Well, honestly . . . it probably wouldn’t work out so well. But there’d be full-page ads from DWR about Eames rockers on the front cover!

PX600 Silver Shade.

The day after Christmas I took the train down to Coney Island. It was snowing. (It was actually a blizzard, I was just too foolish to know).

By the time I got to Coney it was snowing so hard you couldn’t see. I saw a statue in the distance. It was a man with his arm around another man. Oh, I know this story, I thought; even a football fan from the South knows this story. Even a 35 year old knows this story. I didn’t know there was a statue, didn’t know it was down at Coney Island, didn’t know that it would be so cold that the film wouldn’t really turn out, didn’t know that between the snow and the cold and the bronze you wouldn’t be able to tell the men apart.

But after all, wasn’t that the point anyway.

GOD BLESS PEEWEE REESE AND GOD BLESS JACKIE ROBINSON.

PX600 Silver Shade.

Rats seen in subway: 2
Abandoned Metro cards seen in subway: ∞
Level of confusion upon exiting subway into Times Square: high
Times asked for directions over the course of week: less than ten, more than four
Times I might have been helpful: A couple. I hope
Dumplings consumed: six (3 fried, 3 steamed)
Location of dumpling consumption: Mr. Dumpling

Kimchi eaten for Xmas dinner? Y/N. YES
Did you like it? Y/N. YES
Christmas carols sung at Rockefeller Center on Christmas Eve: six or seven, but “12 Days of Christmas” should count extra
Friends acquired: 3
Friendships renewed: 2
Bubble tea: two (one free on Xmas)
Lost time: Oh. oh. oh.
Brow furrowed over Kick Lite NYC subway app? Often.
Q: What album sounded like New York to you that you listened to while you were there?
A: I have to say High Violet, as painfully obvious as that might seem, but it already sounded like a lonely New York Christmas blizzard, even if I didn’t know what that was yet.

SHORT ESSAY. Did you accidentally attend church in Long Island City? If yes, explain your answer.

Yes.

I was coming back to the apartment where my truly gracious friend lives (he was traveling in the South—okay, he was apparently swimming with the dolphins somewhere in the Bahamas) when I realized there was a little Catholic church catty corner from the bodega where I’d been buying grape soda. It was late, and I was beat, and I didn’t notice that there was singing until I was peering at the sign outside, trying to determine when the morning services were—and a couple passed me rushing in, which totally made me jump.

Was it personally transformative, as you hoped?
Maybe a little bit, yeah. It was lovely. It was boring. It was church, you know.

Did you take communion?
No. I am not a Catholic and do not engage in the religious rituals of others, even within the larger confines of my faith.

Really? So you didn’t kneel down when everybody else did?
Well, I did that, but that’s more out of respect.

For the religious rituals of others.
Yes.

What was your favorite part?
When the priest prayed for peace in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine.

Why?
Because praying for peace needs to happen more often. Because we need to stop the wars that we started. And because it felt like something really true and real that you should hope for on Christmas.

Like John & Yoko?
Yes. Like Happy Xmas, War Is Over If You Want It.

Do you really believe that?
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Did you think about taking communion, at least? No one would have known. You might have been a Catholic, shivering there in your Alabama toboggan and black leather jacket, as much as anyone else in Long Island City at the stroke of midnight in this new millennium.
Yes. I thought about it.

How many languages did they sing “Silent Night” in?
Three. Anglais, Deutsche, and Espanol.

What did you do afterwards?
I walked back towards the East River. I took the elevator up. I undid my scarf.

What was in your pockets?
My Metro card—the $27 one that you can ride all week on. My dinosaur wallet. My keys. Some singles in my right pocket in case I saw a busker doing something cool, like a Beatles song or something (no electrified pan-flautists). My iPhone.

Then what?
I stood on the balcony and I looked at the lights of Manhattan. I watered the Christmas tree. And I went to sleep alone.

First off, stupid rule.
Secondly, why not write
about what most interested me
and one million other screaming
Southern teenagers?

