I Am The Spider. (The Killing Joke)

“Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.”
-Derek Jarman

Yes, we have to talk about this one. Unlike the previous ones we’ve had to talk about, the reasoning for talking about this one has less to do with the themes and ideas of the comic and more to do with the background of Kraven’s Last Hunt. For The Killing Joke is why Kraven’s Last Hunt exists in the first place.

A brief production history of Kraven’s Last Hunt (told here so I don’t have to get into it when I could be talking about Kraven’s Last Hunt): the concept of the story began in either 1984 or ’85 (more likely ’85), as a Wonder Man miniseries. The series would be about Wonder Man being buried alive by his brother, The Grim Reaper, only to resurface months later. Suffice it to say, this was a crap idea for a story (not the least of which due to it being about one of the less interesting members of the Maximoff Family [the kind of family where being the Demiurge that will destroy the entire Marvel Universe and recreate it into something new makes you the third most interesting member]), with the only thing surviving into the final narrative being “the villain buries the hero”.

A few months later (definitely in ’85), DeMatteis is pitching a comic to the head editor of the Batman line, Len Wein. It’s a rather good idea (or, at least the kind of good idea that can go to shit if placed in the wrong hands): What would happen after the Joker actually succeeded in killing Batman? This of course invokes a rather famous Superman story where Lex Luthor, Genius: “Have Brain Will Travel” kills Superman. However that story ended with Luthor immediately caught by Supergirl with the future uncertain.

But what if Luthor got away with it?  What if no one knew he killed Superman, but the world knew Superman was dead? What would he do next? DeMatteis’ pitch takes that pitch, applies it to the Joker, and comes up with a rather surprising answer: he’d go sane. The Joker would take off his mask, and be like everyone else. The dance would be over, and he would be at peace.

Wein rejected the pitch, citing that it was far too similar to another comic that was being developed. Some British bloke named Alan Moore submitted something called The Killing Joke that was well received by editorial and would be released… once the artist, Brian Boland, was finished doing the art for it. DeMatteis’ Batman/Joker pitch would be developed roughly 10 years later as part of the Legends of the Dark Knight series that was essentially the home to miniseries done by various writing and art teams who weren’t the main writers/artists of Batman or Detective Comics (the arc, fittingly called Going Sane, will not be covered in this blog series as I wish to keep this blog from discussing DeMatteis’ work outside of Spider-Man as little as possible [otherwise you bet we’d have an entry on The Piper at the Gates of Hell]. For what it’s worth, Going Sane is much better than The Killing Joke [though, that’s not saying much as it just has to be the kind of story that doesn’t make Joe Staton think, “you know, this scene of anguish needs Barbara Gordon’s tits”]).

Nonetheless, it was rejected. To salvage the pitch into being something that wouldn’t be as derivative, DeMatteis recalled a villain by the name of Hugo Strange who, for about two pages, donned a Batman mask. This got the writer thinking: what if Strange “killed” Batman and took over the mantel of the Dark Knight? Surely, this time it wouldn’t be rejected, right?

Between the two Batman pitches, Wein had moved on to more freelance work and the head Batman editor was Dennis O’Neil. O’Neil looked at the pitch, and promptly rejected it (if it means anything, the story sounds like the second and third acts of the ‘94 event series: Knightfall, of which O’Neil was a co-writer of, so perhaps the idea of a more vicious replacement Batman was brewing in O’Neil’s mind). Dejected, after having the story bounced three times, DeMatteis decided to stop pitching the comic story.

Cut to autumn 1986. DeMatteis is eating lunch with editor of the Spider-Man line, Jim Owsley (remember him?), and Tom DeFalco (the editor who bounced the initial Wonder Man pitch). They were trying to convince DeMatteis to be the writer of Spectacular Spider-Man, one of three books the webcrawler had at the time. Initially reluctant, DeMatteis eventually relented and began thinking of what his first arc would be. His mind drifted back to that “Buried Alive” pitch he had tried and tried again to work for Batman and Wonder Man.

And so, he decided to rework the pitch into being a Spider-Man story. He would come up with an all new villain for the piece, one who would truly test Peter’s abilities. When DeMatteis pitched the idea to Owsley, he was ecstatic embracing wholeheartedly the conceit. He loved the new villain, the idea of Spider-Man being buried alive, all of it.

As many a writer does, DeMatteis decided to take some time off before continuing to write his comic. While he was procrastinating, he, like many a fan, flipped through the Marvel Universe Handbook. For no particular reason, the writer turned to an entry on a rather dull Spider-Man villain by the name of Kraven the Hunter who was only notable because he once shot lasers out of his nipples. But DeMatteis, based on a rather minor trivia point that Kraven was Russian, realized that this joke of a villain would be the perfect antagonist for his Spectacular run. Owsley was hesitant, favoring the new villain, but allowed DeMatteis to do as he wilts.

