Could Frame Thy Fearful (What If Kraven’s Last Hunt?)

Side A: And Great Disgust. (What If Kraven the Hunter had Killed Spider-Man?)

 1/2: If they say demons laugh at talking about
next year, it's okay to just let them laugh.

When I concluded this project back in 2018, I knew there were going to be gaps. All histories contain gaps, knowingly or not. Limitations by the writers because of their biases, their greenness, or any such thing. A holistic history cannot be created simply because there is simply too much to contain every grain of sand.

In the case of Fearful Symmetry, my first blog project, the reasoning behind the lack of completeness when it comes to the various follow ups to Kraven’s Last Hunt is fairly obvious: they largely suck. They lack the magic upon which I gravitated towards when reading that initial comics series. Of the two that existed at the time, the one I’m not about to write about at length — Grim Hunt —  had the issue of being rather lame as most post-One More Day Spider-Man comics tend to be. (This is in contrast to the lameness of most post-DeMatteis Spider-Man comics, which gave one the sense that at least one person at a time was trying to do something.)

Meanwhile, later works like The Lost Hunt or the motion picture Kraven the Hunter also felt limited. The latter is fairly obvious in this regard: it’s a bad movie that was rewritten to hell and too incoherent to have any meaning. The former, meanwhile, while containing elements of DeMatteis’ larger themes with the character, nevertheless felt like it would be better off not being put in this context. It would be lessened by it.

So that leaves only one story: What if? In truth, there are two What Ifs to consider. The first of these, released in the immediate wake of Kraven’s Last Hunt (give or take a few years) is rather drab. Indeed, it’s quite apparent how drab the story is from the first proper panel after Uatu the Watcher (the Rod Serling of What If?) makes his opening spiel (with the bluntness of a steel hammer). Here, Peter narrates, “Stupid, Parker. Only a Bonafide nut-case would willingly venture out on a night like this! But that dream--! The spiders crawling all over me! I can’t remember ever feeling so terrified. I know it was only a nightmare, but--Oh, well. Another few blocks and I’ll be helping Mary Jane move the rest of her stuff over to my…Our place. Gee, that has a nice ring to it.”

This is a rather pedestrian approach to Peter’s mental state within the pages of Kraven’s Last Hunt. And yet, it feels small, inconsequential. Lacking in the tone and import of the book proper. Consider how that exact same moment is depicted in the book proper: “Head’s pointing— Like someone’s playing drums inside my brain. Jungle drums. Got the shivers. Stomach’s in a knot. Maybe I’ll just crawl up into a ball and-- No. Just keep moving. Gotta keep moving—and everything’ll be all right.”

Note the short, clipped sentences within the original version. Thoughts constantly interrupted by new thoughts, never being allowed the opportunity to cohere. By contrast, the What If has long, coherent sentences. The pace allows it to calm down from the shock and paranoia. Furthermore, the What If is depicted in a single panel of Spider-Man swinging around New York at ease. The thought bubbles surrounding Spider-Man. By contrast, the original work has the moment depicted over the course of three panels, each one having Spider-Man in a different pose. The text boxes containing his thoughts swing back and forth over the sequence, forcing the reader to move across the panels in a way that’s not inherently chronological.

What’s more, as the What If goes on, it reveals itself to lack several of the thematic and literary elements that makes Kraven’s Last Hunt truly special. The most obvious of these is the contrasting text boxes. Though most notable in the climactic pages of the first issue, wherein Kraven “kills” Spider-Man, the contradictory text boxes allow a variety of perspectives on the events of the story. From the manic mental state of Vermin to Mary Jane’s anxiety.

In this moment, Peter’s mental state is fractured between an almost rational mind trying to remain coherent and snarky in the face of death. The language used is, while short, written with full sentences in mind such that one can see coherent thought processes. The other mental state is more clipped in nature— short, incomplete sentences punching the reader with their intrusive nature. It’s only in the moments of death that the rational thoughts begin to degrade into the format of the less rational thought, by then those thoughts becoming single words, their thoughts split over a multitude of panels.

By contrast, the What If uses more traditional thought bubbles, leading to the thoughts, again, being more coherent. There’s no interruption in the thoughts of Peter Parker beyond Uatu’s narration. There’s a lack of collapse within the mind of Spider-Man and a visual lack of collapse within Kraven’s mind. Yes, he is portrayed in the comic as quite mad. But we never get the sense of his mental state the way Kraven’s Last Hunt immerses us within.

In both comics, Kraven is shown, in the wake of defeating the Spider, to be confronting a horde of spiders. In the What If, this is depicted rather straight forwardly with Kraven eating the spiders. Indeed, writer/artist Richard Howell and colorist Nel Yomtov depict the moment over the course of half a page (five of its seven panels) with a degree of drabness. The colors used to depict the walls of the room are a cool baby blue. Kraven’s body is drawn to look strong and put together, like someone disgusted with himself for eating the spiders, a literal depiction of events. Indeed, the text further literalizes things by explicitly telling the reader things that they were already explicitly told. Specifically, Kraven is shown questioning why he’s doing this in the same panel that the narration notes that he is of two minds regarding what he’s about to do.

