The Killing Joke

I am clearly not the first person to draw the parallel between a certain recently terminated real-world supervillain and a certain archetypal/unkillable comic book supervillain. (Nor did I ever put much thought into the blockbuster movie that made much of that parallel.) But hey, here's the first visual that looked blog-worthy in a search that yielded 993,000 results as of tonight:



(There was also this, for instance, and I expect a lot more in the days ahead.)

In other semi-breaking news, I gotta say recent events do make this development in superhero land seem even more provocative. What both of these stories make me think about is a soundbite from Martin Luther King that has been floating around Facebook all day today:

"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence, you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that."

But enough seriousness for now. Let's get back to horniness, shall we? You already know I am a bigger Batfan than Superfan, but allow me to linger on this tasty bit of hand-drawn manmeat before I disappear back into the shadows for an unspecified amount of time, as I am wont to do:

I am a sucker for this kind of image.

Four months pass, and all I give you is another lazy repost. Thank you, Daily Batman:


OK, OK, you deserve more from me after such a long silence.
So here is yet ANOTHER lazy repost from the same place:



Granted, this makes more sense if you know the game or see other video pieces by the same guerilla performance group, but who needs context? It's still pretty funny, even on its own. And I would quite enjoy seeing a real-life Batman creating an exploding bat-logo outside my local Ben & Jerry's.

Don't ask, he won't tell

Remember, boys and girls: Do NOT ask a cop this question:



It was Officer Hub who tipped me off to the site Things Not to Ask a Cop. The clip-art gent you see above appears in every installment, much like the characterless characters from the much-loved and much-missed (by me, anyway) Get Your War On webcomic.

When I first checked out Things Not to Ask, I automatically assumed it was the work of a cop or maybe a cop spouse. But the more I looked over the identical-looking single-panel comics, the more I started to wonder. Let's just say if an actual officer of the law is coming up with stuff like this, he or she (no, definitely He) surely won't keep his job very long.

Don't ask, don't tell

Normally I am put off by public displays of nationalism/patriotism/warmongering, but passing this larger-than-life-sized sign in the airport has become a high point of every flight:



That high forehead! That slightly pudgy face! Those pursed lips! That cryptic expression, bordering on the Mona Lisa's! Those shades! That trace of stubble! (I'd need to get nice and close to really capture it--something I'll gladly do, mind you, but it's not always a good idea to take too many photos in airports these days.) (And yes, I see the irony in that statement.) (I suppose you could say this guy is fighting for my right to snap and get off on pictures of him.) (And I imagine there's a good chance he'd beat the crap out of me if he knew I was thinking any of this.)

Welcome home, hero, indeed.

Out of the comics & onto the streets

Finally got around to reading "The Legend of Master Legend," Joshua Bearman's "epic tale" of self-created real-life superheroes from the Dec. 25, 2008 issue of Rolling Stone. As Bearman noted in BoingBoing back when the story first ran ,

[T]he narrative at Boing Boing (and in the wider world) about real life superheroes has mostly been bemusement at the weirdos in spandex. That was my perception of the world when I started reporting. But this is [a?] most serious look at what it actually means that people are doing this, and having found Master Legend and spent a lot of time with him, I realize that what he's doing is strange, yes, but also strangely sympathetic.

Sure enough, while there's a tongue-in-cheek quality to the story, you do get the sense that our narrator believes there is more to ML and colleagues like these and these than an easy punchline. Here's a bit from the end of the piece:

This may be the real reason Master Legend inhabits a never-ending comic book in his mind, assigning everyone a character in the grand narrative. ... [T]he reality of Master Legend, a guy who has no job and lives in a run-down house in a crummy neighborhood in Orlando, is transmuted via secret decoder ring into an everlasting tale of heroic outsiders, overcoming the odds and vanquishing enemies. To the outside world, this makes Master Legend seem like a lunatic. But to the people around him, he is the charismatic center of an inviting universe. ... Being a Real Life Superhero means that Master Legend can get in his Nissan pickup and call it the Battle Truck. He can tape together a potato gun and call it the Master Blaster. He can stand in the porch light of a disintegrating clapboard house, a beer in his hand, and behold a glorious clandestine citadel. And who are we to tell him otherwise?