Two final minor things: firstly Mike Zeck, artist of the comic book event series Secret Wars, was put on Spectacular Spider-Man, much to DeMatteis’ delight. This, in turn, inspired DeMatteis to add a deturantagonist, Vermin, to the storyline. And secondly, it was decided by Jim Salicrup, the editor who replaced Owsley in the time between DeMatteis’ hiring and Kraven’s Last Hunt, that the story be released over all three of the Spider-Man titles rather than just Spectacular. Here endeth the history (the longer version discussed, among other things, why Wonder Man was one of the less interesting members of the Maximoff Family).

You might have noticed that I just spent well over a thousand words talking about something that isn’t The Killing Joke. My reasoning is quite simple: it’s a stinker. It’s not painful to read like The Dark Knight Returns, but nonetheless is this a lesser outing on the parts of everyone involved. Other people have gone into the reasons why this was a stinker, the environment that allowed this to be a stinker, and what the fallout of this terrible comic was (in fact, I allude to one of these assessments in my adamant stance that the Batman/Joker pitch was done in 1985).

So instead of doing those kinds of analysis, I think I’ll go with asking the question “What if The Killing Joke were good?” Now, this isn’t the typical form of redemptive reading wherein I analyze the text close enough and create an interpretation of the work that makes the text good. Frankly, the ideas within the Killing Joke aren’t interesting enough to warrant that. Rather, I am going to look at the mechanics of the comic and try to create an entirely new story out of the parts of the old one (effectively, I am writing fan fiction [don’t worry, this’ll connect to the rest of the blog in a way that is both surprising and completely obvious]).

Let’s start with the core of the narrative: the relationship between Batman and the Joker. In theory the graphic novel’s about the relationship between the two, of how neither one of them could (or even would) survive long without the other, and their subsequent need for empathy from the other (be it by accepting treatment or dying). In practice, the narrative is more interested in the Joker and his banal backstory (made irrelevant by the more interesting “multiple choice past”) leaving the caped crusader as more of an inferred character, the lead left a ghost within his own comic, an archetype with minimal interiority. Why, for example, does Batman visit the Joker about being boxed into a place where the two must fight to the death?

The answer is that genre conventions dictate that their dance either goes on forever or one kills the other. It’s not that that isn’t something to be explored (for its time, now it’s extremely rote and assumed), but rather, as is the case of many failed postmodern exercises, it doesn’t reflect upon the real world in any meaningful way. Thus, for our new version to work, we must come up with a completely different answer… what if Batman and the Joker had a relationship prior to the events of The Killing Joke?

It could have been a friendship, they could have been lovers, but regardless they were close (since this is my fan fic, I’m going with they were lovers, because I’m a queer romantic at heart). What if something happened to them that broke their hearts and pushed them towards this path. What if this event was what turned the Joker into what the grinning loon we know him now? Since this is one of our parts, what if the bad thing was what happened to Barbara (though, not necessarily Barbara, just someone)? It doesn’t have to have happened directly in the comic (in fact, I think it would be better left out of the comic entirely as this it the part that pushes the comic to being the third worst thing by Alan Moore [it worked for The Dark Knight Returns]), but it happened and the two are trying to deal with it: a death that haunts the narrative.

The fallout of a traumatic death and how people cope with it is a common experience within humanity. Indeed, we could look at it from the context of a failed relationship. Even now, not many stories tackle the subject of someone’s death tearing people apart that this fan fic could. Given this turn of events, the two leads could be dealing with the death in unhealthy ways (as does happen in relationships). The person taking on the role of Batman could be dealing with the problem via repressing the emotions of the event, preferring to lash out at key moments. This could, in turn, cause him to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Meanwhile the person behind the Joker’s smile could take this as a reason to lash out at those around him. Being both physically and emotionally abusive to those around him all the while trying to cope by replacing the person we call Barbara with someone akin to her (perhaps Harley Quinn could play this part). And neither one of them truly believes the relationship could be salvaged. The Batman character would be visiting his Joker because there’s still that glimmer of hope that maybe they could be saved.

Given that, perhaps we should have a third perspective, a feminine one (because this story is brimming with testosterone [though I suppose the role could go to Gordon… better yet, have Gordon be the one who died and Barbara… oh wait, never mind]) who was also within the relationship but is coping with the events in a much healthier manner. Furthermore, she is more willing to accept the possibility that the relationship could still survive this cruel and unjust tragedy that has befallen them.

This is perhaps the most substantial sign that the events could

only end in one way: Death. Note the lack of eyes when they were

previously used throughout the text as a key sign that something

was going terribly wrong with this Batman comic.

But alas, not everything is meant to be. Sometimes, we delude ourselves into believing that love can save us, no matter what. That all the crimes we have committed in the name of love can be forgiven if the right person (or people) love us. But our Joker analogue was, in many regards, a monster that used and abused the people around him. We could give him sympathy and pathos, but he was still an abuser. Sure, I believe people can change, that we can be better than we actually are. But the tone of the story doesn’t imply a pure happy ending where the leads ride off into the sunset. It leaves off in something ambiguous, with no clear-cut answers. It could be somewhat definitive, the character wearing the joker mask could die trying to redeem himself or by his own hubris. But the tone of the story tells of a sadness regarding these events.