By contrast, the original comic depicts Kraven’s engagement with the spiders over the course of six pages, each ranging between five to seven panels each. Artist Mike Zeck and colorist Ian Tetrault contrast the scene with the cool baby blues used in the What If, but also with a murky, pinkish red, unsettling the reader. Further unsettling things is Kraven, drawn constantly crawling around the manor he lives in, like an absolute nutter. Indeed, we are shown in moments that should be demonstrating his strength that his eyes are those of a mad man. We are trusted to interpret the scene without the narration going “Kraven, by this time, is quite mad. He equates spiders with Spider-Man and also with the decline of civilization.” We are shown this in the mania within his eyes, how the text boxes clutter over each other. And, of course, the fact that instead of eating the spiders, he is fighting a giant amalgamation of all the spiders in the room as some kind of gestalt being.

On this note, it’s worth engaging with the overall lack of mysticism within the What If. While not as explicitly a mystical story as a work by Morrison or Moore, Kraven’s Last Hunt has an air of the mystical. From the ritualistic approach to hunting Kraven engages with to the constant invocations of William Blake’s The Tyger all the way to the framing of how Spider-Man digs himself out of the grave, there’s the vibe of magic within these pages (further emphasized by the sequel, Soul of the Hunter, which makes the mystical elements more explicit).

By contrast, the What If is depressingly literal in how it approaches the world. It quotes the Blake poem, but turns it into the opening for a villain monologue by Kraven about how he’s going to do the bad stuff. Indeed, the comic is more engaged with being a traditional superhero fight than the abject weirdness that is Kraven’s Last Hunt. Instead of Spider-Man being left to his own devices for two weeks, Mary Jane immediately goes to the Human Torch for help. There’s a bunch of stuff with J Jonah Jameson being mad at all superheroes.

But the What If lacks the uncanny nature of the comic its following up. When writing a follow up to a work, you have to engage with what it truly is rather than what is easier to engage with. In the case of Kraven’s Last Hunt, the central heart of it is a horror comic about masculinity. From the serial cannibals lurking within the sewars of New York to Kraven’s own views of masculinity resulting in him becoming more and more monstrous. Indeed, the ultimate catharsis of the story is Spider-Man engaging with Vermin more humanely than Kraven did, a contrast of the kinds of men they are.

Meanwhile, for a comic where Kraven literally eats Spider-Man’s face, there’s a startling lack of horror. Instead, Howell approaches the task like it’s a traditional superhero book where Spider-Man is briefly taken off the board. As a result, the work feels limited.

It is for that reason that I ultimately skipped this when I was initially writing Fearful Symmetry. In truth, I didn’t think I had all that much to say about the work within the context of Kraven’s Last Hunt. Drab superhero comics are dime a dozen and I was, in truth, a rather limited writer at the time. A lot of the follow up pieces to the big Kraven’s Last Huntessay were written with summarization rather than analysis in mind. Summarization can certainly work within a bit of critique, but it can’t be the whole of it.

Sure, I covered up my summarizing tendencies through postmodernism, a term that is so vague it can mean quite literally anything. But I wasn’t really saying anything. There was no material reality to what I was doing with a lot of the works. Yes, there was a degree to which I was processing my grandfather’s death, but there’s also a degree of post hoc to that. That I’m justifying an earlier work with meaning that doesn’t measure up.

But that’s the nature of early works. Oftentimes, the limitations can be seen, even ones that are later overcome and engaged with in more meaningful ways. Artists will show the foundations upon which their later style will be built upon, elements that will, in turn, change over the decades that follow. I’ve always had a difficulty with reading my older works in part due to this change. I can rarely, if ever, see the good parts of it. I can only see the flaws, where I could’ve done better.

And yet, I keep at this sodding criticism game. Because, despite all my misgivings regarding my earlier works, I still love playing the game, still love learning new and interesting things about the medium, be it comics, film, video games, or what have you. I love applying my trade to the world. I want to learn more about the world.

There are limitations to the older work, to be sure. I didn’t read Dostoyevsky until recently, and can absolutely see his confessional approach within the pages of Kraven’s Last Hunt. I didn’t fully dive into the horror elements of the comic despite highlighting several works of horror fiction.

And, of course, there’s the actual piece on Kraven’s Last Hunt. My initial plan was for it to be a kind of choose your own adventure twine fiction (I was heavily indebted to the blog series Vaka Rangi — to the point of arguably being a rip off of it — which did stuff like that quite a bit) that would have alternate endings which the various essays would lead towards. But without that element, the essay becomes unwieldy and overly convoluted (as if it wasn’t already).

But at the same time, there’s still something within those old bones. Something worth engaging with and making something new out of. I still like the essay on Best of Enemies. The psychogeographic approach has yielded dividends. And I wouldn’t be here without it. We all have to start somewhere.

Side B: Burning Bright (What If Kraven Survived his Last Hint?)

1/2: So you can wipe off that grin, I know where
you've been. It's all been a pack of lies!

