Fight Every Fight Like You Can Win (Love Is Everything. Risk Your Life to Elope!!)

First things first: this memo talks about spoilers for the episode of “Dirty Pair,” Love Is Everything. Risk Your Life to Elope!! As such, it’s recommended that you watch the show before you read this memo. Sadly, there are no legal ways of watching the series as the numerous video-sharing sites that typically showcase anime legally (such as Hulu and Chrunchroll) do not have the series on their sites for free (here’s the link to the YouTube page with the episode, available if you pay $16.99 for the season pass, though the OVAs and films are available on YouTube for free). As such, either buy the DVDs (which are surprisingly still in stock) or watch it on extra legal video sharing sites like KissAnime (episode 7, if your source lacks the name).

Now that that’s out of the way, we should perhaps begin with an article by Cheryl Morgan entitled “The Future of Gender Is the Present for Trans* Characters in SciFi Novels.” In this article, Morgan talks about the history of trans* people in both the real world and in fictional ones. She talks about how the majority of genre fiction tends to have issues when it comes to dealing with people of alternative gender performance ranging from keeping them within stereotypes of gender performance (Steel Beach), outright disgust at the very concept (The Transexual Empire), and relatively decent portrayals (Triton). The article ends optimistically, with a desire to see what new stories might come. However, the works Morgan cites are entirely from western cultures, what about the works from Eastern Cultures about trans* people?

Enter “Dirty Pair.” “Dirty Pair” began as a series of Hard Sci-Fi short stories in various Japanese magazines written by Haruka Takachiho. The series chronicles the adventures of a pair of trouble consultants (basically space cops) by the names of Kei and Yuri who go under the name “The Lovely Angels.” However, because they are so good at their jobs that they can find a secret arms deal while searching for a missing cat then accidentally blow up the entire government because they were complicit in this cruel and illegal system, they are given the disparaging nickname of “The Dirty Pair.” Kei, the narrator of the stories, talks very much like the narrator of Jelani Wilson’s 22XX: One-Shot, where the narrator is preoccupied with thoughts of a significant other. But where Wilson’s Sasha Sangare is very much in line with the heteronormative relationship of pining for the girl next door, Takachiho’s Kei is simultaneously hitting on you the reader (regardless of what your gender is) while also talking about how much she most assuredly doesn’t want to make sweet passionate love to Yuri. The characterization of the Lovely Angels is typically read as being a Tomboy/Girly Girl dynamic, however if you pay attention you’ll notice that’s actually a performance done by the characters for the benefit of the audience (Yuri has a very verbose use of French and Kei can get a bit focused in physical appearance). The stories deal with themes of performativity, karma, and big as all fuck explosions. Also, they have a pet cat named Mughi who is from a species of hyper intelligent cats from the short story Black Destroyer. In short, it’s the greatest Star Trek series ever made. (No, I am not explaining that. There are some rabbit holes one should dive into without assistance.)

A few years after the first of the novels for the series was released, Sunrise began work on two OVAs (one of which is amazing, but has an unnecessary rape scene and the other is Project Eden, which is the kind of film that should one should only watch the first 20 minutes of and ignore the rest) and a 25 episode series. For the seventh episode of that series, we have Love Is Everything. Risk Your Life to Elope!!

Rather than go through the story shot for shot, as the episode is not the kind that is based on its visuals (though there are some interesting ones), I’ll give the base outline. Clicky Goldjeff (because Japan), son of an intergalactic cruse line mogul, was kidnapped on the day of his wedding to several women (because Japan (also holy shit, the wedding. He is literally being chained and dragged to the alter by the women out of a skyscraper sized cake while men dressed like Playboy bunnies hand out drinks to the rich people watching)) by a woman named Joanca. Allegedly, she kidnapped him for a large sum of money, which the Lovely Angels are meant to deliver. They hate this case because it’s a really crap case where everyone is crap both to each other and in general. Clicky’s a sycophant, Joanca’s a user out only for herself and a perpetual liar, and the elder Goldjeff is misogynistic dick head. There’s no one likeable.

And then, the penny drops. As it turns out, Joanca and Clicky genuinely love each other and want to be with one another, much to the dismay of the elder Goldjeff. The mogul sates his reasoning quite plainly: Joanca’s a transwoman. This is immediately followed by our protagonists siding with Joanca and Clicky, citing that 1/10 people in the universe identify as trans* and such viewpoints are “old fashioned.” Even the elder Goldjeff respects the gender identity of Joanca, never misgenders her, and yet is still a reactionary because she “used to be a man.” The show, which need I remind you came out in 1985, just showed a utopian future where even the reactionaries accept all gender identities. Better than Star Trek!

Morgan ends her article with the question as to whether or not trans* people will even be a thing in the future, to which “Dirty Pair” answers, “Yes. Yes you will still exist. You will still matter. And you will still be as beautiful as you are now. Yes, there will still be those who hate and fear what they almost understand, but so long as you are loved, and you are indeed loved even if you can’t feel it on your arms, you can soar through the sky like an angel.”

Discussion Question:

-I mentioned briefly that the show deals in the themes of performativity. Kei dons on disguises of alternate gender types including flower girls, black hatted cowboys, and bartender at a dingy bar where you’re more likely to get stabbed in the back than anything else. Indeed, the episode in question explores the ways in which people appear to one another, with several characters acting as a surface level interpretation of other characters and showing specific aspects of themselves to others. How do these themes of performativity tie into the way Dirty Pair handles gender? 

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We Secede From Entropy and the Myth of a Noble Past (Memo 2)

The book opens with Revolution Shuffle by Bao Phi, which tells the story of a nameless duo of Vietnamese Americans living in a zombie apocalypse who decide that the racist and oppressive government that rose out of the ashes of the apocalypse is not that great and probably should be torn down. Tananarive Due’s The Only Lasting Truth is the final entry of Octavia’s Brood and a transcript of a lecture about the work of Octavia Butler, her career as a writer, and how the theme of change permeates her work. And finally Outro as written by Adrienne Maree Brown closes out the book with a summation of the themes and ideas that appeal to Brown in regards to Visionary Fiction. In short, all three of these entries are tied into the concept of change and its relation to the world they are told in.

Unlike with the previous memo, this selection of short pieces has a thoroughly optimistic outlook. Although that might be due to the way I read the concept of change as my personal philosophical worldview is tied directly with the inevitability and necessity of change. We, as a species (and, indeed, all species), are built on change simply due to our need to move and grow, be it because we are acted upon by other forces or of our own volition. If I were to answer Sarah Hannah Gòmez’s rhetorical question I used in the previous memo of “Where are all the people of color in dystopias” using the selections included in this memo, the answer this time would be “In the margins, working diligently to free themselves and others from oppression and burn the system that opts to demonize them instead of fixing systemic problems.”

