Fascism of the Bug

So, Spider-Man, right?

For years I’ve had the fantasy of saying something definitive profound and powerful about my favourite funnybook character, hoping to time it precisely with Stan Lee’s death, allowing for the inevitable wave of emotionality that would follow to make up for my lack of skill drive effort in articulation. Stan Lee would die, the world would react in genuine feigned sorrow, or shock, or anger, or judgement, and I would stake my claim on the biggest share of the pie, like Doctor Doom striding into Hassenstadt. I would lay my deep well of sorrows bare for the world to see, The Man being the catalyst to finally open up about how my life has been shaped by the tyranny of mom dad and Spidey, and bathe in adulation and admiration for my profundity.

For years I have fantasized about Stan Lee’s death.

He would be my Uncle Ben.

For of course Peter Parker needs Uncle Ben to die. A hero needs a burden to bear, to signify the enormous guilt and alienation that he resents the world for always having had to bear, that would otherwise be laughed off as quotidian trivial, that, exteriorised as a very visible yet never-spoken-of burden, shames the world into complicit hero-worship. A shared network of guilt; resentment-powered-selflessness.

And what would a superhero-nerd want more than to be just that, aspire to that, especially an increasingly alienated neuroticized jealous child struggling to balance evident care affection joy joy at the world infinite joy at in and with all that is, with the ever looming spectres of self and punishment?

But. See. Spider-Man, right?

Spider-Man is a showman. Spider-Man decides to use his powers solely for money, for himself (but of course not just for himself - he has a family to support; a hero must ever have that glimmer of conscience and selfless nobility). Spider-Man is shocked into greater righteousness by the violent removal of his guiding light, making him a greater presence in Spider-Man’s life than he ever was before. Spider-Man finds joy, joy in all things despite this burden. Spider-Man finds joy, joy at the world because of this burden. Spider-Man finds joy, joy with life in the singular, in itself, in its spiderweb creep of rapturous, liberatory connections. Spider-Man shrugs off the burden, an act radically altering himself and the Rand-tinged faux-Nietzscheanism of Steve Ditko (also recently departed), affirming not just himself but life. Spider-Man reacts to the system, he upholds slave morality, he traps escapees in his web enmeshing them in a jail prior to jail, he assaults his foes viciously with his barbs, unloading a rapid unhinged strand of sadism, constructing a weird brutal fascism of the bug. Spider-Man cries when he fails to save his true love. Spider-Man kills his true love. Spider-Man affirms himself through destruction. Spider-Man clones himself endlessly, even when seemingly through the agency of others. Spider-Man proliferates. Spider-Man is a menace. Spider-Man is monstrous, unworldly, otherworldly, doing everything a spider can, nothing a man should.

Spider-Man exists outside Peter Parker. Spider-Man is a tool, a concept, a facilitator, not defined by his relations. Spider-Man facilitates Peter’s heroism; but he can just as well and just as easily kill the hero, free Peter Parker from the tyranny of all-encompassing interiority, albeit briefly, all too briefly. Spider-Man can spin up compassion, creation, can facilitate the new as much as he is used to preserve the old; in this, in these, and only these, in flashes that unfortunately can never be sustained, Spider-Man is more than a fixed neurotic fantasy, the distorted joy of a deprived child: he is real, all too real.

Stan Lee joined Marvel, then Timely, in 1939, hired by his uncle as little more than an office boy at first, eventually getting to writing back up stories, eventually getting to create, eventually creating an entire universe of complex links that have now transcended the pages they were born in. He brought realism to superhero comics, suffusing four colour pages with real world anxieties, paving the ground for escapist fantasies that were deeper, and more insidious, in that they always thwarted or deferred the escape. He spun incredible yarns; with Jack Kirby, he launched a fabulous exploration of the unknown within and without the family, in Fantastic Four; with Steve Ditko, he embarked on a still unmatched depiction of the eerie, in Doctor Strange. The Hulk was unmoored, unmediated id; the X-Men were one man’s ego made manifest.

Throughout his life, he was a showman; constructing the image of an endless engine of creativity for Marvel and especially for himself - The House of Ideas - a recursive loop of creativity. He pioneered the Marvel method, and corrupted something that could have potentially destabilized the way certain creators are privileged in the process of the making of a comic book into a machine that would stabilize himself at the centre and hold him at the top, appropriating the work of numerous other creators, creating his own nemesis in Jack Kirby. He spent his last years in a continuous fall from grace, struggling over his legacy, an empire that could always only ever consume him.

Strangely enough, he never created Spider-Man.

Spider-Man lives in the same way Mickey Mouse does. But, surely, somewhere else, Spider-Man still lives, still spins. Surely, someday, he will kill the superhero, as he can, for the superhero must die.

For years I have fantasized about Stan Lee’s death, waiting for that inevitable, magnificent burst of creative energy that it would surely bring, waiting for it to liberate me, waiting also for it to bring me the adulation I so deeply desire.

But, Spider-Man, you know?

Wealth and fame he’s ignored. Not because he has a greater burden to bear, a higher responsibility to stick to. But because he can shrug them off, and then busy himself in the job of spinning.

Action is his reward.

It's happening again.

Turn On The Radio

Going into this series as a big Jack Knight fan, I wasn't expecting to like Will Payton as much as I eventually did.

Roger Stern brings all his Spider-Man experience to bear on his #Starman run, creating a character who is likeable and believably heroic like few capes are these days. Channeling the 80s cape fad of salt-of-the-earth heroes, Stern's Starman makes its space oddity of a hero more convincingly grounded than many writers - and filmmakers - manage with their realistic, grim 'n' gritty masculinist fantasies.

Stern's Starman is by no means revolutionary - whether in its politics or in its storytelling - but Payton's thoroughly working class family (industrial worker single mother, schoolteacher daughter, copy editor son) and his concern for people on the ground - construction workers, cooks and store clerks, the disabled (and, sadly, a few cops) - makes the entire thing reverberate with a kind of ethics that has been missing in mainstream cape comics since Geoff Johns' #Flash run (outliers like G. Willow Wilson's #MsMarvel come almost close at times).

Payton's - and Sterns' - Starman does not share the fondness for esoterica or the art deco energy that lent the Robinson/Jack Knight run much of its greatness. Payton is also a decidedly more bland character than Jack Knight - while he's much less of a white guy whiner, much less entitled, and thus much more likeable than Knight, this also means that he gets a much less well-rounded character arc. Nor is it an underrated or hidden gem in the same way as, say, Peter Milligan's #XStatix. But it is what it is - a familiar, comfortable, yet sometimes surprising and even wild ride that flows like the hazy cosmic jive of a David Bowie bassline, taking its lead to that haven for all great but forgotten legacy characters that Grant Morrison described - that hallowed ground where all the children boogie.

Look out your window, and maybe you can see his light.

I wish I could ask you what death is like.

Jawab al-Azrael

This is a continuation, a beginning, an ending.

It is only after the ground has been marked with many a hoofprint, the fire has been sated,
and the headiness of the Majlis-al-Djinn has been expelled in degrees, that Ashrin
remembers the babble-birthing cacophony that was being suppressed in those quarters of
wisps, even as the Djinn carved their hazy walls out of those voices. The quotidian no longer
blends with (is no longer consumed by) the surreal, the multitudinous nature of the Djinn no
longer suppresses all other multiplicities, and the starkness of the earth-smells solidifies his
own place in between adm and Malak, and he sees, for the first time, the
many worlds the Djinn had shown him. The fire is not greater than the clay, there is no unity
in sin and no shared innocence, and the choice the Djinn  had offered him was no choice at
all. But it is too late. His Buraq has not abandoned him, but the reins have. 

Slip

Like a thousand unmarked needles, invisible, but incessant,
in their chatter, the rain falls, and outside the sky is an unlit white, space but not quite. The
room is eerie in the light's dead glow, soaking in the darkness, which taints the windows as it seeps in,
but the laptop screen is bright. As is the TV as it shews a bizarre colourful diorama, a rape-justifying number from the 90s that holds my attention,
me, arrested,
for the sheer randomness of events and characters on the screen,
 bathed in this dead light tinged with darkness,
transports the room somewhere beyond the normal even as a suited, sunglassed actor chases an impossibly clad actress and the lyrics, mixed with the chatter, try to stimulate some shamefully repressed corner of my brain.
The room, and me in it.

But then the chatter, just the chatter, takes me. I hear other sounds, as I do every night, and I wonder vaguely what they are, but mostly I
let myself be carried by the chatter,
swayed, driven, drenched.
I get up, leave my bed;
right outside my room, the roof is leaking, there is a pile of water on the floor,
not yet blood.
The darkness has completely taken the other rooms, but
nothing is making those other sounds that I hear. 

I am in the verandah, staring at the rain, at the street outside, barely protected by the senile streetlamps,
The chill nips at my flesh, the wind brushes against my bones. The chatter grows ever louder.
I am alone.
But then,
as the vision of buildings, ringed by trees, imposing themselves on the wet, coiling, fullerene-coloured streets, and all of it, the entire scene,
struggling to eclipse the dead white space beyond,
threatens to overwhelm my attention, I turn around.
It is there in the darkness, a figure that is not me yet me.

Against all of my better judgement (if there is such a thing), I move towards it;
It turns, heels up in the air, toes pressing against the cold, ahistoric floor,
It walks, and unwilling, unwitting, I follow.
It moves down the stairs, as do I,
The soles of my slippers burning up in the cold.
The darkness inside grows.

Soon I am on the street,
The buildings on both sides like giant stairs,
The road a wet vomitorium.
The rain, needles and necessary backdrop.
The darkness outside, slightly more knowledgeable though less conversant.
And on both ends, and on either side, in the endless wet, the abundant dark, the unfading cold,
There is me. Many mes.
I run.
Afraid that I might slip, fall face first into the muddy pitch, devoid, at this point, of annotations,
towards and away



The rain never stops.

A Letter to His Majesty

SEPTEMBER 1939
3rd INDIAN ARTILLERY BRIGADE, CALCUTTA
We have been stationed here a while. Long enough for me who is not a man of letters, or pithy reminiscences, to crave the lost comfort of fog and fireplaces, the familiar, filial, and appetising scents of a hearth replaced by the oppressive gunpowder-and-metal foulness of howitzers. They have modelled this city after Home, but it is as far from my home as these thousands of fresh boys, nestlings, being shipped off to fight in a War they have no stake in, crossing forbidden waters, are from theirs.
Forgive my rambling. My time is drawing to a close, in a city of lost men I cannot recognise, and I feel I have much to say and naught but these last few hours to say it. Yet I must do my duty first.  I feel I must warn Your Majesty. A spectre is haunting the Empire. The spectre of Death.
It is not the War, or not just the War: I mean that our time has ended, though all of us may not know it yet. We are but Flying Dutchmen.
That is not idle metaphor. I believe that this spectre is following me, His only reason for not claiming me sooner being to savour my prolonged torment. He thrives on yearning and memories and tears and lost causes as much as on myths and legends and superstition. And I believe He has already claimed several of my men and brothers, though we, blind as we are, did not see it at the time.
I only now wait for Him to arrive, so that I might ask Him His Name, and if He does not answer me I shall scream, "Very well, Demon: then say my name and drag me to Hell" and He shall.
I apologise if it seems that I am wasting your time, or that you have trusted command of your forces to a raving madman (I have killed with and without cause, but never as a madman- this you must believe). But I sit here, now, in my bare alien quarters with only the light of a candle and the chirp of crickets, painful memories, the scratch of my pen and an unfamiliar, uncomfortable rustling for company, to report only what I believe- know- to be true, as is my duty, and to you directly because it is your misfortune to bear the crown and thus, despite all the protection we can offer, to stand at the gates when the time comes.
As is your sacred duty.
We created this spectre; we may have done it in Plassey or in Waziristan or in this very city, in May.
 Poor imitation of home it may be but in desperate times you relish whatever small comfort you can extract: perhaps from a stroll through the corridors of this still fledgling City, or the riverside. Buoyed by the announcement of the new Socialist congregation under one of their native sons (who I believe shall be confined soon), there was unrest, but not enough that I would not steal a chance to gauge how unsafe the city had become in the evening, for us and for them. A few months later death from the skies would ensure that.
A few paces out from the river I came upon what seemed to be a theatrical performance on the streets; the congregation was not big enough for the local Constabulary to notice. My eyes were drawn to what I presumed was a Bengali family: husband, wife and young son, dressed in finery and thus conspicuous in their choice of company, time, and place, despite the assertion that revolution does not follow the maxim of class. I had seen far too many instances to the contrary to believe in this: even the rebels and politicians of the higher classes adopt the vestments of the lower ones in a futile attempt at unity (which works no better than segregation: we tried both and failed). I followed them at a distance, being possessed by a wild curiosity; maybe the morbid and fatal interest one has in the instruments of his own failure.
The play began, stirring the crowd, perhaps shaping their spirits: zeitgeist, as the krauts would call it. The players shouted rhetoric, the crowd answered in kind. There were no guttural screams, or cheers, or bold declarations, as I had witnessed elsewhere, and it was all the more terrifying for it. I watched as they killed us.
Later, when the butchering was over, and the crowd had disappeared, only the conspicuous trinity was there, waiting for me. Evening had seeped into night, and in that mostly calm yet only very slightly troubled, mostly silent yet only very slightly whispering breeze, and in the glow of buildings that did not belong here, I could see myself in a clarity that I had been denied before: as a terrifying yet pathetic being from another world.
They were waiting to deny me, or perhaps to welcome me into their bosom. I do not remember the order in which I killed them then, in my mind, or even if I did: perhaps the boy knew where to strike, and knocked the gun out of my hand, and saved his family; perhaps he joined them in oblivion or a better land. Or perhaps he knelt among their bodies, weeping at the violation of his world.
I watched them leave. I already knew where they would go. And the streets were empty, but for the buildings and the owls and the bats.
And the spectre has been following me since that night. Sometimes it whispers the names of murdered dissidents and denied orphans who do not exist merely in my mind. It tells me of how this edifice raised on the soil of sacrifice and suffering is crumbling. But I am not the only one who is guilty, or with blood on his hands. And so I believe that this spectre, or their own spectres, has claimed so many of my brothers and my men. Soon it- they- will claim us all. Even you, Your Majesty- especially you. God save you.
I hope this reaches you. My night is tonight, and so I made this final effort to collect myself, my thoughts, and do my duty. There is much left to say, but the time has not been granted us. The night has grown quieter, the crickets have silenced their chirping in anticipation, and we, the bastard children of giants who dared to stand on their shoulders, shall now go to sleep.

The rustling grows louder. In distinctive beats, like the flapping of wings. Perhaps it is nothing more than a furry, fickle pest stuck in some corner of this empty room. It does not matter.
All that remains for me now is to blow out the candle.
It has been an honour.
I remain, your most faithful servant,
Major Joseph Chillingworth.