And You May Find Yourself In Another Part Of The World



I moved to Massachusetts in late October 2003, and began The Hurting in January of 2004. A week and a half ago I moved out of Massachusetts and back home to California. It had been, all told, an exile of exactly eleven years: I moved away from the west coast in June of 2000 (to Oklahoma, where I lived for three years), and marked my official return in July of 2011.

Moving is terrible. I've certainly done it a few times over the years: I lived in five different houses in Massachusetts, which adds up to a lot of unpleasant lifting and carrying, to say nothing of dismantling and reconstructing cheap furniture. But hopefully this will be the last move for the considerable future.

In the beginning and for a few years thereafter this blog had a decidedly more personal bent - which was not so much an intentional focus as an unavoidable consequence of the unpleasant circumstances surrounding my life at the time. I was living in the middle of what could only in hindsight be described as a slow-motion nervous breakdown, unemployed, in a shack in the middle of the woods with a crumbling marriage. (Hindsight being 20/20, the writing had been on the wall regarding the marriage for a long time, but it took a while before either of us realized that fact.) The reason this blog was titled The Hurting wasn't just tongue-in-cheek - there was a thick layer of real bleakness caked underneath the orange Blogspot template.

If you have had a blog for any amount of time, you should be intimately familiar with the unpleasant sensation of rereading your earliest posts. For me, however, the sensation is doubly unpleasant on account of the fact that my circumstances have changed to such a significant degree that I can barely recognize the person who wrote the first few years of this blog. It's been a long time since we were so poor I had to beg readers for money to buy groceries (that grocery money actually appeared is one of the great miracles of my life). It's been a long time since the "we" in question was a going concern. Now the "we" in question is entirely different, and the person with whom I moved to California represents a definite and marked improvement over the one with whom I moved to Massachusetts. I've gone from working the night shift at a children's mental hospital to working in academia. A working scholar and a teacher, of all things. Jesus H. Christ!

After having lived there for almost eight years, I can say with some degree of confidence that New England sucks. I'm sure it works fine for Andrew Weiss and Kevin Church, but I'm simply ecstatic to once again be in the land of Mike Sterling and David Brothers. It's not the winters, as most people would maintain - I grew up in the cold parts of California, after all, so I'm hardly a stranger to the snow. But there's something indefinably uncomfortable about the region, a coldness that goes deeper than the weather if you get my drift. If you weren't born there, it's hard to really make yourself fit - which is in itself an odd thing to say about a region filled to the brim with immigrants - but there you have it. Whenever people found out that I had come from California, they're first question was always "what the hell are you doing in Massachusetts?" In all the years I lived there I never found a good answer, and I still don't have one. Thankfully, it's not a problem anymore. The whole place may be two minutes away from falling down around my shoulders at any moment, but I'm back in California, and be it ever so humble there's no place like home. (And, not for nothing, it's worth pointing out that even with a crumbling infrastructure, the roads out here are still better than the roads in good ol' Taxachusetts - and no tolls to ride the damn freeway, either.)

I'm not a superstitious person - or more precisely, I'm one of those people who always likes to say he's not superstitious, but is in fact just as superstitious as the next person. It is therefore submitted without comment that upon returning to California the very first song heard on the radio in the rental car on the way from the airport to town was "Once In A Lifetime" by the Talking Heads. Don't ask me how, but David Byrne knows these things.

Now might be the time you could reasonably expect me to say something along the lines that, given the change in circumstances over these past eight years, The Hurting has run its course and it's time to put the blog to bed. Well, fuck that shit, you should know me better by now. We're gonna rock it till the wheels fall off. Stay tuned for more half-assed content delivered on a completely inscrutable timetable from now until the end of the world.

DON'T BUG ME

The Two Donalds



Everyone knows Donald Duck, right? Three feet tall, orange bill, sailor suit and cap? This guy?



Donald needs no introduction. He's three years older than Superman, having first appeared in 1934's The Wise Little Hen, from back when every Disney cartoon was a "Silly Symphony." Gaining in popularity steadily throughout the 30s and into the 40s, Donald soon threatened to eclipse Mickey Mouse as Disney's most popular character - much to Walt's chagrin, if the stories are true.

But the Donald we know from the cartoons and even from his appearances in Ted Osborne and Al Taliaferro's Donald Duck newspaper strip, is not the same Donald with whom comics readers are most familiar. As you probably know, the person most closely associated with Donald and his family in comics is a man named Carl Barks.



I don't know - I can't recall - if anyone has ever pointed this out before, but Barks' Donald is not the same character as the cartoon Donald.

Go back up to the top of the post and watch a minute of that Donald cartoon. What's the first thing you notice about Donald? What's the one thing everyone knows about Donald? He talks funny. He talks like a duck. His inability to communicate properly became a trademark, much like Porky Pig's famous stammer. The Ducktales cartoon even specifically referred to it as a "speech impediment," I want to say, in order to explain the fact that literally every other duck in the world could talk normal except for Donald.

Funny voices are just not something comics can do very well. Accents are notoriously difficult, and rightly so: almost every attempt to convey a regional dialect in comics comes across as awful.



Given these limitations, it's probably a blessing that no serious attempts were ever made to replicate Clarence Nash's distinctive quack on the comics page. But in the absence of his recognizable voice, Donald slowly evolved into an entirely different character from the one in cartoons. By 1947 ("The Waltz King") this is what Donald "sounded" like in Barks' comics:



I've always suspected (perhaps its been verified elsewhere) that Barks was fully aware of the discrepancy between the way his Donald spoke and the way the cartoon Donald sounded. The comic Donald is a fast-talker, glib and confident, and that's significantly different from the way Donald was ever portrayed in the cartoons. There's a reason for this: it's impossible to imagine Barks' dialogue for Donald coming from Nash's mouth.

The nerve of that chick! Tellin' ME that I might not be able to waltz well enough to be her partner! I, who invented pressurized tails for zoot suits!

These tongue-twisters would be gibberish in duck-speak.

This is one of my favorite Donald bits, from that same year's "The Masters of Melody":



Three years earlier, the issue of Donald's voice was specifically addressed in the story "Kite Weather."





Donald puts on a show in drag by assuming a different voice altogether, including an exaggerated lisp. It's only after Donald gets popped by the boys' slingshot that he drops the act - "Oh! Oh! I know that voice!" the boys scream.

Barks' interpretation of Donald became the standard interpretation for subsequent generations of Duck artists. In 1987 Don Rosa made his entry into the field with a style that very consciously recalled Barks. His Donald was, just like Barks', an extremely verbal, even loquacious character.



But the Donald we know in the comics could never properly translate to film. When Barks' Duck stories were adapted into the widely successful Ducktales series, Donald was notably absent. He appeared in the first episode and rarely thereafter, leaving his nephews with his Uncle Scrooge to accept a new commission in the Navy.



In Barks' classic Scrooge stories, the dynamic between the flinty, uptight Scrooge and the lackadaisical Donald was central to many plots. Writing Donald out of Ducktales required significant alteration, and so the character of Launchpad McQuack was introduced as a kind of surrogate Donald. McQuack was similar enough in conception that the substitution was relatively painless. Most importantly, however, the character had no speech impediment. His dialogue would not slow down or unnecessarily complicate the expository mechanics of a fast-paced weekday-afternoon cartoon plot. I don't know exactly why Donald was written out of the series, but I can't imagine that the difficulty of understanding Donald's (instantly recognizable and thereby inalterable) voice over the course of a 22 minute cartoon was not a factor. Perhaps someone out there in readerland knows more.

What does "our" Donald sound like? Of course comic book characters exist in a silent medium, but all of us in our heads carry around some idea of what these people must sound like. From a very young age I had no trouble whatsoever discriminating between the two Donalds. I understood that the comic Donald had to have his own voice. He didn't have a noticeable speech impediment. And because I grew up with Carl Barks' stories I always felt that this Donald was the true Donald, and that the cartoon version was a bowdlerized doppelganger. In my mind Donald has always sounded just a bit like Spencer Tracy.

Superman Returns



One of the bigger mistakes (among many) that the people at DC have made in the last few years has been to almost completely disregard Clark Kent. One of the very best things to come out of Byrne's Man Of Steel revamp was his reconceptualization of Clark Kent as more than just a mask for Superman. The idea of Superman as someone fully in touch with his Kryptonian heritage and slightly removed from the run of humanity ran its course in the years leading up to the original Crisis. Introducing a Superman who never even heard the word "Krypton" until (I believe) his late teens meant giving us a Superman who believed himself to be fully, completely human in every way that mattered.

This might seem like picking nits - after all, Superman is Superman, right? - but it goes back to the compassion at the heart of Superman's character. Despite his great powers Superman really does not - cannot - believe that there is any meaningful difference between him and any other other person on the planet. He truly believe that the only thing separating himself from the run of humanity is that he has been given by accident of birth the opportunity to act on his compassion. And therefore it is necessary for him to believe himself human, to believe that as much as he is Superman he is also a man named Clark Kent who uses the means available to him in order to fight for the same ideals that Superman holds.





The biggest mistake any writer can make is to portray Superman as naive. Superman is an optimist, yes, and an idealist. He honestly and genuinely wants to see the best in every person he meets. But Clark Kent is a journalist. As a journalist he is necessarily well-acquainted with the absolute worst humanity has to offer. Different creators are inconsistent as to exactly what kind of journalist Kent is - specifics don't really matter so much. Journalism is essentially a good plot device to enable Kent to be put into a number of different situations. But whether he's walking the political beat, doing crime or business or war or even sports, Clark Kent is constantly being pulled into close contact with bad people doing worse things. Whatever kinds of corruption and cruelty might miss his eye as Superman, he sees as Kent. He's a trained investigator with a super-brain, able to sift through massive amounts of data in the blink of an eye, and probably about as shrewd and clever as he wants to be depending on his circumstances. His limitations as Kent are that his reporting is obviously limited to what he can verify as Kent with the cognitive faculties and resources of a normal human at his disposal. (It strikes me that there is a great deal of story potential to be found in the discrepancies between what Superman can know and what Clark Kent can prove.)

So it's probably fairly hard to surprise Superman. He's seen it all, either as a super hero or a journalist. And that is one very important reason why Clark Kent is so necessary to Superman: without Kent, it's easy to lose sight of how smart Superman is. He is very smart. He may not have the same instincts and specific detective experience as Batman, but he's usually able to suss things out just fine on his own. It's important to Superman not to be seen as particularly calculating or cynical - because he's neither of these things, not really. But he can be these things, and being Kent is necessary because it allows the reader to see that the character understands shrewdness and cynicism just fine. Most of the time Superman can't afford the luxury of being cynical: he has to be perceived as eternally optimistic, because that's where his power lies. He is eternally optimistic, but it's not because he's ignorant of the "facts" regarding things like recidivism rates and political corruption and ethnic cleansing. It's in spite of these things that he carries on in the face of the worst the world has to offer.

If you wanted to make the comparison to Batman, this is where the two characters differ. It's Clark Kent's job to acknowledge the hard facts and expose malfeasance, to be suspicious and to act on those suspicions. Superman presents another option: an alternative based on forgiveness and an ideal of mutual responsibility. Bruce Wayne, as a public philanthropist and not-so-public captain of industry, uses his great resources to work on the larger scale for hopeful outcomes, helping ex-cons get back on their feet and funding educational initiatives to lift the working poor out of the desperation that begets crime. But as Batman he deals with the failures of the social welfare system and is forced into close contact with the scum of humanity. Superman and Batman are both essentially two people working for the same goal, but the genius of their dual identities is such that they are each able to become their own compliment, should the need arise. It's moot since (in most incarnations) Batman and Superman always know each other's identities, but it's conceivable that a Clark Kent / Batman team up - two investigators using their minds to expose corruption - might be almost as interesting as the traditional light / dark dichotomy of the World's Finest team.





Garth Ennis is rightfully praised for Hitman #34, featuring Tommy Monaghan's first unlikely encounter with Superman. Rarely discussed is the follow-up, 2007's JLA / Hitman, a direct sequel from the first story picking up the thread of how exactly Superman would react once he knew that the man with whom he had shared such a powerful moment was, in fact, a hired assassin. Everyone in the JLA reacts to Monaghan with the same identical abhorrence - he's a killer, a mercenary, a murderer. But Superman . . . Superman can't forgive Tommy for what he's done and what he does, but by the same token he can't bring himself to condemn anyone - even a hired killer with hundreds of lives on his hands. It's not moral cowardice that compels him to great benevolence even towards his enemies, rather, it's his limitless compassion that enables him to perceive the best in even the worst specimens of humanity.

There was a truly great moment in the otherwise underwhelming conclusion of Paul Cornell's recent "Black Ring" arc in Action Comics. At the climax of the story, after chasing a serious of MacGuffins halfway across the universe and coming into contact with some of the most terrible villains in the universe (as well as Death), Lex Luthor has achieved his lifelong goal of godlike power. He has the ability to do anything - to remake the universe in his image, to create lasting prosperity, eternal peace and harmony. He even wants to do these things - but there's one thing he wants to do first and more than anything else. That's right: kill Superman. The only problem is, because of how the power works, it will only obey him if his actions are completely benevolent.



It shouldn't require any kind of spoiler warning to tell you that, of course, Lex is unable to overcome his animus against Superman, even at the highest cost imaginable. But what's Superman's first instinct, when face to face with a godlike incarnation of his single greatest enemy? Forget me, forget everything about me, he says, I'm not important, I'm every bad thing you've always said I am. Just put me aside and do something good.

Because that's what Superman is all about: everyone, even Lex Luthor, is as capable of doing good as anyone else. We all possess within us the potential to perform great acts of kindness, because simply by being human we have been given the ability to choose good over evil. Even if he's 99% certain that a person will do the wrong thing, he has to believe that, if given the chance, anyone will be able to rise up and better themselves, to be that 1% that bucks the odds and makes the world a better place. If he didn't believe that with every fiber of his being, he wouldn't be Superman.

Superman



Superman's greatest power is his compassion. Throughout every successful iteration of the character that one virtue remains constant: he is an extremely powerful and endlessly resourceful man motivated by bottomless reservoirs of compassion to help people in whatever way he can.

This isn't a new observation, and it comes fairly close to what I think most people consider to be Superman's most basic core principles. But I don't think very many stories really take this idea as far as it could go. Certainly, Morrison's All-Star Superman is justifiably celebrated for being the best Superman story of at least the last decade, but its important to remember that the book succeeded not because it was in any way revisionist or "deconstructionist" (in the informal sense) but because it amplified the character's most central attributes to the point of bare iconography. It was in many respects the "purest" Superman story ever told, in that every story element was expressly dedicated to reflecting some facet of Superman's core thema. It is not the type of Superman story one can imagine coming across very often, because the tone is so unabashedly sincere that it would probably seem merely bathetic in the hands of an inferior creative team. Despite whatever qualms I may possess in regards to latter-day Morrison, there's no doubt that All-Star Superman is a towering work in the field.

But it wasn't All-Star Superman that inspired me to muse on this subject, it was a far less celebrated spin-off limited series from the mid-90s called The Doomsday Wars. If you don't remember it, don't worry, it's been largely forgotten for a number of reasons - the first of which being it is deeply mediocre, and the second of which being it served as a prelude to another in a long line of subpar Brainiac revamps that stretched from the immediate aftermath of the Crisis and on through very recently. I reread the series recently on a whim, looking for a light read and vaguely remembering the series (along with its predecessor, the actually-pretty-decent Hunter / Prey) being a good popcorn read. Sure enough, the actual plot was not particularly memorable, but there were a few bits that did stick in my mind. There's a subplot involving Superman remembering a story from his youth - mid-teenage years - wherein, during a fierce blizzard, he was unable to reach a herd of cattle stranded on a far field, and they died because he crashed the truck into a snowbank while trying to reach them. (Keep in mind this was still the post-Crisis period when Superman's powers did not even begin to emerge until late adolescence.) The flashback echoes the contemporary story, with Superman trying to carry Lana Lang and Pete Ross' newborn son from Kansas to a state-of-the-art neonatal care ward in Atlanta, but being waylaid by Doomsday in the process. (Don't worry, he saves the kid, but not before getting the snot beat out of him a few times. It doesn't end on a downer.)

The point of the story is an important one, despite the rather gruesome imagery of a young Clark Kent being traumatized by dozens of dead cows buried in shoulder-deep snow. Every now and again someone does a story that follows the general idea, "Superman can't save everyone." It's a downer, yes, and there are certainly many examples of the trope done poorly - but it's necessary to do the story every now and again for the simple reason that it underscores what might be the character's single most crucial character trait, the one virtue that enables everything else he does: humility. He is (for all intents and purposes, Captain Marvel notwithstanding) the most powerful man on earth. And yet he must be constantly aware of his own limitations, always conscious of exactly what he can and cannot accomplish with his powers. He knows that there are many, many things that he simply can't do even with all the power in the world, and although it might prove frustrating time and time again - and provide fodder for countless stories - at the end of the day he is Superman because he accepts these limitations and moves forward to do the best that he can.

He has to be able to forgive himself for not being able to be everywhere and do everything, and so by necessity he also has to be forgiving of others as well. Few writers have spent time articulating just how differently the world would seem to someone like Superman. His senses would give him an unenviable vantage point from which to observe humanity. Even if he never used his hearing or his sight to invade privacy - which would probably be fairly difficult to do in absolute terms - he would still be privy to more of the panoply of human behavior than anyone other being in history. He could see cause and effect, the roots of poverty and wealth, the consequences of charity and compassion. Elliot S. Maggin's averred that Superman would have to be a vegetarian, because his enhanced senses, extending to the infrared spectrum, would enable him to "see" the heat auras of living creatures, and register their emotions in much the same way as Daredevil does. He couldn't eat meat because - having grown up on a farm - he would be intimately aware of just how much pain an animal suffers as it dies, would be able to feel, see, smell and hear the process so viscerally that it would be overwhelming.

I think if you extrapolate that idea outwards, it's not hard to see that Superman's compassion is completely reflexive and therefore completely inextricable from the character. It's easy to do an "evil Superman" - just give us the same basic person with the same powers only without the compassion. Without that bedrock human decency, it's hard to see why all that power would not corrupt - but if you believe that "super empathy" is as much a part of Superman's powers as super strength and hearing, it's easy to see why the character would remain so steadfast throughout decades (and, in many alternate versions, centuries and even millennia) of the "Never Ending Battle."

To the best of my knowledge Neil Gaiman has only written one Superman story (not counting cameo appearances), the Green Lantern team-up Legend of the Green Flame. Originally written to run in Action Comics Weekly (that was a long time ago), it was dusted off and finally published in 2000. It's not that memorable of a story, but there's one bit that's always stuck with me. The gist of the story is that, thanks to a mystical MacGuffin (something to do with the Golden Age Green Lantern's lantern, considering that this story was supposedly set during the period when the original Justice Society had been exiled to fight an eternal Ragnarok inside a pocket universe [an odd Roy Thomas plot that was also mentioned during Season of Mists]), Superman and Hal Jordan are killed within the first few pages, and spend the rest of the story wandering the afterlife trying to find out how to return to life. There's an absolutely great bit with Superman and Hal in Hell - the real Hell - and Superman is rendered almost completely insensate. His can see and hear everything, and it's impossible for him to look away from the limitless catalog of torture and suffering in the inferno. He just stares, eyes wide open, unable to do anything but float rigidly above the lake of fire. When faced with the apogee of human suffering, suffering which he is definitively incapable of alleviating, then and only then when hope is obliterated can Superman be completely defeated.