Indeed, that’s essentially the thematic through line of Revolution Shuffle to the point where it essentially becomes the explicit plot with lines like “And so the government classified it as a terrorist act, without evidence, without even an idea of what caused it” (10) and “Zombies. Brown people. On any given day, the armed guards were prepared to shoot either.” (8) This causes the metaphor the genre typically provides of “…the Other/alien [in] the form of the racial or cultural Other, from Africans, to indigenous populations, to the Roma, to die Gastarbeiter, to women, to the LGBTQ communities” (Calvin, 3) to blur into becoming what it represents.

Typically within zombie narratives, the horde is meant to represent the aspect of society that is causing ruination ranging from generic “Barbarians at the gates of Rome” used in Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead, to the specific “Consumerism” as is the case in George A. Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” and, most fittingly, the “Black People” usage of the zombie archetype as seen in D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation”. Despite the text explicitly stating that the majority of the zombies were once living white people, the story explores the anxieties of society typically seen within the context of the zombie genre seen in the Griffith example, though obviously with a less racist ideology. The story shows that, when people are desperate for a scapegoat, they will always go for whatever fits within their worldview, no matter how baseless the claim is. And, for a lot of people, even myself at times, this includes people who look different.

However, more the optimistic (and thematically tied to the theme of change) take on the genre that Revolution Shuffle uses comes in the form of the nameless protagonists of the piece. For they take on the role of the most generic of zombie narratives: “Barbarians at the gates of Rome.” This is a phrase I have heard thrown around whenever someone wants to defend the barbaric actions of countless Empires, especially the European ones, in that they had to be cruel monsters who subjugated the lesser races, for there were barbarians at the gate. This is naturally horseshit, as the way Empires work hinges upon expansion that displaces the indigenous cultures that live in the surrounding area that we call barbarians. In some cases, we as culture (because America, despite its claims of revolution, was founded upon the blood of Empires and natives) have imprisoned and enslaved countless “lesser people” for “their own good” so they might not “join the barbarians” with the obvious example being the Japanese Interment Camps that Phi was no doubt thinking of when creating his short story. As such, the nameless duo replies to this worldview with “Fine, we’ll be the barbarians at your Empire’s gates. And we’re gonna tear them down.”

The ending lines of the story imply that this act of youthful rebellion will “…turn into something like a revolution.” (14) And it is this concept of revolution that is one of many types of change explored within the text. For what is revolution, if not a massive change heaped upon a society? Indeed, many have argued that the apocalypse is simply what a revolution looks like from the perspective of those who have the most to lose in the face of this. Maybe that’s why the most generic of zombie apocalypse narratives has them as Barbarians at the gates of Rome.

Moving on, The Only Lasting Truth explores the work of noted author Octavia Butler, and in particular the novel Parable of the Sower. In it, the lead character of the novel, Lauren Olamina’s core belief system hinges on a singular concept: “…the only lasting truth is change.” (262) The full text of the belief talks about how we are all inevitably changed both by ourselves and the world around us, whom we in turn change. “Attitudes are in need of change to prevent the dystopia in our book, moving away from the class system—again, the hierarchy—of rich, poor, haves, and have nots” (268) which is essentially my worldview written down by someone else years before I even conceived of it. For as a utopian, I believe that for a utopia to avoid becoming dystopic, it needs to have people question the way things are, so as to prevent a system where, say, a single child spends their entire life suffering to teach the “perfect” society that there is such a thing as pain (Le Guin, 3). A society that refuses to change is a dystopia. However, contextually speaking, this philosophy that gives the speech its title first appears within the speech after Due relates to us that Octavia Butler is dead.

Throughout the memo, I have talked about the positive aspects of change and the ways in which it can benefit us in the future. However, I am aware that there are some negative connotations with the concept, from the degradation of the human body to the rise of Fascism in Democratic societies. The speech itself mentions a bit of skepticism on the part of Butler, by featuring a selection of Parable of the Sower in which two of the characters discuss the implications of change being worshiped as a God (269-270). But at the same time, there’s an importance to the concept of change, as Due argues Parable of the Sower “…quite literally sets out to change the world by forcing the readers to consider what a powerful force change really is.” (267) But then, isn’t that the power of art: to change people?

That’s at least what Brown seems to argue in Outro. When she talks about the way in which stories can teach us how to fight in this cruel world we find ourselves in, Brown specifically highlights Parable of the Sower. She talks about how Olamina, with only “… her bag, her knowledge, and her dreams” was able to create a new community of her own that “…[adapt] constantly to ever-changing conditions. Exploring these and other examples of Butler’s work—in addition to studying other aspects of emergence—creates a solid foundation for changing the way we strategize on our path to justice.” (280)

In the end, change is a complicated idea. It is both a concept that can be used for good and for ill. It is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We can refuse to bend the knee to the ever-crashing wave of fascism. We can inspire those who come after us with a song in our hearts and a fury in our eyes. And we can change the world with something as simple and basic as an idea. For we are a machine that kills fascists with love, kindness, and a willingness to admit we need to change.

Discussion Questions:

-Throughout this memo, I have discussed the concept of change as a broad concept encompassing topics from the heat death of the universe to basic movement. However, many have argued that a definition of change that is applicable to the world at large is necessarily based around social constructs. Others, like Octavia Butler, have argued that change is based in the very nature of the universe itself. Do you agree with either of these claims, and if not, what aspect of change would you hinge it off of?

-In the final paragraph of the memo, I argue that the act of change is a method in which we can fight off the coming threat of fascism, as the core of fascist ideologies is a desire for things to remain the way they are or go back to how they used to be. However, I also argued that the very threat of fascism is in and of itself an act of change within a social environment as it is a novum upon a democratic society. How does this seemingly paradoxical way of thinking work out as a coherent thought, if it even does? Is change an inherently forward moving concept?

-Not brought up directly within the memo proper, but still conceptually important, is a quote from Due’s article: “Yet we hope that the work we create is the planting of a seed. And most of the seeds we plant will have no impact beyond entertainment—if that. But one, perhaps one, might actually help change the world.” (267) How do you respond to this quote after reading the memo before you? Do you find it to be overall an optimistic outlook? I can’t answer it for you. Interpretation, after all, necessitates changing a text’s meaning from mere letters and into something more.

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My Legion Of Multiracial Babies Will Be Intersectional As Fuck (Memo 1)

So as I said in the last post, this blog is going to be split up into Acts. I did this mostly because things came up that required me to take a long break in between the Batman RIP entry and the next one. So that there's still content in between the weeks, I'm going to post a series of Memos I wrote for a Science Fiction and Feminism course I took last spring. The first two look at various short pieces from Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements (which can be purchased here). While the third looks at something a lot of you should be familiar with... one of the blog's ghosts, if you will. Fearful Symmetry will return in 2018. You can support me on Patreon here. Thank you for indulging me this far, and I hope you see this through with me.