Who, indeed?

BONUS! Actual comments from and flame wars between some of the heroes in Bearman's tale here and on page 1 of the online version of the story.
EXTRA BONUS! Deleted material from the original story here.

Meanwhile, back in the real (?) world ...

I must admit, I'm disheartened by the recent murder of two policemen by the so-called "Real IRA" (brilliant name, btw, which has now inserted itself sans quotation marks into coverage of the story, thus lending legitimacy to a splinter group that doesn't appear to deserve any). It seemed for so long lately like Northern Ireland was a workable, inspirational example of actual change in a situation that had been deadlocked for decades, if not centuries--a case for diplomacy and compromise as an end to violence. (I thought it was a very smart move, a few years ago, when reps from Ireland tried to lend their experience to participants in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, not that it appears to have done much good.) This NPR interview with BBC correspondent Audrey Carville struck me, as an outsider, as a very good analysis of the situation--the economic context in which the incident took place, the ironies involved (like the image of a former IRA leader now working with the same British police whose murders he once plotted), and just what is at stake right now. I try very hard to keep an open mind to every side of a story, particularly those that unfold on the other side of the world from me, but this feels to me like a pretty clearcut case of a small minority doing everything it can to undo years of hard work for the sheer hell of it.

On a lighter note, we have "Eye-borg," the superhero-ish moniker of filmmaker Rob Spence, a self-described Six Million Dollar Man fan who is outfitting his empty eye socket with a camera. The first interview I heard with him (which I can't find at the moment) explicitly raised the possibility that he could use his new "superpower" for good or for evil. And at Spence's website, you'll find the following video intro; note the many references to Luke Skywalker, Neo, and other fictional precedents:


EYEBORG-- The Two Week Trial from eyeborg on Vimeo.

Maybe Eye-borg can lend his services to "the Troubles."

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's ... Milkman!

"Steve [Beery] was dressed as Robin from the Batman comics, so the supervisor introduced himself by tossing out an effectively hokey line—'Hop on my back, Boy Wonder, and I’ll fly you to Gotham City.'"

So writes Armistead Maupin in the moving introduction to a new book about the late, great Harvey Milk, as excerpted in this TowleRoad blogpost.

In related developments, I'm a little surprised and very much disappointed that Gus Van Sant's extraordinary HM biopic hasn't yet met a bigger splash in the culture at large--I was fully expecting it to be as big a hit among hets and younguns as Brokeback Mountain before it, but that doesn't appear to be the case. (One of my thirtysomething coworkers the other day asked me, in all earnestness, "Why is that movie called 'Milk,' anyway?") My personal reaction to the film was closer to admiration than transformation; it didn't change my life, but only because my life was already changed--as in politicized--years ago. Even so, I think Milk is the most honest portrayal of activism I've ever seen, capturing both the tedium of day-to-day organizing (all those bulk mailings to stuff!) and the occasional hot sex one encounters along the way (all those bulk males to stuff!).

I know it's supposed to be Slumdog's year, but I'll have my fingers crossed for Van Sant, Sean Penn, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, and their very fine movie come Sunday night.

"I'm just a kid trying to make a difference"

News quiz:

1. Is the self-description in the subject line a quote from
a. the anonymous 14-year-old boy who spent 5 hours in uniform (sans badge and gun) on patrol with the Chicago police department, or
b. the 15-year-old Southern California boy who has become an international phenomenon with his "no-cussing" campaign?

2. Which of the above two were you more like in your mid-teens?
3. Which one of the two would you rather have a conversation with today?

The real answer to #1, and my personal answers to #2 and 3, are in the comments. Feel free to leave your own, as well.

