Peiratikos

(The title means, The German Democratic Republic lives on—in 79 square meters!)

Rose and I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 and Good Bye Lenin! this weekend. If Good Bye Lenin is playing near you, you should think about seeing it—it’s fun. If you’ve never even heard of it, here’s what the official American web site has to say about it:

October 1989 was a bad time to fall into a coma if you lived in East Germany—and this is precisely what happens to Alex’s proudly socialist mother. Alex has a big problem on his hands when she suddenly awakens eight months later. Her heart is so weak that any shock might kill her. And what could be more shocking as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the triumph of capitalism in her beloved East Germany? To save his mother, Alex transforms the family apartment into an island of the past, a kind of socialist-era museum here his mother is lovingly duped into believing nothing has changed. What begins as a little white lie turns into a major scam as Alex’s sister and selected neighbors are recruited to maintain the elaborate ruse—and keep her believing that Lenin really did win after all!

Good Bye Lenin! has some thematic resonances with The Invisibles, the seventh and final volume of which I recently read. If the movie were a story in Invisibles, probably everybody would end up dosed with Key 23, the jars of pickles labeled Spreewald Pickles would cause them to hallucinate the counterfeit pickles inside as real Spreewald Pickles, and we’d wonder whether a jar of Netherlandish pickles relabeled as East German Spreewald pickles is really a jar of Spreewald pickles.

(A brief note of explanation: Alex’s mother Christiane must have East German food products, since she doesn’t know the East German brands have disappeared from the shelves and been replaced by vastly superior Western brands. Alex is driven to rummage through dumpsters to find old discarded East German-brand jars and boxes, so he can trick his mother by filling them with Western food. Christiane particularly craves Spreewald pickles, and Alex gives her capitalist pickles from Holland disguised as Spreewalds.)

This is an important question in The Invisibles: Key 23 (or Key 64, or Logoplasm) causes you to hallucinate words as the actual objects those words represent. Is seeing a mirror with “Diseased Face” scrawled on it the same as seeing your own diseased face? Is being shot with one of those cartoon guns with a “Pop” flag the same as being shot for real? How do you get a goose out of a bottle without breaking the bottle or killing the goose? “What fucking goose?” is Jack Frost’s answer to the riddle. Elfayed’s more explanatory answer: “There’s no goose, Jack. No bottle. Only words.” What is more real than language, than the stories we tell ourselves and each other? It’s not that there are only words, as Elfayed claims, but that our interaction with the world is mediated by language. (Of course, for Elfayed, there really are only words—his comic-book world is made of words and pictures—the set of pictorial that make up comics is a kind of language.) If you see a tree and you don’t know it’s a “tree” (or “Baum” or whatever), well, you’re not really seeing a tree, are you, but some nameless thing. But what if you don’t know the words “nameless” or “thing”? If you have no language, you can’t even see nothing, because there is no “nothing” for you. As David Fiore notes, this is a recurring theme in Grant Morrison’s work, and recurs also in Jorge Luis Borges’s stories.

Where Morrison and Borges use fantasy and science fictional elements, writer/director Wolfgang Becker relies on good old-fashioned lying. Alex can’t let his mother know the GDR is no more, so he constructs an increasingly elaborate lie. The dominance of language in our conception of reality takes on apocalyptic importance for Morrison and Borges—and it does for Becker, but in a different way. It’s a quiet apocalypse in Good Bye Lenin!, which is maybe surprising for a movie with the fall of the Berlin Wall at its center. It would be easy to put this theme on a global scale in a story about the fall of a Communist government (1984, e.g., although that’s obviously a story about a Communist government not falling), but Becker avoids the global scale by using Christiane’s bedroom as a microcosm. The effect of the juxtaposition of the backgrounded social upheaval in Germany with the foregrounded familial chaos is a story which manages to be low-key and apocalyptic all at once. Alex’s surprise as his lie takes on a life of its own is mixed up with the terror he and his friends and neighbors must feel as the world they knew ends and a new world is born around them. The sense of simultaneous fun and panic as Alex’s fictional GDR gets bigger and bigger is much like the sense you get reading The Invisible Kingdom, the last volume of The Invisibles, as the narrative threatens to spin entirely out of Morrison’s—and the reader’s—control.