22XX: One-Shot by Jelani Wilson is a short story about Sasha Sangare’s attempt at escaping from The Institute after the military decides his nanotechnological experiments would be extremely effective in a military context while thinking of the genius next door he never said “I love you” to. The excerpt from Levar Burton’s Aftermath deals with Dr. Rene Reynolds, a scientist working on a neural net project that could save countless lives, being kidnapped by a group of people known as “Skinners” who seemingly wish to take her dark skin and use it to prevent a bunch of rich people from getting skin cancer. Finally, “Star Wars and the American Imagination” by Mumia Abu-Jamal is an essay about the political context and subsequent implications of the original Star Wars films. Suffice it to say, none of these works paints a bright picture about the future and our place within it, though Abu-Jamal’s essay is more about our present than what is to come.

It would be extremely easy to take this memo in a pessimistic direction, highlighting how the marginalized will always be marginalized because society is structured to marginalize said groups. How, given these works, the answer to Sarah Hannah Gómez’s question “Where are the people of color in dystopias” is “We killed them all, and those who are left are being used as cattle to make us live longer because America is already a dystopic nightmare and most people don’t notice because the “important” people are all white so no one cares.” Indeed, there is some truth to that answer, as evidenced by the rise of Nazis to positions of power in both law enforcement (see Ferguson, MI) and politics (see President Bannon), but that isn’t what Gómez is asking about.

Her article explicitly rejects the common use of people of color to experience, for lack of a better term, “Black Suffering,” wherein the reader experiences “…a nearly white world with the usual Noble Savage and Magical Negro to guide and humanize the protagonist and ultimately sacrifice themselves for [the white protagonist]” (Gómez). Equally, Gómez rejects the other typical approach of science fiction to just simply cast the characters colorblind while still writing them as if they were white. So then, the question remains: what archetypes and stories can people of color live within the context of a science fiction dystopia.

Going in the order they’re presented in the book, 22XX: One Shot focuses on two characters: Sasha Sangare and his friend Herb. The narrative in which the characters reside is a pretty basic genre mash-up of “The dumb-dumb militaristic government wants to use our brains for smarts and will kill us for it” and “Nice guy can’t bring up the courage to say he loves the girl next door as she dates a mutual friend”. These narratives are reflected in how the characters are portrayed: Sasha is essentially a mad scientist, willing to test brand new experiments on himself, regardless of the danger. However, his positionality within the narrative, as demonstrated by his narration (written in the style of classical fan fiction in works such as Paula Smith’s underrated and misunderstood satire “A Trekkie’s Tale”, Tara Gilesbie’s infamous “My Immortal”, and Haruka Takachiho’s highly influential The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair that typically reveals more about the narrator/focal character than she would want it to) repeatedly, is that of the “romantic comedy lead”. Herb, meanwhile, is relegated to the role of “Generic Doctor Who Companion” (wherein the character exists to say “What’s that?” or “But that’s impossible!” before the clever person explains the plot to them) and never deviates from said role. Both of these roles and narratives are ones typically reserved for white people (in fact, if you exclude expanded universe material, only two people of color have played companions on Doctor Who), but at the same time, there are some problematic elements to them.

More directly seen is that the main focus of the narrative is that of a nice guy complaining about how “his” girl is going out with someone else, and he never shuts up about it, even in the life or death situation Sasha finds himself in. The short story, in turn, frames this mindset in a “boy shucks, ain’t I hopeless” mentality. This ignores the level of privilege such narrative situations typically have, as it assumes the male lead deserves to be with “his” girl without allowing the girl, Delia, to have a say in the matter (not that she gets any lines or even appears in the story to begin with). And given the genre mixing the short story is playing with, this can also lead to the narrative to be framed in terms of “Jock vs. Geek”, which has been a very problematic trope within the sci-fi community to the point where literal Nazis have co-opted segments of nerd culture by preying upon the implied assumption said mentality has of “I don’t play sports-ball, therefore I’m as oppressed as any other marginalized group” (Lovell). Fortunately, the short story doesn’t seem to be engaged with that narrative, and heartily subverts it by focusing more on the antagonistic corporal’s mechanical features over his physical prowess and, ironically, focusing on how compromised our lead is with the whole “mooning over the genius next door while in danger” aspect.

In the excerpt from Aftermath, we primarily follow the plight of Dr. Rene Reynolds. Now typically the narrative of a black woman literally being coveted by white people for her flesh would be problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which being an example of the “damsel in distress” trope, but the excerpt subverts this in a number of ways. For starters, for the majority of the excerpt, we are given the narrative primarily from the perspective of Dr. Reynolds and focused more on her intellectual interests than her kidnapping and torture. In addition to this, by the end of the excerpt, Reynolds turns out to be alive and well and is saved not by a white man, but by fellow person of color, Leon. "I know it's not the most feminist idea to be a woman in a tower wanting to be rescued,” actress Kerry Washington said of her role as Broomhilda in the movie Django Unchained, “but for a woman of color in this country, we've never been afforded that fairy tale because of how the black family was ripped apart [during slavery], I really saw the value of having a story that empowers the African American man to do something chivalrous for the African American woman, because that hasn't been an idea that has held women back in the culture — it's something we've never been allowed to dream about." (Sperling)

As for “Star Wars and the American Imagination”, we start to have some complications with this approach to the three texts. Most obviously, this is not a narrative set within a dystopian society; it’s not even a piece of fiction, but an essay exploring the political implications of the Star Wars franchise. However, the unspoken aspect of the essay is the implications of the Empire (who, need I remind you, are Imperialistic Space Nazis) presented within the Star Wars films as being a metaphor of what America is: the Empire is a dystopia. This would then make Mumia, whose first person account of his experiences and positionality with Star Wars open the essay, the protagonist of a dystopian story calling itself America. As such, it is telling that he focuses upon the past of America, claiming, “Americans, like any people, are subject to delusions” (256) in relation to the long and awful history of slavery and our willingness to ignore the evils that historical figures like Jefferson did while proclaiming themselves to be “rebels”.

This theme of rebelling is prevalent within the POC narratives presented within this selection of chapters. Each story presents different methods of the characters rebelling against their dystopic landscape, whether it’s by critiquing the claims of History, freeing the tortured marginalized slaves from the “progress” of “scientific research”, or simply escaping into a different genre entirely. This is also a typical narrative within dystopic fiction of the goodies rebelling (whether they are successful is up to the author), but then, the white protagonists of those stories seemed to be fine with the torture, subjugation, and humiliation of the marginalized before they themselves were targeted.

Discussion Questions:
 -What are some other stories featuring people of color that don’t rely on their relationship to a white -protagonist?
-Are there alternative forms of rebellion that a character could enact beyond escape, critique, or save and how can they be implemented into future stories?
-What are the roles of non-antagonistic white people within POC Sci-Fi stories?

