Peiratikos

I take off tomorrow for my grandparents’ home, so I’ll be gone for the rest of the week. It will be interesting to see how I get by without regular internet access! Steven will still be around and, I hope, posting some of the thoughts he’s been talking about with me lately.

In addition to being helpful, I should have some time for reading and I’m bringing a knitting project with me, hoping I’ll pass through airport security with my needles. When I come back, though, I can promise at least one comics post. Tonight I finally found the notes I’d taken for Art Spiegelman’s first post-9/11/01 lecture, which he discusses in the introduction to In the Shadow of No Towers. (I probably shouldn’t have let Tom Spurgeon publish something so conversational and rough, but basically all that I said stands.) So that’s something I will accomplish, but I’ve accomplished more than just cleaning and packing this weekend.

I finally finished a shawl for my grandmother, Polly Outhwaite’s Kiri (free PDF format pattern). I had been working on this in early summer but put it aside when I was having trouble with my arm and only picked it up again in the last week to get it finished. The pattern was easy to follow and memorize and I think it makes a lovely shawl. This is yarn that my grandmother gave me, some sort of mohair blend I think in a pale, mottled brown. I think these cones I got are remnants from a closed knitting mill, but I’ll ask about them when I see her. She used to knit blankets from them and while I have the pattern she used, I’ve been sticking to smaller projects, shawls, scarves, and soon a sweater.

I used U.S. #7 needles and with such thin yarn the finished product is practically weightless when it’s worn. It’s about 58 inches along the top edge, 29 inches along the central spine that hangs down. I think each side has 11 points along the edge. I could have blocked it bigger, but my grandmother is not as tall as I am and I think this size will be sufficient. I blocked the shawl by soaking it and then pinning it out to the proper dimensions (I ran a piece of yarn through the top horizontal edge to keep it straight) and shape. Since I finished knitting at 11 last night, I ended up making adjustments until midnight and while exhausted, which probably wasn’t the best state of affairs.

I do think it’s a lovely shawl, light and delicate. I like the repeated leaf pattern that covers it, especially in a light, natural color like this one (although my striped tank top detracts from any simplicity). I think it will be a welcome gift and it has the added advantage of looking more complex than it is. I would recommend this pattern to a first-time lace knitter and it can be expanded to a variety of sizes, from a tiny kerchief to a huge shawl. Mine is midsized, about what you would apparently get with two skeins of Kidsilk Haze, but I think it’s a good size for my purposes, and by this time tomorrow I’ll know!

I bought Rex Libris because it seemed so rare to find a comic with a truly funny pun in its title. I should have read the fine print.

Rose Vess pointed out much of what I would have said about the labored whimsy of the story and its annoying commentary track. (I’m still sort of weirded out and excited that the comics blogosphere is big enough to sustain two Roses.) I mean, even “Rex Libris” stops being a funny name when it’s the name of an actual Roman. Steven didn’t make it through the parody letter from the editor section on the inside front cover because he was so annoyed by the inconsistencies and bad punctuation. I would have written that off as characterization or part of the joke except that it’s pretty clearly not.

And then there’s the front cover, from which I derive my title. See, this is a comic so portentous it even has an epigraph: Sapare Aude. And I looked at that and said, “Wait, shouldn’t that be Sapere?” and then didn’t trust myself because my Latin was inadequate well before it got rusty, so I went on with life. But it nagged at me and I googled it and sure enough you get some hits with their spelling, but that’s why using a dictionary is a good idea, because there’s plenty of information about the meaning and derivation of Sapere aude, “dare to know.”

And I know this is a rant I’ve gone into many times before, but I still think it’s sort of insulting to be expected to appreciate something on an intellectual level if the writers can’t bother to learn how to use commas. Why have a Latin motto if it’s not even in Latin? But more importantly, who’s in charge? I assume Slave Labor can’t afford to have someone proofread the comics before the script gets matched up with the art for the final project or even in large text areas like the “Barry’s Brain” segment. Despite the library focus of the title, it’s not clear that the creator wanted to spend too much time in real libraries or with real librarians in creating it. So here I am left frustrated again that there isn’t any expectation of quality or consistency in even the mechanics of writing. Sure, Brian Michael Bendis got to wherever he is on the current hot writers list without being able to string more than two sentences together coherently and without drastic misspellings, but at least Marvel can offer him an effective spellchecker. I don’t think I would have liked the story in Rex Libris any more had James Turner had this luxury, but it certainly would have made me less annoyed and bitter than I am now.

