Having been an Internet user for years and years and years, I’ve racked up a fair number of web results. Many of them embarrassing. Some are from the days before there was a web, let alone search engines. Had I been named Steve Jones or Bob Smith or something even mildly obscure, I could claim that there was someone else with the same name who was making all the trouble. But given that my name is double imaginary (last name invented during Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s westernization reforms, first name invented by my mom misremembering the credits on Gunsmoke) this is impossible. There’s only one Jarett Kobek in the world. Me.

A long available result for searches on my name has been the capture of a Usenet thread, wherein I started a flame war in alt.fan.harlan-ellison by contending that Ellison’s writing had fallen off ever since he’d met his most recent, and final, wife. This was an obnoxious claim that never should have been made. My only defense is that I was 18 or 19 years old and thus knew no better.

Remarkably, negative responses came not only from the regulars, but also Dave Gerrold, who threated to punch out of my teeth, and Harlan Ellison himself, who went on and on and on about young people and this, that and the other thing. For those of you not geeky enough: Dave Gerrold wrote the screenplay to The Trouble with Tribbles and Ellison was the screenwriter on The City on the Edge of Forever. This means that I managed to really, really upset the writers of the two most popular episodes of Star Trek. Much as I regret the whole affair, I admit that this abstractly remains a pretty funny thing to have done.

Okay, fast-forward. A few months ago, Ellison filed suit against Gary Groth, Kim Thompson, and their company Fantagraphics. Without going too far into the nitty-gritty, these guys have had bad blood for almost 30 years. After years of back and forth & chicanery on both sides, Ellison has decided that he’s had enough. Based on my unexpert readings of his filings, I don’t think he has a case. Am I convinced that this is the RED LETTER FIRST AMENDMENT issue that Fantagraphics wants it to be? Not entirely, but enough to think that they’re technically in the right.

The interesting part is that Ellison is wrong in a more general sense. The worst possible way to fight perceived insults is by trying to suppress them. This has always been true but is only more so in these days of the Internet, where the biggest sin is any action that is regarded as censorship. If Ellison succeeds in court– and while I hope he won’t, I certainly can’t say it’s impossible– what’s the best case scenario? What happens to Fantagraphics? And how will that result be felt? Who will be the real loser?

For reasons beyond me, a few weeks ago I decided to weigh in on all of this with an anonymous comment in a long, stupid thread on Publisher’s Weekly comics blog. This comment ended up being praised not only by Heidi MacDonald, the blog’s author, but also Eddie fucking Campbell. If you’ll excuse the burst of sycophancy: Mr. Campbell is pretty much the foremost talent in comics, both as an artist and as a writer. He’s most famous for illustrating the pictures that accompany Alan Moore’s text in From Hell. (This book, by the way, ruined my life. But that’s a story for another time.) I recommend everyone check out his Alec books, the last two of which strike me as the single smartest works in the history of comics! (I mean How to be An Artist and After the Snooter here. Sad to say, I was a bit cold on Fate of the Artist, which anyway I don’t think is classified by Campbell as an Alec book.)

So, high praise indeed. I posted anonymously because I didn’t want anyone digging up the old flame war and accusing me of having a bias in the whole deal. Which I may have. Who knows? But now that I’ve been given attention, I’ll take the credit.

Personally, I think the whole thing sums up a lot of character development: from snarky teenager to Voice of Reason. Can there be a better narrative?

In a previous sycophantic post, I mentioned that I think Eddie Campbell is the single smartest person, both as an artist and a writer, to have ever worked in comics. Bacchus (under its 200 different titles of publication) was possibly the only character based series of the go-go B&W era that managed to achieve profundity, however fleeting, and the Alec books, individually and as a whole, are my favorite comics, period.

Whenever I feel like I’m throwing my life away, which is at least once a day, I think about How To Be An Artist. Read a certain way, the book tells the impressionable reader (me) that it’s OK to go ahead and bury that bastard in the dustbin. Thankfully, Campbell also published what I consider a companion volume, After the Snooter, demonstrating that once you have done, things work out all right. As long as you know Alan Moore. Which I don’t. You’re so going to Hell, Campbell.

Which says nothing about either of the two books’ artistry. Simply put, they’re masterpieces. Buy them while you can. More recently, Campbell released The Fate of The Artist, which everyone loved. Except me. Usually I’m all for pretentious gobeshit and Examinations of Art and Its Role but for whatever reason I couldn’t get into it. Anyway, I’m probably wrong, and I certainly recognize the book’s intrinsic merit. Just not for me.

Now Campbell’s got a new book out, The Black Diamond Detective Agency. I’ve only read one or two things about its genesis but I gather that it was a previously existing screenplay which Campbell was asked to adapt. If I’m correct, this is the thinking behind such a move: movie executives, being exceptionally stupid, are much more likely to buy a film if they get a package of pretty pictures and dialogue balloons instead of a bunch of INT. EXT. DAY. EVENING. printed across a page. This may well be true!