Good Bye Lenin! always makes clear the separation between inside, where Alex’s fictional GDR continues strong, and outside, where the GDR has fallen and East and West Germany reunited. Viewed from the outside, East Berlin is unaffected by Alex’s ruse. Viewed from inside the apartment, though, the newly emerging social status quo comes to mean the opposite of what it means on the outside, as Alex seeks to mitigate his mother’s increasing exposure to the onslaught of capitalism by enlisting an amateur filmmaker friend to invent fake newscasts about the fall of West Germany and the triumph of socialism. This is not the Borgesian conception of reality as presented in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”:

How could the world not fall under the sway of Tlön, how could it not yield to the vast and minutely detailed evidence of an ordered planet? It would be futile to reply that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but orderly in accordance with divine laws (read: “inhuman laws”) that we can never quite manage to penetrate. Tlön may well be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth forged by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

No, in Good Bye Lenin!, it’s easy to penetrate reality—just step outside the apartment. Alex’s mission, then is to keep his mother inside the apartment, and when she finally does step outside, to keep her thinking like she’s still inside.

The safety of inside is OK, but you can’t hide from the outside forever… right? It’s good of Alex to want to protect his mother from death—but who wants life when there’s nothing to life but lying in bed all day? Protecting yourself with your own little stories is fine, but at some point you have to either connect with the Big Story being told by the rest of the world, or admit your own insanity. Christiane’s unwillingness to emerge from inside the story she tells herself is what led to her heart attack in the first place—her husband had escaped East Berlin years ago and expected her to follow with their children, but she fell for the government propaganda, couldn’t bear to risk losing her children in an attempt to gain freedom, and so she abandoned her husband to the West, stayed in East Berlin and pretended she made a difference in the socialist regime by writing letters of petition demanding the state give the people better toasters. Now all she has to do to escape her self-created prison is step outside her apartment and see the new reunited Germany for what it really is, not the triumph of socialism but its defeat, and her son just can’t bear to let her go. Maybe a dose of the Big Story would kill her, but at least she’d be really alive in that Story before she died.

Still, Alex isn’t a bad person. He’s not judged or punished for his lie, but he’s also not successful in his lie. His girlfriend Lara, who thinks his desire to keep his mother locked up in bed is sort of sick (and she’s right about that), finally tells Christiane the truth. But they both value Alex’s good intentions, and they know as we all do the small happiness you can get sometimes from building up a little wall of protection against the scariness of the world—so they decide to give Alex a little protection and let him continue to believe he’s protecting his mother from the truth.

I think I’m going to stop here for now. Definitely more about The Invisibles later! And if you haven’t seen Good Bye Lenin!, see if it’s playing in a theater near you.

Well, here we are. Here I am, anyway—my neighborhood of the Web has finally learned that peiratikos.net is now pointing to a new server. If you’ve been using http://63.247.87.138/~sberg/blog/, you can go back to https://peiratikos.net/. If you’re using Mozilla, Netscape (maybe Opera, I don’t know), you can use our cool popup menus to the right of your screen. If you’re using Internet Explorer, use the non-popup menu to the right of your screen to navigate to pages with various archive lists and lists of XML feeds. Either way, you’ll want to check out our new citation archives. Want to know what we think of David Fiore or New X-Men? Want to know what mean things we’ve been saying about you? Now it’s easy!

Hey, look at this:

Channel 9 started as a personal story from one of us about fear of flying. Lenn realized after years of dealing with it, that it was actually a fear of the unknown. The fear was conquered through learning. The more transparency into what it took to fly a plane, the more the fear went away. Lenn got to know pilots who flew planes everyday, and every time he flew he turned on Channel 9 on the in-flight audio system to listen in to the cockpit.

We think developers need their own Channel 9, a way to listen in to the cockpit at Microsoft, an opportunity to learn how we fly, a chance to get to know our pilots. Five of us in Redmond are crazy enough to think we just might learn something from getting to know each other. Were we wrong? Time will tell.

Join in, and have a look inside our cockpit and help us fly the plane.

Welcome to Channel 9.

Ooh, now look at this:

This page is not Valid HTML 4.0 Transitional!

Errors: 359

It’s OK though, they know their HTML sucks!

At some point, I’ll go over the whole site and try to make it more palatable for the masses. Xhtml will be the goal, except that I’m not sure how friendly Asp.Net is going to be for that. Anyway, I know it sucks, I wish it didn’t, that’s what i get for pushing our functionality so quickly into both ASP.Net Forums 2.0 and FlexWiki. For now, leave your issues here and i’ll try to address them once this becomes a priority.

I’m having trouble here. I can’t decide what’s funnier… Is it

1. Microsoft’s technical evangelism blog uses 8-year-old obsolete HTML and still can’t get it right
2. ASP.NET isn’t “friendly” with XHTML

???

