bloodygranuaile

In Vermont this weekend I picked up a book I’d been considering buying for a while, since I wanted to reread it and I think it’s something I may wish to revisit periodically: Alison Bechdel’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength, her memoir about her lifelong obsession with exercise, which also doubles as a tour of the last sixty years of American exercise fads and an introduction to transcendentalism.

I got home and read it all in one afternoon, with a break in the middle to do some yoga. It was just as good the second time around. It’s not as simple as that it’s relatable, as a fellow gay gym rat, since much of it isn’t, but a lot of it is. It’s just that the book is both funny and sad and also it goes all over the place but in a way that I like.

Having read all of her family memoirs, I decided it was probably time to check out the comic strip that made up most of Alison Bechdel’s career. The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For is a big 400-page compilation of 21 years of comic strips, starting in 1987, which, quite coincidentally, is also the year I was born. Reliving all the news headlines of my lifetime from birth to when I became old enough to drink, through the point of view of a bunch of cartoon Midwestern lesbians, was quite something, or possibly multiple somethings. I am only sorry that the cartoon seems to have ended shortly before Borders Books and Music went bankrupt in 2011, since I think that would have led to some very funny strips.

But in addition to the… well, sometimes it was nostalgia, about things that were actually timely to the publication of the strips collected here–my own personal beef with Borders, hanging out at Pandora Book Peddlers in high school (Pandora was a bit less radical than the Madwimmin Books of DTWOF; it did have to survive on Waverly Place in Madison, NJ, after all) (also, the founder just died a month ago? That’s what I get for nostalgia googling). Anyway. In addition to the trips down memory lane, there was also a lot more relatable content than I’d expected regarding the everyday nonsense of queer adulthood: various flavors of left-wing crankery are indulgently lampooned; the characters hit a variety of traditional adult milestones–or don’t–in a disorderly mishmash of timeframes and are always surprised; interpersonal conflict is reframed in grandiose political terms in order to avoid resolving it; grand political problems are turned into hippie-ass lifestyle choices. Some of the exact trends in left-wing and pseudo-left-wing goofiness are a bit dated; others are not as dated as I wish they were. The more-or-less main character, Mo, is an absolutely insufferable lifestyle cop, whomst nonetheless is gravely insulted if you call her a liberal (the strip where Harriet calls her a liberal when they’re having an argument amused me far, far more than it ought to). Mo is eventually surpassed in her lifestylism by utilikilt-wearing hippie dad Stuart, who gets increasingly intense about urban homesteading even as Mo’s resolve to consume ethically gets worn down over time by her big-spending girlfriend Sydney and also just life in general.

I am a particular fan of all the little jokes that represent our world outside the characters–riffs on popular brand names, cartoonified news broadcasts, absurd fake products. Despite Stuart and Sparrow’s attempts to raise their child solely on eco-friendly vegan crunchy granola food, little J.R. obsessed with a cereal called “Frosted Fruit Bats.” A Jane Austen merch display at Bounders (or is it Bunns & Noodle?) features a Pride and Prejudice tea cozy, which I think would legitimately be a popular item; a CD of “tunes to do needlework to,” which I would legitimately buy; and “Emma: The Novelization,” which had me wheezing for a good five minutes. The various fake “Dykes to Watch Out For” compilations in the introduction, in which our cartoonist freaks out that she’s been writing this strip for 20 years and forgot to get a job, are also gold, ranging from “Paleozoic DTWOF” to “DTWOF: Curse of the Black Pearl.”

The sense of aging really came through to me in the later comics, which might also be partly on me as a reader–I have been feeling very mid-thirties lately as I have quite recently hit a whole bunch of milestones that once seemed impossibly far off: paying off my student loans, paying off my car, house-hunting. I do like that the characters get older–including the kids, who are not stuck forever in cherubic infancy a la Family Circus, but grow up all the way into bratty teenagers before the book ends.

Some of the plotlines seem a bit repetitive when condensed into one volume–dutifully freaking out about every election; serieses of affairs, relationships, breakups, and arguments about gay marriage; characters getting landed in and out of therapy. All the same, it’s a very entertaining portrayal of a bunch of deeply neurotic weirdos who are, by virtue of being deeply neurotic weirdos, just like everyone else after all.

Book group decided that instead of struggling through another very dense book of theory during the darkest and busiest part of the winter, we were going to have some fun and read Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster’s Superman: The Golden Age, Vol. 1, a collection of the earliest Superman comics, from 1938 and 1939.

I am not a big superhero fan and as such I admit that I did not expect to enjoy them all that much, but I did. They are goofy and quick to read and contain a lot of corrupt, powerful folks getting what’s coming to them. Our titular hero combines his Superman ability to punch people in the face and squish their guns with his bare hands with his Clark Kent investigative reporter role to give many of these terrible people multiple levels of comeuppance, and to direct money, resources, and positive press to the deserving.

Superman’s choices of targets are definitely where things get politically interesting–the very first adventure takes on war profiteers, and involves dropping a munitions magnate into the middle of an active battlefield until he has a change of heart about what his company ought to be manufacturing. Other adventures feature additional Christmas-Carol-esque lessons to the rich and powerful, including one where he temporarily imprisons a rich coal baron inside his own unsafe mine after a worker got trapped there, one where he takes a fast-driving mayor on a trip to the morgue to view auto fatalities until he promises to start enforcing traffic laws, and a second weapons manufacturer who dies by inhaling the deadly gas he had until then been so stoked about manufacturing. In some adventures, dastardly criminals are apprehended and dropped off at the police station for prosecution; in other adventures, Superman takes on cruel and corrupt policemen and prison wardens. Obviously I like the ones where Superman fights cops better than the ones where he delivers people to them. Some of the adventures get a little after-school-special-y, especially the ones where Superman decides to Do Something About reckless driving, juvenile delinquency, and gambling.

Tacked onto the end of many of these adventures are bits of life and physical fitness advice for the younguns reading the comics, which, shall we say, vary in quality. They are however extremely fuckin’ funny.

The bit here that has probably aged the most awkwardly is the love triangle between Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Superman, who for the purposes of mapping out the dynamics here are in fact three different people. Lois hates Clark and she is entirely justified in doing so because her “meek” and “mild-mannered” co-worker keeps hitting on her at the office, and if he’s going to be an enormous coward about everything else he could at LEAST stand to ALSO ever exhibit any hesitation about sexually harassing his coworkers, please. If I were Lois I would also want to punch Clark’s lights out. However if I were Lois I would also have a better personal security plan for my reporting exploits than “be surprised every time I wind up with a gun in my face, then be surprised when I am conveniently rescued by Superman” because, while he has in fact shown up 100% of the time thus far, you can only wind up with a gun shoved in your face so many times before a sensible person would start assuming that to be a normal job hazard and try to account for it.

The bit that has aged the second-most awkwardly is the plotline where Superman impersonates a hurricane and deliberately destroys several blocks of tenement housing so the government is forced to rebuild the neighborhood with nice modern public housing projects. Somehow, I don’t think things would play out quite like that these days.

Overall, a fun and satisfying Robin Hood-esque power fantasy, highly entertaining.

This Sunday I was decompressing from the DSA convention and did something I have missed doing very much this pandemic, which was have cocktails in Harvard Square and then buy a bunch of books. I kept it to three this time which is still perhaps ill-advised given that I’m not staying at home this weekend and will have to lug them all around across state lines twice before I can get them home. But anyway.

One of the books was Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, a graphic novel about Bechdel’s life growing up as a young butch lesbian in a small town in Pennsylvania with her dysfunctional family. The title refers in part to the nickname the family gave to the funeral home her grandparents owned, where her father also worked part-time and where Alison and her siblings and cousins all grew up thinking was perfectly normal. It’s also clearly a rather sarcastic title, as the actual house Alison grew up in wasn’t very fun at all--it was a big rambling museum of a mansion that her father was obsessed with restoring, which went unappreciated by the small children attempting to be small children in there, and everyone was very emotionally distant and had their own solitary creative pursuits to keep themselves occupied and out of each other’s way. Alison’s parents’ marriage was weak, largely because her father was a closeted gay man who had impregnated and married Alison’s mother in a youthful fit of experimenting with play-acting at being F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and was now stuck in a tiny Pennsylvania town surrounded by extended family members in the postwar U.S. Bruce is not winning any World’s Greatest Dad awards anytime soon but you certainly have sympathy for how he ended up that way. Things are further complicated when Bruce dies not too long after Alison comes out to her family, which is when she also learns that he was gay. Much of the book is on the contentious relationship between these two closeted queer family members in very different places in life. Their relationship isn’t all bad, but their communication with each other is heavily mediated by their shared love of literature, since they’re too repressed and WASPy to directly express any love to each other. Death, in the very different forms of Bruce’s sudden and mostly-unexpected one and of the stable and more-homey-than-her-actual-house Bechdel Funeral Home, retroactively colors Alison’s understanding of her parents and her younger self.

It is perhaps unsurprising that, though I rarely read graphic novels and also rarely read literary fiction about people’s sad childhoods, if I were going to read some and really like it it would definitely be the one about the weird queer girl who grew up in a funeral home. That is a set of subjects that is definitely targeted towards getting me to read the thing. But it is also genuinely very good, and being a graphic novel I could read the whole thing over the course of one bath, which made it even better.

Bechdel’s newest graphic novel is apparently about her relationship with exercise, and now I think I might have to read that, too.

On Sunday the DSA Artists, Musicians, and Creators Caucus is having a reading group for Snowpiercer: Volume 1, in preparation for its screening of the movie Snowpiercer on Thursday night. Even though the reading group is on a Sunday evening, I am still planning to go, because graphic novel reading groups are cool and we should do more of them. 

 In Warren Ellis’ Transmetropolitan, Vol. 9: The Cure,  Spider goes around re-gathering evidence for his project to take down President Callahan in between bouts of forgetting words while his brain falls out his nose. (Don’t do drugs, kids.) This outlaw journalism-ing involves such fun tasks as beating Fred Christ’s head in with the Chair Leg of Truth, but it is ultimately Spider’s crotchety former editor who does some massive day-saving with backup copies of Spider’s evidence. Spider then goes out and interviews more people, most of whom are not Fred Christ and who he therefore does not bash in the head with the Chair Leg of Truth. 

 In Transmetropolitan, Vol. 7: Spider’s Thrash, newly unemployed gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem and his filthy assistants are on the lam.

Fortunately, Spider has money, so he can afford to write for free for a bit for the rogue newsfeed The Hole. If he can convince them that doing so won’t get them all killed, which might be tough, since the Smiler’s administration is hellbent on killing Spider and anyone he associates with. But that’s OK for Spider, since he’s equally hellbent on taking down the Smiler.

In the meantime, however, he spends a lot of time interviewing people on the street, first interviewing a bunch of child prostitutes and the foster homes that they sort-of live in, then interviewing all the mentally ill people that the system has slowly been kicking out of actual psychiatric institutions. It’s sad and disturbing to read, especially when you remember the defunding of mental health institutions that took place under Reagan out here in the real world. In-universe, it becomes extra disturbing when you figure out that the mad people filling up the streets were the only witnesses to some of the Callahan administration’s crimes.

This volume’s not nearly as funny as some of the others, but it’s just as exciting.

 Ah, it feels good to get back to Transmet.

After reading the first four volumes in December, I borrowed the next batch but hadn’t gotten the time to actually read them, which is pretty much the story of my life now. Which means Transmetropolitan, Vol. 5: Lonely City is the first volume I’ve read since the current Administration actually began. This is also the first volume in the series after Callahan’s administration begins in the City.

