wrote about “Batman Begins” for Jim Roeg’s site, that Jim was kind enough to say he liked. And I guess all you Bloggers had a similar experience? One day you wrote a huge giant (possibly beer-fuelled) comment on a thread, that made you think “well, crap…why don’t I just get a blog of my own, and stop peeing on somebody else’s carpet?” Yes: I never knew I cared. I never dreamed I had something to say. I mean I’m a lousy journalist, really, because I never believe my own bullshit generalizations – I can never write more than seven hundred words without thinking “this guy doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground!”, and then writing another seven hundred words against the point, before inevitably concluding “this guy doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground!” I have a file folder marked “Essays” which gets stuffed full of ideas and ideas and ideas that I can never follow through on because they’ll eventually disgust me. I suffer, in other words, from what the Catholics call scruples; God’s own forgiveness is not enough for me, if I’ve written something I judge to be crap. In fact some of the worst writing experiences of my life have involved me naively giving somebody something to read (aspiring writers out there: never do this) when they’ve asked for it…only to hear them say something like:

“It was good.”

It was good?

How in the fuck do you imagine I was asking you if you thought it was good? What I want to hear is whether or not you liked it, or you hated it, you want to read more, you think I suck, you want to sleep with me, you’re gonna get your boyfriend to beat me up…

But…good? PAH! I spit on your good…

Anyway…

Where was I. Oh yes. I was going to say: thank goodness for blogging! And not just for the swell people you meet, but for the ability to finally all but empty out those “Essays” files, to have the freedom to write in (as Jim put it) a raw and diaristic style, that (as I put it) bridges writing and performance…well, it’s great.

Whoops! There goes the midnight marker! I’ve officially screwed up…

But to continue: me, I’ve mysteriously found that I can make the occasional piece of coin as a songwriter. Well, who knew? It was never in my plan, or even my self-image, to be a person like that. I always envied musicians, because they could write a song, then BANG! perform the song, and immediately know whether or not people thought well of them. Writing, as I’m sure many of you know, is really different from that: you write the story and then BANG! you rewrite it and then rewrite it once more, and then you rewrite it again, and again, and then finally BANG! rewrite the goddamn thing again, because you sense there’s something wrong with it…and then BANG! you get depressed as hell, and BANG! you start sulking, and BANG! your girlfriend meets a guy at her work, and then BANG! she moves out, and then…

Gee, I hate to be repetitive, but…where was I?

Oh, yeah.

BANG!

You get a blog.

But good for you: it’s healthy. Bloggers, the whole world thinks this is unhealthy and sad, but I say unto you: there ain’t nuthin’ healthier. You get feedback right away; you move yourself to write something you think is good, or funny, or at least something that you care about; whatever anyone says, you’re out there. You’re cutting it. You’re making something from nothing. Take me: my revelation last month was that this humble blog of mine has actually acquired some sort of an overall shape, one that I didn’t expect when I started it. And in it, my voice – which is not quite my real voice, but it’s a voice that belongs to me nonetheless, and I’m not sure I owned it before – has gotten to the point where it has something serious to say. Yea, and it is even here, among the comics fans, that it will be said. For lo, where else could I have been so bold as to put up terminally-embarrassing things like Fan-Fic Films and abortive Morrison JLA fill-in scripts and aimless psychosexual meditations upon Vance Astro and Yondu, except here? And where else could I have successfully deluded myself that any of it mattered?

And lo: yea. And furthermore: forsooth. And lo!

Only here. Only with you people. Hey, thanks. I really appreciate it. And let me just say, specifically, thanks Joe and Alex, thanks Jim (is it all right with you if I abstract that Batman Begins comment of mine from your site and post it here?), thanks Thomas, thanks Shane, thanks Jon, thanks Johnny B., thanks RAB, thanks Tom, thanks Sean the Elder, thanks Sean the Younger, thanks David, thanks Matthew, thanks Dave Fiore, thanks Willow, thanks everyone I’ve forgotten because between one sentence and the next I just spent three hours swilling delicious beer, there, and oh am I all gooned up…thanks Prof. Fury and Gorjus for voting, see it really did pay off like the City Fathers said it would, thanks Marc Singer, thanks Chris from 2 Guys and Jake from Ye Olde, thanks to everybody.

To everybody.

The buzzing in my beard, the scent of skaldic mead on my fingers, the sound of the linnet’s wings, hovering like ravens ’round my eyebrows…it’s all down to you folks. I lied to myself when I started this blog. I told myself it was a good place to store ideas for copyright purposes. I told myself it was a good place to empty my “Essays” file. But really I just wanted to meet you all, ’cause you seemed kinda cool.

And I apologize if I’ve left anyone out.

Hey!

I’m sure I’ll remember what I’ve forgotten, as soon as the bee-loud haze stops buzzing about my ears. Buzz…buzz…time for bed.