I started reading Hope Larson’s Salamander Dream as soon as it began online with the beginning of The Secret Friend Society and I’ve been wanting to write about it since it ended this summer. The story details the various trips a girl, Hailey, makes into the woods behind her house as she grows up and the interactions she has there with Salamander, a sort of magical personified salamander.

“Once upon a time,” the story begins, “there was a little girl very much like you.” And while I don’t know if all readers thought this spoke to them, I know it did to me. My parents moved a few months before I was born, meaning that these were not my woods and mine were more northern ones than North Carolina’s. My story would have had fewer pine trees, more limestone fossils, no chestnuts, but bigger ferns and King Solomon’s Seal. Perhaps because I think of Hailey as a girl very much like me, I don’t think this is a story about imaginary friends; I think it’s a love story. It’s a love story about stories and about the world and the way we can forget about those things as we get older and the importance of remembering them.

I’m still not sure if every story is in some ways a story about the creation of self through narrative, but seldom have I seen such a good example as the story teenaged Hailey tells Salamander starting on page 71. Her story swoops down through her body until subatomic particles make the same tracks that fireflies did in the outside world. (Or are they lightning bugs in North Carolina? This being a minimally wordy story, we never learn!) It’s as-above-so-below on every level, this a story of falling like Salamander’s bird ride was and really like every section of the Salamander Dream story is, dropping Hailey and the reader back in the woods for more of something. What that something is is different every time, but still united. The woods change, our understandings of the woods change, but there being woods somewhere doesn’t change.

One thing that makes this story so compelling and extraordinary (despite the in some ways quite simple subject matter) is that so little of it is told, and I don’t just mean that there aren’t many words. It’s that everything seems to flow and so much is subtext, faces appearing in the clouds or as clouds, the sky behind the pine trees like another row of pine trees, the moments of quiet recognition between Hailey and Salamander. While it’s a story about growing up and with content appropriate for all ages, I’m not sure how the story would read to someone who hasn’t moved away from home and the woods and childhood a bit. But maybe that’s me thinking this is a story about a girl a little too much like myself.

I suppose what I’m getting at (poorly, I’m afraid) is that Salamander Dream does an amazing amount with a little. There aren’t many words and it’s not a long story, but it’s a haunting one. I’m not sure if it was the contemplative experience of reading only one page a day that made it seem like the story itself had gotten into my blood and DNA and atoms and taken up residence there. It feels like it’s mine not because I identify but because it’s told so clearly and directly and without missteps. I get a little weepy at the ending every time because I don’t want to forget Salamander and the way the story makes me feel even as I read it on my laptop in my little apartment. It’s a little piece of spring that nestles inside me and helps me remember to help it grow. The story brings out all the needlessly florid metaphors in me that the text itself rejects. It’s plain and direct and deep and elusive, which I think is the point it’s trying to make about the essential qualities of life and nature, human and otherwise. We all need to be aware of quiet and the spaces between things and the way stories don’t always have easy endings but also the ways they connect and overlap and wind together, the ways we live in the world.

I’d like to say more about Salamander Dream, but it’s time for my own dreaming. And I know that every time I come back to the story I’ll be someone slightly different, growing up in my own way like Hailey. “But maybe she found another place in the world” like I hope we all do, like I hope I have done and continue to do. It’s not the same place but it might be similar, a place to reflect on old places. For me, this has been a weekend for that sort of thing and it was refreshing to reread Salamander Dream and let it pull me out of that and into something else, a kind of awareness of the now as part of all those pasts. I appreciate that and look forward to pushing into futures. And in the near future, I hope to read Salamander Dream in book form to see what the green on cream looks like between my hands, maybe near some grass this time, see what change that brings. Maybe it will give me another story to tell.