Campbell’s art is top notch and entirely on the ball: lots of experimentation with form and content but never so much as to distract. This leaves the reader’s focus on the story. Ah, yes, the story. Therein lies the rub. It’s by the numbers detective investigation set in the fin-de-siecle (one before last) American midwest. Whatever else may be said, from the characterization and plot development, it’s rather clear that this tale began life as a screenplay.

This point is important– screenplays, even detailed shooting scripts, are weird beasts. The format is designed for the intense collaboration of film making. A line of dialogue on the page allows for the impact (negative or positive) of the actors, the cinematographer, the foley artists, the scoring, and finally, the director. While not every screenplay is bereft of, say, characterization, it’s also much, much less necessary than in other storytelling mediums.

To put it another way, think of a film like the overrated Goodfellas. Think of any one of Joe Pesci’s hilariously psycho monologues. Now imagine them delivered by Bill Pullman. Directed by Uwe Boll.

Either way, it’s the same screenplay.

Campbell has taken on the unenviable task of filling each major (and minor) role himself: he’s the gaffer, the director, the actors, the DP, and the caterer. It’s Eddie Campbell’s personal vision of someone else’s post-Watergate detective story set in a random historical milieu.

The most bizarre aspect of this book is Campbell’s status as possibly the least cinematic major artist in comics. Under every other imaginable circumstance, I’d count this as a truly great thing. But presently it compounds the problem, and we are left with the barebones of a screenplay developed into a visual medium sans any of the technique for which it was intended. It’s not bad, per se. It’s just strange.

I’ve never bought into the idea of Comics as Incubator for Cinema, but at least Marvel and DC provide existing product envisioned first as comics and then adapted. Black Diamond’s reverse-engineered approach has only made me more suspicious about the perceived relationship between the two mediums. (It’ll be interesting to see if Marvel’s bet the farm on the wrong horse.)

But before you think it’s all crying & boo-hoo and Campbell what have you done, let me hit the positives.

As I’ve mentioned, the art. It’s great. The colors, the figures, the landscapes– all wonderful. Generally, when I think of Campbell’s work, what comes to mind are scraggly drawings of the artist playing fetch with his dog or a murder victim being pulled from a dodgy London gutter. Don’t get me wrong: these are always lovely. But in Black Diamond, there’s a real grace to much of the figures and coloring that I don’t remember seeing previously. Secondly, for what the story is, Campbell’s handled it as admirably as he could. Third, huzzah for the choice of full-bleed! It works well. (A minor complaint is the gutter: I feel like I’ve lost about 1/20th of most pages to the binding.)

So. All reservations aside– I enjoyed the book, it’s an affable way to spend a few hours, Campbell is a master, and if I weren’t embarrassed to recommend comics, I’d tell people to buy it.

As I’ve mentioned, most of my books are bought in a haphazard fashion, generally at the Hollywood & Western Out of the Closet. The most fascinating thus far has been Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus. Published in ‘73, it’s an insider account of the lives of journalists covering the 1972 election, focused by necessity on the ill-fated McGovern campaign. (Nixon’s strategy was an imperial one; he used the strength of the office to enhance his stature and to highlight the many undeniable flaws of McGovern.) In the run up to the ‘08 election, the book has a OH MY GOD NOTHING EVER CHANGES feel. The players are the same & there’s a looming spectre of a war that can’t be won haunting America. Concerns about the quality of journalism, and its impact on the electorate! Etc! Etc!

Crouse had the bad luck to be the other political reporter for Rolling Stone. Along with the work of Hunter S. Thompson, his campaign coverage in 72 remains the magazine’s high-water mark for writing. (Incidentally, one of the most interesting developments of the last few years has been the current political correspondent, Matt Taibbi.) Thompson’s own brilliant book on the 72 Campaign has overshadowed Crouse’s achievement. The Boys on the Bus is most often referenced as a source book for Thompson’s Crazy! Insane! behavior, which is a shame. There’s a lesson in that for you, somewhere.

Tolling like a bell throughout Crouse’s book, and once again making 2007 feel a lot 1971, is the impact of technology. One section on the advent of cable news could be used nearly verbatim as a description of BLOGGING, YOUTUBE, and the INTERNET. Wild crazy guys on a lawless frontier taking on traditional media! Newspaper circulation declining! Traditional reporting going out the window! (And we shouldn’t forget, either, that 72 was early enough for reporting to still be feeling the shocking impact of plain old network news, the novelity of which is examined at great length by Crouse.)

Technology and its supposed impact have been on my mind– so imagine my surprise when I checked !Journalista! and discovered Mr. Dirk Deppey’s on-going discussion of comics piracy. Deppey’s blog is one of my favorites, but it does have a dark downside: very occassional links to articles about e-books, digital paper and comics going digital! Mostly I ignore them. I try and have the same truce with articles about technology blowing up everything we know that I have with God: if He’s not thinking about me, I’m not going to think about Him. But Deppey’s question about the tipping point has, uh, tipped me over my point, and someone’s gotta say something. And that someone’s gotta be me. I guess.