I leave you with my own personal supremely brilliant fortune-telling trick. It works like this: say there’s four major textiles.

Silk

Cotton

Polyester

Linen

And furthermore say that there’s four major types of cooking fats:

Oil (you may say it’s olive or canola, as you like)

Lard

Butter

Margarine

Now…match them up. What works with what? I guarantee you that some incredible secret truth about you will be revealed by this. Those who participate…and prove to have the right attitude…

(looks around)

Will be favoured with the Disney Tarot, if they deposit their email addresses in the right spot. Suitable for vanity T-shirts, mousepads, and card decks. It’s all I can give, people. I don’t have much.

Did I say thanks?

Thanks.

You’ve been really great.

And I do regret forgetting the people I should’ve remembered, but…isn’t it enough that’s I’ll be working hung over with a sledge and a wedge tomorrow? For whoever I did wrong by, I won’t wear earplugs.

Okay goodnight.

Hey, everybody: fun game. Hot on the heels of the new comics blog update, an invitation to review three blogs not currently on your sidebar, all in the name of that thing only available by Internet, free gloriously FREE comic books.

My sidebar’s pretty outdated, of course, so I’m also going to eschew blogs that I’ve pointed to in posts, as well as bloggers that I frequently correspond with…and, a review? I don’t know if I’ll be quite capable of turning in anything that lives up to that name, but…

Here goes!

No Time To Explain. Did you know Peter B. Gillis had a blog? Well, he does…and it’s great. Nothing against any of the other creator blogs I like to visit, or even feel I should visit more often…but Peter’s long-form, free-wheeling, well-crafted rants are just to my taste: funny, eclectic, free of bum steers, and sparkling evidence of a nimble mind at play. And, updated regularly! Other creator’s blogs delight for the way they allow access to an already well-known voice and personality; No Time To Explain is simply a blog I would read anyway, that (weirdly) just happens to be written by a creator I always liked.

John & Belle Have A Blog. I’d almost forgotten about this one, so congratulations, Guy! This challenge has already been a huge success, at least for me. Jeez, John & Belle…I used to come look around here when I just wanted some down-to-earth yet still academic commentary in the Marc Singer vein…but there’s more to see here than that. First off, I love the look of this blog! It invokes the voyeuristic pleasure I remember from the mid-Nineties, of surfing around just to see what the different people are like (“Hello, my name is Ryoko, I am from Osaka, here is my resume and a picture of my cat” – how I preferred this early style of autobiographical webpage to the early style of its “content”-rich cousins!), while also offering as much in the way of high-powered topical analysis as you could wish…and I suppose this became the template in my mind for other blogs I would eventually visit much more frequently, like Pah! and (probably nearer) Pretty Fakes…”project” blogs, you could call them. Art-blogs? Well, John and Belle are clearly as much the cool kids as Gorjus and Prof. Fury are…the principle of design looms large on their spiffy magazine-like pages, accurately informing even the casual reader of what it is they can expect to encounter there…just as if they themselves were a kind of laid-back brand, their lives a sort of two-person cottage industry all about taking time to think, reflect, read, write, and do things properly. I’ll admit it: I’m envious of those two. So pardon me, I just have to go look them up again…

The Fate Of The Artist. I know, I know…everyone knows about this blog already! But I can’t help it! You get Alan Moore scripts; 23-year-olds’ magnum opus notebooks; thanks for roning. I cannot leave this off the list of three. And you (whoever you are) cannot avoid reading it any longer, if that’s what you’ve been doing.

Ahhhh…

Say, that was kinda fun.

Here’s hoping I win the prize!

Over here.

Thanks, Chris!

Howdy, folks. Just getting ready to unload another essay on you for Seven Soldiers of Steve, this time on the Howard The Duck Treasury Edition, guest-starring The Defenders…

But suddenly I’ve realized there’s something else I ought to cover before I get to it.

You know, this thing has gotten so large over the last eleven months or so that every time I think of working on a new entry for it I have to first do a fair bit of review…because no one who has put fingers to keyboard on this project has done so without bringing up something riveting about it that would never have crossed my mind otherwise. And: thanks again, everybody! There’s no doubt in my mind that I’ve read this stuff over a lot more than anybody else, and I must say the interconnections are quite illuminating…which is something I plan to make much of in my final wrap-up post.

