“Boring Comics: Narratological Point.”

     It is a commonplace in Marvel comic books, particularly ones of a certain era, to waste several pages of the narrative at the beginning with empty scenes showing the super heroes’ battle abilities and finesse in generic battle scenes. The locus classicus is the Danger Room scene in The X-Men.
     The splash page customarily begins with the X-Men seemingly spiritedly fighting one of their most notorious foes. After numerous pages (which we, the comic's humble buyers, have plainly invested and wasted whole cents in) the scene is revealed to be an exercise and an illusion. These were mere phantasms - robotic simulacra created by the Shiiar technology of the Danger Room. Cut to a panel of Kitty Pryde at the Danger Room controls. Eating a slice of pizza, stuck in the mid-Eighties, talking her usual glib “Mary-Sue” patter – beloved of exactly nobody.

     This generic scene purportedly establishes the powers and peccadilloes of the characters for new, first-time “casual” readers. A similar scene is the opener of literally millions of comics: Spider-Man webspinning through New York and breezily espying a mugging in a back alley.
     Must we be forced to behold this sight once again? Must we live it out anew, night after night? Spider-Man capturing the muggers, grinding them down with vapid one-liners that everybody (everybody) is weary of. He webs them up and further lightly humiliates them, then turns to their victims who recoil from him and call him a “nasty hooligan” or some similar synonym.
     Cut to a scene of J. Jonah Jameson droning on about the “web-spinning menace”; or a Daily Bugle front page editorializing against the infamous Spinner of Webs.

     Marvel Comics are boring aren’t they!!! I certainly wish they had never invented the Danger Room.
     Add Danger Room scenes to my list of boring comics.
     Also boring: “Pantheon” storylines that deal with characters from classical mythology.

“Paradox” (“Pearls Before Swine.”)

     At the comics shop.
     Yes – again.
     Whenever customers bring their girlfriends into the shop, the storekeeper always becomes agitated and overly animated. He upbraids the swains, the suitors, for being so lame as to bring their beauties into so low a den.

Bachelor’s Hall, Bachelor’s Hall,
I’ll always stay single, keep Bachelor’s Hall.”

“What are you doing,” he ejaculates, wiping the remnants of a greasy hoagie off onto the back of his t-shirt, “bringing these fine purebreed fillies into this foul donjon?, this debauched bachelor den of wasted male mutates? Would ye besmatter these pearls with vile dross and grit? Aye – and it seems you would.”
     “Whudsoevers bruh. Do you have the latest Birds of Prey dude?”

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

     I chose Birds of Prey for my punchline here simply because it may well be the dullest comic in the creation. [A few years later I began avidly collecting this title –– Ego Scriptor.] Three female superheroes. Barbara Gordon, Black Canary and... who? I forgot.
     (“Batgirl. It’s Batgirl.” – Damian Morgan)
     A while ago the same storekeeper was giving away DC comics “free gratis.” DC or Diamond Distributors had said it was okay for him to “title page” them. That is, to scrap ’em, and just send back the title pages. So I was tottering over the racks when he goes, “Fabian, do you want a copy of Birds of Prey without the cover?”
     I gave him such a purely disgusted, violated look that he added weakly, plaintively, “It’s free.”
     “Still,” I said. “STILL.”
      And yet. And yet.

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

     Speaking of Birds of Prey, the last time I saw D. Oregon Morgan it was in London and we met at the MVE comics shop basement. Damian is always flat-broke but he also always has a pocketful of vouchers.

Sing a song of sixpence
A pocket full of vouchers.
Four and twenty copies
Of Secret Invasion Front Line.

     I went down there and he was already in place, neck deep in slime, filth, damp rot and back-numbers. Wearing his trademark white tuxedo.
     “Livingstone, I presume.”
     “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
     “Echec.”
     “Et mat.”
     Also assembled there were a few other people –– the usual subterranean bottom-dwellers and mouth-breathers, all bent crooked, riffling in silence through the fifty pence bins in a cloud of anthrax spores. I hadn’t seen Damian in nearly a year and the first thing we said to each other was of consequence very emotional. We are friends of many years standing. We have experienced a lot together on two continents in two major capitals. Obviously overcome with feeling, Damian goes:
     “Um, Fabe, so how come Spider-Man gave away his identity in Civil War and now nobody knows who he is again?”
     I coughed and tried to explain this byzantine narrative abortion at some length.
     I didn’t succeed.
     What makes me bring this up is that Damian was all the while steadily and quite blithely building him up a pile of issues of Hawkwoman. I could not believe it.
     “Are you doing this simply to defy me, rascal?” I go. “Sirrah do you do it just to damn my eyes?”

     Damo pulled up a copy of Birds of Prey, squinted at the cover condition like it was a Near Mint issue of Action Comics #1, added it to his pile, and goes, “Naturlich, my dear. What other reason could I or any man have for reading Hawkwoman?”

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

     One last story while I am so clearly on a roll. Then I’m out of here. A few days later we met Damian and his housemates at the launch for some Antony Gormley show at White Cube II, Piccadilly. 

