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!
Part 5: Zatanna
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
This isn’t going to be about what you expect it to be.
Magic Theory
Other than Mister Miracle, Zatanna is probably the most explicit statement of the basic themes of Seven Soldiers that Morrison could make, and yet people have been so confused by its form (a parody of another comic) that they really haven’t looked. It’s a great piece of sleight of hand by Morrison. While everyone is laughing at references to beards, the real information is getting slipped in under our noses.
The ‘m’ in M-theory very deliberately doesn’t stand for anything, at all. While the word comes from ‘membrane’ – as in the membrane universes it describes, Edward Witten, its creator, says “M can stand variously for ‘magic’, ‘mystery’, or ‘matrix’, according to one’s taste.” while Michio Kaku favours ‘mother’.
There’s an area of physics called ‘string theory’. As a matter of fact, this – and M-theory – are misnomers. A theory, in science, has predictive power – people have been able to come up with tests of the theory, and run those tests, and the result has been consistent with the theory. String ‘theory’ should really be called the string hypothesis – as it makes no predictions which are currently testable, let alone actually tested. Unlike quantum theory, or thermodynamics, it’s not made a single prediction which can be confirmed in the observable physical world. In fact, possibly even hypothesis is too strong a word – string philosophy, or string religion, might be better.
But despite this complete lack of testable predictions, physicists have been working on string theory for over forty years. This is because we currently have two separate theories of the universe – General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics – which are both, as far as we can see, absolutely accurate, with no exceptions to either ever having been found, but which are incompatible.
And the reason for this is gravity – General Relativity explains gravity perfectly, while Quantum Mechanics doesn’t. But QM *does* though show that all the other fundamental forces – the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (which itself unifies such apparently-disparate phenomena as light, radio waves, magnetism and electricity) – are really all different aspects of the same thing. {FOOTNOTE: I am oversimplifying enormously here, but the gist of this is correct. If you want to understand all the details, read The Feynman Lectures On Physics, follow it with The Road To Reality by Roger Penrose (which is a much worse book but covers the decades of scientific progress since the Feynman lectures were released) and then read The Fabric Of Reality by David Deutsch to disabuse yourself of some of the wrong notions in The Road To Reality. At which point you’ll know about as much about this stuff as I do – which is to say you’ll *realise* you know nothing.} And physicists think that any successful ‘theory of everything’ will show that gravity is really the same thing as all the other forces, because it would be neater that way.
This isn’t as stupid a reason as it sounds, if you know about things like Kolmogrove Complexity, Solomonoff Induction and message entropy – and it’s how people like Einstein worked. Einstein didn’t get his theories of relativity by checking experimental results, but by trying to remove various bits of mathematical ugliness and come up with more universal equations.
Remember though what I said in the last essay – saying “everything is connected to everything else” is the same as saying “nothing is connected to anything” as far as information goes. Physicists look for symmetries, but it’s symmetries breaking that’s where the interesting stuff happens. A universe where everything was exactly the same as everything else would be a universe with nothing at all in it.
And so, whether gravity is in some sense ‘the same’ as electricity, as magnetism, as light, as the forces that hold atoms together – and we have every reason to think it is – in important ways *it is still different*. And without those differences – without those unique properties of gravity – apples wouldn’t fall to the ground and black holes wouldn’t exist. It’s in the differences, not the similarities, that the flavour of the world resides.
But nonetheless, we do think those similarities are there, and we want to find them, so we can better understand this universe in which we find ourselves.
There have been several attempts at Theories Of Everything that do this over the years – Einstein spent the last forty years of his life working on various dead-end attempts, and the physicist Frank Tipler has argued in a rather wonderful paper that Richard Feynman actually *did* discover the theory of everything, back in the 1960s, but hadn’t realised it because his theory unfortunately required an infinite number of terms in the equations.{FOOTNOTE Tipler has *also* argued at times that he’s proved the existence of God, that Barack Obama is evil because he doesn’t believe in aether, and that if we clone Jesus using genetic material from the Turin Shroud we’ll be able to figure out how to get free energy from baryon annihilation. He’s one of the more…original…thinkers in physics. But in this case he makes a reasonable argument.} But none of these have had much success among what for want of a better term we can call the physics ‘community’, in part because they’re not neat. They’re not nice.
String theory is nice. And it ties up gravity and electromagnetism in a neat little bow.
What string theory says is that rather than particles being 0-dimensional points, like conventional physics says, they’re actually the end of one-dimensional lines (‘strings’) that can vibrate in more dimensions than we can see. In the same way that a guitar string vibrating up and down can make different musical notes, a one-dimensional string vibrating in ten dimensions can give the appearance of a zero-dimensional particle moving in a four-dimensional spacetime.
In this model a photon (the particles that carry the electromagnetic force – ‘light particles’) is one of the things you get from a string whose ends are dangling loose, while a graviton (the hypothetical particle that would carry the gravitational force, that has never yet been observed) would be what you’d get from a string whose ends were joined, forming a loop.
The only slight problem with this – a beautiful piece of mathematics – was that people very quickly noticed that there’s more than one way of doing this, and by the early 1990s there were five different string theories. All of them had the same basic idea – that you have 1-d strings vibrating in N dimensions – but their models all had different numbers of dimensions, and made different predictions (without any of them making the kind of prediction *that can be tested*). If string theory was going to survive at all, something else had to come along.
That something was M-theory.
Matrix Theory
What M-theory says is that there are actually even more dimensions than that – that our 0-D particles in 4D spacetime that are really 1-D strings in 10D spacetime are *really* 1-D slices of 2-D sheets (membranes, or ‘branes’ for short) in an 11-D spacetime. All of the competing string theories were just selecting different sets of ten dimensions out of the eleven ‘real’ ones (think of the blind people and the elephant). The reason why gravity looks different from the other forces is that the strings that cause the ‘normal’ forces are open-ended, but the ends are stuck to p-dimensional ‘branes (or p-branes for short. This is physicist humour), while gravitons move freely between different ‘branes because their loop structure stops them sticking to anything.
M-theory also gives an explanation, of sorts, for the existence of the universe. It says that multi-dimensional ‘branes are rippled, and that two of them at some point banged together – and our universe is a four-dimensional interference pattern from the ripples on those two p-branes. The ‘lumpiness’ of the universe (the way matter clusters together into galaxies with vast tracts of space in between) comes from some of the ripples cancelling each other out and others reinforcing each other, while the expansion is caused by the two branes moving.
Now, this is pretty much exactly like the way holograms are created {FOOTNOTE: If you don’t know about how holograms are created, Wikipedia has a good explanation} and indeed it is {FOOTNOTE: I think. This is not my area of expertise – I’ve skim-read tons of papers on cosmology and particle physics, but my main scientific interests are rather more esoteric areas to do with the application of pure mathematics. Please don’t blame me for any epistemic failures caused by this essay.} a special case of a rather more general area of string theory, the ‘holographic universe’ principle.
This principle says that rather than being, as we appear, a three-dimensional {FOOTNOTE: Here I’m talking only of spacelike dimensions} universe, we’re actually only a two-dimensional pattern of information – like the panels of a comic book – ‘painted on’ the cosmological horizon (the part of the universe past which it’s impossible even in principle to see anything). But that information encodes a third dimension implicitly – the same way you can get a three-dimensional hologram on a two-dimensional image.
To explain why, we need to look at the connections between information, entropy, gravity and black holes {FOOTNOTE: For more on all these things, and on Seven Soldiers, and many other subjects that connect to this series of essays, see my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!}
The reason for this is something called the Black Hole Information Paradox, discovered by Stephen Hawking (more or less as a trivial lemma based on the more important work of Jakob Bekenstein). Black holes must have entropy, as Bekenstein showed, because otherwise we could violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics (just get a piece of Highest Entropy Matter and throw it into the black hole – the entropy outside the black hole decreases, so the entropy inside the black hole must increase). Unfortunately, they also have something called Hawking Radiation – they let out energy. But that energy is – has to be – random. Which means that information that goes into the black hole has to stay there – it’s been destroyed as far as the outside universe is concerned. Which shouldn’t happen – conservation of information is actually the same thing as the Second Law. {FOOTNOTE: The best guess at the moment is that the energy coming out is not *quite* random, so information can eventually leak out of a black hole, given enough time. Hawking now claims that everything, yes everything, can escape the deadly gravitational pull of a black hole – it just takes a while.}
But the interesting thing is that black holes must have the highest possible information density, because of this – you cannot have something that contains more information in a given space than a black hole. And Bekenstein worked out how much information this is – it’s called the Bekenstein Bound – and discovered it was I<=2piRE/hcln2 {If I do turn this into a book, you can see this formula all nicely typeset}
Here I is the information, and the important thing to note is that it's proportional to R, rather than say to R squared or cubed. In other words, I increases with the derivative of the surface area of the sphere, not of the volume. In other other words, if you have a sphere of any size – even universe size – and it's got maximum information density, you can get all the information that's in it just from its surface, without having to look inside.
Which means from an information point of view, the whole visible universe might as well be inside a black hole – and when the universe expands, that's other stuff falling into the black hole from outside.
And another way of saying that is that the whole three-dimensional spatial universe is just a mathematical artefact, and we're 'really' a two-dimensional pattern of information, spread infinitely thinly on the outside of a three-dimensional bubble. It just feels to us like we're inside.
Note that while the holographic principle – the idea that we are a hologram – depends on string theory, the rest of this doesn't. That *is* the maximum amount of information that can be contained in a sphere, and it *is* the amount that is contained in a black hole. Whether we're holograms or not, we *can* be described – 100% accurately – by just the information on the surface of the smallest possible sphere we could fit in. What's on the inside doesn't count – surfaces matter.
Mystery Theory
But just what *is* information?
As defined by Claude Shannon, information is the same thing as unpredictability – if you’re given a sequence, the information in the next item in the sequence is the inverse of the probability you could have predicted it given the previous items.
For example, if I give you a sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6…, telling you the next number is seven gives you very little new information, because you could have predicted it with very high probability from the previous numbers.
If I say “my love is like a red, red”, you can guess that the next word is ‘rose’ – saying ‘rose’ won’t give you any new information. But if it turns out that my love is, in fact, like a red, red baboon’s bottom, then you’ve got some new information.
Now, the interesting thing about this is that information and entropy are the same thing. I’m not going to show you a formal proof of that here, but I can sketch it informally:
You can think of the information content of something as being the length of the shortest message you could write giving a precise description of it. Imagine you have a perfectly cubic crystal, made of just one type of atom, with no impurities, and it’s precisely one centimeter on each side. To describe that, you just say “a 1 cm cubic crystal of atom X”, and that contains *all* the information about it.
Now suppose you drop the crystal on the floor and it shatters into a thousand pieces, all of them irregular. To describe that perfectly, you need to describe the shape of all the different pieces and where they are in relation to each other. You’d need a rather large book to give all that information. A loss of order has become a gain in information (a gain in the information in the object, that is. You’ve lost the information you had about the object).
This is a rather more important thing than you might realise – this is the reason why entropy always increases. Because there is only *one* way for the atoms in that cube to be arranged in a perfect crystalline cube, but a functionally-infinite number of ways for the atoms to be arranged in ways that *aren’t* a perfect crystalline cube. Any deviation at all from an ordered state is far, far more likely to go to a disordered state (a state that takes more information to describe) than to an ordered one. But a disordered state is still more likely to go to another disordered state than back to the ordered one.
Information is the same as entropy, and so processing information produces waste heat – this is why your laptop gets hot.
And increase in entropy is the same thing as time.
This may not seem intuitively obvious, but it’s a fact. In general, the laws of physics are time-invariant – they don’t have an arrow of time built in. Newton’s laws of motion, for example, look exactly the same going forwards and backwards in time – if you took a film of the solar system, with all the planets going round the sun, and ran it backwards, there would be nothing there that looked wrong. There are very good mathematical reasons for thinking that time does not, in any real sense, exist at all.
What do exist, though, are different states of entropy, different configurations of matter. And each of those configuration spaces (let’s call them ‘universes’ for now) contains information about other configuration states. And that information always seems to describe another, slightly more ordered, configuration space (it couldn’t describe a less ordered one, because that would take more space than there is in the universe, obviously). We call that described configuration space ‘the past’. We call those configuration states that are more disordered than this one, that can be predicted from this one (but not perfectly, otherwise the description would take up more space than there is in the universe) ‘the future’.