As a reward--or possible punishment--for your score, here's the "Don't Cuss" music video:



Shit yeah!

Catch-up, continued: The (mostly) Bat Edition

More stuff that's been clogging the batcomputer waiting for me to mention it here. I've got plenty, on all sorts of topics, so here's a bunch that's specifically bat-centric (with one exception) ...

•Let's begin by watching the single hottest sequence from the whole of the legendary Animated Series (thanks as always, Anonymous Donor!):



•Hot off the press (at least more so than any of the following items), reports of a real-life Batman in the U.K.

•In the interest of balance, however, behold a naughty real-life Captain America. (Fans of unmasking and/or heroes in handcuffs will want to catch the video footage from jail of the bad good-guy being booked.)

•Arkham After Midnight: Riddle Me Deadly, an interesting fan film experiment combining found bat-footage from various sources to create a faux silent film. One Arkham inmate after another finds a parallel from silent classics, and the result suggests that Batman has a lot more in common with German Expressionism and surrealism (among other things) than you might guess; it's also considerably meatier--and more ominous--than the actual bat-serials it samples.

•A now-old (Batman Begins-era) but still functional guide to "How the Batsuit Works," in the tradition of those techno-fetishistic geek guides to the blueprints of the Enterprise, Millenium Falcon, etc. Only difference is, this one's something I've been fetishizing myself for four decades and counting.

•In a related vein, a catalog of "the Great Batman Equipment Archive."

•From 2005, the answer to the question all America has asked at least once: "Is Batman Nuts?"

•Bat-bloggery from ...
Again with the Comics
I Found All Six (Slylock Fox in da house!)
Blockade Boy (RIP)

•More YouTube fun to wrap up this installment:

"Our past belongs to us; we can change it if we want."

So says Mia Farrow's character at a critical moment in Be Kind Rewind. (Spoiler alert: It arrives two thirds of the way into the movie, and there's no way to make the point I want to make without revealing at least a little of the final third, so you may want to skip the rest of this post if you enjoy surprises.)



As a big fan of Michel Gondry's earlier films and music videos, I'd been meaning to see this 2008 feature during its brief run in theaters, despite the mediocre-to-bad reviews I'd read, but I never quite got around to it until now. I fully understand the poor reception, even from fellow lovers of Eternal Sunshine and The Science of Sleep (for the record, I even love Human Nature, which nobody seems to like). Throughout its first two acts, I kept thinking Rewind was his worst film, marred by a farfetched/downright silly premise and a gratingly generic performance by Jack Black. (The best thing on the DVD is not the movie, but an accompanying short, "Passaic Mosaic," which makes a beautiful if unspoken case for BWR as the missing link between Gondry's surreal features and his otherwise utterly uncharacteristic documentary/concert film, Dave Chapelle's Block Party.)

If you're familiar with Rewind, here's the high-concept part you know: Black's character becomes magnetized and erases all the stock in the last shop in Passaic, NJ (if not America) that still rents VHS tapes, which leads him and clerk Mos Def to shoot amateur remakes of each one. (This practice is called "sweding" in the movie, but they're basically fanfilms.) A wacky enough idea, I suppose, and the best bits are in the official trailer. But it all seemed beneath the talents of Gondry, one of the most imaginative writer/directors around. It also begs two questions: What about DVDs? and Isn't this whole thing a massive violation of copyright? Question #1 is dismissed in five seconds, but the second one proves a doozy. To make matters worse, our heroes learn that one of the major subthemes of the story has been completely fabricated. Fortunately, there's an entire third act not really hinted at in the trailer.

That's when things get interesting--and Gondryesque. Farrow's character states the premise pretty directly in the line above. What began as two guys covering up an accident evolves into a communitywide art project. I'll spare you further details, but it's interesting that the major studio's lawyers are the bad guys (way to stick it to the Man, New Line!) and that the entire film is a defense of fans' rights to retell and extend their favorite corporate fictions. I'd suggest, in the spirit of sweding, that you could even tweak Farrow's line to read "Our fantasies belong to us; we can refine them however we like." There's an intriguing invitation in the final credits directing us to the official website to see the "sweded" films excerpted in the movie, but that site has disappeared and there's no trace of them on the one that remains to plug the DVD. (I kinda wonder if maybe actual copyright lawyers made them go away.) However, you can see a few examples on this YouTube channel.