When engaging with an artist’s late work, especially a late work following up a critically acclaimed story, one can feel the sense of reflection within. In 1987, when Kraven’s Last Hunt was initially released, JM DeMatteis was in his mid 30s. A few years older than I currently am. He had just finished the first arc of what would become his critically acclaimed series Justice League International. (Indeed, the third word in that title wouldn’t be introduced into the book until halfway through Kraven’s Last Hunt.) He had been working on and off the Spider-Man books since 1981, had completed a solid Conan the Barbarian run in the early 80s, and published works like Into Shamballa and Greenberg the Vampire. And then there’s Moonshadow, his magnum opus, which was completed earlier in the year (or at the end of the previous year, if you’re not looking at the cover date). But there was so much still to come. Seekers into the Mystery, the semi-autobiographical Brooklyn Dreams, his revisiting of his initial pitch for Kraven’s Last Hunt with Batman: Going Sane. Even his full Spider-Man run was till left incomplete. Not yet begun. The future held and still holds so many possibilities.

He had returned before to the story of Kraven and his last hunt before. There was Soul of the Hunter, which sought to clarify the nature of the ending and provide the villain with an air of peace. There was the Lost Hunt, which explored the direct consequences of Kraven’s death on those who knew him. There was even the ill regarded Spider-Man ’94, which had Kraven appear in a supporting role. But DeMatteis never before returned to these specific events. Even when Kraven was resurrected and killed off once more, DeMatteis never returned. But now, in the twilight of his life, age 72, DeMatteis finds himself returning to the forest of the night.

Curious, then, that Blake is one of the book’s absences. There is a degree to which quoting “The Tyger” is a young man’s move. The sort of look how clever I am tactic that you so often do when you’re young. It’s not a bad move per say. Indeed, a lot of brilliant writers have made this move, DeMatteis included. But there’s a maturity to returning to the pages of what once was without the need to placate the fans’ expectations. Indeed, a lot of the comic acts to subvert what one would expect from such a comic while also embracing it. To many fans, the expectation would be akin to what was written back in the day with the initial “What if Kraven had lived” one shot: Kraven becomes a mass murderer that makes everything worse forever. Several sequences existing solely to pay homage to what came before.

And, to be fair, DeMatteis does play some of these tricks. But he doesn’t embrace nostalgia. Consider the one direct reference to the original six issues DeMatteis makes. The comic’s core premise is that, shortly after escaping from the grave, Peter crashes out due to the sheer mental stress of everything that occurred. As a result, Kraven realizes that he’s been a bastard and tries to do right as a sort of bastard version of Spider-Man. People, surprisingly, are on board for this. Meanwhile, Peter is in the hospital, healing from the sheer weight of it all. But there’s someone else at the hospital, waiting. The symbiote, at the time of Kraven’s Last Hunt, had yet to bond with Eddie Brock. As such, it does so with Peter Parker, feeding into his worst instincts and fragile mental state to become a hulking monster version of Spider-Man. They escape and return to Kraven. They descend, much as they did at the end of the fourth chapter of Kraven’s Last Hunt to confront the hunter. The homage, then, is an act of monstrosity. Where in the initial comic, it was the buildup to the final confrontation between fallen hero and triumphant villain, here there are no heroes available. Just two men consumed by monstrosity.

This is a core theme of DeMatteis that is enlivened within the pages of this What If. One loose thread DeMatteis pulls at is the character of Vermin, a tragic figure who recured throughout DeMatteis’ larger run. Kraven, initially seeing the lad as nothing more than a monster, kills him with no hesitation. In doing so, the boy reveals himself to be another victim in the cruel world we find ourselves within, deserving of just as much humanity as anyone else. The folly of Kraven is an inability to see anyone as a person, to see monsters everywhere. This is the approach Kraven takes in being Spider-Man. A hero who slays monsters.

But in the telling of the story, in the form DeMatteis does, he subverts the logic of Kraven himself. Kraven, even by his own admission, is a monstrous man. One capable of great horror and cruelty. But DeMatteis’ pen gives us a great degree of empathy for the hunter. We can witness, in his own words, who he sees himself as, even as the images paint a slightly different picture. Not contradictory, but revelatory. Able to behold the full scope of the man. We see the world outside of Kraven’s perception (even getting a small degree of confirmation regarding a subtext within the original story left unpulled regarding a certain journalist’s knowledge of Peter Parker’s identity), and through it, we understand the contradictory nature of Kraven the Hunter all the more.

It is worth engaging with the artistic stylings of Yildiray Çinar. Çinar has been a regular fixture within the comics industry since the early 2000s. His most acclaimed work has been his collaboration with Al Ewing on X-Men Red. And he’s rather good at it. It’s hard to live up to the sheer horror presented within Mike Zeck’s initial figure work, but Çinar nevertheless finds himself capable of living up to the challenge.

The key talent within the context of this What If is the shape eyes make throughout. Consider the initial sequence of Kraven discovering Peter’s true self at the start of the comic. The three panel sequence (aided by a small narration box by DeMatteis) starts with an imposing shot of Kraven from below, his eyes clearly demonstrating a sheer fury at the monster before him. The next panel moves in closer to Kraven’s face, his eyes softening. The final panel of the sequence is a close up of that face, his eyes completely horrified over what he’s done.