Additional Works Cited
Sperling, Nicole. "'Django Unchained' Was More than a Role for Kerry Washington." Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, 31 Dec. 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2017.

There’s Only One Rule That I Know of, Babies— (The Basilisk Murders)

Relatable.

I never expected to write about Andrew Hickey so soon. I was sure I was going to get to him eventually, but I figured I’d have talked about him in the blog proper rather than in a spin off post. I suppose I should introduce him, if only for the readers who aren’t in the same blogging communities I swim in. Hickey is a science fiction critic whose work ranges from analyzing the unintentional implications of American comics by Scottish writers to exploring the historical importance of The Monkees to leaving various projects about Cerebus incomplete.

In regards to my personal history with the author, he was one of the first critics that made me rethink how I view fiction and the world around me. Given the blogging circles he walks through, as well as the book this post is about, one could argue he was my Red Pill into the world of postmodernist critics. Unfortunately for those invested in “rational” narratives, I somehow did not discover those other authors through him (especially irritating given the article Hickey wrote on sentient universes [an article I remember giving me an idea or two] directly links to one of those author’s blog). But that’s life for you: coherency was never an option.

Recently, he’s written some fiction works (primarily within the science fiction genre, though he has written a Sherlock Holmes pastiche focusing on Dr. Watson that I’ve heard good things about), which while not as good as his critical work, still have a level of quality to them. Indeed, there’s a sense that Hickey’s getting better book-by-book. And while I prefer his previous book (Destroyer), this remains the case with his most recent book, The Basilisk Murders.

Given the preamble I gave to this post, one would not be surprised to see me compare the book to Philip Sandifer’s upcoming (and brilliant) Neoreaction a Basilisk, as both books explore the same snake. However, while there would be humor in that, the books are radically different enough in genre, style, and worldview (Hickey is very much an optimist, while Sandifer [as he presents himself within the text] can be best described as the cynicism of someone who walks down the streets during a downpour unable to remain dry while occasionally pointing out houses on the street) that such a comparison would be tenuous at best.

No, the book The Basilisk Murders ought to be compared to is Warren Ellis’ Normal. Both are locked room mysteries based around a group of highly intelligent, highly unsociable, and slightly mad geniuses being trapped in the same place while a series of unexplained murders happen around them. The only person willing and able to solve the mystery is a person who isn’t the typical detective. There are differences between the works, most notably in the solutions to each of the mysteries. While Normal opts for a more science fiction answer (and a technology the Basilisk Murders offhandedly scoffs at), The Basilisk Murders opts for a more human killer.

It is this difference in solution that highlights the core theme of The Basilisk Murders. More than the jokes at the expense of mathematicians, the befuddlement at wanting to live forever in a computer, and the disgust at the racist rhetoric espoused by rational people, the book has one clear idea it wants to explore: how do you interact with other people? This perhaps most shown with the relation ship between Sarah, our narrator and protagonist, and her wife Jane. Recently, they’ve been having a fight and Sarah feels like her relationship has been falling apart. Being around these tech people has gotten her in the unhealthy mindset of acquisition. Additionally, her ex girlfriend is one of those people and Sarah’s beginning to contemplate if she was responsible for that relationship falling apart as well. I won’t spoil her conclusions on the matter; suffice it to say things aren’t as simple as a math formula.

Hickey’s prose is phenomenally readable, to the point where I’ve had to force myself to stop reading. The book’s wit works wonders, though dies down as the body count begins to rise (though it sadly uses up it’s best joke in the opening chapter). While not up to the standards of quality of his critical work (though Chapter 24 does get the book close to that point), it’s still a good read with its heart in the right place. For no one is an island and sometimes you just need to come in out of the rain.

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[Photo: Doom Patrol #19 by Grant Morrison and Richard Case]

The Potions Spreading Wide My Mind. (Batman R.I.P.)

“There are many things that can die besides the body—old habits, lifestyles, dead-end jobs, a lifeless relationship that may already feel dead. Maybe something has to die for a person to come back to life. The Tarot carries an inbuilt optimism, and the death of something in our lives does not have to leave us as a corpse. A powerful angel follows the Death card; Temperance can symbolize what is liberated when we allow what is old and worn to end. Angels, in fact, surround Death.”
-Rachel Pollack, The New Tarot Handbook

TW: Discussion of Suicide.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

Really? We’re doing this again? Ok, but I’m not doing the whole “1,000 word short story that goes nowhere” thing the last one did (talk about Postmodernism can get wrapped up in form over function). I might as well, seeing as I did claim this was a remake and all. So I guess instead of a short story, I should do something different with this one? Originally, I was going to do an essay within this essay that would lead to an obvious punchline at the end of the post, with each section acting as a transition between non-italic paragraphs. But then I realized that wouldn’t let the thing flow well at all, so instead I figure “why not have each italics react to the non-italics section in some way,” Mini essays and what not. Which really sucks for this one, since the non-italics bit comes after a one-sentence section, hence this being the exposition one.

See, there was this superhero. He’s been around the block of long underwear folks for many years. He’s fought villains and heroes alike, for causes that were mostly good. Right now though, he’s thinking about death. Though he won’t admit it, it is a particular death that scuttles around the mind like a spider as it finishes laying its eggs in the unsuspecting ear of an eleven year old. Love has entered the hero’s life. Love that the hero believes he doesn’t deserve.

Seizing upon this contemplation, a villain, aristocratic and desiring solely to conquer and surpass the hero, attacks him with hallucinogenic drugs that drive the hero made, making him witness long dead men he cared for walk the earth and creatures of unknown origins. In the middle of all this, a madman stalks the streets. He is neither the villain nor the hero, but like them there is a monstrous side to him. He acts purely out of instinct and mild self-preservation. He hisses his words to those who benign themselves to talk to this creature. The hero wants to see the creature healed. The villain wishes to use the creature to torment the hero even further, believing the creature to be something within his control. The creature has plans of his own… Eventually, the villain sees to it that the hero is killed and buried on his estate. Believing he’s bested the hero, the villain gloats silently. He even puts on a costume in the vein of our fallen hero. Not the one most know the hero to wear, but a darker more sinister variant.

But the villain misunderstood what the hero was and why he does what he does. He believed that the heroics were symptom of a madness the hero suffered from, but the truth was far more complicated. And the hero, weakened and drugged, miraculously forces himself out of the grave he was buried in. He fights the villain, and the villain’s hubris gets him in the end.

I was listening to this podcast on Star Trek, Anime, the Titanic, and other anarchistic themes. The guest of the show mentioned this video essay on Vimeo that compared the movie Species, a 1995 film about an alien/human hybrid exploring Los Angeles looking to understand herself and her own dreams while also trying to have consensual sex, with David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a 2001 film about a woman dreaming about exploring Los Angeles with her amnesiac love interest who is trying to discover her own identity. The video argues, via comparing various plot, thematic, and character elements that the films rhyme in similar manner to one another.