So, let me state a basic rejoinder to every article about digital paper, about comics disappearing, and about the iPhone delivering babies: shut up. Everything is always going to be the same. I know it’s a depressing thought, but there it is. Nothing, not even newspapers, are going away.

The problem really began with everyone under 50 first noticing the impact of COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY when they threw out their CDs and took up MP3s; ever since, we’ve been on High Red at the Event Horizon. Unfortunately, this model isn’t scalable outside its first occurrence.

MP3s became dominant because CDs and cassettes were terrible, terrible mediums. (At least Vinyl had huge art.) You loved listening to Hendrix, but you didn’t love a CD. They were clunky, hung around, and took up too much space. It was a stupid and overpriced (this fact is not insignificant) way to give people what they wanted. Take, on the other hand, cinema. Chain exhibitors are doing everything they can to destroy the experience and yet people are still going to films. (Ignore the nonsense about the current box office slump; this is market variation which will correct itself.) Despite many fears, the theatre is never going away. The experience can not be replicated by DVD, by torrents, or by legal direct-on-demand cable.

We move to comics. HAS COMICS PIRACY impacted the industry? Absolutely, no question. Have Marvel and DC and even our highly valued indy publishers lost money? Possibly. It depends on what you consider a sale. If I, for instance (and I didn’t) pirated the Kree-Skrull War trade paperback, would that be a lost sale? Marvel, with its vested interest, undoubtedly would argue yes, but in reality, unless I was getting that garbage free, I’d never read it. On the other hand, there obviously are people getting a mainline fix via the new weekly torrents. But would they buy these books if the torrents weren’t available? The question, really, is this: have “mainstream” comics become such a boutique industry that they can survive piracy because the audience only wants the books in a certain way, in a certain format, with non-zombie variant covers? Recent blockbuster sales make me lean towards yes.

But that’s the short term. Eventually the cholesterol in those hearts will harden and the target audience will die. What of the long term impacts? Here, we return to The Boys on the Bus. (Remember it?) 35 years later, what most comes across is the concern of newspaper reporters that network news can do their jobs better, and quicker; and if you look at the quality of most political coverage circa 1969, that’s certainly true. Why read a 500 word article when you can hear Dan Rather say it in 30 seconds? I may be wrong, but I believe that the papers were forced to adapt and adopt new forms of longer, analysis based journalism (at least until the advent of USA TODAY) that buoyed them for several decades. This lasted until the World Wide Web, a medium absolutely perfect for longer, analysis-based journalism. Now what will happens to the papers!??! Do they go away entirely?! Some will, assuredly. Maybe even one or two biggies. But someone’s going to figure out a new way to write and present data that’s better suited in a physical, newsprint format than the web. Listen, I’ve subscribed to The New Yorker for like 15 years. Half of the articles are online now, and I still read that damned thing front to back each week. The reason why is simple– it’s less irritating to read a 15,000 word piece over a few days on the toilet than it is to read it in a single, or multiple, viewings on a webpage. Even if it is an article about not thinking making you’re smart.

(This is why e-books are, have been, and will be the great chimera of publishing. I’m sure there are some dope addled freaks who do prefer reading Dickens like this, as opposed to this, but we can’t allow drug addicts to shake our faith in a 500 year+ perfected technology. And I say this as a guy who’s got a website full of PDFs.)

How does this relate to the weird world of comics? I’m willing to accept that in the long term, piracy may mean the death of “mainstream” comics in the pamphlet format, and my god, wouldn’t that be great? If so, it’s because the virtues, so-called, of mainstream comics exist in the Bizarro World of anti-reading. When big, meaningless splash pages of exaggerated musculature and striking B&W graphic design hide the fact that neither Brian Michael Bendis nor Frank Miller can write, then of course it’s going to be pirated– these are objects to look at, not read, and a backlit LCD screen is the perfect medium for such an endeavor. Even the great online success story of web comics is based on having, at most, 6 panels that can be viewed in a glance.

But the long form comic that requires its audience to actually, you know, read is much better suited to the printed page. Even if that form is only 25 pages. Sorry, Scott McCloud, but it’s true. Any other way and it’s too annoying.

Much like me posting 30,000 words about comics piracy.

(P.S. The title of Boys on the Bus got me an attempted gay pick-up on the Red Line. It took me about 3 minutes to realize the guy wasn’t crazy and figure out what was happening. Nice enough guy.)

I was there, I saw it happen.

Given free entrance to the affair & invited to the Best Parties, one can find himself staring out the window of a Suite at Caesar’s Palace at 12am Friday (with only the loveliest view of air conditioners and the back of the faux-Colosseum), whilst grown men play $100 rounds of beer pong. On the walls will be cheap imitations of Roman freize painting, in the bedrooms will be unused hottubs, and everywhere one looks will be plaster reproductions of the statues of Antiquity. (Limbs pre-broken.)

