Ignition City…

Looks good.  I am always up for a good time with Warren Ellis.

Final Crisis #6

Read this fine piece of work today.  Good issue?  Yes.  But it does suffer from the next to last issue of a series problem of having so much going on that you only want the last issue and will not be satisfied until your read that issue.  I like what Morrison is doing, but I have been reading The Forever People for the past few   days and this has really helped me to understand it all.  What started out as a murder mystery quickly turns into something that you should probably be reading along with the Kirby Fourth World Omnibi at the same time.  Without any of that you will be totally lost.  I have not been keeping up with the tie-ins, and I have been just been assuming that anything that I don’t understand (which is a fair chunk) has something to do with a tie in that I have not read yet.  Maybe the ability to do that is what allows me to like the story.  Listening to the latest episode of 11 o’clock comics, I think alot of people are having some very different reactions to this story.  One of the main reactions seems to be one of being pissed off.  I guess that I am taking the blame for my own perceptions of denseness in the work.

What amazes is me is how Batman got the cover and he only has a couple of pages.  Well, maybe it doesn’t amaze me so much as surprise me.  OK, it doesn’t even surprise me…it is inevitable.  I didn’t really understand what he did, I don’t know if it ties into Batman RIP or if I just can’t remember what happened in Final Crisis #5.  I cannot even remember for sure if I read Final Crisis #5.  But what does that say.  I think that after issue 7 comes out I’ll sit down are read all of them.  They will probably make more sense and I might get more out of it.

Watching The Watchmen…

Finished reading this big coffee table book tonight.  With the plans for the movie, and the huge push they have made for getting even more copies of the book out there, I came across a copy for 10 bucks on ebay.  Well, I do like Watchmen…though I am not the rabid fan, only a slightly imbalanced one.

The book was written by Dave Gibbons and tells his story of working on the maxi-series project that would become comics version of the first Hendrix album, Sargent Pepper and Dark Side of the Moon.  Highly illustrated, the anecdotes are not the major focus of the book.  The book is an interesting mix of archival materials:  sketches, letters, typewritten pages, scene breakdowns, character designs – everything you can think of ended up in this multimedia museum book.  A majority of the pages were reproductions of sketch breakdowns, and indeed if these were removed the page count might be under 100 pages.  Still it is a great book.  It is more of a museum exhibit in book form about the original art and the process behind the creation of Watchmen.

I learned a few things from this book.  I had no idea that Gibbons did not have a single page of the original art, and in fact he sold it as soon as he had finished it.  Combined, all 12 issues worth the art would probably be valued in the millions under the present climate.  It could be even higher after the movie.  The section with the books colorist was also interesting.  He described the coloring process in 1986, the technology was pretty much the same as what was used in 1960s Spider-man comics.  The lack of a Fed-Ex, DHL or UPS to deliver finished pages from the UK to the US offices also reminds one what conditions were like during the creation of the book.  Even script pages had to be hand carried or mailed.  There was no email, no fax, on meeting in places and talking on the phone.  Reading these descriptions took me back to that time, when I was 11 and made me realize how much different the world is now.  I have absorbed it all.

The only thing really lacking in this book is Alan Moore.  I think most people know his stance on the movie, and he probably associates this book with the movie…and he would be right.  Still, I think this might also be the first of what is likly to be a stream of books about the book following the movie.  I do not know how the movie will do, but if the buzz lives up to half its expectations then we will be seeing serious books of literary criticism about Watchmen, artbooks about the film, a few good toys…and hopefully anything else they decide to produce will be mostly tasteful.  I did hear rumors about a videogame, and though my instinct is towards a dismissal of it even it might be good.

Warner Brothers might just make 2009 “Year of the Watchmen”.  I don’t know if that sounds corny or not.

The Problem of Evil in comics…with added rambling

So the last post was about the anti-life equation.  This led me to write something about a functional nature of mythology in general and comic books as a form of mythology in particular.  Comics, at least super-hero comics, function as a form of speculative fiction.  They are not naturalistic fiction.  They can be science fiction.  They can be horror.  They can be alot of things.  The super-hero genre is wide, but there is a an aspect that very much makes them mythological in that they are based on supernatural abilities.  Now that is not to say that it is total.  Batman is a super-hero without any powers due to his abilities in criminology, physical stamina, martial arts, and use of technology.  He is still a mythological character though.  He is not real, but his franchise is very real and the story of Batman is recreated every generation.  A character like Superman has the supernatural powers that are alien in nature, but they are also scientifically derived.  Many other comic characters gain powers through scientific calculation or accident.  The creation of abilities beyond what is found in the physical world is the expression of the supernatural – and the problem is that the term “supernatural” is loaded with ideas of ghosts and spirits.  The basic usage of the term in my considerations of comics as a form of mythology/fiction is that there is an element of a person who has access to things beyond the abilities of the normal human experience.  It is not always biological, it can also be access to technology that is not available to others.

The Problem of Evil is a philosophical issue that many people have wrestled with in trying to understand.  It is a problem that is usually dealt with in most cultures through their creation of mythology and religion.  The basic issue at hand is how, if people are good and society is good, does evil come into being.  There are many different reasons for this in comics, so I decided to start creating some examples that can be found in them.

Madness – Usually a cultures easiest answer to the problem of evil.  It can often be applied with other goals, but it can also stand as an answer by itself.  It can also be temporary (as with some characters who are possessed by something else that is evil) or it can be causual.  By causual I mean that some event caused a personal loss that creates a state of madness.  Dr. Doom is an example of that.  But the problem with madness is that it can be applied to almost any situation, it is a matter of perception going against reality.

But as far as real understanding of villain of character motivation you can usually apply madness at some level to the characters.  The madness aspect just represents how the character goes against the norms of society and exhibits the behaviors that make them a villain.  For the most part in comics being a villain is presented as a form of madness in itself.

Motivations for villainy:

Revenge:  Dr. Doom is a great example.  He places blame on Reed Richards for causing his scars.  His attempts at spiritualism is more of a cautionary flaw, the occult card being played – that idea of forbidden knowledge.  Another example is the attempts at social revenge by characters who have an origin based in abuse.  Nurtured to behave in such ways, they are acting out revenge against the world for abuses they have received.

Power:  The desire for control and conquest.  The idea is to gain social/political power.  This is often tied together with another desire, money.  But whereas money might be a motive for hired villains, power is about money and control of the means of creating the money.  Kingpin, Lex Luthor these are examples of people who are seeking control as a goal.  There is often an element of political ideology behind this, such as the example of Red Skull.  Darkseid is also a very good example of this element of power and control.  I would include in this category those characters that have the goal of destruction of the universe.  This is a performance of power, the desire to control to such a level that you can destroy everything.  Many humans characters have a drive to power that will make them gods or like gods…this is usually manifested in a way you can compare to the hubris of Greek tragedy.

Money:  This is tricky because just because someone gets hired on to kill a hero doesn’t mean their work is not a matter of motivation.  Bullseye and Bushwacker are great examples of this.  They attack a hero because they are being paid by another villain, usually the employer is motivated towards hiring them as an assasin due to problems the hero is causing by antagonizing the villains will to power.  There are also those villains that are out to make money by knocking over armored cars and the like.  Sandman is an example of that, but he is also a complex character since his desire for money was originated in a need to help his family and he became a hero through this decision.  Taskmaster falls under this.  Mercenary characters do what they do out of money and their desire to perform socially unacceptable things.  There is usually a division though between crimes against property and crimes against people.  Thieves are often the more complexly written characters, a mixture of good and evil – such as Catwoman and Black Cat.  These can be villains or heroes based on their use in the story.

Tricksters:  Often they just wanna mess with a hero.  This has a high element of madness.  Loki and Thor.   Joker and Batman.  These villains are out to cause problems and are usually defined by their enemies.  That is not to say that they are totally defined by a specific nemesis, but that they are usually evoked in a manner that is contra a character.

Socially unacceptable behaviors (cannibalism, murder, vampirism):  Vampirism is a classic case of this.  Vermin is another.  Often this is written into comics as an uncontrollable side effect of their supernatural state, particularly a cannibalistic element.  Venom fits into this with his draining of life energy, a form of vitalistic vampirism.  Serial killer concepts often come under this area.  The main unacceptable behavior is the act of murder, but pure serial killers are often not made villains in comics.  They tend to be very serious and limited (at least the cases of pure human atrocity) to stories where there is a character who operates to antagonize these behaviors.  The Punisher battles many enemies who exist in this realm of pure criminal behavior.  The thing is Punisher is not interested in damage to property or theft of property but in characters who operate in acts of violent crime.  Drug dealers, pimps, slavers, that kind of thing.  In many was assasins fall under this, but are also motivated by money.  They get paid to do what they enjoy doing…which is usually killing.

These catagories are just some rough thoughts I have been having.  They are far from developed.  The motivations are part of the stories that they exist in.  Mythology might not be the best way to understand it.  Comics are a controlled form of social reproduction.  Levi-Strauss structuralist theory will not work here.  Comics are not oral histories with regional variations.  If comics are a form of mythology you need a new designation, mass media mythology, or better yet trademarked mythology.  Being characters who are controlled by corporations there is a controlled presentation of the characters.  In many ways it is like organized religion, which creates canon and announces edicts for how we should interpret the written archives that chronicle these personalities.  The interesting thing about comics is that they are created and then interpreted by a series of writers and authors, with the content being controlled by an editorial position (ideally).  The creation of continuity beyond the creator’s ideas is not something that is really planned.  It just happens.  The building of these characters is a result of multi-author contributions.  The characters become very maliable after awhile.  Personality is added by the author, but in the case of the biggest characters there are thing that are easily out of character.  Minor characters often lack such a widely read connection with readers so they are far more maliable than a character like Spider-man.

The problem with trying to essentialize these motivations is that they are not qualities of a character usually, but contextual aspects of a story which the character is involved.  Even if the character is purely evil they will operate under different motivations based on the need of the story.  An odd collision is the fact that fans of comics are growing more and more vocal about their desire for everything in the continuums that the characters exist in to make sense.  Maybe making sense is not as important as not contradicting other stories.  This has only happened due to the creation of an archive industry based around reprinted collections.  This distribution has really changed the attention of the average comic reader so that it is very concerned with how things line up.  The events further this by creating mini-continuums within the greater continuity.  They also aid in sales and seem to be leading to an environment of continuous events (could this lead to another market meltdown form comics?).  The economic drives create more product, with a drive to get people to buy more floppy comics.  The unfortunate side is that this creates more continuity.  Maybe that is their result – what came out of Secret Invasion, in that the writing is very controlled and changes are only made by certain writers who are writing the big events.  As a side effect characters are going to be written in a very plastic way, fewer character defining moments but plenty of interactions.  Characters as vehicles for stories sometimes feels to me as if it is being overtaken by a unified application of the brand.  I do not feel like I am reading Spider-man as much as I am reading Marvel anymore.  The fact that all of these titles are tying together is interesting in terms of making everything connected, but I often also find myself annoyed with a lack of depth.  This is not to say that comics are shallow today, but that they are losing fixed motivations for characters and are becoming very situationalist.  That is not a bad thing in theory, but it can lead to the story driving the character instead of the character driving the story.  The thing I do not want is for the characters to become chess pieces used to act out a chess game.  I do not want to read that.  I am far more interested in seeing the pieces have their own adventure than being constantly re-organized in a continuity driven universe of events.  Motivations will be reduced at that point to a heirarchy of power driven characters who use smaller characters to get what they want.  That already seems to be the plan for alot of the current books.  On top of that, there does not seem to be much desire to create new characters.  Granted this is not a bad thing, since there are so many characters, but it also contributes to the chess game analogy.  Do we want the content we already know, just rearranged from time to time?  I don’t know.

The Anti-Life Equation…

“loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding x guilt x shame x failure x judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly, love=lies, life=death, self=dark side”

This is the anti-life equation, more or less rewritten by Grant Morrison, that was created by Jack Kirby.  You see in the DC Fourth World series that was written, drawn and created by Kirby this was something that the villian Darkseid was always looking for.  That is the thing about villains, they always need a goal.  It doesn’t have to be a good goal.  Skeletor is a good case of this, he just wants to ruin He-mans day…that and steal his house.  The same thing applies to the Joker under some writers, he just wants to cause problems in the life of Batman.  Bad, psychopathic problems.

So I got to thinking about this idea of an anti-life equation and how it is generally a combination of alienation and despair.  But this is the kind of logic sequence which turns people into killers, gives them the ability to do things like rape, kill and torture.  But it is not that a person who does these things because they reach a place in their cognition of an amoral position.  No, it is the fact that they become justified in their philosophy and their reflective thoughts in such a way that what they do is moral, highly moral.  The brilliance of this equation as a literary device is that it provides the bad guys with a justification – “who but I is justified in doing this.”  That is why it is such a fascinating idea for me.  Disenfranchisement taken to the most extreme where life=anti-life.

I have been following Final Crisis, as well as reading a black and white trade I have of the Forever People (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forever_People).  The thing that has been making Final Crisis interesting for me is the anti-life equation.  I haven’t been keeping up since issue three, but sometime soon I will probably sit down and try to read the last two issues that have come out.  What strikes me as interesting is that Grant Morrison either grasped the appeal of this literary device and managed to import it into his work or was trying to sell those 50 dollar Jack Kirby’s Fourth World omnibuses.  I could see it as going both ways.  I do not know for certain, but I suspect Morrison named Batman R.I.P. what it is because he was going for a dual effect:  there would be alot of intrigue because the title would make you think that Batman was going to die and it would come up in bit torrent searches among rips of Batman movies.  In both cases maybe the idea was to get more people to read the title, and I know the former had some success.  The later might be me just seeing a coincidence and adding it to an authors intentions.

The use of the anti-life equation definitely follows Morrison’s philosophy.  Freedom is life under the Kirby invention, and the anti-life equation is a boiling down of how you are able to convince someone to adopt the psychological predisposition that will allow them to be controlled by Darkseid.  It is a form of paradigm shifting that aims to be permanent.  To break the will you have to break the foundation of the will, pervert freedom so that it cannot absord the other and justifies the destruction of the other.   This is very much in line with Morrison’s writing.

As an anthropologist you come across some very different understandings of freedom.  Some cultures do not view such ideas that our English terms will and freedom, and across cultures there is not always the recognition that all people are humans.  For some cultures anyone who is not of the culture is not human, this is how war usually is justified.  But this thinking is not generally maintained, unless there is some form of conflict which rationalizes the process so that violence and aggression is justified.  It is not always vengeance, it just is because it was and it will be.  The thing is that ideas change, and often violence will come and go from a culture based on how much strife must be endured.  The idea that the individual can express their will at the expense of others becomes a matter of evil under the Western world’s grasp of what is an inalienable right…what is a human right.  The problem is that human rights are usually articulated in terms of protections from power and to exist without blame for events not of an individuals control.  Noble idea, hard to convince people to do.

Bizarre Interview With Morbid Angel In Europe…

This interview with David Vincent is really surreal.  The interviewer is insane and must be taking a piss on Vincent, but Vincent is a smart guy so it seems kinda crazy.  I kinda like this interview format.  I would like to see this guy interview some other people…

I like when he asks Vincent if he went to school to join Morbid Angel, and there is the stuff about kissing and butter. Just plain weird.

Electric Apricot…

My inlaws saw this movie and recommended it.  It is a mockumentary about a jam band that is full of the cliques that are attached to jam band musicians.  The main character, in my opinion, is lapdog…who is played by Les Claypool.  He is the drummer and singer of this band Electric Apricot, a jam band that is getting picked up by a manager to record its first album.  He is a glassblower by trade and makes pipes, bongs and dildos.  It takes him hours to set up his drums for the recording session and is always talking about how “you only record your first album once” and “you only play your first festival once.”

There is also Aiwass, the bass player with a Yoko Ono style girl friend and a penchant for english folk and prog rock.  He changed his name to the spirit that was conjured by Alister Crowley, and makes the whole band call him this.  The band thinks this is silly but they do it to humor him.  He also lives in a tree fort on his parents property.  The guitar player is a Jerry Garcia worshipper who actually punches a guy for saying that he was glad that Garcia died.  He has a religious experience after making an ass of himself talking to Warren Haynes, goes off to get wasted and has a religious experience where Garcia speaks to him.  He even plays a Garcia guitar.  Then there is the keyboard player.  He is obsessed with eastern philosophy and meditation but is kinda an angry asshole most of the time.

The movie is an interesting satire about the jam band scene and the people that are involved in them.  It is fairly accurate in the sense that the hippie jam band scene is like this.  Les Claypool is also very hilarious for not being a commedian (the other actors are commedians).  The music is real too, and they do a pretty funny song called “Hey Are You Going To Burnin’ Man.”  It is a great little movie.

Your Porn Name…

I am sure you have probably heard about the Porn Name game.  The formula varies, some have it as your middle name plus the street you grew up on, some have it as your mother’s maiden name plus the street you live on.  I heard a new formula today…your first pet plus the street you live on.

Using this formula my porn name is Chief Seneca.  Yeah.  This is not really funny.  If I would have gone by my old address it would be Chief 16th Street, which would be a little funny.  But Chief Seneca is not that funny.  Was it culturally insensitive that my first pet was a German Shepard named Chief?  He was from a litter from a police dog, hence the name.  His mother was a drug sniffing dog that had its nose peppered.  So it was Chief as in head of the police, not Native American.  Past porn names under those other formulas are Alan Osage and Bradley Broadway.  Neither of these are particularly interesting.  But they are better than Chief Seneca, that is just weird.

Top 10 Bad Archaeology and Science Stories of 2008…

Click on the link to read about some of the worst archaeology and science actions committed in the 2008 calender year:

http://archaeoporn.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/top-ten-pseudo-archaeological-subjects-of-2008/

Crossover: Steve Ditko Can Kick Your Ass #1, Alan Moore Can Kick Your Ass #4