Back to the Sea Floor; Or, "J'Accuse."

I went back, bewilderingly, to the refried basement sale at Jim Hanley's Universe. I had resolved to stop buying up middling comicbooks and wasting my dwindling life on this third-rate guff. So why'd I go back?

Why'd I go back.

I went back like a reanimated cadaver to his best-loved tomb.

Anyway this time down there the place was verily alive with the fanboy's equivalent of drawing room banter. Somebody said something to the shop steward about Batman and soon half the basement was chiming in on this and other scintillating subjects.

These pillocks, seemingly to a man, could not get past the basic problem of verismilitude in the funnybooks. One major pons asinorum for them was that characters in the comics didn't age at the same rate as people in the so-called "real" world.

"Franklin Richards used to be the same age as the kids in Power Pack," one grumbled. "Now he is younger than them."

"Aunt May was born in the era of the Civil War," complained another with furrowed brow, "and yet she still lives."

I had heard similar confusion in other comicshops. At Roger's, he was reasoning with a young seeker of truth, that if the comics were in "real time" then "Peter Parker would be ten year older than I am." The unshying seeker palled and left that place fast, mumbling "I have to look into this."

John Byrne has talked at considerable length about the tedious problem of Franklin Richard's age in a hundred-page interview that I amazingly read from start to finish. Everything interesting to say about this incredibly dry (and cut-and-dried) subject is in there. Still, the comics basement men talked about it as though it were a new, fresh subject for discussion and they were the first brave pioneers to strike upon this magnificent paradox at the very heart of modern life.

Next they began to bitch that characters in the comics had a habit of dying and then coming back to life. They discovered, through the frank exchange of opinions, that this was not the case in real life. In real life, they announced with grave confidence, people who died seldom returned from that interesting state.

They went on kvetching about the unreality of comics, all the while stacking up piles of comics to buy and presumably read.

Finally, after listening in silence for some time, I had had enough. I said, "Lads, lads. It seems to me that you are in the wrong place in your quest for verisimilitude. Might I recommend the works of Emil Zola?"

A moment. Then the Mexican gentleman, checklist in hand, queried:

"Zola? That's the Kirby-era Cap nazi villain with the camera for a head and his face in his thorax, correct?"

I paused; thought regretfully of this doomed planetoid and replied:

"Eggzackly."

"Hulked-Out."

Or, "Hulk Smashed."

I like to think that I am a man who can concentrate sufficiently to understand basic texts and even to a degree complex ones. Post-war philosophy has long been my Achilles heel but I believe I can cope with this shortcoming manfully.

Is it that contemporary "continental" philosophy is especially complex, or is it that it is routinely boring, poorly written and wilfully introverted? I further wonder aloud, Is it a coincidence that the foremost readers and espousers of theory at university were also proud members of the juggling society?
I used to sit in the postgraduate methodology seminars, batting my bottom lip absently, listening to (no, listening around) the voice of Richard Robinson as he spoke of Heidegger and that interesting Nazi's dull textual sleights of hand, or of Deleuze and Guattari and their eccentric but nevertheless thrilling "rhizomes," and I used to think, "In less than an hour I can be drinking hard cider and shooting wicked-ass pool and we can forget this flimsy pretense for being here."

Given my proven excellences as a reader, then, I have nevertheless come to doubt my certified "powers" as I attempt to make sense of the recent Hulk storyline.

A Guggenheim "genius award" to the first person who can explain this thing to me.

It's hard to work out any of what's going on in the Marvel Universe right now. The Hulk comics are especially mind-bending, and not in a particularly good way. I don't know who's where when and I definitely do not know why.

"Riddle me this, me Trinity scholar":

The Red Hulk was a double-agent between MODOK's grisly crowd of misfits and maniacs on one side and Bruce Banner on the other. Hulk's son Skaar, meanwhile, wants to kill Bruce Banner but only when he turns into the Hulk - which Dr. Banner shan't do. He simply refuses to comply. His resolve is marvellous to behold.
Skaar and Dr. Banner are also in the Wolverine titles at the moment with Skaar double-crossing Wolverine with Wolverine's grandfather (or whatever he is) Romulus. Are you following this rubbish?
Doctor Doom was kidnapped and knocked "the fuck" out with what amounted to a "stupid bomb" so he couldn't think straight. I know the feeling. The eminent Herr fon Doom is, "simultaneously", appearing in titles across the board with a marked knack to be in a dozen places at once almost equal to Deadpool's. Out of alarmed curiosity, Who apart from me is doggedly, perversely reading Doomwar? As a general rule, any story involving the Black Panther (or Storm) is boring beyond measure. This one proves the rule entirely.
Then, in the Hulk titles, every major superhero gets turned into a "Hulked-out" version of themselves. They are really called the "Hulked-Out Heroes." I think that "Hulked-Out" should enter the common parlance, because it describes my condition quite remarkably. I am wholly hulked-out.
Regardless of me and my refined sensibilities, Deadpool-as-Hulk (yklept "Hulkpool") disappeared into the time-space continuum for to kill Deadpool. That is, to go back in time and kill himself before he became "hulked-out". Why any person would suddenly conceive of this powerful drive is not explained by the exellent craftsmen at MARVEL COMICS; but we keep on buying right along. It is a time paraodox: accept it and stare out of the window, as if you are in the postgraduate seminar again and letting the venerable Richard Robinson's paper pass over your head like gamma rays on a balmy afternoon.