But, there is the odd illuminating thing that I don’t intend to jam into the wrap-up, but which still deserves a closer look, and one of these is Jim’s second Marvel Two-In-One post. Now, at the time he wrote it I was working off of a limited number of dial-up hours, and also much engaged with ditch-digging, swimming, and replying in the affirmative to party invitations. Boy, that really sounds great, when I put it like that…

But anyway, because of all that I didn’t manage much of a reply to Jim’s post then. However, it seems it made quite an impression on me regardless, since certain of his observations somewhat slyly made their way into my voluminous posts on the Guardians of the Galaxy later on, probably chief among them the notion that Steve Gerber’s non-team American families are so bound up with ideas of difference that they resist totalization, which is to say that maintaining the diversity of the parts is the only way to maintain the value of the whole. It is, as we say in Canada, more of a mosaic than a melting-pot. Furthermore, the ad hoc symbolic families of the FF, the Defenders, and the Guardians find an even more fractured reflection in MTIO, with substitutions both simple and complex: as Jim points out, there are many “Fantastic Fours” in MTIO, formed and re-formed out of many different perplexities of origin, election, and adoption…and as I’ve had occasion to note before, the truly compelling thing about a chosen identification is not in the choosing at all, but rather in the choosing again. Well, you can take that one all the way back to Robert deBoron, if you feel so inclined…just as with Perceval and the Holy Grail, even to choose is to in a sense be naturally moved by events and qualities – because even to make a free choice is sometimes an erogatory act, that can’t conveniently be avoided – but to choose again is to experience a rebirth: a reformation of identity that is supererogatory in nature, because it is required by nothing at all.

This stuff goes deep, mind you. Very deep.

And so, on second reading, it reminds me forcefully of my contention in those Guardians posts that one of Gerber’s main topics is the way narratives often fall apart under their own pressure to achieve completion. Or, should that be “collapse”? To collapse is also to implode, of course, to fall in on oneself instead of apart. To fall together? And then to fall apart as a consequence, to disintegrate. Mind you, you can have it the other way around, too: falling apart to fall together, falling together to fall apart…that’s forty-five years of FF stories in a nutshell, really…

And, the formula holds for the Guardians too. The human race shuffles two steps forward, one step back…the bloody catharsis of the crowd waiting to tear the Badoon apart is forestalled by Starhawk just as the liberation of the future by the past is forestalled by him as well…an interesting complexification of Jim’s argument about Gerber’s “looking back” to heirloom ideals…and thus, that things only repeat and reiterate and fulfill symbolic patterns in order that those patterns may be broken seems to emerge as a major theme in all this. The Guardians save the Earth, but are cast out; Vance and Nikki sacrifice themselves to save the galaxy, but live…and everywhere the old comic-book editorial logic of a necessary return to the status quo is reimagined, as a more philosophical insistence that victory, salvation, and redemption come through the deferral of expectations rather than their fulfillment. Through defiance, if you will, of all that “return to the status quo” promises, at least in its simplest and most non-reflective form.

So an important freedom from destiny is seen in the action of character, which is perhaps itself the action of a type of fate that looks on destiny as an enemy…I reverse the usual maxim that “character is destiny” on purpose here, you see: making destiny a tragic force, that will trample every character underfoot in its rush to level its story’s terrain…while making fate something else, that this destiny can’t quite enclose or comprehend. Fate as the old unpredictable Necessity, that even the gods must answer to: the inevitable fly in their ointment. And maybe this little fancy of mine is even true! After all, it is the existential hero Ben Grimm who thwarts a cosmic scale-balancing that would otherwise doom humanity, but he doesn’t do it for humanity, or even for existentialism: he does it for Val, whom he sees as a person even though the larger cosmic forces swirling around him presume her a cipher, and therefore no more than a means to an end. Likewise, the rhythmic fluctuations of cosmic power that comprise Wundarr’s existence imply destruction, until they are diverted into other activities more human and less harmful; whereupon Wundarr becomes a pleasing and well-beloved child, instead of a strange, threatening visitor from another planet who is merely plot’s prisoner. Because every plot contains its own quota of destiny, perhaps; but if that’s true, it also seems (at least in the Gerberverse) that every character contains a fate of his or her own that can force destiny to bend aside, into a new shape. A non-totalizable shape, that sustains itself (paradoxically) by continually frustrating itself, unnaturally maintaining its many internal frictions and divisions against the pull that would collapse them all into a singularity.

Well, but what else, when even the mindless Man-Thing’s character is not a prisoner of destiny? You could see poor Ted Sallis as the epitome of the non-negligible character, in this way: unable even to have a thought, he still manages to act, and changes the balance of fate every time he does so. If you like, he’s just as free – as well as just exactly as constrained – as Dr. Strange is, or Reed Richards, or the Silver Surfer. So, no: to get away from this kind of fate in the Marvel Universe (and I would argue: in our own, too) doesn’t seem to be possible. Bear in mind that the Marvel Universe is positively lousy with destiny: everywhere there’s a superpower, there’s a destiny. Well, what else is a superpower? But because of this, the election of destiny actually ends up counting for very little, because destiny is so ubiquitous that it’s as much chance as choice. One person gets a power ( a purpose, a personality) and chooses to become a hero, another gets it and chooses to becomes a villain…and if we only stopped here it wouldn’t matter what the names are, because all this destiny is just the precursor to freedom anyway. Sure! Because how many Eschatotrons has Reed Richards built, and forced his family to step into, only to discover that the immanentizers haven’t been properly calibrated? How many final enlightenments have come, how many apocalypses, armageddons, Ragnaroks, satoris? Destiny is summoned every other hour in the Marvel Universe, and confrontations with “ultimate” power seem merely to mark the solstices and the equinoxes; hardly any story exists, that isn’t seeking to rush in on itself and finish.