According to Trisha Lynn on Tartsville, the search term “jew” has been googlebombed by an anti-Semitic group, so the number one search result is their web site (which I’m obviously not going to link to). I submitted a spam report to Google, just in case nobody else thought to do so. Trisha reports that some bloggers are doing grassroots counter-googlebombing to get the Wikipedia entry on “Jew” into the number one spot. Boy oh boy, the Web sure has introduced the world to some exciting new forms of political activism!

Yes, it’s part four of a four part series of posts on the grand old comic book From Beyond the Unknown #23! Previous installments:

1. “Secret of the Man-Ape!”
2. “Language-Master of Space!”
3. “World of Doomed Spacemen”

Now we come to the letters column, “Messages From Beyond!”

Dear Editor:
Having been writing letters for quite awhile now, it does not surprise me to see my name pop up in a lettercol every time I turn around. What does surprise me is to find out I’ve gotten a mention, not because of a letter I’ve written, but for one I didn’t write! To remedy the lack of my letters to From Beyond the Unknown, here I am.

The trio of Gardner Fox stories in #21 shows the variety of tales the man can review. “Raid of the Rogue Star” is typical of his tales in the old Strange Adventures wherein some alien menace attacks Earth in one way or another and is defeated by a scientist who notices the flaw in the plan just before it is too late. Bill Travis, like all his predecessors and successors is really the same character with a different name; a man who ends up with his girl friend (or wife) on a picnic or at the beach after he saves the world. No publicity, no parades, no nothing. Just a fadeout back into oblivion.

“The Ghost Planet” is the Fox version of a “Twilight Zone” story. This is the quickie type which relies solely on the surprise-twist ending. As twist stories go, this one was pretty good.

“Will the Star Rovers Abandon Earth?” is the third type of sci-fi story Mr. Fox turns out: the series story. While the Star Rovers stories are the most limiting in terms of basic pattern (i.e. each of the three solving the same problem in a different way), each of them is refreshingly different enough to make them enjoyable. This issue’s tale was par for the course.

—BOB ROZAKIS, Elmont, N.Y.

So he wrote so many letters that people actually worried when he failed to write in to From Beyond the Unknown—that’s dedication! The neat thing about letter columns is the way they make the readers’ role as interpreters of the text actually part of the text itself, so that the text becomes self-reflexive. Which isn’t to say authors should necessarily listen to their readers (Hollywood studios actually act on the suggestions of test audiences, and look at all the awful movies that result), but giving readers a voice without requiring that they get published in a lit crit journal or something is a great idea. There are probably better ways to do it than a letter column in the book—like the Web, which is sort of a super-letters column for the entire world, to strain an analogy. Anybody who can get hold of an Internet connection can say anything about anything. People are always coming up with new ways of democratizing critcism—like this wiki for annotating and commenting on Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, which contains the entire text of the book (Lessig helpfully published it under a Creative Commons license).

But back to the letters!

Dear Editor:
Finally. I have discovered not one, but two errors in FBTU #21, both occurring in the explanations of the stories. The first, in “Raid of the Rogue Star”, erroneously led people to believe that an unknown element destroyed anything colored green. This may be all right for the alien planet, but to suggest that anything from Earth would likewise be destroyed, is a little far-fetched. If you were to say that just the pigment was destroyed, then the emerald would have turned to clear transparency.

A better explanation is to propose that a peculiar quality of the alien planet required that it must receive the green part of the visible spectrum or cease to exist. This impurity would account for the disappearance of the rogue star, as anything colored green has a green pigment which reflects green light, making it look green in appearance. As far as the planet goes, you could say that the green light must exist at least when other light is present, thereby saving the planet in times of darkness. In this case there could be no red or blue colored light without some green light mixed in, or anything subjected to it would cease to exist. Follow?

Editorial interlude: Follow? An element which destroys anything colored green is too far-fetched. It would be less far-fetched if the material making up this alien planet had such a quality that exposure to non-green light causes it to cease to exist. Apparently the material would need to absorb green light to continue existing, so the “rogue star” would cease to exist because it reflects green light! Got it? Wait, it’s a rogue star—doesn’t that mean it would radiate green light, not reflect green light?

Now, over to the Star Rovers. Obviously, for Karel’s skin to turn blue, something must have entered her bloodstream, taking away her normal pinkish color. To suggest that her hair is modified skin which also should have turned blue is ridiculous, since hair is nothing more than a protective covering, comparable to nails, claws, quills, scales, or feathers, which are all related and which all function and grow in the same manner. These have nothing to do with skin, and therefore are not related in any way.

Anyway, here’s your answer for this one: In between the second and last panels of the last page was a doctor saying the same things I did but trying to save her anyway, which he obviously did. He gave her a blood transfusion every day for two weeks, which enabled the blue poison to drain from her system. However, what they didn’t know was that the condition was hereditary and all of her future offspring were “blue babies”! Ouch!

—Greg Coben, New Brunswick, N.J.

So Karel’s skin turns blue because of some poison, and characters in the story wonder why her hair doesn’t turn blue as well. Luckily Greg Coben is here to explain why. How’s this guy so smart? Editor Julian Schwartz notes in his reply to the letter, “A wise guy—eh, this Gren Coben? Could be—the portion of his address that we omitted reads: Rutgers University!” Clearly Greg Coben was a professor of colors.

Part three in a four-part series on From Beyond the Unknown #23! Previous installments include “Language-Master of Space!” and “Secret of the Man-Ape!” Today, “World of Doomed Spacemen!” Story by Gardner Fox, art by Mike Sekowsky and Bernard Sachs. (Part four will be the letters column, which is pretty interesting in itself.)

A deserted Earth spaceship with no sign of its crew—a fantastic giant who was the only living thing on a far distant planet—! Had the giant destroyed the Earthmen? Or was there a stranger menace waiting to doom the rescue ships from Earth?

[Rescue ship crewman:] “The giant snapped us up like a pair of toy spaceships! What’s he going to do to us?”

This is an episode in an ongoing Space Museum series, the premise of which is that a son and his father go to the Space Museum and discover some odd and intriguing artifact on display. “Behind every object in the Space Museum there’s a story of heroism, daring, self-sacrifice…” a story which little Tommy Parker’s father tells him. This episode, Tommy and his dad find a pair of contact lenses. And let me tell you, these are some huge contacts. They’re like the size of an entire eyeball! Why are people in the 25th century still wearing contacts, anyway? They also drive flying cars that have wheels. Why do they have wheels if they fly? I guess for landing, but come on, how about vertical landing/take-off? The people of the future are slackers if this is the best technological advancement they can come up with.

But back to contact lenses. What is the story of heroism, daring, and self-sacrifice behind a pair of contact lenses? Glad you asked! The contacts belonged to Tom Miller of the Star-Gazer, the first manned spaceship to travel to the stars! During its maiden voyage, the Star-Gazer is lost somewhere between the Sirius and Procyon systems… Earth sends out two rescue ships! As the commander of one ship explains, “If the lead ship runs into the same disaster, the follow-up one will try to save it—or at least determine the menace!” Astute readers will do doubt catch the logical problem here—it’s sort of a “Who watches the watchmen?” for spaceships… who rescues the rescue ship? Who rescues the rescue-rescue ship? And so on. Sending two rescue ships is only a partial solution, but the problem is that a partial solution is the best you can manage. Sending a backup rescue ship to rescue the rescue ship wouldn’t really significantly increase the probability of a successful rescue mission. You just have to hope the rescue crew are smart and don’t get into trouble themselves. As the story continues, the futility of a backup rescue ship is effectively demonstrated. The rescuers track the Star-Gazer to the planet Procyon, but as soon as they arrive on Procyon a giant shows up and grabs both rescue ships. The backup ship was totally useless!

Luckily for the rescuers, the giant is a friendly giant. In fact, when the giant uses a machine to reduce himself, it turns out it’s Commander Tom Miller! How did Commander Miller find himself giant-sized? Well, after the Star-Gazer landed on Procyon, its crew began disappearing one by one, until none but Commander Miller was left. As Commander Miller searched the barren landscape for his crewmates, a voice spoke to him inside his head! “Follow my thoughts, man of Earth! Your friends are with me, waiting for you…”

[Commander Miller:] “The voice in my mind explained that it belonged to a mighty robot of inestructible metal! It had been created on a far-distant planet called Strykor… Not content with life on Strykor, Extar the Robot decided to journey to other worlds…”

[Extar the Robot:] “All I need to teleport myself across space is mind-energy—which I’ll absorb from the people on this planet…”

There’s an important lesson here. If you build a robot, do not give it the ability to eat minds. If you insist on giving it the ability to eat minds, do not give it the ability to decide to eat your mind. People always get this wrong—they make a killer robot and the robot goes crazy and kills them. Obviously the people of Strykor were not Isaac Asimov fans.

