Happy Birthday, Reality's Raccoon

The persistent ratchet effect of turning 41 years old. It's the feeling of the start of a rollercoaster where the cars are pulled clank-clank to the highest apex, upon which gravity takes over and the cars begin their violent throbbing rush toward an irrefutable end.

Only in aging, in finding myself with a birthday in a couple days, I don't get the sensation of the rollercoaster's power or force, just the tense ratcheting as each day passes.

I don't think people perceive time like I do, or at least as I profess. I think convicts and people in asylums understand the passing of time. To be denied free motion or free thought is a distillation of punishment, pure as 180 proof moonshine. I once watched a burly man take a shot of moonshine: he hit it, doubled over breathless with his hands on his knees, then raised up with a howl, fumes stinging his eyes.

Being a younger man then, I didn't have the courage quotient to take a shot of moonshine. Every time I think about it, I regret it. I wasn't offered a shot, mind you, just that sometimes you have to take what you want. That mentality may get you arrested if what you want is to force some sex on someone, or steal their car, or rob a bank. But in some aspects of life, if you don't act, nothing will happen. Nothing. A virtual and distinct absence of action.

Boys just needed The Girl's validation to become Men.

Nothing crystallizes memory quite like regret. You didn't ask some girl to go out in middle school, you recall plain as day the sensation of failure. You may have suspected the girl, The Girl perhaps, whom you would never believe had "eyes" for you, might have laughed at you. But what if she did not? What if that girl was just as problematically unsure as you? What if she merely had to be presented with the idea of dating, of holding hands, of kissing your virgin lips, to be in love with you? You, the kid with the chuka boots and the too-long jeans because your mother always bought your school clothes too big? "You'll grow into them," she'd say when you complained. "And don't you forget the money I spent! You're ungrateful, you know that? Just roll them up! The other kids won't care!"

But the kids did care. They saw clearly I was a kid in middle school who didn't buy his own clothes. The girl, The Girl, she saw a shy boy with long hair who didn't much like to look other kids in the eye because he might get beaten up for it. A victim of paralyzing social fear. The Girl laughs at the boy too, maybe, just because he reminds her of a raccoon she once saw trying to pry the lid off a trashcan with its monkey paws, its cartoon thief masked eyes goggling comically for fear of the upright hairless monsters inside the house, who might make loud noises to scare the 'coon, or kill it with their magic boomstick.

The Girl may reject you, but God abhors a vacuum.

But the raccoon still made the effort, and that's what made it memorable to the girl. The shy boy doesn't even get the benefit of a survivalist's desperation; because he did not act.

At this point, in my 40s, an age of consent to becoming older, fatter, more stiff, less virile, there's the idea that inaction is regret, but with only so many years remaining in a life, the actions of youth are unforgiving when you're older. The Girl is no longer waiting for love she did not even imagine existed. The Girl is now A Person, scarred, listless, bitter, or merely satisfied. No one thinks of her like boys once did in middle school. She's never going to wonder if there is something better than what she's known. She is a precise result of time, a walking clock face so used to the plodding click of the hour and minute and seconds passing that she hardly has to think anymore to step over them.

For me, a man at last, just as I imagined myself, heroically a man as I envisioned it as a 10-year old boy, too shy, too light in the pants, too sensitive to people's friendly stares, too leary of big boisterous howling men with fumes ruddying their cheeks, I am disappointed in my state of being. My howls are rage-filled, regret-laced and heavy as bowling balls. Without action, without the need to survive, I am a 41-year old mummified raccoon, the bare crumbling outline of hair and bone, with a tiny set of sharp teeth.

The Rager in His Natural Environment

I don't mind conflict in life, but I'm not much into "drama" as it's called. The idea that people would display emotional turmoil for attention, whether from within or without, is repellent to me.

Yet I've indulged frequently in Woody Allen rants about this or that, the kind of "schtick" of intellectual worth, one believes. Structured comedy, more or less. Ranting is healthy, it's a way of saying things while not-doing. You can rant about the bad drivers in the world, instead of killing them.

The only ones hurt in ranting is the listener, especially if they're not committed to the subject of the rant as endemic of a larger problem. Often the listener is stuck trying to "solve" the problem, instead of just being there.

I try not indulge the ranting too much. Too much is a strain on others. Too much ranting in and of itself leads to rage, a physical exertion of rage. I've scars to show for it.

Society is such a festering wound in this day and age, no one voice is heard among the flailing rants of the many. Even the rants are buried under mountainous ruins of broken people's dreams, the dream of living day to day, an ordinary life with children and pets and the occasional night out and the rest work and television. There's nothing wrong with that dream, and it's specifically American. Many people fear the dream is being taken away from them before their very eyes. Worse, they're being told it never existed in the first place. You're either impovershed or gluttonous, and no one economic identity seems to fit any more.