All that is left to do is for the survivors to try to heal; to hold each other in the rain. I’m not a pessimist; I don’t believe the world will remain as is forever and always. I believe we can heal. It’s not going to rain forever. We can come in out of the rain.

(Next Time: The Remake.)

[Photos: Mister Miracle #1 by Tom King and Mitch Gerads]

Fifteen Maggots Off The Street… (The Dark Knight Returns)

I’m always going to be approaching The Dark Knight Returns from the wrong perspective. And not just in the sense that I’m from a generation whose comics either react to or move past the four issue series. Not even in the sense that my first exposure to the world of the comic was from reading the trade paperback of its maligned sequel, The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Rather, this is a comic that only works in its time.

This is not in the typical sense of the phrase “Of its times,” used when someone talks about the 80’s. Most of the time, it’s because the work is extremely unironically campy (Hair Metal) or turns out to universal to a community that isn’t the mainstream (Shock Treatment). But the of its times nature of The Dark Knight Returns is within the politics of the comic. Not that the politics of the comic are not possible to exist outside of the 80’s (I literally couldn’t write this entry for an entire week because those politics were marching down the streets of Charlottesville carrying Tiki Torches while chanting “The Jews Will Not Replace Us” and other charming sentiments). Rather it’s how the comic could be seen as subversive within those times.

The comic is blatant in how much it supports the position of its title character: be it how those who criticize him are portrayed as either deluded jerks just denouncing him for the publicity or women who need to learn their place within the hierarchy; how the arguments for Batman win out no matter how weak they are (this is especially in regards to the claim that “he hasn’t technically killed anyone,” which ignores Grace, the woman he kills in the opening of issue 2, and the fact that he would have let people like Harvey die if the weren’t useful to him); and the fact that, were he not around to force the world to make sense, Gotham would be like the rest of the world after the nuke hits America: a mob tearing itself apart without a care for who lives and who dies (contrary to popular belief, people tend to be good to one another after a crisis has occurred).

There are a few reasons why this comic was read in a more revolutionary sense rather than the reactionary sense it’s read in after Holy Terror was released. The comic is extremely critical of then President of the United States, Ronald Regan; it uses Superman, the superhero you use to critique the genre of the superhero as a whole, to represent how American Idealism is naïve at best and useless at actually; and it was released within the context of Watchmen, so people just assumed it was in the same conversation.

Going backwards from these assumptions, it wasn’t released in the context of Watchmen, Watchmen was released in the context of The Dark Knight Returns. You see, the first issue of Watchmen was released on August 31^st, 1986. The final issue of The Dark Knight Returns was released on June 1^st, 1986, two whole months before Watchmen even begins. This in turn explains how people so catastrophically missed the point of Watchmen that they created the 90’s comic book scene in its name (one could argue that Marvelman prefigures The Dark Knight Returns [in fact, a chubby Miracleman cosplayer can be seen in the streets of Issue 4], but for all its violence, said violence is always done in the name of problematizing the concept of the fascist superhero messiah as opposed to embracing the monstrosity of it).

Next, we have American Idealism is bunk. This of course fits within an unfortunately popular genre of fiction known as Grimdark: a rather unhealthy genre where we accept our cruelties and solve all our problems by hurting everyone around us, especially ourselves. Because growing up means throwing away any belief in the goodness of mankind in favor of watching characters suffer for our amusement; that the pains and cruelties of the world will never be solved, so why bother at all (there are, of course, genres with dark and bitter themes that don’t fall into Grimdark due to embracing the campiness of the genre that the po faced stories that dominate Grimdark like to act as if it’s not there). By having Superman become a tool of the government (in more ways than one), The Dark Knight Returns full heartedly embraces this genre as a good thing.

And finally, there’s the condemnation of Ronald Regan. It’s worth noting the way in which the comic condemns Regan. His first appearance in Issue 2 is a rambling, though on point, monologue about how running the government is like owning a ranch, he acts like a fuddy duddy at the best of times, and is easily provoked into action by being called a degrading name. In short, when contrasted with the more proactive and ruthless Batman, the critique of Regan seems to amount to “he’s to weak and passive to be left in charge.”

And keep in mind; this is Ronald Regan we’re talking about. The man who, when faced with nonviolent protestors who wanted a park not to be replaced with a parking lot, responded with “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with. No more appeasement.” What Batman offers then is a Regan who never had Alzheimer’s, whose brain was still in the place where he would do more than look pretty and do as little as possible.

This of course brings us back to the theme of the Philosopher King that I was yammering on about in the Black Suit entry: that of the right kind of fascist being what people need, specifically, the desire to be led by the smart scientists as opposed to the dumb military. Batman then can be read as the perfect fascist leader in that he embodies both of these philosophical tenants, though the comic primarily focuses on the militaristic aspect of the character (nonetheless, as one of my childhood cartoons put it “Batman’s a scientist”).