So I’ve been following the news almost nonstop for a week—not good for one’s health. I can almost feel my blood pressure building every time I see Barbara Bush’s Marie Antoinette act, which I think is a good sign it’s time for a break. After all, there’s not much I can do that I haven’t already done; sadly, I don’t have a guillotine handy. Momentary distractions are good, and I might as well distract myself with a return to my old hobby of blogging about unimportant stuff.

Banana Sunday #2, Root Nibot and Colleen Coover: Oh dear, oh dear. Now, monkey can get ambiguous, because there are a few monkey species with “ape” in their common name, although such monkeys are not considered true apes. However, gorillas and orangutans are simply not monkeys. You know, now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever before seen gorillas or orangutans mistakenly called monkeys. Chimpanzees and gibbons, sure, they look sort of like monkeys. But gorillas? But the primates are so terribly cute and fun, especially Go-Go, that I can’t resist.

Also, Martin is a creep. I keep hoping Kirby will wise up and punch him right on the nose. But oh, those primates! I guess I’ll put up with anything for a little gorilla who loves butterflies.

Shining Knight #4, Grant Morrison, Simone Bianchi et al.: Jog is still worried about Seven Soldiers—actually, he’s more worried. Alas for him! Well, Shining Knight sure isn’t self-contained. After reading Jog’s post, I wondered, “What was Morrison thinking with his ‘modular storytelling’ hype, anyway?” And, actually, I bet I know what he was thinking: it was probably a joke at the expense of company-wide crossover “events.” Seven Soldiers, at least so far, has the virtue of being mostly self-contained—you don’t need to catch the allusions to other stories to follow the current story, although an understanding of the allusions can add entertaining nuances to your reading. Because he likes to take the piss, Morrison describes the self-containment hyperbolically: not only does a single issue in the Seven Soldiers series (I won’t call it an “event”) not cross over with other series, it doesn’t even cross over with Seven Soldiers! I doubt Morrison ever planned to make Seven Soldiers “modular.” (Or maybe he did—I haven’t spoken with him on the matter! But it doesn’t really matter if the story is satisfying, and I’ve been satisfied thus far.) I haven’t reread all four issues yet, but I think Shining Knight does work as a self-contained chapter in a larger story.

One promise Morrison has kept is that the chapters never quite intersect. Zatanna occasionally moves through Shining Knight’s wake, but no more than that (so far, so far). Which leads me to another of Jog’s complaints: Zatanna and Shining Knight don’t really match up; there are glaring continuity glitches. I admit that didn’t bother me—maybe I cut Morrison and his collaborators too much slack, but I expect Morrison’s narratives to be malleable, more metaphorical abstraction than concrete world-building. But even if the continuity glitches are simply mistakes, I find them more entertaining than bothersome. But I’m obsessed with cut-up aesthetic in all art forms, and there’s almost nothing I like more in a story than when it starts to fall apart, whether or not the author wanted it to. But this is Morrison, so I hesitate to say the inconsistencies are a result of carelessness. I guess we’ll see, though.

And, well, I think we’re meandering toward Jog’s final question: is Morrison getting in over his head? Actually, I hope so! I don’t trust an artist who doesn’t make an occasional graceful bellyflop into the deep end of the pool, and Morrison is one of my favorite writers because his entire artistic career has been one bellyflop after another—some more graceful than others, but all entertaining.

But what about the story? Well. So, Sir Justin is a girl. Unexpected but unsurprising. Like most of his stories, the building blocks of Shining Knight are slightly off-kilter clichés. Let’s see—in Seven Soldiers #0, Shelly Gaynor dresses up in a stupid fetish costume and stupidly goes to bed with an asshole. Zatanna causes no end of trouble by wishing for the man of her dreams. The Manhattan Guardian presents a variation on that immortal action-movie cliché, the obsessed man who neglects his wife and family because, damn it, he’s got a job to do. Gender, especially the feminine, is something to watch out for in Seven Soldiers; I’ll have to keep this in mind as I reread.