Hulkpool Adrift Thru Time was actually a good story but what it added to the larger narrative escapes me. More Deadpool money for the Marvel coffers. Deadpool is in twenty titles a month - even Marvel is making embarrassed jokes about this, even as they scoop up my money into their bulging pockets using a large trowel.

At this moment in my life I don't know if the denouement of the Hulk arc has even happened or not. Has that story finished? Nobody seems quite sure.

Now to DC: Batman is finally returning from the dark confines of the, yes, the space-time continuum. Perhaps out there he'll run into "Hulkpool" and the "Dark Knight Detective" can figure out what is going on in the Hulk titles cause I can't. In their Blackest Night ("Dullest, Wettest Afternoon") maxi-crossover fiasco the sum of it was that DC brought back the Martian Manhunter. Bet you'd been missing him I know I had.

Now you're up-to-date and will have something good to say if you ever have the excellent fortune to be in a drawing room with Tinsley Mortimer or Paul Johnson Calderon.

[Portions of this article first appeared in an e-mail to Damian Morgan.]

Crinkly Headers: Secret Origins (Or, "Secret Rogerins")

Corin Depper is here. With his patented passive-aggressiveness.
Never comes out and has a row –– but he foments trouble everywhere he goes, as if by magic.
I said to him, "Have you ever said 'Boo' to a goose, Corin?"
He goes, "Boo."

***************************************************

I was walking down through Union Square West heading north, thinking, "Apropos of boring comics, all stories involving the Shi'Ar and the Imperial Guard are boring. Also any stories containing or involving Alpha Flight. Likewise anything set in the Savage Land."

***************************************************

The scene: The Time Machine

The time: What is time, after all, in a time machine?

The circumstances: I was trading my Deadpools for numbers of Cable and (pre-Max, MU) Punisher War Journal. Slipped in a Silver Age Doctor Doom special "under the rose". Roger was generous & allowed the trade.

Sifting through some Spider-Man copies and frowning, I coughed and straightened my tie and went to Roger, "May I approach the bar and ask a question?"

Like a slip of a lad hesitantly asking one of his parents where exactly babies come from --- and why.

Roger assenting in his nebulous way, I approached the "bar" bearing a copy of an early-Nineties Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man which was warped and rippled in bumps along the tops and bottoms of the pages.

Nigh every copy I have seen of this title, between #159 and #188, is so corrugated. Also issues of GI Joe and Web of Spider-Man from the same benighted period.

I went to the bar, and showed them to Roger. "Do you mark these bumps along the header?" I asked.

Roger squinted a spell, and looked perplexed. Finally he realised that I was not complaining about the art. (Far from it - Sal Buscema was drawing this title for a long and excellent run at the time.)

When he had ascertained the source of my complaint, he remarked, "You need to see a psychiatrist."

It's going badly with you when your comics guy is remarking that you are in need of therapy. That said, Roger's proffered solution did not satisfy me. He reckoned that the comics were warped and crinkled by sitting in damp. He goes, sheepishly, "Did you get your wrinkled comics from us? Cause we used to keep our longboxes in a damp basement..."

Nice to know that my esteemed comics guy keeps his valuable back stock in a balmy subterranean mangrove swamp - a real winning recommendation there, Rodge. It isn't that though. I think it is a problem with Marvel Comics across the board (or at least certain titles) from that period, irrespective of where they come from. They aren't all from Roger's soggy basement. I just got some numbers of Punisher from Lone Star Comics in Texas and they have the same "crinkly header" problem.

Roger said, "There would have been some comment on this phenomenon among the comics community in the last thirty years. I don't think you have just discovered something that has eluded the greatest minds of the comic-collecting nation . The comics collecting fraternity is traditionally, shall we say, vigilant , ah, exacting indeed, on such minutiae concerning, ah, condition."