More interestingly is Çinar’s use of panel borders. Drawing from Zeck, multiple panels throughout the comic include distinctive panel borders to highlight the violence on display. Be it Kraven murder of Vermin being depicted solely through a close up of Kraven’s eye, a SNAKT sound effect, and a jagged panel border or the alien symbiote lingering within the gutters, attempting to make passage within to infect Peter with its cruelty, Peter’s eyes constantly screaming for help.

Equally, there’s the coloring from Alex Sinclair. An often derided colorist, Sinclair reveals his skills when working in a more muted color pallet Janet Jackson provided, emphasizing the sunken eyes of Peter Parker through grayscale, muddy splotches. Letterer VC’s Joe Caramagna, meanwhile, captures the tone of Rick Parker’s initial letters.

Through it all, we’re presented with the fullness of another life, even as its snuffed out completely(?) by the end. We end, much like with Soul of the Hunter, with Peter and MJ musing about the nature of what has occurred. As before, MJ has a somewhat more cynical (or, perhaps more accurately, less romantic) take on the events. Peter, meanwhile, decides to give the villain a degree of grace. “He died to save me, MJ” he notes, “And to spare other people of the agony of being bonded to that…thing. That’s what I choose to believe. That’s what I’ll go on believing.” In the end, he provides Kraven a degree of grace.

The same could be said of DeMatteis. DeMatteis closes the book on Kraven the Hunter a hero. A complicated man with more vices than virtues, but someone who desired to do the right thing by the end. Moreover, someone who was given the option to shirk his responsibilities, but chose instead to embrace them, even at the cost of his own life. This is, after all, the heart of heroism within the context of Spider-Man comics: what “With great power there must also come great responsibility” truly means.

This was an element I struggled with for some time when it came to Spider-Man. The phrase felt a bit too pat and tacked on, without any true meaning to the story of Spider-Man. It wasn’t until a few years back, that I finally understood via, in Will Graham’s words, a negative. About a month after I concluded my Fearful Symmetry project, DC Comics released an event comic called Heroes in Crisis. Infamous for a number of reasons, Heroes in Crisis ends with the Flash being revealed to being a murderer. The moral of the comic is that you can’t undo the past, can’t undo the harm. But you have to work to make things better. Killing yourself isn’t a solution. The comic itself is a bit of a mess, but I rather liked the morality at the end. It feels earned, albeit messily, to what came before. The comic overall feels like a wet fart for a number of reasons I won’t get into here (though I may change my mind should I reread it), but the ending tracks.

Most comic fans were not happy with the ending of the Flash being arrested for murder, so it was undone, as so many comics are often undone after fan outcry (indeed, One More Day is the rare exception to this form of outcry). In truth, I experience Flash comics through friends rather than on my own. He’s simply a character I never fully gravitated towards. He’s fine, but not my thing. But something began to nag at me upon seeing the way Flash being a murderer was being undone. Over the course of a few years (including a brief dalliance with the Flash becoming the new Dr. Manhattan, as if that was a thing anyone wanted), Heroes in Crisis was undone. The Flash had not, in fact done anything wrong. It was three or four completely unrelated forces.

In superhero comics, I can accept mind control, frame jobs, even things being undone via time travel. But doing all three at once simultaneously by multiple different people feels like hack work. And, because fans love to compare any young adult male superhero to Spider-Man, it got me thinking. There was something about all of this that felt wrong, wrong in a way beyond being bad comics made by hacks, and wrong in a way understandable through Spider-Man comics.

It took me a bit to click the full nature of Spider-Man and responsibility. About that old comic where Peter Parker doesn’t stop a robber, resulting in Ben Parker dying. I thought of Oppenheimer, creator of the atomic bomb, raddled with guilt over what he had done. I thought about the movies, about my good friend David Mann’s own thoughts on the character. I thought of Ben Sisko, who says he can live with it, but is never shown to do so. Never forced to face the music of what he had done.

Spider-Man comics, at their best, are about the need to face the music. To accept what you have done and work to do better. It is about change, about growth and becoming something new. And that means you have to face the music and accept the responsibility of what you have done. The tragedy of Kraven the Hunter, then, is of a man forever trapped in one moment. One fatal sin that he can never undo, save, in his mind, by dying. Kraven the Hunter will never be allowed to survive the events of his most famous story.

He won’t let himself.

“But here begins a new account, the account of a man’s gradual renewal, the account of his gradual regeneration, his gradual transition from one world to another, his acquaintance with a new, hitherto completely unknown reality. It might make the subject of a new story—but our present story is ended.”
-Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866 (tr. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 2021)

The End.

07/13/2017-07/27/2026

[Photos: The Guys With the Best Match Directed by Ryuta Tasaki Wirtten by Shogo Muto, The Future Directed by Ki-Yong Bae and Jinhui Park Written by Lamar Abrams and Miki Brewster]

Long ago in an American autumn.

What Immortal Hand or Eye (Sean Dillon Interview)

1/8:

“In case I don't see you... good afternoon, good evening, and good night.”
-Andrew Niccol, 1998

            The End.

07/13/2017-08/19/2018

[Photo: Fight Club 2 #10 by Chuck Palahniuk and Cameron Stewart]

Long ago in an American autumn.

I Was Magic. (Spider-Man: Hooky)

1/8: Life's a laugh and death's a joke, it's true.