Indeed, the text perfectly fits within many of the tenants of fascism outlined in Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism. The main ones focused on in the comic include “Action for action’s sake” (“…and I honestly don’t know if I could beat him.”), “Hostility to analytical criticism” (every debate segment in this comic), “A permanent state of war” (“It begins here-- an army-- to bring sense to a world plagued by worse than thieves and murderers…”), “Contempt for the weak” (Ronald Regan), “A cult of heroism espousing a noble sacrifice” (“It would be a good death…”), and “A focus on machismo” (“…except he’s got exactly the kind of body I wish he didn’t have…powerful without enough bulk to slow him down…every muscle a steel spring-- ready to lash out--and he’s young… in his physical prime…”). (That’s not getting into how his fascism overwhelms the comic. Throughout the entire comic, the 16-panel grid is adhered to, to the point where [combined with the narration that just never stops [which hurts the comic as some of the pages work better silent then they do with the never ending narration], making the panels even smaller] the comic gets so tight and constrained that it triggers my claustrophobia and literally hurts me to read the fucking comic. This is odd, considering I can read another 16-panel comic, Pax Americana, rather easily). In essence, the Batman of The Dark Knight Returns is the physical embodiment of the enemy of this blog.

Which brings us, over a thousand words in, to why we are talking about this book. In many ways, it ties into a running gag I have in regards to the work of JM DeMatteis: How much does this comic hate Batman? That isn’t to say hates Batman (which is to say I asked and he doesn’t) but that there’s a pattern within his superhero comics that has interesting implications. This can range from the bemused humor of JLI to being the most unsympathetic character in Batman: Absolution, to being Literal, Actual Satan in the mythological system set up in Supergirl: Wings. In the case of Kraven’s Last Hunt, this comes in the form of the titular character.

Consider: both are older men lamenting the fallen world they find themselves living in. Both are lamenting the loss of their parents at a young age, and cope with that by going onto the crime riddled streets and beating the crap out of people (including the neuroatypical). Also, both are aristocratic fascists who are supported by the law (until they get caught committing murder, which forces the law to turn on them). This isn’t me reaching for a connection between the two: DeMatteis has said in an interview with Comics Interview that Kraven, once he resolves the narrative collapse by donning the costume of Spider-Man, “becomes… something akin to Frank Miller’s Dark Knight character.”

Which makes Kraven’s death all the more interesting. It’s a suicide, a common death for a fascist (right up there with guillotines and time travelers). But why does he kill himself? There is no sign that the army is at his door, about to burn down his perfect empire. In fact, he claims throughout the penultimate issue that he’s won the war against the Spider. So then why do it?

Simple: because he empathizes with Spider-Man. Empathy is the understanding between us and them. To see the world from the perspective of other people as they see it rather than how you think they see it. To embrace the stranger as if he’s a fellow in this mad world we live in. To say that fascism needs an other to react against would be an understatement. They need the Jews, the queers, the blacks, the Mexicans, the barbarians plotting to tear down the walls of the Empire. They need that threat of the unknown and a populace that fears it. If punching Nazis is a “Hail Mary” surgery used at the last possible minute (as it has been used lately), then empathy is treating the infection that fascism leaves behind so things don’t get as bad or worse than they currently are.

And so, when injected with empathy towards his enemy, Kraven can’t live anymore. Because the character of Kraven is defined by his fascism, and outside of that he is a rather simplistic character (even DeMatteis didn’t find interesting until he found out Kraven was Russian, and could write him as a Dostoyevsky character [I don’t think I’m going to read a Dostoyevsky book for this, but there are other posts that I didn’t think I was going to write about that I am, so who knows]). When the hunt is over, Kraven is nothing; just a guy in a leopard leotard howling about Spiders.

Is this how we solve fascism then: by making it empathize with the other? By creating a society of people who care about how their actions and opinions hurt others and try their best to make things better? For our society to just fight less, talk more; say sorry sometimes? Is it really that simple? No. It’s not simple at all.

I’ve been on twitter lately, mainly to procrastinate from writing this post. There was this tweet that’s been going around about how Tina Fey made a joke about how we should just stay inside and do nothing and how she is speaking from a perspective of privilege in that she can just ignore the outside world. In response to that, someone pointed out a more egregious joke Fey made in regards to a desire for neo-Nazis to fight drag queens since they’re “a 6’4” black man”.

Now to say that’s a minefield that should be treaded on carefully would be an understatement. But what I’m more interested in is a defense of it made by another comedian (much smaller than Fey, so he’ll be left unnamed). The defense effectively amounts to a bemoaning the circular firing squad the left tends to use constantly. More precisely, it’s that we shouldn’t critique the particulars of a joke in the face of literal, actual Nazis.

In essence, it’s the long-standing stance of the neoliberal that when catastrophe comes, we must put aside our petty differences to fight the common enemy (typically, said petty differences amount to “the powers that be are right and the marginalized are wrong”). By rejecting the opinions of the marginalized, we allow fascism to burrow itself into the fabric of our society, which it can as our society is one that is founded upon a status of white supremacy, which goes hand in hand with fascism. Be its face the Klan, the Nazis, the Gators, the Puppies, the Neoreactionaries, so long as we keep society as it is fascism will adapt and become more powerful until we all suffocate and die in the face of it’s oppressive structure.

Sadly, we don’t seem to want to change the world. We’d rather die of climate change than see the end of things as we know them. As someone once put it, “We can imagine the end of the world before we can imagine the end of capitalism.” We’d rather bend the knee to a fascist than embrace painful, wonderful change. And if we can’t accept change, what hope do we have?

“Hope? (Keep those bells ringing, Chris.) You want to talk about hope? We’ve got a militarized police state in front of us! A race of carnivorous monsters behind us! A city that’s given everything because it doesn’t have the guts to fight! Let me tell you a thing about hope! Hope has three daughters: Anger at the state things have fallen into. Courage to fight to make things right. And the third daughter is Truth… And she won’t hide her true face any longer.”
-Kaare Andrews, Spider-Man: Reign

(Next Time: The Other Thing I Have To Talk About.)

[Photos: Dumbing of Age: “Your princess is in another castle” by David M. Willis]

Just Outside, (Glass Spider Tour)

pretty things

This is the story of the universe:

A man walks up to the world. The man, as many of his kind are, is a trickster. Dressed in clothing of a dead punk rocker, his hair is a series of spires that conduct an electric charge across the world. He has four eyes, one seen through glasses, the other covered by pitch green lenses. He is armed with a machine that kills fascists and proceeds to play it. The song is a discordant piece, mixing Van Halen and Merzbow into a cacophony of rebellion and bravado. Above him, in darkness, stands God, the only lasting God. The Spider-God. It is a god made of neon and circuitry. A man made god, who in turn made man. And god sayeth unto the trickster, “SHUT UP!” The trickster pauses for a moment, not knowing God would care. He looks up at the Spider-God, thunder crashing into his very flesh. There is a small hint of awe in his eyes. He returns to the guitar, bobbing his head like he just don’t care. More strained, perhaps even broken, the Spider-God once more requests the trickster to shut up. Instead, the trickster continues playing, harder, more discordant. With his last breath, the Spider-God pleads for the trickster to shut up. When the killing blow is laid, allies of the trickster climb down from God’s entrails. They're teenagers, fellow tricksters, rebels, those made of the wrong stuff. This is the way the world ends. Not with a whimper. But with a rock and roll show.

The vacuum created by the arrival of freedom.

God is a Concept…

But god isn’t dead. For the Spider takes many forms, and we have witnessed it’s rebirth. Form out of its corpse, as a child comes out its mother’s mouth, sits a man on a golden chair. The man shaped form God takes at this moment. His name is David Bowie, and he is speaking on the telephone. Given this, we should perhaps look at what noted philosopher Avital Ronell has to say of the telephone. She writes:

The Nazis voted-their only “vote”-against television and for radio, because at a certain point they had to choose their weapons, that is, choose the technology for the Volk that would secure a reliable and controllable form of transference; thus they chose telephone and radio. The Germans were simultaneously hooked on Hitler’s voice alternating with Wagner’s music, and they developed, we could say, a dependency on the radio.

Ten years ago, Bowie was the Thin White Duke, a Nazi by another name. Is this a sign of the times? Is this army of the young and dispossessed bending the knee to fascism in the name of their New God? Has the Spider embraced the leather grasp of cruelty and darkness? No, for midway through the reformative chant the Spider God sings, he discards the phone. (It should be noted that there are no songs from Station to Station featured in this performance) In this form, God is a being of visuals, the opposite end of the radio binary. Then again, so it was in the last form. For a giant Glass Spider just doesn’t work unless you can see the bloody thing.

So then, what is God’s view of things? To see this, we must look at the mask the Spider currently wears: mainly David Bowie’s. Bowie is notable for several reasons: he is one of the greatest artists of the 20^th century, reinventing countless genres of the years (successfully or otherwise), and being the first rock star to make his own death a publicity stunt (as opposed to most rock star deaths, which don’t have their own tie in albums and musicals). But perhaps most notable of all is the way Bowie dealt with the theme of performativity.

Now, being performative isn’t a rarity within the music genre. Indeed, a large part of the show is going on stage and put on some sort of character. This ranges from eating a bat while it tries to wriggle out of your hands to going off stage while a prerecorded skit that ties into your Disney Channel TV series plays on the monitors. But Bowie was different. See, while the others would typically stick to one mask to express their artifice, Bowie would change his masks like we would change pants.

This is a rarity of any artistic endeavor: to have an ever changing and willfully contradictory vision of what your story is about is unheard of (Peter Ackroyd claim’s Blake identified heavily with the antagonist of his mythos Urizen… Blake, notably, was not a pop star and is only brought up here for thematic cohesion). He has worn several masks in his time, ranging from space age messiah to washed out hack trying to be hip with the kids these days to cosplaying as a corpse from Coraline. He wore costumes of the old guard, like Pagliacci, and danced in the fashion of the new, like his tour with the Nine Inch Nails. Despite what many rock and roll supremacists might say, Bowie was about more than just one thing.

And now we see what the Spider represents for 1987. In many ways, it’s the antithesis of The Thin White Duke’s fascism. Fascism, in its purest form, wishes to push the world in a uniquely dull form of obedience and suffering. And while the Spider’s current form doesn’t reject suffering, it instead shapes it into something more productive. Something that can, in its own way, soothe those afflicted while still having enough bite to attack those who wish to afflict others. In many ways, you could say that the Spider has turned into the only lasting truth. In none too many words: God is change.

Earth keeps on rolling – witnesses falling.

When you’re under the USA,

Oh Girl, my problems can’t follow me.

But if my love is your love,

(Believing the strangest things, loving the alien)

I could escape this feeling, with my China girl.

Turn, and face the strange!

But then, change has always been a constant with the Spider. Since the dawn of its existence, it has embodied change. From when it was a young idea, before it was a God, the Spider brought change. For it was trickster, akin to Hershel of Ostropol or Anansi. The Spider would change faces again and again before and after this point: Charlie Chaplin, Spyral no. 37, Mattie Franklin; all masks and emanations of the Spider. So then, if change is essential to the nature of God, what makes one who embodies the concept so special (it’s like saying a Superhero is about With great power, there must also come -- great responsibility, there’s something more going on)?

The key to understanding this era’s Spider comes in the form of a line from later in the show: She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl. The song, Rebel Rebel, comes from the album, Diamond Dogs, made up of various songs mostly pertaining to a failed attempt by Bowie to make a musical out of 1984 (the other song from that album included in the tour is Big Brother, about looking for the right fascist to lead us before descending into a chaotic chant about how we love big brother). It tells of transitions, from the swinging glam of the 70’s to the more punkish style of the 80’s.

The line in question refers to the blurring of gender norms within the punk scene, with female presenting members dressing in more male coded clothing, having their hair cut extremely short, and embracing ultraviolence as an aesthetic pleasure akin to psychedelia of the previous generation. Much like that generation, the punks ended up going to crap and voting for rather shitty people (Thatcher and Regan for the hippies, Blair and Bush for the punks) due to a misbegotten belief that rebelling against the cruel and unjust system is something that kids do and whereas voting for a Conservative, no mater how bugnutterly terrible they are, is the adult move to make. But at the time, the punks were rather the go to source of youthful rebellion.

Equally, this line points towards a group of people mostly ignored in the context of the narrative of the 80’s: queer people and specifically people in the Transgender part of the LGBT acronym. Much like the B, Trans people tend to be overlooked in favor of stories like “Sexy Lesbians” and “Sad Gay Men Die”. Indeed, it was a little under 10 years since the infamous “Transsexual Empire” was released (though the concert came out the exact same year as Sandy Stone’s rebuttal “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” And while it did come out in late 1987 (giving it as much weight to be included in this psychochronography as some of the other subjects I’ll talk about), I probably won’t talk about it. I am quite frankly feeling extremely anxious talking about the subject of trans people in the context of this essay alone, as I have put my foot in my mouth when talking about it outside of Internet contexts. If it does get included in the blog, it’ll probably be in either a guest post or a bonus essay in a book version when I feel more confident talking about this subject [if either of those things ever happen]), and thus the rise of TERFs (about as close to the Alt-Left as is plausible).

Indeed the two major (and good) pieces of trans culture within the pop culture scene (that I’m aware of, please tell me what I missed) were a movie about a transvestite rapist reinterpretation of Frankenstien with Meat Loaf… and David Bowie. While not transgender himself, Bowie (a fellow bisexual) had an androgynous form that didn’t quite fit into a gender binary, even when playing explicitly gendered roles like Phillip Jeffries or The Thin White Duke. He was in the middle of roles by the time Glass Spider was being played, not sure where to go next after a major shock.

And so we see what “God is Change” refers to in this context: it’s a transition between different states of being, different ideologies and personal expressions. A rejection of the static change provided by the fascist Thin White Duke in favor of more fluid change.

Turn to the left!

“F” is for how fucked you are!

It’s August 12, 2017. It’s 4:41 PM. I don’t know when this’ll be uploaded (I assume late November/early December), but this is when I’m writing it. I’m supposed to be writing the bit on Rebel Rebel, but I feel I need to write this one first. Nazis have descended upon the streets of Charlottesville to protest the tearing down of a Confederate statue. (While I was writing the Glass Spider bit late last night, they were marching with burning swastikas and torches, to make it more clear which side the sodding baddies are. A video was up on twitter of one of them beating up counterprotesters. I didn’t go to bed for a long time.) In response, leftists marched down the streets in broad daylight to show that the Nazi opinion is a minor one. One Nazi, decided to get his vengeance upon the leftists by driving a car in the middle of the crowd, killing at least one of them. The police’s response was to tell the leftists to go back home and keep the peace (i.e. leave the Nazis alone so they can do what Nazis always do). The President responded by saying that this was a terrible thing to happen, of how both sides of the conflict are at fault. He never names which sides they were. On the bright side, Dick Spencer got arrested.

(I should say, before some asshole who isn’t even reading this sentence writes a spiel about how “The Alt-Right aren’t real Nazis” or “This name calling is why we are allowed to kill leftists” or something involving the word Cuck, I should note that no, the group that marched carrying burning swastikas and doing the Hitler salute aren’t technically Nazis. This technicality is based solely off the fact that, rather than advocating the rise of the Aryan Race, the Alt-Right simply wishes to instead bring about an evolutionary shift in humanity that would force us to evolve face tentacles via white nationalism and placing a CEO as King of America. Completely different, however by virtue of aesthetic similarities, I find it more useful to put aside this rather minor difference and keep things simple. But if you want to have some more connective tissue between the two, recall that Phase I was about Nazi Lovecraftian horrors, and you’re good to go. If you wish to read more about the Alt-Right and their need for Steve Jobs [back when he was alive] to be king, I’d recommend Neoreaction a Basilisk by Dr. Philip Sandifer, which I assume will be out by the time this post is up, if not by January.)

One wonders how we can rebel against these forces. Some have suggested that those who publicly walk the streets as Nazis be reported on to their bosses and promptly fired from their white collar jobs. Others have offered the more moderate position of punching Nazis in the face (and before some MY FREE SPEECH jackass comes along and doesn’t read this sentence, I would like to point out that being an active Nazi, unlike being an active Black Lives Matter protester, is the verbal equivalent of punching someone in the face. A mob of people marching down the streets with fucking torches is terrifying, and keeps more people from using their first amendment right than punching one Nazi would. A universally free and open marker of language will always support those with power, regardless of what Trickle Down Linguists will tell you. And that’s not even accounting for the fact that they literally ran over people, killing at least one of them). I’m sympathetic towards this option, and it’s very hard to see a superhero, especially a Jewish one like Spider-Man (noted Spider-Man scholar Andrew Rilstone on the first Amazing Spider-Man annual: Page 33: “You know your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is always available for weddings, barmitzvahs, and all sorts of fun things”… Confirmation, if confirmation were needed, of Peter Parker’s heritage: someone with a Christian background would have said “weddings, Christenings…”), being against this moderate stance.

Day after day,

I called her name,

“Tell me I’m rapidly yours!”

“It couldn’t be done.”

We are alone together.

We seem to be trapped in the past. Not just Bowie, who is literally tied up in the Spider-God’s webs while an old clip from a silent movie plays in on the Spider-God’s, as if he’s using the old fiction to hold onto a life that was over long ago. Nor even the main thesis of this blog, of looking back 30 years to see what the world was like when a Spider-Man died. No, I’m talking about the fact that even though the thesis hinges on it being about October-November, 1987, we’re 5 entries in and this is the second one to talk about something that happened in that time frame. The rest of the stuff was either from before that era or talked about something from before that era. In fact, this is the last entry in this section to talk about something from October-November, 1987 (the first two for reasons necessitated by the subject matter of the blog, and the third is arguably a remake of the subject matter in the sense that Mulholland Drive is a remake of Species).

Even the two works we have talked about from that time period aren’t confined to that era. Phase I was initially serialized in 2000AD beginning in August of ’87 and ended in November. Whereas the Glass Spider Tour started in May of that year and, interestingly enough, ended on the exact same day as Phase I: November 28^th, 1987. It’s not that this was intentional, indeed the structure of this project wasn’t supposed to have parts for it to be broken up into. The story I’m telling with this blog (which I only have a vague idea what it’s about) just shaped itself out this way.

I feel like I’m less someone who writes up a plan and follows it to the letter, and more akin to an improve artist who has a vague idea what they’re doing with their lives. Sure, sometimes I’ll have an idea of what I’m going to write, but sometimes those ideas go out the window in favor of new ones when my fingers reach the keyboard (for example, I wasn’t going to do the “OH GOD, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING HERE, PLEASE HELP!” theme of this mini essay for another entry). I just go through the work I’m reading or watching or whatever, and I try to create a response that feels right for the material. That is, both the subject of the blog post and the work the blog is tangentially about. That’s the hard part: getting it all to fit together in a nice bow. Sure, I have that for this one already, but I have another three songs to talk about (Initially, I wanted to do the whole concert, but it just felt like way too much). And so I got stuck in tangents about the past. Don’t worry though, once we’re out of this, we’ll stick to the era for the rest of the blog (save for one entry near the end, for reasons I might get to when we get there).

So how do we get out? Well, I suppose the same way Bowie does: by asking for help from someone outside of himself. In his case, help came in the form of a sharp haired woman in a flowery pink and blue dress. So who can I ask for help? You. You’re good people, naturally I’m sure. Though I don’t know who you are, and will only get the briefest glimpse of your face (as is the case of all close friends), I’m sure we can work together to get out of this past, in favor of other ones. Ones actually set in October-November of 1987 perhaps?

‘Til the 21^st century lose.

God is Angst.

One thing predominantly unspoken of in regards to fluid change is that it tends to hurt. Sure, this is true of all change, but unlike more static changes where even the most extreme and radical collapse could still be healed from, fluid change keeps happening every so often, pushing in all sorts of different directions. You can never stop and be the new thing you are for long. You have to be something else entirely the first moment a new direction presents itself.

It’s not just the performativity of Bowie that this refers to. We are all in a state of fluid change. We get five years of elementary school, three of middle, four of High School and college, and then various jobs until you’re retired/dead. Few people have their first job be their only job. Even jobs with “security” also have promotions that push people into new and different environments. And that’s not even dealing with the other people surrounding you who are also changing, whose changes in turn change you.

We can’t stop changing, no matter what the political devils murdering people tell us. We can’t go back to the way things were, we aren’t Batman or Iron Man where our stories have a base status quo that remains the same forever and always amen. When we bounce back, we don’t always return to form. Sometimes we end up dead, where our corpses slowly change more and more until we are one with the ever-changing Earth we live on.

There is no Golden Age, where everything was wonderful and peaceful before the bastards came and ruined it. History is a rudderless series of events where the only constant is that everything changes. To suggest a return to the past as a preference to the present is ludicrous at best. We need change, to embrace new and fantastical ideas. For without them, we wouldn’t be us.

We fight against this oncoming swarm of change, wierdos, and newness because change hurts (said hurt comes in the form of losing a form of power. As Jed Blue once put it The Apocalypse is a Revolution from the perspective of those who have something to lose). It’s necessary, but it still hurts. Some of us would rather appeal to an imagined version of a past that was, if we’re being kind, not as good as it is right now for a large majority of people (people of color, queer people, women, children, men…). A past that can’t quite fit with the way the world works and itself must be changed to work as a reaction to the ethics and logics of the modern day. It’s a rejection of being critical of the past in favor of taking the “bugs” of history as features that should be embraced as the pinnacle of humanity. Alternatively, people have used the cruelties and destructive tendencies to point out what needs to change in our society (reminder: Slavery is still being brought up because the system of slavery isn’t so much dead as reorganized towards prison labor, foreign countries, and white supremacy).

I suppose that’s what people, and especially young people, ought to do at one point or another: reexamine the past and imagine a better future.

“Wrong-negative fades-never the twain, reckless and tame;

Rise for a year or two then make a war

For making up underwear-”

“What’s that sound? What’s that sound!”

“Let’s dance for fear!”

“…Feeling so gay, feeling gay?”

A dirty angel with a lovely pair.

I was going to talk about Let’s Dance initially, but thematic reasons push me into talking about Time. This is mainly because David Bowie decided to wear fucking wings for this number and fly in the face of the old Spider-God. Now, the obvious image to go with for a story of Time, Angels, and Change would be Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus:

His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

Indeed, the song itself seems to be sympathetic to the Angel’s plight. Time is a discordant song about the inevitability of the end of dreams with images like The sniper in the brain and I look at my watch, it says 9:25. And I think, “Oh God, I’m still alive!” that imply a desire to just end it all. To just go back to the dirt rather than deal with this constant day in, day out bullshit.

The problem is, no matter how much we want to, we can never go back. To go back to the old paradise would be as much of a wreckage as going forward to a new one. Time consumes everything in the end. But we can choose what ideas get consumed, which get reclaimed, and which evolve into something stranger. As Bowie puts it in his song, descending to the stage with the grace a wingless angel, Breaking up is hard, but keeping dark is hateful. I had so many dreams, I had so many breakthroughs. But you, my love, were kind, but love has left you dreamless. The door to dreams is closed. Your park was real dreamless. Perhaps you’re smiling now, smiling through this darkness. Before belting out with glee of acceptance: But all I had to give was the guilt of dreaming!

It’s not that looking back is the problem. Far from it, it’s what I’m literally doing right now. The problem is looking back merely to look back to a Golden Age, to use the past as an opiate that must be kept “pure” from the “filth” of the future who dare question it’s supremacy over the future and all alternative pasts. But we are all of us ruins. Flawed, mixed up beings who try our best to make things better, only to screw up royally. In the end, all we have… is each other.

Sometimes I feel like (oh, the whole human race)…

So messed up, I want you here.

Futari kiri de hajimete atta hoshikuzu no terasu.

Love can be used for anything. A father, who loves his daughter, would send her to conversion therapy out of love for who she once was. A man who loves his country, will murder countless citizens in the name of his vision of it. An abuser will stalk his love so she’ll be his forever. Just saying, “love conquers all” means nothing when the all is left undefined. Love requires the acceptance of change of those you love, less it be twisted into something cruel and terrible. You have to accept that you don’t have power over the things you love, and can’t stop them from changing. Your little princess will fall in love with people you don’t approve of; your country will embrace those hurt by your love; and no means no. Change is inevitable, though not always shapeable. Cruel love believes that if you can dominate it enough, it will love you back. As Jung put it, Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

The lights go out. The players take their bow. The Old God’s corpse is taken down. The New God leaves to come up with a new role. Angels sing songs of remixing the world. And we fade to black…

(Next Time: Kraven in His Element.)

[Photos: Batman #680 by Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel]