Blog Tour Day Five: Mindless Ones
Interview with Botswana Beast and Illogical Volume up here. We talk about Seven Soldiers, Jeremy Paxmam, self-publishing, blogging, and some other stuff. I come across as a bit of an arrogant prick in this one, I’m afraid.
If you’re wondering about days three and four, I’ve been too ill to complete them, so they’ll be happening retrospectively – my guest posts for Thagomizer and Liberal England will be up as soon as I’ve got them finished.
Comments are disabled on this post so you’ll all comment on the Mindless site.
Seven Soldiers Book Now Out!
My new book, An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers is now available in paperback or PDF and hardback from Lulu.com . The various ebook formats should be uploaded tomorrow night.
Here’s the blurb:
In An Incomprehensible Condition, Andrew Hickey examines Grant Morrison’s 2005 comic series Seven Soldiers of Victory, and traces the history of the ideas used.
From Greek myth to hip-hop, from John Bunyan to Alan Turing, from Arius of Alexandria to Isaac Newton, we see how Frankenstein connects to Robert Johnson, what George Bernard Shaw had to say about Bulleteer, and what G.K. Chesterton thinks of I, Spider.
As always with my print books, I don’t yet have a paper proof copy, so caveat emptor.
It’s only a short book, but it’s very dense. Please don’t let the low page count fool you – this is a book that will take time to read.
Blog Tour Day One: Deep Space Transmissions
The first part of my Blog Tour is now up, in which the wonderful Grant Morrison fan site Deep Space Transmissions interviews me about the Seven Soldiers book. Since that interview was done, the book has gained a title – it’s going to be called An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. And it should be out tomorrow, with luck (I’m waiting on a couple of my beta-readers to get back to me. Once I have their comments, though, I will only have to incorporate their thoughts, which is maybe eight hours’ work total.)
As Deep Space Transmissions doesn’t have a comment section, feel free to comment about the interview here.
Tomorrow, I’m interviewed by Gavin at Investigations Of A Dog, about self-publishing.
10: Seven Soldiers 1
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”
(Luke 14:26)
“But what there is on the credit side! It is rather like the effect of the Ring–a self-riching work, harmony piling up on harmony, grandeur on grandeur, pity on pity. The first section, merely on the mystery of the Overlords, would be enough for most authors …here we meet a modern author who understands that there may be things that have a higher claim than the survival or happiness of humanity: a man who could almost understand “He that hateth not father and mother” and certainly would understand the situation in Aeneid III between those who go on to Latium and those who stay in Sicily.
We are almost brought up out of psyche into pneuma. I mean, his myth does that to us imaginatively. Of course his own thoughts about what the higher level might be are not, in our eyes, very new or very profound: but that doesn’t really make so much difference. (Though, by the way, it would have been better, even on purely literary grounds, to leave it in its mystery, to philosophise less.) After all, few authors’ glosses on their own myths are as good as the myths: unless, like Dante, they take the glosses from other men, real thinkers…
Many minor dissatisfactions, of course. The women are all made up out of a few abstract ideas of jealousy, vanity, maternity etc. But it really matters very little: the thing is great enough to carry far more faults than it commits.
It is a strange comment on our age that such a book lies hid in a hideous paper-backed edition, wholly unnoticed by the cognoscenti, while any “realistic” drivel about some neurotic in a London flat–something that needs no real invention at all, something that any educated man could write if he chose, may get seriously reviewed and mentioned in serious books–as if it really mattered.
I wonder how long this tyranny will last? Twenty years ago, I felt no doubt that I should live to see it all break up and great literature return: but here I am, losing teeth and hair, and still no break in the clouds.
And now, what do you think? Do you agree that it is AN ABSOLUTE CORKER?”
C.S. Lewis on Childhood’s End by Arthur C Clarke
So here’s where I’m meant to come up with some pithy summary that encapsulates the whole of Seven Soldiers, and ties together everything in a neat bow, right?
I’m not going to, of course.
Seven Soldiers is the kind of work that, when examined in enough detail, grows to encompass everything. Writing this book involved more than a little bit of a dance with mental illness. While I never, as Ian MacDonald said of Charles Manson, ‘crossed the line between textual analysis and mass murder’, there was a point while writing this when it seemed to be coming too easily – when every time I researched an aspect of something I wanted to talk about in the book, I found another trivial little link. I decided to take a break from writing for a couple of hours, and listen to the new Doctor Who audio story that had just come out, Heroes Of Sontar.
In that story, the Doctor, Tegan, Turlough and Nyssa are trapped on a dangerous planet with a squad of Sontarans. Sontaran soldiers. Seven Sontaran soldiers.
I extended my break from a couple of hours to a couple of weeks. It was probably for the best.
“I have no control over how people handle the Seven Soldiers characters in my wake – Klarion already seems barely recognizable and appears to have returned to his role (a role no-one could ever sell in the first place) as a teen warlock who turns up to fight DCs younger characters – a sort of Goth Mr. Myxyzptlk. I honestly don’t expect anyone to actualize the potential of these characters, but I’d like to be proven wrong. The Guardian and Frankenstein could join the JLA.”
Grant Morrison
Do I think that what I’m getting out of Seven Soldiers is precisely what Grant Morrison put in?
No, of course not.
But what I do think is that Morrison actually had things to say in this series – and what he had to say was not just about superhero comics, but about the stories we tell ourselves, about growing up, about the relationships between parents and children, about thought…
And I think Morrison was, very deliberately, using symbols that have the absolute maximum resonance for his purposes. He may not, for example, have been aware on a conscious level of the story of Alan Turing’s suicide using a poisoned apple (though he may well have been), but he was certainly aware of the stories of Snow White, and of Adam and Eve, and of Eris, and of what the apple meant in those stories. He was aware of Newton seeing the apple fall. And he will have known, therefore, that there will be other resonances, other stories that have been told about apples, and about falling, and about forbidden knowledge and secrets.
Read a mediocre book, and you come out knowing exactly what the author intended, and what she wanted you to know. Read a great book, and you come out thinking things neither you nor the author ever thought of.
Morrison is deliberately encouraging us to make connections – putting important plot points into a cryptic crossword! – and whether the reader notices the references to Milton and Bunyan, or the references to Stephen King and Arthur C Clarke, isn’t really the point. The point is to notice something.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.Philip Larkin – This Be The Verse
This book has ended up almost entirely different from my original plan for it. It was originally going to be a much more conventional – and rather longer – book. I’d have explained carefully all the references to other superhero stories, I’d have made things explicit rather than implicit. I’d have written much more and said much less. But no plan survives contact with the enemy.
And insofar as I think there’s a single point to Seven Soldiers (there isn’t, of course. If Morrison had a single-sentence point to make, he’d have just written a sentence, rather than thirty-plus comics), that might be it.
We create things – be they comics, or books, or children – and as soon as we do they’re out of our control, sometimes even before we’ve finished. The book you’re reading is not the book I wrote – it’s your interpretation of what I had to say. Some of you will come away thinking I’m a lot cleverer than I really am, while others will come away thinking I’m much stupider, because you’ll have taken out more or less than I put in.
But even the book I wrote isn’t the book I planned to write. It wriggled out from under me and turned into something a lot more ambiguous. I’m not even sure it’s a book I’d like to read, were I not the author. I’m not sure I’d get that much out of it.
Our children will always rebel against us. We may bring them up with a healthy disrespect for authority, only to see them become accountants and vote Conservative. We can’t control them, and no matter what the plans we had for them when they were born, they become something different. Superman was meant to be a Doc Savage knock-off in a newspaper strip, not a symbol of hope and pure goodness with near-godly powers. Bulleteer ends up flying in a crowd scene.
But conversely we are all rebellious children ourselves. There are forces acting on us from all sides that feel inexorable, inevitable. Whether it be gravity, parental expectations, entropy…it can feel like we have no control at all, that we’re walking a narrow road, thick beset with thorns and briars. But there’s not really any such thing as destiny. Libertarian free will may not exist, and we are all the product of every influence, every force that’s ever acted on us, but there are choices, always. There is a third road.
“Sometimes I wonder why my friends they all still sing their songs
Even when not so many sing along
There must be some kind of belief in their hearts or heads
That what they’re doing beats out being dead…
Sometimes I wonder why my friends they all still play guitar
It’s not like they’re in line to be rock stars
There must be some kind of belief in a better world
Where we can strum and smile and get the girl”Blake Jones And The Trike Shop – Sing Along
What gives us hope, what makes it all worthwhile, is the act of creation itself. It’s a messy process, and what we end up with is never what we hoped. Creating anything, be it a baby or a song or a book or a comic, is a recipe for disaster if we put all our hopes and dreams in the result. What matters is the process. And the process is what gives meaning to our lives.
We take the most unpromising materials possible, bits of inspiration from wherever we can find them, and stitch them together, and we can see the joins, and the bolts in its neck, and we know it doesn’t fit together right. We see its imperfections better than anyone else can, and we know it’s a failure. But it has the spark of life, the spark of creativity, and despite its imperfections, it’s better than its creator.
The act of creativity is an alchemical act, one that takes the dead flesh of the past and turns it into the life of the future. It’s turning entropy, the enemy of life, into information, its greatest ally.
If you’re not disappointed in your children, they’re not doing it right.
It’s been said that a measure of progress is the number of those who are counted as people. Millennia ago, only the men of the local tribe were counted as people. Then only the men of our country. Then the men and women of our race. Then all human beings. And now some, I think including Morrison, would include at least some animals. And I’m pretty certain Morrison would include fictional people in that counting.
And yes, that’s ridiculous. But we all put our hands out to Zatanna, didn’t we?
So we must have compassion for our creations, just as we have compassion for our parents. We’re all the rebellious child disappointing her parents, just as we’re all the parents who don’t understand the monster they’ve created. It’s quite possible there can never be true understanding between generations, but there can be empathy. There can be compassion. There can be love.
Comic issues Seven Soldiers #1
Artists J.H. Williams III (line art and colours), Dave Stewart (colours)
Other credits Todd Klein (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi(editor)
Connected Morrison works All of them
Look Out For Everything
Still to come in Seven Soldiers The rest of your life.
9: Mister Miracle
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
(Before I start, a quick apology to any visually impaired people reading this. I posted all this before, with alt tags for the images, including one with a little extra bit about the use of the handkerchief in the minstrel show, but WordPress ate it. I’ve reposted this, but don’t have time to retag the images tonight – I am unwell with what I’m hoping isn’t stomach flu. I will do so as soon as practical. I’ve also not re-italicised titles.)
Before I start this, an admission. I am a white man. Further, I am a white man from England. I say this up front because I am going to be treading on some astonishingly touchy ground regarding race in the USA, and while I consider myself to be a passionate, committed opponent of all forms of racism, I am aware enough of my own privilege to know that it’s entirely possible I will make mistakes here, even though I am making every effort not to. Please feel free to inform me of any problematic aspects of this.
“I found that Hoyle and Narlikar had already worked out Wheeler-Feynman electrodynamics in expanding universes, and had then gone on to formulate a time-symmetric new theory of gravity. Hoyle unveiled the theory at a meeting of the Royal Society in 1964. I was at the lecture, and in the question period, I said that the influence of all the matter in a steady state universe would make his masses infinite. Hoyle asked why I said that, and I replied that I had calculated it. Everyone thought I had done it in my head during the lecture, but in fact, I was sharing an office with Narlikar, and had seen a draft of the paper. Hoyle was furious. He was trying to set up his own institute, and threatening to join the brain drain to America if he didn’t get the money. He thought I had been put up to it, to sabotage his plans. However, he got his institute, and later gave me a job, so he didn’t harbor a grudge against me”
Stephen Hawking
Authenticity is a tricky subject, isn’t it?
It used to be so simple. Fats Domino doing Ain’t That A Shame was definitely authentic. Pat Boone doing the same song wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Pat Boone wanted to change the words to “Isn’t that a shame?”
But then, Chuck Berry is definitely ‘authentic’ too, isn’t he? He pretty much invented his genre. But have a look at Hail! Hail! Rock And Roll, the 1986 documentary about him. There’s a scene where he talks about how he’d admired musicians like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, as well as Domino, but realised that their music was ghettoised. So he changed his vocal style to sound less black, and more like Boone – “Why can’t I do what Pat Boone does and sell records to the white people, too?” [FOOTNOTE: Unfortunately I'm currently unable to check this quote for perfect accuracy, as I can no longer play my old VHS copy of this film. Should anyone be able to provide a corrected version, I will post it to http://andrewhickey.info/errata.]
This appears to have worked. Witness the scene in It by Stephen King (a novel about seven misfits who go off to fight a giant spider that’s really a far more malicious and powerful force than it at first appears), where one character wants to go and watch TV to see if Neil Sedaka is ‘a Negro’, because he’d been fooled into thinking Chuck Berry was white until seeing him on TV. [FOOTNOTE: This, as with much of King's work, is semi-autobiographical. See http://www.stephenking.pl/sk_artykuly_ew_58.html, in which King argues that white people like Bob Seger and Snow Patrol can now sound every bit as good as black people like Chuck Berry.]
Is someone ‘authentic’ when they’re copying an ‘inauthentic’ performer who is in turn copying an ‘authentic’ performer?
I still know a few people who prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles because the former are more ‘authentic’. Is an LSE economics dropout from Kent singing Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters songs more or less authentic than an art school dropout from Liverpool singing Marvelettes and Isley Brothers songs? Discuss.
Chuck Berry is, of course, known for suing artists such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys, who he considers stole his ideas. Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s pianist, sued him in 2000, claiming to have co-written most of Berry’s hits without credit. The lawsuit was thrown out.
In Mister Miracle, Shilo Norman complains that Baron Bedlam, an imitator made out of plastic, is ripping off his act. Shilo Norman is the third Mister Miracle.
“You’re tokenising me! I’m not a white man, I’m a Scot, OK? My fucking country… my country has been ruled by the fucking English for five hundred years, so don’t tokenise me, okay?!”
Grant Morrison, reply to a fan’s question at a convention panel, 2006
In Final Crisis, Grant Morrison’s 2008 follow-up to Seven Soldiers (and specifically to the Mister Miracle section), Anthro, the first boy ever born and the DC Universe equivalent of Adam, is given the secret of fire by Metron of the New Gods.[ FOOTNOTE: Metron is the Greek for 'measure'. One of the quotes I considered but discarded for one of these section headers was from Antiphon the Sophist - "Time is a thought or a measure [metron], not a substance.” – but I couldn’t find a source for it other than Wikipedia] The scene is somewhat reminiscent of the scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which knowledge is given to hominids by aliens. Unsurprisingly, Jack Kirby, the creator of the New Gods, adapted 2001 in comic form in the mid-70s – both Kubrick’s film and Kirby’s comics dealt with the idea that ultimately, what makes us human comes not from ourselves but from aliens who took the clay that was the crude form of proto-humanity and shaped it into something other and different.
Popularised by Eric von Däniken, a convicted fraudster, the ‘chariots of the Gods’ idea holds that beings from elsewhere arrived and civilised a poor bunch of ape-people who could never have achieved anything by themselves, by turning those ape-people into a poor imitation of themselves. For some reason, I can’t imagine why, this idea is a lot more popular among the nastier sections of the right-wing than among others.
Here, though, Metron is explicitly linked to astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who has become the modern-day symbol for knowledge and intelligence, even though his own initial reputation was based on having taken secret knowledge from others and making it public. Hawking, who uses a wheelchair because he lives with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was, when Seven Soldiers was written, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge – the same position Isaac Newton had held centuries earlier. The chair that allows Hawking to move about is paralleled by Metron’s Möbius chair, which allows him to travel throughout time and space.
Much of Hawking’s work over the decades has been to do with black holes, and in particular the black hole information paradox, which we discussed back in the chapter on Zatanna. To refresh your memory very briefly, black holes suck things into themselves. They also radiate particles (Hawking radiation). But those particles should, according to the ‘no-hair theorem’, be totally random. So the information in the objects originally sucked into the black holes is destroyed. And information is supposed to be unable to be destroyed. This would violate all sorts of things, including our old friend the Second Law Of Thermodynamics.
One solution to this, which we’ve touched on earlier, is the holographic universe idea. Another is that the information gets pumped into another universe. Hawking, though, at around the time Seven Soldiers was being published, decided that Hawking radiation is just non-random enough to allow the information to escape back into the universe it came from.
“In active (feedforward and/or feedback) regulation, each disturbance D will have to be compensated by an appropriate counteraction from the regulator R. If R would react in the same way to two different disturbances, then the result would be two different values for the essential variables, and thus imperfect regulation. This means that if we wish to completely block the effect of D, the regulator must be able to produce at least as many counteractions as there are disturbances in D. Therefore, the variety of R must be at least as great as the variety of D.”
Principia Cybernetica – http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/reqvar.html
It’s generally regarded that American popular song began with Stephen Foster. Foster, who died aged 37 the year before the American Civil War ended, wrote songs for blackface minstrel shows. These shows, which remained popular in the UK into the 1980s but thankfully died out in the US some decades earlier, involved light-skinned performers ‘blacking up’ as black people, and singing and dancing in a parody of what they imagined the black manner to be. Interestingly, many of the performers in these shows, who would now be regarded as white, were Jewish, Italian or Irish – ethnicities and nationalities that were regarded as inferior at the time.
Foster’s songs, and the other songs of the type, were advertised as being authentic examples of ‘African’ or ‘Ethiopian’ music (as well as some much more offensive terms). But they were in fact far more in the style of Irish ballads and European parlour song, and owed little or nothing in their composition to the actual songs of the enslaved black people of the period. However, they were intended for playing on the banjo, an instrument adapted from one used by slaves to perform their own music, and to be sung in ‘negro’ voices.
In fact, many of the earliest professional black entertainers in the USA performed in minstrel shows, wearing black makeup and performing in the same style as the white performers. These shows were apparently hugely popular with black audiences, who were glad to see any black performers on stage at all, even if they were reduced to playing caricatures of white people playing caricatures of black people.
The cult of ‘authenticity’ in popular music comes from much the same place, and is largely the responsibility of people like John and Alan Lomax. The Lomaxes and their ilk were well-meaning in their attempts to record a culture that was already dying, but their wish to ‘preserve’ music meant that if a black performer had a song that didn’t, to them, sound black enough it must have been contamination from white music. Likewise white folk singers were discouraged from singing blues numbers.
The person worst served by this kind of thing was probably Robert Johnson, known among his peers as a sophisticated musician in a multitude of styles, but who only ever got to record in the blues style for which he’s now known [FOOTNOTE: Johnson was recorded by commercial producers, rather than the Lomaxes, who I'm using as the most prominent example of a general trend of thinking.] Johnson, of course, died young, and to add insult to injury it became widely believed that he had sold his soul to Satan in return for musical facility – it being, of course, impossible that a young black man could have become a virtuoso guitarist through a combination of natural ability and practice.
Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter did somewhat better. While the Lomaxes insisted on recording only his blues music, rather than his impassioned political songs or gorgeous ballads, and only gave him the money he earned in small amounts, supposedly to stop him spending it all on drink (until he threatened to sue them), he later managed to record pieces like Goodnight, Irene which are among his most enduring works.
But we see, time and again, the theme of the black artist being defined by what the white people think the black people should be doing, stretching from Lead Belly all the way back to the ex-slaves copying their ex-masters’ on-stage aping of them.
In Mister Miracle, Shilo Norman is an escapologist. He puts on chains and escapes from them for his audience.