     Yaaaa-essss, we’re all big art buffs. [This said in the voice of John Lydon on the Bill Grundy show.] They’re all heroes of ours, ain’t they? Oh yessss! They really turn us on. Damian and his band of ageless housemates had been in St. James’s Park that afternoon, playing Ultimate Frisbee, football golf and also their own version of badminton where you batted the shuttlecock up as high as you can and keep volleying it up as high as you can. A regular paralympics (“laff-a-lympics”). I looked at them strangely and said, “It's like Don Quixote, at the end, when they all decide to become shepherds.” 

     Something pathetic and woeful about this –  – something that seemed to suggest to me that the world will end in the next few years.
     Everybody was enjoying the free beer except me. I don’t drink beer, so I had a glass of revolting white wine from the pub nearby. Awful piss.
         Speaking of, Will Self was there.
       Anyway, the conversation was strictly pedestrian and quite obviously headed nowhere, so I decided to “pep” it up a bit during one wretchedly dull phase with a wry remark to Damian about the comics. Some observation about Franken-Castle or something equally erudite. 

   Damian pulled up his collar and withdrew from his waistcoat his pince-nez and a silver snuffbox and he heaved a big inhalation of snuff and utterly fucking ignored me.
       I drew myself up with one of those smiles that looks like its wearer might as soon burst into tears as laugh. “Do you snub me now sir?”
      “Didn’t hear what you said, Fabe.”
    “I was talking about the four-color funny-books, Damian. And I rather think you heard me damn well.”

      Damian gazed into his snuffbox sadly.
      “What’s this, hey?” Damian’s boon companion Kirk said. “Do you read comics, Damian?”
     “I’ve got maybe about six back at my Mum’s, Kirk,” Damian barked haughtily, flushing and looking the other way.
       I nodded, coolly, and simply cooed: “And the cock crew thrice.”
       And you know what it did.

                                                                   “THE END.”

"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 its 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 verisimilitude in the funny-books. 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 Revolutionary War,” complained another with furrowed brow, “and yet she still lives.”
     I have heard similar confusion in other comicshops. At Roger’s Time Machine, he was reasoning with a young seeker of truth, that if the comics took place in “real time” then “Peter Parker would be ten years older than I am.” The unshying seeker palled and left that place fast, mumbling “I have to look into this.”
     For my part I was mentally trying to work out Roger’s age from this obscure admission. I surreptitiously retrieved a pen and paper from my satchel and drew out a rude timeline. 

     John Byrne has talked at considerable length about the tedious problem of Franklin Richard’s age in a hundred-page interview that I once, 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 faltering frontiersmen 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 formulated 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. You would be far happier I believe tucking into the works of the realists and the naturalists. Might I recommend the works of Emil Zola?”
     A moment. Then the eminent Mexican gentleman, checklist in hand, ahemmed:
     “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:
     “Correctimundo.”

“Hulked Out.” Or, “Hulk Duly 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. I have managed to cover it up magnificently in my day-to-day dealings with other people. 

Is it that contemporary “continental” philosophy is especially complex, or is it that it is routinely boring, poorly written and willfully 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 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 pool and we can forget this flimsy pretense for being here.”

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

A MacArthur “genius award” to the first person who can explain the 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 shuttled between MODOK’s grisly crowd of misfits and maniacs on one side and Bruce Banner on the other. Fine. Hulk’s son “Skaar”, meanwhile, wants to kill Bruce Banner but only once he turns into the Hulk – which Dr. Banner shan’t do. He simply refuses to comply. His resolve is marvelous to behold.

Skaar and Dr. Banner are also popping up and cross-overing in the Wolverine titles at the moment with Skaar double-crossing Wolverine with Wolverine’s grandfather Romulus. Are you following this rubbish?     

Doctor Doom was kidnapped and knocked “the fuck” out with what amounted to a “stupid bomb” (their words) so that he couldn't think straight. I know the feeling. The eminent Herr fon Doom is, in his turn, appearing “simultaneously” in titles across the board with a marked knack to be in a dozen places at once almost equal to Deadpool’s. 

Then, in the Hulk titles, every major superhero gets turned into a “Hulked-out” version of themselves. They really are 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, there 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 excellent craftsmen at MARVEL COMICS; but we keep on buying right along. It is a time paradox: 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. What it did for the furtherance of human civilization eludes me. More Deadpool money for the Marvel coffers.    

Deadpool is in twenty titles any given 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 you're up-to-date and will have a witty thing to say if you ever have the excellent fortune to be in a drawing room with those interesting personages Tinsley Mortimer or Paul Johnson Calderon.

“Cockled Headers: Secret Origins.”

     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, "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 & okayed 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. (I found out later from Harry Metcalf that the correct term for this is "cockling".)  

     Nigh every copy I have seen of this title, at least those issues numbering between #159 and #188, is so corrugated. Also issues of GI Joe and Quasar and Iron Man and Web of Spider-Man from the same benighted period. I believe depredated conditions such as these contribute to what historians refer to as a “Dark Age”.
     I went to the bar, and showed them to Roger. “Do you mark these bumps [–cockles–] along the header?” I asked.
     Roger squinted a spell, and looked perplexed. Finally he deduced 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 nodded to himself and 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 community. The comics collecting fraternity is traditionally, shall we say, vigilant, ah, exacting indeed, on such minutiae concerning, ah, condition.”
     I bridled at this, “slightually.” As if 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 dull workaday 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. 

      Dum vivimus vivamus!