Eight notes, containing fifty-two thoughts, on the occasion
of my favorite anarchist DC Comics writer releasing the first issue of his
latest multiple-universes epic.
Grant Morrison:
1. Comics writer Morrison likes to toy with his characters’
conceptions of reality and is a vegetarian on animal-welfare principles (thus
he might have liked the TV show Wilfred,
judging by Sonny
Bunch's review).
2. Part of the reason this entry is long is that I was
avoiding blogging, tweeting, and Facing for a week, and this is what happens
when I save it up. It’s not just me, though: cyber-addiction is now trans-species (which might trouble
Morrison): Emily Zanotti Skyles, fascinatingly, notes that her cat Fat George
gets huffy and stomps around mad if she takes away the iPad on which she
sometimes lets him watch birds.
3. But to return to the main topic: the first issue of the
nine-issue, Morrison-written miniseries The
Multiversity from DC Comics came out yesterday, featuring numerous
familiar-yet-surreal characters amidst a multiversal war, including talking
rabbit Capt. Carrot and an evil giant eyeball reminiscent of the villains
Brother Eye and Mickey Eye (used by Morrison in past stories) and, probably-coincidentally,
reminiscent as well of the Marvel Comics villain the Orb (who recently stole
the secrets of that company’s multiverse in its
biggest current miniseries).
At the heart of the conflict set up in the first issue is
the last living Monitor of the multiverse, Nix Uotan (which presumably
translates roughly as Nothing-Father, as opposed to Odin the All-Father), who
is torn between the assembled forces of good and evil. In the end, though, I
suspect we the readers will become the real Monitors, in keeping with
Morrison’s usual penchant for metafiction.
4. Morrison is a rather Michael-Moorcock-like anarchist: loving
diverse worlds, characters, and aspects of personality because he finds in the
resulting ironies pockets of freedom.
And given how rapidly media is accumulating layers of irony
and self-referentiality these days, especially online, one has to wonder if
there’s an irony-oriented equivalent of the tech-oriented Singularity on the
horizon, a point past which no one will have the slightest idea whether anyone
else is serious about anything.
5. Morrison is also fond of magic and so might like this video of a magician
taunting a cop.
6. He would likely greatly appreciate the fact that a
real-world Washington Post article
about Ferguson (last I checked) inappropriately
capitalizes “Watchmen.” Apparently, another anarchist comics writer, Alan
Moore, has successfully blended his work in the popular mind with the Juvenal
saying. Let none call comics juvenile.
7. Even Wired is
writing about Multiversity, likening it
to the multiple-worlds interpretation of quantum theory (h/t Jackie).
8. Here are six
pages of the story you can read yourself (or at least try to comprehend,
for those not steeped in weird comics already).
9. If nothing else, the miniseries will leave us with
Morrison’s amusingly complex-and-nerdy new map
of the Multiverse. There’s at least one Stan Lee-influenced Earth over on
the dark side of the multiverse and the very Jack Kirby-influenced Earth 51
over on the light side, interestingly.
The most interesting innovation in Morrison’s very faithful
map, though, may be placing all the pagan gods’ homes on neighboring mountain
peaks in a place called Skyland and opposing it to an Underworld that also goes
by the (Kryptonian) name the Phantom Zone, which like so many Morrison
innovations makes a great deal of sense even from a very traditionalist
perspective.
While we’re at it, I think they could make real historical sense
of the term “Fourth World” for Kirby’s New Gods characters once and for all by
declaring the local spirits of animist faiths the First World, the pagan
pantheons the Second, the God of monotheism the Third, and treating Kirby’s
Fourth World characters as the troubled, more tech-oriented neophyte gods born
of the Industrial Era’s turn away from Christianity and similar faiths. But,
hey, I don’t write these things (often).
Other Voices:
10. Despite their slight creative similarities, I don’t know
what Morrison thinks of departed manic-trickster demigod Robin Williams...
11. ...but I suspect he’d appreciate the metafictional fact
that
Williams is being turned into an ongoing character in the virtual reality
that is World of Warcraft (and he might share my vague sense that there was
something slightly immoral about that notorious raid on a funeral procession --
inspired by a real-world death -- that was once carried out in WoW by, uh,
trolls).
12. Neither Morrison nor Williams, by the way, should be
considered crazy in the way that, say, anti-Semite
Michael Jackson seems to have been (not that Jacko was the world's only
anti-Semite, as countless ugly actions in recent days have shown).
13. And Morrison stands firmly within a proud tradition even
when writing his strangest comics tales, helped
by writers of the past.
14. Speaking of time periods, I may wait until they
inevitably collect Multiversity into
a likely two-volume anthology a year hence before reading the whole thing, but
I can start the enthusiasm now.
Many Roads to War/Burbank:
15. By mid-2015, it appears all ten of the following comics
plotlines, not just The Multiversity,
may lead to a two-month “Darkseid War,” with DC Comics’ move to Burbank
smoothed by a forty-issue melee between different versions of their characters
(and the end of DC’s “New 52” version of fictional reality perhaps? or at least
of that increasingly-dated label? followed by something even more closely
hewing to the increasingly lucrative movie/TV versions of their characters,
perhaps?).
16. Robin has been partially resurrected with help from the
Kirby-created evil world of Apokolips, home to the tyrant god Darkseid (in Batman and Robin).
17. Darkseid’s apparent daughter, the chaos goddess Kaiyo,
toys with the Supermen of multiple Earths (in Batman/Superman).
18. The New Gods are at war with the Lantern Corps (in the
multiple Green Lantern series).
19. Kirby’s Infinity
Man and the Forever People purportedly face a big threat to the multiverse
themselves (in their brand-new ongoing series, already the lowest-selling of
all of DC’s core fifty-two titles, “despite” being written by the editor in
charge of it all, Dan Didio, the guy who years ago thought it would be funny to
make Superboy a building super -- get it?! -- and now apparently thinks it’s
funny to make the villainous Dr. Scuba an apartment complex pool cleaner).
20. Darkseid is reconquering the homeworld of Doctor Fate
and other mid-century-style heroes (in the pages of Earth 2).
21. That conflict was presaged by Apokoliptian incursions
during the youth of Huntress and Power Girl (as soon to be seen in Worlds’ Finest).
22. The conflict may in turn spill over onto -- and piss off
-- other Earths such as the main one in DC’s multiverse, Earth-0 (in Earth 2: Worlds' End).
23. And that leaves Earth-0 ripe for conquest by the
mechanical Kirby villain Brother Eye fives years in the future (in the pages of
New 52: Futures End).
24. None of which may affect Morrison’s plans one bit but is
surely meant to resonate with them (even if only outside the pages of The Multiversity, in comics like Justice League, in which it’s hinted the Anti-Monitor will soon attack both Alexander Luthor Jr. and Darkseid).
Other Comics:
25. I hope none of that will turn into a trainwreck, but if
for some perverse reason you’d like to see time travel and multiple realities
handled very badly and rendered hopelessly confusing, check out Superboy #34, the final issue of that
series.
26. The character Vibe’s solo series was supposed to be an
important window on the multiverse, but that got canceled just as the character
was poised to appear on TV in the upcoming Flash
show -- leading to him being rather perfunctorily and perhaps angrily
deep-sixed in an offhand line of dialogue by writer and DC co-publisher Geoff
Johns (if you ask me, there’s an office politics story there somewhere).
27. Vibe was also meant to become a tie to Detroit by Michigan-raised
Johns. Alas.
28. Detroit has suffered far greater losses than the
cancelation of Vibe, though, as was
made clear to me and other gathered writers at an August 12 presentation on the
economic situation there, organized by Deroy Murdock and the Atlas Foundation.
Detroit could undeniably use a superhero, or at least freer markets.
29. I’ll sketch only one connection between superheroes and
real-world politics for the remainder of my fifty-two points in this blog
entry, but remember you can always find plenty of that sort of thing over at http://LibertyIslandMag.com.
Worlds of Ambiguity:
30. In real quantum mechanics news, it sounds as though an
amazing French discovery from 2011 (h/t Charles Blake) -- that something really
can be a particle and a wave at the same time through the surprisingly
classical means of being such a steady wave that it has a stable “droplet” at
its head -- may end up being something of a buzzkill to some. The universe may
adhere to common sense after all without having any multiple worlds or
inherently fuzzy edges.
31. I would still advise seeing the documentary Particle Fever, though, which depicts
the scientists who worked to bring CERN’s Large Hadron Collider online --
and ends on a knife-edge of uncertainty about whether new particle discoveries
lend greater credence to the existence of a multiverse or a universe filled
with dark matter.
32. Two of the producers, Gerry Ohrstrom and Thomas Campbell
Jackson, are friends of mine and also libertarians, so leftists -- some of whom
think the Koch Brothers like dinosaur exhibits just because dinosaurs are big
and mean and could bite prey -- should start puzzling out why evil libertarians
also like physics. I’m sure they’ll think of something nefarious, like us wanting
to drop fission weapons on the poor or something.
The left has no more shame and not even a residual fondness
for logic, it lately seems. Give them any random set of facts or events, even
murders committed by government, and they will find a tortuous way to blame
liberty advocates for the disaster instead of government. They seem to pride
themselves on how bendy their logic is lately, especially if it produces
click-bait headlines in the likes of Salon.
33. Whether in politics or physics, it seems we are often
left poised between competing plausible theories. Skeptic though I am by
methodology, I’m not even so sure I can dismiss ancient tales of giants anymore
-- especially since some
of them don’t seem to be all that ancient.
34. And as is embarrassingly obvious, I’ve taken a somewhat
more agnostic attitude toward UFO claims in recent years than in my prior three
decades (only a bit, but can you blame me for wondering how weird the world might be with many people in Houston claiming to see -- and apparently photographing --
a ring of hovering lights, and more mundane yet shocking things happening like still-living
plankton making
its way on wind currents all the way up to the International Space Station?).
This Skeptic article from a few
years ago (lest I appear to have forgotten my usual loyalties) is really
quite marvelously balanced in summing up the whole complicated UFO issue, I
think, despite one or two missteps (scroll down to the big “UFO” headline).
35. And the chronic ambivalence most people feel about rival
political theories can only be
exacerbated by things like this Duck
Enlightenment Twitter feed, which seem to both promote and parody a given
philosophy -- in this case the “Dark Enlightenment” view adopted by some
disgruntled ex-libertarians who’ve turned to retrograde things like monarchism
and racism.
And in most moods I like the diversity of political
philosophies in the world, so long as they are generally trending toward
liberty: I was tempted years ago (even before widespread Net use speeded up the
creation of niche ideologies) to write sci-fi in which the same underlying philosophy looked radically different on
different worlds -- sometimes liberal, sometimes anarchist, sometimes conservative
-- but was always pro-liberty in the end, if you catch my (Straussian?) drift.
Advances in Sci-Fi:
36. The sci-fi novel The
Cassini Division, which I mentioned
briefly before, has something of that ideologically-playful spirit,
essentially pitting against each other three versions of humankind who believe
in anarcho-communism, individualist anarchism, and anarcho-capitalism, with big
consequences for their technology and psyches.
37. A less political -- but very quantum-mechanical --
sci-fi notion I’ve had is someday using the multiple-worlds interpretation
(quickly before it goes out of fashion) to explain why certain cryptids and
other phenomena supposedly drift into our world from time to time to be
glimpsed only fleetingly: Perhaps there is a timeline in which ape-men still
roam the Pacific Northwest, another with plesiosaurs in Scotland, another with
your dead relatives in it, another with super-evolved saucer men, and so on. We’ll
keep that on the back burner for now.
38. Speaking of mystical explanations, Marvel Studios reportedly
doing no more origin stories on film
is good news, I think, and bodes well for Doctor
Strange in two years. Let’s move these narratives forward (as DC appears to be doing in Batman v Superman, since Batman will reportedly be depicted as
a middle-aged hero returning to the fight).
39. In other big movie news, what appear to be real photos
of Stormtrooper helmets from Star Wars VII have appeared online, but if we
aren’t sure whether those are real...
40. ...this
amazing real picture from back in the days of Return of the Jedi (h/t Justin Shubow) will have to do.
41. I’m pleased to hear both the so-far-announced new Star
Wars Episode directors, J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson, are planning to emphasize
“practical effects” instead of computer graphics. I recall my depression during
the unengaging Gungan/Trade Federation droids battle of 1999 -- and people’s
subsequent (partial) relief at the solid, physical X-wing cockpit that cropped
up briefly in 2002 on the watery Cloners’ world.
Police Wars:
42. But remember, we don't need sci-fi to see stormtroopers
anymore. We live under the Empire,
pal, which means articles
like this (h/t Cathal Floinn) just might lead to a blending of
fight-the-power black militancy with conservative/libertarian fear of
government, at least for a moment -- or perhaps for decades to come.
43. Yet blogger Amanda Marcotte somehow drew an anti-libertarian message from recent
events in Ferguson, part of a big trend toward the left lying their asses off at
the drop of a hat about libertarianism. We must threaten them -- not to mention
threatening the execrable David Frum -- in a very profound way (with good
reason, let us hope).
Can you imagine going through life stupid enough to believe
that government -- which can’t handle relatively simple things like stopping
looters -- can handle nuanced things like co-running your business, molding art
and culture, or ending poverty?
44. But at least not all government employees are violent --
some are too fat for
violence (h/t R. Brent Mattis).
45. Real-life heroes include that woman shown in a recent New York Post photo gripping the thief
who attacked her until the cops could arrive -- yet the ever-more-psychotic
leftists found a way to make her the villain, with
the perverse Gawker running a piece saying we shouldn’t even believe in
arresting teenage thieves anymore (what a mindboggling piece of shit of a
human being Gawker writer Jordan Sargent must be).
Adding to our cultural pain, the thief’s mother, on cue,
reportedly said, “[The robbed woman] has her hands all over him...Why is she
touching him like that?...He’s a very good boy...He’s just been hanging out
with the wrong crowd.”
Would that Gawker understood the point I heard made in a
speech by Robert Bidinotto on one of my first trips to NYC, back in college: Let
a violent thief go, and you aren’t doing any favors for his future victims, nor
for the other kids in his neighborhood who learn that they can embark on lives
of crime without consequences.
46. And that subculture of criminality, really, is one huge
unspoken reason for over-militant places like Ferguson, the one reason the dominant
culture in the U.S. still dares not address, and without which it can get no
real handle on it all. Just
watch Jason Riley -- who can speak the truth because he’s black -- try to make
that point to white female liberal media stars. In short, yes, you really can have a fight
between barbarians and fascists, with
both sides wrong (it‘s quite common, really).
47. Yet in The
Multiversity, a black U.S. president is (literally) secretly Superman. So,
sure, let’s all celebrate diversity -- pardon me, multiversity -- one more
time, but let’s not pretend doing that is what makes everything OK, all right, Progressives? Ritually slaying the evil racism monster over and over again --
or blaming everything on poverty as Kareem Abdul-Jabar did in a column -- will
eventually be seen as shallow responses.
Unity/Disunity:
48. But hey, lest I sound like I’m not engaged in outreach,
now Facebook’s count awards me four
non-existent friends, totally making up for the three real people who unfriended me around the time of my just-ended week
off.
I will withdraw further in a few weeks and may emerge around
the time the Multiversity trade paperback comes
out in 2015, not that I expect the world to be saner then, but I could use some
time to more quietly contemplate how best
to sanely address an insane world. I will endeavor to emerge a better man if
I lay low for a bit, I promise.
49. And I hope I emerge more syncretic and peacemaking (many
people, obviously, struggle with their urge to fight -- but I swear I always secretly
crave peace even in the midst of political arguments and should start saying so
more openly, even in a world where motivated mishearing is the norm and the
rewards for snark and conflict immense). Conflict-avoidance looks more
appealing the more that articles
like this become necessary (h/t Jesse Forgione and, once more, the lovely
Jackie).
50. Calm, mellow conflict-resolution thinking could
certainly be put to good use on the Russians, Palestinians, Syrians, ISISes,
Iranians, ebolans, Mexicans, and Fergusonians, not to mention half the people online...
51. I for one somehow got placed on -- and booted from -- both
an anarcho-capitalist transhumanist Facebook page (not so unlike something from
The Cassini Division) and an unrelated UFO page during my week
off from Facebook. Ever-churning drama.
52. If I emerge from a period offline with an uplifting
vision of how to help people get along, let us hope it is as inspiring as the
video I linked to on that AnCapTransHu page, Rick Springfield’s highly
relevant “Human Touch,” which I notice is supposed to take place in the
futuristic year 2016. (It has hints of rock, liberty, science, and fantasy -- ever
the inescapable tetrad for me; I am a tetraditionalist, you might say.)
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