We open on a bitter January evening. A trio of crooks are attempting to rob a building with a metal door for reasons the story never explicitly tells us. In truth, they’re more akin to the three stooges than a typical thief, as they are quick to argue and get into physical arguments. Even Spider-Man notes the connection once he reveals himself to the trio. Naturally, the four don’t get on and so they fight. While the fight is going on, the owner of the building the trio was attempting to rob watches. As he watches with disdain, he notices a clicking sound. He turns his head to find a camera Spider-Man webbed to the fire escape to take pictures of the fight.

Seeing the material worth of the camera, the man decides to steal it whilst Spidey’s preoccupied with the hoodlums. But just as he’s about to cut the camera free from the webs, a little girl throws a snowball right in his face. She doesn’t take kindly to thieves and, as her western attire implies, tells the “varmint” to leave the camera be. Just before the man is about to stab the little girl, Spider-Man shows up to take his camera back, telling the old man to just walk away and they won’t say a word. The old man agrees to this proposal.

As Spider-Man goes down to thank the little girl, she says it wasn’t a problem and that he should hug his Uncle Ben to make them even. Spidey, shocked by this revelation, tries to act as if he has no idea what she’s talking about but the little girl says his secret’s safe with her and that his aura stick out like a sore thumb. She introduces herself as Marandi “Mandi” Sjorokker, though admits he might not remember her, and claims to be picking up some stuff to fight the “Tordenkakerlakk.” As the police arrive, Mandi leaves the scene, telling Spidey it’s out of his league but if he wants to help, he should come back at 6:30 the next morning. Confused by what just happened, Spidey leaves without helping a single police officer in their inquiry.

He tries to figure out who this little girl is, how she knows him. He doesn’t know any 12 year old girls and isn’t quite sure if he knew any six year old ones when he was younger. Mandi mentioned knowing Dr. Strange, so Spidey decides that’s where he should head off to next. He calls up to see if Strange isn’t asleep, but Strange’s assistant Wong tells Spidey that he’s in some mystical dimension a few doors down from our reality. When he asks about the Tordenkakerlakk, Wong relays that he doesn’t know that word or anything about the girl who said it.

While dismayed, the conversation did make Spider-Man recall that there was a Norwegian family in the neighborhood he grew up in. A pity that Aunt May is out ‘til Sunday, or he could have asked her directly. But it gives him a starting point to look up the term “Tordenkakerlakk,” which is loosely translated from Norwegian to mean “Thunder Cockroach.” With no other choice, Peter decides to help the young girl in… whatever it is she’s planning.

For once, he’s the one left waiting for someone else while their running late, but Mandi does eventually arrive. It seems she needed to get some materials and her shopping list was six pages long. “For a world where magic isn’t much believed,” she says, “you can find a lot of powerful stuff if you know where to look.” Rather than stay in the cold, Mandi reveals to Spider-Man her portable door, which can take them to an alternate dimension. And when he looks inside, Spider-Man sees a strange new landscape, unlike any he could ever exist within.

As they travel through the door, Mandi reveals she used to deliver newspapers to the neighborhood Peter grew up in when he was five and that Uncle Ben was her favorite customer. When Peter questions how a 12 year old could have a paper route when she was only seven, she reveals that she’s actually centuries old, but hasn’t aged a day. Mandi tells Spider-Man that she believes the Tordenkakerlakk is the bane that was prophesized to happen, a sort of death curse. Hearing this and acknowledging this is outside of his wheelhouse, Spidey offers his assistance.

As they fly to their destination with their magic ponchos, Mandi explains her lack of hope in defeating the bane. She thinks Spidey will not be able to help her and the Tordenkakerlakk will only kill him if he tries. She just doesn’t want to die forgotten and alone. To get off the morbid subject, Mandi commends Spidey’s ability to learn quickly, just as his Uncle Ben said. When she asks how the old man is doing, Spidey replies that he died a few years back. He admits that its taken him and Aunt May a few years to adjust to the idea that Ben’s dead, but before he can finish that thought, Spidey gets flung by the jetstreams that allow the two of them to fly. To save him, Mandi makes a portal to another dimension with fluffy pillows and a harem of barely dressed ladies. Peter has to remind himself that he can’t just stay there while Mandi’s life is in danger, so he flies off to her world: Cloudsea.

While enjoying the wondrous sea of clouds that allow Spidey to fly, a fly like being called an Ephex tries to strangle the superhero and he is only barely able to survive. After that random encounter, they arrive to Mandi’s ship: The Nonesuch, which looks more like a canoe with a frog’s face than a traditional ship. While on the ship, Mandi explains that she spent the past couple of centuries exiled on Earth moving from family to family, getting an education, learning new things, and moves on when it becomes abundantly clear she isn’t aging. The reason this is occurring is because she comes from a line of unpopular (evil) wizards, her father being Kurudred the Blood Drinker.