Sonnets about Jean’s suicide
on the Moon, haiku detailing
Ororo’s claustrophobia

(which could be traced to her parents’
death in a collapsed building)

pentameter about a world
where mutants are feared & hated
because they are different, where
it could one day get so bad that
we’d round them all up in camps,
collars and tags according to
genetic markers.*

*See ish #141, the legendary “Days of Future Past” storyline by Mssrs. Claremont & Byrne!—ed.

even
at eight I knew
that was crazy,

we’d never do that in America, but I’d
seen Red Dawn, and maybe if the right
wrong people got into charge it could happen here,
but not with us, not without
something terrible happening, maybe if
the Russians took over, maybe only
then, and Wolverines! is not just for
your stupid football team, it means
you got knocked down into the sewers but you
just made the wrong one mad, bub.

But that’s crazy we’d never.*

*See ish #1942, “The Struggle of Korematsu.”

That’s crazy we’d never.*

*See ish #2009, “Riot at Camp X-Ray!”

That’s crazy we’d never.*

*See Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, Re: Standard of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. §§2340-2340A (“We further conclude that certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A’s proscription against torture . . . We conclude by examining possible defenses that would negate any claim that certain interrogation methods violate the statute”) (August 1, 2002).

I shoulda dropped right out when
the man scowled and said,
comics, what the hell
does that have to do with poetry.

Oh Maine, it’s okay, we understand you
down here in Mississippi.
We wouldn’t have voted to
integrate the schools in ’54, either

Hell we even shut down our
City pools in Jackson, so as not to commit
a little white child to being splashed
by a colored one.
Hell we had riots when ole Meredith
wanted to take botany, and we
Shot Medgar Evers in the back.
Hell we shot him in the back in
the driveway of his house. I can never remember
if his kids were home at the time,
but we shot him in the back at his home.

Oh Maine, it’s okay
join the club.

Here is another friend,
who will stand in the doorway with you
our Yellowhammer Cousin the
Heart of Dixie.
Hell Bull tell them
nobody remembers that all those pictures of firehoses
they was all turned on children that day
(the adults were all locked up from a week of protesting)
look away, look away
Firehoses trained on j.v. cheerleaders holding their
little brother’s hands.

O Birmingham, O Bombingham
Thy streets are so unchanging
Portland you would love it.
Nobody would so much as blink at you here,
for what you did.
No one would look away.
We would cheer with you, pray with you.
Oh Maine even the churches aren’t safe in Alabama.

O Maine, last night I saw Lester Maddox on the teevee
with some smart-ass New York jew
Oh Hell Maine, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

It’s okay, we’re here to help you
I can teach you Dixie over the phone
it’s such a lovely song, a truly lovely song
Oh Maine welcome to our club.

O Maine we stripped and beat Fannie Lou, we
wrapped a little boy in barbed wire and
threw him in the River. You can catch us if you try
O Maine, O Maine
do you want to join our club.

O Maine we are dead and we are dying
Our hair is white, our bones are brittle
O Maine we need new blood.
O Maine if you squint
faggot and nigger are
the same word.
We can just change up some
of our literature and you can use it if you want,
we don’t mind if you peek over our shoulder
and copy our homework.
O Maine please don’t look away.

O Maine we need new blood.
O Maine we are only green when summer’s here
but much pleasure can we give thee
O Maine O Maine O Maine

Don’t look away, don’t look away

I sat down and read both series together recently, and the result is that “Joe Simon circa 1968-1975” has secured a permanent spot on my “5 Persons Living or Dead You’d Like to Know What the Heck They Were Thinking” list. These are bizarre and wonderful (though not to say unproblematic) comics that represent what seems to me to be an honest attempt to engage with the political upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s—a period when a newly energized group of young people were politically active in ways that freaked their families out. And Simon did it by drawing on bizarre fantasy, science fiction, and superhero motifs to suggest not only how “out there” the youngsters seemed to an older generation but also the ways in which the youngsters were attempting to imagine new kinds of possibilities for their lives, were seeking new idioms to express their vision of the United States. Simon is I think ambivalent about these new idioms and concerned with throwing out the baby of valuable tradition with the bathwater of hidebound conservatism, but it’s an honest and noble ambivalence.

