or so says this blog:
http://www.yourmomsbasement.com/archives/2006/11/galactus_is_com.html
It’s always refreshing to find a site that revolves around references to old comic books that strike me as obscure.
Your moms basement is now right up there with Fafblog (http://fafblog.blogspot.com/) as my source for reliable news.
In breaking news, blogger now supports labels, so this blog may well live a little longer.
In reference to the most recent post, I gather that Eco’s most recent novel is about the discovery of one’s self from recalling childhood pop culture. I guess I’m in good company. On the other hand Slate’s review of the novel, The Great Brain – Is Umberto Eco’s new novel about memory really postmodern? By Robert Alter, rightly points out this is really just a story we (Umberto and I) tell ourselves. Real psychologists with real science can tell us how memory and identity really work, this stuff about comic books is composed of speculative ruminations, and I still can’t figure out what the point of those things are. That is, unless Aristotle is right and the the finest things are those that are done for their own sake alone. This would make reflecting on comic books a very fine thing to do indeed.
How could I let this go by without comment: Pandagon on the politics of comic books.
Comic books themselves presented my first awareness of any number of topics, at least in part because I was rather late to reading, being completely uninterested in what the schools wanted to me. Comic books were an important catalyst in my becoming a reader. At least that’s what I tell myself. In any case, comic books made me think about politics. There were two stages to this, at first I was the only person I knew who read comics, so I didn’t discuss the stories with anyone else because no one was interested.
Marvel comics, especially, are populated with moral ambiguities. The good guy is always good, and the bad guy always bad. But each of them is really in conflict with themselves and their unusual places in their environments. Some manage to over come their problems and become heroes like Spider Man, others are consumed by their own desires and become villians, like Dr. Doom giving into vanity and rage. There’s also a significant group, such as Magneto, who walk back and forth across the hero-villian line and the morally ambigous, hulk on a rampage, Nick Fury in his treatment of espers etc. Of course, there are others who are simply unexplained toad people. Why do toad people do what they do? I don’t think we’re ever meant to know. The point being that the stories can often become a complex dance between the motivations of the characters. The actual punching could come as a relief to trying to understand the problems motivating a story. Since these stories tend to reflect the most prominent anxities expressed at large when they are written, the step towards more real world style political thinking was easy.
Turns out that not eveybody read comics this way. The second stage was after a comic book store opened in my town and created a community of comic readers. In general comic book readers are intrigued by ideas, but don’t take to them naturally. I remember one long discussion in which a group of store regulars could not figure out a way in which they could reliably become rich given a time machine. Try this exercise yourselve. Moreover, most felt that the violence in the comics needed to be understood as a literal solution to the sorts of problems that might be considered. (Spiderman’s punching and web-slinging was a solution to crime, whatever Stan might say on his soap box. It was as if Godzilla showed the way to fight environmental corruption when he took on the smog monster. Apologies for media jumping.)
The second stage didn’t so much change my political reflections as it made it clear that having an intelligent conversation about comic books, at least in my small part of the commonwealth, meant leaving the comic shop.
I’ve been thinking more and more about the conservative student who bemoaned that the problem with the world as it is is that thing as not the way they should be. The more I read about the election and the distribution of red and blue counties, the more I see that he’s not alone, not at all.
The family needs to be fundamental unit of society, small government is necessary for the family to perform its appropriate functions. Unions are unnecessary. Large corporations are a necessary evil. (I can’t see anyone whose primary focus is hearth and home finding much sympathy with something as impersonal as a multi-national conglomerate.)
The point seems to be that the family, working as a unit, is best able to secure the goods to its members, including a relevant sort of freedom. My rough (ie unsupported) conclusions indicate that this position is most commonly held in rural (ie red) counties. I’ve also seen it described as the position shared by the people who founded this country, by which I think they mean the settlers of various generations. This is the group that tamed the wilderness, settling wherever they could clear their own bit of land to satsify their needs. Quite literally the family would be the most relevant unit of operation. This group contrasts with later generations of immigrants who left Europe for the more familiar context of the cities.
The rural counties have an obvious sort of appeal for someone who’d like to emulate these values and the descendants of the frontier settlers who haven’t rejected these values would most reasonably be found in the red counties.
This particular approach reminds me strongly of the Little House books. Pa didn’t need any social security. Retirement was an alien concept anyway. In traditional societies, offspring are security in old-age. Here’s one more way that contemporary western cultures break with traditional ways of living.
Regulatory government is the death of the Little House approach to living. Environmental regulation prevents the most effecient forms of farming, large scale projects lower the entry costs to the frontier too much …
But the more I think about it, the less appealing a Little House life seems. The isolation, the crude ammenities, not to mention the occasional brutality and lack of good coffee make all make me glad that I don’t live on the frontier.
www.ComicCovers.com – Your source for weekly comic book cover scans. ahh, this is heaven, and very useful incase I have another dream inspired search for comic book covers.
I have two concerns about this:
1. considering my post earlier this week on hypergnosia, there may be some reason to doubt my grip on reality.
2. the database contains 50,000 covers. Considering that I have, conservatively, owned 1,000 comics over the years and read more, it would seem that 50,000 isn’t that many.
EDIT: and they don’t have the cover to the immortal Devil Dinosaur. This says something about me, and its something I didn’t really want to know.
There are hidden messages. Some of these are guerrilla art, intentional acts of expression hidden in plain view. Some are the simple coincedental juxtaposition of informative elements into a psuedo-message. Do the latter count as messages? Guerrilla art instances that I’ve been thinking of recently are:
Screaming baby, There was a sign, maybe a route number or instructions to pedestrians. Smallish for a traffic sign. But the original sign had been covered with a poster of a screaming babies face. The poster was the same size as the original poster and the same black and light grey.
That Stupid Pencil. No link. This was a stunt that some people at my undergraduate institution* tried where they drew pictures on the boards of empty classrooms and took out classified adds in the paper which featured a cartoon pencil sharpened to a nub and a sentence like “It’s coming.” The problem was that the cartoonist in school paper had been using the same sigil as a signature for over a year. Anyone observant enough to notice their guerilla message had probably also noticed the cartoon. When I asked about it, I was told there was no big event planned, it was just to get people talking, but the stunt was never that interesting.
Andre the Giant. This campaign had some advantages: Andre the Giant is cool, and the posse vibe simultaneously intimidates and offers promise of belonging to a secret clique. Some people still look at me oddly when I mention that “Andre the Giant has a posse.” If you’ve never heard of Andre’s posse, then how did you get here.
Ana Ng. The song that really turned me to They Might Be Giants. I had appreciated them before I heard this song, but only because of their novelty flavor and because I had friends who liked them. I can remember a time when MTV would show this video back to back with Rockit by Herbie Hancock. MTV was cool once. When was the last time they put anything by a veteran of the Miles Davis Quartet in heavy rotation?
There’s an important difference between Andre the Giant and Ana Ng. In the first case, some guy who sells t-shirts has conspired to hide his messages in the environment, while in the second, the messages arise on their own.
* refering to your “undergraduate institution” immediately identifies me as one of those people who aren’t to be trusted.