If the world, culture and society crumbles, I know I will perish fairly immediately. No one is more vulnerable than the ranting rager devoid of hope, badgered by guilt, and honeycombed with bad memories.

The U.S.S. Broken Down

Chad Carter's Knowledge of Pain

This is my self-portrait of pain. I forgot to include the half-numb, half-painful place on my upper thigh, which I assume is some kind of nerve damage. I threw in prostate because I'm paranoid of the Most Embarrassing Deaths one can have, which I feel like anything to do with the a-hole is. I'm guessing most doctors figure it's your fault if you have a sore behind and urge incontinence. Going back to my assertion that no hero in movies or literature can be "real," I never see a scene where the hero is about ready to go in with his double .45s blazing, but has to stop for a quick sh*t first.

Both elbows are actually jacked up, above: one from doing forward elbow strikes which caused some kind of inflammation and fluid build-up, the other what I've been told is "golfer's elbow," where you get pain when you make a fist. The one wrist was injured while doing some strikes, because I love boxing and boxing exercise is good for you. Only you can do it wrong and hurt yourself, who knew.

The ankle and heel are from a couple of fractures. Now there's scarring all up in there which causes discomfort most all the time. I limp a bit from time to time, depending on what kind of stress I've had on the old hooves in a day's time.

And it makes me wonder, about the unpleasantness of the future, of getting really old, of needing a cane or walker, or a baggie with a tube in my side to catch my wastes, of chronic joint issues. How much do we fear death as we age, that we'll prefer a creeping sunken wreck of the human form to the sweet, sweet darkness, if we but let go?

I mean, once the world is Pain, how much enjoyment can there be? Just a minute here or there, near the broken glass of rustling night, the mewling whisper of the void?

The Shut-In Laughs Last

It struck me this evening, how much time I spend avoiding other people.

I'm generally not a buddy-buddy kind of guy, rarely have an interest in other men. Which is funny, because I grew up idolizing men. My car mechanic grandfather raised me, and I was referred to as his "shadow." Everywhere he went, I went. We ate together, slept together, even urinated at the same time together. After Rufus Lee Carter died, I really sought a father figure, needed one, but there wasn't a man half as good or decent or respected as my grandfather. So that search came up snake eyes. I idolized heroes, Indiana Jones and R.J. MacReady and the Incredible Hulk, who reeked of fierce individual manliness. But fictional heroes couldn't give me advice on how to deal with bullies and talk to girls. So eventually even they turned away from a needful teenager.

Every kid needs a dad and a hero. If they get both in the same dude, they should forever be grateful.

At some point, post high school, I realized the extreme and crippling shyness I had suffered most of my life was becoming full-blown pathology. I had shut down the kind of receptors to social behavior I'd once been taught, while yearning painfully not to be alone any longer. Obviously girls were out of the question.

In later life, I overcame a lot of the severity of the social phobia, finally becoming a man who could display intellect and sexuality and physicality even. This effort was mostly due to the administrations of close, singular friends, and the love of beautiful women who, like casting agents, recognized my potential. And also I needed a little blue pill to calm whatever evil lurked in the treetops of my brain. But I like to believe it was at least somewhat force of will, to rid myself of childhood devils.

Today, I spend prodigious amounts of time alone, in a room, trying to be a writer. I'm there now. It isn't easy, and no one pats me on the back for making the effort. Unlike pathology, there's no quantifiable means to assess creative endeavor. Cavemen probably had no idea scratching at a wall was meant to do anything but be a warning to others not to get caught in the open with a Sabretooth tiger.

The reason I idolize the Hulk: he's angry a lot, he's lonely a lot, and all he ever wanted was to be left alone. Particularly by stupid puny humans. 

But what I know for sure is how repelled I am by most people. Not those familar and adored few, so important to me, but the mass of human beings. Their insidious presences are not welcome. The bar trolls in their heels and the street people with their plastic bags, the college students in their fluffy boots and the lawyers waiting for the jury with vodka tonic in hand, the black teens in ass-bag pants and the Chinese delivery drivers. They are diverse only in that they smell different, one to the other, like spices, and as a whole they are a cloying brimstone of unease. Their subliminal message is an invitation, a dramatic overture of possibility, one could even say "adventure awaits." I've lived long enough to know how arresting other people are, how destructive, how submissive and mesmerizing. But only for very short periods of time, and only in the awkward moments before tedium sets in.

I fear people, generally, not for what they might do to me, but for what they expect me to do. You, me, all of us. To perform, to amuse, to satiate, to hurt. We all consist of magnetic fields and electric charges, and universes die when we make contact. I do not wish to be a "shut-in" as it's now called, but nothing in the vapid whirlpool of drama people represent calls to me. They are, in short, strangers. Not because I do not know them, but because I am stranger than they will ever be. And I enjoy it.

The Happenstance of Misery

There is such a thing as the "happenstance of misery" where it applies to how people are developed, who they become, and why they are not the people we think they should be.

If everyone shared the same misery, or no misery at all, then we'd all pretty much be the same kind of human being. Evil or good wouldn't factor, nor would the "shades of gray" so many want to extoll, as if that designation justifies any poor decision they make in life.

From a black/white perspective, there cannot be such a thing as the "happenstance of misery," the misery formed when poverty and violence and sexuality and painful revelation all correspond to create the human being at their most malleable. Usually as a child. As it so happens, a child sees the world in black/white terms, by default, and are most likely to experience misery without knowledge of what it is.

Abuse and hardship detail the happenstance, evolve it, and eventually crystallize as pure miserable experience. The experience is heart-rending, sometimes heart-removing. Misery, as attractive to the damned and the mentally-ill as any gorgeous woman or chemical stimulant, grows throbbing roots throughout human history. Bulging with pain, misery finds a throne from which to rule, designed by the cumulative human needs and desires which give it force. This black hole of doubt and remorse has no equal in all the cosmos, for it is essentially organic, essentially human, a mirror of godly proportions for Mankind.

I don't think the fundamentals of "choice" deter misery, since most misery is established so early in life. What other reason can there be for how people mash their way through life, obliterating every odd moment of clarity, demolishing any hope for an occurance of strange beauty to be found in the light glinting off the hide of a beetle?

If there is beauty in the world, it is often masked in misery, a kind of scarecrow in the psychology of Man, placed there by the unknown, with a purpose of chasing away the very question of meaning. If every bullet fired from a weapon is a marvel of scientific engineering, how quick the meaning?

Turtle Power

I envy anyone who has had a defining moment.

A defining moment, a brush with death, an ensnarement in mortality's web of thorns. I mean the kind of defining moment you do not return from. As "defined," you are exactly what you are from that moment on. Even the worst moments, the horror of war, the most effective detriment to the human psyche. An alienation by violent rapture. The soldiers in Iraq, many of them will return with defining moment intact, and evident upon them in the form of sociopathic inertia and missing parts of their bodies.

I envy their definition. To honorably engage with mortality is something to hang on to, even if lives never advance beyond it. Their purpose has been served, they have etched some kind of impact on the physical world.

A woman who survives breast cancer or an autistic child lost in a forest as deep and dark as its incomprehension, they are defined despite themselves. Whereas animals are defined from birth, from mere seconds of life where survival is a coin flip minute to minute, hour to hour, human beings must seek meaning and purpose in this world, or become as stiff and lifeless as a faded leaf in a stream.

Often, definition is thrust upon us, but sometimes it is not. I believe, in my case, definition missed me, like a speeding truck straddling a turtle in the road. The tires did not crush my shell, nor damage the fragile tissue within. If definition had run me down, I'd have known it. Whatever scars of life I received have been inconsequential, scrapes on the shell caused by the dragging of it all around me.

I prefer the shell, but in many ways remain undefined. To be defined by the shell, to be seen as a part of it or, rather, as the shell itself, an unliving mass, stoic brute matter, is the tragedy.

A turtle never lived who did not crave escape from its shell. I'm sure of it.

Burly Living: Six Projects DC Comics Needs Working On

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/06/six-by-6-by-sixth-gun-cullen-bunns-six-nostalgic-dream-projects/#more-47120

Above is a question to a current comic book professional about the Six Nostalgic Projects he'd undertake in comics if given a free hand.

Because I always love an excuse to write about what I want to write, in much the same manner, I'll follow suit. My projects, in order of basic import and improbability of ever having the opportunity:

Dr. Occult: http://www.toonopedia.com/droccult.htm

Read the above for Don Markstein's great summation. This character was created by the dudes who created Superman. That right there is worth looking into. He carries around a mystic talisman, has a cool hat, his two fists, and probably an ex-wife or two somewhere.

Like most great characters, "Dr. Occult" is just that. He hasn't a secret identity. He's a supernatural private eye. He's the first supernatural investigator, and we've had no shortage of those over the years, peaking with Kolchak "the Night Stalker" for 1970s television and bastardized by "The X-Files" later. Still, I'd jump all over an ongoing series using a two-fisted PI who can kick ass in the real world and on the astral plane as well. Kind of like Doctor Strange, but without the suave. A 1930s PI character fighting microscopic demons, bleeding heart social workers, Neanderthal undead, and at one point trapped on Dinosaur Island, you'll love Dr. Occult. Plus he allows for the inclusion of other obscure characters like Prince Ra-Man and the G.I. Robot. Trust me.

Space Ranger:  for one thing, he was designed in the 1950s by the great Bob Brown, an artist who is criminally unknown today. For another, he's almost predominantly yellow in space-age cool, meaning he could dust off a Green Lantern with no trouble. He's a tough outer space dude who uses all kinds of slick 1950s-type weapons and his dukes to fix little red wagons. The way I think about him, he's cooler than most science fiction heroes since he's a regular joe who has to depend on his science to survive. He also has his own shapeshifter Girl Friday, who is like Maya on the 1970s "Space 1999" show who could become a variety of cool animals and alien creatures. Figuring too that Ultraa the Ultra-Alien will be heavily featured, and the stories basically as Harlan Ellison would have written them, and I think Space Ranger is full on frontal awesome.

Metamorpho the Element Man: the first time I knew about this character, I was a kid who had bought a two-sided 45 rpm record with one side a Plastic Man adventure "The Invasion of the Plastic Men" and on the other Metamorpho versus "Fumo the Fire Giant." I don't care how you slice it, I never forgot Rex Mason, the Element Man, saying, "Oh Yeah?Here. Try this...Cobalt Fist! Unf!"

Rex is another tragic hero. He was an Indiana Jones type cursed by an alien artifact buried in an Eygptian tomb, transformed into a being made up of the known elements. Needless to say, the resultant bad complexion and odd fact of not being human any more was really unfortunate. As such, Rex uses acerbic humor and his own good nature to combat freakish depression. He's been kicking around comics since the 1960s, mostly as a member of other superhero teams. I've simply always loved Rex Mason, and I think he would work really well in a "buddy comic" instead. Like the old POWER MAN AND IRON FIST comic or CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE FALCON.

The best partner? Read below.

Wildcat: Ted Grant, the ex-heavyweight boxing champion of the world who got framed for murder and became a costumed hero, is simply one of the great characters ever. He's the epitome of the Burly Man, he's non-PC, he's arrogant and he's misogynist. He's also an "old guy", somewhere in his 50s. He's trained Batman on boxing. He's knocked out a young Muhammed Ali. He has a motorcycle with a giant cat face on the front of it. He was cool in the 1940s and he's cool now.

The problem with Wildcat over the years is that he's been written "old." He's a retired superhero with tenure. Any story that Ted Grant is involved in invariably involves boxing. I realize every hero needs a schtick, but Wildcat can do much more. If you figure Ted will probably be a drinking hunk who punches first and never asks questions, you'll have it right. Just because he's in his 50s doesn't mean he can't bring it. Charles Bronson was 55 years old when he made HARD TIMES.

Anyway, WILDCAT AND THE ELEMENT MAN sounds like a television pilot from the 1970s, starring George Peppard and Darren McGavin. Which is as it should be. This counts as one project here, just so you know.

SANDMAN MYSTERY THEATRE/ "Golden Age" Sandman: Wesley Dodds is an amateur detective who looks like Mr. Limpet (below) and battles crime by sneaking around and knocking criminals right the f*ck out with a sleeping gas gun.

He's another hero from the 1940s, but I'm interested in bringing him into the modern era. Much as I'd like to leave him in the 1930s, Wesley simply merits the cool of being a different kind of vigilante in our world. His insulated intellect, his gas-mask covered features, his gloved fists, indicate how Wesley is removed from society while obsessed with what is infecting it: human evil, victimization, rape, torture, murder. The Sandman finds those responsible and his sleeping gas causes all kinds of freaky hallucinations that just don't go away overnight. You can be assured, if Wesley blasts you, you're never going to sleep without nightmares again. Which is probably one of the most hardcore punishments out there, isn't it? Imagine it. Imagine the psychological impact. Who wouldn't kill themselves to escape the mists of the Sandman?

The Doom Patrol:  the first time a superhero team was ever killed outright in their own comic, it was the 1960s and writer Arnold Drake and artist Bruno Primiani decided to end it all for the Fabulous Freaks. Ever since, the team, revitalized from death after almost four decades, has seen its good days and bad. Mostly though, it's been a tribute to the weirdness of the original series and the unfortunate need to keep the DP smothered in bizarreness that has been both a strength and weakness for the comic.

