Grant Morrison’s run on Batman and his approach to the character have revolved around a central, radical conceit: he has assumed that every story published about Batman is, for lack of a better word, “true.” This neatly cleaves away the most unpleasant and alienating obsession of genre comics: what is and is not continuity, what did and did not happen, what is and is not real.

As I explained this to a friend, she rightly made fun. “How can anything about Batman be true?” asked she, once again reminding me that I am of low ways.

The problem, summarized thusly: Batman has been published continuously for sixty-nine years, spanning nearly the full history of superhero comics. The character has witnessed countless transformations in creative approaches and an endless succession of writers and artists. Presuming that Batman has an existence beyond being a thin, two-dimensional fictional construct, the dissonance between the various approaches, and their creators, has become more apparent than any aspect of the character itself.

In the beginning, Batman was rough heeled and pulpy, shooting guns at toughs and smacking wet ones on his molls. Soon he picked up a youthful sidekick and began chillin’ like a respectable gent, a single dad who brought sonny-boy out to fight crime. This was followed by a long spell of increasingly weird stories: Batman eating radioactive spaghetti. Batman wearing a Zebra costume. Batman going to Planet X. Things were reigned in. The TV show hit. The sidekick went to college and Batman got a penthouse and became a swinging bachelor. And then, at last, the 1980s turned Batman hella grim & had him rolling down amongst the gore and the blood. Pretty much every supporting character died or was hideously maimed. Until Morrison’s run, this is where matters have stood. The character has been written as utterly insane and unappealing for more than twenty years.

Other fictional constructs have been allowed growth; even Sherlock Holmes became a cokehead. But the nature of Batman– a commercial commodity owned by corporate interests– demands that the character never change. In seventy years of publishing, Batman has not aged one perceptible day– the character is trapped in a perpetual stasis. How, then, does one reconcile ultra-grim, bone crushing 1990s Batman with the super-happy 1950s Batman who took Robin for bike rides in the very merry month of May?

Morrison’s approach, detailed in this interview, presumes retroactively that Batman has been allowed growth and change. In this reading, the different reboots of creative approach roughly equate to different phases in the character’s life– deducing a history in the existing text. To wit:

When I started this story, my first idea was, “What if all the Batman adventures from the 1930s until now were all part of one guy’s life, and he’s really gone through all this stuff, and it’s happened over the space of, say, 15 years, potentially?” To make it all work and still keep Batman at his peak, I settled on him being about 35 right now, so let’s say he’s been Batman since he was 19 or 20 years old.

…

Those were the days, when Batman and Robin on a riverbed was enough to sell millions of copies. Those stories represent the time in Batman’s life when he was first being influenced by Robin. I imagine that Batman – the 20-year-old Batman of Year One and the Golden Age stories, who’s given himself this mission - is working his issues out, but he’s still very grim and angry and lacks responsibility.

And then he meets this little poor kid, a carnival kid, a trapeze artist. And I figure that as soon as he met Robin, it changed his life, because suddenly he had someone to talk to. Bruce Wayne was emotionally frozen when his parents were killed, so he really needed Robin. He never got to have a pal like this when he was young because he was grieving. And where Bruce was a fairly sheltered rich kid, Dick Grayson is a rough-and-tumble street-smart circus boy so Batman learns a lot from the kid.

And I can kind of imagine Robin introducing all this cool stuff to the Batcave, the submarines and dinosaurs, all these crazy kid elements, and maybe even convincing Batman to wear a lighter-colored costume. They were like kids together. Emotionally Bruce was still a boy and some of those goofier older stories work more ‘realistically’ when seen in that light.

And again, when Robin leaves to go to college – at that point, we get the Denny O’Neill/Neal Adams stories which returned to a grimmer, 30s influenced Batman…and that’s obviously his emotional response to losing his little best friend to the grown-ups.

In other words, squaring the fucking circle.

I recommend this interview– even if one cares nothing for Batman, or is of low ways, there’s always an immense pleasure in being exposed to the thought process of a very smart person. Problem solving is fun. (But math class is hard.)

Happy 145th Birthday to Arthur Machen!

Having recently posted one of the two official videos of Kate Bush’s breakthrough hit, 1978’s “Wuthering Heights,” I ask the beggar’s indulgence. Being a performance from Top of the Pops, it’s the Lady in Black miming to the original recording:

The hideous & oddly placed graphics do the viewer a service, dating the performance to March, 1978. Kate Bush was all of nineteen years old– the first woman to hit #1 in the UK with a self-penned song. Watching now, I wonder if she Knew. It’s so obvious in retrospect, but I doubt that you know while it’s happening. For truly, for a brief flash, she was the biggest freak in England and, just possibly, the world.