One of the important contexts for Brother Power and Prez is the underground comix movement, which was at the peak of its popularity and perhaps its creative energy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Free from the restrictions of the comics code, the undergrounds were one of the places the counterculture worked out its own self-definition as well as its critique of mainstream American culture. I don’t really think that Simon’s 70s work is an attempt to “do” an underground book at DC. Brother Power, at least, came out probably before the comix movement had really blossomed. But it’s clear that these comics share the underground’s anarchic spirit and freewheeling attitude toward both form and narrative.

(Then again, though it can be hard to imagine these days, mainstream comics generally used to be a bit more anarchic and freewheeling, at least in terms of being willing to publish a broader range of stuff, some of it bizarre. Like Superman teaming up with Don Rickels, that sort of thing. So maybe that’s the tradition that these works are really in dialogue with.)

So, Brother Power:

Brother Power is a tailor’s dummy who comes to life when he’s struck by lightning; he takes up with a group of hippies whom Simon characterizes as friendly, tolerant, and accepting, but also as lazy and misguided in their protests against the establishment. whose lives consist of “protesting against the establishment! Mainly, doing nothing!” (#1). (Tellingly, the targets of the hippie protests are rarely spelled out in much detail; at one point Simon even seems to make a distinction between “hippies” and “activisits,” indicating that these hippies at least are pretty self-absorbed.) Brother Power, though, has other ideas: He becomes the very epitome of boostraps individualism. He tries to run for Congress on a “Flower Power” ticket and, through a series of unlikely events that involves a psychedelic circus, a motorcycle gang, and a group of World War I German cosplayers, becomes plant foreman at a missile factory.

This last position puts him in conflict with his former hippie chums, who believe he has become a war-monger until he explains that the missiles are intended for space exploration. Their fears assuaged, the hippies actually come to work on the plant’s assembly line, where they are initially distrusted by the plant owners and general public before proving their loyalty by exposing a traitor who intends to sell the missile plans to America’s foreign enemies. This last development seems to suggest that Simon looked toward a future in which the political fractures between hippies and “straights” would heal, resulting in a truly united United States – albeit one in which everyone learns to appreciate the wisdom of choosing a straight life and a 9-to-5 factory job.

Oh yeah, and the traitor I mentioned above? His name is Lord Sliderule. Here he is:

Brother Power only ran two issues—apparently DC editor Mort Weisinger hated it for its (somewhat) positive depiction of the hippies (as discussed in this post, which offers a more in-depth summary of the first issue. Further reading on Brother Power can be found here.) But Simon would return to some of the same themes in Prez:

Prez is both a gonzo adventure and a serious look at what happens when countercultural idealists gain elected office and have to translate their ideals into the messy world of politics. Simon’s strength is in doing both of these things at once, so that, for instance, a story about a possible invasion by a vampire army is also a thoughtful rumination on the morality of military force. (People often cite the 1968 film Wild in the Streets as an inspiration, and sure, I can see that, but Wild in the Streets didn’t have skateboard Dracula, now, did it?) Simon’s collaborator, artist Jerry Grandenetti, was at this point best known for his work on DC’s war comics and Warren’s horror comics, and those experiences make him a good match for the proto-magical realism of Simon’s story: the general look of Prez is a very straight-faced depiction of a surreal world. Grandenetti is, to paraphrase Marianne Moore, a literalist of his and Joe Simon’s imaginations.