The best DP stories work when the living brain trapped in a robot body, the woman who can shrink to ant-size or grow to King Kong-size, and the man who has a radiation being inside of him and is cursed as a walking atomic pile, and their weird enemies are all contrasted against the mundane. They fight an alien invasion in a gas station, defend a nursery school from giant ferrets, they solve a murder mystery in a full baseball stadium. To me, and I'm just saying, I belive the Doom Patrol to be the greatest example of pure iconic story-telling, because there's no limit to where they can go or what they can do.

Hawkman: there may be no character more intriging to so many, who feel the urge to change everything about him until he is universally reviled and is quickly shunted off to cancellation. Or, worse, having Hawkgirl replace him in his own comic.

Carter Hall is an archaologist who may or may not be reincarnated throughout the ages. He has memories of past lives and he is skilled at ancient weaponry, like cestus and the all-mighty mace. To me, trying too hard to fit all of Hawkman's history into his character is stupid. He's a guy who uses a hawk avatar and knows how to beat ass with weapons people have never seen before.

If it's me, I put Carter Hall into some kind of strange Dinosaur Island type place where he's constantly fighting six-armed burning gorillas and invaders from other dimensions. Essentially, Hawkman would gather up some local color and turn into the Herculoids (above.)

If that doesn't seem cool, I just don't know what would.

Note: All "Microheroes" property of their respective creators. I do love some Microheroes, man.

Burly Living: What I Learned from Frank Frazetta

I was reading a huge interview with Frazetta just recently. I'd always had Frazetta in my periphery. I knew him for the Conan paperback covers. I remember as a kid being a little freaked out by his paintings. I was a bit of a poosy as a kid, so forgive me. I thought they were neat, but scary in a "I'm glad I'm not a f*cking Viking" sort of way. By chance, just a year ago or so, I somehow discovered Frazetta had been working in the 1950s, had been ground-zero for the pulp mags back in the Real Day, where it was REAL. I saw some of his work and thought, "Sheet, I've been missing out on Frazetta."

Soonafter, I stumbled across the Comics Journal Library edition with the massive Frazetta interview in it. Also some glorious discussions with the great Russ Heath and Russ Manning. In this interview, Frazetta points out where the strength in his figures, his Conans and Death Dealers, actually comes from. It's not about drawing body builders, whom Frazetta called "idiotic." It's all about the glutes. Strength, real strength in actual fighting men, is generated by the muscles of the butt.


And this was a revelation to me, for some reason. Frazetta was probably a better athlete than he was an artist. I think he was drafted by the San Franscisco Giants. He was a fighting street tough in the 1950s, and in the 1970s picked up martial arts with the same natural ease. Brilliant, but never pretentious, about anything he picked up. Frazetta enjoyed life. Until his health problems started to cloud his days, I get the impression Frazetta was 100 percent in on the game of life. Strokes reduced his drawing hand to a twisted claw, and he was teaching himself to draw left-handed. And it was still recognizably Frazetta.

So when Frazetta says a strong ass is necessary for a strong fighter, I believe him. His uncanny anatomy understanding made him a giant.

Recently I snatched up the only copy of a reprint title of Frazetta and Gardner Fox's THUN'DA TALES. Thun'da is Frazetta's Tarzan knock-off, in the 1950s. And when I say the art in this thing blew me away, I'm not kidding. It was like somebody took Joe Kubert and John Buscema and fused them into one god-like being. Thun'da is fantastic stuff, thoroughly pulptastic but unlike anything you've quite seen before.

I guess I'm trying to say, it's good to discover Frazetta, to really appreciate him at a time when he's passed on. Vikings beware...Frazetta is coming.

Burly Living (Burly Dead): Audie Murphy

Arlington National Cemetery, yesterday. I know everybody and their mother has seen Audie Murphy's grave, but I hadn't. It was a blast, considering Audie Murphy might jump out of the ground and kick my a** at any moment! Or at least that's how it felt.



Just that little grave marker, just like any other soldier. Pretty cool, I must say.

2009 About Done, And About Godd*mn Time!

I still haven't gotten so old that I start to wax nostalgic about all the past years that have come and gone in my 39 pulse-pounding years of life.

No, I still see the end of 2009 and say, "F*ck it! Let's get to 2010!"

Frankly, there's nothing about 2009 to hold up and study, or reflect on. No Horatio's Skull to be found here. A whole bunch of people crying over the economy. A blizzard in Virginia for the first time since 1996 or whatever it was. I busted up with a girl. I injured the tissues in my chest and thought I had a heart attack, but it was just a sign of getting older. I'm nearer the end of my life than the beginning. These are high points in an otherwise non-detailed year.

