Up on the Wall ...

I hang 10 new comics on my cubicle wall every week. i don't do it to remind me of my childhood or bunnies or whatever. I hang them up cuz the shit looks good on my wall and i can forget where i am for a few brief, imaginative moments throughout the day.

After I started researching these books in depth and discovering the writers, artists, story-arcs, and cultural/sociological relevance, i began to see a similarity in the enjoyment of the comics genre to the pasttime of following a sports team like the Red Sox or maybe a tennis diva. You could maintain an infinite involvement with statistics, relationships and storylines without having to buy tickets to the game (why would anyone ever pass that up?!) and the admirers are a loyal crowd. I admit without hesitation to my friends or other comics aficionados that i'm in it for the art. I love the potential animation that a color newsprint page presents from an issue of Metal Men or Looney Tunes, but I'm a technology geek, too, so I like to sort and collate information. It orders my world.

If you're not enthralled with comics, just skip the technical stuff and enjoy the artwork. i call that "reading", too.

Adventures On the Planet of the Apes #4 (“Trial By Fear”), Feb/1976

On the cover, an Orangutan judge decrees: “The defendant has been found guilty … and the sentence is death!” and the Charlton Heston look-alike in shackles responds: “Dirty animals, you won’t get away with this! I swear I’ll have my revenge!”

All I can say to that, is, you should be polite when you’re visiting someone else’s planet.

Superman #82 (“Back For Good”), Oct/1993

This is one of my favorite variant, specialized covers; a full mylar wraparound with liquid silver, emerald green and gold with a clenched-fisted Superman in his superhero tights, emblazoned on the centerpiece. This issue had at least one other cover variation (non-mylar) that shipped in one of those Big “S” sealed plastic bags and I was really lucky to find this particular copy for a buck with a protective bag and board. At the same time, I snagged some 50-centers at my favorite Cup of Kryptonite coffee/comic shop near the airport right after the owner, Kyle had picked up the collection this comic was in. This one exhibits no sign of the typical superfine surface scratches, an unusual thing for these special mylar covers. I think I have only one other that is in such great condition. The spine is tight with no puckering and I would grade it at NM 9.8.

Captain Marvel #43 (“Destroy! Destroy!”), Mar/1976

It doesn't show through on this scan but the cover colors are spectacular  -- the “Captain Marvel” red lettering with yellow highlight makes for a garrish, hotdog-style title that pops off the page. When I first saw this in the 50-cent bin at the store, the cover was grubby enough to imagine that the last owner had actually been eating an oscar myer wiener slathered with mustard while enjoying Steve Englehart’s writing with Al Milgrom’s artwork, and color assistance from Bernie Wrightson.

That puts this comic into an interesting intersection of Wrightson’s and Englehart’s timeline. Wrightson had just a few years earlier been doing spectacular musculatures with “The Swamp Thing” at DC (I think his skill, and possibly, style came through the inspiration of meeting Frank Frazetta in 1967), and Englehart was soon to be jumping ship in the opposite direction, going to DC, after having editorial disagreements with Marvel. I love, love, love Wrightson’s Swamp Thing – but it is the cameos of Englehart’s lifestory that capture my attention here.

Engelhart’s condensed bio is on Wikipedia along with his liberal political ideology and how it dovetails with his comicbook writing.  Earning a degree in psychology, he served in the army during the Vietnam War and was discharged honorably as a conscientious objector! Wiki states:

Englehart brought a complex, freewheeling style to Marvel's comics, often dealing with philosophical or political issues in a superhero story, such as a celebrated run on Captain America (with artists Sal Buscema and Frank Robbins) that reflected the then-ongoing Watergate scandal.

And that’s not all. Along with artist Frank Brunner, Englehart gets snagged for a Dr. Strange story arc in Marvel Premiere #13/14 as a result of a character named Sise-Neg (spell it backwards), a sorcerer who time-travels backwards to collect all magical powers ever created. He travels ultimately to the Big Bang of the Universe and becomes omnipotent. Sound like a familiar three-letter word? After publication of issue #14, Stan Lee noticed the conclusion of the storyline and feared the market loss of creationist readers and demanded that Englehart and Brunner print a retraction stating that “God” should have been “a god”. In an interview in 2005, Brunner tells how the artist and writer responded: he and Englehart, posing as a minister from Texas write a fake letter of praise for the storyline and send it to Marvel. Marvel gets the letter, serendipitously prints it, and Lee’s retraction order is dropped.