One will hear the international sound of fun, every twenty minutes: glass bottles shattering, followed by crowds of men screaming their approval. One will be amongst them. For as Antonin Artaud says, and the Misfits too: “If you’re gonna scream / scream with me.”

At 2am Saturday night, in a Penthouse suite at the Riviera, after watching a live band cover the theme songs to Double Dragon and Castlevania, one will find oneself on a filthy floor, watching grown men in The Wall t-shirts playing Wii Sports baseball. One will look at himself, at his surroundings and at the pornography being projected on the wall above one’s head, and one will say: “It is most certainly time to go home.”

One will run to his hotel room, gather his belongings, and take the long drive back I-15, to home, to sanctuary: with the sun breaking over Pasadena at 6am, just another freak in the freak kingdom.

Dirk Deppey has been linking, and probably causing, a mini-debate amongst female fans of comics regarding Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke. This centers, as with every other discussion of The Killing Joke, on the victimization of Barbara Gordon/Batgirl by The Joker. The Joker shoots Gordon in the stomach and through the spine, thus paralyzing her, and then takes pictures of her bloodied and naked body. (To my mind there’s also the implication of a rape.) One blog thinks it’s alienating to women, another says no, this stuff happens, it’s in the handling of it. Depictions of violence are not innately improper or alienating. Yeah, but…

A cavalier and socially irresponsible comic shop owner sold me a copy of The Killing Joke when I was about 11, and it, of course, blew the back out of my mind. At that point I had yet to develop abstract thinking, so I can’t say how aware I was that someone was responsible for writing this story, and I certainly hadn’t heard about Alan Moore, but it was clear that this was Something Different and significantly better than the usual Batman comic.

When I look at the book now, with wizened eyes, the The Killing Joke is still Something Different. It’s also bad. I don’t disagree with my childhood assessment that compared to whatever the hell else Batman was doing in 1988 (fighting Iran?), it shows a depth of craft far exceeding what had been achieved with the character. (And, yes, I include Frank Miller’s book in this assessment.) This tells one a great deal more about previous standards of writing and character development than it does anything about The Killing Joke.

In many ways, as it usually is, the blogosphere is half-right: the worst part of the book is indeed the violation of Barbara Gordon. Not because of its inappropriateness, nor because she’s a woman, but for the fact that it uses the character as a McGuffin, and uses her in the worst way possible. Not only is she subject to an unusual depravity, but the consequences of this depravity seriously damaged the character for future storytellers. I think that this is the worst thing that can be done with a genre character; you can let them grow, but you really shouldn’t screw them up for whomever is going to be working on the character after you. (To DC’s credit, and ain’t that a phrase I am not oft to utter, the pointless injuries sustained by Batgirl weren’t retconned and were developed into a new phase for the character. Has this ever happened before or since in comics?)

And what’s this claptrap about driving Jim Gordon insane?

Like the victimization of Batgirl, it’s pretext, one of several nonsense excuses strung together to get Batman and the Joker into a funhouse (because the Joker, you see, is a twisted image of fun) where they can then beat the crap out of each other. And since this is 1980s Alan Moore at his lowest, a book titled The Killing Joke has to be meta and have an actual joke at the end, allowing the reader the deep insight of Batman and the Joker laughing together and oh my god is there a ying-yang kinship between them? No, really?! Is there? Can Batman be just as crazy as the Joker?!?! Is this a metaphor for the madness of Thatcherite England?!

First, let me just out right say it: that joke isn’t funny and it never was. There. I’ve been waiting 16 years. But secondly, who cares if Batman is or isn’t crazy? This is the book’s payoff? That a genre character in an admittedly unrealistic medium is just as nuts as his arch-nemesis? Dude dresses up like a bat and is fighting an evil clown. How profound can it get?

Moore himself says this and, uh, more, in an interview on the great Daev Walsh’s Blather:

“But at the end of the day, Watchmen was something to do with power, V for Vendetta was about fascism and anarchy, The Killing Joke was just about Batman and the Joker - and Batman and the Joker are not really symbols of anything that are real, in the real world, they’re just two comic book characters.”

Some people blame Watchmen or Miller for the current state of comic books– personally, I blame The Killing Joke. To get from the ‘86 books to current comics, you have to strip those books of any of their plotting, any of their character development, any of their innovation and technique, and any of their ideas. (Obviously, with the last, I mean Moore. Miller’s ideas, such as they are, have always been: Mike Hammer Smash and Freedom Isn’t Free.)

The Killing Joke, on the other hand, presents an easy template for how to be an Editor-in-Chief and have an Event: kill off, mame, or otherwise screw up an existing character to get other characters together to fight, fight, fight. Provide pseudo-insights into their pseudo-psyches, preferably while they’re punching each other, and if, perchance to dream, along the way you can establish a heavy handed metaphor for the Current State of Things, then boffo for you!

(UPDATE 9/7/07: Honest to god I have a life. The latest.)