I kind of bridled at this, "slightually". Like I wasn't able to out-think the paltry comics buff community with my excellent eye for detail? Like I, with my larger knowledge of the universe, couldn't see beyond the petty purview of the fanboy?
"Or perhaps it's just that I'm a pioneer, and you men gathered this day in this room have not the 'eyes to see'" I yelped faintly, to dull chuckling from the room.

The fact remains that I keep finding crinkled comics from that period in select Marvel titles from a variety of sources. Should "they" ever come to notice this phenomenon, say in the pages of Overstreet or even Wizard, I hope that some honest soul will rightly attribute its original recognition to me.

[In the voice of Crispin Glover, in River's Edge:] I feel like... Cotton Mather!

Puppies "4" Sale

Watched another episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter where the cops beat Dog to the suspect. Should this show be renamed Dog, That Whipped Puppy? Should this show be renamed Cringing Cur Cowed by a Rolled-Up Newspaper? Or should this show be renamed, succinctly, Cops?

Nothing daunted, after wasting fifteen minutes of my time with a case that goes nowhere, Bobby Brown and Dog and his family now rallied and went after a female petty thief. Surely even they can’t bitch this one up.

OR SO YOU’D THINK.

Perp worked out of a “video store” as a "model" and so Dog says, “Bobby you go into the store and pretend you want to hire her and get an appointment with her and then we’ll pounce.”
At this time Bobby is dressed in a t-shirt that says in large letters “Property of Bobby Brown, Bail Bonds” and he has his big bounty-hunter badge swinging from around his neck. Surreptitious as ever. He flaps into the store and soon he bounces out again, saying, “He’s setting up an appointment now.”
Here be stealth.

So they're like a bunch of Scooby-Doo detectives scurrying and panicking in the forecourt of a mini-strip-mall and they go, "Quick she's coming, let's hide!" They duck into a building and Dog goes, as they scram through the plain wooden door, "Can you see through the peep-hole." A moment later as the door shuts: "Is there a peep hole."

The room they were in was a sort of abandoned seminar room.

When they "pounced" on the girl she just passively stood there and singularly failed to enter into the excitement of the moment. It's often that way on this show; the bounty-hunters get all worked up and enthused about the job and the chase and the thrill of the hunt, the spoor of the quarry, view halloo! and tally-ho!, right up until the moment when the perp has been caught and the perp is so bored and bland that the illusion is dashed. This girl simply misunderstood the arrest warrant. She said she didn't want to check in with the police until she had paid off her cell-phone charges.
This is, I believe, precisely what Hannah Arendt had in mind when she coined the phrase "The Banality of Evil."

Another idiocy while we’re at it: On the side of my Kellogs “Smart Start” cereal box (“Dumb Start” more like - a vapid cereal we bought while they were on offer and now that I have established conclusively that I hate this shit we have about ten boxes to go) is an offer to get the DVD of Marley and Me. What I ask you could possibly go wrong with a post-suicide-attempt Owen Wilson, a labrador puppy and Jennifer Aniston as the stars. Anyway, on the side of the box it says, “Get a $3 rebate when you laugh and fall in love with Marley and Me.”
I naturally thought of the following “exchange”:
“What if I don’t laugh and fall in love with Marley and Me?”
“Then you don’t get the rebate.”

Peculiar episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter I just saw.

Peculiar episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter I just saw.

You want to hear about it?

It was a bit like Otto Preminger’s Angel Face starring Bob Mitchum. The end was protracted and impotent – there was a false crescendo, a premature ejaculation, and then half an hour of just noodling. Like A Passage to India or Huckleberry Finn. Imperfect resolutions in each.

Leland it was who said, “I only had three hours sleep. I wasn’t even halfway through my dream.” Leave it to Leland to come up with the gnomic Heraclitean summary of the episode. Actually, isn’t that the beginning of Dante’s Commedia?

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.
In the middle of the dream that is our life
I awoke to find myself
In the SUV with Dad chasing a fugitive
Who was no longer a fugitive.

The fugitive in question, one Nono, a serial beater of women (although everybody who knew him swore he was a swell all-round fellow), had gone down to the county sheriff’s “around about midnight” and had his girlfriend Mary “go his bail.” They kept quiet about this and went ahead made a deal for Nono to “give himself up” to Dog and his crew. The idea, it was surmised, was to catch Dog and his team for false arrest and so get them in turn humiliated and arrested while Mary – the schemer behind the scenes – would simultaneously collect some money off Dog for her “informing”.