Brave and the Bold #66 (“Metamorpho and The Metal Men”), Jul/1966

Metamorpho is a character that I became interested in after discovering the 6-issue series that Dan Jurgens and Jesse Delperdang published with DC in 2007 (“Metamorpho Year One”). Jurgens wrote through all the issues but only pencilled the first two (followed by Mike Norton pencilling on 3 thru 6), but Delperdang’s color work really got me going.

This Brave and the Bold is one of four featuring Metamorpho (also appearing in #57, #58, then #66, #68) in B&B Vol 1. I don’t have 57 and 58 but the artwork is delicious, and what better character combination could you ever achieve than Metamorpho with The Metal Men?? I think the highlight of The Metal Men series was from the artwork of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito, and the orginating artist for Metamorpho, Ramona Fradon, presents a similar character style to Andru and Esposito but slightly more emphatic action with delightfully whimsical pencilling flowing from her covers and story panels. I believe for the first four or five issues of Metamorpho Vol. 1, Ramona did all aspects of the art, inside and out.

For Issue #66, Fradon did the cover (Charles Paris contributing color) with Mike Esposito adding his inks to the interior story.

The Tomb of Dracula #14 ("Dracula is Dead!"), Nov/1973

“Blade has managed to slay Dracula by impaling him in the heart with one of his wooden daggers. However, before the vampire hunters can get rid of Dracula’s body, the villagers in Dracula’s thrall break into the mortuary and overpower the heroes, taking away Dracula’s corpse.”

This is another example of an awesome 50-center I pulled out of the bins at Cup of Kryptonite and it will be one of those that hangs at home for  ghoulish Halloween atmosphere in the coming weeks.

How about the dialog on the cover?

“You’re doomed, Dracula! We brought you back to life – only so that we could kill you again!“ 

Poor Dracula. Sounds like my life at work every day.

Ok, does the cover have ANYTHING to do with the storyline? Sometimes stories are written last, around the cover, sometimes it gets kinda loose and sometimes the cover action doesn’t even relate to an internal panel but is simply ‘atmospheric’. Angry mobs waving pitchforks, flaming torches, and crucifixes are appropriate for any godless monster sleepwalking into your average contemporary village. Throw in a gorgeous, unconscious, blonde damsel draped in Dracula’s arms and you’re instantly marketing the right literature to any 13-year old kid in 1973 standing at the magazine rack. Only twenty cents at the register, duh, gimme a Defenders-101 for fifty cents while yer at it.

Well, that's only five -- the others were not as notable (another Brave and the Bold and some more Tomb of Draculas). If you like this post i'll do more, please leave me a note and let me know what you thought about it.

yellow jersey

jobhunter bicyclist rides the lightspeed track

to his finish-line meeting, texting semaphores of hope

with apples and blueberrys,

jumping potholes, dodging drivers,

deftly scoping morning rushhour mentors.

bluegold spandex suit stretches on sinew, bone and absent gristle

like a weight-room poser before the tour de france.

could he break away from an interview as easily as his hounding pack,

knowing the difference in risk of losing a job or losing the race;

losing the vaunted jersey to unemployment and someone else’s sweat?

i still wear my yellow silks and keep my backward connections:

a waterfall of letters with endorsements from my top desk drawer,

envelopes and  cancelled stamps,

paper meeting agendas crashing down to the foaming rocks of

boredom and scribbled in pencil.

i’m wireless, too! certified papers that document my day.

away! away! from cell tower conversations

whose tasteless,

invisible microwaves spread,

attenuating out to the small talk of space.

i always imagined a tour de france cyclist late for a meeting or job interview and the sweat and tension this situation presents.

the bug

clings to the cracks in

the bricks of my vestibule

like a blind rock climber patting

the surface with stick hands

and a cane,

probing for new lines to chock its

bug-spit carabiners,

waiting for a brighter light,

the touch of a mate,

an acrid puff of air.

it has no driver’s license,

and it smells bad

devoid of compassion, its life

charted by a

jagged, vertical path on the wall.

without malice, but then a sting,

it may unwittingly

kill me.

no public notice, no knock on the door.

I will not understand its motive.

It will not understand my funeral.

opened flowers

 

near-buried in the summer-young hay

with afternoon flits, swallows sounding in the wind

and grain-thieving varmints swimming

in the waves of this four foot tall

field cover, I wondered

what crayon color this was and dozed off

in the liferaft of a do-nothing day.

with each breath, a tide of sweet green air swelled in my lungs.

there is no quelling my thirst for green like this and

I drank deep the prairie vale,

its emerald fluorescence breaking along the moving hillside.

all that I could see before me was immutable, opaque, plate glass green.

I awoke standing (to opened flowers),

a challenge of parasols on fire

in the meadowed embers of the sunset,

and drank heavily through the evening,

washing down the mood-ring sky with these

flamenco blooms, their floral cast, and slowly lost my way

into the dark, azure tarpaulin shade of night.

Garage Sailor

there are definitely a few things better than the drudgery of a day’s work! this poem is how I might act out my impulse to end the day early.

Scuttle the click of keycaps

beneath calloused fingertips and

anxious gangplanks

cantilevered above

your business meetings -

strip from your office-soured clothing!

Jump into the port-side wake to

tred through the eddies of

weekday flotsam

for the trinkets, knick-knacks,

the neighborhood buried treasure;

…but now hear this …

Reach for the bargain lifesaver!

Like a ouija board on the water,

let it pull you up

the driveways;

new discount harbors,

navigating

the perfect price!

foothills of the past

Shortly after the time Marconi began his famous radio transmissions, my grandmother as a young girl was still on horseback for supplies at the small general store. Situated at the crossroads of a Swedish settlement in Iowa, it was near the church my great great great grandfather built and ministered.

As I grew up, my grandmother recounted these tales of my family as they were passed down to her but the basis of her own existence as a little girl was modern: riding a horse into town for supplies was better than walking. And she knew stories of hardship. Even before the homes were staked, the first winter was severe and early, forcing her ancestors to dig caves  into the hillsides for shelter.

She lived in between two centuries, to the age of 103 and was lucky enough to see the memorial of the immigrants’ community in its ghost-town form of Calliope Village, put onto a plot of land near her town's present day railroad.

--- 

at the end of her burial day as

the wind cut through the switchgrass,

a soot-black suit carried forward

the muted explorations of a cobweb-rattled

stable from one hundred years ago.

steeped in molasses-soaked barley, the sweat

of a horse under cracked leather tack

drifts through the homesteader’s air on a calliope song

long gone across the tracks to the empty side of town.

clouds of dust ripple out like marconi’s waves on the

gravel road as she meditates in the saddle to the clopping

hooves of her four-legged ride.

a stone-ground loaf of bread waits on the sill,

baked for her by the shopkeep’s boy at the grey clapboard

store facing north near the church and cemetery where

her great grandfather Ring lowered the

dead and softly sang their praise:

swedish hymns to the tenders of the prairie

and the harmonies they knew in the dust, rough-milled grain

and the holes dug into the winter ground.

I learned these ballads at her side in this four-cornered

churchyard where the sandstones lean distilled through

time and I quietly now sing out my goodbyes

to the girl with her warm bread and

long-stride friend as they fade down the road

to their far place in the foothills of the past.

See also: 

Lost at Sea - Part One

Lost at Sea - Part Two

 

Lost at Sea - Part Two

A Search for Meaning

  

Mark and the Healey, Fall 1966

When a friend’s car in storage finally had to move, Mark brought it home and managed his teen-survival by escaping to our garage where he and his high-school buddies would spend their time for the next couple of years restoring a very ugly, very non-running Austin Healey 3000 MK-I that would “soon be cherry, really!” Pistons, connecting rods, and camshafts would land in one of four spider-filled corners as each new portion of the engine block was split open like a carp on the riverbank. Sections were gutted and placed to rest in the right sequence - or not - and they prayed for their salvation with the hope to finding their way back to the convertible’s beginning; the mechanical mecca of their 2.9 liter car, to purr again like it did at LeMans in 1959.