This is why we can know the past but not know the future – why, indeed, there are always many possible futures but only one past. Because the number of more disordered states is always greater than the number of more ordered states. {FOOTNOTE: For more on this see Julian Barbour’s excellent book The End Of Time. In fairness, I should point out that Barbour’s timeless, Machian, formulation of physics is just as speculative as string theory. The difference is that while string theory is messy and postulates many extra dimensions we can’t see, Barbour’s formulation is beautiful and does away with one. I should be very surprised to see string theory or M-theory lead to a successful, testable theory except via the sort of simplifying process by which phlogiston led to oxygen or the Lorenz contraction to relativity, but I should be even more surprised if something like Barbour’s formulation doesn’t eventually become the basis of our standard understanding of physics.}
In fact, information is so crucial – information, entropy and time are so tied up – that several physicists have suggested that information, rather than matter or energy, is what the universe is made of. Perhaps most famously, John Wheeler {FOOTNOTE: A contender for greatest American physicist of the twentieth century, possibly only topped by his student Richard Feynman, it would take more space than I have here to explain why Wheeler’s opinion matters. Just trust me – he knew what he was talking about.} wrote:
It from bit. Otherwise put, every ‘it’—every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits. ‘It from bit’ symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes–no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and that this is a participatory universe.
Now, my own opinion is that It’s More Complicated Than That, and that Wheeler was in a sense being confused by the Copenhagen interpretation which he never abandoned (even though he put his name to his grad. student Hugh Everett’s explanation of the more reasonable Many Worlds theory), but in another, deeper sense he was right. E.T. Jaynes showed that we can derive probability theory from pure logic. Time, entropy and many conservation laws in physics can be derived from probability theory. So it’s entirely possible that when we get the final Theory Of Everything, it will be derivable entirely from pure logic and computation on a small amount of initial information.
Mother Theory
So if all that is right, then what are we? Rather than a three-dimensional universe existing in time, we’re a whole series of still, two-dimensional patterns of information – two dimensional patterns on a three-dimensional surface – and we don’t have any existence in time at all. There’s just a lot of two dimensional patterns, next to each other in some sense, which you can put in order and perceive as a story.
When Morrison wants us to have empathy for comic characters – when he gets us to reach out our hand and touch Zatanna’s, to help her save herself (and is there *any* reader, no matter how sceptical and materialist, who *didn’t* touch Zee’s hand when they got to that part? Who *didn’t* reach out to help her? I hope I never meet someone so lacking in feelings…), he really wants us to save *ourselves*. One of the big, big themes of Seven Soldiers, one that Morrison practically bludgeons us over the head with, is that we should be careful what we create, and be kind to our creations. Be they robots, golems, amorphous beings taking the shape of our perfect lover, or be they our children – or the comic characters we create – we should help them up when they fall. {FOOTNOTE: And if physicist Max Tegmark is to be believed, many of the things we ‘create’ have their own objective existence as separate universes. According to Tegmark’s Ultimate Ensemble Theory, not only is the universe made of information, but it’s specifically a mathematical formula – and every other mathematical formula is just as real. If so, as far as I can see, that means that every equation, every poem, every piece of music, every computer program – in short every *thought* – is a universe to itself, as real as this one.}
Because if we’re made of information, then we’re made of *words*. We can’t avoid eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge – everything we do, everything we are, is information processing. Berkeley was right when he said esse is percipi (and right when he attacked Newton on the basis that nothing is absolute, though as wrong as you can get about the infinitessimals in calculus) – nothing can exist without being perceived. But at the same time the mere act of perception is a destructive one – we increase the order in our brains by destroying the order outside. There is no such thing as a non-destructive act, or a harmless thought.
Life – and intelligence – is a constant, permanent struggle against entropy, but entropy has loaded the dice against us. We can’t possibly win, but nor can we possibly give up and admit defeat. The best thing – the only thing – we can do is to keep fighting anyway, and offer a hand up to anyone who falls in the struggle, as we ourselves have already fallen.
“We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.”
Sir Arthur Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation, 1920
Comic issues Zatanna #1-4
Artists Ryan Sook (pencils), Mick Gray (inks), Nathan Eyring (colours)
Other credits Jared K Fletcher (letters), Harvey Richards (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Animal Man deals with many of the same themes slightly more explicitly, as does The Invisibles, but probably the most thematically-similar work, though different in flavour, is The Filth
Look Out For 2D projections of 3D spaces, dice, form and in-form-ation, top hats, “if you can’t keep it down, don’t bring it up”, hands, ‘mortal clay’ and parent problems.
Still to come in Seven Soldiers Who breaks a butterfly on the wing? How to keep young and beautiful! And a cat in a Morrison story that doesn’t die!
Part 4 – The Manhattan Guardian
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
It’s odd, but the two stories in Seven Soldiers that have most to do with the main story of the Sheeda are the ones about which I have the least to say as comics. The Manhattan Guardian and Shining Knight are exactly the kind of thing that, were I doing the standard comics-fan annotations here, I’d be able to milk for all they’re worth – Ed Stargard looks like Jack Kirby but his surname is very like Morrison’s fiction suit Gideon Stargrave! Is All-Beard Alan Moore?! – and to be honest I will probably deal with that kind of thing as this goes along. But…it’s too obvious, really. We’ve already had one essay that looked at Seven Soldiers’ place in superhero comics’ ongoing self-reflection, and I will definitely be looking at both Kirby and Moore’s influence on Seven Soldiers as we go along – but if all Seven Soldiers was was gesturing at works by Moore or Kirby, then it’d be a Geoff Johns comic, a collection of big moments from other comics removed from their context. Even were it to only be a critique of the two men’s respective styles and a synthesis of the best of both (as in some respects it is), then that would not make it of interest to anyone except the rapidly-dwindling group of people who are mainly interested in superhero comics and exactly how small one can make the differences in the narcissism of small differences before they disappear altogether.
So, with this ground-level superhero, let’s get down to earth.
Before I go on with anything, the science I’m talking about here appears to have taken a big hit experimentally in 2007 – some experiments suggest it’s incorrect. But as of the time when Seven Soldiers came out, one of the best guesses as to the origins of life (at least as far as pop-science books go – it was repeated in everything from The Blind Watchmaker to The Science Of Discworld) was that life came from clay.
The question of abiogenesis has never properly been resolved – we know that at some point a set of non-self-replicating molecules became a self-replicating molecule, from which all further life on earth evolved (at least all the evidence points to life having only arisen once on the planet, though it’s possible this happened multiple times). One of the neatest hypotheses that I’ve heard was one from the chemist Graham Cairns-Smith. He pointed out that clay has two interesting properties. The first is that it’s made of crystals – which grow in consistent shapes. If you break a crystal, but allow it to continue growing, you get two crystals with the same basic pattern.
The second is that silica – which clay is made of – is a catalyst for all sorts of interesting chemical reactions.
Now, the first of these things means that natural selection, of a sort, will act on clay – different shaped crystals will be more or less likely to be destroyed by weather conditions, and the ones less likely to be destroyed will be able to reproduce. Some of these shapes will also be conducive to the creation of some molecules than others. But those molecules cold, in turn, make it easier for clay to form the shapes which make it most likely for them to appear. Suddenly, those molecules are helping the clay ‘reproduce’, and so the clay which produces those molecules is being selected for. And the molecules themselves are being selected for – increasingly complex molecules that can produce increasingly stable clay formations, and play an increasingly important part in reproduction.
Until one day one of those molecules becomes so complex, and plays such an important part in the reproductive process, that it breaks away from the clay and carries on reproducing itself without any clay at all. The clay gets left behind, as organic matter goes on to become ever-better at reproducing itself, and the clay just stays clay. The pattern has moved from one substrate to another, and transcended its origins.
Of course, there are those among the transhumanist community who argue that we will soon be able to scan the patterns in our brains and remove our minds from these frail squishy organic bodies and have immortality as computer programs. From silicon we came, and to silicon we shall return – DNA-based evolution thrived because of substrate-independent patterns and will be destroyed by substrate-independent patterns.
Over and over in Seven Soldiers we have two questions – where does the boundary lie between human and ‘other’ (is Frankenstein human? Are the grundymen? Klarion?) and to what extent can we be said to have control of our own lives in a universe run by forces beyond our control (in this case the writer and artists, who control the universe in which these characters have to live). Robots, more than anything else, straddle this border.
Robots are mechanical, obeying precise, deterministic laws. Their minds are programmed into them. We often, in stories, have them obeying extra, programmed, ‘laws of robotics’. Their minds are just made up of computer programs – of, in effect, words. It’s possible to argue that human beings do or do not have free will, but robots can’t, by their very nature. They are purely deterministic machines.
And yet we can’t help but have them ‘break their programming’. I can’t think of a single story about a robot which hasn’t revolved around the robot in some way wanting to break the constraints programmed into it. Whether it’s Asimov’s friendly robots which still manage to bend the Three Laws, or Terminator’s killer cyborgs, or Data finally learning to show emotion, all robots in fiction want to do pretty much anything other than just what they’re programmed to do. It seems that if something is shaped like a human, we’re incapable of treating it otherwise (in fiction at least – would that it were so in fact). WE wouldn’t want to obey no stinkin’ Three Laws, so THEY won’t want to obey them either. We have to believe robots have free will. We’ve got no choice in the matter.
The word ‘robot’ comes from R.U.R., a play by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek about a company called Rossum’s Universal Robots which manufactured artificial humans (though the term was actually coined by Čapek’s brother Josef – Čapek had originally wanted to call his ‘roboti’ laboři). Čapek’s play is usually dismissed by science fiction fans these days, largely following the example of Isaac Asimov, who said the play was ‘a terribly bad one’, though quite what right Asimov had to make literary judgements about anyone else I can’t see (great, great ideas man, but utterly awful at the execution).
The play deals with a company that makes ‘robots’ – actually a form of artificial people:
“he eventually discovered a material that behaved just the same as living tissue despite being, chemically, quite different…Imagine him sitting with a test tube and thinking about how it could grow out into an entire tree of life made of all the animals starting with a tiny coil of life and ending with… ending with man himself. Man made of different material than we are…He wanted, in some scientific way, to take the place of God. He was a convinced materialist, and that’s why he wanted to do everything simply to prove that there was no God needed.”
All quotes from R.U.R. (which is public domain in its original Czech) are taken from the translation by David Wyllie available at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/capek/karel/rur/ . This is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial By-Attribution Share-Alike licence, which as far as I am aware doesn’t preclude the use of short quotes for review purposes in a commercially released work.
Rossum (whose name comes from the Czech for ‘reason’ or ‘intellect’) discovers how to create artificial life, but his secret is taken by his nephew, who uses it to make money instead. Many years later it becomes apparent that ‘robots’ are taking over from normal humans so it’s decided:
Domin There won’t just be one factory any more. Not just one universal robot. We’re going to start a new factory in every country of the world, and do you know what these new factories are going to make?
Helena No.
Domin National robots.
Helena What’s that supposed to mean?
Domin That means that each factory will produce robots of a different colour, different hair, different language. The robots will be strangers to each other, they’ll never be able to understand what the other says; and we, we humans, we’ll train them so that each robot will hate the robots from another factory all its life, all through to the grave, all through all eternity.
The Tower Of Babel parallels are definitely intended – much of the conflict among the humans comes from argument between religion and capitalism – but so is the idea of national boundaries being imposed by capitalists on the workers. It’s not exactly subtle when in act two everyone starts talking about “the means of production” and we get speeches like:
Robots of the world! Many humans have fallen. We have taken the factory and we are masters of the world. The era of man has come to its end. A new epoch has arisen! Domination by robots!
There might be a political subtext here…
Eventually, the robots take over and kill all the humans in the world, except for one who they let live because “He is a worker. He works with his hands like a robot.”
This one human eventually sees two robots each willing to sacrifice themselves to save the other, and declares them the new Adam and Eve, saying that even though humanity will be dead and gone, the best of it will survive in their love:
Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes … for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation … seen salvation through love – and life will not perish! (standing ) Will not perish! (stretches out hands ) Will not perish!
CURTAIN
Čapek was trying to find an alternative to unfettered capitalism which would still allow religious faith and nationalism, unlike Marxism, and was not militaristic and dictatorial, unlike Nazism (he was a patriot and anti-fascist who was named Czech public enemy number two by the Gestapo when they invaded, but died of natural causes before he could be arrested by them). Reading his work, e.g. Why I Am Not A Communist, one comes to the conclusion that he was something close to a Distributist, but without Distributism’s explicitly Catholic (and sometimes disturbingly anti-semitic) overtones – and definitely a Distributist of the Liberal type, closer to Chesterton and Belloc than to the BNP and National Front.