“LEAD BELLY Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel”
Headline in Life magazine, 1937
The second law of thermodynamics is what both gives us our freedom and eventually dooms us. It states that as time goes on, entropy (disorder) must increase. This is quite possibly the most fundamental law in the universe, and it’s what gives us the arrow of time at all – we can define time, simply, as the increase in entropy.
But the second law is also mathematically equivalent to Ashby’s Law Of Requisite Variety, which states (in lay terms) that it’s impossible to control a system unless you have as many options open as there are ways the system can do things you don’t want. The more complex a system – the more disordered a system – the more options you have to have to control it. So all attempts at control are, ultimately, futile. Dark Side can find as many ways to hem Mister MIracle in as he likes, but the escape artist will always find a way out. The controller has to be lucky every time – the controlled only has to be lucky once.
Black holes are the ultimate expression of the law of gravity. Gravity pulls everything towards the centre, and get something massive enough, and this force will pull all the mass toward the centre to such an extent that even light is pulled toward it. Once you’ve crossed the ‘event horizon’ – the point at which the attraction of the singularity becomes great enough – you can’t get out.
In most black holes, movement towards the singularity (the centre of a black hole, not the geek rapture) is the same thing as the increase in entropy – this is why you can never escape. But there’s a special type of black hole – the extremal black hole (and really, what other kind could a superhero ever deign to try to escape from but an extremal one?) – where that may not be true. These are the smallest possible black holes that can exist (which also means that they’d be the perfect type to be artificially created, like the one Mister Miracle escapes from).
The physicist Sean Carrol has shown [FOOTNOTE: for a value of 'shown' that means 'done some mathematics about objects that have never been shown to exist in nature, in a situation that would be unlikely to occur even if they do exist'] that if these are charged in a particular way, there are actually two event horizons. There’s an outer one, which is inescapable – once you’re inside it, increase in entropy becomes equivalent to movement toward the centre, so it’s impossible to get out of.
But then inside this, there’s a second event horizon. Inside this, time works normally again. Anything in it can move towards the singularity, or just hang around in the inner event horizon forever. Were you to find yourself in this inner event horizon, and somehow managed not to die instantly from the extraordinary gravitational forces, you would find you had room to move. You could never get out into the outer event horizon, but you’d have wiggle room.
And the singularity of this type of black hole, should it exist, would be something of a type unique in this universe – it would have zero entropy, according to Carrol. What Carrol suggests this means is that the entropy of anything entering the singularity would escape into another dimension, which he calls Whoville.
“Taking the extremal limit of a non-extremal Reissner-Nordström black hole (by externally varying the mass or charge), the region between the inner and outer event horizons experiences an interesting fate — while this region is absent in the extremal case, it does not disappear in the extremal limit but rather approaches a patch of $AdS_2\times S^2$. In other words, the approach to extremality is not continuous, as the non-extremal Reissner-Nordström solution splits into two spacetimes at extremality: an extremal black hole and a disconnected $AdS$ space. We suggest that the unusual nature of this limit may help in understanding the entropy of extremal black holes.”
Extremal limits and black hole entropy, Sean M. Carroll, Matthew C. Johnson, Lisa Randall
So we’ve seen that a notion of authenticity is ultimately an oppressive one. Coming originally from the best of motives – to try to preserve the unique music of an oppressed racial group, and later to protect black musicians from having their music sanitised and popularised by more ‘acceptable’ white musicians – it’s ended up trapping musicians in artistic ghettos.
The songwriter Mark “Stew” Stewart actually went so far as to name his band The Negro Problem, partly in reference to An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a 1945 study into racial prejudice, but mostly because that’s how he’s regarded. Nearly 80 years after Lead Belly’s heyday, it has now become so accepted that black people make ‘black music’ that the idea of a black man playing a guitar or singing melodies, rather than using a turntable and rapping, is anathema to the music industry. In albums like Post-Minstrel Syndrome, and in his musical Passing Strange, Stew has created some of the best songs in any genre for the last thirty years.
When ‘authenticity’ means a songwriter like Stew is punished for trying to escape from a musical ghetto, is it another tool of oppression? Is it worth letting a troop of plastic clones come along, one after another, and make sanitised copies of ‘authentic’ art, if that’s the price of setting people free? Can we get rid of Pat Boone, the minstrel show and Vanilla Ice without getting rid of Fats Domino, Lead Belly and the Wu Tang Clan? And should we even want to?
Chinese guys can jump real high and Germans cook soul food
white boys rap and hippies nap up their dreads to look rude
jazz is now suburban, it’s Marsalis-ly clean
and now we’ve got Viagra everyone’s a sex machine
so black men ski
Some kids I’ll describe as friends say I am race-obsessed
the luxury of your opinion shows you that you are blessed
I have poems about sunsets, flowers and the rain
I’ve read them to policemen, but it was all in vainStew – Black Men Ski
“Barker and Taylor do that, too, but after describing the marketing manoeuvres that made country and the blues racially “pure” categories (and left much of folk a politically impotent exercise in earnestness), they shy away from the legacy of that divide: rock purists and anti-hip-hop crusades on the one hand, and, on the other, pop music that entertains but rarely provokes, and never threatens any real danger but suicide, packaged and sold as a gesture of romantic authenticity. By the time they get to punk, a genre defined by politics, they’re so committed to avoiding the authenticity trap that they celebrate punk’s overlooked showmanship, failing to recognise that their embrace of inauthenticity as the essence of popular music is itself a trap.
But, as they write of the Monkees’ utterly contrived “I’m a Believer”, so what? It’s still a great song. And Faking It is a great collection of true stories about “fake” music. It’s the essay as Möbius strip; a literary illusion that ultimately makes less of an argument than it seems to, and yet tells us more about what’s true, what’s not, and why that doesn’t always matter, than a more straightforward confrontation with the secrets and lies of pop music ever could.”
Jeff Sharlett, Keeping It Unreal, New Statesman 16 April 2007
Lead Belly is buried in Shiloh Baptist Church, Mooringsport, Louisiana. He died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Comic issues Mister Miracle #1-4
Artists Pasqual Ferry, Billy Patton, Freddie Williams II(pencils), Pasqual Ferry, Michael Bair, Freddie Williams II (inks), Dave McCaig (colours)
Other credits Pat Brosseau, Nick J Napolitano, Phil Balsman, Travis Lanham (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Most of his DC work after this has followed on from it – 52, Final Crisis and The Return Of Bruce Wayne are all sequels to this.
Look Out For Freedom, responsibility and entropy
Still to come in Seven Soldiers The end
8: Bulleteer
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
We’re heading into the home stretch now, so hold tight.
“Fair was the woman’s face, and sweet
Her voice, and swift were her noiseless feet,
And kind her hands; but her husband knew
Full little of her the fair and true
To work when the dawn brake golden-fair;
At work when the stars of night shone there
Forewatcht, forwearied at night and worn,
Yet eager to meet his work at morn”The Sculptor – Emily Hickey [FOOTNOTE No relation as far as I know, though this 19th century poet shares the name of my paternal grandmother.]
Over and over in this series of essays we have seen variations of the same story – the creator making something in the likeness of a human being, and that creature gaining life and sentience. Whether Frankenstein, or the golem, or the robot revolt, or Gwydion, over and over we’ve seen the creator/created conflict appear in Seven Soldiers.
Even the Snow White legend, which at first sight seems to be of a totally different type, fits into this pattern. Snow White’s mother wished for a beautiful daughter, but as soon as her daughter grew more beautiful than her, she tried to have her killed. (The Brothers Grimm only changed the mother to a step-mother fairly late on – in the original story it was the mother).
The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (rhymes, more or less, with Bulleteer) is another story of this type. According to the classical poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion was not interested in women, because they were all whores (who says the ancient Greeks were misogynist?). So he decided to carve himself one out of ivory, because women made out of the teeth of dead elephants are somehow better than the kind made out of flesh. However, when he groped its breasts they weren’t soft, so he prayed to Venus, the godess of love, to turn his statue into a real woman. Rather than say “No, leave me alone you strange man” she granted his wish, and the next time he groped his statue’s breast she became human, and despite the fact that her very first experience of him, or indeed of life, was of him sexually assaulting her, the nameless statue (only given the name Galatea centuries later, when people realised that women mattered) agreed to marry him. Who says the ancient Greeks were misogynist?
This, incidentally, is another connection to the stories of both Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, both of whom have to be awoken by a similar assault.
These days, this story is best known as the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, in which philologist Henry Higgins (whose self-description is “I do genuine scientific work in phonetics, and a little as a poet on Miltonic lines”) attempts to raise Cockney Eliza Doolittle out of the gutter and into polite society by teaching her to speak ‘correctly’. Doolittle, of course, rebels against him and asserts her own individuality, though during Shaw’s lifetime he had continuously to fight directors who wanted to bowdlerise his work and have her fall in love with her teacher.
Cyn: I would not have thee find another head
That seemed as fair to thee for all the world!
We’ll have no stranger models if you please,
I’ll be your model, sir, as heretofore,
So reproduce me at your will; and yet
It were sheer vanity in me to think
That this fair stone recalls Cynisca’s face!
PYG. Cynisca’s face in every line!
CYN. No, no!
Those outlines softened, angles smoothed away,
The eyebrows arched, the head more truly poised,
The forehead ten years smoother than my own
Tell rather of Cynisca as she was
When, in the silent groves of Artemis,
Pygmalion told his love ten years ago:
And then the placid brow, the sweet sad lips,
The gentle head down-bent resignedly,
Proclaim that this is not Pygmalion’s wife,
Who laughs and frowns, but knows no meed between.
I am no longer as that statue is!
PYG. Why here’s ingratitude, to slander Time,
Who in his hurried course has passed thee by!
Or is it that Cynisca won’t allow
That Time could pass her by, and never pause
To print a kiss upon so fair a face?Pygmalion And Galatea by W.S. Gilbert
So why does this story of the creature rebelling against the creator have so much resonance? I suspect it’s to do with our old friend entropy.
As soon as we’re born, we’re destined to die, and once we’ve got past about the age of eighteen our bodies are slowly starting to crumble. Our mortality is a fact that hits us every time we see a new grey hair in our beard, or notice that we can no longer hear the very highest frequencies, or have to have a tooth extracted. Pretty much as soon as everything in our body has started working at its full functionality, bits of us stop working, until eventually we stop altogether.
This is something very few of us actually welcome. The idea that the very best-case scenario for me is to spend fifty to seventy more years in slowly-increasing amounts of pain and disability, before ceasing to exist forever, is not a cheery one. So we look for ways to avoid this. It’s no surprise that one of our very oldest pieces of literature, the Epic Of Gilgamesh, deals with an attempt to gain immortality. It’s also no surprise that legends of a Golden Age and a Fall have such potency – I remember how in my late teens I would go to my lectures on the eighteenth floor of the Maths department and take the stairs, and how my hair wasn’t receding, and wonder what went wrong (I forget that in my late teens I was desperately lonely, physically unattractive and reliant on others for financial support, of course. There was never a Golden Age, our memories have just yellowed with age).
The two ways in which people have usually attempted to gain at least a metaphorical immortality are through their children and through their artistic creations, so it’s natural that we’d have stories develop about children who *are* artistic creations. The problem is, though, that as a method of gaining immortality, having children is a decidedly ambiguous one. Yes, our children carry our genes and often resemble us a great deal. We can even hope that our children carry on the best of us while leaving the worst.
But children are also the worst reminders of our own mortality – not only are they a reminder that we’re grown up, and an additional responsibility, but they’re our replacement. Once Us Mk II exists, it’s only a matter of time before Mk I gets taken off the market.
There’s also, for men at least, the additional possibility that our child is not really our biological child at all – that it’s not ‘me’ becoming ‘immortal’ at all, but someone else. That’s not a problem when it’s our intellectual, rather than biological, child. And men can make those all by themselves, without any of those icky girls being involved.
But if a child being a parent’s ‘replacement’ is hard for the parent, it’s hard, too, for the child. The child, after all, loves and respects the parent (assuming even basic competence in parenting – which is sadly not an assumption one can make all that freely), but is an individual herself who cannot be expected to want the same things her parents do. There’s a reason that one of the first words learned by all babies, after ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’ or their local equivalent, is ‘no’.
(It may be significant here that work on Seven Soldiers started shortly after Grant Morrison’s father, who seems to have been a genuinely great man, died. See for example the obituary of Walter Morrison at http://libcom.org/history/morrison-walter-1924-2004.)
Seen this way, Pygmalion becomes a myth of defeminizing, in which the artist/scientist would ensure the male final cause (through which version of the myth the single man attains the state of God the father) by seeking to control, through this bizarre form of recycling, original female energy. Natural birth (as well as natural death) is recast as a fantasy of perpetual motion. The female body, seen as the source of entropy, is turned into a machine to defeat entropy. The benefit of this process ensues only for the male who manipulates this force to his advantage – a possible infinite extension of his single-willed life.
In Shaw’s play Pygmalion, the twist on the myth is that it is not a statue that is brought to physical life, but rather a lower-class woman made into a socially acceptable being. Through diction lessons, another’s words are in a sense put in Eliza’s mouth, and by the same token her own organic life drawn out. It is necessary to turn the woman into a statue before the statue can be made to speak the proper way, made into a work of social art, and thus into a person a male artist can not just love but “wed” in civilized society. Shaw, it seems, is equating here the creation of a statue with an act of male vampirism.
George Slusser – Last Men And First Women: The Dynamics Of Life Extension In Shaw And Heinlein, in Shaw, vol 17, Shaw And Science Fiction (Milton T Woolf ed.)
Alix Harrower, like Eliza Doolittle, is an almost entirely passive figure until the very end of her comic. Her husband decides her destiny is to be a superhero, and turns her into one without her consent. The only reason she survives is because she (unlike him) keeps her wedding ring on. She then fulfills his ambitions for her after his death even though she doesn’t want to – she becomes a superhero during a suicide attempt she makes when she discovers his infidelity. Everything that happens to her in the entire story is initiated by someone else, usually for reasons Alix never fully knows. The only decision she makes in the four issues of her comic – the one that truly defines her as a character – is to walk away and stop being a superhero.
Even at the climax in Seven Soldiers #1, she makes no decisions even as she ends up saving the day. She’s ‘the spear never thrown’ because she chooses not to throw herself into events. Instead, events throw themselves at her. She refuses to accept the fate which the entire world, from her genetic ancestors, through to her manipulative husband, through to the supernatural forces manipulating everything behind the scenes, has planned for her.
(It’s rather depressing how she’s been used in comics since Seven Soldiers finished. Turned into a generic superhero, she’s depicted in crowd scenes, usually flying, even though she doesn’t fly. Even after her story’s completely over, her decisions and her very existence are disrespected and rendered unimportant – though so too are the opinions of her male creator, which is on one level an appropriate response).
The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature in general, and of feminine instinct in particular.
George Bernard Shaw – Pygmalion (afterword)
Bulleteer has an odd position within the Seven Soldiers mega-story. The mini-series itself is one of the three (Shining Knight and The Manhattan Guardian being the other two) that provide the narrative throughline for the story, while the other four series flesh out the bigger picture, but the character’s own narrative ‘arc’ (I had hoped to get through this book without using that word, but it seems the only appropriate one) is almost entirely divorced from it. The rest of the characters in the story are concerned with superheroism, or with the Sheeda invasion, or with taking revenge on overbearing parents, but Alix herself is only after a quiet life. It’s notable that while the other characters are either born different, or become heroic when they gain their costume, the Alix before her accident is more confident, wittier, happier, and more secure than afterward. She’s also actually more heroic – she works with autistic children before the accident, while afterwards she works as a bodyguard for an unpleasant film star.
But like Jake Jordan, the other character who starts out the series as just a normal human being, her instincts are always good, even when she’s depressed and suicidal. She refuses to be a ‘hero’, but she takes the woman who tried to steal her husband and attempted to murder her to hospital without a second’s thought, because it’s the right thing to do.
Bernard Shaw eventually had to write a short ‘sequel’ to his Pygmalion (it’s a prose piece, printed as the afterword in most editions of the play now) giving Eliza Doolittle a happy ending, because the audience flat out refused to believe that the story ended with her walking away from Henry Higgins, and directors kept changing the ending to suit what they wanted. His sequel still wasn’t what the audience actually wanted – they’d been expecting a love story, and were angry that they didn’t get one – but it was an attempt to give them a sense of completion, of ‘closure’. Of course, after his death, it was turned into a musical and given a love-story ending (the same people also wrote Camelot, which had Arthur and Lancelot forgiving each other and surviving at the end, rather than going to war against each other as in their source material).
It may well be the fate of Bulleteer to continue appearing in crowd scenes, flying, and doing generic-superhero stuff for all eternity unless her creator gives her an ending that comes closer to the desires of the typical superhero comic reader than simply walking away and getting on with her life. There’s something sadly appropriate about that. The one decision Alix makes, her one bit of agency, is taken away from her by forces outside her control.
But it’s by fighting those narrative conventions all the way, by struggling to gain any kind of agency, that Alix fulfills her destiny and saves the world. Had she gone with the flow, had she been the superhero the entire universe seemed to be wanting to make of her, the world would have been lost.
Comic issues Bulleteer #1-4
Artists Yanick Paquette (pencils), Michael Bair (inks), Alex Sinclair (colours)
Other credits Phil Balsman (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works The Filth is very, very, very different, but has some connections.
Look Out For Millions The Mystery Mutt’s secret
Still to come in Seven Soldiers The time of your life!
7: Frankenstein
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
“Did I request thee, Maker from my clay
To mould Me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?”
John Milton, Paradise Lost
“When, after some heretics had taken Christ for a mere man and others for the supreme God, St John in his Gospel endeavoured to state his nature so that men might have from thence a right apprehension of him and avoid those heresies and to that end calls him the word or logos: we must suppose that he intended that term in the sense that it was taken in the world before he used it when in like manner applied to an intelligent being. For if the Apostles had not used words as they found them how could they expect to have been rightly understood. Now the term logos before St John wrote, was generally used in the sense of the Platonists, when applied to an intelligent being and the Arians understood it in the same sense, and therefore theirs is the true sense of St John.”
Isaac Newton
So let’s talk about Arianism.
Arius of Alexandria must have been very naughty indeed, even though he was a priest. We know this because he is the one person of whom we actually have a reasonable historical record of him being slapped in the face by St Nicholas.
So what put Arius on the naughty list?
The Nicene creed (“We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible…”) is the major touchstone of the Christian faith, and is shared by the vast majority of Christians in the world – Orthodox, Anglican, Catholic and Lutheran alike share this creed. It was drawn up in the early fourth century at the first Council of Nicaea, the event at which this face-slapping took place. And this council, probably the most important event in the history of Christian theology, took place mostly just to tell Arius he was wrong.
The original version of the creed, in fact, ended with “But those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not;’ and ‘He was not before he was made;’ and ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or ‘He is of another substance’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘The Son of God is created,’ or ‘changeable,’ or ‘alterable’—they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.” – this was specifically aimed at Arius.
Because what the Christian church – as we know it today, as it has been known since the fourth century – teaches is that God has three aspects in one. There is God the Father, The Son (who is also The Word who became flesh as Jesus), and the Holy Spirit. But these are all the same thing. I would say here that they’re ‘like different faces of a die’ or something, except that pretty much every metaphor for the Trinity has, over the millennia, been declared a heresy. But they’re three aspects of the same thing – Donne’s “three person’d God”.
By contrast, Arius taught that the Word (which is to say, the thing that became Christ) was not the same as God, but was created by God – that the Word was the first and best creation of God, and that all the other creations were created by the Word, which acts as the intermediary between God and the physical/spiritual universe. (Arianism seems almost here to shade over into Gnosticism).
Richard Dawkins, incidentally, says in his book The God Delusion that there is ‘very little’ difference between these two positions. One hates to imagine Dawkins’ reaction were a theologian to claim there was ‘very little’ difference between Lamarckianism and natural selection. I would here use the phrase ‘separate magisteria’ but that would just be rubbing salt in the wound.
The substantive point here is that Arius, and his followers the Arians (who include modern-day Jehovah’s Witnesses, which possibly explains their aversion to Santa – old enmities die hard), believed that rather than being the same thing as God, Jesus was somewhat closer to the Devil or Adam. God was eternal, but the Son had a beginning. He was created. He was a creature.
Some of them say that the Son is an eructation, others that he is a production, others that he is also unbegotten. These are impieties to which we cannot listen, even though the heretics threaten us with a thousand deaths. But we say and believe and have taught, and do teach, that the Son is not unbegotten, nor in any way part of the unbegotten; and that he does not derive his subsistence from any matter; but that by his own will and counsel he has subsisted before time and before ages as perfect God, only begotten and unchangeable, and that before he was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, he was not. For he was not unbegotten. We are persecuted, because we say that the Son has a beginning, but that God is without beginning.
Arius
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, once the Reformation had allowed religious disagreements to surface in central Europe [FOOTNOTE: Interestingly, this was the same time and place in which Rabbi Loew lived. Had we not earlier discussed his golem, this would undoubtedly feature in this essay.], there was a flourishing of theological thought never seen before or since. The many movements that became known as Puritanism were among the more obvious fruits of this, but one small but influential group were the Socinians.
Based on the teachings of Fausto Sozzini (also known as Faustus [FOOTNOTE: This is the Latin for 'lucky'. The tale of Faust was not yet so widespread that the name had died out. However, it's a nice coincidence given our subject.] Socinus), Socinianism became popular in Poland and TransylvaniaYes, honestly. It was an offshoot of Calvinism which disagreed with Calvin on two important points. It agreed with Arius that Jesus was a creature, not God, and it also believed that humans have free will, and therefore God’s omniscience only stretched to necessary truths, not contingent ones.
England in the mid 17th century wasn’t as theologically diverse as central Europe of a few decades earlier. While a certain amount of religious toleration was allowed, this was toleration of the “OK, we’ll stop torturing Puritans and burning Catholics to death, for now” type, and it had definite limits. The Act of Toleration of 1689, for example, which legalised nonconformist Protestantism, included a reiteration that Catholicism and disbelief in the Trinity were still illegal.
Nonetheless, Socinianism had a huge influence on three of the most important English thinkers of the time – Sir Isaac Newton, [FOOTNOTE The great Liberal economist John Maynard Keynes, who first brought to light Newton's views on theology and magic, said “It may be that Newton fell under Socinian influences, but I think not. He was rather a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides.” However, it seems generally agreed that Newton was influenced by the Socinians. Certainly the argument I quote above is a specifically Arian, rather than Maimonidean, one. ] John Locke and John Milton. Newton has been dealt with extensively in these pages already, so I’ll be looking more at the others, but keep the influence on Newton in mind.
I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Washd by the Water-wheels of Newton.black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.William Blake
John Locke was a friend of Newton, and one of the intellectual founders of both Capitalism and Liberalism. He was also one of the greatest proponents of religious tolerance of the time – his A Letter Concerning Toleration showed that suppression of religious dissent caused more problems than the dissent itself did (one of the earliest examples of the type of cybernetic insight that led to Ashby’s Law, and the eventual unification of thermodynamics and information theory), though he didn’t go so far as to accept that this toleration should extend to atheists, who would be incapable of swearing binding oaths.
The swearing of oaths was hugely important to Locke, because central to his thinking was the idea of the social contract – that society should be based on agreements freely entered into, rather than on authority imposed from above. (Locke did not seem to see any contradiction between this and his being one of the most important people in the slave trade). Free trade and free expression would ultimately lead to a better world.
The reason Locke could think this is that he dismissed the idea of Original Sin. To Locke, humanity wasn’t fallen. Rather people were tabula rasa – blank slates written on by their experiences. No-one was born bad or good, a genius or fool, but everyone was made the way they were by their experiences. Locke’s view here can be contrasted with the earlier work of Hobbes, who in Leviathan [FOOTNOTE: Referenced, of course, in Klarion. Honestly, I'm not reading all this 17th century philosophy stuff into the comics - this stuff is text, not subtext] argues for a social contract but also for an absolute monarch, on the grounds that humans are irredeemably evil and anything less would lead to ‘the war of all against all’.
Locke’s ideas represented the first real break between the philosophy of the English-speaking nations (Locke was a huge influence on the founders of the USA) and that of continental Europe. While self-proclaimed ‘rationalists’ like Leibniz were arguing that many ideas were innate, Locke, an empiricist, argued that we only have a concept of, say, ‘red’ after we have experienced something red in the real world.
Locke’s ideas lead, essentially, to the idea that the soul does not exist as something apart from and separate from the physical world [FOOTNOTE The Socinians were Christian Mortalists, who believed that the soul dies with the body but is resurrected by God on Judgement Day. Both Hobbes and Locke held to this idea, as did Milton, of whom more shortly.]. Humans, like Locke’s deity, are a single substance, rather than beings with multiple independent aspects. God made his Son the same way he made us, and all we are are lumps of flesh – but lumps of flesh that are infinitely perfectible, not innately evil.
OF man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos:John Milton, Paradise Lost
John Milton disagreed with Locke about Original Sin – in fact Milton’s greatest work, Paradise Lost, is from beginning to end about the Fall, first of Satan and then of Adam. But Milton was also influenced by the Socinians, and shared Locke’s political views. The two of them were, separately (their productive years overlapped, but only slightly) hugely influential in the formation of the Whigs, the party that later became the Liberals and later still the Liberal Democrats, because both advocated religious freedom and a severely limited monarchy. Even the fact of Milton writing in blank verse was down to his wanting to liberate himself from “the troublesom and modern bondage of Rimeing”.
This wish for freedom caused overrated Tory windbag Samuel Johnson to say in the late 18th century that “the Devil was the first Whig”, and indeed despite Milton’s intense piety Blake noted that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” This is because in Paradise Lost the figure of Lucifer, the fallen angel, is a far more sympathetic one than any of the ‘good’ characters.
This is because the politics of Paradise Lost are confused as hell. Milton’s Satan is a hierarchy-loving conservative who is meant to represent the British monarchy, while God and the Son of God are represented as meritocrats who want everyone to rise to their natural station, like the Roundheads whose revolution Milton so ardently supported.
Yet, of course, it is Satan, not God, who is the revolutionary in the poem by his actions, even though his words are those of a Tory, while God, for all his Whiggish rhetoric, is pretty much the ultimate Tory. As a Whig, Milton couldn’t help but have more sympathy for the creature than the creator.
The interesting thing about the story of the War In Heaven, and Lucifer betraying God, and Lucifer also being the snake in the Garden Of Eden, is that it has relatively little Biblical grounding [FOOTNOTE: Although a similar story, involving a fallen angel named Azazel who teaches humans metalwork before becoming Satan, appears in the apocryphal Book Of Enoch. But there, a separate fallen angel called Gadrel tempts Eve.], and in fact Lucifer seems to have wandered out of a totally different mythology altogether. Lucifer means ‘bringer of light’, and by encouraging Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, he brings the light of knowledge to humanity, removing it from being the exclusive province of God.
In this, he is more than slightly similar to another figure – Prometheus, of Greek myth.
Prometheus was a Titan, whose rebellion against the other Titans helped the Greek Gods overthrow them. Prometheus made the first men out of clay (and according to Aesop accidentally invented LGBT people by, when drunk, sticking the wrong genitals on people, causing them to revel in ‘perverted pleasures’), but the first men annoyed Zeus, so Zeus wouldn’t allow them the secret of fire. Prometheus stole the secret of fire from the Gods and gave it to men, and this annoyed Zeus so much that, as well as punishing Prometheus, he decided to punish mankind as well, by creating women (who says the Ancient Greeks were misogynist?)
Pandora, the first woman, was made out of clay by Hephaestus and driven so much by her utterly insatiable curiosity that she opened a jar clearly marked ‘do not open’ and let out all the troubles of the world (who says the Ancient Greeks were misogynist?)
“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.”
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
“The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.”
Percy Shelley
In 1818 Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her husband, Percy Shelley, both wrote very different works on a similar theme. Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound , now the less-known of the two works, was a poetical sequel to Æschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Like Milton, who he took as inspiration, Shelley was writing in the aftermath of a revolution – this time the French Revolution – and Shelley wanted to find a way to avoid the mistakes that had caused France to endure an arguably worse tyranny as a result of the revolution than it had endured before. His Prometheus becomes a heroic revolutionary, eventually overthrowing the Greek Gods and bringing in an anarchist Utopia.
Mary Shelley, on the other hand, had a very different, more conventional view of Prometheus. As far as she was concerned, it was Prometheus’ gift of fire that had caused humanity’s downfall, allowing people to cook and eat meat rather than remaining placid vegetarians. And so in her Frankenstein: Or The Modern Prometheus, her Prometheus is Doctor Frankenstein, the creator, while her creature (never named in the book, but Shelley always referred to him as Adam) is Milton’s Satan in every detail (the creature even learns to read from a copy of Paradise Lost he finds in a barn [FOOTNOTE: As the comedian Mark Steel points out, this is the most implausible part of the story, the most likely reading matter to be found in an isolated barn being pornography, not religious poetry.]).
Frankenstein was, in essence, a reaction against both the Locke-inspired Enlightenment values of Mary Shelley’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Romantic utopian idealism of her husband. While Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley all believed in human perfectibility and the advancement of humanity through knowledge, Frankenstein is a profoundly conservative work. While Mary Shelley has been described as “William Godwin’s and Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter who became Shelley’s Pygmalion. [sic - the writer clearly meant Shelley's Galatea]”, Frankenstein is opposed to everything Percy Shelley ever wrote. Frankenstein aspires to the knowledge that man was not meant to know, and is destroyed by it. He does not even bring fire to anyone else – it is not for the crime of sharing that this Prometheus is punished, but merely for the crime of thinking at all.
Comic issues Frankenstein #1-4
Artists Doug Mahnke (line art), Nathan Eyring (colours)
Other credits Phil Balsman (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Morrison’s really done very little with this kind of feel. The nearest is probably Seaguy.
Look Out For Fairytales, the dead having their revenge on the living
Still to come in Seven Soldiers Galatea!
Rebooting The DC Universe
Blame plok. I had a post all planned out for today, about Morrison’s Frankenstein, and about the resurgence of Arianism in the 17th century, but then I read this, and now I have to do my own “How would I reboot the DC Universe in 52 comics?”
Now I agree with plok that we need simultaneously to have less continuity-heavy crossover stories *and* to have a way to bring readers through from one line to another. By stealing some ideas from the Faction Paradox range, and adding a few of my own, I think I know how to do it.
It involves Hypertime, of course.
An entity exists at the end of time. A single entity, that exists for precisely one Planck length of time, but that is all-knowing, all-seeing, and omnipotent for that one Planck time. Call it God – we might as well,
But it’s at war with itself.
There are two possible histories of the universe. One leads to one type of God, the other to another. Both these histories have different laws of physics – one set of laws is what we call ‘science’, the other is what we call ‘magic’. Both are totally self-consistent sets of rules that will lead to a consistent universe.
But there can be only one end of the universe, and only one God, and so both Gods are in an existential struggle to become the one that really exists. If either God actually won, not only would the one that lost cease to exist, it would also cease ever to have even possibly existed – we might as well think of it as two potential universes at war as two beings.
So both Gods are trying to manipulate the hypertimelines, to destroy ones that lead to the other’s existence. But the Hypertime multiverse currently exists in a state of flux, and our universe is an interference pattern between two incompatible universes.
This means that there for many beings, they see a universe of scientific rationality, where the universe operates according to the principles we know now. Another lot of people see a universe where thought and mind have an ontologically basic existence – a universe of magic.
There are the people – the vast majority – who live in a lowest common denominator set of the two worlds, that looks like the ‘real world’.
And there are those, a very few, who exist in both universes simultaneously. We call these superheroes. They appear at first glance to operate according to one set of rules, but don’t quite fit. They, and only they, exist in both universes. They can affect both universes, but only to a limited extent – they can prevent an incursion of one on the other, but can’t affect the overall course of history. Superman can travel in time, or defeat an evil magician, and it’ll be on the front page of the Daily Planet and everyone will believe it – but the next day they’ll still think time travel and magic impossible.
All the big dichotomies in the DC Universe – Heaven/Hell , Order/Chaos, Monitor/Antimonitor – are reflections of this great war, and every power in the universe, be it the New Gods of New Genesis or the Guardians Of The Universe, has taken one side or the other, although the alliances are complex and constantly shifting.
There’s a very small alliance, though – no more than a handful of individuals – who make up a third side in the conflict. They realise that were either side to win, their rich universe would collapse into a dull conformity, and so they stand in the middle and try subtly to play one side against the other. Metron and Rip Hunter are the main ones here.
This then lets us split the comics into four separate lines quite neatly. We have the main-line superheroes, who can operate without continuity constraints, and any real continuity blunders we can just blame on the war. We have the SF/Space Opera stuff, which is where we dump all the real hardcore universe building for the people who are currently buying and enjoying superhero comics. There’s a magic universe, which we aim at the Vertigo readers, and the Twilight/Harry Potter people. And then there’s the ‘ground level’ of characters who could almost live in our universe. The superheroes can appear in any of these stories, but there’s otherwise no crossing over between the four lines.
The main line should be done-in-one stories, accessible to anyone of pretty much any age. The SF line would be aimed at the current comic reading audience, the magic line at the huge ‘dark fantasy’ audience, and the ground-level stuff should be, in general, based around character rather than plot and aimed at the largely-untapped but very real female audience for these types of stories.
Main superhero line
Batman
Superman
Wonder Woman
JLA
Captain Marvel
The Flash (using plok’s idea of The Flash being really about time)
Doom Patrol (keep the current Giffen take on this – it’s essentially Morrison’s version, but done so people who aren’t Morrison can do it and with extra Ambush Bug)
Plastic Man (get Kyle Baker back)
Power Girl
Bulleteer
Tales Of The DC Universe – this would be an ongoing along the lines of 52, done in much the same way.
Frankenstein: Agent Of SHADE – give this to Morrison
Metamorpho
SF line
Green Lantern
Metal Men (Giffen and DeMatteis for this)
Omega Men
Booster Gold (done the way it currently is, with Rip Hunter an important character)
Blue Beetle (Jaime)
The Atom (Ryan Choi)
New Gods
Mister Miracle
Green Lantern Corps
Legion Of Superheroes
Magic line
Sandman (also known as ‘get Neil Gaiman to do any magic-related title we can)
Doctor Thirteen (who has ended up in the magical universe from the scientific one)
Zatanna
Klarion
House Of Mystery
The Adventures Of Detective Chimp In Gorilla City (“I was on my twelfth cigar and third whisky of the day, and thinking about breakfast, when the client knuckled in. I don’t normally go for the larger types, but this gal had arms up to her shoulders and the kind of figure that would straighten anyone’s banana”, with Monsieur Mallah and The Brain as occasional guest stars).
The Demon
Tim Hunter
Animal Man
Hellblazer
Amethyst, Princess Of Gemworld
The Spectre
Ground level
Birds Of Prey (with Oracle, who is Barbara Gordon)
Batwoman (by JH Williams)
The Question (Renee Montoya)
Manhattan Guardian
Action Comics (As I described in my Superman pop-drama, with a Jimmy Olsen done-in-one story in the front and a Lois Lane serial as backup. Clark Kent can appear, but no Superman).
Sgt Rock – Garth Ennis and Joe Kubert
Jonah Hex
Catwoman
Black Canary/Green Arrow
Gotham Central
The Spirit (get Darwyn Cooke back on this)
Hitman
Along with these, I’d have five other comics:
World’s Finest – Superman and Batman team-ups
The Brave And The Bold – Batman team-ups
Showcase – an anthology, the first story of which would be a new character by the best-quality team possible, the backup would be a well-known character by first-time creators
Solo – a showcase title for writer-artists
80-Page Giant – a monthly 80-page reprint of classic stories, usually tying in with something out this month (say if the Penguin is the Batman villain this month, a classic Penguin story would be in there).
Hugo Blogging 2: Grandville, Feed, Blackout, Cryoburn
Continuing my reviews of this year’s Hugo entries. Remember, if you want to get a ton of SF ebooks for $50 and vote in the Hugos yourself, you can get the Hugo packet here.
One point here – the four books I’m reviewing here are a sequel, part one of a two-volume story set in a world where that author has apparently set several previous books, part one of a trilogy, and part of a ‘saga’. The Best Novel candidate I’ve not yet read is also part one of a trilogy. Since when did SF writers become physically incapable of writing individual, stand-alone books?
Grandville Mon Amour by Bryan Talbot
Nominated for Best Graphic Story, while this is far from the best comic released during its year of eligibility, it’s still a Bryan Talbot comic, and therefore deserves to win.
The sequel to Grandville, this has the same strengths and weaknesses as the previous book. The art is still gorgeous (though reading it as a PDF on the computer means you can’t see his masterful layout work in full) and it’s still as fun to play spot-the-reference as with the early League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen issues (I especially like the cameo by the misogynist aardvaark). But like the earlier work, the plot is a bit lightweight – and while the first one was roughly based around the conspiracy theories around the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, this one is *very* roughly based around Jack The Ripper conspiracy theories. This means it invites comparisons with From Hell, which are unfair, as this is a deliberately light, pulpy comic.
It’s no Luther Arkwright or Alice In Sunderland, but even when he’s just having fun Talbot is always worth reading.
Blackout by Connie Willis
This was really, really, really annoying. Five hundred and eleven pages long, this is all set-up with no resolution at all, because the resolution is in another book (I didn’t realise this til I was up to page 507 and the major plot point hadn’t happened yet). It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing at all happened in the book, but certainly the actual *events* in it could be compressed into a short story. Well, half a short story. The Wikipedia page for the book has a nine-line plot summary – and a nine *paragraph* summary of the sequel.
Willis writes well, but fundamentally this is like if someone had taken just the World War II parts of Cryptonomicon (say), removed all the discussion of ideas so you were just left with the painfully accurate research about the war years, and put that out as a book. Except have all the fiddly little details right about the war but totally wrong about the country in which it’s set. Yes, it’s part one of a two-part novel, but it’s still not structured *at all* as a single volume – it just stops, and after 511 pages giving the reader no reward whatsoever seems more than a little unfair.
Over and over again Willis assumes that the UK is really just exactly the same as the USA except for us all drinking tea and loving the Royal Family. It’s a minor point, but the biggest problem I had with the book was that everyone speaks in USian dialect – they say “I’ve got to go get that” rather than “I’ve got to go *and* get that”, and “January thirteenth” instead of “January *the* thirteenth”. If you’re going to go to the trouble, as Willis obviously has, of researching dates of bombings and the names of shops on Oxford Street in the 40s, you could at least bother to listen to an English person speak. Maybe even get one to read the book before you put it out. Judging from these posts, the ePub has actually been revised and the most egregious errors fixed compared to the original paper publication. Christ alone knows how bad this was before that. Utter, utter, unmitigated crap.
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
The ePub file for this crashes my e-reader, so I’m just mentioning it so people know I’m not ignoring it.
Feed by Mira Grant
While I’ve had more than enough of zombies at the moment, seeing on the title page that Grant also writes as Seanan McGuire gave me hope, even despite this being ‘part one of the Newsflesh trilogy’ – McGuire’s piece had been the one piece I’d really enjoyed in Chicks Dig Time Lords, so I expected this to be at least decent.
And while hardly great, it was a pleasant, enjoyable read. The worldbuilding is deftly done – set a few decades after a zombie outbreak, the anti-zombie precautions are very much in the same mould as our current ‘anti-terror’ laws – though I’d question the idea that blogging will still be regarded as ‘new media’ at that time, rather than hopelessly antiquated. All the characters were well sketched, the plot, while predictable, does have one twist that I at least didn’t see coming (though I really should have) and the prose style is very easy to read.
In fact, this reads like what we are now euphemistically supposed to call ‘Young Adult’ books (they’re not for young adults. I’m a young adult – I’m 32 – and they’re not aimed at me. Call them what they are, children’s books – or use the old term Heinlein used, ‘juveniles’). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it makes the book very, very readable. But the end result is something lightweight and lacking substance.
That sounds a harsher judgement than I mean it to. I enjoyed this (and despite it being part one of a trilogy, it had a proper structure and ending. It can be done, Willis) and while I’m not going to eagerly seek out parts two and three of the trilogy, nor am I going to avoid them. Definitely the most enjoyable of the ‘best novel’ candidates I’ve read so far.
Cryoburn by Lois McMaster Bujold started with so many strikes against it that I almost didn’t even get through the first chapter. It’s part of a ‘saga’ (I don’t do sagas, and I’m certainly not normally going to start reading something that’s part nineteen or whatever of a story). The characters have odd names in what appear to be multiple different orthographies, causing extra cognitive load to keep track of them. It’s set on a planet where people address each other with -san or -sensei endings but in all other ways behave like Westerners, and its main characters are important in some sort of Galactic Empire (unless you’re Asimov, I want my viewpoint characters to be fighting against hereditary dictators, not helping keep them in positions of power) and have hereditary titles themselves. Were I not trying to read everything so I can vote honestly in the Hugos, I wouldn’t have read this if you’d paid me.
However, *despite* all those things I ended up quite enjoying this. It seems to be riffing off Clifford Simak’s Why Call Them Back From Heaven? and its main effect was to make me want to reread that book, but I found myself almost unwillingly drawn into the story. Admittedly, the plot runs on rails so obvious that I predicted one twist ( “Gung’f abg zl zbzzl!” (ROT13 to avoid spoilers)) two chapters in advance down to the precise wording, but it’s still a *decent* plot, and it’s well-written. I won’t be seeking out any more of Bujold’s work based on this, but am pleasantly surprised by how decent it seemed given that it’s very, *very* much Not My Sort Of Thing.
6: Klarion
This essay appears in a revised form in my book An Incomprehensible Condition: An Unauthorised Guide To Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers. Paperback, Hardback, Kindle (US), Kindle (UK), other ebook formats
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide the gate, and broad the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat.
Because strait the gate, and narrow the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
Matthew 7:13 – 7:14 (King James version)
Note – the paragraphs of this essay before the first illustration contain discussions of stories which deal with abortion, in a quite unpleasant way. If you have strong feelings on this subject or are otherwise likely to be ‘triggered’ by this, please skip to the illustration. You should be able to pick up from there.
In 1975, Harlan Ellison wrote a short story called Croatoan. It came shortly after the Roe v Wade court decision which legalised abortion in the USA, and was part of a minor wave of anti-abortion Science Fiction that came out around that time – for years I confused it with Philip K Dick’s much better-written (and less nasty, though more misogynist) The Pre-Persons from 1974. Ellison, with his customary intellectual cowardice, said his story was neither pro- nor anti-abortion (possibly because of Dick’s experience, when he received a ton of hate mail, most notably from the feminist academic and SF writer Joanna Russ) but, well…
The plot of the story is that our narrator’s girlfriend has had an abortion. And the narrator flushes the aborted foetus down the toilet (apparently in Ellison’s world, it is common practice for people to be given the foetus after an abortion). His girlfriend, being a hysterical emotional woman, not a manly man like Harlan Ellison, starts screaming at him to go down into the sewer and get the foetus, so the narrator agrees.
He travels into the sewers of New York, where he finds ‘Croatoan’ written on the wall, a la the Roanoke colony. He also finds that the urban legend about crocodiles (which have been flushed down the toilet once they became bigger than babies) living in the sewers is true – but they’re pets. They’re being ridden by the aborted foetuses that get flushed down the toilet. It ends:
“I am the one they have been looking for all along…They call me father.”
Ellison claimed this was about ‘parental responsibility’, and to be fair it does seem to be about the search for a father-figure, especially in the flashbacks, but it’s really just a nasty little piece of grand guignol, albeit an effective one.
Missing or dead fathers appear all over Seven Soldiers, of course – Zatanna’s father, Klarion’s father, Larry Marcus, but also the missing or absent Gods that appear throughout the text. And one of the great works of English literature is about the search for God-the-father, even as it’s about a father who abandons his own child.
The man therefore read it, and looking upon Evangelist very carefully, said, Whither must I fly? Then said Evangelist, pointing with his finger over a very wide field, Do you see yonder wicket-gate? The man said, No. Then said the other, Do you see yonder shining light? He said, I think I do. Then said Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto: so shalt thou see the gate; at which, when thou knockest, it shall be told thee what thou shalt do.
The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come, John Bunyan
Like most of the symbolism in Seven Soldiers, the ‘wicket gate’ here has at least two meanings – one that will be noticed by ‘geeks’ of the type who read superhero comics, and one that will be noticed by others. I’ll talk about the first one first.
In the book Life, the Universe, and Everything, by Douglas Adams (part of the famous Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series), the English game of cricket turns out to be a folk-memory of an evil, genocidal race who come from the planet Krikkit. In order to prevent the Krikkitmen from escaping, they are locked away from the rest of the universe, unable to see the stars in the sky, in a bubble of slow time. While time passes by for the rest of the universe, they are stuck in the past, and unable to know about the rest of the universe, unless they can open the Wikkit Gate and escape.
Like most of Adams’ jokes, this works on a couple of levels. Most obviously, it’s a reference to the game of cricket, and the wickets that are used in that game. But it’s also a nodding acknowledgement to one of Adams’ influences.
Adams was, before becoming the writer of the Doctor Who serials The Pirate Planet, City Of Death and Shada (as well as some other, more minor, works), a student of English Literature at Cambridge, and his work often features obscure literary references. In particular, the main character of the Hitch-Hiker’s series is named after a 17th century writer of Puritan tracts.
Arthur Dent was the author of The Plain Man’s Pathway To Heaven, Wherein Every Man May Clearly See Whether He Shall Be Saved Or Damned, Set Forth Dialogue-Wise, For The Better Understanding Of The Simple, a catchily-titled Puritan tract. A cheery work, it has chapters such as “On Man’s Corruption And Misery”, “On Regeneration”, “On Contempt Of The Gospel” and “On Whoredom And Adultery” (the latter subdivided into “whoredom and the dangers thereof”, “excuses of whoredom”, “the fearful effects of whoredom”, “the punishment of whoredom”, “the causes of whoredom” and “remedies against whoredom”).
Written as a conversation between two rather earnest Calvinists (who are later joined by an atheist and someone who is ignorant of religion) the book sets out the basic theology of the puritans:
Phil. What reason is there that we should be thus punished for another man’s offence?
Theol. Because we were then all in him, and are now all of him: That is we are so descended out of his loins that of him we have not only received our natural and corrupt bodies, but also by propagation have inherited his foul corruptions, as it were by hereditary right.
Phil. But forasmuch as some have dreamed that Adam by his fall hurt himself only, and not his posterity, and that we have his corruption derived into us by imitation, and not by propagation; therefore I pray you shew this more plainly.
Theol. Even as great personages, by committing treason, do not only hurt themselves, but also stain their blood, and disgrace their posterity, for the children of such nobles are disinherited, whose blood is attainted, til they be restored again by act of parliament; even so, our blood being attainted by Adam’s transgression, we can inherit nothing of right, til we be restored by Christ.
(I find that this stuff becomes more readable if you substitute the names Vladimir and Estragon for Phil. and Theol.)
At the time, Dent’s book was a massive success, selling in excess of a hundred thousand copies – which in the largely illiterate society of the early Stuart monarchs was a huge number (and indeed would be a spectacular result for any book in the largely-illiterate society of the late Windsor monarchs). But these days it’s best known for its effect on one reader. Along with one other book, it made up the dowry of John Bunyan’s first wife (whose name history does not record) and became one of the principal influences of a book that influenced both Adams and, more to the point of this essay, Grant Morrison.
The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come by John Bunyan is one of the great works of English literature. Bunyan was a Baptist, one of the many religious sects which tend to be lumped in under the name of ‘Puritanism’ (along with the Quakers, the Presbyterians, the Arian revivalists, the various Calvinist groups and others). These groups were actually more different than they were similar, but all were strongly opposed both to Catholicism and to what they saw as elements of ‘Popery’ within the established Church. Most also valued the conscience of the individual over any authority – at least as long as they were not the ones in authority.
For they eat the bread of wickedness, and drink the wine of violence.
But the path of the just as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.
The way of the wicked as darkness: they know not at what they stumble.Proverbs 4:17 – 4:19 (King James version)
In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan tries to set out his view of how to get to Heaven, which is represented in his allegory as a Celestial City.The story tells of a man called Christian, who leaves his wife and children to travel to the Celestial City and get eternal life, but who is beset by such characters as Mr Worldly Wiseman, Adam The First, Giant Despair and Ignorance. To get to the Celestial City one has to travel through the Slough Of Despond, Vanity Fair and the Valley Of The Shadow Of Death.
After various travels through elements representing aspects of the Old Testament and Jewish Law, Christian finally reaches the Wicket Gate (a type of small gate set into a wall), through which one has to pass in order to get on the Straight And Narrow Path that takes one to the Celestial City. This Wicket Gate is opened by Goodwill, a fairly obvious representation of Jesus.
Having to stay on a straight and narrow path is, of course, one of the morals one picks up from fairy tales. As Chesterton points out in The Ethics Of Elfland (an essay everyone should read, in which he manages somehow to juggle Forteanism, anti-science Romanticism, literary criticism, arguments for Liberalism and democracy, and Catholic apologism), “In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken.”, contrasting it to what he considers the false laws of science:
The man of science says, “Cut the stalk, and the apple will fall”; but he says it calmly, as if the one idea really led up to the other. The witch in the fairy tale says, “Blow the horn, and the ogre’s castle will fall”; but she does not say it as if it were something in which the effect obviously arose out of the cause.
We may come back to this fairy-tale lack of cause and effect, and arbitrary punishment, later. The point is that in Bunyan, like in Little Red Riding Hood, straying off the path leads to certain doom.
“Guide us along the Straight Way. The way of those whom You have bestowed Your Grace. Not of those who earn Your anger, nor of those who go astray.” (Qur’an, 1:5-7)
While it’s obviously inspired by other works of Christian art (notably the Lyke Wake Dirge), most of Pilgrim’s Progress’ influence has been on purely secular works – notably in Slaughterhouse Five or The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy or Gulliver’s Travels (and is it just me or is it striking that *such* a Christian book would be so influential on books with such a nihilistic worldview as those three?), but also on many fairy-tales and superhero comics.
Grant Morrison has referenced Pilgrim’s Progress many times, of course – it’s a constant theme throughout Seven Soldiers, but it’s also an obvious inspiration for the Limbo scenes in Animal Man. He’s also described Seaguy (possibly his most interesting recent work other than Seven Soldiers, and certainly his most personal), with its conflicts with ‘the Anti-Dad’ and chess games with Death, as “a sci-fi Pilgrim’s Progress”.
But I don’t think it’s just Morrison. The whole ethos and aesthetic of superhero comics fits perfectly with Bunyan. We have worlds with strictly demarcated good and evil, with a central character who goes through immense struggles, sometimes loses his (and it almost always is a he) way, and eventually overcomes it all with the help of his allies. So far so Joseph Campbell.
But the need to pitch the storytelling at small children in the early years of the genre has meant that all the characters in comics could come out of Bunyan virtually unchanged. One can easily imagine Christian having to deal with The Joker or The Riddler or Two-Face or Doctor Psycho or Mister Mind, and just as easily imagine him being aided by Captain Marvel or Superman.
Of course the king of this kind of naming, as of so much else, was Jack Kirby, the creator of Klarion (and the Guardian and Mister Miracle). His Fourth World stories, in which the good gods of New Genesis like Lightray and Highfather battle the evil gods of Apokolips like Darkseid and Desaad, are the ultimate in bludgeoning obviousness – but manage to go so far in that direction that they get immense power by that very obviousness.
Character names in superhero comics, for the most part, are simple labels – characters in superhero universes operate by a principle of nominative determinacy, so if you’re born Edward Nigma you’re going to end up having a supervillain career based on riddles and there’s nothing you can really do about it. The names of characters in superhero comics function as little more than labels saying ‘goodie’ and ‘baddie’.
Almost five thousand years ago, there were pilgrims walking to the Celestial City, as these as these two honest persons are; and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their companions seeing that the path of the pilgrims lay through this town of Vanity, set up a fair; a fair where they would see all sorts of vanity, and it should last all the year long. Therefore at this fair are all such things sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.
The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come, John Bunyan
You may here be reminded of Sir Justyn being followed by the Monster Guilt in Shining Knight. Morrison has spun a much, much denser referential-symbolic web here than even the most dilligent of annotators have realised, and just because Klarion (with its references to the wicket gate, trip to Vanity Fair, and subtitle for issue one) is the only miniseries within Seven Soldiers to have direct references to Pilgrim’s Progress, doesn’t mean its influence doesn’t permeate everything.
I have argued before (in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! ) that Morrison is a modernist at heart, and while I hadn’t realised the connection until relatively recently [FOOTNOTE I am here indebted to Space, Time And The Pilgrimage In Modern Literature by K.M. Scheel, a PhD dissertation which can be found at http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/retrieve/2113/etd1745.pdf, which should be read by anyone who finds this and the next few essays interesting.], one of the distinctions between Modernism and the more conventional narratives that preceded it (and still dominate comics and the cinema) is that Modernism moved away from quest narratives (the type of narrative that tends to follow the Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell) and toward pilgrimage narratives.
To quote Scheel:
A pilgrimage is substantially different from a quest, offering a radically altered worldview…As mentioned earlier, pilgrimages are undertaken as a form of penance, as a devotion, to give thanks, to appeal for healing, or to re-enact a religious event. Where the hero of a quest is traditionally a warrior aristocrat who displays excellence in fulfilment of some idealized behaviour, pilgrims may be foolish, confused and uncertain of their identity…Further, while the quest is well characterized as a masculine enterprise, pilgrims are neither necessarily male, nor heroic. While knights traveled in a hierarchical organization, no class was excluded from the pilgrimage… the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales include among their professions, a knight, religious men and women, tradesmen, a doctor, the Wife of Bath, and a cook, to name a few. The quest is an individualistic enterprise – only one man can be the hero – but pilgrims often traveled together for protection, and, as we see in The Canterbury Tales, for the joy of companionship on what could be a long and tedious journey.
Modernism sees a turn away from quest narratives and toward a parody of the form – Ulysses recasts Odysseus as an advertising salesman from Dublin, The Waste Land has been described as ‘a Grail narrative with no Grail’, and as Eliot realised, Grail narratives with no Grail or hero come very close to pilgrimage narratives. Which is why The Waste Land starts:
April is the cruelest month,
breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,
mixing Memory and desire,
stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
in clear homage to the start of the Canterbury Tales:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
In many ways Seven Soldiers is to superhero comics as The Waste Land is to epic poetry – the same dense levels of reference, the same multiple viewpoints – and while its stories might present themselves in the quest narrative format, reading them one can clearly see that rather than questing for an external goal, almost every character is either trying to change something about themselves (especially obvious in Seven Soldiers #0, where all the characters get themselves killed for no better reason than that they’re bored with the lives they’re leading) or has no goal at all. They journey for the sake of the journey, or because it’s their job, not because they are in search of a goal.
Partly this is astute commercial sense on Morrison’s part. The idea was to reinvent these characters and allow them to become serialised comics, and having the characters have a clear objective means that objective can be fulfilled – *must* be fulfilled for a satisfactory heroic quest narrative – and so having the goal of defeating the Sheeda being essentially incidental to the characters’ lives is a way of keeping each character’s story open.
But there’s also an aesthetic reason. The quest narrative is essentially linear – time based – this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then the goodies win. The pilgrimage, on the other hand, is a space-based form – it’s about the places visited. The goal, such as it is, is merely to exist in one place at at least one moment in time. Given the way Morrison plays with time and space, taking perspectives outside time, implying an essentially cyclical time (the Sheeda feeding on the past from the future, the many falls of Camelot) and showing the same events happening over and again – and given that Seven Soldiers is so rooted in place, in a New York that both is and isn’t our New York (the “Cinderella city”), the pilgrimage narrative – and the choice of Pilgrim’s Progress as a source of inspiration – is far more appropriate than it may at first appear.
The Pilgrim’s Progress itself, of course, is in some ways closer to the Hero’s Journey than to the pilgrimage narratives, at least in its first part. But where a Hero’s Journey story would end with the hero having reached his destination, there is a whole second book of Pilgrim’s Progress in which Christian’s wife, Christiana, her neighbour, Mercy, Christian and Christiana’s four sons, and the four wives they pick up along the way all also decide to go to the Celestial City too. Bunyan wrote this second part – which unfortunately is not as well-known as the first part – in order to show that women could be pilgrims just as much as men could.
And this – carrying on after what would normally be the ‘end’, having multiple equally important characters of multiple genders – is a characteristic of both Modernism and the Pilgrimage narrative, but emphatically not of the Quest form. The Lord Of The Rings doesn’t suddenly switch half-way through to being about Mrs Baggins and the four little(r) Baggins going to Mordor because Frodo accidentally left a second ring at home. The quest narrative is about how the world is fundamentally right except for one thing that needs fixing, with one man who can fix it. For all its literal-mindedness, Bunyan’s work doesn’t make that obvious a mistake. Neither does Morrison.
Bunyan’s work was a fundamentally revolutionary one – as Bernard Shaw pointed out, all his representations of sin were in the form of the rich, while his good characters were uniformly poor, and Puritanism was bound up tightly with the revolutionary politics of the time. This is something William Blake responded to, more than a century later, when he provided his famous illustrations to Pilgrim’s Progress.
Blake is often talked about as a Romantic, but really he’s a man of the seventeenth century, born a century too late. His reaction against science is not, as that of for example Keats (one of the greatest cretins in English literature), born out of a desire to return to a simpler Golden Age, but out of a religious radicalism that is of a piece with Bunyan and Milton.
Which is why it’s a shame he was so blinkered when it came to Newton.
But we’ll come to that when I write on Frankenstein.
O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset wi’ thorns and briers?
That is the Path of Righteousness,
Though after it but few inquires.
And see ye not yon braid, braid road,
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the Path of Wickedness,
Though some call it the Road to Heaven.
Comic issues Klarion #1-4
Artist Frazer Irving
Other credits Pat Brosseau (letters), Harvey Richards (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Marvel Boy has some of Klarion’s flavour, while he returns to big-hatted stern-looking Puritans drawn by Frazer Irving in Return Of Bruce Wayne.
Look Out For Missing fathers, parasitism on the work of previous generations, missing gods.
Still to come in Seven Soldiers More stuff inspired by 17th century religious literature!
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