What I Read

Banana Sunday #1, by Root Nibot and Colleen Coover: Orangutans and gorillas are apes, not monkeys. This error is especially troubling in a book that I would otherwise happily give to a child. Oh well. Nibot writes stylized, emotionally heightened dialogue—it’s like the characters are just a little more excited by everything than they would be if the dialogue were more naturalistic. Hmm, I see David Welsh has already explained what I’m trying to talk about. As he notes, a lot of the dialogue is exclamatory declarations of character traits. It fits just right with Coover’s cartoony exaggeration. The page I’ve scanned here is one of the clearest examples, especially the middle tier of panels. Coover tends to draw characters in an odd half-hunched posture—it makes them look endearingly eager or beleaguered as appropriate. Go-Go the gorilla is a shameless scene stealer, and I cannot resist.

Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville: I’ve only just started it. I hated Billy Budd when I had to read it in high school, but Moby-Dick is great fun so far. So far it’s mostly been the madcap adventures of Ishmael and Queequeeg, and I can’t wait till this comedy duo encounters Captain Ahab and his mad quest—who knows what’ll happen then, but it’s sure to be crazy and entertaining. For some reason, I imagine Grant Morrison reading Moby-Dick at a malleable age. I’ll have more to say when I’ve finished the book, I think.

Rose and I saw Mulholland Dr. and Rize recently, so hopefully more about them later. And, er, Minority Report, which I haven’t forgotten but have been too lazy to watch.

The comics internet is fucked! And we’re all part of the problem. Really, you’re not pushing comics forward. We’re folks on the internet writing about stuff, and we don’t matter to anybody but ourselves and the few other people who read us. Just kick back, have fun writing about stuff, and don’t worry about the forward momentum of the art form.

I think we can all agree that the final sentence of Rose’s post was ill-advised. A very bad idea. If you read everything Rose has written about this and think she’s accusing anybody of being misogynist or claiming she knows what anybody was thinking during recruiting for CBG, you need to work on your reading comprehension skills. The only badly behaved people in that comments thread are Alan David Doane, Steven Berg and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Christopher Allen.

You all are protesting way too much. Why is that?

You spend—let me count—one and a half years writing about comics, then you make a couple of fairly mild criticisms of Comic Book Galaxy (and one ill-advised final sentence, yes, we all remember that) and you’re suddenly PART OF THE PROBLEM!!!

You are all very silly and hysterical. So am I. Maybe you should get over it now, Logan and friends. I myself am getting over it… now. Now you try.*

P.S. Rose did bring up race, Logan. Thanks for reading before ranting.

P.P.S. No, really, we don’t want to write for CBG. So sorry.

* Yes, actually, this post is part of our shameful secret “agenda.” If I used smilies, I’d put one of those eye-rolling smilies right here.

What I Watched

La Dolce vita, Federico Fellini et al.: The irony of 8 ½ is that even after Guido’s revelation that he loves everybody and can’t live without the people in his life, the movie remains trapped in his fantasy. Guido has successfully alienated everybody, but he imagines that they all forgive him and join him in a circus-like celebration of his new happiness; he imagines that everybody else’s happiness is congruous with his own. The movie remains claustrophobically solipsistic to the end. La Dolce vita, on the other hand, remains outside its protagonist Marcello’s mind. (Guido is a film director and Marcello is a gossip journalist, but they are almost variations of the same character. Guido is more playful, less seemingly defeated by decadence than Marcello; but who knows how Marcello really thinks of himself? The gauche Marcello at the end of La Dolce vita might be how the rest of the world sees Guido.) It turns out the whole doomed culture is solipsist. If Marcello ever has an inspiration like Guido’s, it remains hidden; we see only the stark reality: a sordid orgy, an encounter with a big dead fish, a moment of failed communication. La Dolce vita and 8 ½ both begin their finales with characters half-walking and half-dancing onto a beach; I recall that the characters moved left to right in 8 ½, but in La Dolce vita they move right to left. (Rose reminds me the girl whom Marcello cannot hear and fails to recognize moves from left to right, which is certainly important.) Basic film technique: because right is good (and because Western written languages read left to right, time progresses in a left-to-right circle on a clock, &c.), movement from left to right suggests progress; although the association of left and badness has largely disappeared, movement from right to left still seems backwards. In 8 ½, of course, the characters move clockwise in a circle—the progress is as illusory as the fantasy in which it occurs.