Here’s a bonus. It’s even weirder. From The Dreaming.

Clearly a video that will gain traction– Oklahoma State Legislator Sally Kern goes on a rant: “Homosexual Agenda is Destroying America.” Gays are a worse threat than terrorists and– gasp!– Islam. This is the stock & trade of Internet hilarity, and one can hear the inevitable trance mashups before they’re rendered.

Other than its grotesque nature, I’ve posted this video because I’m interested in its central contradiction– from what I gather, this speech? was recorded secretly and is distributed by an LGBT activist group, who’ve added titles & photographs of people holding handmade signs that denounce Kern’s message.

I am fascinated by the text coming at 1:55 and reading, “Hate speech affects us all.”

There’s ambiguity in that– what exactly does “affect” mean?– but I think the most obvious, and probably correct, interpretation is that hate speech is an offensive tool with Real Consequences. My lifelong masquerade as Whitey Straightman may render me congenitally unable to grasp this idea– a well-loved refrain of identity politics– but I have never believed it. For the life of me, I’ve always thought that the best way to combat an opposing (and therefore wrong) viewpoint has been to let the other person talk and talk and talk until they’ve hanged themselves. This is, in fact, the dynamic at work in the video– added text and photographs notwithstanding.

Joseph Mitchell knew this approach well– some of the best pieces in Up in the Old Hotel are those wherein idiots are revealed by their own words, desperately murdered by a human desire to be heard.

(Hi. I have a blog.)

The lowest form of blogging– with YouTube links running a close second– must be a blogger writing on the topic of her or his own blog. Having admitted the crime, I now commit it and point out that this site has undergone a revision of design.

The original look was a relic of 2004, when I had fancied myself a political blogger & ran, for roughly three minutes, a politics themed blog. That whimsy died when I adopted a highly unfashionable apathy to World Affairs, or suffered my only period of prolonged depression– your choice, gentle reader!

When I established our present monster, I used a slight modification of the design that I had crafted for the old blog. This was sheer lazyness. Mea culpa. It also seems likely that I hardly believed this thing would last long enough to warrant any work beyond the writing. But look upon my works, ye mighty, for like a tough blonde dame out of David Goodis, BLOG.KOBEK.COM: Live & Direct From the Pleasure Dome has itself a swell set of gams and one nice pair of long legs.

Given the amount of content generated over the months, the old design became embarrassing in its thick-lined clutter and inadequate for any purposeful navigation. Thus, I’ve cleaned the thing up & thrown some navigatory aids in the sidebar– a list of what I consider (and search results indicate) to be the best moments in this blog’s short history, and also, further down, a handy catalog of catagories. Both the categories and the monthly archives now run in descending chronological order– a far more palatable state of affairs than reading everything backward. The main index continues to display the most recent posts first.

That’s about it. We now return to the regular state of barely updating.

Front image of The Berkeley Barb, Volume 3, Number 21, Issue 119, 1966. Taken from Free Press: Underground and Alternative Publications, 1965-1975, edited by Jean-Francois Bizot.

Note the date. Possibly the last time that any underground freak would draw Gandalf without the SF Family Dog/Fillmore poster influence. A real relic.

The last time that I last saw my old pal and BFF, Arafat Kazi , was way back September-way. That particular trip was total shite, but me and Kazi had us some good times– bumming around Harvard Square at midnight & road-runnering up from Boston on 1A and Route 128 to Salem and Gloucester. His countrywoman, the ever lovely Jisha, accompanied us as we toured a crummy Wax Museum. With the advent of night, a natural fear of vampires forced our return to the state capital, where Arafat’s mother offered me some of her famous tea and sympathy. It was enough to cause a massive emotional panic; it had become too much, too familiar. Too many choking old memories. I bid my Banglaboy goodbye and fled down Burbank-street. Desperate, totally desperate, to get out of Boston.

How reassuring that, apparently, some things never change.

Now Kazi’s back in Bangladesh and I’m here in Hollywood. There is a near-daily exchange of emails that pledge our undying fraternal love. He can come on heavy with his Muslim public/private opprobrium regarding my life choices, but still. I miss my monster.

This longing got me Googling-oogling, and I discovered remnants of the days of future past, when Arafat was an undergraduate at Boston University and a columnist for the student newspaper, The Daily Free Press. It’s hard to imagine what possessed the editorial body– boredom, probably– to print Kazi’s dirty filth on their clean pages, but for several months, the man wrote weekly under the heading of “300 Pounds and Rising.”

