"Inter-Dimensional Overkill: A Review of the Recent Round of Marvel (Non–) Events."

A while ago, after around six years of fevered and uncritical abandon, around the time of the listless, baldly pointless, Marvel Comics come-all-ye known as Fear Itself, I quitted buying comics.

Induced by the sheer Bendisishness badness of the writing, I (who still consider the first Secret Wars a "high water mark of Western culture") had an out of body experience and saw myself, of a Wednesday, stood among the twit team irregulards at the comics racks, queueing up for my weekly dose of ampules.

I saw you queueing at the Gates of Hell
On that day – what were you doing?!

Not long after that, I did the inevitable elementary calculations in my head and realized that I was scheißing away the paltry few nickels and dimes I had, not to mention the second-best years of my life, on what was largely advertising. 


The stacked wads of comics in our railroad apartment were taking over the place, had become a fire hazard. Longboxes accrued, looked like coffins for pre-teens laid out jenga-style. Our "library" had come to look a little like the necropolises of New Orleans or the Mediterranean. I calculated, in my dawning recoil, that a good few hundred feet of that living-space-annihilation was composed of bad advertising.  

I stopped buying comics soon after. Followed an equally fanatical project to replace as many of those comics as possible with the bound collections (preferably the deluxe hardback edition) of the comics, i.e. sans the ads. I shall not speak of that folly, principally because I am still in the middle of it, intoxicated by the heady wine of the moment. 

(I remember reading on the fanboy message boards, one aspirant who was delighted with the hardback omnibus reprints of old comics runs, especially because the reprints included the original letters pages and Bullpen Bulletins. He only wished that in future editions Marvel would reprint the advertisements.)

Enough dull prefacing. Suffice it to say, I no longer buy the comics, I only buy collections. 

Hardly a superior pose, but it saves me a fortune. I have no particular concern about being six months or so "behind" my former brethren, the Wednesday morning clownshoe-wearers. Still, it remains that by not reading individual issues one might (one can) (one does) buy a clunker or two along the way without realising it until too late. I am right glad that I didn't buy the fathomless checklist of individual issues of the Avengers Versus X-Men fiasco, because the cost would have run into the thousands. I am less glad that I forked out even fifty dollars on the large hardcover of this trenchant torrent of tofu-flavoured fudge. "Forewarned is forearmed."

That X-Men farce seemed the last wheeze of the old-style Marvel BYOB–and-won't-ye-stand-in-a-circle epics, though. With their overhaul and reboot ("Marvel Now"), the company seems to be trying to intellectualize their fluffernutter – to sprinkle on some pink rock salt or artisanal red peppercorns.

In Infinity, I noticed with wry, urbane amusement that Wolverine was dispatched early and in a relative instant. A refreshing turn. Throw him out for the general embarrassment he is. I was reminded of that "sublime moment in the literature" (Bakhtin, I believe) when Deathstroke the Terminator floored Wolverine with debonair ease using only a glorified cattle prod (the X-Men/Teen Titans one-shot). Hickman, the author of Infinity, seems to be trying to minimise the recurrence of old tropes (i.e., the ubiquity of Wolverine, Spider-Man). 

This may however be at the cost of some valuable (Mark Gruenwald-era) continuity. For an example, I give you the unexplained panel of Iron Man and the Watcher standing over a catatonic or dead form of the Living Tribunal on the moon – or the whole debacle with resituating the so-called "New Universe" within the Marvel Universe after Gruenwald had done a most serviceable job of it (involving the aforementioned Tribunal) in Quasar in the 1990s.

Poor Mark Gruenwald's Quasar did so much for Marvel's cosmic pantheon, the body of which is now systematically ignored by the new wave of middling writers. 

They must return to their OHOTMUs. 

Further adding the tincture of a scorched earth DC reboot to the proceedings was the remoteness of the villain "Thanos" from his many earlier (often tedious) fracases with the Marvel superheroes. The poor fellow seemed like he'd never met, let alone tangled with, these people before. Thanos of old seemed to have an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the arcana of the Marvel Universe. But for Hickman to achieve the requisite level of seriousness (rather dry and humourless) it is necessary to conveniently forget all the knock-down drag-out scrums and skirmishes Thanos gamely participated in over the last twenty-three years. Does Thanos have no recollection of his feud with the Pet Avengers? (He lost.) 

Continuity seems adrift. Babies –– bathwater. What, after all, does Hickman replace the old order with? Chiefly chaff; post-Bendis Mary Sues. Hickman isn't exactly Stan Lee ( – let alone Mark Gruenwald –– ) when it comes to portraying the quotidian existence of the superheroes. Captain America and Thor devolved into ciphers when the films started coming out. The Gruenwald and DeFalco iterations of these  two had individual foibles, replete with both the drama and the humour that comes with such flaws. 