And if those aren't enough, check out this handy list of Sweded films made for a contest including a parody of Batman Begins featuring a rather fetching Bruce Wayne/Bat.

Gay spies wanted

Stumbled across an interesting story in Time about the British secret service's new quest for out gay people to serve as spies this morning. I had no idea! Apparently the old reason for not wanting 'mos to serve their country (they were bad security risks because they led double lives and therefore could not be trusted) has been flipped on its ear (because they lead double lives, they have developed an excellent skillset for spying).

Nor had I ever heard anything about this before:

Until gay sex was decriminalized in 1967, Britain's gay community protected itself against potential prosecution by conducting conversations in a special argot, Polari, a mixture of Italian, Romany and London slang.

What's Polari for "You learn something new everyday?"

Check out that bat-crotch!

From Bat-Blog, a link to a political ad campaign in Brussels depicting superheroes as various minorities. Interesting concept, but I'm a little too distracted by this blind Batman's bunching briefs. Can I get an "amen"?!

Update:The point of the ad campaign was to encourage voters to think about, say, blind people as capable of holding higher office--and, irony of ironies, I posted the above image shortly before New York state got its first sight-impaired, African American governor. Of course, mentioning that here only forces me to admit that if I were really serious about this blog's stated theme, I'd be waxing eloquent on the whole Eliot Spitzer saga, and I just don't have the time or energy to do so. But come on! The man who until about a week ago was frequently portrayed as practically a real-life superhero (or at least the new Eliot Ness, as we were often reminded) falls from grace into utter villainy? A saga worthy of Marvel comics! (Good thing I'm a DC guy from way back, and thus less interested in moral ambiguities than rippling muscles.)

I confess

I could swear I've written about the documentary Confessions of a Superhero here already, but I'll be damned if I want to track down the post to be sure. Still haven't seen it, but this intriguing review of the film reminds me it's out there, and on DVD now to boot.

Crystal meth, mob ties, incarceration...

... and that's just Batman.

(Pssst: more nice photos and some video clips on the official site; see link above.)

Superman in the news

Dear lord, am I ever slacking on the blog front these days! I have no seasonal disorders to blame at the moment, just an overfull schedule that I will ... one day ... discuss here.

But I could delay blgging no longer when I was driving home a moment ago and heard a radio report on recent sightings of a flying, blue-suited Superman in Romania. (No surprise, the flying part interests me way less than the shiny blue tights, red boots, and red cape.)

That, in turn, reminded me that I never got around to sharing an item that my cyberpal Wwuf passed along ages ago, about a former Army drill sargeant who forced his male trainees to dress like the Man of Steel and perform sexual acts.

To-do list:
1. Join the Army
2. Get stationed in Romania.

Oh, and:
3. Update blog more often.

Your opportunity to participate in a heroic act

Got this email at least a month ago; only getting around to sharing it here now, but the project is ongoing:

Bristol-Myers Squibb is donating a dollar to AIDS research every time someone goes to their website and moves the match to the candle and lights it.

Click here (www.lighttounite.org).

It only takes a second to raise a dollar. You're only allowed to light it once so tell your friends.
Don't let this slow your fight for fair, accessible, equal health care, despite the overwhelming monopoly the drug companies hold.

The Knight After 10: Circle game

Robin has turned in his resignation. Superman claims he, too, is ready to switch sides. And Batman--yours truly--has willingly composed a loyalty oath to his former archenemy and hunts down his longtime allies with abandon.