La Dolce vita reminds me of Bright Young Things (which I saw first), and I imagine Stephen Fry was influenced by Fellini in making his own movie. The oppressive sordidness of the upper-class and its hangers-on and the obsession with celebrity are straight out of Evelyn Waugh’s book—I suppose Fellini was influenced by Waugh. But Fry’s swarms of photographers and party scenes mixing sexy young people and batty old aristocrats are straight from Fellini. There an interesting connection I just noticed between Vile Bodies/Bright Young Things and La Dolce vita, viz. the protagonists are both writers who’ve written books that are never published (Marcello’s supposed book is only mentioned, Adam’s is a finished manuscript but is confiscated as smut by Customs). Both are journalists who write celebrity gossip whose books seem to represent a failed communication of something more important and genuine—it’s easy to idealize a book that exists only hypothetically. (Adam’s book exists more than hypothetically but only to him, never to the viewer.)

What I Read

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H.W. Fowler: An indispensable guide to using English with good taste. Provides ceaseless entertainment to the well-educated and pedantic. The dictionary was published in 1926, so interested readers can judge the accuracy of Fowler’s speculations on future developments of usage.

Shining Knight #3, Grant Morrison, Simone Bianchi et al.: Lots of exposition, as Jog notes, but it’s pretty fun. The Seven Soldiers stories all have storytelling and the unresolved dialectic of story and reality—in Shining Knight #3, a certain character’s relation of the original Arthurian myth becomes even more interesting on a second reading, after her true identity is revealed. Elsewhere, narrative captions comment on the narrative with excerpts from an Arthurian protomyth; at the end of issue #2, in fact, Sir Justin responds directly in dialogue to the narration. Morrison infuses Shining Knight with myth but avoids tiresomely literal adherence to the monomyth and overwrought quotation from The Apocalypse of John.

What I Played

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Rockstar Games: It’s by far the largest and most complex of the Grand Theft Auto games, but it introduces the new concepts gradually as part of gameplay—in fact, most of the new concepts seem to be unavailable until the game introduces them, so there’s little chance of confusion. Each new GTA game invites new controversy; I haven’t heard of any controversy yet surrounding San Andreas, but its portrayal of gang banging in the poorest neighborhoods of a fictionalized Los Angeles is unlikely to get a pass. (In fact, Rose informs me, San Andreas is already in trouble.) I was skeptical of the decision to give the player-character in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City a name, personality and voice: too much emphasis on the story, which is superfluous and necessary only to give the gameplay a sensible context. San Andreas’s story has become even more, um, serious (relative only to Grand Theft Auto 3), and player-character Carl Johnson’s sad backstory (he returns to Los Santos at the beginning of the game because his mother has been murdered) is annoyingly incongruous with the hilariously frenetic gameplay. I haven’t decided yet if San Andreas is too big and too realistic, too focused on character and story, but it’s been fun for the fifteen or so hours I’ve played.

Edit 2005-07-06: Corrected my mispelling of Jim Cheung’s name.

Young Avengers, Allan Heinberg, Jim Cheung et al.

[This began as a post of brief thoughts on books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched in the last week (a new column-type thing I hope will get me posting at least once or twice a week), but my piece on Young Avengers #4 & #5 ended up so long that I decided I’d better put it in its own post.]

I almost wrote a response to James Meeley’s latest correspondence, but why bother? I will note that Heinberg diplomatically explains to him that Young Avengers is not an all-ages book. (Meeley, one imagines, objects also to teenagers reading about sex.) It is an intelligent book about and for teenagers. The art is pleasant; Cheung draws reasonably anatomically correct figures and costumes that look like real (albeit exceedingly tight) clothes. The story is pregnant with identity crisis both fantastic and realistic—the fuel of a good superhero story in David Fiore’s neo-existentialist romance mold, I think. The typical secret-identity confusion (and these kids’ secret identities are multilayered) is enhanced by the liminality of adolescence.* Iron Lad of the 30th century (ha ha) knows he’s going to grow up to be Kang the Conqueror (apparently a particularly infamous supervillain)—unless he refuses to do so, a decision which would irrevocably change not only his own 30th-century future but, thanks to Kang’s time traveling, the future of the 20th century, causing who knows what temporal chaos. Patriot is the grandson of Isiah Bradley, the black Captain America. Cassie Lang, Ant-Man’s daughter, thought she was normal, but it turns out she has superpowers too. Kate Bishop has no superpowers and isn’t even related to any superheroes, but she’s turning into one of those Batman-type characters who outdoes the superpowered but inexperienced—and, it must be said, inept—guys with pure human skill and cool-headedness. We don’t know much about Hulkling and the Asgardian yet.