The Harlan Ellison -vs- Fantagraphics Lawsuit has been resolved through mediation and the details of said resolution have at last been posted. I’ve commented on this lawsuit before. (And as that link demonstrates, I’ve had my own long-forgotten and kind of hilarious digital encounter with Ellison.) Off site commentary here.

The terms of the resolution are, basically: Fantgraphics + Co have to shut up about Ellison, Ellison has to shut up about Fantagraphics + Co, everyone has to pay their own legal bills, no one admits any wrongdoing, Fantagraphics has to delete the Offending Passages in the book that started this whole go-round, Ellison’s name and interview are dropped from any further reprints of the interview book, and, not insignificantly, Gary Groth is allowed to post for 30 days a 500-word rebuttal to Ellison’s claims on Ellison’s own website.

This may seem like a sort of mutual defeat, or possibly even a defeat for Fantagraphics. Maybe it is. However, I see this as a fairly significant Ellison loss brought upon the man by himself, and one displaying how tricky the Internet can be for those with only a poor-to-middling grasp of the consequences of a medium in which seemingly nothing ever dies. To my mind, the key points of the agreement are this: that Fantagraphics has to delete the Offending Passages and that Groth gets the last word and that Ellison has to publish it.

The deletion of the passages apparently goes against the blessed 1st Amendment & sticks in the craw of every hard cussing American kid raised on his or her own inalienable right to mouth off and sass his or her betters. I’m not going to get into the ethical implications of which side was right. What’s the point? This was decided in mediation. It has no significant consequence outside the immediate case. No real damage done except possibly to Ellison’s reputation as a staunch defender of free speech.

In this specific matter, Ellison may have won a technical victory, but the truth is way murkier. If the point of the lawsuit was to reap damages from the imminent publication of the Offending Passages, well, obviously he lost– he’s paying his own legal bills and collecting squat. If the point was to suppress the passages, then, again, Ellison lost.

Anyone who wants to read those passages can now read them free and possibly forever. When you sue someone you have to say what you’re suing them for, and in a document that is filed with the court. Ellison’s lawsuit specifically quotes and reproduces, verbatim, the Offending Passages. The passages have now become a part of a standing public record. My legal knowledge here is sketchy, but I believe that as this document was filed with the court, pretty much anyone can go ahead and order a copy from now until the end of time. In my ever bizarro working life, I’ve had to order deposition testimony from civil suits, and there never was any trouble getting one’s hands on them, nor on reproducing them.

Plus, the damn things are all over the Internet. They’re quoted in blog reports. They’re quoted in news reports. They’re still on Ellison’s website. So they’re there. And they aren’t going anywhere. It took me two minutes to find the Offending Passages.

The fascinating thing about this agreement is the Groth rebuttal. I have no idea whether or not Fantagraphics + Co thought about the implications of getting the legally sanctioned last word, but I’m gonna assume that someone knew they were winning a huge victory. The extreme specificity of the terms– no more than 500 words, no more than 30 days, must go up 5 days after the lawsuit resolution– demonstrate a hard fought battle, presumably on Ellison’s side, to minimize the impact of this statement.

For lack of a better term, this is Print Mentality. Because in print, stuff dies. News disappears and goes away with the thrown out newspaper. Or people buy up the physical commodity and then there’s no more for anyone. If you didn’t get that information while you could, then you’re out of luck. Maybe they’ll reprint it. Most likely not.

The moment that Groth’s statement goes up, twenty to thirty blogs will repost it in its entirety, thus ensuring that it never goes away. And you can cram a lot into 500 words. Other than length and duration of availablity on Ellison’s site, the terms of the rebuttal agreement are hugely favorable to Groth. Ellison can’t edit it, Ellison has to post it, and Ellison can’t sue or complain about anything that Groth says in it. Considering the earlier provision in the settlement barring ad hominem attacks, Groth probably can’t call Ellison a crapface, but that’s about it. He seems to be able to say anything he wants. Wasn’t that the gol’ darn problem in the first place?

And since Ellison is a Highly Controversial Figure with a Big Mouth who Likes to Fight, who brought this lawsuit that pretty much everyone thought was a bad idea, and Fantagraphics was able to semi-successfully cast it as a First Amendment issue, and the end result is a book being edited & having passages from it deleted… well, I think it’s safe to say that there are going to be many people (myself not included) who will be overjoyed at the spectacle of him having to put Groth’s words on his own website. And quote and copy at will.

So is everyone happy now?

UPDATE, A DAY LATER: Harlan Ellison quasi-responds.

UPDATE: Even more.

I consider Cerebus to be the single most illustratively innovative comic in the history of the form. If there is/was another series as consistently successful at expressing ideas with such elegance, I should very much love to know its name.

The credit here is not only Dave Sim’s. It’s impossible to separate his contributions from those of his collaborator Gerhard: there was a weird alchemy unlikely to be repeated or surpassed. Sim’s design sense and his character work played off the austere backgrounds and gave us Something Else in a truly glorious use of black and white and grey.

That said, I find Cerebus to be deeply, deeply problematic. I would be hard pressed to call it, for instance, “Good.” I certainly would never recommend it to anyone who had not been a long initiate in the arcane world of Comics– and even with an initiate, I could think of probably 50 titles, off hand, that I would recommend before Cerebus.

Since there has apparently been a Homosexualist-Feminist-Marxist-Trotskyist-Situationist-International Conspiracy to prevent Sim and Gerhard’s work from getting the Just Airing it Deserves, let me say, flatly: no. This has nothing to do with Sim’s Theories & Ideas & Truths. Seriously, if there’s one thing that’s been constant through my various stages of life, it is thus: I really don’t care. Anyone can say whatever crazy nonsense they want– and at this late date, I’m way beyond offense. And, again, as I articulated yesterday, I’m not sure that Sim believes any of it. His constant Self-Appointed Gadfly routine strikes me about as a genuine as one by Andrew Dice Clay or Rodney Dangerfield. Could it be that our Form has become a Void?

No, my concerns with Cerebus are best exemplified in its most basic element: there is something distancing about the character of Cerebus himself. Throughout this hugely ambitious work about power, religion, love and every other aspect of human existence, our guide is a cartoonish Earth-born pig that is completely off-model from every other significant personage. This is not to say that Animal Books, or any other type of comic, are inherently unprofound. But books like Goodbye Chunky Rice or Maus work because they are self-consistent. At some point, the little Conan-parody-that-could can no longer bear the weight of 20+ years of Serious Inquiry. If Cerebus himself were merely an avatar, an odd image representing a plausible character, would anyone notice after page 12? Yet, weirdly, Cerebus never loses his initial jokey persona– he always talks like The Incredible Hulk, referring to himself in the third person and flashing one-liners.

This idea is scalable to the series as a whole. For every moment of power or profundity in Cerebus, the reader is expected to suffer through 30 pages of Moonroach. Cerebus is attending to matters of state? Time for a Wolverine parody! Cerebus has just had his heart ripped out? Time to bring in caricatures of the Rolling Stones! And hey, here’s a lot of crap about Oscar Wilde! The entire world is ending? Oh, there’s Alan Moore in a funny hat!

Every major work of literature has its share of digressions and sidepaths– but when these things occur in, say, Ulysses, you know that you’re eventually, somehow coming back to Papa Joyce’s master plan. That’s the key: a plan. A plot. Cerebus wasn’t conceived as a 300 issue series– it ended up as one, and no matter protests to the contrary, it shows. We are in the presence of someone making it up as he goes along. Other people may have an opinion to the contrary, but Cerebus’s many elements never gel for me. They never add up to a whole.

Plus, for such a character driven narrative, Sim can write some truly awful dialogue.

–

OK, like yesterday, this post was supposed to be about what many people consider the High Point of the series, Jaka’s Story. Clearly that’s not happening. See you tomorrow, chums!

UPDATE, LATER: Incidentally,  this post by Noah Berlatsky, discusses the immutability of Cerebus (the character) and considers it (at least in part) an asset to Cerebus (the series). Which proves: different strokes for different folks.

There was no way in Hell that I was paying $25 to go to MacWorld, but elly had a Solution. She scummed a badge off someone not in need & thus, for an hour, my name was Nicole.

Not counting bathroom breaks and crying jags, the amount of time I spent inside MacWorld proper was about 15 minutes. This was enough to see what was necessary: a weird, religious pillar of MacBook Air cases strung together and hanging from the ceiling. The faithful flocked like man-apes in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and touched the plastic in the hopes that it would confer powers. (In a cruel twist of fate, it was later pointed out that the man-apes had a primitive, barter-based economy allowing an amount of social and individual mobility, while the attendees of MacWorld were all landlocked booshwah-z incapable of change. Dang. )

Anyway:

These pictures reminded me of the… third to last convention that I attended, Erotica LA 2007, for a gig that never panned out, way back in July. Something about the cameras and the creepy grabbing. Contrast & compare, amigos:

(That’s Tia Sweets in the role of a lifetime: the MacBook Air pillar!)

Last summer, when I attended the San Diego Comic Con, I was struck by its blankness– there was literally nothing that required photography and nothing, after the cease of the spectacle, that was worth remembering. My sum total of purchases was $3 for a grotty bottle of Vitamin Water.

This year gave me hardcore deja-vu, but I was prepared by the previous engagement– I managed about twenty photographs and achieved the holy grail of commodity fetishism: the acquisition of a relatively unique object in unrepeatable circumstances. Along with my toilet photograph, this triumph indicates, I believe, that I had a good experience– two Unique Moments in what is, after all, an event dedicated to specific conformity of product.

It’s been many moons since I last read Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and my memory of it is terrible– but I believe that much of its central conceit revolves around the idea of the mass media providing a perverted mirror of actual human relations which then cheapens and destroys the human relations that it mirrors, thus making its own reflection increasingly perverted.

It’s hard to attend an event dedicated to the replacement of personalities with corporate products and not feel a little bit like a freaked-out Left Bank intellectual. The best way to think about the culture of comics fandom, or any fandom, really– and establishing a way of weeding out enemy from friend– is this: are people reacting to the product as a thing crafted and created by individuals and engaging with the communication implicit within that creation, or is the consumer’s interest in the surface aspects like “plot”, “characters” and “story”?

This is what makes the hoopla-hoo about the recent-released The Dark Knight completely repellent; Heath Ledger’s performance requires that the audience care (or pretend to care) about the Joker, a one-dimensional construct with no implicit or explicit meaning beyond its reflection of pulp tropes from the 1940s and an ability to sell related merchandise for the parent owner, Time Warner.

Ledger’s turn is an empty thing– imagine Popeye learning how to method act and channeling Marlon Brando from One-Eyed Jacks– but it could never be anything else. The Joker, in every incarnation, is what the lowest brow entertainment of its origin period had to tell us about criminality and madness: barely anything at all.

We live in the first society in which media narratives are an embedded industry: sheer statistics demand and enforce a hierarchy of consumption. Just as there will always be a certain number of cars sold each season, so too will there always be certain kinds of films achieving varying levels of success. Some will be blockbusters, some will be sleepers. Others will bomb.

The products themselves, being delivery mechanisms for the intake and release of capital, contain surface level narratives that are essentially meaningless and variations on tired themes: this is why the same people who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer are now watching Battlestar Galactica. The analogue with the auto industry again becomes useful: just as young people buy “edgy” cars and mature individuals buy “solid” cars, reasonably above-average nerds watch “smart” television, but avoid “dumb” shows like Enterprise. It’s an interface of marketing and demographics, and, in the case of Dark Knight, Time Warner’s exceptional good luck that its actor sacrificed himself upon Mammon’s Altar of High Marketing.

The lead-in for 2007’s installment– Transformers– was nostalgia for enormous fucking robots that turned into cars; this year it was the actor who went too far into the Darkness of the Joker and Never Came Back. But, really, let’s be honest: there’s about as much depth and darkness in the Joker as there is in the infinitely repeating cliche of the Hollywood OD. These same empty cultural tropes have been recycled forever; and if you don’t believe me, ask Lupe Velez.

The real purpose of Ledger’s performance appears to be a granting of permission for a certain kind of man to smear his face with makeup. You know these people: they had a real hey-hey-hey-day after 1994’s The Crow, another comics property with a lead actor bearing an oddly similar resemblance to Ledger in Dark Knight, who also died tragically before his film’s release. (Memo to Hollywood males: properly apply your eye and lip liners.)

These people, the cosplayers and the costumed, are the blank ciphers on which the spectacle is writ.

And that brings us right back to the San Diego Comic Con, 2008, ground zero of the masquerade, where the most common costume was the Joker. Cosplay and costuming are pretty abstractly interesting– if you think about them hard enough, you start wondering about the basic nature of free will. Each cosplayer makes a specific choice to dress up as a media property, but what if that’s an inversion of the actuality? What if the media property itself– the platonic form of the commodity– is making that choice on a spectral plane of existence? What if some people are genuinely so blank and empty that their souls and their bodies are nothing more than a canvas on which the idea of the Green Lantern is writing itself? And if that’s the case, then what, really, is the Green Lantern trying to tell those of us that see it?

The masquerade is like everything else at the Comic Con– a practical reassurance for all parties, those in costume and those not, that the Hobbies and Interests of the attendees are safe, unchallenging things. There’s a faux-surprise with each outrageous costume; can you believe that chick is half-naked? Can you believe that the fat dude is dressed as Kazaar? But these are rhetorical questions and the shock is faked, another false emotion amidst five days of lucre hiding behind camaraderie. The freak parade is a giant advertisement disguised as a hug.

This year, I attended the Con with elly, my old chum and romantic interest, and weeks before, she had asked me about cosplay; somewhere in our discussion, I suggested that we attend dressed as characters from Art Spiegelman’s Maus. I’d go as one of the death camp mice and she’d go as a Nazi guard. After all, by the logic of the costumed, Maus is a pretty good property: well-drawn anthropomorphic animals. But for certain reasons– taste and laziness– this plan was abandoned. Instead we hit the floor and were awash in seventy years worth of filth and debris.

The only reprieve from the sea of flesh was our attendance of a panel in celebration of Blake Bell’s recently released book on Steve Ditko. Around these quarters, Ditko is a long-term idee fixe– the only comic artist whose work I actively collect. I have my thoughts on the man, some of which are poorly expressed here.

I have a lot of trouble with panels– they conflict with my inability to sit still for more than thirty minutes and my complete unwillingness to shut up– but I always attend at least one of the more obscure. These sequestered, fluorescently lit cells are clusters of ultra-hardcore interests; the panelists and attendees are professionals and specialists in the totally arcane, and generally far removed from creeping product. Last year, I attended one on Disney strike-busting that bored my companion to tears; I was fascinated not only by the topic but by the audience. How was it possible to be in a room of thirty people who cared about attempts to unionize animators in the 1940s? But there it was.