A scheme worthy of Machiavelli – or the sinister minds behind the JFK assassination.

That’s complicated I realize. Imagine how I felt watching it. There were conspiracies everywhere. Beth said she was conducting “the investigation behind the investigation” and she made it a gendered issue (as they say in the academy) by solving the mystery with Mary Ellen while Dog was blundering around with this guy “Scott”. She kept making the same joke: “Girls rule, dogs drool.”

Scott was a four foot ten double-agent sent by Nono’s malicious shadow militia to sabotage the Dog camp from within. Scott was expert at this, blundering and stuttering the whole time and ballsing up any investigation with his vacillation and hemming and hawing. Dog was naturally incapable of combating this cause he’s prone to hem haw and space out vacantly himself.

Scott was so short he was like a sinister dwarf from a circus of crime. I expected him to turn up at any point in a clown suit and turn somersaults while throwing skittles at the team. But he lost out in the end because Beth donned her deerstalker and solved the conspiracy and begad she had the last laugh. She said, “Scott, we caught you out, interloper at the margins that ye are, and now you are expelled from society.” Scott, who you see had once been a bounty-hunter himself and had found a sort of kinship there that he had never felt before outside of the circus, walked across the parking lot sniffling with his head hung in shame. He looked even samller than usual, the figure he cut there as he trundled into the distance. He walked out to the perimeters of the outer city limits and then he kept walking down tords the creek. Perhaps he is still walking – or perhaps his figurative hat is floating.

I was puzzled, though, why Dog and crew would pursue Nono after they knew that his bail had been paid and his warrant had been pulled the night before. They knew he was trying to scam them, but they still showed up. For what?

To taunt him, was the reason. I watched this story unfold for an hour just to see some childish chest-puffing and drubbing at its end?

Dog and his “pound” need to really work on their narrative endings.

Sometimes the cops come into Dog the Bounty Hunter and foul up the whole story. Dog is always put out by this, largely because he doesn't get his money when the cops arrest the perp. But also it makes for a poor show. Sometimes Dog is duly obeisant and says that the cops are "our big brother" but other times - like today - he spits the word "cops" like everybody else does.

It really is important to be able to finish a narrative with a flourish.

Wisht I coulda-------

Da Kine. Da Fuck?

1) I have a dreadful habit of watching episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter that I've already seen. They all start to seem the same after a while - like episodes of New York Noise. The one with Devo - Vivian Girls - Blondie - that dork from Beirut - Byron and Thurston... So usually I'm two thirds of the way through an episode of Dog before I realise, "Oh I seen this one already I know what happens." By which point I think fuck it I'll watch it again.

Because life is so long that we can afford to waste time like this can't we?

I was watching this one episode with a female perpetrator who in her mugshot had badly-drawn on eyebrows. It was as if they had been drawn on with a big black magic marker - via the tremulous hands of a blind man. And when I saw her mugshot and those magnificent brows, I thought, "Oh I've seen this episode." But I kept watching, rapt in my sublime forgetfulness, and Dog and Beth and family were nosing about this woman's home - which was really just a dirtshack complex on a remote backlot, but it was full of hidden rooms. Lots of ninja hidey-holes. I thought I was watching Shinobi No Mono for a minute!

Heh.

You didn't like that one, all right.

Anyway, the woman was a "meth-head" and (naturally) also a single mother of six, but she in addition stood accused of stealing somebody's dog. Like that episode when that "Bonnie and Clyde" team stole Buddhas from outside a Thai restaurant. And so this time Beth goes, "What the fuck is this about you stealing a dog?"
"I didn't steal no dog."

Meanwhile Beth is, you can tell, trying to steal one of the woman's dogs herelf! I know I've seen one episode where Beth actually did take the perpetrator's pet dog because she liked it and the perp was going to jail after all. So Beth is in the habit, let us say, of blithely taking other people's pets herself. And she was playing with this puppy on camera for ages. Lots of screen time for this one puppy. Eventually Beth had to reluctantly give the puppy back to the meth-head owner (who dully goes, "Drive safe now"), but you could tell that she had been hard at work angling to get the puppy for free. Like a child in a toyshop does - tries to get his or her parents to buy them something simply because they make such a public show of spontaneous fondness for it that the parents can't legally refuse.

Like my nephew in the Disneyland shop. He ran in there, sensing that the time was ripe to get gifts from the adults around, even when he didn't necessarily want anything. He wanted things in the abstract. He was picking up things willy-nilly and pulling a heart-tugging expression.