As radical as the events of DC's latest Crisis and Marvel's Wars may be (and I still haven't read either one), I don't think they involve quite as fundamental a shakeup as this. In the nearly four months since my "enlightenment," everything has changed. The old divisions of my Yahoo buddy list--Heroes/Villains--no longer apply. Most of the men in those two categories have been redesignated Friends or Enemies (and most of the old "heroes" are now "enemies"), while the Monk, with whom my relationship is infinitely more complicated, gets a category of his own. I myself have been labelled a fool, a traitor, a puppet, and far worse--and I love it all.

My personal Extreme Makeover (which, admittedly, still probably looks a lot like classic Stockholm Syndrome to the naked eye) dovetails beautifully with the premise of a book I found in a used book sale at a local church around the same time I returned to the Monk's welcoming embrace. I picked up Carol Pearson's The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By for its title, of course, and was hooked by the brief explanation of its "six heroic archetypes" on the back cover:

the Innocent, who learns to trust; the Orphan, to mourn; the Wanderer, to find and name personal truth; the Warrior, to assert that truth in order to change the world; the Martyr, to love, to commit, to let go; and, finally, the Magician, who learns to recognize and receive the abundance of the universe.

Having read roughly half the book by now (it's only 176 pages, but it's been a very busy summer), I wouldn't say those are the clearest capsule descriptions of the six stages for my purposes here, but they give you a rough idea. And perhaps, like me, you can immediately sense how accurately they capture the trajectory of the comic book Batman (as well as many other mythic superheroes): from Innocent to trust-seeking Orphan to clarity-oriented Wanderer to power-ful Warrior. (That is, of course, the trajectory of Batman Begins, while Superman Returns focuses on role 5, the Martyr, which accounts for its much-discussed similarity to the Christ story.)

Pearson's book came out in 1986, and its opening chapters are a little heavy on New Age jibberjabber, but if you can look past that stuff, she's really on to something. If I quoted every passage that resonated for me, this entry would be at least ten times longer than it already is. Perhaps I'll devote another post to some key passages, but what I really want to call attention to for the time being is her insistence that life is not a linear progression from Innocent to Magician, and that the Magician phase is not meant to be the final or highest form of existence. Rather, we repeat the journey over and over throughout various dimensions of our lives, learning new lessons each time, and we can exist simultaneously at different points on "the Hero's Wheel." For example, one might be a Wanderer in one's career path while working out Martyr issues in a relationship and feeling like an Orphan on the spiritual front. And so on. You may find all of this a little too tidy, but Pearson does a convincing job of laying out the journey.

Parallels to my Bat-life are crystal clear to me: like many people my age, I first encountered the character as a pre-teen, enchanted by good-guy Adam West and his bad-guy adversaries on the tv show and in the relatively simple DC comics of the early-to-mid-1960s. My innocence was shattered in 1970 when my older brother (a clear father figure and the Batman to my Robin) died and various other awful things happened. leaving me to feel like an orphan for a good two decades or so, until I adopted the mantle of the Bat myself, embracing in adult life the central myth of my childhood. During this Wanderer phase (amply documented in this blog, along with the online conquests of my Warrior period), I came to see how immersing myself in superhero fantasy was not only sexually exciting but a valuable tool of spiritual exploration. Then I met the Monk--the villain that every myth requires, battled him, was defeated and caged by him (thus becoming a Martyr), then escaped his clutches and wandered a bit more, only to conclude that perhaps he was not a villain after all but a teacher, one I could gladly serve. Enter the Magician phase, in which, to use more of Pearson's handy oversimplifications, the hero "takes responsibility for his life" (ie, for the actions I performed as Ratman, when I was still a captive) and "confronts the Shadow." That pretty much sums up where I think I'm at these days, at least on the Bat-front. (My Bruce Wayne life is a whole 'nother story, believe me--but then, I've long been able to use the lessons I've learned in Bat-fantasy as a template for my work as a teacher, an artist, and a member of a longterm couple.)