He wanted to conquer the seven planets of Lemne, but Elmak the Light Shaper kept getting in his way. Eventually, Kurudred conjured a spell for eight days to melt Elmak’s citadel with him in it. He thought he could get away with it, but the League of Three Threes thought otherwise and killed both Kurudred and his brother. But, when it came to killing Marandi, the league was uncomfortable with the prospect of killing a little girl. To save his daughter, Kurudred used the last of his magic to keep Marandi from ever growing up. It was the curse of immortality and perpetual adolescence. With her story done, Mandi tells Spidey to get some sleep, as Roach Hunting is a morning task. They bond over the possibility of Spidey being in a harem with The Vision and David Lee Roth. But before either can get the sleep they need, the Tordenkakerlakk suddenly appears and attacks, living up to the “kakerlakk” part of the name. They’re able to lure it away with the ships sonar, though Mandi notes the same trick won’t work on it twice.

The next morning, Mandi explains that the Tordenkakerlakk is part of a prophecy told to her by an Oracle from Stoa Neroi, who claimed in the verse that many a prophecy uses that a wizard-spawned bane is trying to kill her she won’t be able to kill it until she “drink the doom it brings,” which Mandi interprets to mean “it won’t die until she dies.” When Spidey offers to help her retreat if things get too rough, Mandi says she’s sick of paper routes and adoption; she just wants this over with.

Eventually, the Tordenkakerlakk returns, right atop the Elmak’s ruin of a citadel. Mandi concludes from the bane’s current location that Elmak was the one who placed the bane on her as revenge for killing him. As Spidey fights the bane, his webs are able to web up the creature, but it quickly begins to metamorphosize into something less cockroach shaped and more akin to a hybrid between a cockroach and the bone thing from that episode of Hannibal where Will kills Randall Tier. Spidey tries to physically fight the creature, but it’s able to grab ahold of the costumed hero quickly. Thinking fast, Spidey blinds the creature and tries to fly long enough to escape back to the ship.

But the Tordenkakerlakk isn’t one to give up quickly, as it extends its neck to eat them both. When Spidey traps it with his webs, the bane transforms once more, now something more akin to an angry giant with pincers on its face. At this point, the Tordenkakerlakk is able to communicate, but it’s only able to say stuff along the lines of “DEATH TO THE CHILD!” and “DEATH! DEATH! DEATH!” among other things. After it throws Spidey to the other side of the ship, he notes that it’s in the Hulk’s weight class and since Mandi doesn’t know any spells to defeat the creature, Spider-Man has no choice but to keep fighting until he finds the anchor of the ship and stabs the bane with it.

During the respite as the bane regenerates, Peter notes the unlikelyhood that Elmak the Light Shaper would use his final breath to put a death curse on a litteral child, so he asks who could have done the spell. Mandi notes that the League of Three Threes died years before she went on the run and the power needed would have to be on her father’s level. There isn’t anyone in the spheres who could do such a thing. Spidey asks about people from Earth who could hold a grudge, but Mandi says she’s always careful and that she only knows Dr. Strange through passing. Everything else is just her and her interests in Vikings, Norse Mythology, and Clint Eastwood.

But before they can get any answers out of their discussion, the Tordenkakerlakk takes on a new form, this one more akin to John Carpenter’s The Thing. Mandi is too shocked to move, dreading the inevitability of her death. To get her out of it, Spidey sacrifices himself to the bane, not to die by its hand, but to show Mandi that it can be defeated. He webs it up faster than even he thought possible. But before they can escape to get help from Dr. Strange, the Tordenkakerlakk grabs ahold of Peter’s ankle and he tells Mandi to leave without him. When he returns to the ship, Peter finds the bane has now become a motherfucking dragon.

The dragon gives Spidey an ultimatum: Flee or Die. But at that moment, Spidey realizes something: the same method shouldn’t work twice. So why do his webs keep working? Even his Spider-Sense shorts out around the bane, but never his web fluids. He speculates that maybe the reality of the fluids is throwing the bane off, because they aren’t magical at all. To test this theory, the Dragon breaths fire at Spider-Man with only a web shield to protect him. (Since I cut out the bit that was going to have this, I should note that this is a scene where Spider-Man fights a dragon as drawn by Bernie motherfucking Wrightson! I love this comic!) Fortunately, it works. Spidey uses the last of his web fluids to clog up the Dragon’s mouth and it explodes.

Mandi returns alone to find Spidey knocked out and the Tordenkakerlakk still regenerating. Spider-Man doesn’t have the strength to fight the creature again, He suggests that maybe she should improvise the way an adult wizard could. Initially hesitant, Mandi eventually makes up a spell, declaring herself “Marandi the Loyal” and the Tordenkakerlakk is defeated. When she awakens, Spidey explains his theory that Kurudred’s spell to keep Mandi young wasn’t supposed to last forever, but until he thought it was safe for her to grow up (which is to say when the League of Three Threes was dead). The Tordenkakerlakk was a way to push Mandi towards the pain and terror of adulthood. The doom in the prophecy was in fact referring to the loss of her eternal childhood. Growing up is difficult, even terrifying at times. But if Spider-Man stories have taught me anything, it’s that it’s a necessary aspect of life and one that should be embraced. It’s painful, but without that pain we’re left in a stasis that never ends. There are so many corners of the world unseen by those who refuse to grow up.

They return to New York, and Spider-Man swings off to another adventure.

“There is much that remains untold. But let us end our story here."
-Hayao Miyazaki, 1994

            The End.

