Critical Apprehensions & Intemperate Discourses

Kip Manley, proprietor

The not-​entirely-​safe-​for-​work players present:

Some drip has observed the reactions of 52 women and 38 men to two-minute snippets of pornographic films (interspersed with landscape photography as a control) and from this has come to the conclusion “that [straight] men tend to get excited by images of women, gay men are aroused at images of men—and women, well, they seem to like them both.”

Oh, for God’s sake.

It’s something of a parlor game these days to take down the shortcomings and absurd leaps of logic in “soft” science studies like this one. —A game that skirts perilously close to anti-intellectualism, yes, and one that depends on skimming and generalizing from puffed-up grant-grubbing attention-grabbing press releases rewritten by sensationalist editors trying to justify the Science section of the paper to the next quarterly budget review rather than actual, you know, studies, with footnotes and cites and such; it’s a parlor game, after all, and not to be taken seriously. But studies purporting to examine sex, gender, and sexuality are unbelievably ripe for this sort of take-down, this armchair quarterbacking, this huffing-and-puffing-and-Fisking-your-house-down moralizing. Sex and gender and sexuality are unbelievably important in how we define ourselves, after all, and for a lot of us in this unevenly distributed 21st century floating world, it’s contested to an unprecedented degree: how we define it, how it defines us, how others do both. We cherish our myths and received wisdoms, hold them closely, and fail to see how they blind and blinker our supposedly objective judgments. (As a not entirely fair example to J. Michael Bailey [whom I’ve already called a “drip,” so it’s a bit late for civility, I guess], I offer up this take-down of Eric Raymond’s inexplicably well-received but thoroughly amateur study of “bad porn” from a whiles back—as an example of the short-circuits of logic that creep into one’s supposedly objective investigations of one’s troubled desires.)

So. Let’s amuse ourselves by shredding Bailey’s study, since, after all, it purportedly challenges myths and received wisdoms that I myself hold dear.

The sample size, for one, is terribly tiny. 52 women; 38 men. —Not in and of itself a crippling factor, when dealing with, say, the measurement of a brute force—whether one’s aroused or not, for instance. The criteria for arousal have been carefully defined. It’s either there or it isn’t, right? So long as you’ve been scrupulous in your selection process to weed out any selection factors that might bias the results, and there’s a body of research to compare it with and the expectation that the study will be repeated to check its results, there’s no reason why one can’t speculate from such a small sample size.

But while arousal might be a brute force, the psychology behind it—what triggers it, and how, and how we react to it—is quicksilver slippery. What was done to link what was being measured—girth, or darkness (basically, increased blood flow to spongy tissues in both cases)—with the thing purportedly studied—the brain, and its construction of and reaction to the arousal? What was done to establish a benchmark between the male and female scales, to allow for accurate comparison? How were potential differences in physiology accounted for? (Hmm. Maybe we do need a larger sample…) A brief reference is made to transsexuals who took part. Why only male-to-female transsexuals? And how was that benchmark established and compared, and how were those physiological differences accounted for? And how many were tested?

Also, any such study that makes no mention of cultural factors is automatically not just suspect, but ridiculous. Ours (here in this unevenly distributed 21st century floating world) is a culture based rather heavily on the [straight] male gaze. It’s getting better, Lord knows, and hurrah for that, but. The default image of what is sexy and sexual is the female form. Women grow up and construct themselves and their sexualities in a cultural environment which lauds, applauds, and constantly hypes images of women as being sexy and sexual. Sexualized imagery of men is nonexistent, or carefully ghettoized—or sexualized in much more heavily coded and subtextual ways. Also, think of the relative levels of hostility in the culture at large to the ideas of male homosexuality versus female homosexuality; think lesbian chic and [straight] male fantasies; look to which sex is more likely to fall back on “gay panic” as a defense in assault cases. It’s not hard to construct alternate theories to explain the results of this study that don’t leap straight for the hardwiring of male and female brains.

And: to think one is measuring someone’s reactions to sex and arousal, the decisions they make in their lives dealing with and based on desires articulable and unacknowledged (“Since most women seem capable of sexual arousal to both sexes, why do they choose one or the other?” Bailey asked. “Probably, for reasons other than sexual arousal”), by measuring their reactions to porn, is, well, it’s easy to quantify, perhaps, but it’s also rather like drawing conclusions about the circumstances of people’s lives by noting their movie preferences. (“He likes buddy movie action comedies, so his life must be madcap, a little stressful, and replete with non-threatening homoerotic subtext.”) —And hey: what kind of porn was used? Soft-focus dimly lit red shoe erotica, or sweaty grindhouse hardcore? It does make a difference—after all, males are supposedly attracted solely to visual stimulus, while females supposedly require situation, character, and emotional interaction. Or was this bit of conventional wisdom not taken into account?