Nothing I saw or read as entertainment utterly changed me, though I had some mind-boggling moments. The best thing I read all year was Darwyn Cooke's adaption of Richard Stark's THE HUNTER. It's a fabulous taste of severe criminal. I can't say Cooke is doing anything but the Lord's work in his endeavor to reproduce Stark's blocky, uncompromising prose into illustration. You just cannot imagine two things going together better than Cooke and Stark.

Other notables are the ongoing SCALPED trades, each one of which gets more sweaty and desperate than the last.

One of the best things I watched all year, for certain, is this made-for-Internet video from some flick called 500 DAYS OF SUMMER. It's magic, no joke.



Though not movies released in 2009, some of the more memorable, flat-out fun ones were:

PUNISHER: WAR ZONE, which illicited all kinds of pissing and moaning from "fans" of the property. I dislike the Punisher visually and in conceit, in comics, but this movie provided mounds of action value. WAR ZONE is homage movie about the 1980s action genre, without all the snide self-awareness.

David Mamet's REDBELT, a well-done movie about Mixed Martial Arts, for all intents. Mamet always goes over the top and doesn't hesitate to do so here. But it's Mamet and it's almost impossible not to be thrilled by Mamet-Speak and the strong assured hand he brings to directing his own work.

Another solid action entry is TAKEN, about Liam Neeson doing what you know Liam Neeson can do: give an intense goddam stare in the seconds before beating down on a man until you hear the man shit his pants. The whole movie is just that, and I had a wonderful time. I might have shit my pants while watching it, in fact.

I watched a Chinese ecological "animals gone wild) horror movie from the early 1980s called CALAMITY OF SNAKES. If you have an aversion to hundreds of real "attacking" snakes being killed, don't watch it. If you're ready to freak out, do watch it.

Mario Bava's BAY OF BLOOD was another head-slapper. Some things have to be seen to be seen.

MORITURI with Marlon Brando and Yul Brenner was the best Man on a Mission movie I saw. Fantastic production and Jerry Goldsmith score. Just superb.


The one flick I did see released this year, CRANK 2: HIGH VOLTAGE, was so insane and visceral that, again, it was hard to tell if it was really happening or if it was all in my head. Again, like WAR ZONE and most of the other high-point flicks here, not many are expected to love these movies. I loved them because they all did something different and affected me in different ways. They created unforgettable images, and wonderfully fun quotes, and I can't thank most of them enough.

So anyway, I'm ready to be done already with 2009. Like I was ready to be done with 2008. And like I'll be ready to move on from 2010. But at least there is the hope, the geniune hope, of some kind of unknown disaster or critical happiness or essential success, somewhere in the future. Or if not, at least the ability to say, "F*ck it! Next year will be better!"

And maybe it will.

Charles Bronson and the Teachings of Mandom

A little acknowledged bit of manly wonder was Charles Bronson's Japanese-made commercials of the early 1970s, just prior to Bronson's superstar explosion. At this time, Bronson is best known for ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST by Sergio Leone and in Europe as "Il Brutto" and a massive star. In America, Bronson had yet to make DEATH WISH, which of course turned him into an icon.

Bronson's Japanese commercials were for "Mandom" men's cologne. According to Steven Whitney's paperback biography CHARLES BRONSON SUPERSTAR (Dell Publishing, 1975), Bronson signed on to do them out of nowhere. The Japanese, less than two decades after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had already lionized the American Bronson as a manly ideal, and of a Western ideal. This is important to note, as clearly the Western movie had a huge impact on Japanese filmmaking of the 1960s, and Samurai films of Japan circled to Italy to influence the "Spaghetti Western" sub-genre which turned Clint Eastwood into a major player. So by 1972, Bronson is ground zero on an entire generation of Japanese raised on the American Western ideal, which so closely bonded to the Samurai structure of honor and loyalty.

Apparently Bronson was as gracious and humble as the Japanese commercial makers could have ever imagined. Bronson impressed them with his humility and dedication to detail, never displaying a star's self-centered behavior. This reflected Bronson's personal approach, as he was genuine and professional.

The funny part about these commercials, which by the way were gigantically successful outside the U.S.A., is how open Bronson is to ridicule and yet how honest his experience seems to be. You can't watch these commercials and think Bronson is going through the motions. He's a man enjoying being a man, without making it seem like a farce or a tough guy trailer. Hell, you can even say he's vulnerable and introspective, if you want, because there's some of that in there too.


