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.

We Got Every Last One of These Punks. (Spider-Man: Reign)

“Sometimes, it's necessary to fight back.”
-Andrew Cartmel, 1992

1/8: The revolution will not be televised.

When I was a boy, my aunt would get me Christmas presents. Some years it would be video games, others it would be Hot Wheels. Nowadays, it’s cash (which is increasingly the present I get from that side of the family. Then again, I don’t have the closeness to them that I do with the other side, mostly due to distance). But the last year I remember getting an actual present was when I was just exiting middle school. I got a phone call from my aunt and she asked what I wanted for Christmas. At the time, I had begun reading comics in earnest again, and so I asked for some.

Or rather, just one: Spider-Man The Other. While I was getting into comics, one of the trades I would always return to was “Back in Black,” which featured a story with a character from The Other. I was intrigued by the oddness of such a character in a Spider-Man comic and I wanted to learn more about them. So I asked my aunt for the comic and she sent it to me. The Other was a storyline from a few years back wherein Peter dies at the hands of a vampire and comes back from the dead through mystical means. Looking back, I don’t think either was as good as I remembered it being when I was 13.

But that wasn’t the only comic I got that Christmas. There were two others: Fallen Son (which looked at the Marvel Universe’s reaction to the Death of Captain America) and Spider-Man Reign: One of the greatest Spider-Man comic of the 21^st Century. There are many negative things one could say about Reign: The art is a bit crap at times (especially the backgrounds, which don’t seem to even try at points), some of the plot details are left to the side when they should have been somewhat explained (how did Jonah learn about Peter’s secret identity), the story probably needed another issue of space, and a couple of panels are counterintuitive to the themes and ideas the story is invested in (specifically, in the final issue, one of the minor characters inexplicably says, “I believe” and that works against the rest of the comic’s suspicion of the previous generation).

But when people talk about Spider-Man Reign in a negative light, what they focus on aren’t those aspects of the text but rather the text’s approach to sexuality and how it flagrantly nicks ideas from the Dark Knight Returns. In regards to sexuality, this comes from two moments. Firstly, in the initial printing of the story, Kaare Andrews drew a picture of Peter Parker completely naked. Which is to say we see his cock. On the one hand, this is a very embarrassing miss on the part of Marvel editorial. But at the same time, it’s not all that detailed in the panel it appears in (indeed, it’s even less so than Dr. Manhattan’s infamously tiny penis), so it’s understandable that Andrews was briefly able to get away with that.

The other piece of sexuality requires a bit more work. In the penultimate issue, it’s revealed that the cause of Mary Jane’s death was being in a relationship with Peter. (The fact that Mary Jane Watson died at all was something that was suggested by both the covers and the fact that her ghost literally haunts Peter, but not something that was explicitly stated until the second issue.) Now the decision to kill off Mary Jane as a means to get Peter to stop being a superhero is problematic to say the least, but the contention most critics of this story have with this isn’t that she was killed off but rather how she was killed off. Though not explicitly stated in the text, one can infer (both from the dialogue of “I am filled with radioactive blood. And not just blood. Every fluid. Touching me… Loving me… Loving me killed you!!” and the fact that Andrews decided to draw Spidey’s penis) that Mary Jane was killed by Peter’s Spider-Sperm.

If one is to make the argument that Spider-Man Reign is one of the greatest Spider-Man comics ever made, this is certainly a moment for redemptive reading. In many regards, this is a literalization of what Harry was talking about in Best of Enemies: “…We leave nothing but pain in our wake. We’re toxic, Peter-- anyone comes near us… and their lives become radioactive.” (For all that I’ll get into the influence of Frank Miller, perhaps the biggest influence on this story is that of JM DeMatteis from the invocation of Kraven’s Last Hunt [indeed, Reign was the story that introduced me to that one] to the investment in masks and performance to the contrast between toxic masculinity and healthy masculinity. Also, note the lack of appearance of Gwen Stacy and Harry Osborn. While most likely done to give the story the ability to somewhat stand on its own, it also has the implication that Peter was able to make peace with those deaths as he was with Ned Leeds and Charlamange, connecting the story with another theme of the DeMatteis era: the ability to cope with trauma.) In this regard, recall that I argued that comic could be read as being about the final stages of a collapsing polyamorous relationship. Given this, it could be read that the Spider-Sperm was less of a “super cancer” than it was a metaphor for having AIDS. Many an AIDS narrative focused on either the experience of slowly dying of the disease or, as Spider-Man Reign does, the guilt of the carrier for having caused the death of their lover through their love and how they cope with outliving them. (An alternative reading would be just to point out that there's no actual proof within the text that being in a relationship with Peter caused Mary Jane to die. Literally all we have is Peter Parker's word on the matter. It could very well be that Peter just blames himself for his wife getting cancer. Indeed, the text supports this theory given the ghost of Mary Jane [because comics] responds to Peter tearfully confessing that he gave his wife cancer with "Stop being silly.")

Of course, connecting this text with my own read of a 20 year old comic isn’t enough to actually argue that this is a queer text (nor is it enough to save said text from the banality of killing off a female lead solely to give the male lead some drama, but then few things can and Spider-Man Reign is interesting enough to survive without those factors). There has to be something within the text that alludes to queerness in some fashion. Fortunately, this comes in the form of the story’s main antagonist: Venom, the Black Suit made manifest. When confronting the bad guy in the final issue, the way Venom talks to Peter has an abusive ex-boyfriend vibe to it, in particular: “Well, well, well, look who’s come crawling back. It’s been a long time, lover. Heard you’re single again.” Add to that the way Venom gaslights Peter about the nature of their relationship (specifically in regards to his awareness about the Black Suit’s nature), and it’s abundant that Venom’s relationship with Peter (as with all his relationships really) is one founded upon abusing his partner.