Amazingly, these articles remain available. To shame Arafat Kazi for a period of indefinite duration, I offer links to each and every one. Salaam, Arafat-bhai, and give my regards to Auntie:

September 8th, 2003 – The American Way and a third of the world

September 15th, 2003 – Downloading tips and tricks for the Pope

September 22nd, 2003 – Stars and stripes: an exposé

September 29th, 2003 – Don’t Be Hating the Fat Kids (*)

October 6th, 2003 – The Perfection Solution to the Crappy Day

October 20th, 2003 – Whetted by the American Dream

October 27th, 2003 – The lonely path of the frotteur

November 3rd, 2003 – All that glitters is not Goldin

November 10th, 2003 – Mindless drones: come to me

November 24th, 2003 – Don’t Welsh on me, homophobes

December 1st, 2003 – Hope for more than a Lindt truffle

December 8th, 2003 – A life in the life of a BU lifer

(*) To Arafat’s lasting horror, the 9/29/03 column, “Don’t Be Hating the Fat Kids,” which he considers best amongst the lot, was co-authored by yours truly. This was done to expedite matters– I needed Arafat out of my apartment, but the column was overdue. I pushed him away from my computer and did the second half in about five minutes. For the record, my opinion is in total opposition: I think it’s the worst.

I should’ve known after I saw the young man vomiting in front of the costume store, but too much time on the West Coast has left me soft– I’ve lost my New York paranoia.

Like all the best people, I associate public intoxication & its dreadful results with the island of Manhattan. Whenever I return to that corner of the world, it’s inevitable that I see someone– and always within a few hours– forcibly expel the contents of his or her stomach. It’s a time-honored thing, an awful way of knowing that I’m home. The city welcomes its wayward son with a reminder of low ways and old days.

But I’ve forgotten my natural defenses. So I carried on. A few blocks later a dude on a skateboard came blasting West, playing chicken. I side-stepped to my right, avoiding him, and took two steps forward. My right boot slipped and I slid down Hollywood Boulevard, almost falling on my face. My balance in these situations is near impeccable– a relic of New England winters and black ice– and I recovered before the crash.

I looked down. An enormous slick of vomit. Then I realize what block I’m on and it makes sense. This post is intentionally cryptic, but I say this: every piece of serious writing eventually comes true.

A film that would have appealed to me at the age of 19– but so did John Woo’s Face/Off.

A Late Nite Sojourn to The Old Stone Mill/Viking Tower of Newport, Rhode Island.

From the recent archives of the black magic wielder.

(Some say a witch.)

The open eruption of history’s wounds in the on-going-but-dying-out Obama/Reverend Wright controversy has contributed to the most fascinating, depressing and sobering period of American public debate for as long as I’ve been politically aware. For some time, my contention has been that, as individuals, Americans have grown consistently less racist while, institutionally, the country has become systematically more biased against, in particular, African-Americans.

In my opinion, the root of this is the perpetual conflation of being black with being poor. Every society has an underclass, but there is something uniquely perverse about the ability of Americans to associate the state of poverty with one racial phenotype. Though this is a legacy of slavery, the calcification began during the years and decades following the Civil War, in which a systematic abuse of African-Americans became the de facto policy of this country. Given an honest assessment in this Year of Our Lord 2008– a few days ago, I read that 50% of African-American female teenagers have some form of STD– it’s difficult to see how the political and social mechanisms have much improved, at least on an economic basis. And social mobility and justice is entirely economic.

Nothing about Wright’s sermons surprised me; anyone possessing even a passing familiarity with African-American religion knows that it has always been, in part, a mirror held to the failings of The Dream. When a theology is born amongst an enslaved people, please do not be surprised that this theology is less than enchanted with the status quo. There was nothing surprising about Obama’s membership in this church– nor the fact that as a middle class black man, he would not be frothing at the mouth in horror.

The truth has always been there: that dude’s a part of the black community. What I think genuinely did blindside Obama, whose entire life has been spent as liminal figure straddling multiple identities, is the extent to which African-American culture– and I mean the culture of real people, not just the folk on TV and radio– is completely ignored by the rest of the country.

At first I tried to dismiss the outrage as more Right Wing inanity, but the consistency of the response, even after The Speech, has me convinced that this is a real concern for a lot of White People. And make no mistake: such real concerns are, and always have been, motivated by racism. Not merely an institutional racism, but a personal, individual discomfort and fear. The idiotic reactions to Wright’s goofy statements have me wondering if I haven’t been wrong. Perhaps as a result of Reagan and post-Reagan (by which I mean Clinton more than Dubya) policies and demographic migrations, African-American have become more invisible, thereby lessening the opportunities for white racism by individuals.