This was how the dream spunout in their heads while eating Scrumptuous cheeseburgers and hanging at the drive-in theatre watching “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” They played like teenagers late at night and away from home, and the car was still a dream remembered every morning, but that wasn’t the moving force for them. It was the refuge of the garage and its social event playing weekly that was their raison d’etre. It was better than a Wednesday night cardgame though you might have easily seen their caricatures off the sideroad parking lot as dogs around a table painted on black velvet; green plastic visors on their foreheads and wrenchs in their hands; doobies in the ashtrays. Their time as friends working on the car together was a process that would help them all slowly pull that family crap of their households out of them like a swallowed fishhook; away from the environment most damaging, away from the emotional chaos and dysfunctional alignment to their parents.

Their idea worked for awhile but the closer they got to putting pistons and cylinders back into harmonic balance, the farther away from reality a maiden-voyage fill-up at the Sinclair pump would ever become. They had the dream, but lack of cash dashed their hopes as gran prix mechanics, and their time in the garage became less time spent on the car and more on their bravado.

Gran Prix Mechanics, Fall 1966

After the second year with Mark and his friends holed up in their ashram, it was apparent to my dad that the Austin Healey wasn’t going to roll down the driveway on its own ignition and he had the heap towed and scrapped and regretfully gave Mark the fractional money returned from the sale for his college funds as a payoff. He had better things planned for the garage, like lawnmowers and rakes, and wanted the oil stains over and done with. At this point, quite the drinker in his own right, my dad hadn’t gone so far yet to check himself in to the 12-Step Program but the Healey stood as an incentive moment from a latenight confrontation illuminated under the swinging glare of a naked bulb dangling high from a single wire, each arc shifting the light and stretching the shadows of an ugly moment of ultimatums; friends scattering into the dark; fouled spark plugs kicked on the floor, and the garage door closing on the dream of a cherry car with a high-performance history for the last time.

You should know that my dad had grown up in the Great Depression where northwestern Iowa bordered South Dakota, in the midst of thousands of other Scandinavians who had staked their claims and  transplanted their farming knowledge in the 1860s onto the restless fields of 4-foot tall grasses, blackened sod, and tight little Seventh Day Adventist communities. His ancestors had founded a township in South Dakota near Big Springs and his great-grandfather, as carpenter and pastor, built the church and its graveyard on the knoll beside that still quietly covers those first settlers of that small corner of the American landscape.

My dad was without brothers or sisters and his childhood was all about work. His grandfather was a banker who had lost everything in the 1920s and went back to the dirt and muck to survive. My dad’s mother was also an only child and sang from a strict and a severe prairie hymnal, and he was bequethed the same at age four when his father died. His mother quickly remarried for survival, to a smalltown entrepreneur in Hawarden who owned a dry-cleaning business and the three worked together in the steam-filled rooms mixed with solvent to make ends meet.

He believed in a strong work ethic and freely assigned our chores but I also think he wanted us to understand that we could survive the inevitable drudgery of work and still live a fulfilling life. As the eldest male, Mark felt inequitably burdened by this dogma and with resentment held it over my head as ‘older brother ammo’ for years. After the garage repair shop was closed, my dad decorated it with his favorite lawn implements but NO power mowers until it was deemed that I was old enough to carry on the torch of turf trimming. Into our adulthood, Mark would continue to torment me with the guilt that ‘I got off light with the power-mower’, that his indentured summers were defined by Greek mythology; to forever push a rock up the hill of our 2-acre lawn by the helical blades of a push-mower and the heroic determination of his own adolescent muscle.

All behind him now. Finger Lakes, Summer 1968

First the oil paints, canvas and lessons, then the sportscar to the metalcrusher, and now, my fault, the power mower that might have given the meaning of love to his life. He could only stand by helplessly as my father bestowed upon me (obviously his favorite son) the luxury of a new and  powerful LawnBoy with razor-sharp blades and limegreen paint. Mark stood planted in one spot for the next half hour, glaring and seething as I pushed it effortlessly, trickling a gratuitous bead of sweat down my unworthy, undeserving brow over the buff green. I felt him looking on as the mower hummed smoothly over the yard like a hovercraft, row after row – then sensing his resignation – I glanced up to see his retreat into the house, back to the quiet of his black lair under the basement stairs and the comfort that was there for him.

Next … Closing in on the Gulfstream

Previous ... Part One - Casting Off