Patriot (who, if he’s the kid from the end of Truth: Red, White & Black, is named Litigious) and Kate are the most interesting characters so far, I think. Patriot is a kid with a chip on his shoulder about Captain America’s role, however unknowing, in Isiah Bradley’s ruin, who finds himself with a power and responsibility he doesn’t want because of his heritage and who tries to compensate for his basic immaturity with a dubious attempt at macho bravado. Kate, on the other hand, is a girl who saves the day when the Young Avengers botch an attempt to rescue two hundred wedding guests in a church from hostage-takers; she decides to tag along with Cassie when Cassie goes on a search for the Young Avengers, and she grabs some superhero weapons and leaps into battle when Kang the Conqueror attacks. Their relationship begins with typical “no girls allowed on our superteam” posturing by Patriot, but it veers off in entertaining directions all its own when his attacks whither against Kate’s unassailable confidence. That their mundane adolescent sparring plays out in the midst of superhero battles heightens rather than diminishes the human drama. As Rose says (of Scott Pilgrim):

The reason I like superhero stories is because they have so little to do with the smashing and stomping that are supposed to be at their core, at least if done correctly. Instead they’re a heavy template for readers to fit themselves into a reality where certain narratives make sense and the readers can make sense of themselves. It’s not about the power fantasy but about both power and fantasy, which is something over-specific “slice of life” stories can miss.

Pretty much all the stories I’ve encountered in my life that I really enjoyed (as well as many that I didn’t enjoy) have at least a little bit of magic to undermine the alienating specificity of realism.† Kate and Patriot are very good. Iron Lad worries me, though, because Kang the Conqueror threatens constantly to overwhelm the story and turn it into a dumb fight between the Avengers and Kang. Battles and backstory minutiae don’t interest me in themselves, and they quickly bore me when they become detached from more entertaining storytelling concerns. That’s always the danger with a mainstream superhero story, that it turns into series of fight scenes and explorations of minor points of backstory, with the moral or philosophical problems of the story typically degenerating into inchoate muttering about heroism. An most infamous recent example is Identity Crisis, a story whose only reasons for existence are to explain apparent inconsistencies in some supervillains’ characterization and to engage in hand-wringing over superheroes’ inability to protect their loved ones (due mostly to ineptitude and negligence, as far as I can tell). The latter might have made for a good story,‡ but nothing ever comes of it except faux-tough-guy narration from Green Arrow about the tragedy of your wife getting killed because you’re never home and you forgot to secure your house against tiny people crawling through the phone lines.** So I worry that Young Avengers will degenerate into a big fight, with Iron Lad doing the right thing because he’s a hero (or doing the wrong thing because he’s destined to become a villain). Issue #5 remains entertaining, but it’s walking the fine line between a story with fighting and a story about the fighting. But I’m not very worried, because the last page (which genuinely surprised me) all but guarantees an entertaining conclusion for Iron Lad. Still, I never underestimate the corrupting influence of Marvel.

