A few thoughts on a new-ish theme for an old, worked-over hero:

ori­gin mythos par­tially intact:
Frank Miller’s Bruce Wayne as a boy falls down the well; some­thing dark and sin­is­ter there imprints cer­tain psycho-spiritual tem­plate, brings about changes in char­ac­ter and the even­tual down­fall of the sys­tem of secu­ri­ties around him–> lead­ing to the death of his par­ents (seen much much later to be the work of the psy­chos­pir­i­tual agent within him), alien­ation of his world, and his jour­neys to Africa, the Mid­dle East, Rus­sia, Cen­tral Asia, China, then over to Cal­i­for­nia, even­u­ally back to Gotham City..

(each of these jour­neys a sub-story, pos­si­bly through flash­backs or inter-episode events… e.g. con­fronting night-demons in the Mid­dle East, psy­chotropic glad­i­a­to­r­ial com­bat in African jun­gle (** where the com­bat­ants drink some hal­lu­cino­genic root/tea and have a dream-scape com­bat in the ether between con­scious­nesses) etc. –> all the while pur­sued, haunted, and dri­ven by the psy­chos­pir­i­tual agent within him… accru­ing knowl­edge about life, magic, fight­ing styles, “con­trol­ling his mad­ness”, and more and more it dawns on him that he has another soul liv­ing within him)

Bruce Wayne, after a period of try­ing to sub­vert the internal-agent, begins to believe he must fight fire with fire. He embraces many of the dark arts he has learned, tak­ing for his famil­iar a lar­gish bat… con­se­crat­ing the moment with vows for blood… he decides to use the blood of crim­i­nals to pay his end of the power-bargain. Becomes a sem­b­lence of Bat­man… but Bat­man as wiz­ard. His fight­ing tech­nique is a blend of mar­tial arts and magic, some­times sim­ple spells to bol­ster a jump or apply mind-coercion… in the heat of bat­tle it is hard to cast large spells so he uses sim­pler aug­men­ta­tions… but has sev­eral vials, potions, pre­pared items– chang­ing the infa­mous “tool-belt” to a “reagent belt” or something.

Using spells and future-scrying, Bruce Wayne rebuilds his old for­tune, finds and re-hires Alfred (fam­ily but­ler), and has sev­eral run-ins with crim­i­nals– how­ever, oddly enough, many of the crim­i­nals start say­ing things, as if they were pos­sessed, momentary-“puppets” of what Bruce/Batman believes is the force/creature within him, and he believes his strange war with his ori­gins has been ele­vated to a new sur­real level.

As in the first Bob Kane series, the ini­tial clas­sic enemy is Clayface.

ROBIN: As the fight­ing esca­lates, and the ene­mies become more sur­real, pow­er­ful, and pow­ered by extra-human gifts (a thing not lost on Bruce Wayne), Bat­man is approached by a strange humanoid, offer­ing part­ner­ship: the Robin, who has a human-type side (Dick Grayson), but is really some hybrid like Bruce him­self– seems to be over­run by a psy­chotic, avian-like soul given to hys­ter­i­cal laugh­ter at times and a vicious cru­elty that belies his short wiry stature… out­fit more like a king­fisher, spiky hair, jewel-like body armor, fea­tures angu­lar, mis­chevi­ous evil faerie (Robin Good­fel­low, kind of Gaiman’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the Shake­speare crea­ture). It is an odd trust at first, but Robin proves him­self over and over again in help­ing and defend­ing Bat­man, though Bat­man is often forced to hold Robin back from utter cru­el­ties and tortures.

Later it becomes known that Batman’s arts have placed him firmly in the wiz­ard cat­e­gory, and he has entered into a new and dan­ger­ous vari­a­tion on the “familiar”-realm by adding Robin (with an ani­mal nature) to his exist­ing bat-familiar. Other wiz­ards arise to put down the upstart and his violation-of-magical-nature, adding a new level of con­flict to the ris­ing tide of supervillians.

A bit after some great adven­ture and action, the idea begins to occur to Batman/Bruce Wayne that he actu­ally is insane, and much of what he expe­ri­ences on a daily basis is a psy­chotic episode. Robin delights in this idea when Bat­man con­fesses it to him, and there is no end to the lengths Robin goes to per­form­ing prac­ti­cal jokes or mak­ing up nick­names for the Bat­man. “Batty” “the Dark Plight” etc

…bul­let stopped dead, I sup­pose. Was that really my last post? I will spare you the details of that flight, a sleep­less zombie-walk overnight in Bal­ti­more, lost bag­gage… I will spare you.

So, it’s been a while. I might not have even tried this (this=Blogger), but I am a lit­tle Microsoft-Accessed-OUT at the moment, and left my inher­ited lap­top machine scry­ing through its own innards, look­ing for viral infec­tions and the like– if I am going to try to exer­cise reg­u­larly, I see no rea­son my com­put­ers shouldn’t suf­fer the dis­ci­plines of health too– and I fired up the old Linux box (psy­cho­naut, I have told you all before) and *that* reminds me of post­ing. For some reason.

But I dis­sem­ble, as I dis­as­sem­ble… I have been itch­ing to con­vert said Access data­base to MySQL and pump it over to psy­cho­naut and then prac­tice admin­is­ter­ing via the web. And all that involves get­ting some of the Linux chops back up, so…

And the itch goes fur­ther, I sup­pose… I have been map­ping out writing-thoughts in my head, of late, and real­ize that writ­ing, like draw­ing, is a per­ish­able skill and must be main­tained through prac­tice. Of some sorts.

Which brings us to this, here, now: some sort of attempt at writ­ing. An update, if you will.

I was, just this morn­ing, writ­ing out a bunch of lists, and as I am still in the blush of such an orderly mind­set, I will give you, gen­tle reader, one of your very own:

1. Plane ride. But you’ve already heard.
2. Data­base for the par­ents. Which is inter­est­ing in a way, for it sug­gests some inter­est­ing work­ings of the mind. For exam­ple– and this has hap­pened sev­eral times now– I will be totally stumped by some aspect, give up on it, and find that later– days, a week– I will be build­ing some­thing more com­plex, based on that very knowl­edge I aban­doned which has sur­rep­ti­tiously become so clear to me as to be ren­dered transparent.
3. Con­tin­u­ing pre­vi­ous thought: catch­ing myself in thought recur­sion + ReJon’s ideas about pro­gram­ming accent­ing cer­tain of his human traits, con­trary to pop­u­lar misconception
4. Run­ning 4 miles, right past Randall’s house, but I don’t know which one. I think it was the grey-blue one that I heard some Radio­head out of the other day. I run once every 2–3 days. Run­ning sucks.
5. I made some pup­pet heads, shame­lessly lift­ing tech­niques from Chris Sick­els and Scott Radke. I am cur­rently sum­mon­ing up the time, energy, and mood to foam-out their bod­ies and put them in endear­ing or creepy poses.
6. bought the domain name psychicradio.org for a tighter cou­pling of site & comics.
7. con­tin­u­a­tion: I sliced up the pan­els of all the old and most the new comic pages and put a semi-random link­age walk-thru of them… go to psychicradio.org and see. Then tell me if it is inter­est­ing, groovy, frus­trat­ing, and/or incon­se­quen­tial (those are your only options, so keep to them).
8. Went to the Comic-Con with the beau­ti­ful Iryna (who doesn’t have a web page any­more but should) and we had an insane comic-frenzy and a t-shirt buy­ing com­pe­ti­tion and she bought us both H.P. Love­craft plush Cthulu dolls. Peo­ple of the world, please curb your envy.
9. From K.J. Hays: “the aver­age comic con attendee was between the ages of 30 & 40″
10. Launched into an insane work-week, get­ting so much done that I almost for­got that I am a lazy-ish per­son. I have even had mild fan­tasies of re-stocking my old plan­ner with new cal­en­der pages… not that I have any press­ing engage­ments at present, but it’s like the base­ball field… if I have the blank pages, the appoint­ments will come.
11. Went to the library today, here’s what I got:
    • The Green Arrow, writ­ten by Kevin Smith
    • Y The Last Man. heard alot about it at Comic-Con
    • The Books of Magic: Girl in the Box. Liked Neil Gaiman’s issue, thought I would see how John Ney Reiber would do.
    • The Chron­i­cles of Conan, Vol­ume 2. a classic.
    • Bone. Jeff Smith. got to check it out.
    • The Bat­man Archives. After some heated con­ver­sa­tions with comic-sage John Mark, I decided to get the full scoop, from the begin­ning. This has all the Bob Kane ones from Detec­tive Comics. And what I find most inter­est­ing is that in the begin­ning (issues 1–5) Bat­man kills about 1 per­son per episode. Threw a jewel theif off a build­ing. Kicked an Indian thug– who was unwise enough to stick his head out the win­dow– and broke his neck. Poison-gassed another Indian thug.

So, I am try­ing to decide some things. Mostly, I am dig­ging deep down inside myself to see if I have the patience and for­ti­tude to actu­ally draw some comics. My draw­ing is rusty, and though some­times its cranky and twisted lines please me, more often than not I can­not draw what I see in my head. Not like I used to, when I was an avid pen­ciller. As I said before: per­ish­able. Since I have decided, by and large, to con­cen­trate on the comic-images for artis­tic pur­poses, this seems a lia­bil­ity. So you see, some soul-searching is in order.

Alright, that’s about all I can muster for the day. I am going to try my hand at hand-coding some Queries, and as that is a bor­ing task, I will spare you the numb­ing journey.

Good week­ends to you all.

Read­ing poetry out loud, to myself, while sit­ting on the toi­let. I can hear, above me, the flows, then trick­les, of water from the upstairs bath­room, toi­lets and sinks and the long, snakey sil­ver sounds of the drain­ing water, a musi­cal weave through the pipes right behind my head. I am struck a bit by the con­flu­ent absur­dity, or the absurd con­flu­ence… sand­wiched between flows of waste, a ver­ti­cal strata of elim­i­na­tion, sure, but also: the house has a sys­tem, organs and pipes and valves and flows, organic com­bi­na­tion of mechan­i­cal mus­cles and evolved physics. I laugh as I read out­loud, try­ing to cap­ture a rhythm I think might be embed­ded in the damn poem– a poem far far bet­ter than one I ever wrote– but I have never been good at read­ing poetry out­loud. In fact, part of my desire to effect this pro­nounce­ment is the lin­ger­ing, and frus­trat­ing, mem­ory of my poetry days at Mas­sArt, frus­trated vow­els, duplic­i­tous con­so­nants, pat­terns awry, and all I ever achieved was a bor­ing state­li­ness, per­haps, or maybe even a painful over­drama­ti­za­tion. Shit. And I mean that. Never a vibrant, dynamic conversation.

But any­way, ver­ti­cal to lat­eral, breath is waste too. I mean, let’s face it– we exhale what we don’t need, can’t process; the airy garbage; waste pro­duc­tion of healthy res­pi­ra­tion. I do tend to for­get that.

A cross is formed, a cross­roads, an inter­sec­tion, a junc­ture where two sim­i­lar, but dif­fer­ent, worlds meet for a moment and then move apart, more dif­fer­ent every incre­ment away from the axis… and here, on the trans­verse of plumb­ing, out comes poetry, each immor­tal word a per­pen­dic­u­lar puff of invis­i­ble waste.

1. How the bugs fly in syn­chro­nized cir­cles, spirals
2. Falling shad­ows of a hot day
3. Heat seems to be green, and milk white, and some­times a pale-yolky color
4. Some­thing inside the head that expands big­ger than the cra­nium. Pressure
5. The way some­thing I was just think­ing about slips away, for­ever, for all I know
6. See­ing a future fight, man­u­fac­tured rage, because we all see our­selves in a movie, sometimes
7. Skin and mus­cle just sag­ging off the bone
8. Breezes– mov­ing every­thing at once. Green
9. A scare­crow in shock.
10. How flies move when noth­ing else will
11. Rheumy eyes.
12. 32nd degree Freema­son, who would have guessed?
13. Creak­ing steps of one above you

Morn­ings, lately, have been mea­sured by mucus con­tent. An inter­nal barom­e­ter, sinus pres­sure and mil­li­liters of slip­pery, green-and-grey fluid that my body some­how pro­duces mys­ti­cally, in quan­ti­ties I find hard to believe. All because of some invis­i­ble spores. All because of trees hav­ing their promis­cu­ous cloudy sex. I am a gate-crasher at this ver­nal orgy, and I wade through a land of over­pro­duced seed, unlucky enough to inhale some and unluck­ier still to have no bio­log­i­cal use for the stuff, so my body– invaded, it thinks– reacts appro­pri­ately; and by that I mean defen­sively, syrup-y, like a Venus Fly Trap, to catch all the inva­sive whorls and dervishes of the pollen-ilk, and eject them in the cruel cat­a­pault of a sneeze.
…
Any­way, it’s about 6:30 AM PST, but 9:30 AM EST; all my watches and computer-clocks are still set to San Diego time. I believe the Clark fam­ily is slowly gearing-up for a visit to some local “tag sales”… which is what the East Coast­ers call Yard Sales, or Garage Sales, and the like. It’s all junk trad­ing hands, that strange, sub-market flow of goods that is the last river­ine jour­ney of a thing before its final rest­ing place, like the river Styx, per­haps, flow­ing par­al­lel to Hades, the final orbit of a thing, un-ferried.

