"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."

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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.

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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?”

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     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.

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     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?”

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     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.