07/13/2017-03/22/2017

[Photo: The Last Jedi Written and Directed by Rian Johnson]

Long ago in an American autumn.

They Said My Mother Was Insane. (Die II)

1/8: It brings on many changes.

            Tragically, You Died.

“It’s strange… I never imagined it would feel so good to realize I’ve been wrong all along.”
-Gene Luen Yang, 2009

            The End.

07/13/2017-03/22/2018

[Photo: The Royal Tenenbaums Directed by Wes Anderson Script by Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson]

Long ago in an American autumn.

And I’m Going to be Free. (Seekers into the Mystery)

CW: Discussion of Pedophilia

                    1/8: You are sleeping off your demons when I come home.

There are many ways I could approach this one. The most obvious would be to look at it through the lens of JM DeMatteis’ belief system, though that would require a knowledge of said belief system that I neither have nor have the time to research. Alternatively, I could look at it from the perspective of Spider-Man and point out that, much like the main character Lucas Hart, Peter Parker has some… experience with being sexually abused as a kid. But that would be a bit too miserable of an ending for this project. Another possibility would be to point out that the T-shirt Lucas wears from his film “Rocket Starfield” is akin to the shirt Steven Universe wears, but that doesn’t really say much beyond “Oh, look. They wear the same shirt. Isn’t that interesting?”

In the end though, what I’m focusing on is the fact that somehow, someone from 1987 was able to predict the existence of Quentin Tarantino. The obvious answer would be to point out that this was not a story written in 1987, so DeMatteis most likely forgot (or was unaware that) Tarantino wasn’t a thing until 1992 (though My Best Friend’s Birthday did come out in ’87). However, there are mystical implications to invoking Tarantino in a mystical work. For starters, Alan Moore is apparently a fan of his. Or, at the very least, the movie Reservoir Dogs, which is referenced and invoked in his two most personal and mystical works: Promethea and Jerusalem.

I’m not going to go into the Jerusalem reference, as that would require rereading that book, and I frankly don’t have the time, energy, or coping mechanisms to do so. Suffice it to say, there are two, one of which is in the chapter narrated by Alma Warren, Moore’s author insert character, so there’s some importance there. Promethea meanwhile tells the story of a hybrid between Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel being lectured and lecturing about the mystical implications of the universe. In the third issue, she enters the land of Fiction and meets up with her imaginary friend, a machine gun toting version of Little Red Riding Hood. Somehow, she got the idea for this character after watching Reservoir Dogs.

Out of all of Tarantino’s films released at the time the issue came out, that is perhaps the most ill fitting option Moore could have picked. Not just because the film isn’t all that violent (it has the infamous ear scene, sure, but the majority of the film is a group of angry men talking about who fucked them over), but also because men exclusively dominate the film, with the sole female character (a minor police researcher who I don’t think was given a name) being cut out of the film entirely. Tarantino would certainly improve on the roles female character would have in his films (in that he would give them actual roles), but that doesn’t change the fact that Reservoir Dogs is brimming with testosterone (and I’m saying this as someone who views Reservoir Dogs to be one of his three favorite films).

Given this, the most likely explanation for Promethea to create such a character after watching such a film is either a) She was so bored by the lack of violence implied by the statement “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino” that she created a character who inverts all that film stood for or b) Alan Moore has never seen Reservoir Dogs and is basing the character off of his assumptions of the phrase “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino.” (Indeed the aspects of Jerusalem that invoke Reservoir Dogs are very much the aesthetics of the film rather than the narrative, or so I recall.) Both are equally likely.

But of course Seekers into the Mystery predates both texts, and its invocation of Tarantino is extremely interesting. In the penultimate issue (drawn exquisitely by Jill Thompson), Lucas is offered the possibility to abandon his reality in favor of one where his father didn’t rape him, his brother didn’t die as a kid, he isn’t divorced, and is in fact a successful screenwriter. To highlight the absurdity of this false reality, it postulates that the fourth film of a science fiction film series seeped in the works of Joseph Campbell and has characters with the name “Obidiah Crater” can win Oscars in categories like “Best Original Screenplay.” (Not that the film is inherently bad, but rather the Oscars are notorious for their refusal to let even the barest bones genre piece get recognized.) Suffice it to say, it’s too good to be true.

Which in many ways is the point. If we were put into Lucas’ position, we would want to believe the lie. That life isn’t a series of painful events that often ends in anticlimaxes and despair; that you can be successful if you set your mind to it; that your father’s love will be enough to not make him want to rape you as a child and those complicated feelings of love won’t be around once he’s dead. Lying has its uses, certainly but lying to that degree is delusional at best. It only hurts us in the end.

Which brings us back to the work of Quentin Tarantino. As a storyteller, Tarantino has an extreme investment in the concept of lying. His films are full of liars attempting to one up each other in their lies. Existence within a Tarantino film is performative (fitting as his films are invested in the implications of movies, but that’s a different matter entirely). But at the same time, he is keenly aware that one can easily fall into delusions of grandeur. For example, let’s take a look at the film that came out the same year the final issue of Seekers into the Mystery came out: Jackie Brown. Not so much the main character herself, but rather the central antagonist: Ordell Robbie. Robbie believes himself to be this bad mother fucker who no one should fuck with, less they end up with a bullet in the head. But in reality, he’s a fuck up who gets conned out of his money twice, gets all his sales pitches from crappy infomercials, and he puts way too much trust in someone whose been in prison for 20 years because he’s played by Robert DeNiro. He needs to play the role of a bad mother fucker because it’s expected of a drug dealing gun runner to be as such. But he’s not good at it, and it kills him in the end.