Hickman had a celebrated run on Fantastic Four a few years back, a comic that had previously been a poor earner for the company with the mainstream of hard junk ingesters. To accommodate the droves (never a good move) Hickman and Marvel chose to emphasise family and the sciences. You can imagine the conversation in a meeting. "What's Reed Richards got that the other characters don't?" 
"A one-thousand yard dingaling."
 "Apart from that."
"A wife and kids and a jerk brother-in-law. Plus the Thing." 
"So let's emphasise the kids Christ sake. All the putzes reading comics now are balding family men –– at least they are, if they aren't balding derelicts living in a twilight pocket universe of their own making in their mother's basement. And bald family men like nothing better than to drone on boringly after their kids. Let's appease them with talk about kids and how special and wonderful they are and can be." 
"Kids are great. And these are special kids! These are gifted kids with unusual attributes!"
"Adzactly."
"And when there's a lull in the proceedings we can bring in either Galactus or Doctor Doom. One or the other. The rest writes itself."
"Got it."
"Hickman, you can toddle right along now and write your little funny-book and let the big boys talk."

The sum of the recent Age of Ultron hootenanny, the punchline, was that it was all a prologue to another epic, which would amount to Galactus eating the Ultimate Universe. 

"No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to
Prologue to an egg and butter."

When this non-event happened it was tediously pointed out that the heroes of the Marvel Universe had ruptured the substance of time and space by all their exhaustive and really quite irresponsible rambling through the highways and byways of parallel dimensions. (Have you read the complete run of Exiles comic?) 

This could be taken (by a contemptible cynic) as an analogy for how worn and frayed the patience of the readers has become with the habitual sallying through time as the go-to escape route for the bankrupt writer. 

It is good for us to remember that when DC had its first fully-fledged Crisis of Confidence, they pointedly decided – back in 1985 –– that such inter-dimensional horse-flaying was played out, and they tidily consolidated all their earths into one, like the estimable Arab folding up his pup tent. 

The Science Police banned time-travel henceforth and Brainiac 5 was awful sore. DC has since routinely reneged on this (blame Booster Gold) but it was a noble ideal. 

Marvel seems to have taken another thirty years to deduce the opposite. They reason that the infinite splintering of possible futures is where the money is at. Bendis must have his way with the Silver Age X-Men and who at Marvel could possibly want to stand in the way of the march of Bendis. 

After all phantasies of time travel are fun and idyllic.  Old girlfriends can be returned to us all ship-shape and prelapsarian. Best of all, we can return to a world that predates cellphones and the Internet again––! A world before tedious comics web-logs about time-travel in the entertainment industry. 

What If... I Never Wrote This Article?

I too have enjoyed the time-travel alt-universe trope when it is done well (the aforementioned Booster Gold, Zero Hour, Legion of Super-Heroes passim, Steve Englehart's classic time-travel "arc" in West Coast Avengers, Avengers Forever, Universe X). However a trend is emerging and for better or for ill it would be a desertion of my duty as a citizen not to at least document the trend. 

I thought that the express realpolitik military-industrial corporate argument against such incessant  tampering – the infinite versions of Cable and X-Man, Doctors Richards and Von Doom, Cyclops and Wolverine et al. – was that they alienated the "lay reader" and watered-down the core brand. ("Mother, why is Reed Richards now a bald black man?") Has Marvel abandoned wholly the idea of a "lay reader"? Must we all now have bloated crania like Uatu, the man in the moon, to comprehend these multitudes?  

On the other hand, per the "Ultimates Universe" and the "Heroes Reborn" interregnum (and per DC) Marvel is also not above trying out a reboot of its well-trod myths for a new readership. As we know, these never work and we return eventually to the original continuity. Isn't that what Grant Morrison is supposedly planning, even now, over at DC? A meta-narrative that absorbs all the reboots & makes sense of them? 

And then he shall unravel the Gordian Knot––

Time–travel is fun and nostalgic, but we must be careful not to blunder into the path of our past-selves and cause a rupture. Also, imagine seeing your past self up close, you who hate to hear your voice played back on answer-phone message! 

Imagine if you saw yourself, crudely flirting with the girls. Gulping cider at the bar. 

Last year Laurence Remila and I returned, like old time-travellers returning to the scenes of our best skirmishing. We went to Camden –– visited the Mixer, the Dublin Castle and wound up in the Spread Eagle. It was like walking through a sunken ghost-ship. And we too were revenants, unremarkable to the few revelers who still walked there. Of course, Laurence lives in Paris and I live in New York so we were woefully out of date, but this must be rather how time-travel could be. We ended up drinking a last, strange pint in Kensington –– a pub on Church Street we never once drank ins. It was the only pub still open past midnight. 