Amidst the furore, I have been bombarded endlessly with this Stuff That White People Like blog– probably the most insubstantial, and worse yet, least funny of all Internet fads. Surely someone has commented on the timing of this site’s hitting critical mass. That the author clinched a book deal in the same week in which Obama gave The Speech can not be irrelevant; it’s almost as if the attempt at substantiative discussion forced America to expel from its bowels a meaningless and thin diversion. The site is not merely unfunny, it’s also a smoke-screen.

–

I’ve never found Bloggingheads to be anything but annoying, but I think that this discussion between John McWhorter and Glenn Loury is one of the best things that I’ve ever seen on the Internet. Both men are relatively controversial African-Americans scholars, and they discuss Obama, Wright and The Speech. It’s the finest encapsulation and discussion of the consequences of this affair. You won’t find anything better.

By now, it’s true, everybody knows: I live in the wilds. I’m not sure how it’s possible, but this apartment attracts a consistent menagerie. The ant problem has died out– praise be to Allah– but I’ve got two or three feral cats living beneath the floorboards. (They are no longer in heat.) And as I write, the main room appears to have developed an association with enormous, black bumblebees. The spider issue, as always, is on going.

Lately there’s been a beautiful blue bird around the fig tree. I’ve tried to get a few pictures, but they’ve been crap. Today I managed nice ones:

I presume that this is an example of the Western Bluebird. I’m never unphased when I see such native creatures (in the Northeast, you’re lucky if you spot a Bluejay once every two years.) I remember when I encountered my first hummingbird –about three years ago– and could not believe that it was real.

Though I rag on mainstream comics, there is much to be said for spectacle done proper. Serialized superheros are the last vestige of the pulp press, and at their best, offer a genuinely unique low-to-middle-brow pleasure of installments on the payment plan. Soon, I fear, this shall be no more; the move across the various tiers of the comics industry is towards trades– only manga will give any sense of what it’s like to receive stories of questionable quality in small, regulated doses, like a King building an arsenic immunity.

This idea has been playing in my head for a while, and as a result, I’ve been reading the recent back catalogues of some of the more overtly pulp influenced titles. The two authorial runs that most stuck out were Brian Michael Bendis on Daredevil and Garth Ennis on The Punisher.

I’ve made fun of Bendis’s work for years, and deservedly so; when the man phones it in, he really phones it in. Worse yet, when he believes that he’s writing something serious and important, every single page lets you know that you’re reading something Serious and Important. (Also, he’s unfunny. Sorry. It’s true.) That said, Bendis’s four year run on Daredevil was pitch-perfect and the best anyone’s ever done with the character. Engaging development married to reasonably plausible storylines that were heavy without being Profoundly Consequential For Marvel. And he managed, as I’m sure all have commented, to do what had been impossible since 1986: not taste like Miller Lite.

Ennis’s writing on The Punisher has spanned eight years, two regular titles, several miniseries, multiple one-shots and god knows what else. By the time of Punisher: MAX and Born, Ennis had thrown aside the many, many crutches that have plagued his body of work (emphasis on scatology + corny attempts at humor) and began delivering what constitutes the best work on a mainstream comic in the last five years. The easiest way to describe his achievement is thus: in all 55 (so far) issues of the MAX series, there hasn’t been a bad installment. Not one.

Ennis’s initial handling of the character– a 12 issue miniseries that reintroduced the Punisher after the ugly years of the late Nineties– was pretty god damned dumb. A regular series (Volume 4) followed, of which Ennis wrote the majority. Again, much of it is really dumb. But it gets better with time, and it’s fascinating to watch the process of Ennis moving ever closer towards a more serious idea of what he wants to achieve with the character.

I’d argue that this vision (the one that continues in MAX) had been present all along. It was right there in the first (and best) issue of the original miniseries, something that is seemingly acknowledged at the end of Volume 4 by a direct & exacting quotation:

(From The Punisher, vol 3, #1. April 2000.)

(From The Punisher, vol 4, #37, February 2003.)

Incidentally, this demonstrates how the serial form can be employed in a way that’s rarely, if ever, seen in the mainstream. Superhero continuity is about Massive Happenstances– like, remember when the Green Goblin killed Gwen Stacey?– that are referenced endlessly. By contrast, these two scenes (ignoring the homicides) are about one quiet moment reminding a person of another– and having the most apocalyptic event in recent American history intrude on both. In theory, this is what long form, multi-part narratives should be about: changing with the tides and sways, and providing a quick, visceral response. Bully capital.