Extar absorbed the mind energy of the Strykorians, teleported to Procyon, and got stuck there because Procyonian civilization is long dead—no mind-energy to absorb! Luckily, Commander Miller and Co. arrived. But wait—Extar was able to mind-control the Star-Gazer crew, but when he tried to mind-control Commander Miller he failed miserably! (Can you guess why?) The Commander narrowly escaped, discovered the enlarging/shrinking machine, and enlarged himself in preparation for battle with Extar the Robot.

Now, did you guess why Extar was unable to mind-control Commander Miller? If you guessed that the mind-control rays were distorted due to the refractive index of the glass, and thus failed to strike the control centers of the commander’s brain… you are correct!

Commander Miller and the rescue crew form a battle plan:

1. Bust into the robot’s lair
2. Throw the enlarging/shrinking machine at the robot (distraction, see?)
3. Put glass space helmets on the mind-controlled Star-Gazer crew

Brilliant plan, right? But there’s one problem: the mind-controlled crewmembers are still even after they get space helments! Commander Miller, Space Sleuth, deduces that “The robot must have changed the frequency of its mental rays to allow for the distortion of the glass, figuring to capture me this way!” Commander Miller leaps into action and operates the englarging/shrinking machine to shrink Extar to subatomic size! Another crew member, now free of the robotic mind control, marvels, “The robot’s so small now that it is on one of the uncounted trillions of sub-atomic worlds! It’ll never find its way back! Our universe is now safe!” Wow, uncounted trillions of sub-atomic worlds… Commander Miller replies, “The machine used up all its power in shrinking Extar! It’s useless to us now because we don’t know on what fuel it operates!” Alas!

If you’re wondering how Commander Miller avoided being mind-controlled after the robot altered the frequency of its mind-control ray, you’re not alone:

[Tommy:] “But, Dad, how did Commander Miller prevent the robot from overcoming him as it did the others?”

[Dad:] “When he realized that the robot had altered its mental waves to compensate for glass, Miller removed his contact lenses—an thus Extar’s mental waves couldn’t overcome him!”

Luckily, Commander Miller’s eyesight wasn’t too bad without his contacts in. It’d be pretty embarrassing to be fighting an evil robot and trip on a chair or something because you’re too blind to see it.

I know the burning question in your heart: What is new Captain America writer Robert Kirkman going to do with the book? Prepare to find out: [via Fanboy Rampage]

“Focus on him beating up people? I’m not touching on the higher themes of Cap and patriotism. It’s been done before and been done better than I could ever do it. My story is about a guy that dresses up in an American flag and does his part in defending this country from crazy people that dress up in Halloween costumes. I’m trying to keep it simple. In light of where the books been for the last couple years, I’m hoping that will seem like a fresh take.”

Awesome! Who wants patriotism in a book about a guy dressed up in an American flag anyway… Wait. Wait.

Remember a few months ago, Bill Jemas’s proposal for a Thor series with Thor as a political allegory of American foreign policy? The problem with that sort of political allegory is, it doesn’t strengthen the political arguments at all—in fact, it obfuscates them. If you disguise a political argument as a Thor comic, you’re just adding an unnecessary extra comprehension step as readers will have to decode your allegory before they can even consider your argument. If you want to convince people the war in Iraq is a bad idea, just tell them and don’t screw around with allegory! Now does that mean fiction can’t address political topics? Not at all! See David Fiore:

This doesn’t mean that you can’t feature political issues as story elements—Morrison’s Animal Man demonstrates pretty clearly that you can; as do the works of Charles Dickens and Frank Capra (anyone know who Frank Capra voted for back in the thirties? anyone care? I hope not, because his films, even the ones that take place in Washington, don’t really have anything to do with politics)—you just can’t make them the point of the story, otherwise your work will suck.

As anyone who has read this blog at all knows, I’m a psycho when it comes to defending liberal values and the question of animal rights—but even I know enough never to write a novel about these things… If I have something to say about a specific issue, I’ll just say it… When I write fiction, I deal with the kind of stuff that nobody conducts polls on—like epistemological conundrums and the magic of inter-subjectivity.

So let’s just be clear up front: a Captain America story whose sole purpose is to explore what Captain America would think of President Bush or a Captain America story which is a straightforward political allegory of the war in Iraq is bound to suck a lot. Nobody cares what Captain America thinks of American foreign foreign policy. (Or anybody who does care is a weirdo—come on, he’s a fictional character! His political beliefs have no bearing on real-world politics.) A story that uses Cap’s political experiences metaphorically to deal with more interesting things, well, that has more promise.