What happened to that idea that London pubs were going to be open around the clock?

"Hoarders Are Weird."

My wife was telling me a story about somebody who was a chronic hoarder, as I was going through a pile of comics bags and boards separating them into two piles. All the while she was talking about hoarding, I was coolly making these two piles. One pile was of bags and boards where the bags were wide enough that you could fit an average-sized trade paperback inside it. The other pile was for bags and boards that were too narrow to hold a trade paperback and could only hold a single issue of a comicbook (or as the fanboys now term them, a "pamphlet"). When I had finished I put the first pile into a cardboard box so they would be neat and easily available. The other pile, for which I had less time and esteem, I thought I didn't want to waste a box on so I decided in a flash of artistic inspiration to put these bags and boards inside a Trader Joe paper bag. I was influenced in this not so much by the art world as by the Chinese shoe repair people down the street who keep all the shoes they are fixing in brown bags. They can never find your shoes. It's a sort of trademark they have. We will almost certainly lose your shoes. This our personal promise to you.

When my wife had finished her interesting story I took a pause from my industry, as I said putting these bags and boards into two piles according to size, prelude to placing the piles in respectively a box and a paper bag, and as I said I paused from my work to remark:

"Yes. Hoarders are peculiar."

"Boring Comics Are Here Again."

Boring Comics. Anything with the Savage Land or the Shi'Ar in it. That is to say, the X-Men. When Sauron (half-man, half-pteranosaur) flies into the shot it is time for us to retire discreetly to our separate rooms. When the Starjammers come running dynamically into a room pointing their ray-guns (as they invariably do) it is time to respectfully retire from that same room –– by a different door –– methinks.

I was re-reading some old issues of Uncanny X-Men from about 1990 and you could almost see, as if  in "real time," the collapse and utter demise of Chris Claremont's writing style into incoherence. It's shocking to behold. He developed this sort of be-bopping free-association stream-of-consciousness that was alarming to the sensitive reader. By the end of his run, when I presume he was forcibly removed from the Marvel offices, he was writing sheer gibberish, talking in tongues. Like Pound with the so-called "China Cantos."

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

Also boring, the Wolverine story, "Weapon X." What actually happens in this story? It's a protracted surgical procedure with, so far as I can tell, bickering staff. I'd as lief watch Grey's Anatomy.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

Last night, on Person of Interest, John Rees dispatched the perp by driving his car into the guy's SUV and knocking it into him.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

On Jeopardy, the two new contestants were named Walkenhorst and Lowmaster. Both females. The blonde woman who had dominated for the last week was toppled from her throne without dignity. There wasn't anything offensive about her per se, but I was greatly relieved when she was deposed. She seemed to get cockier every day in her little interviews with Alex, after the first break. She was getting to sort of like being on the television. She was kind of adapting horribly to it. She was clucking with her tongue. Alex, of course, hates it when the contestants try to outshine him and he jealously, peevishly squashes their repartee when it sprouts. He tries to kill their jokes in the very act of birth. It's in his professional interest for the contestants to be stammering dullards with nothing worth saying. Usually they are. So he was happy to see the blonde go too I think.

Lowmaster won. How her reign shall be remembered by future generations, we cannot say.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

On Life After Top Chef Mike Isabella shows up each week even though he is not one of the four featured chefs. Even though he is not even invited by the show's producers. I presume he was "put out" that he wasn't invited to be one of the featured chefs, so he furiously contrives to turn up at the filming of every episode as if by happenstance, and "naturally" wanders into shot.

This week he happened to turn up at Spike Mendelsohn's place on his moped while the cameras were there. 

"Oh, are you filming?" he says, all innocent. "I'll come back. I can go. You want me to stay? Okay I'll stay."

By the way, the title to this show must be ironic, because the overriding message behind this show is that there is no life after Top Chef. These glorified cooks are just diddling about while life goes past!

One day they'll be dead!

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

Idea for TV Show. Colicchio Versus Colameco: Who Wudd Win.

The pitch: "Who'd win in the crude, ugly slugfest that would obviously ensue when these two eminent chefs met."

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  

Incidentally, did I not make the point several months ago that Mitt Romney looks like Don Draper? "Katty Kay" made the same point, belatedly, on Charlie Rose the other night, after the debate. I wish you could copyright little super–facial–recognitions like that. There must be a way to make money out of super–recognition but I haven't figured it out yet if there is.

“Jor–El: What’s Wrong With a Prison?”

   It’s very easy to become bored –– disheartened –– actually depressed –– when you are reading about the planet Krypton before it blew up. It’s such dull stuff. And at the crux of this energetic maelstrom of dishwater, the eye of this vortex of banality, is none other than Jor–El, the father of Superman.

     Partially it is because we have read the origin story of Superman so many times that we would as lief eat a pincushion as read it once more. We wish these superficial marionettes conjured up before us like so much trivial vapour would vanish. And this is, indeed, what generation after generation of writers has been striving – and failing – to accomplish, and will continue to do so from now ’til time immemorial – until, no doubt, the Earth itself blows up in a manner very like the  one that did for planet Krypton. In World of Krypton all of Jor–El’s many well-trod scientific endeavours and breakthroughs are explored in tedious detail – the Phantom Zone, anti-gravity thrusters, etc.  Nothing too dull or trivial it seems. 

     One of his more eccentric “brainwaves” is in the field of, shall we say, criminal rehabilitation. It doesn’t make sense to me. Jor–El recommends that criminals should henceforth be placed in suspended animation and launched in bubbles into orbit in the planet Krypton’s immediate atmosphere. There they can float above the planet until they have served out their sentences.

     I fail to see the advantage in this. How exactly does it profit the polis, sage Socrates? It seems downright perverse to me – contrary – unwholesome. Need I point out what is obvious to the followers of one FRANK CASTLE’s many adventures, that the essence of capital punishment is that it is punishing – even if it is not always capital. If the malfeasant miscreants are in suspended animation (being brainwashed by rehabilitating subliminal mind-control tapes, incidentally – but I shan’t even pursue that rather boring course of leftist critique here) then they are not actually awake to appreciate the wrong that they have done. What's the significance of time passing if you're asleep? It makes of the prisoners mere Rip Van Winkles. They’re put in the bubbles and then they wake up and come out of the bubbles. It’s like having your wisdom teeth extracted.

    Also, floating about unconscious in solitary bubbles above Krypton’s surface they are under no threat whatsoever from grisly prison rape, which is –– I naively thought –– the cornerstone of Western civilization’s deterrents against lawbreaking. The threat of prison rape is, in fact, the single greatest deterrent against wrongdoing in existence. Without it, the world  would be in inchoate, antediluvian anarchy. 

    The reason why Jor–El's crackpot scheme prevails is because of the alternative that is even more outre.  The solution offered by Jor–El's competitor, one “Tron–Et” (his real name apparently), is the ingenious “Matter-Dissolver”. This –– as you might imagine –– succinctly “eliminates the problem of the criminal.” If Frank Castle was a denizen of Krypton (– idea for a Marvel/DC crossover event ––) he would surely be a keen subscriber to Tron–Et’s peculiar philosophical tenets.

  Or not: unfortunately this canny device is discredited in the end when it turns out that “Tron–Et” is himself a master criminal who wants to annihilate all the criminal lackeys who worked for him before they can be put in Jor–El’s rehabilitator-capsules. 

     Tron–Et is frightened – “reasonably” enough – that these erstwhile henchmen might emerge from Jor–El’s bubbles older, wiser and reformed. His “sensible” fear is that on clambering, like newborns a-birthing, from the bubbles and after only a rudimentary snack, the former lackeys would go directly to the criminal courts and tell the judge that Tron–Et was a criminal kingpin.

     You can see how a thing like that might happen.

     Hence the “Matter-Dissolver.”

     Hence the success of Jor–El’s prison-capsules.

   I see that I have taken up quite enough of your time. And I can see from your faces, having read this far, that you agree with me entirely – Krypton and Jor–El are very boring.

AFTERTHOUGHT

     [This afterthought is really only for you comics jagoffs out there in the wide, disappointing world. It occurs to me now, as I write this, that the origin story of Superman has some resemblances to the origin story of Galactus. Superman is the last survivor of a dying planet –– for Galactus it is a dying multiverse –– but the “core myth” (and pardon the dreadful pun) is the same. It’d be like that story where it was intimated that the Phantom Stranger is actually the future son of Superman and Wonder Woman cast back through time.

     As I said, dull stuff in the dry diggings, which I very much regret having to say, but sometimes – as an academic – or as a lapsed academic I should say! – I have to “publish” my findings, desiccated and loathsome as they are, to add them to that infinitely expanding, pulsing pool of knowledge we call HUMAN CIVILIZATION. This pool of knowledge is, as Jor-El would no doubt attest, our only hope for the endurance of a sensitive society.

     That and the vile spectre of the ever-present threat of prison rape.]

“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.”