But at the same time, there’s the Tarantino film DeMatteis inadvertently predicts. In the aforementioned Oscar win, the other films nominated include films by Mitchell Rose (a short film director whose short film “Helicopter” was somehow good enough to get nominated), Jeff Maguire (the screenwriter of Timeline), Chris Columbus (who for some reason was pinched to direct a remake of a 1972 Hammer Studios piece), and Quentin Tarantino for a film called “Little Men.” Within the filmography of Tarantino, the term “Little Man” appears in his 2009 film Inglourious Basterds as the inexplicable derogatory nickname used for BJ Novak’s character, a character so minor you don’t even remember him being in the film at all.

It’s at this point that I realize that I don’t really have much to say about Seekers into the Mystery. It’s not a text that inspired a lot of weird and interesting ideas in me; it’s not Moonshadow, what DeMatteis followed Kraven’s Last Hunt up with and the other “piece about the nature of the universe from a mystical lens” that Seekers is a complement to. It’s a wonderful book, full of ideas and implications that someone far more interesting than I should write about. But at the same time, the book left me a bit cold after reading it. Not in the “I hated this book” or “I missed something within the text” but rather in the “I have nothing to say about this book beyond the technical aspects, which make for terrible analysis.” There are some moments of charm, dangling themes and threads that could make entire books on their own.

At its heart though is a somber story of a man coming to terms with being sexually abused as a child by his father by falling in love with a magician. I use the term somber not in the humorless sense one would expect (there are a lot of jokes made in regards to the [in both the academic and literal sense] magical negro’s bodily fluids), but rather in the stark look it takes at the history of repression and abuse Lucas has gone through and how its affected his ability to be in committed relationships. Even worse is the fact that he comes to this revelation shortly before his father dies. So there’s no moment of confrontation between the two. No point of closure for Lucas. Just complicated feelings of love, disgust, hatred, and compassion towards his father.

I suppose, since I talked at length about Alan Moore, I should discuss a work by his opposite, Grant Morrison (I need another 500 words or so, so why not). In his major piece about the nature of the universe via a mystical lens, The Invisibles, Morrison centralizes the narrative around the character of Audrey Murray, a minor character who only appears in two issues and never as the main character. Her husband, both through gas lighting Audrey in front of her friends and physically assaulting her, abused her. But in the end, he dies at the hands of the Grant Morrison self insert character not for her sake, but because he was just another faceless mook in the army of the enemy.

And yet, for all the pain she’s gone through, all the trauma and torment, she doesn’t let this make her a shitty person. Likewise Lucas Hart, for all his shittyness (there’s a reason why he got divorced), doesn’t let his trauma turn him into a shitty person. It’s only when he acknowledges the trauma as something that happened rather than repressing it that he becomes a better person (with the occasional relapses into shittyness). (Alternatively, there’s Dean Trippe’s autobiographical comic Something Terrible, which deals in these same themes as well as the constant worry that his abusive past will make him want to hurt his kid the way he was hurt.)

For some, trauma is the “be all/end all” of existence. It’s the moment where life stops making sense and everything just hurts. For others, it might be too much to handle and thus needs to be repressed until such a time they’re ready to cope with it. But it comes out eventually and the fact is no one is ever truly ready. But people have their way of trying to find their true self, to seek the answer to the mystery of existence. And the answers aren’t always pleasant.

But we seek anyways because we are a species that can’t handle not knowing. We want to know about why we’re here, if we have free will, and what other people are keeping from us. We don’t like being left in the dark, so we go out and try to find out why. Even if the methodology is weird like looking at a work of fiction from the perspective of the historical context it comes out in or by making a movie critiquing another movie. Nonetheless, we seek the answers to the problems we face as if there’s one coherent answer that’ll explain everything to everyone.

But that’s rarely if ever the case. The answers tend to lead to more questions, which lead to further questions and so forth. We’re never going to have all the answers to the meaning of life, be it personal or mystical. Not because there is no correct answer, but because the correct answers contradict each other. Seekers into the Mystery and Promethea and The Invisibles are all contradictions. But then-- aren’t we all?

“And now that I’ve lost everything… now that everyone I love is gone, all I have left is everything. The river carries me on, though every fear is facing me. And I do not know what next will be, and I cannot know what next I’ll see. I’m running forward anyway. I’m not afraid to meet the day! The world is filled with everything. I’m a boy who could be anything. And now, I will do everything! The whole world unfurls before me; a great adventure lies before me. I’m reaching out for anything. I’m calling out to everything. There’s nothing I’m afraid to be: the world is new and glittery. I run to meet it, hopefully! Love never dies in memory and I will meet life gloriously.”
-Anne Washburn, 2014

            The End.

07/13/2017-03/22/2018

[Photo: Praying Directed by Ross Shuman Script by Dino Stamatopoulos]

Long ago in an American autumn.