Back to Kirkman. Kirkman, according to his Newsarama interview, is wisely not going to use Captain America as a platform for expressing his political beliefs. But he is also not going to address “higher themes” like “patriotism.” Nuh uh, hold on there, Kirkman! Cap dresses in an American flag. He’s a walking, talking, fighting symbol of the USA! The USA is a political entity—you can’t take a character who’s a symbol of a political entity and make him apolitical!

But Steven, we’ll just say he’s beyond politics, that he’s a symbol of the American Ideal. No problem.

But the notion that there’s such a thing as an “American Ideal” or an “American Dream” is a matter of nationalistic politics. “American” has no inherent moral value separate from its sociopolitical meaning.

Well, look, he’s just a symbol of a moral ideal. It’s not especially nationalistic. We’re just ignoring patriotism, all right?

No no no, Hypothetical Debater! He’s dressed in a flag, anything he represents is necessarily associated with America.

Look, damn it, we’ll just have him beat up the Serpent Society or something, no political stuff there!

Nope. The political stuff is there. The American flag, as a symbol of America, carries with it tons of political baggage. Kirkman can tell people to ignore it, and some readers will play along (just look at the comments below the Newsarama article), but critical readers will not play along. Kirkman can refuse to address the political themes inherent in a superhero who wears an American flag costume, but that doesn’t mean the political themes go away. It means Kirkman is willfully ignorant of the political themes in his text, which means he can’t control them. Allowing a large chunk of unconscious thematic material to lurk around in your text is generally a dangerous idea. A critical reading will unearth those lurking themes. If the story is something like, “Captain America beats up the Serpent Society,” the most obvious reading would be that Captain America is a simplistic metaphor for the American tradition of heroic violence, or something like that. And because Captain America is the Good Guy and the association of Captain America’s violent heroism with America goes unquestioned, we’re pretty much back at the level of banal political allegory where the Serpent Society represents America’s enemies by implication. It’s even worse than the Thor thing because the allegory isn’t even intentional. And wait, before you reply, remember that we’re talking about unintentional and unconscious elements in the text, so “But Kirkman didn’t intend it to be a political allegory, the Serpent Society isn’t supposed to represent anything” is not much of a counterargument.

And wait, one more thing! The fact that Captain America may not be fit to address political issues is irrelevent. Sure, maybe a superhero dressed as a flag who beats up mental patients in weird drag isn’t much good for commenting on patriotism and nationalism, but that doesn’t make it possible not to address patriotism and nationalism with such a character!

Second in a series of, oh, four posts, I suppose, about the excellent comic book From Beyond the Unknown #23. The first concerned the “Secret of the Man-Ape!” This post, as you have no doubt deduced from its title, concerns the “Language-Master of Space!” Story by Gardner Fox, art by Sid Greene. I know the mystery of the literatus gorilla has been the primary topic of interest w/r/t From Beyond the Unknown, but stick around for more sf comics craziness of yesteryear!

Gideon Karr had mastered a hundred different planet-languages—but he wouldn’t be satisfied till he had increased that number ten times as much! Then one day on the planet Klyara he was forced to do some “straight talking” with the strangest weapon in the galaxy—to save his own life!

“The name is Gideon Karr, folks—star wanderer, planetary adventurer, and master linguist! A man with an itch to roam the spaceways—ready to tell my story in any of a hundred languages, if you “savvy” them…

“Maybe you’ve never stopped to realize how many different ways intelligent beings communicate with one another! For instance, on Gran they use radiant light beams—on Proganus, they vibrate their four antennae…

“The Sporrans of Arcturus-4 talk with colored bubbles of vocal energy…

“On Dellagro, the four-armed natives use a sign language…

“The green beings of Slistilyssa communicate by making clicking sounds with their long fingernails…” [In the panel, a smooth green ladies man clicks away, as an editor’s note helpfully translates: “How about a date tonight, honey?”]

Gideon Karr, Peripatetic Space Linguist, finds his “fiddlefoot” itching again, which he takes to mean that it’s time for him to continue his endless wandering in quest of learning 1,000 languages (Gideon is nothing if not ambitious). As he heads for the spaceport, however, he’s caught in the crossfire as two Sfarrans and a Callistan battle it out with blast-guns! Gideon, a lifelong advocate of the underdog, leaps into the fray and soundly trounces the Sfarrans—too late to save the life of the Callistan! Nevertheless, the friendly Callistan offers Gideon a reward of information: the location of some fire gems! Fire gems, “a legend in the stars! Fantastically beautiful, they are absolutely priceless! The only fire gem ever known to exist had been destroyed in the catastrophe which destroyed Solonar…” But there’s a whole stash of them in the Lake of White Water on the planet Klyara. If Gideon can get his paws on a fire gem, he’ll never have to work again—he’ll have the rest of his life free to study study study those languages! Now he knows just how he can scratch his “fiddlefoot.”

Arriving on Klyara, Gideon finds it inhabited entirely by life-like statues. A normal man would certainly, upon such a discovery, say, “Why is this planet covered with cities inhabited by statues? That’s really weird.” But Gideon is a man of singular purpose! He cares about only two things in the universe:

1. languages and
2. fire gems.

Gideon dives to the bottom of the Lake of White Water and finds a fire gem inside a mollusk (just as pearls are found inside oysters on Earth, Gideon educationally points out). After cutting and polishing the gem on his spaceship (he’s also an amateur jeweler!), he strolls over the library to read about Klyara’s language. (Why does a city of inanimate statues have a library stocked with books? Who’s supposed to read them? Gideon has no time for such insignificant questions!) He sees another spaceship land, and it soons comes to light that Klyara is under invasion! The Klyarans are not inanimate statues, but living people slowed almost to the point of absolute stillness by a delayogas bomb released by the invading Skrann aliens (that’s “delay-o-gas,” by the way, it took me several seconds to figure out how to parse that word). At first Gideon, unarmed and unable to make use of the Klyaran’s sophisticated arsenal (which seems rather insecure, or maybe Gideon is also a master of infiltration), decides that discretion is the better part of valor. He changes his mind, though, after a bolt of energy zaps from the fire gem (which he made into a ring) and melts his spaceship.

“Hardly believing my eyes, I tested the ring again! In some mysterious manner the fire gem had transformed the noonday sunlight into a deadly disintigrating ray…

“For ages, man has made light from electricity! The fire gem—like a photo-electric cell—reverses the process, turning light into electricity! Actually, the fire gem turns light into a discharge of raw, destructive fury!”

Got it? It’s the opposite of a light bulb!

Gideon boldy threatens to melt the Skranns’ spaceship, but then the sun goes down and the ring stops working! He waits till next sunrise, melts the spaceship, and then the Skranns apparently stand around discussing the possible ramifications on their invasion plan of having their spaceship melted, and they take so long deciding what to do about this that the sun goes down again. (Gideon, courteous to the end, kindly doesn’t take the opportunity to just get on with it and melt the Skranns.) Luckily for Gideon, they decide to surrender. After the effect of the delayogas wears off, the Klyarans are happy to reward Gideon by teaching him their ear-wiggling language. Seriously, Klyarans have mouths and everything (maybe they don’t have vocal cords?), but they communicate by wiggling their huge donkey-like ears.

You’ll note that the “master linguist of space” concept exists mostly to give Gideon a motivation and to set up the “straight talking” joke on the opening splash page of the story. Too bad! Just imagine the possibilities of linguistics-centered pulp sf… “Gideon Karr and the Language Virus from Space!”

Marc Singer has a good summary analysis of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men.

New X-Men moves in three distinct phases, roughly one for each year Morrison spent on the title. The first year is one of resuscitation, as Morrison rethinks old X-Men concepts and selectively introduces new ones, including a threat that will force drastic changes to Magneto, to the Sentinels, and ultimately to Xavier himself.

Marc’s reading organizes the entire epic story into three parts: X-Men renaissance (catalyzed, appropriately, by Charles Xavier’s evil twin Cassandra Nova whom ey tried to kill in the womb), the X-Men’s exploration of their new role as public advocates for mutant rights, and finally the collapse of Xavier’s dream—and of Magneto’s dream. “Planet X” ends with apocalypse, and the “Here Comes Tomorrow” epilogue apparently further explodes the narrative so there is no status quo established at all, not the pre-Morrison nor Morrison’s own nor an entirely new one. Wonderful! That’s just what I hoped would happen. Not a continuity reset button so much as a marker, a sunset and a sunrise. “This is where the X-Men end… and where they begin again. What next, X-Men?” The fact that Chris Claremont and Chuck Austen decide what they do next is, as Marc notes, a problem only if you keep reading the books after Morrison leaves. I personally think that a new beginning is a lovely way to end a story.

Marc does seem a little disappointed with “Planet X,” which is too bad. I noted some of the “lingering questions,” but by the time I was reading about how Logan chooses to end his life (and Jean’s life), I was practically physically incapable of caring why Logan never smelled Magneto hiding in the school.

Ooh, can’t wait for the “Here Comes Tomorrow” trade to be published! It sounds excellent.

“Secret of the Man-Ape!” Published in From Beyond the Unknown. Story by Otto Binder, art by Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella.

Who knows what past civilizations dominated ancient Earth—and vanished without a trace? Who knows what other intelligent creatures may have reigned over our world?

By a twist of evolutionary fate, an alien from outer space finds he has chosen the wrong disguise to spy on Earth!

[Scientist:] If my machine works, I’ll be able to transform this gorilla into a human!

[Gorilla (thinking):] It better work—or my plan to conquer the Earth will fail!

You see, 100,000 years ago, Earth was ruled by a civilization of intelligent gorillas. And, as we all know, if some aliens on a planet 100,000 light years from our solar system viewed Earth through a telescope, they would see the Earth of 100,000 years ago, ruled by gorillas. If said aliens then, operating on this 100,000-year-old intelligence, decided to send a spy to Earth in preparation for a full-scale invasion (as aliens are wont to do), they would naturally send an alien spy transformed by a ray into a gorilla. The tragedy of the situation, you will note, is that Earth is no longer ruled by a civilization of intelligent gorillas, but by humans. (It doesn’t matter, if you’re wondering, who will be ruling Earth in the distant future, because the aliens, despite having light-speed-only telescopes, do have faster-than-light space travel. One might wonder why they don’t simply send an invisible spy camera or something, if one were a hard-hearted curmudgeon with no appreciation for the lovely absurdity of 1950s comics featuring gorillas.) Luckily, our gorilla protagonist finds himself captured by a scientist with a ray which transforms gorillas into human form:

When the mind-reading gorilla is delivered to the scientist’s laboratory in America—

[Scientist:] I’ve been waiting for this specimen, to try out my evolving ray!

[Gorilla (thinking):] I hope it works! My whole mission depends on it!

As the rays bathe the alien gorilla…

[Scientist (thinking):] Gorilla to human in ten minutes! According to my calculations, only the body has changed, not the brain!

[Gorilla (thinking):] Now if I can escape this cage…

But the next moment, the ray is turned on the alien again…

[Scientist:] This experiment is too dangerous for me to continue on my own! I’ll change him back…

[Gorilla (thinking):] No—no!

[Scientist:] As soon as I dismantle the machine, I’ll turn my plans over to the science society for further study!

[Gorilla (thinking):] Trapped in gorilla form again! I must get those plans for myself, somehow!

Meanwhile, Professor Scott finds another “spy” lurking outside his window…

[Scientist (thinking):] That face in the window again! It’s Hal Todd, my former assistant! I never trusted him, and fired him! I wonder if he’s scheming to steal my plans for evil purposes?

Now we begin to understand that mysterious cover, as Prof. Scott decides to smuggle his secret notes past Hal by hiding them in his nephew’s library books: Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe, and Treasure Island! As Prof. Scott takes his notes to the science society, he is so worried about this stalker Hal, he walks right in front of a truck! Hal kneels to examine the professor’s cane, hat, and books, scattered in the street (the corpose is nowhere to be seen, perhaps stuck under the truck), his thoughts are ironic: “Professor Scott—dead! I wonder if he planned to use his discovery for evil purposes, as I half suspected at times?”

(Philosophical question: To what evil purposes do you suppose somebody might put a ray which makes gorillas look like humans, but doesn’t make them smarter?)

A passer-by returns the prof’s books to the library (this is apparently minutes after the prof was run over by a truck, and there’s been no indication that anybody called an ambulance or anything…), where our alien gorilla, having escaped his cage, checks them out. (As she hands over the books, the librarian thinks, “At first I imagined that gorilla was talking to me—but it’s his thoughts I hear! How is such a fantastic thing possible?” In a display of flagrant negligence, she fails to ask the gorilla for his library card.)

The gorilla steals a car and speeds out of town—trailed by Hal, who made to the library only after the gorilla got the books, despite having been standing in front of the library a couple pages ago when the prof was hit by the truck. The gorilla, who does not have a driver’s license, drives right off a cliff. Hal muses that “The world will never know” just what the gorilla’s nefarious plans were. The end.

And so “Secret of the Man-Ape!” is a tragedy, a cautionary tale of the peril of acting on insufficient information. It is happy that the aliens are willing to jump to conclusions based on suspect intelligence, since we certainly don’t want Earth falling to the aliens. If only, though, Hal and the prof had not allowed themselves to be ruled by suspicion! They give in to paranoia, and the sad result is the prof’s violent death and Hal’s looking like an idiot for losing some library books to a gorilla.

Stay tuned for “Language-Master of Space!” and “World of Doomed Spacemen!”