SAVING TIME IN A BRAIN

 First, a pair of juxtaposed quotes:

Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.

Why couldn't the past, present and future all be occurring at the same time-- but in different dimensions?

The first quote comes from one of the most famous graphic novels of all time, the 1986-87 Moore/Gibbons WATCHMEN, and the sentiment expressed, about the relativity of time, is "intricately structured" as one of the narrative's main themes.

The second comes from a very obscure Lee-Kirby story in AMAZING ADVENTURES #3 (1961), "We Were Trapped in the Twilight World." It wasn't reprinted until the twenty-first century and I doubt that even its creators remembered it after they tossed it out within the pages of a title that was finished in three more issues.

Not only was"Twilight" probably tossed off to fill space, the idea of the simultaneity of past, present and future isn't even important to the story's plot. Shortly after the handsome young theorist expresses his time-theory, he drives away with his girlfriend. A mysterious, never-explained mist transports them both back into Earth's prehistoric past. While the two of them flee various menaces, the scientist theorizes that entities from the past sometimes entered the mist and showed up in modern times, so that ape-like cavemen generated the story of the Abominable Snowmen. Grand Comics Database believes that "Twilight" is one of many SF-stories plotted by Stan Lee but dialogued by his brother Larry Leiber, so, failing the discovery of original Kirby art, there's no ascertaining which of the three creators involved generated the line.

In both stories, the simultaneity of all times has one common function: to cast a light on the limits of human perception. But is there any truth in it?

In the sense of the bodies we occupy, not really. Our common experience as human beings is that our bodies are totally enslaved by the unstoppable progress of the future, remorselessly eating away the present the way age eats away at our bodily integrity. And yet, one organ in the body defies future's tyranny and that's the brain.

Only in the brain are past, present and future truly unified-- though one may question if Moore's correct about how "intricate" the structure is, even assuming that the paradigm applies only to fully functioning human brains. And time is only unified in terms of a given subject's own memories. I don't necessarily dismiss such things as "memories of a past life" that are usually cited in support of reincarnation. But those type of memories are not universal enough to draw any conclusions.

My ability to "time-travel" in my memories is similarly limited. I can summon a quasi-memory of being on a family vacation and finding MARVEL TALES #11 at an out-of-town pharmacy. That comic book would have been on sale in 1967, probably a few months prior to its November cover-date. I *think* this was probably the first SPIDER-MAN comic I bought, but my memories of reading the comic for the first time aren't that specific. I hadn't been buying superhero comics for even a year before late 1967, having only started doing so after the debut of the BATMAN teleseries in early 1966. That show would have finished its second season in March 1967, at which time I might have felt venturesome enough to sample a superhero I'd never heard of. Now, for me to be correct on that score, I would have to have bought MARVEL TALES before the 1967 SPIDER-MAN cartoon debuted that September, since it's also my memory that I watched that TV show when it first aired. But can I be *absolutely* sure that I didn't see the cartoon before buying the comic book? Not in the least. I *seem* to remember that I'd bought enough back issues of SPIDER-MAN or MARVEL TALES that when the cartoon debuted, I recognized how some of the cartoon-stories had been adapted from the originals. But that memory is not reliable.

In the WATCHMEN chapter referenced, Doctor Manhattan can foresee future events as accurately as he can memories of the past-- or at least, whatever past experiences are important to Moore's narrative. And in "Twilight," the protagonists live through the past so as to clarify events in their present. But total narrative clarity is denied real people. However, what our functioning memories do preserve are not just every single experience we have, but the IMPORTANT experiences. 

Humans can travel in time from SIGNIFICANT THING #1 to SIGNIFICANT THING #4566 via chains of mental association. Some of these associations might be subconscious. I once noticed that Robert E. Howard's barbarian hero Kull first appeared in print in the August 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, about three or four years before Siegel and Shuster collaborated on their landmark hero Superman. We know that Siegel named Superman's dad after himself, making "Jor-L" out of the first syllable of the author's first name and the last syllable of his last name. But whence comes "Kal-L?" Did it come from... "Kul-L?" Even assuming that Siegel read the Kull story, there's no way of knowing if he consciously remembered reading it. But IF he read it, maybe something about the hero's name appealed to Siegel, and he simply recycled that appeal when it came time to name his own hero.

We do not know if anything survives the demise of our physical forms. But while we are alive, it's entirely logical to build up our stores of significant memories, whether we can take them with us or not. To borrow from the title of an old English poem, those memories provide us with our only "triumph over time."

One last Significant Thing: the last issue of Marvel magazine AMAZING ADVENTURES was cover-dated November 1961, the same date assigned to FANTASTIC FOUR #1. So that arbitrary date becomes something of a threshold between the Old Marvel Way of doing things, and the New Approach, which would, as I've argued elsewhere, saved the medium of comic books from extinction.

NULL-MYTHS: KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE (2012)

Hmm, it's been almost a full year since I did a "null-myth" entry. I can't believe that I've been reading only good comics since then, so it must just be that I' haven't found any that were worth writing about.

I had to debate whether or not KINGSMAN (originally called just SECRET SERVICE) had enough mythic content to fall into the "near myth" group. It was an okay read, compared to earlier Mark Millar works like WANTED and OLD MAN LOGAN, two brain-dead exercises in superhero ultraviolence. Millar has written a lot of superhero works I have not read, so it's quite possible he's written something better than these two bore-fests. Yet I get the impression that, whereas many British writers sought to expand what superhero comics could do by bringing in aspects of the real world, Millar merely used realism as a method of degrading iconic characters, whether he used the actual characters (Wolverine in LOGAN) or approximations (various DC Comics villains in WANTED). KINGSMAN is no exception, since the project began as a pitch to Marvel Comics, in which eternal superspy Nick Fury took a young spy under his wing.

KINGSMAN is definitely improved by not taking place in the Marvel Universe, and by being centered in Millar's own country, which also happens to be the birthplace of Ian Flemijng's quintessential superspy. Millar, working alongside artist (and fellow Brit) Dave Gibbons, certainly brings a vraisemblance to this James Bond pastiche. The "older man" figure, Jack London, is a former working-class Brit who's been a covert superspy for decades. His sister still lives on welfare with her grown son and a succession of bad bed-mates, so one day London decides that he'll become a tutelary figure to young wastrel-in-training Gary "Eggsy" Unwin. The dramatic exchanges between the knowing elder and the impulsive youth are at least competent, and occasionally Millar and Gibbons touch on sociological themes about British society, though none of these get as much development as Fleming put into his least interesting Fleming novels.

To be sure, KINGSMAN isn't trying to emulate the Bond books, only the Bond movies. Fleming gave his villains assorted exotic gimmicks, but only in the films did Bond have access to similar doodads. In the TPB collection I read, an interview with Gibbons includes a passage wherein the artist scoffs at the "invisible car" seen in one of the Pierce Brosnan flicks. But KINGSMAN is lousy with crazy devices, such as the "laser penknife" with which Gary wins his climactic battle with a villain-henchman named Gazelle because-- well, he has two metal legs that look like those of a gazelle.

But if there's one thing that renders any potential meaning in KINGSMAN inert and inconsummate, it's Millar's handling of his villain. Even many of the Bond-villains invented for the movies prove fit to stand alongside the classic Fleming-fiends. But what does Millar come up with? Well, it's none other than-- James Arnold, Super-Fanboy. Arnold-- who's given one of the blandest villain-names of all time-- is a nerdy genius who decides to play God (or maybe Thanos) by eliminating most of the world's populace. However, because he's a nerd, he gives away his plans in part by trying to kidnap a lot of the celebrities from SF-films, such as Mark Hamill and Ridley Scott. Perhaps Millar and Gibbons thought they were putting across some devastating satire of fan-culture. Frankly, it seems more like a desperate attempt to keep away from the political content found in many of the Bond films, simplified though this content was in comparison to the Fleming books.

There are two sequels I've not read, but I'm not getting my hopes up, based on the mild pleasures of SECRET SERVICE.


ADDENDUM: I did read KINGSMAN THE RED DIAMOND and found it no better than the previous GN, though it's not written by creator Millar and so isn't nearly as bloodthirsty. This one's sole virtue is pitting Eggsy against Kwaito, a tough intelligence-agent from Africa, who is fairly charming despite the great improbability that any current country in Africa could come up with a world-class intelligence organization.

MYTHCOMICS: WATCHMEN #1-12 (1986-87)

I said here that I planned to comment upon Alan Moore's tendency to let his didactic tendencies overwhelm his symbolic discourse. However, when I did the same with Dave Sim and Steve Ditko, I first gave examples of works in which they managed to keep their didacticism under control. So I'll do the same with respect to Alan Moore.

I fleetingly mentioned WATCHMEN in THE ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY, and I've mentioned various aspects of the graphic novel in other essays. Obviously I'm not going to try to analyze the entire novel in a single blogpost. What I will address is a theme in Moore's work that I might call (with a tip of the hat to Anthony Burgess) "the clockwork rape."

Of course, everyone knows that Alan Moore writes rapey comics. Few if any critics have commented on what part the trope of rape might play within the greater patterns of Moore's work, because most critics today are only concerned with a smug political correctness. But I'll advance the notion that in WATCHMEN at least, rape is one of many ways in which Moore-- in concert with his collaborator Dave Gibbons, naturally-- depicts the clockwork patterning of human lives.

One can hardly read WATCHMEN without having the image of the clock, in one form or another, shoved in one's face.

The workings of clocks become a primary metaphor in the life of one of the story's ensemble characters: Doctor Manhattan, who's given a watch to study as a young boy and as a superhero even builds a clockwork city on Mars. 

The image of the two hands coming into conjunction, however, is far more pervasive than its use only in clocks or clock-like objects. For instance, two human bodies can be brought into such a conjunction, in a manner that mingles Eros and Thanatos.

For the purposes of this essay I'll term all such conjunctions as "syzygies." The syzygy is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as a "pair of connected or corresponding things." To my knowledge the term's never been applied to the hour hand and minute hand of a clock, but it's a fair statement to say that the two items are connected: that the clock would be close to useless without the interaction of both pieces of the clock.

Now, the above scene from issue #7 focuses on the syzygy of two humans making love. Yet nothing in this image of "love-death" contradicts the possibility of a syzygy in which one being seeks to dominate the other.  Here's the "rapey scenario" that everyone who's read the comic remembers:

Of course, the attempted rape doesn't transpire, which may a reason that the sequence doesn't merit its own syzygy-image. But such a syzygy-image does appear when Walter Kovacs, a.k.a. "Rorschach," views an ink-blot during a psychologist's "Rorschach test." 

Walter has projected his own memory of this unpleasant incident onto the ink-blot, whose corresponding shapes remind him of being abused by his mother. Moore and Gibbons are clearly being ambiguous about what the woman does to her male offspring. But if one chooses to hew to the logic used by many feminists in the comics-world-- i.e., that any use of violence by a male upon a female must constitute a displaced form of rape-- then the reverse must be true, as I demonstrated here, even if Mrs. Kovacs doesn't dispense anything but pure violence.

Even more significantly, the text of WATCHMEN makes clear that Walter Kovacs never forgives his mother for whatever she did to him. By contrast, the Comedian approaches Silk Spectre for unambiguous sexual favors, hinting that she's been sending him signals. When she doesn't give in, he beats her down, and she's saved from rape only by the intrusion of a third party. Yet at some later date she does apparently have consensual sex with the Comedian, resulting in the birth of their daughter Laurie-- though apparently the ex-superheroine forbids the Comedian from divulging the fact of his parenthood to his grown offspring. It's entirely possible that Silk Spectre's implied forgiveness irks some ultraliberals far more than the sight of the attempted rape itself.

Throughout WATCHMEN the ticking clock is conspicuously used to emphasize how time is running out-- possibly for humanity as a whole, not just the fictional characters in their character-arcs. For the characters as for the readers, the syzygies depict moments frozen in time, different from other comics-panels only in the degree of their abstraction. 

Moore, as a modernist author, wants to use his art as a bully pulpit, to warn others of the limitations of their real lives. That's why it's so ironic that he should be assailed for "rapey comics," since he's clearly calling attention to rape's moral consequences. Neither I nor anyone else can be sure that this is his only reason for employing the situation. But in my personal estimation, if there's any author who seems gets less joy, displaced or otherwise, from the rape-spectacle than Alan Moore, I don't know who it would be.