Radiant Comics

A really slim week. I only bought one comic. Strangers in Paradise #81. It is one of my regular books but it is being ended at issue #90. I looked around the shop and found a TPB to buy because I couldn’t leave with just one comic. I bought “Ring of Roses” by Petrou, Watkiss and McLester. It was originaly a four issue mini from Dark Horse printed in the early 90s but the TPB was published by Image in 04. It is categorized as Horror/Fantasy and I’ll let you know how it is.

I thought that I had a topic earlier in the week to write about but now I have forgotten. I should have written it down. Imagine how much information was lost because someone didn’t write it down. It is no wonder that “Civilization” (yeah, I just hadda use quotes around that I’m feeling cynical) kicked into high gear when people learned to write things down.

Writing is a magic thing. When you don’t know how to read letters are just marks on paper. But to those in the loop the letters’ meaning is clear without even thinking.

I often use fake writing in my artwork. I use real writing too because I like the space words and pictures create when they are next to each other but sometimes I don’t want words. I just want the idea of writing or symbols. So I make up some letter forms. They vaguely remind me of Middle Eastern lettering because there are lots of curves and swoops but they are really just based on the motion of my hand. What is important is not that they mean anything literal but that they could be a vessel for holding meaning. Just like writing is. Sometimes the cup is more important than what is inside the cup.

I’m still trying to remember that topic but my remembery (a word I stole from the Family Circus) isn’t working. It had something to do with something. That much I am sure about.

One thing I do remember is that I like my devil to be the Prince of Lies. I watched a movie the other night and the devil showed up in it. I don’t like it when most movies or comics use the devil as a character because he usually lets me down. He gets messed up by because they humanize him and give him some vague sense of honor. In the movie the devil has the hero’s soul and then lets him go for no good reason. The devil is supposed to be deceitful and trick you out of your soul. You are supposed to think that you have won but then the twist comes and you have lost and when he has you he has you for good. That is what makes him the devil. I know that in the movies the hero has to win but the devil shouldn’t just let him win. Out of character.

Do you know that you can’t buy a good french curve anymore? They are all crappy with burrs on their curves. I think computers killed the french curve market. Maybe they still make them in France. Have you noticed that France is the only country you are allowed to be bigoted about? Turn on the TV and you will hear every bad thing said about the French that would never be said about any other ethnic group. How did that happen?

My favorite quote I have discovered recently is by René Magritte the Surrealist painter. I read it in a magazine called “The Sun” which I have subscribed to for years and has a section of quotes on its last page. It goes, “The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown”. I love images of the unknown and I make images of the unknown so how could I not like that quote. The mind looks for meaning and will try to find it if it is there or not.

And that’s my story for tonight.

Do you know what my greatest fantasy is? To learn the secret of life. I know there really is no secret to life but I still want to learn it. I’m dedicated alright.

I have to think the best place to learn the secret of life is in books. There are plenty of books that claim to have the secret of life such as religious and self help books but these don’t interest me. It is a secret, after all, so why would it be in a book that millions of people have read? No, it has to be in an obscure book tucked away in some dusty old room. This is why I like the movie “The Ninth Gate”. No one else I know likes it but the movie is about Johnny Depp searching through rare books for the secret of life. Johhny’s secret of life involves proving the devil exists which really doesn’t interest me but the search does. He just keeps looking and looking…

Mostly I read books on history and biography. I think that if the secret of life exists these are the type of books it would be in. Maybe some person in the past discovered it and the secret can be gleaned from the story of his life. Or it might be found in some great past event that if looked at in just the right light would reveal everything. Usually the events and people are interesting enough on their own to make good subjects for books but in the back of my mind I’m always on the lookout for that secret.

The other good place to try and find the secret of life is in documentaries. I had one on as I was drawing today about Nixon and Watergate. No secret of life was revealed to me but somewhere in that scandalous mess it might be hiding. HBO and PBS usually have good docs about life in this old world of ours and somewhere in all of those millions of feet of film there must be some peek at life’s secret. There has to be. The odds say so. A million monkeys and all.

The other type of documentary is the cable TV “In Search Of” type. I hesitate to call them documentaries because they really don’t document anything other than speculations about if aliens are among us and such but I don’t think there is another name for them. I don’t really care for the alien ones but the history based ones can be entertaining. Henry Lincoln’s “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” docs from the BBC come to mind. They are from the 70’s and cover a lot of the ground that “The DaVinci Code” walks on. The Knights Templar, secret societies, lost royal blood lines, secret treasures and all that fun stuff are in Lincoln’s three docs. The only reason to have a secret society is to guard secrets so it is a natural place to look.

All of these pseudo-docs claim to have a lot of “hidden truths”. So one of them could have the secret of life. Right? Because if Nikola Tesla didn’t have it than who did? Rasputin maybe? Unfortunately none of these shows actually reveal any secrets. Though they do make up plenty of stuff that the next show can quote.

Anything about Atlantis is cool too. Those Atlanteans knew all kinds of stuff. It makes me wonder why Aquaman is so damn boring.

Paintings can help in the search. I’m sure there is something in van Gogh’s work that I just have to nail down. Just look at it. He saw the world in a way that no one else did. I also think I can almost see the secret of life when I look at an Ad Reinhardt composition in black.

Whenever I dream of learning the secret of life I am inevitably drawn to a Tom T. Hall song that I heard in my childhood. In it the singer is asking an old man about the secret of life.

“I knew I had to ask him about the mysteries of life he spit between his boots and he replied:
It’s faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, and more money” -Tom T Hall “Faster Horses”

One of the most annoying aspects of science fiction TV and movies is time travel. I’ve got no problem with time travel in general but when the stories get written often writers don’t bother to have it make sense. Usually there are two takes on time travel. “You can’t change the past” or “you can change the past”. The “you can change the past” is further broken down into two categories: “there is only one timeline and changing the past changes this timeline” and “there are many alternate timelines and changing the past creates another alternate timeline”.

All three of these approaches have problems but the biggest problem comes when the writers mix and match them. A recent example is the movie “The Jacket” which was pretty good except they spent the whole movie saying that you can’t change time and at the end they changed time. It was a confusing movie anyway so what the hey.

The all time king of the mix and match is Star Trek. In that Joan Collins episode Kirk couldn’t save her because, “that is the way things have to happen”. Yet there are countless other alternate reality episodes where evil beards are worn and they mess with the time stream to their heart’s delight. Alternate realities abound. Time plays by different rules in different episodes of Trek. Not to mention different series.

The “Butterfly’s Wing” hypothesis says that the beating of a butterfly’s wing can set off a chain of events that creates a hurricane. This is why you have to be careful what you do when you time travel because your actions can have “unforeseen consequences”. But if a butterfly’s wing can cause a hurricane than so can your breathing. Time travelers don’t have to do anything but time travel and they will affect things. This should only matter in the “one timeline” take because in the alternate timeline ones why should anyone care. You can just create a new timeline and then go back to your own. Why be so careful? Pull a Homer Simpson and bash a few thing with a club.

All those different alternate worlds. No one ever explains how all these timelines are created. Usually a person creates one by going back in time and changing things but what about when some crazy accident knocks him into an alternate world where people wear evil beards? Where did that one come from? Did some other time traveler make it? Who knows? The writer don’t usually bother to explain such things.

The answer for a lot of stories is that all of the alternate realities exist at once. They are all there just waiting to be discovered. The TV show “Sliders” is an example of this type. They slide from one reality where England still rules the U.S. to another where women run the world. Of course I have a problem with this too. If all alternate realities exist at once there must be an infinite amount of them. Not just worlds where there are huge dramatic differences; this is a literary conceit. But worlds with mundane, not even noticeable differences. For example, I used to work in Manhattan. I would get of off a bus at 40th and 8th Ave. and walk to 28th and Park Ave. That is about a 20-25 minute walk and I had no set path. I would just follow the lights and cross the streets where I could. There were lots of choices. Can I make this light? Should I dash across or just turn downtown? I bet that if I chose differently at any of those corners it would not have mattered. There are billions of butterfly wing beats and few hurricanes; most small choices don’t matter. But there still would have to be an alternate world where the only difference is that I walked one block further east before turning south. Otherwise everything is the same. Multiply this by many days walking and by many millions of people. Infinite alternate worlds all essentially the same. I bet if you traveled to an alternate world you wouldn’t even notice the difference. Except there would be two of you. Unless the other you traveled to an alternate world too. Wait this is too confusing. Anyway, the odds of finding an alternate world dramatically different would be slim. That would be a real exciting show. Traveling from world to world where everything is the same.

I have always found Robert Heinlein’s “you can’t change time” take the neatest. There are no such thing as time paradoxes. If you go back in time to try and kill your mother before you were born something will stop you. It never happened so you won’t be able to do it. But that doesn’t let a writer “threaten the whole time space continuum”. So most stay away from it. It’s must easier to not sweat the details of time travel. Lazy Bums.

I was reading my Teen Titan’s Archive again and I came across another of my favorite comic book devises. The boxing glove arrow. It was in every comic book archer’s quiver for decades. Most people make fun of the boxing glove arrow because not only would it never fit in an archer’s quiver but aerodynamics say it would never fly. This are both true and worthy of a good laugh. But what I find most amazing is that it is a boxing glove.

These are super-heros. Even the ones with no super powers spend all of their time punching one and other. With bare fists. Batman doesn’t wear boxing gloves when he goes up against the Joker. Why would an archer put one on the end of an arrow? Because it’s sporting? To be nice to the bad guy? To make it non-lethal couldn’t he just put a rubber ball or some such to blunt it? Nope. A boxing glove is chosen.

I’ve never seen it but I can picture an archer pulling the boxing glove arrow out of his quiver and saying, “Time to get serious” or “Time to take the gloves off”. Then he would pull the boxing glove off of the arrow revealing a bare fisted arrow. No more Mr. Nice guy. That would show ’em. But nobody ever has a bare fisted arrow. Just a gloved one.

Please, no fisting jokes John. This is serious business.