* A note on adolescent power fantasy and the mainstream of superhero comic books. To suggest that superhero stories are immature power fantasies is to commit careless synechdoche in considering genuinely (if not self-consciously) immature power fantasies as the totality of the genre in ignorance (sometimes real, sometimes feigned) of more sophisticated stories about power and fantasy and identity. (Moreover, they tend to ignore the potentially interesting parts of otherwise banal or objectionable stories, such as the metafictional weirdness of Crisis on Infinite Earths.) In truth, superhero stories are a subset of a larger genre of fantastic fiction that includes, in addition to obvious superhero stories: Scott Pilgrim; much of Grant Morrison’s work in comics, especially The Invisibles but also Kill Your Boyfriend and Sebastian O; Eightball #23 (”The Death-Ray”); Dune; Wings of Desire; Joan of Arcadia. Perhaps I shouldn’t call it a genre; it’s not a coherent body of works like, say, film noir. It’s a disparate collection of fantastic stories with potentially interesting thematic relations. Occasionally there is clear intertexuality, but the mainstream of superhero comics is largely insular and doesn’t invite comparison with anything outside. Those few superhero comics which escape the stultifying effect of that insularity may be more fruitfully considered, I now think, in the larger context than in the context of the superhero mainstream.

There are several common elements in these stories, viz.: confusion and ambiguity about identity, represented in the protagonist both by a fantastic secret or unknown identity and by more realistic identity crises; a problematic power relationship enhanced by the protagonist’s preternatural abilities; significant romantic and existentialist influence; stories about stories (e.g., flashbacks, frame stories, storyteller characters); rejection of naturalism in favor of artificiality, often through narratorial and authorial discussion of the story (instead of remaining unobtrusive to assist ‘willing suspension of disbelief’) and extensive use of allusion and intertexuality.

† This is a problematic statement, probably too much so. I should distinguish between, um, storytelling and journalism. No, I don’t like those terms, but I mean narratives that are about more than their specific events and narratives that are about only their specific events. When I write story, I mean the former class of narrative. The latter kind is not a lesser art; the only lesser art is an attempt to create the former class of narrative using only the tools of the latter.

Needless to say, the nature of the magic used in service of stories has a profound effect. The superpowers and secret identities in Young Avengers encourage one kind of story, and the ubiquitous blue tv glow and mysterious guy who paints “Ghost World” graffiti in Ghost World encourage an entirely different kind. Obviously, I don’t consider ‘magic’ necessarily to be actual magic; I consider ‘magic’ to encompass any non-realistic storytelling device. I shan’t presume to guess how other people read, but I wouldn’t be surprised if even the strictest adherent of realism could find the realism-undermining magic in a beloved story or, failing that, recognize that the ’story’ in fact belongs to the second class of narrative mentioned above.

‡ E.g., Grant Morrison’s Animal Man.

** Not all such stories are bad—1960s DC comic books abound with five-page stories explaining how Superman used to hang out with Jay Garrick even though Jay Garrick is a fictional comic-book character in 1960s continuity (there’s a second Earth with Jay Garrick and a second Superman, which emits psychic radiation or something into the minds of comic-book writers) and why nobody realizes Clark Kent is Superman (Superman unwittingly transmits hypnotic disguise rays to people around him). Plenty of comic-book readers love stuff, obviously, so good for them. Identity Crisis’s crime is taking up seven long issues and being aesthetically offensive and dumb.

I’ve been hoping to post something substantive but now that I’m peering out from under the edge of a multi-day migraine, I’ll be shuffling back to bed as soon as I can. So instead of substance, I can give vague impressions.

Greg Burgas had some thoughts about why you don’t see more Christians in superhero comics (one of the answers being because you don’t look hard enough) and while I didn’t think there was too much going on there beyond the anecdote-swapping, it reminded me that I had written about portrayals of Muslim women in mainstream comics a few months ago. Both posts have plenty of activity in the comments, too, if you’re not about to retreat to bed and are looking to kill some time reading.

Since I wrote that in February, Vimanarama has ended, and I should really update my thoughts on how it dealt with faith in both religious and secular or personal terms. I found it both satisfying and disappointing; a three-issue story is seldom enough for me these days. I’m not sure I have much more to say now. However, there clearly is more to say about Dust of New X-Men, a book I’m not currently reading in either its Hellions miniseries or Mutant Academy X formats. Steven went to buy comics today and returned to tell me I absolutely had to look at the cover of Hellions #2, but he didn’t buy us a copy. Apparently the premise is that in this issue Dust has the option of making one wish that can change her life forever, and I’m not sure what to make of the suggestions the cover implies. I’m tempted now to buy the miniseries just to find out what’s going on with her, whether she now considers her modesty a confining limitation or whether the artist can only conceive of Muslim women as seductive harem girls in the Orientalist tradition (and I hope not, since he’s the interior artist as well) or really what’s going on here. I was interested in her story because I like teenage stories about body issues, especially on feminist terms. I’m interested in smart analysis of the contrary pulls to living in an attractive body versus being just one of the guys or a brain in a vat, what it means to be taken seriously as a person and a woman. On the off chance that this is what’s going on here, I may well have a look.