(There is of course a sensible argument to be made in regards to implicitly queering the main antagonist of the text. However the narrative doesn’t do so in the typical way, opting to instead make the queerness an implication of dialogue rather than the typical methodology of using stereotypical queer signifiers [such as a focus on fashion and being extremely camp] to highlight the villainy. Indeed, the villainy of Venom is less in regards to his queerness than in regards to him being a fascist who plots to enslave and consume humanity because he was “abandoned” by the one person who he “loved.” Even if we are to assume a sympathetic motivation [which the text grants to some degree, but not enough to allow Peter to be unsympathetic], the final solution Venom comes up with dashes those arguments away for the bollocks that they are.)

Which leaves us with the Dark Knight Returns connection. In most regards, this is a superficial read of the text, focusing on the fact that it’s the story of old man Spidey coming out of retirement to do battle with a dystopian future. There are some other minor details that connect the two texts: there’s an army of young people who don masks to combat the horrors of the dystopia, a murder occurs that everyone (including the author) ignores, and the main character’s retirement is caused by the death of someone close to him.

However if one were to actually look at those moments closely, it becomes clear that Spider-Man Reign is talking about completely different things. For starters, Peter’s reasoning for retiring has less to do with Batman realizing that he’s pushed the game of caped crusader too far (again, he’s blatantly Adam West Batman) but rather the guilt caused by the death of someone he loves. (In fact, unlike Jason Todd, the death of Mary Jane is central to the text. Peter's arc within the story is making peace with her death. Batman doesn't give a shit about Jason once Carrie Kelly comes into the picture.) Indeed, when given the opportunity to return to being a costume superhero, Batman immediately jumps at the chance whereas Peter tries to run as far away as possible. As for the youths, where Dark Knight Returns demonized them until they were wielded by someone of great power and control, Spider-Man Reign views them in a more valorizing light. (This should come as no surprise given their more recent work: where Frank Miller went on to write a screed against Islam to such a degree as to plausibly mortify Ben Garrison, Andrews went on to write a comic that argues for the extrajudicial murder of the 1%.)

Furthermore, there’s the people who brought the youths together in the end. For the Dark Knight Returns, it’s Batman who whips these criminal youths into his own militia. His indomitable will pushes their criminality towards his own ends. Conversely, Spider-Man Reign initially has this role be played by J Jonah Jameson. Jameson has an interesting role within the narrative. He’s a sympathetic character, and yet he’s consistently viewed as being in the wrong about just everything. He’s wrong about Peter’s willingness to be the great superhero who will destroy the dystopia, he’s wrong about the people being inspired to fight once they see the superhero in action, and he was wrong about who Venom was possessing (he thought it was George W. Bush whereas it was really Dick Cheney). (This has an interesting impact on his final benediction where he thanks god for the return of the Superhero as opposed to the collapse of the fascist state. Indeed, it’s ambiguous as to whether Spider-Man is now a traditional superhero or if he’s become something else entirely.)

Midway through though, he’s arrested for starting a riot and the young people are scattered without a leader. And so the person who brings them together is not Spider-Man, but the text’s deturagonist (who remains nameless within the text, which doesn’t work at all). She proclaims to the crowd of fellow teenagers and kids “We can’t rely on them anymore. The old men. They can’t show us how to live. They took our city and made it a cage. They only hurt us. Stop running. Stop hiding. It’s time we became something more than what we are.“ This reads a lot differently in 2018 than it did 10 years ago, especially given the gun debate going on right now. (In many ways, this prescience is what makes Spider-Man Reign one of the best Spider-Man comics of the 21^st century.) (Another interesting note is that she’s reacting against, of all things, a Doctor Who reference. In the episode Survival, a joke is made about two men being chased by a tiger, and one of the men claims he’ll survive because he’s faster than the other. Spider-Man Reign tells the joke verbatim, save for changing the tiger to a bear.)

At the same time though, Andrews is aware enough of these small connections to the Dark Knight Returns to play with them in his narrative, which really hurts the story overall. While some, such as the televisions (and, subsequently, the journalist Miller Janson), add to the theme of watching the world as a method to bringing about social change (for one cannot change the world if one looks away from their child of Omelas), the decision to confine the story within four issues hurts the flow and impact of the narrative. In retrospect the story should have either had the issues extended as Dark Knight Returns were or had an additional issue added to expand on things. Also the decision to toy with some plot beats of the Dark Knight Returns (the superhero returns for a one off mission, which is successful so he goes after a bigger target, which proves to be too much for him and he’s saved by his girl sidekick [the subversion comes from that last part, where instead of a last minute rescue, the girl flees because “he’s just an old man. Weak. Like the rest of us”]) should have stopped in the first issue in favor of doing its own thing.

And yet, I can’t help but love this story. There are so many things that I haven’t brought up that are absolutely fantastic (the use of Deus Ex Machina, the Mary Jane scenes, the two instances of the nine panel grid, etc.). But more than that, this is one of the texts that actually got me invested in literary criticism. One of the first comics blogs I ever followed was 4thletter, which is sadly no longer active. One of the posts I read on that site was David Brothers’ take on Spider-Man Reign in a series on the influence of the Dark Knight Returns. It’s a spectacular piece that highlights why this comic is great to such a degree that if I was to make my argument, I’d just be ripping off his work entirely. Brothers, along with Gavok, Andrew Hickey and the rest of the Mindless Ones, and Dr. Anj, were among the earliest of my influences and guides to comics. Without them and so many others, this blog wouldn’t exist. Thank you.

            The End.

07/13/2017-03/21/2018

[Photo: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys #5 by Gerard Way, Shaun Simon, and Becky Cloonan]

Long ago in an American autumn.