Later, I discovered that the line-up of the Ditko panel as originally announced was Bell, the phenomenal Kim Deitch, Gary Groth, Jim Starlin, Carl Potts and Dean Mullaney. Mullaney– who had published Ditko under the Eclipse Comics banner– did not attend; his replacement was a younger woman Liana K., a Canadian who appears to be “known” for talking to a sock puppet and attending conventions half-naked, but, in the moment, we possessed zero knowledge of her background, nor of Mullaney’s absence, and assumed, in light of the seasoning of the other panelists, that she had been included as a misguided representation of the Female Perspective.

The panel had highlights. Bell projected a nice selection of Ditko art, and Kim Deitch discussed at some length the interest of his brother and collaborator Simon in Ditko; he also dissed on poor John Romita Sr. Sera sera, sez I. But, as all discussions of Ditko must do, the whole thing broke into contention around the topic of the Randian-influenced Objectivist comics, and in particular, Mr. A. (Viewers of the Jonathan Ross documentary might recall Mr. A as the point where Neil Gaiman, a man possessing no small experience with 20th Century American belief systems, started talking about “American barking madness.”)

It was Liana K. who brought the pain– discussing her discomfort with Mr. A and taking, I think, exception to the political didacticism in the work. These concerns fell into a well-honed tradition: most comics cognoscenti lean Left, and Leftism’s enduring problem is its condescension to those of opposing viewpoints. In short, while folks on the Right think that people on the Left are deranged, hell-bound sodomities, folks on the Left appear to believe that people on the Right are stupid.

It seems almost impossible to discuss Ditko’s Mr. A work without giving up a lament that the work “suffered” due to Ditko’s loading it with his politics. The person discussing the work will most often find these politics repellent and thus, indirectly, discuss Ditko as though he were stupid or somehow mistaken. (Not everyone, though: Jim Starlin was just fine.) But what this line of commentary really drives at is the same problem encountered in Ditko’s Hawk and Dove: the rigidity of the superhero genre as a storytelling device, and the limitations of a readership raised on genre expectations.

Ditko’s Mr. A stories only seem like “bad comics” if one expects genre exercises– if, however, one assumes that the works appear as their creator intended, they exist much more comfortably. They’re only “bad” if one’s definition of comics is limited to one genre & its one story, and if one assumes that there is only one potential audience being addressed.

Namely oneself.

(The strange thing about people constantly trying to wedge the Mr. A comics into the superhero genre is that both Dr. Strange and Spider-Man under Ditko were quite far from the genre; Peter Parker was the perpetually unfulfilled female lead of a Romance Comic, and Dr. Strange touristed through a successive series of monster/horror comics.)

Which is a long-winded way of suggesting that the worst possible place in the world to be raising the most obvious and hackneyed objections to Ditko’s Objectivist work has got to be a panel at the San Diego Comic Con. For the record, I also don’t recommend quoting scripture and verse to Christians.

It was not soon after Liana K. had called Mr. A something like “bad comics,” that a man in the audience called out with the most difficult possible question: “What would you have done differently?”

At the time, what stood out was the unfortunate undertone of (perhaps not so) latent sexism; who was this girl on a panel amongst industry veterans, and why was she prattling on about Ditko in such an ill-informed manner? Clearly, such assertions could not go unchallenged! About five to ten minutes of argument and floundering occurred– all of it painful and disagreeable to the eyewitness.

I was of two minds: I had a partial sympathy, knowing how incredibly awful it must be as a woman amongst nerds, but even without my later acquired knowledge, I couldn’t help wondering why anyone with such a surface level understanding of Ditko would sit on a panel of individuals that had published the man, or had hung out in his studio, or had edited him, or, you know, had written a book on the man’s life and art. We each have our interests, but interest alone does not make us an expert.

Coming home and discovering that the individual in question’s major credentials appear to be squeezing into a Batgirl costume and conversing with a sock puppet only made me wonder what in god’s name panel organizer Blake Bell was thinking; why would you ever invite this person? Isn’t it bad enough that the Comic Con is one enormous headsqueeze– must I witness parochial sexism against the ill-informed and often half-clothed?

With the distance of a few days, I have begun to see this moment as emblematic of the entire Comic Con; a collision between the cosplaying media personality, an almost living avatar of the convention’s current direction, and the ultra-nerd contingent, the kind of obsessive old school freak that was once its heart-and-soul.

Much as my basic sympathies fall with the latter camp, it’s also clear that these people are dinosaurs– the comics industry has become raw meat for the grinder of film & television, and there’s an awful day of reckoning not far from now, when the vast majority of youngish comic book fans have come up reading their funnybooks from right to left. Even the outcasts and the arty will be pushing books based on conventions and ideas that have no connection whatsoever– none at all– to that great mass of readers. And then, kids, it’s done.