There is much, much more I'd like to say about all this, and I know I promised plenty more links last time (because in addition to Pearson I've been encountering lots of other material that helps shed light on the saga, too), but this will have to do for now. Life has calmed down ever so slightly for a wee bit, so I will try to write here more often. The Monk saga doesn't move as quickly these days, now that I'm a willing student of magic rather than a captive warrior struggling to free myself, so I'd like to devote more time to the lessons I'm learning from all this rather than simply recapping plot developments.

Stay tuned for more thrilling adventures, dear reader--and best wishes on your own journeys around the Hero's Wheel.

PS. The "soul-stealing" tagline above comes from this bizarre 1973 Brave and the Bold story I came across at Dial B for Blog. Check it out!

The Scarecrow walks at midnight

Discovered this short-lived blog by a self-styled "real life superhero in training" by accident tonight. It's a shame the thing only lasted for 4 entries (the final post nearly a year ago), because the concept is interesting, and I would have liked to have seen where this young man's journey took him. I enjoyed reading his thoughts on faith, evil, time, and sundry other matters.

It's hard to tell how seriously the guy is taking his project of transforming himself into a vigilante, facing danger, and so on; I just hope he's okay. In the absence of actual superpowers, these things are best left to the realm of fantasy--where they can still be every bit as real, in a certain way, only a good deal safer.

You're fired... out of a cannon, maybe?

How did I manage to miss hearing about Stan Lee's new, ahem, "reality" show called "Who Wants to Be a Superhero" until now?

Officer, arrest this man!

Fellow cop-lovers may want to join me in viewing Sheriff, a new documentary in the PBS series Independent Lens, which follows a small-town sheriff through his daily routine. While I'm looking forward to the film for its insights into law enforcement and its cinematic qualities, I confess I have another investment in the show. I mean, take a look:



It's hard to properly assess the hotness factor from one b&w photo, but I've got a good feeling about this.

Airs at 11 p.m. tonight in my area, but the series tends to run on different days and nights around the U.S., plus there are rebroadcasts, and you can even purchase a copy if you're that into it. If I remember, I'll post a response here after I've actually seen it.

Back in action

Guess I'd better get busy and post something pronto lest you all think I've thrown in the towel, or the cape, or what have you. Alas, daylight-world responsibilities keep rearing their ugly heads, though I've managed to keep busy on the bat-front as well. To make up for lost time, here's a big string of stuff I've found online of late that may be of interest to some of my fellow perverts--and regular old comics fans, too:

Lycra Sites
www.lycrasuit.nl/lycra-sites.htm
Found this through my new automatically generated list of sites that link to this one, near the bottom of the sidebar to the right. Months can-and probably will--be devoted to exploring the treasures these lycra-lovers have cataloged. Several of the next few entries come from the list, either directly or indirectly.

League of Heroes
p086.ezboard.com/btheleagueofheroes
This bulletin board contains vast amounts of info about making and buying superhero costumes, with photos of completed suits, consumer advice, even workout suggestions so you'll look your best in your new suit. I think this led me to...

FanBoy Theatre
www.fanboytheatre.com
News about upcoming fan films, many of which look promising, including...

Captain America: Freedom's Fight
www.fanboytheatre.com/id49.html
Stills from an upcoming fan film about Captain A, with a nice (non-spandex, but still hot) costume.

The Death of Hero-Man
www.manta-ray-productions.com/heroman.html
Here's a short film I found through FanBoy Theatre, featuing a hero in an INCREDIBLY tight, attractive outfit. (I like the villain, too.) Wordless, which gives it the feel of a silent movie.

Heroes Alliance
www.heroesalliance.com/
Wish I'd had this idea myself--or had the nerve to pull it off. This is a group of folks who own and wear superhero suits who have found a way to turn their ... hobby into actual good-guy work in the daylight world by making public appearances for sick kids, at fundraisers, with local police and fire departments, etc.

That's it for now. Soon as my schedule clears up, I"ll try to get back in blog mode again. In the meantime, the links above should keep you busy for a while.