You can find a great overview of the series by Bill Reed here. The basic set-up is that Prez Rickard is a teenager who, after an act of folkloric heroism—he makes all the clocks in his hometown of Steadfast tell the same time—is swept into office by the huge new voting bloc of teenagers able to hit the polls for the first time since the ratification of the 26th amendment in 1971. Prez is helped along the way by a crooked benefactor, Boss Smiley, who looks, well, like this:

Smiley intends to use Prez to harness the idealism of young voters to maintain the political status quo, but after Prez undergoes a grueling initiation into the mysteries of nature at the hands of Eagle Free, an unfortunately stereotyped Native American (who eventually becomes Prez’s FBI director), he becomes suspicious of his unctuous pal and refuses to protect his interests. Though Boss Smiley wants to pull his machine’s support from Prez, it’s too late—a rush of voting teenagers make Prez their man, eventually passing a new constitutional amendment that lets 18-year-olds serve as president. The rest of the series follows his attempts to remake the United States in the optimistic image of its young people.

One of the fascinating aspects of the series is that while Simon seems largely admiring of Prez’s principles and integrity, he also suggests that he is autocratic and egotistical. He chooses his own mother to serve as his vice-president, but he ignores her advice and is generally disdainful of the “over-thirties.” Then again, it’s not clear that his VP or her peers actually offer any real guidance besides the usual platitudes and bromides; so, Simon suggests, Prez’s arrogance may be the vanity of youth, or it may represent a valid response to an exhausted worldview, or—more likely—it’s both. Then again again, there’s the fact that he has his own face printed on the one dollar bill.

One of the really interesting moments in the series comes in issue 3. After passing repealing the second amendment (no, really), Priest incurs the wrath of a group of posteritite* insurrectionists. They’re led by an ersatz George Washington – they camp at “Valley Forgery,” ‘natch —who wears wooden teeth, just like his idol, and, just like the Grey Fox himself, they submit declarations of war by launching a little person in a hollow bombshell:

The little person’s name is Baron von Stomp. Now, that’s not the interesting moment I was talking about, though maybe we should indeed dwell on it in more detail. But I’m actually thinking of a passage near the end. After the enemy militia refuses to honor a truce, Prez gives up his pacifist stance and calls in the military in order to save more lives. His compromise does not sit well with his followers:

I would have been interested to see how Simon handled Prez’s gradual shift from idealism to pragmatism (and the question of what Prez’s new pragmatism is in service of, exactly)—if indeed that’s where he was going with it.

Oh yeah, Skateboard Dracula. He’s not really Skateboard Dracula—he’s lost the use of his legs at some point and for some reason they don’t regenerate—so it’s really a little dolly he wheels around on. I have no idea how this is supposed to fit into the big picture, really, except that it affords Grandenetti the opportunity to draw a very Grampa-Munster looking Dracula scooting around the White House.

Also, I love that this is the cliffhanger the series goes out on:

I’m imagining a Warren Ellis-written series exploring the geopolitical ramifications of creating a vampire-oriented Marshall Plan to rebuild the infrastructure of the land of the dead. It would be drawn by Joe Sacco, and its three issues would come out over the course of 17 years. Get cracking, guys! Make this deal!

*Eternal thanks to Barry Hannah for coining the term “posteritite.”

“I loved Blackhawk! [. . . ]It was about achieving liberal ends by fascist means. It was the first comic book I ever stole.” – Howard Chaykin, interview in Comic Book Artist #5 (2004).

It’s a good time for Chaykin fans these days: The first year of his daring and innovative American Flagg! is (finally!) back in print, he’s reviving his Dominic Fortune character at Marvel, and he’s writing a Die Hard: Year One series for BOOM. All this and talk of movie deals for maybe either Black Kiss or Bite Club, though who knows if anything will come of that. Chaykin was at least as responsible as Moore or Miller for the 1980s move toward doing formally and philosophically sophisticated work in pulpy adventure genres, yet he didn’t get the kind of mainstream media attention accorded Watchmen or Dark Knight Returns—maybe because American Flagg! was an ongoing serial with no clear end (and one which Chaykin had left to other hands by the time those books were breaking big), or maybe because it was really funny, or maybe because it just didn’t have Batman in it. I’m hoping that his ongoing work, combined with continued reprinting of his early stuff, will help situate him in his rightfully lofty spot in the pantheon of significant and groundbreaking comics creators.

That said, when I read his Blackhawk a couple of years after it came out, it left me a little cold. Part of the problem for me at I guess 14 or so was that it didn’t seem quite Chaykin-y enough for me in the way I understood Chaykin comics at the time, which had a lot to do with ladies in vintage lingerie; nor did it seem Blackhawk-y enough for me in the way I understood Blackhawk at the time, which involved lots of gripping aerial combat. And they only yell Hawkaaaaa once! What’s up with that?

Well, so I’ve read some of the earlier Blackhawk stories since then, and sure, there’s a fair amount of gripping aerial combat, but there’s also a lot of flying somewhere and then landing the planes to go punch people, or flying somewhere and then crashing into the War Wheel and then going to punch people. So Chaykin is well within the tradition there. And my understanding of what makes Chaykin great has gotten a little more sophisticated, too; in addition to being one of the great formal innovators in comics history, he’s also one of the modern comics era’s most passionate lefties—an old-fashioned, Popular Front lefty even (and one whose ambivalence about the modern left can make for interesting and problematic friction in his stories and in his interviews.)

And that’s one of the things that makes his 1987 Blackhawk mini so great—by recasting Janos “Blackhawk” Prohaska as a 1930s anti-fascist Communist, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and an early adopter on the whole Hitler-is-evil thing (when more than a few Americans were content to turn a blind eye), Chaykin is—in the era of Reagan and Red Dawn no less—recovering the lost but vital history of heroic socialists, communists, and other loosely affiliated leftists in the United States. The real-life examples are many, but to pick one close to the hearts of this site’s southern readership: The Scottsboro “Boys”? Their defense was handled by the Communist Party USA. None of this is to suggest that Chaykin had a rosy picture of Soviet-style Communism. In fact, he has Blackhawk get drummed out of the party for being a Trotskyite, a move that points to the inevitable iron-fisted orthodoxies that enabled and followed Stalin’s consolidation of power.

But I digress; what I was going to say about the collection is, I’m glad it’s coming out, since the reprint will raise the book’s and Chaykin’s profiles in the comics world and because now if I ever want to teach it (alongside The Book of Daniel and Chris Bachelder’s U.S.! maybe?) I can. But: it’s not like you can’t find the original issues pretty easily and for much less than cover price.

So: DC should include some bonus material. For instance: Did you know that Chaykin contributed covers and a short story to the 1982 Mark Evanier/Dan Spiegle Blackhawk relaunch? The short piece (#260) is a beautiful and surprisingly complex 8-pager spotlighting French lothario Andre; Evanier’s characterization for Andre in the main series was as a basically noble ladies man driven to recklessness by his anger over the German occupation of France; in this story, Evanier writes him as a soldier who can’t quite put his love for a woman over his love of glory and headlines. It’s as though Chaykin’s pencils make Andre more of a bastard (and more interesting to boot). And then there are the covers; some of them are just pretty good, and at least one (#262) is marred by a coloring error, but there are a couple of beauts, including this scene (#259) of nighttime parachute-and-spotlight action (which doesn’t come through as well as it should in this scan, I’m afraid):

And one of my faves, which is actually taped to the side of my filing cabinet at work:

This is a quintessentially Chaykin image. Why? Well, just gaze into Blackhawk’s eyes, and you’ll see the horrible truth: that Blackhawk totally seduced and bedded that swastika before shooting it to death and setting it on fire.

Don’t forget: Gorjus wrote about PF contributor Jack Butler’s use of Blackhawk in his amazing novel Jujitsu for Christ.

Also, I don’t think anyone read Chaykin’s 2006 City of Tomorrow mini-series except for me and Jog, but when you read Chaykin’s description of it, don’t you want to run out and buy a copy? Oh, you haven’t read it? Here, from the same interview in CBA cited above: It’s “a science-fiction/adventure book—The Untouchables meets Westworld at EPCOT.” Now, come on people.