I thought I had more to say, but if I can’t remember, that must mean it’s time to quit.

I’m still on the injured list, with my right arm sort of swollen and sore from today’s NCV and EMG, but when I couldn’t sleep last night I read Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, the second volume in Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series and because this was a gift from the author, I feel compelled to write something lousy about a fun book in hopes that I’ll feel more inclined to say something fun later. I read it twice and noticed all sorts of interesting connections on my second time through, so I’m hoping I’ll have a second post about some of those later this week.

And this is indeed a fun book. It picks up with the craziness from the end of Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life and just gets crazier. Ramona can still show up in Scott’s dreams (and seriously, that would be the end of the relationship for me; I’m surprised I can comfortably share an apartment with Steven, but he manages to get around my privacy barriers) and there are other dreamers too and more video-game action, not to mention melodramatic coincidences and moments of realization. We get some background on Scott’s high school days, a secret origin of sorts. And when I talked last year about how the first volume made me regain some faith in comics, this year and this volume have brought me back to and beyond superheroes. I know I’ve argued before that even Joan of Arcadia is a story about superheroes, and I’m realizing that I defended superhero comics in the past for things they could do well, but I appreciate those things even more when they’re done without spandex or breast implants. And that’s just what’s going on in Scott Pilgrim’s life, from fighting to costume and hairstyle changes to interpersonal drama, superhero stuff.

The reason I like superhero stories is because they have so little to do with the smashing and stomping that are supposed to be at their core, at least if done correctly. Instead they’re a heavy template for readers to fit themselves into a reality where certain narratives make sense and the readers can make sense of themselves. It’s not about the power fantasy but about both power and fantasy, which is something over-specific “slice of life” stories can miss. In slicing skewed lives from a slightly off reality, Scott Pilgrim manages to avoid being a dullsville story about an endearingly scatter-brained slacker who can’t bother to get a job or commit to a real and healthy relationship by instead being a story that blows up the drama of the mundane so that it looks the way it feels. Scott’s heartbroken ex-girlfriend Knives Chau (17 years old!) doesn’t just get a new look to feel better about herself post-breakup but makes herself an obsessed avenging angel able to play out the fantasies many feel after a first rejection. Sitting on a rug eating garlic bread is a t????te-????-t????te dinner more romantic than a more traditional setup. Casual contact from a lost love can leave even a hero decimated. Romantic mistakes characters make play out in their lives again and again like the returns of villains who in a more standard superhero story would be burly guys or femmes fatales rather than plain old bad habits and bad choices and things going around and coming around.

And honestly I was a tiny bit worried about what direction this book would take, although I expected the humor and the lovely art. I don’t like stalker romances; they’re creepy in general and hit too close to home. And yet Scott’s relationship with Ramona is able to blossom into something real because the world around it, the league of evil ex-boyfriends, is so unrealistic that “normal” reactions or behaviors don’t enter into it at all and none of this bothers me. It’s the romantic version of cartoon violence, although the pain is palpable (and so is the thrill). But love is scarily full of possibilities, and I did basically love Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life. But I enjoyed its successor, too, and I remain charmed and excited. Last night I would have told you that I still prefer the first book, the mixture of inanity and wackiness, but tonight I was leaning toward the second. It may just be that I can’t really choose or separate them. And maybe on a larger scale separation just isn’t the point. Dreams and video games and real life are hopelessly muddled in this tale, as big bosses steal girls and vanquished foes leave only coins behind them. One thing flows into another, and while there’s some game physics going on, it’s not really clear if this is dream logic or life logic underlying the emotional narrative. I’m certainly still a fan, a Scottaholic as my little pal Knives would say, and If I can’t sleep tonight I’ll be reading again (though really I’d rather be dreaming myself).