Beth was doing that very thing with this puppy, but it didn't work anyway.

And then she has the big brazen magnificent balls to accuse the perp of stealing a dog!

2) So then they have the perp on the backseat, and if you've read my earlier "posts" about the show in question you'll know that the backseat is a scene for a lot of soul-searching and hard questions. As the academics would say, it is a "site of radical cultural mediation and exchange." So as usual Dog and Beth are like Jay Leno, in that the first thing they ask the perp is if she's got any kids, and she goes "I had six, but one died."
And Dog, half-asleep and oblivious, goes, "And how old is she?"
"She WAS one-year-old -- WHEN SHE DIED in a car accident!"
So then, all tact and sensitivity, Dog goes, "Oh, da kine."

The fuck---?

"Da kine" is an old Hawaii word that doesn't have a set meaning and so can be said at virtually any times. Dog's company is even called "Da Kine Bail Bonds." And so when this woman tells him her daughter died aged one, all he can find in his human heart to say is, "Oh. Huh. Da kine."

One for the linguists, methinks!

Apocalypse Gulcher (Open Letter to Laurence Remila)

Laurence - - - - -
I went to the Book Expo at the Javits Centre - you know, scrabbling around for free comics - THAT IS I MEAN I went picking up copies of the university press catalogues - - - to see what is forthcoming in my field - -

any-way you wudda laughed, because there was Adam Parfrey in the Feral House booth. The funny thing is he looked uncannily like Roger Cardinal. Has anyone spotted this before? Probably not. It's like my theory that whutzizname - Frodo Baggins - looks like Tatsuya Nakadai. Nobody cares except me.
Who shall attest to it, and I die?

Anyway I goe to Adam Parfrey, "SSSSSSOOOO... you still see Boyd Rice about town ever?" (This is my greeting to strangers everywhere, actually: Do you run into old BOYD?)
He says, Yesss... I goe, What whenddyou last see him? Like I'm in the CIA or something. Whuttzis last known address? Is he still shaving his head or has he acquired a toupee? As if to say, This man is wanted in four states for impersonating Nick Cave.

This man has brought Satanism into disrepute.

Heh... no... but... Parfrey's freebie giveaways were packets of poppy seeds, and he goes, Have a poppy seed on me.
I said, feh - I don't have a garden.

I beg your pardon...
I never promised you a rose garden...

I don't know if the grow-your-own-poppies thing is an allusion to heroin or not or if it is straight up and rather sweet horticulturalism. P____ says to him here, were these grown in Afghanistan? and laughed. He squinted and leaned forward and said, What? Were these grown in Afghanistan?
No...
I thought they only grew them in Afghanistan...
I was counselling her, no, they grow poppies in Cromer too.

I feel like last time I was at the expo (LA) Feral House was giving out seeds then too.
Tomato seeds I believe.

Back to the matter at hand, I then goe - in my now standard and familiar way of imposing on strangers - Meh. Uh, did you ever read Lisa Carver's book?
He goes Lisa...?... oh Lisa CARVER. No, I heard about it I didn't read it.
I said, Boyd Rice doesn't come out so well in that...
He reflected on that one and said, Well Lisa knew what she was getting into. She dated G.G. Allin...
Here the woman on the booth with Parfrey goes, Who dated G.G. Allin?!
I, being a scholarly pedant go, Well I don't know if you can strictly call it dating what they did...
Parfrey was saying, in essence, As ye sow so shall ye reap and I can't really fault that at this stage of my life. It's in the Bible. "Words to Live By." What G.G. - or Napoleon Hill indeed - probably would have called "The Golden Rule."

Speaking of whom, Parfrey says he has a bunch of letters from G.G. from when he was in jail that he is going to publish sensationally in his new autobiography; and he hands me a postcard. I said, "I used to e-mail Mykel Board for a while. Wanna trade?"
Would you like to exclusively publish my e-mail correspondence with Mykel Board, yes or no?
That was in 1994. Imagine; I've been e-mailing for fifteen miserable years.

I said, summing up, "Anyway: G.G, Boyd and Lisa they gave us lotsa great records that we listen to oftentimes to this day didn't they all of them?"

I could have stuck around and rapped some more...
("So... how's Crispin Glover?")
("Wanna buy a pristine unplayed Tards ten inch on Sympathy?")
...But amazingly I knew my cue - for once - and beat it, with postcards but sans poppy seeds. .
Anyway buddy I thought thisd MAKE YOU LAUGH.
I think we all need to laugh now and then and you more than most.
All right - speak to you in another year I guess - - -

FABIAN