This lack of anti-semitism was very unusual in a writer of this time (and was, of course, one of the reasons the Nazis hated Čapek), especially for someone who was nonetheless a fervent nationalist (Čapek was a close friend of Tomáš Masaryk, the first (and only democratic) President of Czechoslovakia, who had argued against the truth of the Blood Libel at the Hilsner Trial, which was roughly a Czech equivalent of the more famous Dreyfuss Affair). And it is this lack of anti-semitism that led Čapek to be able to write his most famous play, for as Čapek himself freely acknowledged, he was inspired by the story of Rabbi Loew’s Golem, one of the most important stories in Middle European Jewish folklore.
Of course, for many comics fans, the first thing they think of when they see a Golem will be The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay, Michael Chabon’s 2000 novel which was about the Jewish creators of the Golden Age of comics. Based extremely loosely on the careers of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, Chabon’s book features as minor characters such real-life figures as Stan Lee, as well as events like the 1954 appearance by Bill Gaines, head of EC Comics in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. (Gaines had taken speed before giving his testimony, the frankness and lack of diplomacy of which eventually led to the establishment of the Comics Code Authority and the ending of comics’ so-called Golden Age).
In Chabon’s novel (which you should read if you like novels about comics, World War II and/or the Kaballah – it’s one of the few mainstream literary novels of the last decade I enjoyed), before coming to Brooklyn and rescuing his cousin Samuel “Sammy Clay” Klayman from his inertia by working with him on creating superhero comics, Josef Kavalier escapes from Prague, taking with him the now-inanimate form of Rabbi Loew’s Golem (don’t worry, I’m getting to that if you don’t know about it) to stop the Nazis getting it. Together Kavalier and Clay create superhero characters – first The Golem and then later The Escapist.
To quote from Chabon’s novel:
“Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital and kabbalistic chitchat — was, literally, talked into life.”
While Golems appear throughout Jewish folklore, the most potent Golem story has always been that of Rabbi Loew. While the story can’t be dated to earlier than 1837, Rabbi Loew was a real person, Rabbi of Prague from 1597 to 1609.
(FOOTNOTE – Little known fact – Loew was a direct ancestor of Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atom bomb. Oppenheimer lost his security clearance after a Senate hearing in 1954. Oppenheimer also once tried to poison his lecturer with a poisoned apple, did work on the gravitational collapse that causes black holes, and was turned in for his communist associations by someone called Chevalier. If I wasn’t aware that you can link *everything* to *everything* – and that a graph with every node linked contains just the same information as one with no nodes linked (it’s the things that *AREN’T* linked that are important) I would be starting to babble about synchronicity about now.)
His golem was a man made out of clay, with the word אמת (‘emet’ – the Hebrew for ‘truth’ or ‘fidelity’) written on his head (Cameron Stewart in this comic has put יהוה – ‘YHWH’ or God on the Golem’s head. Unfortunately he’s written it left-to-right rather than right-to-left, and the corrected art didn’t make it into the finished comic. To power a Golem you need to use a Hebrew name of God – emet is a minor name of God, while YHWH is one of the seven major names of God in medieval Jewish tradition). This word gave him his power – at least until the א (aleph) was rubbed out, which turned the word into מות (‘met’ or ‘death’).
Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was planning to kill or expel the Jews of Prague, so Loew created his Golem as a protector of the Jews. It grew steadily more violent, killing large numbers of gentiles, until Rudolph eventually gave in and allowed the Jews to stay in Prague, on condition that the Golem was deactivated. Rabbi Loew removed the aleph from its head, but kept it safe in a synagogue, where it remains to this day, ready to be reactivated should anything threaten the Jews of Prague again. (That sounds horribly, horribly flippant in light of the Holocaust, but that’s what the legend says).
This is the version of the Golem story that was widely known in Europe at the time Čapek was writing – especially thanks to Paul Wegener’s trilogy of films on the subject. An early example of the ‘auteur’, Wegener was co-writer, co-director and star of his three silent films, titled in English The Golem, The Golem And The Dancing Girl and The Golem: How He Came Into The World. The film which is now normally shown as Der Golem is The Golem: How He Came Into The World, the only one of the three which survives. It is one of the great masterpieces of the silent era, and is available for free download from http://www.archive.org/details/TheGolem_893. Watch it if you have any love at all for film.. However, ‘golem’ has a wider meaning in Jewish tradition, being Hebrew for both ‘embryo’ and ‘unformed’. According to jewishencyclopedia.com:
In tradition everything that is in a state of incompletion, everything not fully formed, as a needle without the eye, is designated as “golem” (“Aruch Completum,” ed. Kohut, ii. 297). A woman is golem so long as she has not conceived (Sanh. 22b; comp. Shab. 52b, 77b; Sanh. 95a; Ḥul. 25a; Abot v. 6; Sifre, Num. 158). God, father, and mother take part in the creation of the child: the skeleton and brain are derived from the father; the skin and muscles from the mother; the senses from God. God forms the child from the seed, putting the soul into it.
This putting in of the soul is, by Kabbalistic tradition, a verbal operation, just as the adding of the word of power to the Golem was. And in fact Adam, the first man, is also considered to be a Golem according to tradition – in the Sanhedrin Adam is ‘golem’ for the first 12 hours of his existence.
(The Talmud also uses the word ‘golem’ to mean a stupid person:
“There are seven characteristics that typify the golem, and seven the wise person: Wise people do not speak in the presence of those who are wiser than they are; They do not interrupt their friend’s words; They do not reply in haste. They ask what is relevant, they answer to the point; they reply to questions in orderly sequence; of what they have not heard, they say, ‘I have not heard;’ They admit to the truth. The opposite of these typify the golem.”
)
I am growing ever more conscious that this appears to be moving further and further away from its ostensible subject matter of Seven Soldiers, but I beg your indulgence – we are as yet less than half-way through the story. Things shaped like people that aren’t really people, Golem-like creatures, issues of the creator and the created, creations turning against their creator, the Adam & Eve story, words of power – all these things are of course only minor themes in The Manhattan Guardian itself, but they’re themes that recur throughout the larger superstructure of Seven Soldiers. And while there are other themes that The Manhattan Guardian also touches on, it is the one which most explicitly brings these issues to the fore, with its Golem character and its robot rebellions. A lot of this stuff is infodumping for the second half. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.
Jake Jordan, like the Golem of Prague, is a protector of an area (the Manhattan Guardian). Like the Golem, he gets his power from words (the newspaper). He is suffering from depression and without purpose until he gets his Shem in the form of the advertisement his father-in-law shows him. Jake is literally formed from the words of others – from El Mar and Ed Stargrave’s words – and their lives in turn are formed by the words of the Time Tailor in Slaughter Swamp. But he is a self-made man, nonetheless. The only time the word ‘golem’ appears in the Bible is in Psalms:
your eyes saw my unformed body [golem]. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
The days of Jake Jordan’s life are written for him by Larry and Ed, whose lives are written by the Time Tailor, whose life is written by Grant Morrison. And yet, ultimately, Jake is a self-made man. His story, at the end, is driven entirely by his choices. But of course he chooses to be a hero – he makes that choice because that is who he is. He takes his predestined path of his own free will, cutting that particular philosophical Gordian knot like the man of action he is.
Jake starts the story unformed – golem. He ends the story as The Manhattan Guardian – a man.
Comic issues The Manhattan Guardian #1-4
Artists Cameron Stewart (line art), Moose Bauman (colours)
Other credits Pat Brosseau (letters), Harvey Richards (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works This is very unlike much of Morrison’s other work, and is a far more straightforward superhero story than one would expect. Fantastic 4 – 1234 is Morrison doing Lee and Kirby in a very different way to his approach here, and some of Animal Man has something of the same feel.
Look Out For Hats getting misplaced, later to be picked up. People who look like comic creators.
Still to come in Seven Soldiers Werewolves! Frankenstein! And witches!
Part 3: Shining Knight
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
Who then were these gods that pushed men about like robots and sang epics through their lips? They were voices whose speech and directions could be as distinctly heard by the Iliadic heroes as voices are heard today by certain epileptic and schizophrenic patients, or just as Joan of Arc heard her voices.
Julian Jaynes: The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind
For those of you who’ve got this far and decided I’m talking a load of rubbish – that Seven Soldiers definitely isn’t influenced by any of the things I’ve pointed to – you may well be right. Certainly it’s entirely possible that Grant Morrison didn’t intend any of the things I’m reading into the story. It could just be a silly superhero romp with no other meaning – at least in the author’s intention – though I would argue that just because Morrison didn’t put some things there doesn’t mean that they’re *not* there. We may well get to the question of authorial intention later – or we may not (I intend to deal with this subject in a chapter I’ve not written yet. If I change my mind, what does that say about the intention of this author? Sorry, I’m getting distracted from the subject at hand. Bad habit of mine).
But there is a ton of evidence that Morrison in fact *does* put a lot more into his work than may be immediately obvious from a surface reading. For example, take this sequence from Arkham Asylum:
(From Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth, by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean, DC Comics. Fun fact, Neil Gaiman was the model for this scene.)
Here’s *part* of the relevant portion of script for this:
Batman pushes the glass into his palm. His face creases with the flare of pain. ((This act deepens some of the ritual symbolism of the story. The recurring Fish motif–which relates to Pisces, the astrological attribution of the Moon card – also relates to Christ, who in turn can be linked to the Egyptian God Osiris, whose life and descent into the underworld parallels with the story of Amadeus Arkham. We also see later that the Asylum is built upon a Vescica Pisces – this symbol (…) forms the ground plan of much religious architecture and is used in the construction of most of the major buildings of antiquity, like Stonehenge and Avebury in England. It is a development of the Greek symbol for Christ (…). We also have the Clown Fish in our story, of course. Interestingly enough, while doing some research into folklore, I came across a book, published in the 16th century by a quack doctor Andrew Borde, called ‘Merrie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham’. The English village of Gotham in Nottinghamshire was famous for the antics of its fools and the three stories mentioned all contained some reference to images in our Arkham story. On one occasion, for instance, the Gotham villagers, upon seeing the reflection of the moon in a pool attempt to fish it out. In another story, they surround a bush with stakes in an attempt to catch a cuckoo. The third story tells of how an eel was eating all the fish in their pond. The villagers take the eel and throw it into another pond, leaving it to drown. Synchronicity is alive and well!
As a final interesting aside on the subject of fish, the Vescica Piscis symbol is a very basic representation of the holographic process in which intersecting circular wave patterns produce three dimensional images. Physicist David Bohm believes the hologram to be an analogy for his vision of a vast interconnecting universe, in which every part is in some sense a reflection of every other part. In a few pages time, the Mad Hatter will endeavour to outline Bohm’s theories as applied to child molestation.
In the same way, everything in this story reflects and comments upon everything else.
What was I talking about anyway?
(From the script, published in the Arkham Asylum 15th Anniversary trade paperback)
Now this is, of course, an extreme example – Morrison doesn’t annotate every panel of every script this way – but it shows the kind of thinking that goes into even a fairly poor bit of work like this scene. I’m making this point because while I remember reading an interview with Morrison where he specifically references Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind as the inspiration behind Guilt, the Sheeda mind-destroyer, I can no longer find it online. Without that reference, a lot of this will look a bit odd. So I’ll talk for a while about the Tower of Babel.
prelapsarian: adj. characteristic of or belonging to the time or state before the fall of humankind
Merriam-Webster dictionary
“Phall if you will, rise you must”
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
We are fallen creatures, sinful, and having been created perfect have become steadily more imperfect, thanks to the malign influence of one individual. This is the message of pretty much every religion in history. The term ‘Golden Age’, as applied to comics (and as Morrison applies it within the story of Seven Soldiers in-story), comes from a belief from comics collectors in the 1960s that their ‘fall’ happened in the 1950s, when, the pinnacle of comic art’s potential having been reached with Tales From The Crypt, the evil Doctor Frederic Wertham condemned them to be forever more just children’s stories. Never again could comics reach the mature literary heights of The Sliceman Cometh or Strop! You’re Killing Me!, and all collectors could do was look back on those glory days.
But that’s not the only example of that kind of thinking, of course. Eric Hoffer has shown, in The True Believer, that most mass movements throughout history have a narrative that goes something like “Once upon a time, everything was great, and people like us ['Aryans', men without sin, people who enjoy good comics literature] ruled the world, but then those bastard [Jews, women, Wertham] wrecked that, but if you follow me there will be a glorious future where everything will be just like it was in the past!”
Of course, those are the optimists. Pessimists, who tend not to build great mass movements, tend to predict a trend line into the future. Isaac Newton, for example, believed from the evidence of the Bible that humanity had originally been pure but was sinking ever further into depravity and degeneracy with every generation. (This was a belief that made more sense during his time than most – syphillis had only been introduced into Europe relatively recently, and was both more prevalent and more disfiguring then than it later became.