I don't know, but I miss stuff like this. I miss the times in which something like this was made to appeal to men, and being a man wasn't something that required a falsified ego, or the backing of Nike, or a shaved hairless six-pack. Being a man was about being an individual, wholly predicated on his own experience and knowledge. It also meant using some Mandom cologne, in quantity, but if you could be Bronson for one day...wouldn't you???

Hell's Squeaky Spinner Rack

(This entry coupled with some fave comic book covers of the distant, and I mean distant, past...)

I read the conclusion of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' INCOGNITO. Despite liking it overall, I still wonder about the pacing of many projects in today's comic book community. Brubaker as the writer seems content to milk the cow with two fingers, until the five issues started to come to a conclusion, and then it's a rush to complete the work. Not that it comes off bad or anything, but you can tell Brubaker's been saturated in the "taffy plot" mentality, as I'll coin it right now. The idea that you can stretch the plot seemingly forever as long as you're a good enough cocktease. This is evident in Brubaker's CAPTAIN AMERICA as well, which is floundering a bit ever since the ascension of former sidekick Bucky Barnes to the Cap role. Which coincides with the eventual resurrection of Cap himself from his grave (expected, of course) but just terrible planning. Bucky is worse than a lame duck, unless Marvel Comics wants two Captain Americas running around, like there's multiple earthen Green Lanterns and multiple Flashes and multiple Supermen over at DC. It's called de-uniquing, and it waters down the impact these characters are supposed to have.


That said, Brubaker and Phillips' CRIMINAL is often the best thing on the stands, so any time you see a new arc, pick it up. Bru's tendancies to give a good lapdance is lessened by his innate ability to get inside noir-trodden characters, and Phillips is much more effective as a mood artist than an action one (though he's pretty good at that as well.)

AGENTS OF ATLAS has been cancelled, one of the best comics to come out of Marvel in a long time, which I have to thank all you fine Spider-Man/Batman/"Dark" Avengers buyers for. Thanks for f*cking that up. Jeff Parker and the blossoming talent of artist Gabriel Hardman was producing a comic of full-bodied depth and gratifyingly action-packed dimensions. Parker knows he's writing pure heroin in the form of Pulp, so he throws everything great into a mix of talking gorillas, 1950s robots, secret agents and Uranian saucer men. It's impossible to even describe AGENTS OF ATLAS without nearly weeping from happiness, so I appreciate everyone buying it and keeping it on the shelves. Nice pull, folks.

AGENTS will be extant at Marvel, albeit in crossovers with X-titties and backing up in someone else's comic. Which then forces me to buy a comic I don't want to get the back-up I do. Oh, you Marvel-ous ways.



SECRET SIX by writer Gail Simone and artist Nicola Scott is still pulsating with life, thankfully, at DC, and it's head and shoulders better than anything else the company is producing. Visceral and ethically-challenged, you're in for a treat designed for you, the adult comic book reader. Which means, when you read SECRET SIX, you aren't forcing DC Comics to adultify Superman and Batman (kids' characters) to meet your expectations. The criminal protagonists of SECRET SIX exist in a moral void, yet continue to amuse with their inability to ever truly be evil. No matter how repellant their actions, they still somehow conflict with greater evils than themselves. And I'll say now: Nicola Scott is the best comics artist working right now. That's a fact. She has the exquisite style straight from the pre-1990s, coupled with the ability to draw stunningly sexy women without having to resort to porn poses in order to convince the reader they are, in fact, supposed to be attracted to the female form. Amazingly, Scott's women are beautiful and sensuous the more ragged and sweaty they are, because by god they look like real women would look, instead of some horny teenager's wet dream of the way they look.

Also, I bought THE SATAN FACTORY, a prose novel starring Mike Mignola's pulp hero Lobster Johnson, written by novelist Thomas E. Sniegoski. I hope it's amazing, and of course I'll be letting you Squeaky Spinner Rack readers know, fer sure.

Go Feral: Think Like a Man

Developing men. At some point in history, every boy was a developing man. Necessity and survival played an integral role. Smashing through Visogoths with a mace began in training as a child. Hard to imagine that world now. Not that I'd want to be there, personally, but then I'd be trained to deal with it.

The "fearlessness" of manhood was a concept, not a reality. Being a man meant subverting fear for the greater good, whether to retain territory or protect the family.

Our man-like state continued into the Industrial Age, whereby electricity diminished the impenetrable darkness of the unknown. Slowly, being a man was less about brawn and more about knowledge of mechanics and sciences. Men actually began to enjoy the leisure of power, derived from their knowledge and not some royal bond of blood.