The beginning of this volume is a series of random vignettes about the City and about Spider and his life at the moment and his various psychological issues. He tells short little stories about people from his past and profiles some of the unfortunates living in the City. There is a short storyline where they make a local senator’s life hell. Then eventually the plot starts, and it’s a sadly relevant one, futuristic gene-reading technology aside.

In the middle of the night, a kid with a recessive gene from some kind of genetically modified church that had been freaking people out a few generations ago was kicked to death by four assailants. The police at first do not release the tapes of the attack or arrest anybody, which Spider finds suspicious, because he knows there must be tapes due to the overly surveilled nature of public space in the City. Spider uses his platform to shame the police into making arrests, and protests gather outside the police building as the dead guy’s community realizes the police had tried to bury a hate crime. But it gets worse, and by the end of the book, there’s a pile of dead bodies and Spider’s the only person who knows what happened to them—but when he tries to publish, his column is censored by Callahan’s government for security reasons. In short: Police brutality, corruption, and coverups. Sound relevant?

This being Transmet instead of the real world, however, this version of police brutality and impunity comes colored with lots of darkly hilarious absurdity, over-the-top vulgarity, and creative future-shock tech. Spider grandstands about journalism and shoots people with his bowel disruptor, as is typical for him, and his two filthy assistants do their best to keep up and keep him out of trouble. The cat still has two faces. The illustrations of the City are full of cleverly awful jokes and bizarre foodstuffs, including Irish children, because of course.

I could probably have read this more slowly and spent more time looking at the art, because the art is very, very busy and detailed. But that’s quite hard for me to do, for some reason. The art is about as fast-paced as the story, so I end up ripping through each volume quite quickly.

On to the next one, to see what perfidy the Smiler has in store for our antiheroes. 

Hold onto your butts, because Transmetropolitan, Vol. 3: Year of the Bastard is where the real main plotline in Transmet—and the one that’s got nerds running in droves to reread the series—shows up: the election.

With Channon having ragequit Spider’s employment and fucked off to a nunnery, Spider starts off this volume avoiding covering the electoral shitshow that is consuming the city. His editor lands him with a new assistant and orders to start doing his damn job, so Spider decides to cover the opposition party’s convention.

The incumbent president is a corrupt, marginally competent lowlife that Spider has stuck with the nickname The Beast, and who seems to be the one primarily responsible for doing to the America in Transmet what Steve Bannon wants to do to the America in our reality, in this the worst of all timelines.

The opposition party’s two main candidates are a racist fascist named Joe Heller and a clean-cut senator with a creepy wide grin, Gary Callahan, nicknamed The Smiler. Spider’s main puzzle in this book is to ferret out and report on the shady dealings that allow Callahan to steal the Florida primary from Heller, who practically owns the state, and therefore nab the opposition party nomination. The shady dealings include a vice-presidential candidate who was literally grown in a vat. Personally, I think it’s unlikely that Florida will still exist by the time we’re growing full humans in vats, but perhaps it went and annexed part of another state or something.

Callahan’s campaign manager, Vita Severn, is basically the only halfway decent-seeming person involved in the whole affair, so of course she gets assassinated. This upsets Spider and gives Callahan a giant boost in the polls. What a coincidence, eh?

The political parallels to today’s electoral fuckery aren’t perfect—the Beast, Heller, and the Smiler all have attributes that are familiar enough among today’s politicians, but the characters themselves are quite their own. But there’s a lot of very resonant stuff about corruption and fakery and the government being run by people whose views on what the government actually ought to do are certainly not along the lines of “promote the general welfare.”  And, of course, there’s the role of the media, although none of the investigative journalists actually covering our campaign ended up getting quite the amount of celebrity Jerusalem supposedly enjoys (or hates, rather), plus Spider doesn’t have to compete with professional troll farms.

Still. Elections is ugly, and Ellis does ugly very well.

God, I hadn't realized how much I missed Spider Jerusalem.

I first read Transmetropolitan in college, almost ten years ago now, during a blessed period of time where Donald Trump was just some buffoon on reality TV and was totally off the radar screen of people who don't watch reality TV, which just so happened to include me and literally everybody else I knew. That might have been the only plus of that time period, honestly—any hopey-changey goodfeels brought on by the impending end of the historically awful Bush administration were offset by it being precisely the time when the economy imploded. (More specifically, I think I read Transmet during the fall semester at the end of 2007, after the subprime loans had started crashing but before TARP was passed.)

Following the surprise election of the nuke-happy, gropey old toddler to the highest office in the land—helped along by Kremlin trollbots, a corrupt FBI (itself helped by the execrable Jason Chaffetz), thirty years of hysterical anti-Hillary Big Lie propaganda from the GOP because she dared support universal health insurance before it was cool, a comfortably useless Democratic establishment without a competent marketer in sight, and a useless clickbait-driven media ecosystem that on the whole displays editorial judgement so poor it would get kicked off the middle school yearbook staff—it seemed like time to revisit everyone's favorite foul-mouthed, drug-addled gonzo journalist and see how prescient the series really was.

The result, so far, is that it's depressingly prescient. There are a handful of things in it that come off as now being weirdly old-fashioned—cash tollbooths with humans working in them, which are rapidly on their way out in the real world, or the fact that Jerusalem can live off of only writing one column a week, even if he is a celebrity—but overall, we do really seem to be just further along the trajectories Ellis identified in 1998 when it was first published: Increased corruption, sham democracy, advertisements and screens everywhere, cities overcrowded to the point where they can't ever stop being filthy no matter how fancy and overdeveloped they get; high-tech luxuries existing alongside widespread poverty; an exhausted, frenzied populace overstimulated into gullibility and complacency; and, of course, power-hungry scam artists taking advantage of all the generalized confusion and disorder at every turn. It's actually quite shocking to realize it was written almost twenty years ago—if it had been published last week, I'm pretty sure the only thing that would need to change would be the tollbooth worker.

In the middle of it all is social justice rogue Spider Jerusalem, returned to the city after hiding in the mountains for five years because his creditors finally found him, a heavily tattooed agent of chaos in colorfully mismatched camera-spectacles (the machine that made them is also on drugs).  Spider bullies his way back into a writing gig with his old editor, a weekly column called I Hate It Here, where he dedicates himself afflicting the comfortable but doesn't really have the time or sensitivity to comfort the afflicted. He does, however, tell their stories, raging on behalf of the dispossessed in time-honored angry lefty fashion, calling out the dirty secrets of the powerful and generally using his boundless capacity for assholery to troll for good.

Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street covers Spider's return from the mountain and his break back into the spotlight as he covers a riot and uncovers the deliberate setup behind the violence. It bears an unsettling resemblance to some of the accounts of outbreaks of police violence at protests we've been hearing about over the past few years—peaceful protests where some small event (or unproven reports of one) are used as a pretext for attack by an overmilitarized police force, although these haven't ended in actual mass slaughter in the U.S. (so far, at least). The group targeted in this riot is a bunch of people spliced with alien DNA, known as transients, who are basically kind of a cult led by a Charles Manson-esque figure called Fred Christ. Christ leads the group to "secede," declaring the destitute handful of city blocks they've been sidelined into to be its own country, building half-assed barricades around the transient's ghetto and cutting off the utilities that their altered bodies don't need in order to drive out any remaining full humans. They're portrayed as a bunch of gullible but harmless weirdos (except for Fred Christ, who is a creeper), so of course the state brings down the hammer on them for this hopelessly ineffectual act of treason.

With a busy, expressive drawing style and lots of creative swearing, this high-octane nightmare-fueled story nonetheless displays a greatly hopeful reminder of what journalism could and should be. Today's Beltway media would do well to take note: With the incoming administration, all journalists are going to have to become muckraking investigative pains in the ass, or they can go find another profession. Put on your stompy boots and remember: You don't have to put up with this shabby crap! You're a journalist!