Don't Eat Poo / It's Not Good For You



Many years ago, during the "Acts of Vengeance" crossover, a story ran in the pages of the Fantastic Four detailing a trip the team made to Washington, DC. It was something of a lead-in to Walt Simonson's abbreviated but spectacular run on the series -- a breather after Steve Englehart's lengthy but unsatisfying run, three issues written by Simonson but not pencilled. It's kind of fun as these things go -- the whole point of "Acts of Vengeance" was that a consortium of super-villains (led, secretly, by Loki, duh) decided to gang up on really inflict some punishment on their arch-enemies. They actually succeeded in doing this fairly well by switching foes, which made for some fun match-ups. Where else are you going to see Daredevil fight Ultron?*

Anyway, the crossover part in Fantastic Four was basically played for laughs. Instead of trying to find an actual villain worth battling for the FF, Dr. Doom uses a variation on the same device he used to bust up Reed & Sue's wedding, psychically attracting every two-bit, no-name supervillain to try to take them down. People like Plant Man and the Eel, basically every lame supervillain that Scourge hadn't killed. The best sequence occurred when, after being beset by all these lame-brained losers, a report comes in from the Air Force that Apocalypse has been seen flying near the DC area. Well, the FF run out to change into their costumes, thinking that this is going to be a real fight . . . and then the report comes back that Apocalypse was just passing through, flying near the capital on his way to somewhere else. And they have to go change back out of their costumes in order to continue testifying in front of Congress.

Anyway, this story recurred to me today for some odd reason. The whole thinjg was predicated on the FF being called to Washington to testify on the matter of a proposed Mutant Registration Act -- an act that, if I recall correctly, was used as a MacGuffin throughout the 80s and early 90s, the constant threat of which hung over the heads of Marvel's mutants. Anyway, there's a lengthy sequence where Reed pontificates on how such an act is not only misguided but would be counterproductive and open to abuse -- using Spider-Man as a specific example of a hero whose crime fighting activities would be seriously curtailed by the requirements of registration, if and when the Mutant Registration Act was ever broadened to cover the entire superhero community (which, he reasoned, was practically an inevitability given the proposed act's nature). Given all the uproar over the recent Civil War business, that made me laugh when I remembered it. You know it's bad when someone who hasn't bought a regular monthly Marvel title in years can punch a whole through your premise with a half-remembered plot from twenty years ago . . .

Now, I suppose it is too much to ask that anyone writing a Fantastic Four story have to keep up-to-date on every Fantastic Four story ever written, but dammit, it seems that somewhere along the line, someone should have spoken up to say that not only was this exact same story told a little less than twenty years ago, but the same character was on the exact opposite side of the debate. And they wonder why the long-term fans are up in arms . . . the Powers That Be in charge of superhero comincs have got this idea in their heads that any controversy is good controversy, and as long as it gets people talking, they'll continue to buy the books. And as much as the long-term fans scream about it, they'll continue to do so as long as it sells the books. And it will, because people will continue to buy the crappy comics regardless of what their common sense tells them. And that is the secret of capitalism right there. Right now there is no market premium on quality, in terms of consistency. There is a premium on controversy, because that's the only thing capable of shocking moribund sales to life.

And you see this across the superhero industry. I am morbidly amused by the fact that, despite the sales success of Infinity Crisis and all the crossover titles leading up to it, almost all the post-Crisis spin-offs have been losing readers at a precipitous rate. If the purpose of the Crisis was to build interest in new long-term properties, it failed miserably. 52 is a success, but that is because, from what I have seen, it keeps a sense of the large-scale, widescreen adventure that worked so well for the Crisis. The market is so desiccated that the only thing that gets any attention is massive upheaval, the storytelling equivalent of an adrenalin shot straight through the heart. Anything else just withers on the vine.

And sure enough, all these titles that are spinning off out of Civil War? Some of them will probably continue to do well, but most of them will start shedding readers at frightening speed once the crossover is over. The new, inevitable Thor relaunch that will most certainly be the end push resulting from Civil War will be a classic example here. I can predict the outcome, barring any major upheaval: it will premiere big, maybe even the biggest seller of that month. But after a year, regardless of the creative team, regardless of how good the book is or is not, it will be lucky to still be moving a third of the numbers as it premiered with. And then they'll look around and realize the only thing that juices sales is events, because that seems to be the only thing that does work consistently. So then they'll eventually figure out how to create a state of constant anticipation and building tension in a vain attempt to keep sales at a plateau.

Which is sorta what DC did in the year building up to Infinite Crisis. The problem was that eventually it had to build up to something, and when that release came, it was inevitably an anti-climax as compared to a year and a half of epic buildup. When the release came and they had to get to the business of just telling regular stories, everything started sagging again. But then, DC was smart about that -- even as they are trying to pitch a new direction, they're still planting seeds for a potential new cataclysm, certain to be bigger and louder and even less satisfying than the last one.

---

*This wasn't actually as mismatched a fight as you might imagine: Dr. Doom rebuilt Ultron in order to sic him on Daredevil at the Kingpin's behest, but Doom didn't do a very good job so Ultron came out all kinds of crazy, with every different programming iteration of Ultron's personality vying for predominance. He was schizoid with religious delusions -- a perfect match for Daredevil, who was at the time bumming around the country, half-crazy and depressed himself. Fun stuff.

The Fate of the Critic
Finale

Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Every so often I find myself wondering just why I do it -- this blog, that is. Whereas many other blogs seem to have specific purposes and recognizably distinct perspectives, I always feel slightly purposeless next to more rigorously defined sites. Ultimately, however, it has little to do with a useless question like "what do readers get out of this site"? Obviously they (you) get something from me doing this, or you wouldn't be reading this right now. To doubt that there is an audience at this point would be essentially fishing for pity. I make no bones about fishing for money, but I draw the line somewhere . . .

At some point blogging crosses over from a neat idea that sounds like it might be fun, and becomes a responsibility. It may not sound glamorous or fun, but there it is: at some point The Hurting became less an avocation than a compulsion. It's not that I do or don't enjoy it, it simply is, it's become a fixture in my life. Some people come to blogging for a short amount of time, and when the novelty wears off they wander away. Others find themselves sucked in. I feel guilty when I go more than a day without posting something, because I know at least a few people care. I notice when I take long sabbaticals (as has happened when I have taken breaks for trips and the like) that the readership goes down. I don't scan my stats or anything like that, but you notice these things in terms of the comments and kind of responses you get. Of all the writing I have to do in my life, writing a blog post is perhaps the least effective use of my writing time conceivable, considering that I don't get paid for this, I'm not building connections that can help further my "real" writing career, and oftentimes writing involved blogposts is just a way of getting sidetracked from other things I need to be doing at any given moment. I can trick myself into feeling I've gotten something accomplished when, really, I've just wrote a blogpost, maybe even a spectacularly stupid piece of fanfic using Iron Man as a metaphor for creative achievement (what can I say -- it was a good metaphor that I don't think anyone had ever used before).

Does that sound bad? Really, it's merely true. I've gotten a handful of e-mails since this series began, asking me if the "Fate of the Critic" series was going to mean the end of The Hurting. While it is indeed flattering to see that at least a couple people care, it's not the end.

Reading Eddie Campbell's The Fate of the Artist, I identified with Campbell's character perhaps more than I should have. I'm a single white male, newly divorced, with some degree of independence but still essentially frustrated in my chosen field (writing). It's easy to wake up one day and realize the grinding sensation you feel is the sound of the ignition grinding as the car stalls in the middle of traffic. Forward momentum ceases and you start sliding sideways -- not backwards, but not one inch closer to your ultimate goal.

And you get comfortable. You live by yourself. You get to build and design your life just exactly how you want it. You look up one day and realize that you've become "eccentric", and that you're talking to yourself in the grocery store. When you go out to visit family for a week it is amazing just how harsh and acerbic your voice sounds, because you haven't been using it an awful lot. You get a cat, so you can pretend you're talking to someone without sounding totally crazy. And you write in the second person, just like Don McGregor, to somehow try and depersonalize what is, essentially, your story.

Because that's what this is all about. I recognize the fact that The Hurting has something of a schizoid reputation -- on the one hand, the reviews and think-pieces are often stridently impersonal for the blog format. Not without reason do I strive for a formality of tone in my longer pieces. But then, the first person "I" invariably comes crashing in through the skylight. I don't think I wear it well, honestly. I'm more comfortable talking about myself in the second or third person. I believe that at its most basic form, blogging is a limited format. When I write reviews, I try to ground them in the same standards I would use writing for the Journal or Popmatters. I don't know why I do this, other than it seems more "natural" to me than not. All the same, I've become increasingly aware of the fact that my voice -- or a voice which somehow approximates mine -- shines through.

It's not a diary, it's not a journal, it's not a magazine, it's not an academic review, it's not a brand name, it's not profitable. It's simply The Hurting. It is what it is. Trying to define it further, at this point, is just counter-productive.

It's the fate of the artist to create art. I honestly don't know why critics do what they do -- even after I've been one for years, even after I've been paid for it, I still don't know. I suspect most of us just spend so much time thinking that critiquing is essentially second-nature. I know that when I'm really feeling spot-on, a review is a kind of automatic writing, spewing forth what has already percolated in my head onto the keyboard. Sometimes I fear that my work seems dashed-off, or worse, lacking in rigor -- how many times have I made contentious points, only to see them demolished on further examination? That comes from thinking out loud. It's good to have a blog on which to do so, but I still worry sometimes that I come across as insufficiently substantial. That, more than anything else, is probably the fate of the critic: perpetual insecurity.

Because you can't criticize other people's work without coming in for criticism yourself. Perhaps there are certain critics who reside in an ivory tower of insoluble perfection, but I always worry that every decision I make regarding how I perceive art is somehow contradictory, insupportable, arbitrary or just plain uninformed. There's always someone smarter.

And at the end of the day, no matter how good my melting gun is, I'm not going to be able to succeed in melting Iron Man. He'll always find a way to clobber me and win the day. As important as it is to discuss art, to understand our relationship with art and the way we perceive art, the people who actually create art will always retain the moral high ground. Some criticism becomes art by virtue of its heft, but most is, at best, of supplementary value. No matter how good a piece of criticism is, it only exists because someone, somewhere, took the first step to create something new in the first place, something which the critic could then respond to and hold a dialogue with. Ultimately, criticism is futile -- truly great art will always resist explication. And an artist will continue on his or her merry way, regardless of how many idiots with melting guns are lined up outside the gate.

So we sit and we talk and we explicate and we explain and we develop these little alternative cosmologies to try and explain how things work, when in reality it's all so much more complicated and yet so much more simpler than any critic could ever explain. The act of creation is ineffable and mysterious. And at the same time, the act of reading or viewing or listening is so simple, one gets the idea that sometimes critics can lose sight of just how basic the act is. We learn how to judge art, and how to apply criteria and utilize informed comparisons, but really, it's all just a development of the same aesthetic sense we develop from a very young age. And the best art, the truly great art, can succeed in transporting us back to the very genesis of our critical faculties. We can talk all day about why it is good, but ultimately, attempts to explicate the inexplicable will fall mercilessly short.

I can't really pretend to understand why anyone else does anything, but I know for me that trying to understand art through criticism is done with an extremely specific purpose. I can't learn to be inspired but I can learn how to apply craft to inspiration. For me, at least, the fate of the critic is to take what I have learned and apply it. Of course, when you become adept at disassembling other people's art, you are liable to become a merciless critic of your own work. But then, no one ever said being an artist was easy or fun -- good old Tolstoy spent decades in the second half of his life wandering around the woods of his estate with a rifle, trying to think of a good reason not to kill himself. That's your "fate of the artist", right there. We'll see how it goes.

The Fate of the Critic
Part Five



These were the moments he lived for.

The building was silent. A few security guards paced up and down the hallways, the soles of their shoes clicking against the hard tile, echoing through the empty corridors. The real security, of course, had nothing to do with a few dozing rent-a-cops. The headquarters of Stark Enterprises was one of the most well-defended buildings in the western hemisphere -- or so, at least, were the many basements and sub-basements that represented the core of the company's technological achievements. The complex had been constructed in such a way that even if the building itself were to be totally demolished, the laboratories and warehouses beneath would remain unharmed and impenetrable. It wasn't merely paranoia, it was a dire necessity. There were many men and organizations that would gladly have sacrificed the lives of thousands to possess the contents of those basements.

Deep in the bowels of Stark Headquarters, Tony Stark was hard at work. Ensconced deep within the cavernous depths of his foundry, he retreated from the world, turning off all communications, without so much as a radio playing in the background. This was what fulfilled him.

Playing a super hero was fun -- more than fun. It was a thrill, a rush like nothing else. He played the part of playboy to the hilt, and it wasn't hard -- he really did enjoy the fast cars and loose women. But there wasn't a car built that could compare with the thrill of soaring through the clouds as Iron Man, or the sheer joy of victory in the face of certain defeat. Being Iron Man was serious business, sure, but he didn't consider it a vocation. He knew that there would come a time when he would be able to retire with relatively little regret. It was a demanding lifestyle.

Being Iron Man didn't define who he was -- it was the act of creation itself. That was something that no one else could understand. None of his friends in the Avengers, not even Reed Richards, could feel the same kind of thrill. He was an engineer. He didn't have the mind for theoretical abstracts that Richards did (nor, he imagined, did anyone else), but when it came to the practical business of designing and implementing technology, he felt with some justification that he was in a class by himself. And the Iron Man armor was more than just another invention, it had become over the years the focal point for his energies, the medium through which he could channel his immense creativity.

He had lost count of just how many lucrative patents had been plucked from technologies developed for the Iron Man armor. Stark Enterprises remained solvent partly through a constant stream of innovations that originated in this laboratory. But the bulk of the armor remained a proprietary secret. No one, not S.H.I.E.L.D., not the Avengers, not the federal government, knew the precise schematics for creating the simplest prototype Iron Man armor. Even the Guardsman armor had been licensed to the government through what was essentially an open-ended lease, with all ownership ultimately reverting back to Stark. Of course, sometimes it didn't work out that way. Then he had to take matters into his own hands.

Which was another thing that no one understood. He personally didn't really understand the notions of duty and responsibility that motivated his peers to be heroes. His responsibilities, while no less critical, lay in a different field: he protected his armor, and the secrets thereof. There had been times when he had been forced to take personal responsibility for his technology, taking a proactive stance against thieves and pirates who had put his proprietary technology to misuse. No one else understood that. He had to remain in control of his inventions, because the potential for disaster was too great.

He was already wealthy, rich beyond even his parents' wildest dreams. But with the technology of the Iron Man armor he could have been the wealthiest man on earth. Iron Man could have remade the planet a thousand times over. But Stark knew that the Iron Man armor, and all the advanced technologies that composed it, were not merely tools for piece. In the wrong hands they could become the most disastrous weapons of mass destruction ever created.

It was hard, sometimes, to keep that in context. He had been asked, more than once, why Iron Man couldn't potentially provide ways of managing intensely debilitating conditions like paraplegia or Parkinson's disease. Not too long ago he'd been confined to a wheelchair himself. It was a tempting thought -- use the Iron Man technology to enable those who could not walk to walk again, those with debilitating tremors to move with precision, those who worked in dangerous fields such as mining and refining to work without danger. But the moment he allowed that technology free, he was opening up Pandora's Box for anyone to construct their own Iron Man. In his nightmares he imagined an army of Iron Men marching under the flag of Red China, or Osama Bin Laden attacking New York City wrapped in armor...

And that is why the Iron Man armor could never be released. It was his technology, his responsibility. He did as much good as he could as Iron Man, but the potential hazards of releasing the technology into wider use was simply too great.

This was one of the things he liked about Peter -- Peter understood responsibility. He always said "with great power comes great responsibility" -- but Stark knew that both men interpreted such an axiom in diametrically different ways. Peter was racked by the responsibility to do everything in his power to prevent injustice -- noble, but futile. A juvenile idealism forged by trauma. Stark, on the other hand, knew full well that it was a tough world. People got hurt, people got killed. Stark had power -- proactive power to stop a limited degree of suffering, yes, but more importantly he had to keep his power under check for fear of unleashing powerful forces the world could not hope to control. That was his responsibility, his burden. He was the only person he could trust, it was as simple as that.

Sometimes, he reflected, circumstances had made him brittle and harsh. The hardest part of AA had been the second step -- he could never bring himself to believe in a greater power. He always tried to sidestep it in meetings. He didn't believe in God. He believed in himself, in the power of the free market, in individual responsibility, but not God. He didn't understand why anyone would possibly object to such a simple idea as government registration -- didn't they believe in being responsible, in standing behind their own abilities, in working together to ensure that power was always exercised wisely and with judicious restraint? The alternative was chaos. He had to prevent that. Sometimes it felt like he was the only person who could actually see the big picture.

But even if he sometimes didn't understand other people, he was comforted by his work. That was why these long, quiet nights of research and discovery sustained him. It's funny -- whenever he was left to his own devices for any length of time he always wanted a drink, but never when he was working. Stepping into his lab, he forgot about all the problems and the stresses, and simply allowed himself to enjoy the moment.

And then there were the damn villains. He sat for nights on end, hammering and soldering long past the break of dawn, developing the perfect armor for an imperfect world. And always -- without fail! -- some asshole with a melting gun would come along and try to melt him. Every single time. He was sick of tossing multi-million dollar servo mechanisms in the slagheap because they got melted by some high-school dropout who bought a molten ray from an AIM yard sale. Why did he always get the melting guys? Why couldn't the Melter ever go after someone who wasn't wearing fifty million dollars worth of the most technologically advanced weaponry on earth?

Everyone's a critic.

But the moment of creation makes it all worth while. It's sitting her, in the quiet of the night, that he is allowed to feel some sense of fulfillment, some kind of artistic satisfaction, however transient. It felt good to be able to create something where previously there had been nothing. What were all the villains in the world -- all the damn critics who didn't understand who he was or why he did what he did -- what were they compared to the singular joys of creation? Not a whole hell of a lot.

Won't Somebody Please Think Of The Children?

So I caught the new Ultimate Avengers movie on cable the other day. Pretty good, a definite improvement on the first. Considering the fact that the first was pretty bad, that may not seem like much of a complement, but there's actually some good bits in the new film ... and wisely, they stuck pretty close to the rock 'em sock 'em action. So even if I wasn't blown away I was sufficiently entertained for an hour and change.

But, yeah, I don't know if I'd want my kids, at least young kids, watching this thing. First, there's a great scene where the Black Widow (in an extremely small dress, no less) takes a cocktail olive out of Tony Stark's martini and, um, swallows it. It only lasts about three seconds but it was a lot more suggestive than I'd have expected, even for a PG film. The most questionable bit, however, was the scene near the, um, climax of the film, when Iron Man and Giant Man have to fly into the heart of the Skrull spaceship to blow it up. Doesn't sound bad, but on film it basically plays as the two of them flying into a large vagina and stimulating a glowing clitoris the size of the Flatiron building. Now, I can't be the only one who saw that, right? Right? I've seen a copy of that one sitting around at work, so I know some of the kids are watching it.

Yesterday I was sitting at work watching television with a group of kids - an episode of Dragonball GT, I believe. Now, I am no Dragonball expert - I can vaguely recognize Goku but I had to have someone explain to me why he was a kid again. But it seemed odd to me that the storyline in this particular episode was that Goku goes to hell, gets tortured by the Devil and tormented by the souls of the people he's killed, and is then devoured by this weird dude with a giant penis growing out of his back. It's not even some kind of vague resemblance to a penis - no, it's a giant, elongated pink penis, complete with enlarged tip and undulating ribs. It grabs Goku and swallows him whole. As I sat in this room with a dozen kids and two or three other staff, I wondered if I was the only person in the entire world who didn't think that was really, really messed up, at least in the context of a kids' cartoon? No one else seemed to notice, which is really disturbing on a whole 'nother level.

The Fate of the Critic
Part Four





The Fate of the Artist
by Eddie Campbell

I think anyone who desires to be an artist of any kind really needs to sit down and watch Fellini's 8 1/2. Perhaps it's not the type of movie you could expect the young and ambitious to understand -- more likely, it's the type of story you could appreciate on the surface, revelling in the textures and techniques of the storytelling itself, while the actual meaning at the heart of the narrative passes through your system undigested. It's not so much that the movie is about anything as hoary and uninspired as getting older or gaining perspective based on age. No, really, it's about something very specific, something extremely private and essentially internal in the act of art itself. That Fellini was able to put it up on the screen without making it seem incredibly self-indulgent and borderline incoherent is a testament to his skill as a filmmaker. But anyone who has ever struggled to create will immediately recognize themselves in the film.

People speak about art as a way of externalizing internal feelings, of attempting to understand previously inexplicable facets of human existence through expression. All well and good, of course, but that's all bullshit. Anyone who sets out with such lofty goals in mind is either doomed to failure or doomed to create intensely mediocre art -- interpreting art is best left to the audience. Creating art is hard work, any kind of art. It requires a formidable investment of craft and inspiration. The meaning that becomes attached to art is only attached after the fact, because good art is invariably, first and foremost, a personal reaction. You can't make any kind of hard-and-fast rules about art, but I'd be willing to bet that anyone throughout history who has ever set out to make good art has begun with something personal and intimate as their starting point -- how else to create the kind of connection that can pull an artist through the hard slog of creation?

Perhaps I'm projecting here. But art is still hard work. And the odd temperament which allows the artist to continue forward in the face of circumstances (because, really, creation is an act of measured futility) is almost impossible to understand, least of all for those actually inside the beast. I remember reading an anecdote of Stephen King's (I can't remember where I came across it, unfortunately) in which he stated that it wasn't until long after the fact that he realized The Shining was about his own writer's block, even though everyone who has read The Shining or seen the movie figures out pretty quick that the story is about writer's block (as well as substance abuse and professional anxiety, two other factors which were much on King's mind at the time). Well, that may seem unusual but it makes perfect sense to me: the artist in the process of creation is slogging through a deep, dark and dank tunnel, and it is only after the fact that he looks around and sees what he has actually accomplished. I can attest to the truth of this description myself.

I imagine it must be even worse for a filmmaker, working in tiny bits and pieces of time, usually filmed out of sequence, piled up in a closet until the time comes to assemble the final product. And then perhaps it's possible to get a clear idea of what is going on, but then, well, it's like a little miracle -- immensely satisfying, like nothing else. At least for a few hours. And then once it's gone and discharged, the hard reality settles in and the artist has an entirely new set of problems to worry about, not to mention the stress involved in having to start something entirely new in the near future.

8 1/2 isn't about writers' block so much as writers' frustration, writers' futility and writers' laziness -- all of those emotions and sensations that might seem inherently strange and slightly removed from the struggles of everyday existence, but are probably the most real and critical sensations in an artist's professional life. Whatever else it may be about (and it is about many things, don't get me wrong), 8 1/2 is about creative ennui. I don't think the phrase "writers' block" really applies, because I really hate that term. Myself, personally, I have rarely felt that I was blocked. What I am more likely to feel is lazy, unmotivated, racked by anxiety or simply exhausted. Not without reason does the movie begin with Marcello Mastroianni at a cushy resort for neurotics -- he's falling apart without inspiration. It's a neat variation of La Dolce Vida. In that film, Mastroianni is a frustrated writer forced into the secondary field of journalism -- undemanding, puerile celebrity gossip journalism, no less -- unable to summon the nerve to actually make a go at his real ambition and driven to dissipation and resentment as a result. In 8 1/2 Mastroianni begins already at the height of his career, already a famous director who has found considerable acclaim, with incredible scrutiny focused on his next project. Where do you go from there? Trying to find inspiration is hard enough, trying to summon up the motivation to work in a gilded cage could be even worse.

Which is essentially where The Fate of the Artist begins, in media res. 8 1/2 begins with Mastroianni fleeing the site of his next great film, an incredibly expensive and comically elaborate science-fiction set covered in actors, crew, producers and press. The Fate of the Artist begins with Eddie Campbell already gone, having exited stage left before the book even begins. Even the picture of Campbell on the book's cover is deceptive, a wooden scaffolding with a picture of Campbell's face, erected to fool the prospective reader into believing that Campbell is in fact present when he is actually gone.

And so what we have is an autobiographical story in which the subject -- ostensibly the first-person narrator -- does not actually appear. This inversion is actually the first of many throughout the book -- a comic book that purports to not be a comic book, a graphic novel told through text and photography, an extended narrative composed of little jumpy bits and pieces, scraps and scribbles in a dozen different modes. In form it is slightly incongruous, if not totally at odds with Campbell's overall output. But for years Campbell has been fighting Sisyphian battles against the forces of orthodoxy, arguing against "conventional wisdom" insomuch as it applies to the strange world of comics. As his daughter Hayley says during the course of the investigation: "[Once] you start operating with your own dictionary you find yourself moving, an inch at a time, beyond communication with your fellow peeps."

Campbell has always been such a confident and prolific artist that the gaps in his output have been more revealing than the long periods of tireless consistency. Bringing his own Eddie Campbell Comics imprint to an end after the conclusion of Bacchus and the ambitious overreach of Egomania magazine seems, in retrospect, a singularly jarring and unexpected climax. Now it makes sense, as does his spending a year to illustrate a Batman graphic novel and doing fill-in issues of Captain America somewhere in between.

It shouldn't have been such a surprise. After the Snooter was about nothing so much as the sensation of mid-life crisis. But The Fate of the Artist is not really about the same kind of crisis, at least not in the same way. An artist doesn't have to be in mid-life to reach a crisis (although it helps); many artists exist in a perpetual state of crisis. Campbell relates the artistic crisis to his age by way of ossification: he has reached a point where his life and way he lives it has grown increasingly static and controlled. An artist needs to be able to define their own surroundings to some degree in order to live a productive existence, but Campbell is seen taking things to an almost pathological degree. Those familiar with his (blasphemous) thoughts on cutting up books to create the most organized reference file possible will not be surprised by the odd manner in which he micromanages his CD collection. As someone who runs my own kingdom of clutter in as -- shall we say? -- eclectic a manner as possible, I can definitely relate.

As in 8 1/2, Campbell's relationship to the women in his life assumes a position of central importance. An artist never ceases to be an artist, and by necessity the bulk of their existence revolves around creating as easy a context for their art as possible. All of which is incredibly difficult for the people around him, who are not objects to be arranged and rearranged at the whims of the great auteur. My favorite scene in 8 1/2, and by extension one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema, takes place towards the end of the movie, a dream sequence in which Mastroianni is surrounded by all the women in his life -- his mother, his wife, his family and lovers and even slim acquaintances. All are arrayed around him, willing to cede to his every whim, his concubines assembled for his pleasure and his family devoted to his care, all intensely happy and almost religiously ecstatic to be granted the privilege of serving him. It's a grotesquely chauvinistic image, but that doesn't mean it isn't also essentially correct. The image of Campbell in The Fate of the Artist, although much less majestic in design, matches Fellini's conception of the artist as petit bourgeois dictator -- he is a distracted by the degree to which the world around him does not agree with his desires, and in many ways actively stymies his ambitions of peace and order. The smallest irritation is continually seen to blossom into an incredible frustration, a sign of an inner ability to comprehend an essentially chaotic life. The women around him, meanwhile, are continually frustrated by his growing inability to tolerate deviations from his "standard" reality.

So what is left, then? The Fate of the Artist leaves Campbell's story unfinished. There is no conclusion. Ultimately, Campbell does not succeed in escaping to a desert island, he's still left on the (slightly less desert) island of New Zealand. The image of God scrawled on a napkin which begins the story appears periodically throughout, but the question as to whether Campbell ever achieves anything remotely close to the desired state of grace is still open. Perhaps the only grace open to Campbell at this late stage is to be relieved of the necessity to define his existence. The way out is through. Mastroianni in 8 1/2 is, of course, left on the precipice of this anxiety, and even with his skill Campbell is unable to make the transformation clear; the book leaves us with a strong implication, but the future is still opaque. The creative ennui is still palpable, but there is at least the understanding that further inaction would be fatal. Although seen from that angle The Fate of the Artist presents us with a protagonist in a holding pattern, still merely on the cusp of epiphany, there is a great sense of potential energy in the book's final pages. It seems as if even Campbell himself has grown frustrated by his indolence: shit or get off the pot. Thus, we are ultimately left with the knowledge that the actual fate of the artist is simple: the artist either creates or he doesn't. It's a remarkably effective binary system. Anything else is sophistry. Perhaps he will, perhaps he won't, but continuing to muddle his way through the middle is just lazy.