American culture, probably born out of the legends of the Wild West, began to mythologize our manliness. The belief that a man emerges from a bed of broken slate to become a figure of legend. Men wanted to assume more than they were. Flesh and blood wasn't enough. This idea incorporated the heroic ideal. Soon being a man meant being a hero. Audie Murphy, World War II multi-Decorated war hero (a severe Shaft-type badass on the battlefields) was almost physically the embodiment of the fresh-faced boy we once were and the feral mace-wielding warrior of a collective past. He saw his own dark savagery, and man's, staring out at himself, a shadow as deep as Neitzsche's abyss. Murphy accepted his shadow otherness by mythologizing himself, becoming an actor in Westerns and War Films throughout the 1950s. In effect, he made peace with "the Horror" referred to by Brando's Vietnam-shattered character "Kurtz" in APOCALYPSE NOW.

Justifiably, post-WW 2 and Korea, men took pride in their manhood. They began to reward themselves for the fires they'd already braved. Some veterans did not recover, as in any war, while others dedicated themselves to creating a persona of Man. What Men enjoyed, after work, was paramount to their being men. For a modern view, watch any episode of AMC's "Mad Men." The poetry of Man relies solely on the image. And yet the image detailed a man's role. The producers of the series walk a fine line between accepting why men dominated their environments in the 1960s and why the Image of Man distorted the American Ideal. Eventually, the Image of Man became an albatross harshly rebelled against by the Vietnam generation.

Manliness as an Image reached its apex sometime in the 1970s and early 1980s. As the Vietnam Generation grew older, the inevitable influx of sexuality much different and much more diverse emerged. An avatar of manliness, Rock Hudson, died of AIDS. His homosexuality was an ill-kept secret in Hollywood, but the real world wasn't prepared for the implications. The AIDS virus would deal a damaging blow to male sexuality as we understood it. The Man Image began to incorporate feminizing aspects as men struggled with the new battlefield. Frank Sinatra gave way to Andrew McCarthy's (actor, ST. ELMO'S FIRE circa 1985) softer, more vulnerable male persona. Ronald Reagan, "tough guy" President, represented Man as prehistorically dense intellectually. The schism had become generational, as Reagan's Image and "Brat Pack" McCarthy Image widened a gulf between the shrewdness of the Old and the intuitiveness of the Young.

As with anything in culture, Manliness has become cyclical as well. The Ideal, Guiniune Man has returned as a study in depth and meaning. George Clooney went from Andrew McCarthy's passiveness to become a rending force of gray-templed manly endeavor. Clooney represents Man as a free-thinking individual, with taste, and creative density. Nothing about him is lightweight, or unsure. He's become the Man we all want to be.

In direct contrast to this reevaluation of the Man Image, Oprah Winfrey's dominating presence in the cultural consciousness has solidified the female and the feminized man point of view. In establishing her own dynastic royalty (supported by millions of stay-at-home wives and career professional women, followed by the sensitive generational alternative to the Man Image), Winfrey has deified the schism between the Manly and the Supportive Male.

It should be noted that nowhere, at any point, has the idea of true Manliness been anything but a humble endeavor. It's hard to define how to be a man, except to say that being a True Man is not the cultural archetype we have now. It's not diversity of thought and process everyone believes, the kind of "broadening" of viewpoint that relegates Manliness to a kind of benign, easily-ignored buffoonishness. Manliness is an acceptance of the shadow Other by a man, the realization of savagery as a feral inevitability. The difference being, and this is important, Manliness is a reaction. It's a discipline.

To protect a loved one, to respect authority, to determine a course of action, is the province of the thinking human being. While Oprah Winfrey's estrogen-fueled corporation engulfs the accepted cultural norms, the Man Image remains a stoic representation of the Individual. Being a Man is exactly what it seems to be, an acceptance of the crucial disciplines. Be solid, be honest, be humble, and yet know there is a spiny shadow of bestial fury somewhere within. This shadow will forever alienate Men, as it is their nature. It's not to be taken lightly. This isn't about owning a handgun or a rebuilding a muscle-car or being street-saavy enough to score. It's about integrity. To do the right thing. To be brave in the face of doom.

In that regard, this is a part of the grand Internet experiment which focuses on the appeal of Manliness, the burly appeal of the cultural touchpoints of Manliness. There should be a place for Men, a cultural epicenter like a crater hole in the American southwest. We realize that at one point, something bright and shining and moving at high velocity once existed, and it exploded into shards of forgotten lore. Just because it's not there, inside the crater, does not mean Manliness does not exist. We're here to gather the shards into something undeniable, something rough and yet strangely comforting. A recognition. An acceptance.