Of note, both of the amnesiac characters trying to find their true selves initially plan to go to the Saharan Motor Hotel, but decide not to out of fear of entrapment by the forces chasing them (as with much of the works of Lynch, this interpretation of Mulholland Drive is based partially out of inference within the text given a lone police car drives past the character before she leaves. Species being a B-Movie is less subtle about this). They both try to discover who they are through the dreams they have, but find little to no success. Furthermore, both films feature detectives named Dan recalling horrific nightmares to their partners that relate to the crux of the film.

There are other examples (even some inversions like the blonde lead of Species disguising herself as a brunette while the brunette lead of Mulholland Drive disguises herself as a blonde), but they rhyme just enough to note a connection. Of course, it could be extremely coincidental (many a film is set in Los Angeles and sometimes people reuse the same locations). Quite simply, one would have to ask why would David Lynch care about some B-Movie about space people. It’s not unreasonable to see Lynch having an interest in the film, a large part of his aesthetic is extremely flawed B-Movies in the vein of Ed Wood (see the bird in Blue Velvet).

One could see Lynch going to see a film like Species (probably flipping channels during a break while making Lost Highway), and could even read Species as the lost Lynch Sci-Fi film we should have gotten instead of Dune. The film does share a base plot line with many a Lynch film from that era: a lost and confused outsider from an isolated area finds themselves in a seedy and strange city that seeks to corrupt and destroy them, but the lead keeps their nice demeanor, even as they have to partake in rather nasty activities like sex and murder. That’s not to say Species is a good film (for starters, it decides to jettison that plot midway through act two in favor of being a rather rote Sci-Fi film about exterminating the outsider because they’re trying to invade and destroy us and the third act throws everything else away in favor of a drawn out chase in a dark sewer with a big explosion that kills the baddie), but it still lends itself to interesting implications and connections.

Then again, what I should have used as the alternative to my analogy was Under the Skin, a 2013 film about an alien exploring a strange city in order to get consensual sex. Of course, I haven’t seen that film so I can’t judge if they rhyme or if such a reading would be reaching. Regardless, I ended up watching Species shortly after the podcast was finished and found it to be a bit of fun, if a bit crap. Then again, a lot of things I like are just a bit crap.

I am of course talking about the Batman storyline: R.I.P. by Scottish author Grant Morrison and American artist Tony Daniel. Like many a Morrison story, it’s about rebirth: characters going through a traumatic experience that shakes the very essence of who they claim to be in order to allow their true selves to shine through.  This is pretty basic narrative fair, all characters in good stories end up changed in some fashion, but where Morrison differs is that he ties this narrative experience to the mystical tradition.

As with many a ritual, this requires copious amounts of drugs, something Morrison goes in more depth with in his “Magical Theory” trilogy (Flex, Invisibles, Filth). But within R.I.P., the drugs that are forced upon Batman (as noted magician Alan Moore points out, mystical experiences are not necessarily consensual) transform him into a more primal version of himself: a vicious brute whose sole solution to all of his problems is to beat up those around him until they obey his will.

A grim notion of what Batman’s true self is perhaps? No, Morrison hasn’t had his heart broken quite yet by Batman, and still believes he can be saved from his self-destructive tendencies (Jed Blue goes into more depth on those tendencies on his blog, which is much better than this one). In truth, this is only an aspect of the Batman persona, with a key aspect of the character removed: the Bat sans the Man, if you will.

We of course see examples of the Man in the text in the form of an act of kindness upon one of God’s poor, wherein Batman gives a couple hundred dollars to a homeless man with only one eye. The homeless man, Honor Jackson, decides to return the favor by helping Batman find his new self. Problem is… Honor Jackson’s dead. He’s died using the money Batman gave him to do a lot of smack, and went out on his own terms (someone who has read it would probably quote Avital Ronel’s Crack Wars at this point).

I didn’t really grow up with superhero comics as a kid. For the most part characters like Spider-Man and Batman and Superman were relegated to reruns on my Nonna’s cable (I didn’t get cable at home until well into high school) in between Fairly Odd Parents and Courage the Cowardly Dog, the occasional summer movie, and New York Times giveaways of Ditko era comics (did you know one of Spider-Man’s first baddies was literal, actual aliens?). Sometimes I'd catch an episode or two of Static Shock, but it didn't leave that much of an impact (I have fondness for it, but not enough to revisit it). Comics were mostly the Sunday strips and Simpsons trade paperbacks I checked out from the library. I was fond of Spider-Man and considered him my favorite, but I didn’t need to read everything about him.

It wasn’t until the superhero phase really started kicking with the Nolan Batman movies (since someone’s bound to ask: the Sam Rami Spider-Man films are very much films I [mostly] understand why people like, but I couldn’t get into them beyond that one Sandman sequence) that I got into comics more regularly. I started out by just checking stuff out of the library: the hardcover of the Venom arc from Ultimate Spider-Man, this Batman comic set in the 1930’s where his dad is secretly a klansman out to destroy the union, that Marvel comic set in 1602, this weird comic by some guy named Frank Miller with weirdly drawn tits (I didn’t so much read it as gawk at the tits).

I heard there was this movie coming out called Watchman by that guy who did that Zombie film I really liked, and it was based on a comic book (I read a lot of things because they were going to adapt it into another medium [that’s how I read the Divine Comedy in eighth grade]). I rather liked it, though for a long time I associated the author with middle school aesthetics. I read up on other things people in comics liked quite a bit like Transmetropolian (which I feel I should read again) and Sandman (solely due to the comic having a depiction of Death in it, which was always instant pull for me as I’ve always had an interest in the character).

Eventually, I got around to just pulling stuff based on characters I rather liked like a trade where Spidey fights the Green Goblin or one where Superman and Batman travel to different universes to something something Mxyzptlk. My aunt would sometimes get me comics for Christmas (mostly Simpsons, but one year it was a set of superhero comics), and somehow decided to get this rather odd comic about Old Man Spidey that I didn't think too much about until some people I read and listened to praised the comic (David something or other and some youtuber named duke?).

Another one of those people, something Eric, had a YouTube where he reviewed various films and comics that I would come to enjoy including The Stand, Brick, and Batman R.I.P. On his first go through with the comic, he wasn’t all that impressed. But when he read it for a second time, he found that the work made a lot more sense. Details that were initially obscured suddenly made more sense. He felt a kinship with the comic (especially since on his second read through, he was slightly medicated and passed out eerily at the same moment Batman passed out) and recommended it to me. So, I sought it out at my local library and it didn’t really do it for me. I liked it, but I felt there was something missing from it.

Googling the comic, I saw that it was the third volume in a run by a guy named Grant Morrison. My library had a few things by him: We3, All Star Superman, The Invisibles, but only one other part of Morrison’s Batman run: the Club of Heroes. I figured might as well put that on hold and hey, this Animal Man thing has an interesting subtitle: Deus Ex Machina. That got me hooked on Morrison. From there, I looked up article after article on the fellow, even tried to read the Invisibles at one point (still haven’t succeeded at that but once I finish this blog project and Kirby’s Fourth World…). Through this, I found out about these weirdo comic scholars called the Mindless Ones whose works would shape me for the rest of my academic days, especially the works of Andrew Hickey and the guy who wrote about The Filth. (Oddly enough, even though I should have found out about him through this connection, I didn’t discover my most blatant influence until much later in my blogging career. It took going on AV Club to do that.)

This is not Honor Jackson. This is the last remains of The Man as his psyche is being taken over by his incomplete self: The Bat. Unlike the full self, the Bat is, as we’ve mentioned, a vicious brute. This can be difficult to parse within the context of typical superhero fare because many a costumed hero solves their problems with punching people in the face. However, typically there’s an additional element to their fighting that counteracts their more Mike Hammer tendencies: A sense of justice; a belief that they can save those they fight; self-deprecation disguising depression.

Not so with the Bat, who just simply wails on his foes because that’s what he does. A nonstop barrage of punching and punching and punching, only alleviated by occasional interjections by his imaginary friend from the Fifth Dimension telling the Bat that he’s the last vestige of the Bat’s sanity.

This new persona isn’t because the mystical ritual to change Batman and reveal his true self is complete, far from it. Rather, Batman has inserted this purer version of himself to counteract any attempts at going through such a ritual. He’s infected himself with a fiction to simulate a mystical experience (in Multiversity, the first part of his “Fuck Off Grant Morrison” trilogy, Morrison would later claim that the act of creating fiction is akin to the requirements for a mystical experience).

Unlike with most instances, intentional or otherwise, where someone tries to trick their way out of a mystical experience (wherein it ends with them deciding that white nationalism is the best methodology for growing face tentacles [as Morrison put it, the key to a mystical experience isn’t going mad, but coming back from madness]), the Bat ends up on top for the majority of the time. But, as with any period of a rabid dog being the top dog, eventually someone’s going to come around, grab you by the balls, and put you down. Which brings us, perhaps fittingly, to the Joker.

Earlier this year, I took a course in Science Fiction and Feminism. It was a good course, especially since it was the teacher’s first time teaching the class (though I wish I was taking it next year so I could talk to other people about the wonder that is Bitch Planet. Also, I’m both surprised and unsurprised that the class didn’t care for Left Hand of Darkness). It was a very enlightening course that helped hone in my views on feminism and introduced me to some works that I wasn’t aware were absolutely my thing. (As an aside: Hi Abbey, hope the semester’s going well and next semester’s class likes Kindred as much as ours did. Also, have you watched Dirty Pair yet?).

One of the assignments for the class was to write two memos (500-700 word essays) based on three entries from the anthology book Octavia’s Brood. The book featured works by various authors from LeVar Burton to David Walker to Bao Phi. For one of the memos, I looked at an essay by Tananarive Due called The Only Lasting Truth. To be honest, I chose it because I figured I could write something about the revolutionary spirit of the book without actually reading the essay (the other two I picked were Bao Phi’s Revolution Shuffle and the outro of the book by adrienne maree brown, as I figured it would be a concluding thesis for the text). When I finally read the essay, which was on the works of the titular Octavia Butler, I came across the quote that titles the essay, and everything changed forever:

All that you touch,

You Change

All that you Change,

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God is Change.

I had never come across that quote prior to reading that story. I only knew of Octavia Butler because we read Kindred earlier in the semester. I didn’t know at the time of Earthseed or Olamina or any of the other related topics. Maybe I read an article that claimed similarities between now and the books Butler wrote, but those articles tended to also claim that 1984 is about PC Culture, so I paid them no mind. But this essay, which featured this quote, finally contextualized the ideas that swam in my brain without an ocean to thrive in.

This is what I believe in. I believe in necessity and inevitability of change. Maybe it’s because of all these weirdos that I follow that I believe this. Maybe I read one too many essay on Darkseid and Entropy, that it warped my mind to accept that change is an inherent good, if a painful one. Maybe it was the unending cycles my family would go through year after year that pushed me to want to find an escape from them. Or maybe I wanted something that wasn’t the singular vision of the gamer gating alt-right. Regardless, I had to read that book.

When I got home from college, I checked out the book the quote came from, Parable of the Sower, out of my local library. I rather liked the work and was surprised how bleak the text was. It was an honest tale about the collapse of society and how we can hold on to one another. It currently sits in between The Lathe of Heaven and The Ocean at the End of the Lane as my second favorite book of all time. As for its sequel, while I liked it from a mechanical angle, I felt its aim at deconstructing Olamina, the lead of both novels, were flawed especially within the climate of 2017. The only one that stuck was the rigidity of Olamina’s vision of Earthseed, the belief system that has “God is Change” at its center.

Unlike Batman, who simply corrupted the mystical experience and barely managed to stay on top, the Joker out right rejects the very notion of going through a mystical experience. Or rather, the experience never ends, for the Joker rejects the very concept of a true self. Morrison brought this concept up way back in his mildly-overrated Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, wherein it’s theorized that The Joker has no true self, and just goes through phases of identity (we could, at this point, compare him to David Bowie in this regard especially given his current persona calls himself the Thin White Duke… OF DEATH! [Twang]).

Obviously this ties into The Killing Joke’s more interesting idea for what the Joker’s origin is: multiple choice. Each version of the clown prince of crime would act as a starting point for the others: the sad clown becomes a psychotic serial killer; the camp sadist goes serious after his lover shot him in the face and starts cutting himself; etc. However, unlike within The Killing Joke [where it’s a clever idea that doesn’t go anywhere (like the interpretation that the book ends with Batman killing the Joker]), Morrison’s read ties this into the Joker’s neuroatypical experience.

Unlike with many villain motivations that essentially boil down to “he’s crazy,” Morrison doesn’t look at the Joker’s mental issues with contempt. Rather, he frames thusly: “Maybe he is a nu human mutation, bred of slimy industrial waters, spawned in a world of bright carcinogens and acid rains. Maybe he is the model for 21^st-century big-time multiplex man, shuffling selves like a croupier deals cards, to buffer the shocks and work some alchemy that might just turn the lead of tragedy and horror into the fierce, chaotic gold of the laughter of the damned. Maybe he is special, and not just a gruesomely scarred, mentally-ill man addicted to an endless cycle of self-annihilating violence. Stranger things have happened.” In many regards, he is akin to Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal Lecter: a monstrous force of nature not bound by human morality (“Ethics become aesthetics”) that the text can’t help but be enamored by.