That said, I feel like I should remind my par­ents that all the best stuff will be gone by now, as local cus­tom has the Tag Sale start­ing at 8:00 AM… one-and-a-half hours of goods gone now, and more being lost every minute. Not that I want any­thing, really– I have enough stuff, weighs me down. But I think of the books. I can­not resist a book. A book is light, but bet­ter: a book makes you, your­self, lighter. Buoys the con­scious­ness, give you more float, makes angelic– indi­vis­i­ble, invis­i­ble, immutable, immor­tal, eter­nal, illo­cale, and agile. When my plane [of life] crashes in the sea [aquatic chaos of Baby­lon­ian remark] it will be books that act as my life-preserver, and on a raft of their paper and leather and card­stock and ink I will wait out the dan­ger and the storm and land on the rocky shores of land.
…
Get­ting time to get gone, now… I had wanted to write about the scare­crow I saw yes­ter­day, real-life-crow-scaring-human-effigy, as non-Disney and non-comic as you can get. The remark­able thing about it– beyond its real­ity, that is– was the pose in which the cre­ators had fixed the poor devil: arms sort of out­stretched, not to the side in classic-scarecrow pose, but out in front, and up towards the sky… the head was thrown back and seemed to be star­ing upwards, and the entire assem­blage was one of shock, a holy-shit-what’s-coming-at-me type shock, like some­thing in the sky, or even the sky itself, was beyond com­pre­hen­sion and left the crow-scarer in frozen and anguished overload-of-disbelief.
.…..
OK, off to the col­lapsable tables of the Great Unused, now…

Have your­selves a beau­ti­ful day.

lately it’s phrase-ology, it seems. of this I am aware. But after the head­ing must come the content.

Mild over­haul in progress. I would laugh at the multi-strata res­o­nance of that com­ment, but it has been too long, too many times, and I know that a shuf­fle of design on a web­site is part of a sys­temic thing, no less; but per­haps not in the direc­tions you might think.

read­ing Under­world and The Body Artist by mr. Don Delillo is a strange yet ecsta­tic process: it hits you, hard, like a leaden, wet whal­lop, but after­wards you real­ize that that con­tact actu­ally involved thou­sands of lit­tle sharp nee­dles, leav­ing cruel, painful pat­terns of welts and pen­e­tra­tions all over you, through which new life– veg­etable and meat, pollen and bac­te­ria, fun­gus and face– enters you and min­gles. I remem­ber read­ing Ken Kesey once, talk­ing about the power of lit­er­a­ture to actu­ally alter one’s con­scious­ness, like a drug I sup­pose was the unstated com­par­i­son– seems rather obvi­ous in ret­ro­spect but was actu­ally kinda sub­tle at the time, and any­way, the point is, how much I have known this, that I can­not read some­thing that doesn’t really, dras­ti­cally, alter me at some level, a mol­e­c­u­lar rearrange­ment, a quan­tum shuf­fle, a cut-the-deck magic trick and ohmy­god! there buried lies a face-card.

What I mean is, at the edge of explor­ing comics– lit­tle pan­eled worlds of color and thick line and strange sig­nif­i­cance– I all of a sud­den see the amaz­ing, unique, mag­i­cal pow­ers of words (again).

So make room, make room calls a voice, and I try; shuf­fle the instruc­tions to move the lit­tle bits of light around, make room make room for more words, more words. Some­where up there I slip in a sliver of my pro­fes­sion, a few images of easy nav­i­ga­tion to get to comics and the like, however…

…just not today. A long drive, a revisitation-if only for an hour or two. There too I will make room, clear a small stor­age space of I-can’t-remember-what, empty the attic of that clut­ter of his­tory, and move on.

I am get­ting some new stuff together, squeez­ing in some edits inbe­tween bouts of work on the data­base. It isn’t going well, so I am ‘throw­ing up’ a stock-template for the moment. My apolo­gies. But all of this is the dizzy pre­am­ble to my intended return to post­ing more-than-infrequently. Wish me luck!