“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!

Frankencastle –– Quai Des Brumes.

         I liked Frankencastle so far. I liked that they brought him back to life without fanfare. As if the reassembling and reanimating of the Punisher was a cinch and didn't even require exposition. Usually Marvel would be at pains to tediously detail "how it was done." This time it happened off-camera. We wake up as Frank & strangle the werewolf. What was it he said? "Your dog eats his own shit. Stinks." I don't know if even Ennis could have come up with that line. And I liked the Disney/Moebius art. I only resented that I'd already read half of it in last month's number. 

         I liked that line, "Ghod makes mistakes!" 

         Also the distant sight, from the ground up, of Daken chopping up Frank. As seen by Jigsaw's son. 

         Yes I have seen and like well Quai des Brumes. I mix it up, understandably, with Clouzot's Quai des Orfevres, which is superior by far. Quai des Brumes has a great performance by Michel Simon though, as the lowest trash of the low. You seen him in Boudu Saved From Drowning? A better film, I argue against the tide, than La Regle du Jeu. Meanwhile Gabin is at his inscrutable-hammy best. I like Gabin a lot, but I find him patently absurd every time.  (Except in Touchez Pas Au Grisbi and maybe La Grande Illusion.) They used to say, "Gabin always plays Gabin." Speaking of Carne, have you seen Therese Raquin? I consider it a better film (than Quai des Brumes). Although, all in, you come to believe what "they" say, that the excellence of Les Enfants du Paradis is really all down to Prevert. 

"Contra Lycanthropy."

 I was reading old Batmans (“Batmen”) and that familiar trusty sensor went off in my medulla oblongata, like a red telephone with Commissioner Gordon at the other end, that announced the arrival of The Boring again into our lives.
     It was a story about that noteworthy curiosa Americana, the Man-Bat. I realized, hardly with the shock of the new, that lycanthropy and its variants are powerful dull to me. Vladimir Propp might have summed the lycanthropy story up well:

Funktion / Aktion 1— Well-intentioned scientist blunders upon chemical compound of apparently innocent properties, albeit untried. Naively imbibes thereof.

Funktion / Aktion 2— Amazement as scientist transforms into a man-animal amalgam of some dreary and fatuous sort. 

Funktion / Aktion 3— Said scientist–hippogriff embarks on a rampage. In the melee he possibly kidnaps his own wife or daughter.

Funktion / Aktion 4—  He simply must be stopped.

Function / Aktion 5— In the nick of time, he is stopped. An antidote is located and duly administered. Customary humdrum reality is restored to the “polis.” Exeunt all.

Funktion / Aktion 6— Sleep is induced in all of us out of boredom.

I think of Spider-Man’s boring foe The Lizard, as much as Batman’s boring foe Man-Bat. 

     In the 1970s particularly, for reasons presumably allied to the horror revival that took place then, werewolves abounded in the comics, alongside the kung-fu characters (berobed bores to a man) and Dracula (“Die Comte fon Suck and Blow”). I say nothing here about Frankenstein (“actually, it’s the Frankenstein monster— ”) and his monotonous ways. 

     Is there any one among the classic pantheon of horror monsters who is tolerable? Perhaps the Mummy. Underneath his bandages, the Mummy is still anonymous (“androgynous”) – there is still room for originality and possibility – improvisation and flux – beneath the bandages, whereas with the others there is no such thing. The werewolf – or the Man-Bat – must behave in a certain tedious way. Dracula shall always be a bloodsucking leech on the poor. Frankenstein shall always wreak havoc among the townsfolk and their laundry.
       The Crypt-Keeper is always dull company at parties. How he drones on.

     I have been going through old DC comics of the Sixties lately, and I realize also that I am not particularly interested in the classic “rogue’s galleries” of most of the heroes. I prefer those stories where Clark Kent is compromised by Red Kryptonite, or by Lois Lane and Lana Lang’s snooping suspicions, or by Jimmy Olsen’s well-intentioned but plainly insane machinations, far more than a story involving the Parasite. (The exceptions are Mr. Mxyzptlk and Lex Luthor. The exception is not Brainiac.)

     (Brainiac bores me.)
     This could be the beginning of a very good suicide note:
     “Brainiac bores me, ergo I must die.”