Exactly two years before I started writing this post (so August 15, 2015), I started watching the show Hannibal. I had heard about the show prior to that time, but I ignored it due to the premise of “procedural drama adapting a popular movie” wasn’t that interesting to me. I was only vaguely aware of Bryan Fuller through Pushing Daises and a Scrubs fan fic that crossed that series over with Dead Like Me. And while at the time I liked both of those works, I never felt the need to revisit them in 2015.

What finally convinced me to watch the series were three things. First, numerous tumblrs I followed at the time (and still follow) were heaping praise for the series, pitching it as this fantastical show about the devil (or a demon) corrupting the world by possessing the baddie from Casino Royale. Secondly, I had learned that the series was being canceled at the end of its third season, and I prefer to get into a thing at either its beginnings or its endings. And thirdly, and in retrospect most importantly, I had just completed my third and final course of summer courses that I took over the course of June and July.

The courses consisted of two business classes required for a minor I was told I needed to take in order to survive in the “real world” and an English course detailing the various eras of science fiction wherein I learned to utterly despise Hard Sci-Fi and its incessantly dull charts. I needed something to cleanse the pallet so I could be ready for my junior year of college (perhaps the worst year of college I’ve had thus far, and that’s including the year I literally had a nervous breakdown and couldn’t stop crying). And so, I decided to watch Hannibal.

I breezed through the first season over the course of a single day, and I found the show to be quite good, but still not quite to the level of greatness that I was lead to believe the series had (that would come at the La Gazza Ladra sequence in Contorno, though I noticed the smaller pleasures when I rewatched the show back in May). It was when I reached the second season that things got… interesting.

It wasn’t so much that the series was any better or any more interesting (I’m still within the “I’m liking it, but I’m not loving it” stage at this point, though it felt padded at points during the back half [we didn’t need to revisit the guy who cared for the animals whose meant to represent Will, for example]). But something happened when I got to this point. I’m not exactly sure which episode I was on when it happened. I know I was on season 2 because I was watching it on DVD instead of NBC’s on demand service. There was a Verger scene, so it had to be in the back half. From what I recall of the episode, I think it was either the one with the skeleton man or the one where Freddie Lounds dies, though don’t quote me on that.

Regardless, I felt rather hot while watching it. Not so much because of the summer heat or the sexual aroma at the lead characters, but my body felt like it was on fire much like how a computer feels when you never turn it off. My brother, who was in the next room at the time, recommended that I go take a shower to cool myself down. For some reason, maybe because I didn’t want to wake anyone up, I took it in the basement shower.

When I turned on the shower, for some bizarre reason it felt too cold. It wasn’t set to a cold setting and it didn’t feel especially cold just not warm enough. So I increased it, at an incremental pace, until it got to the point where it should be burning my skin off my flesh like I was being cleansed in lava. It just stung a bit. Then, it started to hurt even more. It was at that point, that I needed to get out of the shower. But it was a glass cage whose door was extremely easy to open, just one swift push. Instead, I just kept banging and banging and banging on the glass screaming, “HELP!” over and over again.

And then, the world started to cut itself. Not as if it was a teenager trapped in an abusive household, but as if it were a movie. It kept on cutting to a black screen, as if a clip of darkness had replaced every other frame. I had no idea what was going on, I just kept howling, “help” to the void. Eventually it turned into a mewling before the darkness overtook me, and there was nothing left to see.

I awoke on the carpet outside where I was taking a shower. As he would later tell me, I had escaped from my glass prison and went to the doorway where my brother was hard at work, watching videos on the Internet. I didn’t do anything per say, I just stood there in a fugue state waiting for him to notice. When he finally did, I tumbled my way back into consciousness, and he caught me before I fell onto something that would do serious damage. My brother left me to lie on the carpet alone with my thoughts. He had to tell mom about what happened.

Not that I could move anyways, I was pinned to the carpet. My flesh was piping red, but it didn’t hurt. In spite of losing all control of myself, I felt the calmer than I have ever felt in a long time. It was as if I was a new man, ready to explore the world and all of its complexities. For now, I was just bored, wanting to talk to someone about anything. Instead, when my mom and brother came to get me, I was whisked away to bed. I wonder what I would have said.

Which, rather unfortunately, brings us to the main villains of this piece: Dr. Hurt and the Black Glove. Now, it’s not that they’re bad villains per say (a group of rich sadists who go around betting on the fight between good and evil solely because they’re bored is rather inventive, if obvious given that Hostel II came out a year earlier [the whole “maybe I’m Bruce’s father or maybe I’m Satan” thing Hurt has going for him doesn’t really become interesting until more interesting ideas consume him {more of a Red Dragon to Joker’s Chesapeake Ripper}]). Rather, within the context of a mystical ritual to change the very essence of Batman, they’re a rote instigator for sparking the change.

This is, in part, due to their lack of understanding of the situation they’re setting up. They see Batman and the Joker as people who are merely damaged without any consideration for the possibility that they might fight back against being tortured. The Black Glove assumes that because they’re rich and powerful and predominantly white, they can do whatever they want to people they see as beneath them without any consequences. They plan for every single eventuality from which henchmen will be punched in the face, how to get Bruce to fall in love with them (yeah, it’s revealed in the penultimate issue that Bruce’s love interest is a baddie, which we should have seen coming since she’s rather unfortunately named “Jezebel Jet”), and they set up the Joker being shot in the face by a guy dressed in a Batman costume (did I bring up the relationship between magic and artifice prior to this? Short answer: a fictional representative of an idea is the same thing as the idea itself [most writers just call it symbolism]) so he doesn’t team up with Batman against these “upstart newcomers”. But they never consider that the neurodivergent target they’re going after might be able to withstand any and all attempts at destroying them (partially because people like us tend to be used to torment but mostly because he’s the main character). Which leads us to a rather unfortunate problem with the mystical ritual that Batman is going through:

Prior to me even outlining this project, I wanted to do an essay in twine. The base conceit was to look at the event comic Avengers VS X-Men and propose an alternative path than the one the comics took (what if the Avengers were possessed by the Phoenix instead). It would have been more of a creative writing piece than a straight forward essay, but I would still have to analyze the entire history of Peter Parker in order to find out the answer to one simple question: Why would he want to destroy the world?

Of course, I wouldn’t want to tip my hand of this intent quite as soon as the introduction, so instead I took some liberties with the narrative form. Obviously, there was the twine aspect of the essay. I didn’t want to railroad my readers into a single path, as I tended to hate that when I read choose your own adventure books as a kid. So I decided to create a few diverging paths away from my initial essay idea that would further the creative writing aspect of this essay.

The narrative would begin with Peter looking into the sun as Wolverine screams bloody vengeance at him as he tries to dig his way out of the sun and fling himself at the earth. With a gun in hand, Peter contemplates one of three questions: When did this all become inevitable, How did this happen, and Why don’t I just get on with it already? I started out with the last of these questions, as it was the one that required the least amount of research (I never got any ideas for the first one beyond “Clip Show analysis”). The problem with it was simple: I had to create a convincing reason why someone would want to commit suicide.

To say this was detrimental to my mental wellbeing would be an understatement to say the least. It wasn’t just that he was convincing himself to commit suicide (he literally murdered all of his friends); it was that he was trying and failing to convince himself not to do it. In essence, what I was doing with the segment was deconstruct all the arguments I had spent the past couple of years creating so that I wouldn’t listen to the voice in the back of my head that tells me to just jump in front of a subway train or something (It got to the point where the only way I could actually get some sleep was to just express these emotions to someone who’d listen). I ended up having to get away from the project until a later point and work on something else (i.e. the blog project you’re reading now). I did eventually come to a realization one night for what I should do with that section, but I might revisit the series at a later point, so I don’t want to spoil it.

What I will spoil is an idea I had in regards to the second section: How did this happen? This would be where I would create a scenario where the Avengers got the Phoenix powers and the various divergences based on the multiple possibilities provided by Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers), and Spider-Man (Peter Parker) getting the powers of a god. A bit of paranoia inspired me to not refer to them directly by name, but rather invoke them via cards in a Tarot Deck.

I’ve been trying to get into Tarot for a few years now (I think my relationship with the form of mysticism started with an episode of Yu Gi Oh). I have two decks (Rider and Crowley), but I haven’t gotten the chance to use them to predict the future or anything like that. But I’ve always wondered about the possibility of a Marvel themed Tarot deck. I’ve seen one based on the DC Universe that places Superman as the 0 card (I think they renamed it), but the Marvel one seemed a bit lacking, like it was out of obligation rather than inspiration.

A few ideas from this desire came to mind: Sue would be in the Fool’s place within the deck (Rachel Pollack argues one way the deck can be read as the story of the Fool, so who else’s story would the Marvel Universe, for lack of a better word, center itself around, but a woman who wanted to buck the law and status quo in favor of the strangeness of the universe), Steve Rogers as either The Devil or Justice (though typically reversed and partially due to Richard Jones’ influence), and of course Peter Parker as Death.

The explanation for this placement would have been the crux of my argument for that essay: Spider-Man is about change. Consider: what is Peter Parker’s status quo? What does he always go back to in the sense that Iron Man is a billionaire playboy philanthropist, Captain America is a soldier out of time, and Thor is the God of Thunder? The most common answers to that would be “high school teenager trying to juggle superheroics and regular life” or “photographer at the Daily Bugle,” but he graduated high school in the middle of the Ditko era and hasn’t worked for the Bugle since the 90’s.

Since then, Spidey’s been a scientist, a CEO, a school teacher, married, divorced, simultaneously two superheroes and two supervillains at once, and more. Furthermore, unlike characters like Batman or Captain America, Spider-Man doesn’t have to be defined by the status quo set up by Peter Parker’s white passing Jewish alter ego (in terms of "We need a huge movement to radically alter how we view race within pop culture, we can just plop in a non cis het white Spider-Man" [I added this parentheses shortly after watching Mikey Newman's amazing video on The Batman Question, which made me think about the implications of the original sentence and I didn't like them. For the record, Yujiro Ishihara, Mads Mikkelsen, or Andre Braugher {though, I really want him to be J. Jonah Jameson}]). He can be half Latinix/half Black like Miles Morralis or female/trans/gender fluid like Mattie Franklin (she was introduced wearing a binder for crying out loud). And that’s not even getting into “non-canonical” ones like Takuya Yamashiro or alternative readings of the new movie Spider-Man as being transgender. In essence, anyone could be Spider-Man without the need to add a descriptive title in front of the name.

It seems that where Superman is defined by wanting humanity to surpass him (thank you again Richard Jones), Spider-Man is defined by his ability to evolve with the times and be a better and better idea (Indeed noted writers Tom King and Tim Seeley point out this aspect of the character in their series Grayson: “The Flying Grayson. Nightwing. Robin. They were about more than fight moves. They were about Inspiration. Comfort. Trust. Family. I gave that up to become a spy. A Spider Man. A Tsuchigumo. I have changed.” [underline added]). Yes, change is painful and Spider-Man reflects that with the (misused and overrated) concept of the Parker Luck: a flawed acknowledgement that being something else doesn’t always net positive results and sometimes things are lost in the shuffle (the overrated part is that this state of pain and suffering lasts forever and always, a neoliberal story if I’d ever seen one).

A Spider-Man story can be about anything, so long as it keeps one foot in the material and the other in the strange. In other words, Spider-Man is America’s response to Doctor Who. A shame the writers seem unwilling to write about anything but Base Under Siege stories, but that’s America for yah.

Batman doesn’t change.

For all that the story dances with being a mystical ritual to alter the very fabric of what Batman is, for all the acknowledgements that Batman’s way of life isn’t healthy (as made by the villains, but it’s at a point in the narrative where we’re not supposed to think Jezebel is a baddie, despite knowing she’s called Jezebel), for all that his attempts to circumvent his change fail utterly (because of course a partial self is going to lose to the true self), Batman still doesn’t change.

Is this because Batman is Bruce’s true self? No. Batman is a performance played by Bruce to cope with the trauma of being the last survivor of his family (the goal is to commit suicide. Failing that, as he must, he wants to help other people around him with their problems so the world wouldn’t make another Batman. He will fail at this). A true self, as I’ve come to find, isn’t just the artifice you present to the world. Nor is it the thing you keep hidden from those who know you intimately. It’s the union of those opposites. The synthesis of a binary choice, as Morrison is fond of doing.

But Batman wants to keep the realms of Man and Bat separate from one another, a singular vision of protection, which dances within the dreams of an orphaned eight year old. It would take something much larger to even put a dent into that singular vision than a mere cult of bored, rich assholes led by an actor playing Satan playing Thomas Wayne. Even then, the Bat would realign the self away from that synthesis back to the status quo.

For in the same way the concept of Superman is about surpassing the impossible (be it the social constraints of an era or singing God, eldest of things, to death) and Wonder Woman is about liberating people from their chains (be it the chains of patriarchy or the bondage of ropes and leather), Batman is about holding things together. Of things never changing. Sure there are positives to that approach (he is Superman’s heroic antithesis after all), like how families that we make can hold us together through a rough patch or a community can be strong in the face of cruelty, but it still remains that no matter what that change might be, to be a Bat is to reject it entirely.

And that’s why Spider-Man is better than Batman.

End Act I.

(Next Time: Why Is the World in Love Again?)

[Photos: Kill Bill Vol. 2 Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino]