jesus, etc.

Whew, what a week.

Don’t worry, I won’t go into it. It’s not a big thing, just a lot of work. Monday was my first day back at work after three weeks, and by Wednesday I felt I hadn’t a day off in…months. So that’s not ideal, but nothing worth bending your ear about.

Instead, I think I’m just gonna kvetch for a bit here tonight? They say if you want God to laugh, make a plan and in my experience that’s certainly true (if by “make a plan,” you mean, “have Jeff sketch ideas for things he wants to write about in advance,” and by “if you want God to laugh,” you mean, “if you want Jeff to develop writer’s block).

So, instead. Stuff I’ve been thinking about written to you, the person who is most likely to understand it and/or me.

First and foremost: a certain amount of time waiting for the morning commute train and thinking about Strange Adventures and Rohschach, both written by Tom King and drawn, colored, inked, and lettered by assorted extremely talented individuals sadly not at the center of my thoughts.

Because I’ve thought about those books a lot (well, comparatively), even after discussing them with Graeme on the podcast. The two books strike me as mirror images of one another, as I’ve said, but the other morning, waiting for the train, I had a new variation on the thought.

Strange Adventures is about Adam Strange, the Earthman turned hero of the war to save Rann whose triumphant return to Earth is slowly undone by a number of factors, not least of which are the lies he told about that war. Rorschach is about an unnamed detective hired to investigate the failed assassination of a Presidential candidate by a cowgirl and a elderly cartoonist dressed like Rorschach.

They are both, I think, books by King about what it means to have a career as a comic book writer (Strange Adventures opens and closes with Strange signing copies of his book, for example, and both books have quotes from comic book creators at the end of every issue/chapter). And again, I think that’s a thing I’ve said on the podcast.

But. The thought I had the other morning is that their differences might in part be based about the difference between the ideal and the actuality. In Strange Adventures, Strange is covering up a lie about his past and unaware of how he’s been brainwashed and reprogrammed by the enemy—there are the lies he knows he’s telling and the lies he doesn’t, and this seems to me to be something true for the majority of writers: they/we are so fixated on the lies we’re constructing, we don’t even know about the lies we’ve been programmed by society to tell. The public face of the writer is the face they put on to hide the secrets in their fiction, unaware of the other face below that private one, the one that repeats the lies they haven’t challenged.

This is a more satisfying fit for Strange Adventures, where King pulls apart the tropes in Adam Strange, the character and the setting, to show up the white savior imperialist narrative for the brainwashing that it is.

Now, whether or not he does that particularly well is up for debate—honestly, I would say that he doesn’t in that the “white savior/hero among the savages” pulp hero construction of Tarzan, Flash Gordon, John Carter (and, yes, Adam Strange) is not the narrative of the war hero. It’s constructed by the same people to serve the same masters, yes, but they’re extraordinarily different narratives—but it’s a satisfying fit, it’s a satisfying idea.

And it grows a bit more satisfying the closer you more you can speculate on how close King is intending as a inquiry into King—after all, the whole book grew out of an actual bit of online speculation about King’s pre-comics resumé as a CIA operative, and it’s not hard to look at the rather harrowing brainwashing issue as one more emotionally true to King’s experience as a CIA operative. (I don’t remember where I read it, but I do remember an anecdote about King talking about Batman on the same panel as Frank Miller and talking about how Batman’s interrogation techniques Miller made famous are fun to read but don’t actually work in real life.)

The comics writer is the CIA operative is the brainwashed war hero is the guy trying to sell his books and make a living. It’s PhilDickian enough in conception that I find it tremendously compelling.

As for Rorschach, the narrative runs similarly. The cowgirl and the cartoonist in the Rorschach costume are outsiders, whose isolation and outsider beliefs (that the aliens created by Ozymandias’ conspiracy are real) leaves them easy prey to become, like Strange, unwitting pawns in a violent political plot.

But the difference is King doesn’t identify with them—he identifies with the quiet, nameless detective who methodically pulls apart the narratives that have been cinched together by challenging everything, by refusing any kind of magical thinking to get in the way of the truth.

And in the end, King’s protagonist sits in a movie theater watching a pirate movie—just as pirates supplanted superheroes as the dominant forces in American comic books in Moore’s Watchmen, pirate movie franchises are now the dominant movie genre decades later—and ruminating about what is and isn’t valuable about creating comics. The detective’s determination to see things through and not cave to corruption come from the desire in his heart to be a pirate, to be beholden to no king and no country.

Depending on how you look at it, that conclusion could be considered a master class in either personal or writerly misdirection—King is writing Rorschach for DC and Warner Brothers and doing so in defiance to the wishes of Watchmen co-creator Alan Moore, not the other way around—but I think even if so, it suits his ideas about writing here the same way Strange Adventures suited the ideas there. Rorschach is about the writer as the outsider who gets it right; who makes sense of the insensible, uncovers the mystery, by understanding both the outside and the inside, who knows how the world works but is still true, as outsiders are, to himself.

And here’s the thing, whether it’s about art, or Tom King, or this contrast I’ve constructed entirely upon a single reading of each book: what does it mean that I think Strange Adventures ultimately fails, and Rorschach ultimately succeeds?

Because King’s Rorschach succeeds, it can be taken as proof of its own argument about art—by holding allegiance to no one but the task, the artist can create art that succeeds.

And if it had failed, and Strange Adventures—the book about how the artist is a sleeper agent for the subject he is exaiming, how King is playing everyone around him but also able to show how fully he’s been played—had succeeded, what then?

I certainly would’ve been happier—it gives me very little pleasure to extol the virtues of Rorschach, and would’ve been far happier to give the thumb’s up to a searing deconstruction of Julie Schwartz’s derivative but successful creation that also is fair enough to put King’s own feet to the flames.

But, you know, what does it mean? Is it a failure of King—as good a game as he puts forward, he can’t actually nail the truth about being a successful writer, the shell game involved in selling onself to the public and to oneself—or is it a failure of that idea?

Or is it a failure of me, that I see triumph in the book that holds the romantic ideal of the artist, and failure in the one that tries to address the reality?

I have to see the the former as the success, because I can’t see success in the latter.

Because I’m the guy who believes in the emotional truth of me being a writer, the guy who’s writing a newsletter at 9:35pm on a Friday night, and not in the actual truth—the guy waiting for the train to take him to work, thinking about something to distract him from the truth of his existence as a guy who waits for the train to take him to work?

-Jeff