And yet as well as being very deep, this stuff is very old, too; world mythology is rife with stories in which destiny foreordains that a given character will be a “Chosen One”, and makes it impossible for such a character to elect against his role…but frequently (we can look back to Perceval again, here), being a Chosen One does not just mean having the power to fulfill prophecy, but it also means having the power to defeat it as well. Culmination is defused, to create an unqualifiable futurity; the predetermined footprints are filled up by Chosen feet, but somehow what they mean is changed, along the way. Necessity derails the train, upsets the timetable, uses its last cigar to burn through the rope…and as a result, events are pruned away from the direction of destiny, and destiny never really arrives, though it still hangs there in the sky overhead, like a sun.

I could ramble on for a long time about this. Character…fate…divinity (what all supervillains are dying to achieve, don’tcha know)…the history and significance of the Individual as a topic in literature. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ramble on about it like that! I’m almost done, in fact. But just before I go, perhaps I should say that even though (as Jim has noted) Gerber’s run on MTIO has much to do with the silly and the scattershot, it may be that very sense of ungoverned playfulness which caused “On America” to strike such sparks in my head. These team-up books often seem like natural vehicles for picaresque storytelling, and Gerber is undoubtedly Marvel’s pre-eminent picaresque storyteller…and the Thing himself seems like he’d make the best picaro to be found anywhere outside the Everglades, or the Cleveland city limits…except that part of the fun here is that Ben isn’t the picaro at all, but instead everybody else is. So if you will, America takes a somewhat loopy tour through his life (instead of the other way around), just as if he were playing the part of the road in this road story…and in that capacity (which we might easily meld together with the idea of Ben as Existential Everyman) he’s privileged to see the kaleidoscopic reconstruction, the continual rearrangement and re-sorting – the endless re-choosing – of the American non-team from its many discrete pieces.

And therefore I’ll agree with Jim, and say that Gerber’s political (and philosophical) ideal here is indeed “something like democracy”…but how compelling, how numinous, is that “something”! Unlike life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, unlike equality and freedom and all the other cardinal American virtues, it isn’t part of the corpus of American law, but it seems to me to be no less an irreplaceable part of the essential American aspiration than anything that is written down. We could call it a crucial part of the American persona, if we liked: something that only becomes real in the perception of it, as it falls apart to fall together, falls together to fall apart.

Ah. And now I’m out of coffee, at last.

Yeesh, what a relief!

For shame!

Bloggers, be Bloggers!

Yes, you’re off the hook for my one-year bloggiversary that’s coming in two days, you Bloggers who (thank you!) read me regularly…but won’t you say hello to my friend Merrie? She’s a person who has every reason to think we’re the most terrible nerds that ever crawled out from under a geeky rock, and yet she came here, and yet I mean to show her that we have access to some stories that she needs to know about.

She’s very funny (very goddamn funny!), and she’s very smart (very goddamn smart!), but no one she knows is telling her about Alan Moore, or Steve Ditko, or Jack Kirby, or Steve Leialoha, or Gil Kane. That world of storytelling is totally alien to her.

So Bloggers, join me in recommending a TPB for Merrie, that adaptable and intelligent friend of mine, who wants to like modern comics, but doesn’t know it yet, because she hasn’t seen any. Bloggers, Merrie is a real person. Bloggers, Merrie is smart as shit. Bloggers, her mind is open to ideas and to media, and I will buy her a TPB or something based on your recommendations. You may suggest three things, three different TPBs, to ignite her interest. I’ll start you off:

Vimanarama
From Hell
Beanworld

Hey, you got a better idea?

Good: I’m calling for it.

And also you must preface every entry with the words “Hi, Merrie!”

Or, if you could extemporize a little bit on what I’ve given you, I may give you extra points.

Oh God, is it that late?!? Why didn’t one of you stop me?!? Jesus Christ, next you’re gonna tell me you were so irresponsible that you let me publish thi

Not what you think, Bloggers: I have a guest today, and I thought since she’s here I might as well point her to Jim’s fabulous essay on comic-book existentialism. Much more useful than Mark Kingwell’s articles for Saturday Night…you know for a while there I thought he was going to start asking questions like “How come in Scooby-Doo it’s always Freddie and Daphne who go down one tunnel, while the lesbian, the asexual guy, and the dog go down the other?”

I confess it: I did.