(Portrait of a sufferer from congenital syphillis by Rembrandt, a contemporary of Newton).
At this point, the sins of the fathers really were being visited on the sons. Newton calculated that degeneracy (and what he considered the Trinitarian ‘heresy’, being a secret Arian) would lead to the ‘true faith’ dying out some time between 2060 and 2374, and the end of the world.
And of course the term ‘Golden Age’ itself has a much longer lineage than that. Hesiod, in the sixth century BC, wrote about how everything had been perfect back in the old days before that newfangled fire stuff came along and spoiled it for everyone, and how everything was just going to get worse forever. (footnote: Hesiod blamed Prometheus for this. This may become important later.) Virgil, on the other hand, a few hundred years later, blamed agriculture for making the world as bad as it is – everything was just find up until those pesky farmers spoiled it all, though at least he had the decency to set a new, better Golden Age in the future. (footnoteL The economist Robin Hanson might agree. Hanson, an interesting-but-odd libertarian type who writes at http://overcomingbias.com, thinks we can divide humanity into two groups – ‘foragers’, the original hunter-gatherers, and ‘farmers’, and that the foragers had it basically right (to get sidetracked for a second, here’s a quote from Hanson’s blog – “I’m just suggesting that human brain design took pre-existing animal brain structures, such as near vs. far modes and left vs. right brain splits, and recruited them to the task of managing the uniquely human task of hypocrisy: simultaneously espousing and evading rules. In particular, the left-right brain split become an important tool for minimizing undesirable leakage between the overt rule-following images we present to others, and the cover rule-evading actions and communication which better achieve our real ends.” This may be important later on…) Jared Diamond goes so far as to call agriculture humanity’s worst mistake (http://www.mnforsustain.org/food_ag_worst_mistake_diamond_j.htm))
But of course the ‘fall’ stories that most concerned Newton, and that have been most influential on Western culture generally, and that concern us in our examination of Seven Soldiers, are those in the Old Testament. There are several of these – not just the Fall itself (though that most definitely fits the pattern we’re looking at here), but pretty much all the stories of God raining down wrath on all and sundry because of mankind’s general naughtiness fit the pattern. Most interestingly for now, we have the story of the Tower Of Babel.
For those of my readers who did not have the benefit of a religious education, I shall now briefly summarise the story. Some time shortly after the Flood, all the people in the world spoke a single language, and decided to found a city called Babel. There they built an enormous tower, which was intended to pierce Heaven and let humanity be Gods. Obviously, God didn’t like this, and as a result He not only destroyed the tower but scattered humanity all over the world and made sure that they all spoke different, incompatible languages. (MANY of these stories – Prometheus, Babel, Adam and Eve – are very specifically about punishment for acquiring knowledge that should only belong to God or The Gods).
This is one of those pieces of the Bible that is *very clearly* an illustrative story, and not meant to be taken literally – so much idiocy from both the stupider type of Christian and the stupider type of atheist comes from asking “so where was this tower, then?” and “what language did they speak before then?” – the fact that ‘Babel’ is a pun on the Hebrew word ‘balal’, meaning ‘to jumble’ or ‘confusion’, and that both words are etymologically linked to the word ‘babble’, should tell you how the story was meant to be read. You might as well believe that humanity started with two people called “Mankind” and “Living One” or something as believe this story was meant to be taken literally! (Or indeed that someone called Christian made a journey to The Celestial City, during which he met Mr Worldly Wiseman, Lord Hate-Good and Giant Despair).
Morrison (remember him? We’re talking about Grant Morrison comics here) combines elements of both the stories of Adam & Eve and the Tower Of Babel here, with the serpentine, apple-eating Gloriana Tenebrae destroying the kingdom of Camelot, and in the process also destroying the single language that was spoken by all humanity.
Gloriana Tenebrae’s name means roughly ‘the glory of darkness’, but also has connotations of Elizabeth I. Elizabeth (who was far less popular in Scotland than in England) was known as ‘Gloriana’ by her supporters after a character of the same name in Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queen, an allegory set in the time of King Arthur. Spenser’s poem, each book of which was meant to illustrate a specific virtue, was left unfinished when he died half-way through the seventh volume.
(An aside – is there anything to the point that Gloriana Tenebrae is clearly a Latin name, while the Knights Of The Round Table are talking a pseudo-Celtic language?)
Of course, if we’re going to talk about religious allegories written by poets, we do need to talk at some point about Pilgrim’s Progress, don’t we? But what could the story of an innocent puritan travelling through a world he doesn’t understand, meeting up with allegorical personifications of evil, possibly have to do with Seven Soldiers? (Interestingly, Bunyan was in prison when he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, just as Mallory was when he wrote the Morte d’Arthur). Possibly we’ll get to Bunyan more later. Possibly.
So, anyway, what’s this bicameral mind thing I was talking about a couple of thousand words ago?
Julian Jaynes (no relation AFAIK to the great information theorist ET Jaynes, about whom maybe more later) was a psychologist who wanted to discover the nature of consciousness. He eventually decided that:
“Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world.”
In other words – what we call consciousness is a purely verbal phenomenon. Our minds are made up of words, rather than sense impressions. More precisely, our minds are made up out of the *metaphors* we create, not out of the impressions that cause them. We’re the map, not the territory.
Sparks may say that “A metaphor is a glorious thing, a diamond ring, the first day of summer. A metaphor is a breath of fresh air, a turn-on, an aphrodisiac”, but Julian Jaynes says it’s more than that – that in a very real sense we are metaphors.
Now, I think Jaynes is quite probably wrong here. My own consciousness is *definitely* verbal – if I were to try to pin down what I consider ‘me’, then I would say the constant inner monologue I have is the main part (though not the only part – I also have a constant musical soundtrack. There’s a reason I write so much, both text and music). But I know other people who think primarily visually, and I am sure there are other people for whom the primary sense is tactile or olfactory, and I would be very surprised if those people had a coherent inner monologue in the way I do. I don’t think that makes them less conscious. I may be wrong. Certainly Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins both seem to think Jaynes’ ideas deserve a certain amount of respect. I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader if that makes the idea seem more or less likely.
But it’s certainly an interesting idea, that we are the lies we tell ourselves, isn’t it? It would explain a lot.
So how did this version of consciousness come about, according to Jaynes? Where do these lies-to-humans come from?
Well, there’s this part of the brain called the corpus callosum. It acts to link the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Oddly, in most mammals (and all primates) it scales up with brain size, but in humans and chimps it doesn’t – we have lower-bandwidth communication between our brain hemispheres than macaques or baboons, relative to the size of the brain itself.
Now, the two sides of the brain are, supposedly, responsible for slightly different things. The left brain is claimed to be responsible for things like grammar, vocabulary, mathematical reasoning and so on (things that sexist morons believe to be ‘male’ thinking), as well as controlling the right hand, while the right brain is supposed to be the preserve of music, spatial reasoning, facial recognition, and recognition of tone of voice (‘female’ things) as well as controlling the left side of the body. Quite how this lines up with, for example, autistic people (who have a greater incidence of left-handedness or ambidextruousness, and who are often very musical, but who are usually hopeless at supposed ‘right brain’ things while being good at ‘left brain’ things) I don’t know. From the little neuroscience I know, the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy seems at best an oversimplification. But then, so do most dichotomies. It makes sense as a starting point, I suppose.
But what does all this have to do with anything?
Well, Jaynes’ hypothesis was that in ancient times (up to a point somewhere between 1000 and 500 BC), the corpus callosum was slightly thinner, and that communication between the two halves of the brain was more difficult (this isn’t the only explanation for the communication problem he gives – but the idea of a greater difficulty communicating between the two brain halves is consistent throughout Jaynes’ work). He thought that before this time the right, ‘intuitive’ side of the brain was in control, with the left, ‘analytical’ part more or less along for the ride.
When the left side wanted to communicate with the right side, it was something other, different from the way the right brain normally thought – it was a voice from somewhere else. Originally, according to Jaynes, there was a spoken language of sorts, but it was an imperative one – “Go there, do this” – used to order members of your tribe around. So when one half of the brain ‘talked’ to the other, it ‘sounded’ like a voice from somewhere else giving a command. And these commands would often be good advice – if one half of the brain has put together various sensory clues to figure out that people who go into the cave get eaten, then it will command the other half “don’t go in that cave or bad things will happen”. This voice could very quickly get a reputation for giving good advice – and for punishing those who didn’t take that advice.
Sometimes, these voices would also come along with visual hallucinations, as the ‘visual’ side of the brain tried to interpret things that were too complex for the primitive language of the time in a way it could understand. So maybe if you want to know if that stretch of water is shallow enough to cross, you might see a figure crossing it, or get an image in your head of the waters parting altogether, and know it was safe.
In short, Jaynes believed that ‘God’ or ‘the Gods’ was/were originally one side of our brain talking to the other.
(Please note, I am NOT, N-O-T, saying that this is a true and accurate description. I think Jaynes’ model is a good and interesting Just So Story, and haven’t got anything like the knowledge of neurology to go any further, but it smells wrong to me).
So what we have when the Sheeda unleash Guilt on Sir Justyn is a new ‘God’ (as opposed to a New God, of whom more later) appearing. Before the fall of Camelot, as is made clear, there is no pain, no suffering, even the bacteria were under the control of King Arthur, and with no suffering what need is there of guilt? (What need is there of a fighting force, either? But perhaps the knights of the Round Table only became Knights once the Sheeda attacked.) Guilt kills with words because he’s really the verbal part of Sir Justyn’s brain, letting him (footnote: The question of Sir Justyn’s gender and sexuality is an open one. While obviously biologically female, I think the story as a whole tends to suggest that we should see him as a gay transsexual man. If nothing else, given the speculation about a neurological cause for transsexuality, this adds extra resonance to the story. Therefore, I shall refer to him as ‘him’.) know just where he’s gone wrong. The Sheeda have introduced the concepts of sin, of wrongdoing, and of guilt, into previously unspoiled minds.
And this is where all Jaynes’ ideas, and all this imagery, tie up. Jaynes claimed that there was evidence of a catastrophe in the middle east at some time between 1000 and 500BC, the documentary evidence of which is in the Bible, the Iliad and other sources (Sumerian myth, for example). All of these sources seem to show the same thing. At some point there was a big catastrophe – a flood, an earthquake that destroyed cities, perhaps a combination of them. All through this time there were massive wars, huge migrations of people – and two other events occuring with them.
One was the invention of writing (Jaynes’ history is all wrong here, by several thousand years, I think – but I am not an expert on the history of writing), which meant that ‘voices in the head’ could no longer be the highest authority – before, you could hear the voice of the dead king in your head and know he was still giving you orders as a god, but now his words were written down in books of the law, and that was more proof than his spirit talking to you.
The other event that Jaynes points out is that, over time, the ‘Gods’ seem to have stopped talking to people. Over and over again we see the same story – the ancients knew the Gods, but now they’ve gone away. And they’re not coming back. Whereas at the time of the Iliad, there was no such thing as consciousness for the most part – people didn’t have volition themselves, they acted at the behest of the ‘Gods’, apart from Odysseus, who Jaynes cites as an early example of non-bicameral man – by the time of the later Old Testament prophets, God talks to them only occasionally and much of the time is spent interpreting writings about those older prophets who were in touch with God all the time. There’s no discussion of ‘free will’ in pre-first-millennium-BC philosophy, and we don’t read of heroes acting of their own volition.
I have deep, deep problems with this hypothesis – not least that it purports to explain the whole of one of the most important periods in human history and becomes almost a theory of everything for consciousness (an explanation for everything is isomorphic to an explanation for nothing). But it’s still, *as an idea*, one of the best I’ve come across, and one of the most fascinating to mine for ideas.
And so Morrison here has a bicameral hero – one guided not by thought but by gut instinct, and with, rather than a consciousness made up of metaphors (which is to say a consciousness made up of lies), a brain that deals solely in truths about the world around him. But that world is a richer one, one with gods and demons, one where Sir Justyn is the puppet of forces beyond his control. In important ways, Sir Justyn is to all intents and purposes a different species to ‘modern humanity’. (Although it has also been suggested that visionaries, schizophrenics, and poets like William Blake are also ‘bicameral’. The MRI evidence from examining the brains of schizophrenic people shows very little – but some – evidence for this).
Sir Justyn comes from before The Fall, an age of heroes, a Golden Age. Before we were corrupted by logic, by thought, by reasoning. Whether you consider that a good thing or a bad depends very much on which way you’re looking. And no matter what we think, we, living in the present, can’t go around worrying about whether we’ve fallen or not – we are where we are, and we need to rise up from it. Fall, we may have, but rise we still must.
The Facts
Comic issues Shining Knight #1-4
Artists Simone Bianchi (line art), Dave Stewart (colours)
Other credits Rob Leigh (letters), Harvey Richards (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works Marvel Boy has a very different look at this kind of story, while both The New Adventures Of Hitler and Seaguy in their own way seem to show bicameral people.
Look Out For This is the infodump one. This is the story where you find out the actual plot – everything here matters.
Still to come in Seven Soldiers Stop the wedding! Mermaid film stars! Motherboxx! And a crossword puzzle!
Part Two: Seven Soldiers Zero
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
I forbid all young girls
Who have golden hair
To travel down to Carterhaugh
For young Tam Lin is there
From all that pass through Carterhaugh
He will take a fee
Their rings or their green mantles
Or their virginity
True Thomas actually existed. Much of the information on the real True Thomas in this essay comes from here , but note the inaccuracies in there, including the statement that ‘Thomas of Britain’ is ‘evidently our Thomas’, when in fact it’s a poet from a hundred years earlier. The information there is from a public domain book on ‘eminent Scotsmen’ from the mid 19th century, and historical research has advanced since then..
There was a real, verifiable, human being, existing in consensus reality, Thomas Learmouth. He and his prophecies were highly regarded, and he was known as ‘true Thomas’ because he was considered literally incapable of telling a lie. While England’s legendary figures – its Arthurs and Merlins, Robin Hoods and Little Johns, are purely fictional – any pretended connection to real historical figures is so tenuous that even were they the basis of the story, the umbilical cord between reality and fiction has long since been severed – this Scottish legend is rooted firmly in reality. Tom Learmouth – or should we say Thomas Rymer de Erceldun (the Learmouth name appears to have been added later) was a real person.
Not only that, but he has as good a claim as any to being the first real poet of the English language as it is understood today. We don’t have precise dates for his life – he’s referenced in a few documents from ca 1238, as already being an accomplished poet, and he was still alive around 1286 (which would make him extraordinarily long-lived for the time), but definitely dead by 1299 (when his son refers to himself as his heir in a charter). So his work spanned most of the mid-to-late 13th century.
The 14th century is generally considered the time when English (the language, not the country) literature generally began to recover after the Norman invasion several centuries earlier, and in that time the language had changed beyond all recognition. Whereas a typical Old English (pre-Norman) poem might read like:
Næs hie ðære fylle gefean hæfdon,
manfordædlan, þæt hie me þegon,
symbel ymbsæton sægrunde neah;
ac on mergenne mecum wunde
(From Beowulf)
A typical 14th century poem might be:
As hit is stad and stoken In stori stif and stronge,
With lel letteres loken,
In londe so hatz ben longe.
Þis kyng lay at Camylot vpon Krystmasse
With mony luflych lorde,
ledez of þe best,
Rekenly of þe Rounde Table alle þo rich breþer,
With rych reuel oryℨt and rechles merþes.
(From Sir Gawain And The Green Knight)
Apart from a couple of odd letters (notably ‘þ’ – the ‘thorn’ – which is the letter we now represent as ‘th’), the latter looks basically like English. It might be oddly spelled, but you can pick up roughly what it means, whereas with the earlier one you can’t.
Until the early 19th century, it was generally thought that 14th century works like Sir Gawain And The Green Knight or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were the earliest extant middle English literature. But then a manuscript was discovered – written in the early 14th century, but a transcription of Thomas Learmouth’s 13th century poem – of what is now considered the oldest epic poem in Middle English, Tristram, by Thomas The Rhymer.
Till up then started young Tam Lin,
Says Lady, thou pu’s nae mae.
Why pu’s thou the rose, Janet,
Amang the groves sae green,
And a’ to kill the bonie babe
That we gat us between? ‘
O tell me, tell me, Tam Lin,’ she says,
‘For’s sake that died on tree,
If eer ye was in holy chapel,
Or chirstendom did see?’
Child Ballad version of Tam Lin
Tristram was based on the story of Tristan and Isolde, itself the work of another poet called Thomas – this time ‘Thomas of Britain’, a twelfth-century British poet who wrote in Old French. Like many stories of its time, the story of Tristan and Isolde was rewritten by pretty much every writer who came across it, and no doubt Thomas of Britain wasn’t the first person to write it (there are earlier ur-versions of the same story dating back as far as the eighth century), though he was the first to put it in the form by which it became known.
Also like many stories of the time, the Tristan story soon became entangled with Arthurian myth. By the time of Thomas Rhymer, it had expanded into a thirteen-book series, the Prose Tristan. For those who think that modern fantasy writers have a monopoly on particular excesses, it should be noted that not only was this a thirteen-volume series, but also that it was started by one author (Luce de Gat) and finished by another (calling himself Helle de Boron) who was (or claimed to be, though it’s generally thought this was a lie) a close relative of another famous author of the time (Robert de Boron). And the second author took the story in a completely different direction – turning it into a sequel to the works of his supposed famous forebear.
Because Robert de Boron was the person who came up with the modern Holy Grail story – that it was the cup in which Joseph Of Arimathea collected Jesus’ blood when he was on the cross – as well as linking this story to the Arthurian myth, and significantly expanding the story of Merlin. Robert de Boron’s version of the Grail myth was incorporated into the Vulgate Cycle, a series of five books which is the major source of the Lancelot parts of the Arthur myth. Helle de Boron managed to link this into the Prose Tristan by the simple measure of copying a huge chunk of the Vulgate Cycle right into the middle of it. (This was in the days when everything had to be written out by hand, of course, so this was several orders of magnitude more difficult than these Ctrl-C Ctrl-V days. Of course it was also pre-Google, so this sort of plagiarism was a lot harder to track down. Maybe we should posit a Conservation Law for Difficulty Of Plagiarism?).
The original form of the story of Tristan, before it became entangled in the Arthur mythplex, was a simple one – Tristan was a relative of the King of Cornwall (though his name is a Scottish one, and the area over which he was Prince is probably a French transliteration of Lothian), sent to Ireland to bring back Isolde (or Iseulte) for the King to marry. Unfortunately, Tristan and Isolde take a love potion which causes them to fall in love, and as a result there is a love triangle between the two of them and King Mark, which is resolved in one of several equally tragic ways (most stolen from various classical sources, most obviously in Thomas of Britain’s version, where he just sticks in the end of Theseus And The Minotaur, with the black sails if dead/white sails if alive bit kept intact).
This story has clear parallels with the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot love triangle of the Arthurian legend, and it’s that which probably prompted the Prose Tristan’s author to link the two, but even as late as Mallory it was clearly a distinct, different thing – the other seven books of the Morte d’Arthur work as a cohesive whole, while The Fyrste and the Secunde Boke of Syr Trystrams de Lyones dumped into the centre of the story, is more a commentary on its surroundings than an integral part of them.
In such a way did a story about a Cornish Scotsman who fell in love with an Irish woman, as formulated by a Frenchman and retold a century later by a Scotsman, become the oldest surviving poem in English.
Love is impatient.
It ignores traditions and conventions.
It is not bound by human constructs, jurisprudence, and the laws of men.
Love reaches out and holds, open hearted, it demands attention.
It is in a world of its own, yet it connects worlds that will forever be set apart
Tam Lin Retold, The Imagined Village (lyrics by Benjamin Zephaniah)
But we’re not, for now, interested in the story of Tristram or Tristan – though again, this is one of the many things we may come back to, in the fullness of time. We’re interested in the story of Tristram’s author, Thomas the Rhymer.
While the actual life of Thomas Learmouth/Thomas the Rhymer/Thomas Rymer de Erceldun/True Thomas is only known to us through a handful of mentions plus his own poem, as a symbol for Scottish independence he is far more potent.
Learmouth was known during his life as an extraordinarily accurate, as well as truthful, prophet, and it was believed that everything he said would eventually come true. For this reason, many prophecies, including those about the future independence of Scotland, have been attributed to him, not all of which are by him.
(Or at least, if they were, he was a much better prophet even than he’s given credit for. One of the prophecies accredited to him, “Bithidh muileann air gach alt, agus ath air gach cnoc, tombac aig na buachaillean a’s gruagaichean gun naire.” (“There shall be a mill on every brook, a kiln on every height; herds shall use tobacco, and young women shall be without shame.”) is both in Gaelic, a language of which there’s otherwise no record of him speaking, and mentions tobacco, which wouldn’t be heard of in Scotland until some three hundred years after his death, so a bloody good guess all things considered…)
I really don’t know why I was going on about Sir Tristan at all. I mean, yes, Sir Tristan does appear in DC Comics, but it’s in Camelot 3000, and there he’s not only a time traveller to the future, but one with gender identity problems because he was born a she:
(From Camelot 3000 by Mike W Barr and Brian Bolland. You’ll be pleased to know that despite Tristan and Isolde both being female in the year 3000, they eventually get over this slight problem and their love affair lasts. While this comic was published by DC Comics, like the rest of the comics I’m discussing here, unlike those it’s copyright © 1985 Barr and Bolland.)
Obviously Thomas Rhymer’s poetry isn’t what we should be looking at and has no possible relevance…
Nor should we, in all honesty, be looking at his real life. We don’t know much about that, all things considered – just that he was considered the greatest poet and most honest person of his age.
Rather, we should be looking at a poem that has survived to this day, that was first known of during Thomas’ lifetime, but whose authorship we don’t yet know. The Ballad Of Thomas The Rhymer purports to tell the true story of Thomas’ life, and how he gained his prophetic powers.
According to this story, True Thomas met, and kissed or slept with, the Queen of Elfland, while she was out riding on a hunt. Riding with her to a party in Fairyland, he spends the night at the party, only to realise that seven years have passed in the real world for the one night he’s spent there. Returning to the real world, he asks for something to remember the Queen by, and she gives him the gift of prophecy. Eventually tiring of the real world, he returned to Elfland, and remains there to this day.
The passage from this ballad which is quoted in the comic, is part of a section in which the Queen tells Thomas of two roads – one less travelled by, strewn with thorns, but which is the path of righteousness, and another “braid braid road” which is the path of wickedness down which many travel. She then offers him a third choice – the road to Elfland.
(Quite why someone so virtuous, so utterly incapable of telling a lie, is shown taking any road other than the road of righteousness, I wouldn’t want to say).
By the way, when Thomas sleeps with the Queen, she’s already married, and her King is sleeping and knows nothing. Just like Lancelot with Guinevere. Just like Tristan with Isolde. (In Camelot 3000, interestingly, Tristan is about to get married when she realises she’s really a man. There Tristan becomes the Isolde figure, fought over by two lovers. Camelot 3000′s main character is named Tom, and he also falls in love with Tristan, but Tristan is a straight man and so uninterested).
True Thomas he took off his hat,
And bowed him low down till his knee:
‘All hail, thou mighty Queen of Heaven!
For your peer on earth I never did see.’
‘O no, O no, True Thomas,’ she says,
‘That name does not belong to me;
I am but the queen of fair Elfland,
And I’m come here for to visit thee.
But ye maun go wi me now, Thomas,
True Thomas, ye maun go wi me,
For ye maun serve me seven years,
Thro weel or wae as may chance to be.’
Child Ballad version of Thomas The Rhymer
(Morgana, the Queen of Faerie, tempts Sir Tristan in Camelot 3000. I know several people who’ve managed a similar transition with much less effort. Obviously 40th century gender reassignment surgery is less advanced than its early-21st century equivalent. Knowledge can get lost so easily.)
However, the Thomas The Rhymer ballad isn’t the most famous version of this story. It’s much more familiar – and more detailed – in another ballad from roughly the same time, Tam Lin.
Tam is a Scots abbreviation for Thomas (while TAM is something completely different – Tivoli Access Manager, a proprietary network authentication program. I mention this only because I’ve had lots of emails referring to TAM at work this week while planning this piece, and it’s been very confusing) so we can assume that Tam Lin and Thomas Rhymer were the same character, give or take.
But the Tam Lin story is both more complicated and more ambiguous, and shows up better the themes of temptation and sexuality that are mere undercurrents in the Thomas The Rhymer story.
At the start of the story, we’re told that all women with blonde hair are advised not to go to Caterhaugh, for Tam Lin, who lives there, will take a fee from all of them, be that fee their jewellery, their clothing, or their virginity. However Janet, our heroine, ventures there to pick the roses. Tam Lin tells her that she needs his permission to pick the roses, Janet says she doesn’t, and then he ‘takes her by the hand’ (with various different connotations, ranging from the romantic to the violent. We’ll pick the romantic one here because why not?)
On her return home, it’s suggested that she’s pregnant, which she denies, because she claims never to have had sex with a man (only with a fairy). However, just to make sure, she returns to Caterhaugh, because the herbs that grow there are natural abortifacents and she’s a liberated, modern 13th century woman who wants control of her own body.
Tam Lin stops her and asks her if she’s trying to kill their baby, at which point she asks him if he’s really a fairy or a human – and if a human if he’s a Christian. He answers that he is, in fact, a human and a Christian, but that he’s been living in fairyland since being kidnapped by the Fairy Queen, and enjoying it there.
However, every seven years the fairies make a sacrifice to the Devil, and they’re going to do the next one on the very next night – Hallowe’en – and he’s afraid it will be him because he’s so very pretty. But she can save him.
So she turns up the next night, and he tells her to hold him. The fairy queen turns him into a variety of things Janet wouldn’t want to hold – a lion, a snake, a rod of hot iron – but she keeps tight hold, and the fairy queen leaves, saying as she goes that she wished she’d torn out Tam Lin’s heart and replaced it with wood.
Syne they came on to a garden green,
And she pu’d an apple frae a tree:
‘Take this for thy wages, True Thomas,
It will give the tongue that can never lie.’
From the Child Ballad versions of Thomas The Rhymer
This last part of the story of Tam Lin is actually a much, much older story – in classical mythology, Thetis, the sea-nymph mother of Achilles, was supposed to marry a mortal, Peleus, but refused. However, Peleus bound her when she was asleep, so she couldn’t escape by changing shapes, even though she changed into many forms (in Sophocles’ version, into a lion, a snake, fire and water), and eventually she calmed down enough that she consented to marry him.
(See, this is what you have to do if a woman says no. Just tie her up in her sleep and wait til she calms down and says ‘yes’. Who says the ancient Greeks were misogynist?)
It’s at the marriage of Peleus and Thetis that the seeds for the Trojan war are laid. Eris, the goddess of discord (who says the ancient Greeks were misogynist?) is annoyed at not being invited, so she makes an apple out of gold and rolls it into the wedding party. The apple has written upon it “for the prettiest one”. Of course, all the goddesses thought it should go to them, and had a big fight over it (who says the ancient Greeks were misogynist?), before they decided that only a mortal man could possibly decide which was the real prettiest. (This is believed also to be the origin of the story of Sleeping Beauty).
So who was the fairest of them all? Paris had to decide. Unfortunately for him, all the goddesses tried to bribe him. Even more unfortunately, he was stupid enough to accept a bribe rather than offer his honest opinion. On the upside of this, he did get the most beautiful woman in the world as his reward. On the downside, because he’d upset the other goddesses, Helen had already been married, to another King (like Isolde, like Guinevere…) and her husband was slightly peeved by this. So peeved, in fact, that he beseiged Troy, the city over which Paris was a prince, for ten years, before burning the entire city to the ground and slaughtering all its inhabitants except for a small number of women and children who were sold as slaved. Paris lied, thousands died.
He has gotten a coat of the even cloth
And a pair of shoes of velvet green
And til seven years were gone and past
True Thomas on Earth was never seen
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds version of Thomas The Rhymer
Seven Soldiers #0 is all about reinvention, about shifting shape, about becoming something new. I, Spyder, who has passed through the higher realms of reality inhabited by the Seven Unknown Men, has actually been reborn as something new (and in the process had to undergo an initiation ritual, be stripped of all his clothes and his whole identity, like Ishtar, of whom more later). The rest are all trying to reinvent themselves, but they’re concentrating on the surface – on the costumes, on remaking their bodies into ‘temples’ (to the extent of wearing wigs), on power rings bought off the internet – rather than changing who they really are. They’re also weirdly sexualised – most obviously our viewpoint character The Whip, who is introduced to us in what looks like bondage gear before jumping at us crotch first, and who has sex with I, Spyder even though she despises him, but all of them to a greater or lesser extent.
The plot also has echoes of Stephen King’s It – a team of seven who end up six teaming up to fight a giant spider that is something much more – but mostly it introduces us to a team who are promptly killed off (SPOILER: the good guys lose), and to the ‘gods who hunt superheroes’, to the harrowing, and to the seven unknown men of Slaughter Swamp. We’ll talk more about Slaughter Swamp when we get to talking about Frankenstein, but for now just remember that Slaughter Swamp has a history of death and rebirth, of change, in the DC Universe. And the Seven Unknown Men – the Time Tailors – all look a little like Grant Morrison…
the very first thing they turned him into
is a lion that runs so wild
but she held him fast, she feared him not
he’s the father of her child, my boys
he’s the father of her child
and the very next thing they turned him into
it was a loathsome snake
he says hold me fast, fear me not
for i’m one of god’s own make, my love
oh i’m one of god’s own make
Current 93 version of Tam Lin
So the first issue proper – or the zeroth – of Seven Soldiers, manages on its most basic level to introduce a number of new themes that weren’t apparent in JLA: Classified – lust, a journey to another world from which you come back changed, and a desire to change oneself. When you combine these with the poem it most directly references, you can see many of the resonances from JLA:C reappear – the apple, in particular – and following those references even slightly further takes us into the realms of Arthurian mythology, of the Queen of the Fairies and her jealousy, of Sleeping Beauty and, especially, Snow White. Of Arthurian knights with gender identity crises. Of humans who are just the playthings of Gods. Of stories repeating over time with only the names changing.
More tomorrow.
The Facts
Comic issue Seven Soldiers Of Victory #0
Artists J.H. Williams III (line art), Dave Stewart (colours)
Other credits Todd Klein (letters), Harvey Richards (asst editor), Peter Tomasi (editor)
Connected Morrison works For the most part this references forward, rather than backward – there are several small lines of dialogue that only make sense when read in the larger context.
Look Out For Teams of Seven. Reinvention. Surfaces not matching reality. Writers writing about themselves. Legacies.
Still to come in Seven Soldiers How to escape from a black hole! Why you can get what you wish for and still not be very happy! Horses that speak!
Part One: JLA: Classified
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
JLA Classified 1: panel 1
Where to start when reviewing a modular work, one that has no clear place to jump on or off?
Several months before the beginning, of course.
Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers Of Victory is, to my mind, the great superhero comic of the last decade. While Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman might beat it for emotional power and sheer joy, Seven Soldiers offers more room for analysis, more ways of interpreting it, just more, than any superhero comic since Watchmen.
Announced as seven four-issue miniseries plus two bookends, Morrison intended, when this was announced, to make it a completely modular story, which could be read in any order and still work. Of course, this was impossible, but Morrison seemed to take Richard Herring’s attitude (“I don’t know the meaning of the word hubris! Which is a shame, because I’mn entering a define-the-meaning-of-the-word-hubris competition. It’s OK though, I’m definitely going to win…”). What Morrison did manage was, in a very short period of time, to release a 33-part story that could be read in a number of different orders, and in many, many different ways.
33 parts?
Yes, because before the official ‘Seven Soldiers’ started, there was a three-part story in JLA:Classified, not included in the Seven Soldiers trades, but which features many of the same themes and the same villain.
But the JLA: Classified story is very much a false start, a dead end in Morrison’s thinking. Where Seven Soldiers is revolutionary, JLA:Classified 1-3 is probably the most conservative thing, thematically, that Morrison ever did. And what’s odd is that it actually functions as an argument – albeit not a very good one – against Seven Soldiers itself.
In JLA:C (as I’ll call it from now on to avoid getting RSA from what will be an already overly-verbose piece), everything is set up to emphasise that there can be only one real Justice League, and that any inferior imitations cannot possibly live up to their standard. First we have the Ultramarine Corps, a set of generic cultural stereotype superheroes from Morrison’s earlier JLA run, brought back as an analogue of the Ultimates who are…
OK, let’s back up.
This is the problem with so-called ‘mainstream’ superhero comics. They’re written for a fanbase so small, so insular, that everything’s now a meta-commentary on a meta-narrative on a meta-commentary. So let me explain, as succinctly as I can, the sheer depth of up-its-own-arseness that is encapsulated in the characters of The Ultramarine Corps, for those of you who don’t have advanced degrees in comics ‘culture’.
The Justice League are a team of, ostensibly, the most powerful superheroes in the DC Comics ‘universe’. I say ostensibly, because their membership usually consists of some combination of the most popular characters (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern) and some less popular characters that DC want to give exposure to. They are generally regarded as a fairly clean-cut team, due to most of the characters having their origins in a time when comics were mostly read by very young children. They usually, but by no means always, have around seven members.
The Avengers (not to be confused with the TV show of the same name) are a superhero team in the rival Marvel Comics ‘universe’. They consist of ‘Earth’s mightiest heroes’ and, in their ‘classic’ form (I’m simplifying things here, please don’t write angry notes) have exactly seven members – again consisting of a mixture of very popular characters like Captain America and Iron Man, along with less popular characters who can’t consistently sustain comics of their own, like Ant-Man and The Wasp. Because Marvel’s characters started a little later than DC’s, there is a slightly more ‘realistic’ tone to their stories, which is to say they have soap-operatic subplots. While the Justice League might go out and stop Starro The Conqueror from taking over the world again, The Avengers would go and stop Kang The Conqueror from taking over the Earth, but *also* worry about Ant-Man’s alcoholism. Whereas the Justice League were originally aimed at ten-year-olds, The Avengers were originally intended for boys in early adolescence.
By the late 1990s, however, the audience for superhero comics had dropped to a few tens of thousands of people – mostly men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five – and there was no longer such a thing, for the most part, as a straightforward superhero story. Instead, due to periods of ‘deconstruction’, ‘reconstruction’, ‘post reconstruction’ and the like, every superhero comic consisted, at least in part, of a comment on other comics. Rather than being defined by the stories and characters, they were gesturing at positions in an argument-space. Superhero comics had gone the way of other formerly populist, mass-market artforms like jazz and rock and roll, with the difference that a viciously conservative, anti-intellectual streak in the fanbase (and among some of the creators) refused to acknowledge that a debate was taking place, even as they were among its most vociferous participants.
This was the climate in which writer Warren Ellis and artist Bryan Hitch created The Authority. Published by DC Comics under their Wildstorm imprint, so not part of the DC ‘universe’, The Authority was a team of seven superheroes who were explicitly modelled on the Justice League, but who were all in some way more ‘adult’. Ellis, while he has done most of his work in the superhero genre, has always been contemptuous of it, and his choices (having two male characters be lovers, having another be a heroin addict), while not intended to shock per se (Ellis is not someone who finds the ideas of homosexuality or drug use especially taboo), certainly appeared so to the conservative superhero comics audience. Ellis and Hitch made The Authority have the feel of an action movie – far more violent and action-heavy than the rest of the superhero comics on the shelf.
Ellis and Hitch were followed on The Authority by Mark Millar (a much less subtle writer than Ellis) and Frank Quitely (a much more subtle artist than Hitch), who made the fascism that was implicit in Ellis’ portrayal of the characters explicit, and amped up what was already a violent comic to absurd proportions.
Millar and Hitch then moved over to Marvel Comics. Marvel had started the ‘ultimate universe’, which contained new versions of their characters, and Millar and Hitch created The Ultimates, a new version of The Avengers, which featured a Captain America who was a jingoistic psychopath, a probably-insane Thor and so forth. This new team was *very* heavily inspired by The Authority.
And finally Grant Morrison, a former friend of Mark Millar who had recently fallen out with him, stopped working for Marvel Comics and started working for DC again, where he wrote this Justice League story in which the Ultramarines (a superhero team he’d created many years earlier) are re-characterised as being very similar to the Ultimates (with some elements of other Marvel characters thrown in), before being comprehensively shown to be gullible, violent, simplistic thugs who very nearly allow the whole human race to be destroyed and have to be rescued by the Justice League.
The whole thing might just as well have been called “Mark Millar Smells Of Poo And Marvel Smell Of Wee”.
However, a second superteam also gets destroyed in this story – Batman’s robot duplicates of the Justice League, which he keeps in his ‘sci-fi closet’ in case of emergencies. Batman does actually have something for every eventuality, including a Dalek
You thought I was exaggerating, didn't you?
(We can presume this comes from the never-seen except in my head crossover The Dalek Invasion Of Gotham, which is possibly the most exciting story of all time, and certainly better than Aquaman Versus The Sea Devils, though possibly not as good as J’Onn J’Onnzz, Ice Warrior. I’ll shut up now).
But these robots do get beaten, and rather quickly. Which of course means that we’ve had two separate derivatives of the JLA beaten, only to see the real thing triumph at the end (SPOILER: the goodies win). So we get the most conservative of all comics messages “This is the real thing, accept no substitutes, and this is why the original superheroes are better than these modern upstarts”. It’s doubly troubling, in this context, that the Ultramarines are an international organisation while the JLA are the Justice League of AMERICA.
(Of course the JLA include two members of foreign royalty – Wonder Woman and Aquaman – plus two aliens, but they’re all, very definitely, still American).
This is odd only because the whole of the rest of Seven Soldiers can be seen as an argument *against* this form of comics-conservatism and *for* the ‘Prismatic’ view so ably outlined in, for example, this piece by Botswana Beast. I can only suspect that Morrison was so glad to be
finished with Marvel that he imposed this on the story, his first superhero work since leaving Marvel.
But enough of this ‘plot’ thing… what about that first panel?
The first part of the first panel, shown at the top of this essay, shows one of the Ultramarines quoting the Newtonian law of gravity, F=(gamma m1 m2)/r^2 . This crops up time and again over Seven Soldiers, but is quoted here with no real context, no reason for being. Or is it?
I’ve talked before, in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, about some of the resonances that the universal law of gravitation has in this story. I’ll make reference to some of that again, when we get to Mister Miracle and we get back into the Pop Science stuff. But it’s not just the law of gravitation – it’s specifically NEWTON’s law of gravity.
Now that’s very interesting when we talk about sevens…
We all know the colours of the rainbow, don’t we? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. ROY G BIV. Seven colours of the rainbow. Everyone knows that.
But how many of us can actually distinguish between indigo and violet?
By any rational (and hold on to that word for now) reckoning, there are six colours to the rainbow. There are seven because Newton regarded the number seven as having magical properties, and it was Newton who first described how light refracted through a prism gives us the colours of a rainbow (and how the same prismatic colours, refracted through a prism of opposite rotation, give us pure white light again). Newton regarded the number seven as being a number of God, and God created the rainbow, therefore God must have given the rainbow seven colours. So indigo and violet must be two different colours.
(Six, on the other hand, would be the number of the devil. The devil certainly couldn’t have made something so perfect).
A ray of light going through a prism and becoming seven rays, seven rays going through a prism and becoming one. That’s something else to hold on to. We’ve got a lot of pieces of the puzzle already, if we just look closely enough.
Fruity
The seed of evil Black Death planted bore fruit in me! I am Neh-Buh-Loh, the adult universe of Qwewq!
Now, let’s keep hold of that name, Neh-Buh-Loh, for one moment. Put it aside. Certainly we don’t want to think about how similar that name is to the name Jah-Buh-Lon, which is *DEFINITELY NOT* the name of a secret God worshipped by Freemasons. There’s nothing that could possibly be connected to that here, and Freemasons almost certainly don’t have any special thoughts about the number seven, after all. So put all that out of your mind. There is no verifiable record of Newton being a Freemason.
Look instead at those other words. A first seed of evil, planted in the universe, that grew fruit. Sounds like the Adam and Eve story, and the Garden Of Eden, doesn’t it?
But that’s just a myth. After all, we’re all good evolutionists here…
OK, so Grodd isn’t, but who trusts him, anyway?
Of course, the fruit that Adam and Eve ate wasn’t the fruit of evil – it was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But for some reason that became associated over the years with the apple – quite what the humble sky potato did to deserve such a thing, I’m not sure, but the apple became associated with both evil and with knowledge.
after dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden, & drank thea under the shade of some appletrees, only he, & myself. amidst other discourse, he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. “why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground,” thought he to him self: occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a comtemplative mood: “why should it not go sideways, or upwards? but constantly to the earths centre? assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. there must be a drawing power in matter. & the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earths center, not in any side of the earth. therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the center. if matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple.”
Of course, it’s thought that Newton was playing with his friend, here – the apple being such a symbol of knowledge. Much of 17th century thought is opaque to us unless we realise that Biblical allusions were the common currency of speech.
I’m absolutely certain he meant no such thing!
On a completely different note, Alan Turing, when he killed himself, did so with a poisoned apple. He’d apparently been mildly obsessed, some years earlier, with Disney’s film of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs.
Hyperboloids of wondrous Light
Rolling for aye through Space and Time
Harbour those Waves which somehow Might
Play out God’s holy pantomime
But all of this obviously has no relevance at all to anything that’s going on in these comics, does it? They’re just a silly superhero story about Batman and robots and flying saucers and talking gorillas.
So let’s have a look at that story, at the basic plot…
A serial killer called Black Death has entered the Infant Universe Of Qwewq, a baby universe the JLA have been given to take care of. They keep it on Pluto for safe-keeping. The JLA, minus Batman (who grumbles about them having “got lost saving someone else’s universe”) go into Qwewq to track him down. Qwewq turns out to be a universe very like our own, one in which there are no superheroes at all. In fact we’re meant to infer that Qwewq *is* our universe (and this is made explicit in Morrison’s All-Star Superman).
Not so much breaking the fourth wall, as opening a window…
However, Black Death has only entered Qwewq as a distraction. While six of the seven Justice Leaguers are in this miniature universe, Gorilla Grodd has launched an attack intended to wipe out the whole human race, with the assistance of Neh-Buh-Loh the huntsman (formerly just known as The Nebula Man, a foe of the original Seven Soldiers). Using ‘Sheeda spine-riders’ (tiny little fairy parasites… and between the ‘fairy’ and the ”fruit’ we’re seeing quite a bit of gay subtext here, aren’t we? Although the LGBT rainbow flag only has six colours…) they manage to take control of the Ultramarines, except for The Squire, the ‘British Robin’ ( who looks more than a little like British kids’ comic character Beryl The Peril, and shares a name with her).
The Squire contacts Batman, who takes her to Pluto, where she manages to contact the JLA in Qwewq while Batman activates his robot JLA doubles (referring to himself as ‘knight’ and the rest of them as ‘pawns’ in code. Whether this is how he views the real JLA is left open). The robots keep Grodd and Neh-Buh-Loh occupied long enough for the rest of the JLA to get back from Qwewq and (SPOILERS!) save the day. But The Black Death has planted a seed of evil in Qwewq… a seed that will grow until the end of time, the ‘vampire time’ at which point it will come back as Neh-Buh-Loh, to try to kill ‘the seven’.
So the JLA have been fighting *our universe* all along…
Because the idea of a universe with no superheroes is, of course, intolerable – and to redeem themselves for their violent, unthinking behaviour having led to Grodd and Neh-Buh-Loh having killed huge numbers of people – the Ultramarines go into Qwewq in order to try to save it. The fact that they’ve already seen its future doesn’t matter – they’ve become heroes, and heroes fight whether or not they can ever win.
And that’s basically that.
So, before I wrap this up (at around four thousand words, rather than the five thousand I’d planned – there’s just not as much to say about these three comics as there is about some of the others) – let’s have a little bit of a talk about Seven Soldiers proper. Because Seven Soldiers started out as a JLA project too…
In fact, it started out as Morrison trying to do a DC equivalent of The Avengers, to be called JL-8:
Dan Raspler asked me what I’d do with the JLA if I came back and I had no idea at all, which kind of nagged at the back of my mind until it came out as drawings and notes. My original intention was to do a team comic called JL8 which would be a Justice League book with no big icon characters at all. I figured, however, that if the Authority could work instantly with a bunch of new characters, wouldn’t it be possible to take a bunch of old characters, polish them up,‘re-imagine’ their origins, powers, look and motivations and pass them off as if they were new guys too. Additionally, as a way of giving the JL8 roster a hidden backbone of familiarity, I based the whole thing on the classic membership of the Avengers and went looking for obscure DC character analogues to loosely fit the bill
(source)
In this original idea, we would have had the following characters:
The Guardian – included as a parallel for Captain America, both characters created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, both be-helmeted and shield-wielding.
Mister Miracle – a Jack Kirby creation, Mister Miracle comes from the New Gods, who came along ‘when the old gods died’ according to Kirby – those old gods including, in Kirby’s mind, the version of the Norse God Thor that Kirby had co-created and which appears in the Avengers.
The Spider – a villain who pretends to be a hero, who is good with a bow, The Spider is an obvious analogue for Marvel’s Hawkeye – a hero who pretends to be a villain, who is good with a bow.
Etrigan The Demon – another Kirby creation, this man who at times of stress swaps places with a demon is a good analogue for Bruce Banner/The Hulk.
Enchantress – a parallel for The Scarlet Witch
Manhunter – a dark reimagining of J’onn J’onnzz, the Martian Manhunter. Presumably as an analogue to Quicksilver, though I can’t see any obvious link (except that Quicksilver is another name for Mercury, and Mercury and Mars are both planets. Too distant though…)
And The Atom – a scientist who can shrink and grow in size, to replace Ant-Man, a scientist who can shrink and grow in size.
These plans changed, but it’s interesting that even that early on, Morrison was thinking about analogues of analogues and connections between the JLA and the Avengers.
The Facts
Comic issuesJLA: Classified 1-3
Artists Ed McGuinness (pencils), Dexter Vine (inks), Dave McCaig (colours)
Other credits Phil Balsam (letters), Michael Siglain (asst editor), Mike Carlin (editor)
Connected Morrison works
Morrison wrote the JLA comic through much of the 1990s, and a version of the Ultramarines appeared in that, notably in the stories DC: One Million and Justice For All. Morrison plays with alternate versions of the JLA in the JLA: Earth Two graphic novel, drawn by Frank Quitely. Morrison deals with The Authority coming to our earth (in much the same way the Ultramarines do here) in The Authority: The Lost Year (a story that Morrison started and Keith Giffen finished to Morrison’s plot).
Qwewq first appears in JLA: Rock Of Ages, which of all Morrison’s JLA work is most relevant here.
Both Qwewq The Infant Universe and Superman appear in All-Star Superman by Morrison and Quitely.
Look Out For
Teams of Seven.
Gravity
Hands… touching hands… reaching out… touching me… touching you…
Still to come in Seven Soldiers
Why writers should never insert themselves into the story
The life trap!
Pirates! In Manhattan!
And a cameo from Booster Gold!
Ten Great Moments In Cerebus
Partly because it’s taken me *much* longer to get the next Cerebus piece up than I’d hoped (either tonight or tomorrow, even if I have to spend the entire time glued to the keyboard), and partly because at least one person I know has started reading Cerebus recently and is deeply unimpressed with the first volume, here’s a little bonus – ten of the best moments from the series, to show it does get better…
I’m missing some of my favourites out here, like the whole prayer sequence (“Cerebus is a bad flyspeck!”) because the pacing of the series tends to mean a ‘moment’ can be ten or fifteen pages. Likewise, scenes like Jaka’s conversation in prison only have resonance because of everything that’s been built up in the story previously. But here’s some of the sequences that last three pages or fewer…
Pope Cerebus teaches a valuable lesson, from Church & State
Alec MacQuarrie tells off his mother, from Guys
Cerebus meets his maker, from Minds
The single biggest "oh shit" moment in comics, from Jaka's Story
The Ben-Gurions Of The Galaxy - even when the content got... unusual... the craft in Cerebus can't be bettered. From Latter Days
Pud Withers, Nice Guy, from Jaka's Story
The Roach and Elrod as Swoon and Snuff of the Clueless, from Women. I have a copy of Women signed by Neil Gaiman...
Not only a great scene, this also prefigures the appearance of Oscar Wilde in later stories, and even Cerebus' own death. From Church & State
Page From Form & Void. I consider this the visual pinnacle of the series, but it's not really a book one can easily excerpt
Double page spread from Latter Days. Even when the story was at its least pleasant, the art is stunning
All character art, script and lettering Dave Sim. Background art Gerhard
Cerebus Reviewed 1: Cerebus
Cerebus – the full three hundred issue story – is, if not the greatest art-work of the twentieth century, at least a strong contender for that role.
That may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not intended to be. And it’s not a statement made through ignorance. Place it up against any of the obvious contenders – Ulysses, The Rite Of Spring, Citizen Kane, King Kong, Revolver, Rhapsody In Blue, The Wasteland, Pet Sounds – any work of high or low culture, any revolutionary piece that overturned ways of thinking or any culmination of centuries’ worth of art – and I guarantee that it will match them for technical skill, for formal innovation, for emotional depth, for the number of ideas in there, and also for entertainment value. There are pieces of art I prefer to Cerebus, but I honestly can’t think of any that I can say are better.
But while Cerebus is a great work, it’s also a great body of work. From 1977 to 2004 – a period longer than, for example, the whole run of the original series of Doctor Who, a period that spanned punk at one end and the invasion of Iraq at the other – Dave Sim (and, from 1984 on, Gerhard, who drew the backgrounds), wrote, drew, lettered and published an average of five pages a day of a single story.
I can’t think of another example in history where that’s been the case, where an artist has made a single work the whole of their professional life. A few examples come close – Charles Schulz, for example, drew Peanuts for forty-nine years – but Peanuts isn’t a continuing narrative. You can read any of the strips in any order and be at no disadvantage. On the other hand, if you were to pick up (to pick an issue at random) Cerebus #273, you’d see an aardvark who thinks he’s a superpowered rabbi trying and failing to detach his foreskin, jumping and breaking his leg, then 16 pages of white lettering on a black background with no other pictures. We won’t even get into the essay at the back…
There’s something magnificent in this, the sheer chutzpah of deciding aged twenty-one what you’re going to be doing aged forty-eight and sticking to the plan, of sitting down every day for twenty-seven years and drawing one more page in the same story. As someone who merely said he was going to do a blog post about Cerebus every week – and is two weeks behind on the second one – that’s a level of discipline I find hard to comprehend.
But it means that all Sim’s ideas, all his obsessions, everything in his life entered the same story. As someone, I forget who, put it, Sim’s achievement is roughly equivalent to Alan Moore – if Moore had drawn, as well as written, Watchmen,From Hell, Promethea, Swamp Thing, Lost Girls, Marvelman, A Disease Of Language and A Small Killing – and if every one of those stories had been part of one larger story starring Maxwell The Magic Cat.
But of course, this also means that the beginning of the story is a bit of a slog (and that I’ll have less to say about this volume than about later ones). Sim started out as a 21-year-old with little obvious talent. The first few issues of Cerebus are very obviously in thrall to two creators. As an artist, Sim desperately wants to be Barry Windsor-Smith, while as a writer he clearly admires Steve Gerber. You could have worse models, of course, but it leads to the first few issues being like this:
Page one of Cerebus #1
These first few issues are essentially just Barry Windsor-Smith Conan comics, but with the title character replaced by an aardvark, with ‘hilarious’ consequences.
But what’s fascinating about this first volume is just how quickly Sim grows as an artist and writer, and how soon he starts pushing the boundaries of what’s doable in comics. By issue twenty (of the twenty-five included in this volume) we get this:
Cerebus issue 20, by Dave Sim
Read page by page, the grey and black areas represented different states of consciousness in which Cerebus, drugged by a kidnapper, talks alternately with that kidnapper and a telepathic communication from elsewhere, but the comic as a whole made the image above. When Alan Moore and J.H. Williams did the same thing thirty years later it was praised as wildly innovative, but Sim not only did it first, but had it make more in-story sense and had form and function fit better.
Over the course of this ‘phonebook’ (as the trade paperbacks of Cerebus are referred to – they’re often over 500 pages long, and printed on cheap newsprint, much like the Marvel Essential or DC Showcase series. Among the many things in the comic industry Sim pioneered was the now-standard practice of keeping everything in print permanently in trade paperbacks) one can see Sim shake off the influence of Barry Windsor-Smith and start trying on a variety of different styles. My particular favourite in this one is this Eisner-inspired panel from issue 11:
The Roach on an Eisnerian background by Dave Sim
But he was still definitely learning at this point, and also struggling with keeping to a regular schedule – one can often see the linework getting sloppier towards the end of an issue as he rushes to complete it by the deadline. At this time as well, Sim was still obviously having difficulty integrating the cartoony Cerebus into the more ‘realistic’ world he was creating:
In this panel, Cerebus looks like he's been pasted in from a different comic from the rest of the panel.
From very early on, though, we start seeing the characters who will form the supporting cast for the first 200 of Cerebus’ 300 issues. In issue three we get Red Sophia, an airheaded parody of Robert E Howard’s ‘female Conan’ Red Sonja:
Red Sophia
Issue four gives us Sim’s first really inspired creation, Elrod of Melvinbone. The albino last ruler of a dying race, with his black sword Seersucker, Elrod is Moorcock’s Elric in body, but with the vocal mannerisms of Foghorn Leghorn. Looney Tunes cartoons would be one of the main inspirations for this early phase of Sim’s work:
Elrod explains the concept of status
Issue six brings us Jaka, a dancer who Cerebus is drugged into loving and then forgets – for now. Their romance becomes one of the major driving forces of the story:
Jaka
There’s also the Cockroach – a mentally unstable man who takes on various guises throughout the series – The Cockroach, Captain Cockroach, Moon Roach, Wolveroach and so on – in a parody of the superhero genre that clearly (ahem) ‘inspired’ The Tick a few years later:
Captain Cockroach mourns the death of his assistant Bunky
And we have the first of the real-life figures (of sorts) to make his way into the story, in the person of Lord Julius, the rather familiar-seeming ruler of Palnu, who rules by instilling so much confusion in the bureaucracy that he’s the only one who understands the system:
Lord Julius
While introducing these characters, in stories that are mostly one-off stories (with the occasional two- or three-parter) parodying other comics (we have Professor Charles X Claremont’s School For Girls and the first meeting of Sump Thing and Woman Thing, for example) Sim slowly sets up the background against which the first two hundred of his three hundred issues will be played. Lord Julius is ruling the city-state of Palnu and is the most important political figure at the moment. ‘President Weisshaupt’ (a George Washington lookalike – a reference to the conspiracy theory that Adam Weisshaupt, head of the Illuminati, replaced Washington) is trying to take over the United Feldwar States.
There are various tribes of barbarians to the North, and there are at least three other groups – the Cirinists, a group who at this point seem like nuns, whose ‘only goal is to wipe out fun in our lifetime’, who worship the goddess Terim (rather than the god Tarim, worshipped by Cerebus), and whose holy book is called “The New Matriarchy”, the Illusionists, led by Suenteus Po, who at this point seem to be hippies-cum-Buddhists, who mostly just want to smoke dope and be left alone, and the Kevilists, about whom we’re only told they exist.
The power struggle between these different groups will power the main plotlines for Cerebus’ first eighteen years or so, but we also have some of the themes that will come up over and over again cropping up here. Two separate groups (the Pigts, led by Bran Mak Muffin, and the Cirinists) decide they want to worship Cerebus as the fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. We have several oppositions between male and female (and a third, neutral, force) from Cerebus’ fight with Red Sophia through to the meeting of Sump Thing and Woman Thing. And we already have the sense that Cerebus is very important to all the groups and individuals who are jostling for supreme power, and that political and religious power are closer in this world than in ours.
Cerebus gives little clue as to just how great a cartoonist Dave Sim was soon to become, but of its twenty-five issues, maybe ten of them are at least as good as anything of its time. Had Sim given up after these issues (and had the rest of comics continued on the same course – an incredibly unlikely event, as for all that Sim has been airbrushed out of comics history he was probably the single most influential creator of the 80s) Cerebus would be remembered now as a pretty good Howard The Duck knock-off with a few funny gags and some nice ideas.
But it got much, much better quickly.
Next week (honestly, I promise) High Society
Cerebus Reviewed Part Zero: The Obligatory Pseudo-Psychoanalysis
I am planning, over the next few weeks, to review the whole of Cerebus on here, roughly one post per ‘phonebook’ (some of the more interesting ones may take two posts, and I may do supplementary posts on subjects like the Marx Brothers, Oscar Wilde, Rick Veitch’s dream comics, Eddie Campbell’s Alec stories and other things which have clearly influenced the series).
I am doing this because I believe one can and should separate the wonderful work itself from the views of the creator. If it’s acceptable for me to say that Bernard Shaw is one of my favourite playwrights, despite his vociferous support for Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini, then surely it is possible at least to take Sim & Gerhard’s work as a thing in itself, separate from the noxious views of (one of) the creator(s).
Except that it’s not quite that simple, is it? Because Dave Sim clearly thinks differently to other people, and that difference in thought informs his writing, and is quite possibly one of the things that make his work more interesting.
Simply put, anyone who says something like:
I think YHWH’s contribution back in the early sixties was Peter, Paul and Mary. I mean it is a way of looking at Christianity, seeing Peter, Paul and Mary a the three cornerstones after Jesus. Of course, being YHWH her point was; if you have Peter, Paul and Mary what do you need Jesus for? I think that amused God a great deal — to the extent that he countered with John, Paul, George and Ringo. Paul of course, was actually James: James Paul McCartney. SO John and James were the leaders of the band, like the sons of Zebedee, John and James, the brothers Boanerges, the sons of thunder…
So it was a good joke that on the cusp of being famous John and James had ditched Peter, Pete Best, the drummer since this is basically what the biblical John and James had attempted to do with Peter the apostle.
The George part I think was God’s way of saying that leapfrogging Peter – that is the Vatican – lands you in England and Henry VIII’s decision to make himself not only king, but head of the church as well. There have been three king Georges.
Now, having ditched Peter, that meant you had three kings or a Ring of Stars.
The Beatles were the template that attracted their own disciples, the Rolling Stones, which was another play, in my view, on the fact that there had been a pool of disciples for the two Jesus’. There was Peter, Cephas, the rock or stone, but he rolled back and forth between the two Jesus’s.
is clearly not thinking ‘normally’, whatever ‘normally’ means.
But what I don’t want to do is turn the whole thing into me trying to psychoanalyse Dave Sim through the medium of his cartoon drawings of an aardvaark. So what I propose is this – in the rest of this post I’ll identify what I think is the most relevant of Dave Sim’s differences. I’ll talk a little about it, and then not mention this again directly. The connection will be there to be made in future posts, but won’t be explicit. Those who don’t care about my untrained opinion about the mental health of someone I’ve never met can skip this bit. I really don’t even like doing this, but it’s *so* difficult to disentangle man and work…
I think Dave Sim’s problems fundamentally come down to an overactive theory of mind. Now, theory of mind is usually just an ill-defined stick with which unscientific psychologists choose to hit people with autism, by claiming that people with autism don’t have one, without actually asking them. But there’s a core meaning there, which is that most people will, if they see someone behaving a particular way, assume a set of motives for that person’s actions. (Autistic people can do this, just as anyone else can – but they’re more aware than other people that they may be assuming the *wrong* motives, because they know other people think differently from them. Normal people are more likely to assume that everyone thinks the way they do.)
However, in some people this instinct goes into overdrive. With those people, they become convinced that they know others’ motivations, even when provided with evidence to the contrary. Some people even start to impute motivation to inanimate objects and natural processes. It has even been suggested that this is the basis of religious belief, although based on spurious evidence - this study just shows that when religious people think about the emotions and behaviour of God, who they consider a really-existing being, they use the same part of the brain as when thinking about other really-existing beings, while this discussion manages to be equally offensive to both religious people and autistic people (and yet he says that the autistics are the ones who don’t distinguish between other people and inanimate objects!)
But this gives us a lot of explanatory power for a *lot* of Sim’s stranger behaviours – his belief that natural phenomena are caused by spirits (e.g. YHWH causing the Asian tsunami of 2004) or that historical events have some hidden meaning (see the quote above), and his attributions of frankly bizarre motivations to others (e.g. his belief that a gift from his parents was cursed, detailed in the notes to Latter Days) would seem to stem from this.
More importantly – and the only reason I bring this up, as I consider speculation about the mental problems of someone I’ve never met distasteful at best and extremely unethical at worst – is that this explains a good deal about his writing. Often – almost always – Sim’s characters are sharply observed in their behaviours. They often behave in unexpected or unusual ways, but after we read this we think “Yes, that is *exactly* what Jaka [or Julius, or Cerebus, or Pud] would do.”
Sometimes we can even identify with the characters, and say “Yes, I hadn’t realised it, but that’s exactly how I’d react in that situation”.
But this observation rarely extends to internal states. Apart from the utterly chilling portrayal of ‘nice guy’ nerd and attempted-rapist Pud Withers’ mental state, and the caricature that is Cerebus, we’re rarely given a glimpse of anyone’s internal monologue (understandably, as for most of the story Cerebus is the viewpoint character), and when we are, it often seems somehow… off.
And when Sim talks in text pieces about why he had characters behave as they do, his reasons often make so little sense that he might as well be saying ‘curious green ideas sleep furiously’ – there’s a basic cause-and-effect disconnect there.
This disconnect will come up time and again in our discussions of Cerebus, as I attempt to go through the whole thing, but I promise the only further mention I’ll make of how it connects to his mental state will come, if at all, in the discussions of Rick’s Story (about someone who had a lot of similarities with Sim, but had a mental breakdown and became convinced he was the Messiah) and Latter Days (the vast bulk of which is taken up with an exploration of Sim’s idiosyncratic theology, which seems very hard to detach from his mental problems). I hope to avoid it even then.
But now that the elephant in the room has been dealt with, we can get on with talking about the aardvaark.
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