What can I say? I have terrible taste. You knew that already, right?

Maybe the tone is a bit combative in these. So? Obama’s not a wuss. I am greatly disturbed by Geithner’s Wall Street insider blinders, and when Obama went on Leno the other night, he seemed more interested in coming across as plausible and in charge than he did in actually confronting the problem. In my opinion we have had way way more than enough of officials telling us to keep quiet and trust them. It sounded like he was still campaigning. I DO trust Obama, sort of. But campaign strategy aint gonna cut it, and I think the citizens in a democracy are obliged to keep an eye of their choices.

Besides, who pays attention to poets? We may be the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but in my experience most of the emphasis in that phrase goes on the word “unacknowledged.”

5. BONUS?

The Secretary of the Treasury
paid off his friends first. Why should you be
defending this turkey? We believe in change
all right, you need a little time. Not strange.
But it doesn’t take time to begin, and you began wrong.
Same old greedy story, same old song.
I voted for you, but now you must get rid
of the “expert” crooks: We’re counting on you, kid.

6. YOU ASKED FOR IT

Listen, I hate to break the news to you,
but after the idiot self-righteous clown and his crew
did all that damage to our country, we need
a hero, a Lincoln. Don’t let it go to your head.
The heroes always have to pay a price.
It isn’t rhetoric, but sacrifice.
What’ll it be? Smooth-talking also-ran?
Or do you have the guts to be the man?

7. ON THE REVERENCE WE OWE ELECTED OFFICIALS

As far as I’m concerned, the president
is just a man, not some divine advent.
He campaigns well, and maybe, just maybe,
can throw out the bathwater but not the baby.
I’ve spent nearly fifty years on what I love,
and I’m better at it, when push comes to shove,
than he is at his job. So should I bow
and bend the knee? No way, no time, nohow.

Since I’m a poet, I naturally thought of a poetic form. What I came up with is a variation on an old standard, the heroic couplet (two lines of rhyming pentameter). My variation is eight lines or only four couplets long, way under the limit, but who wanted to say that much anyway? Naturally, I use the movement of speech to jazz up what would otherwise be the monotony of meter.

I’m writing them whenever the mood strikes, whenever a subject coalesces from the general furor and seems to merit a comment. A bonus: Though technically speaking I am sure I am just as powerless, the act of construction required to put my thoughts into a form, even a slight one, has done away with my sense of helplessness.

Here’s the first four. There will likely be others.

1. ELECTION

When Venus reached its height as evening star,
we chose a president, an exemplar,
we hoped, a quiet man who understood
no good comes of being up to no good.
What holds us all together is fair play
and mutual respect. It aint the U. S. A.
without the principles. Not shock and awe,
but truth approximated in the law.

2. STIMULUS

They’re slow and fat, easy to out-maneuver.
Let them filibuster till hell freezes over.
They’ll take the money, but swear they voted
according to principle. Duly noted.
How healthy would you be if you wrote off
ten percent of your cells, you had a cough
that wilted flowers, and you got no sun at all?
And speaking of health—here comes a new roll call!

3.HEALTH CARE

You told them, gathered together in that room,
that, like the banks, they were inviting doom,
the ax that would reduce their firms to kindling,
to wit: overvalued assets and a dwindling
customer base. Those are the facts of the case.
Oh call it universal health care, Ace,
who cares? Why not save what you can of your wealth
while getting credit for caring about our health?

4. BACK AWAY

from them there “entitlements” with your hands in the air.
Social Security doesn’t need your “repair.”
If it isn’t my money, what did you take from my check?
You want to tinker? Fine. First give it all back.
Won’t even charge you interest. What a deal!
You think we wouldn’t notice? Good buddy, get real.
You think you can keep your job behaving this way?
—Be sure and read my lips election day.