A lot of the answers to these questions are doubtless to be found in the more detailed write-up of the study. And just because we can construct alternate theories doesn’t mean we’ve invalidated Bailey’s theories; it just means we need to test and re-test, refine and come at it again, and compare and debate and compare some more. —However, his contretemps with the Washington Times demonstrates why this is unlikely. Studies of sex, gender, and sexuality, after all, deal with terribly important, hotly contested issues of self-definition. It’s no wonder people get all het up over them. But it’s no excuse to hide our heads in the sand and pretend we know everything already and there’s no use studying what turns us on, and why. Otherwise, we just end up with our cherished myths and received wisdoms reinforced by whatever soundbite memes break through our attention span, and horny frat boys get to use clippings like this to try to convince their girlfriends that really, she’d like a threesome if she’d just, you know, try it.

What it comes down to: and this is as much if not moreso on Lucio Guerrero’s shoulders as J. Michael Bailey’s; Bailey’s not entirely responsible for how the Sun-Times chooses to hype his study’s hype, but: the first line of the article is worthwhile, and says something about the research that we can accept at face value: “When it comes to watching pornographic movies, it appears women are less selective then men.”

After that?

Feh.

(Says me, with my cherished myths and received wisdoms clutched to my bosom. Fuck l’difference! Biology is not destiny! La la la I can’t hear you! —Your own mileage may, of course, vary.)

—Filed 8171 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [9].

This one’s for Sacchi del Amy.

—Via MetaFilter: The Illustrated Catalog of ACME Products.

Accept No Imitations.

But! This one isn’t for Amy; she never was a big Buffy fan. IGN’s FilmForce (NASDAQ: IGNX, and isn’t there something fetchingly quaint about a website with its ticker symbol in the footer?) has an impressively comprehensive interview with Joss Whedon. Ten screens’ worth of stuff from an interviewer who isn’t afraid to ask the tough questions. Questions like:

On a side tangent, what was the purpose of the—I hesitate to use the phrase—sort of clumsy storytelling with the whole “Giles not touching things” thing…

But! Boarding school days, the Wesleyan mafia, lunch with Roseanne, feminism, gnomic utterances regarding cast tensions—it’s all here. A fun read, and you can cop a clue as to the underlying metaphor of Firefly for extra credit.

—Filed 8172 days ago to Poprocks; Comments [1].

The verie best, and swetest liquor.

For as those, which serue in publik function do turn their learning to publik vse, which is the naturall vse of all learning: so such as liue to themselues either for pleasur in their studye, or to avoid foren truble do turn their learning to a priuate ease, which is the priuat abuse of a publik good. For the common weall is the measure of everie mans being, which if anie one respect not, he is not to liue in it.

—Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementarie, 1582.

—Filed 8173 days ago to Squawkbox; .

Why you don’t read comics.

One of the cool things about helping run your own magazine is you get to decide what it is the magazine will cover. (Means of production and all that.) And from the start at Anodyne I insisted that I wanted us to cover comics on a regular basis. Luckily, I didn’t have to insist all that hard. We were a scrappy, underdog arts magazine with a yen for the hip yet unsung, and comics were a scrappy, underdog art, unsung, yet with the faintest whiff of hip about them. (Comics have always been scrappy, unsung, on the verge of hip, finally growing up, not just for kids anymore. Read the entertainment press going back 10, 15 years and you’ll see the same damn headline over and over again: “Biff! Pow! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” —This is how comics are defined for most people. This is part of the problem.)

So we covered comics. Along with The Stranger, we were the only general arts periodical on the West Coast to feature regular comics reviews and news. Then The Stranger stopped writing about comics so they could have room for a gossip column.

I wrote about Eddie Campbell and bad girls and Strangehaven and Jon Lewis. I wrote about the San Diego Comic-Con and Pickle and I did my muckraking bit to help save Reading Frenzy from Taco del Mar. I got to run strips by Barry Deutsch and Kevin Moore and Amy Sacks and Shannon Wheeler and Keith Knight, and I got to run pieces by Barry on Bruno and Ariel Schrag and sociological studies of daily strips, and by Kevin on Peanuts and David Collier, and by Jenn on Dean Hsieh and Inu-Yasha. We ran interviews with David Chelsea and Scott McCloud and Alison Bechdel and Mike Allred, and all of it appeared each and every month along with CD reviews and book reviews and band profiles and fashion shoots and Burning Man write-ups and cigarette ads and the other sorts of things that scrappy, underdog hipsters find interesting. (And I discovered an important secret of the reviewing game: if you tell publishers that you run reviews, they send you free stuff. Cool.)

In 1998, I pulled out all the stops I could find, and ran a 5,000 word jeremiad on the decline and fall of the comics industry, as it were. “Why You Don’t Read Comics,” I called it. I did the most legwork I’ve ever done for a piece: among other research (and numerous interviews), I sat down with the phone book and called every comics shop listed in the Portland area and asked them a set of market research questions: what did they sell besides comics, how much of their business was comics, what percentage of their comics sales were from subscription boxes, that sort of thing. There were 25 listed; I think I managed to get hold of 17 or 18 of them by press-time.

I just checked the yellow pages: there are 12 shops listed today. That’s counting Things From Another World’s three branches as individual shops. I’m pretty sure they had seven or eight branches, in 1998.

Anodyne folded in 1999, and I stopped getting free comics. So I fell out of covering the scene qua scene. We went back to picking up only what we were interested in, which wasn’t much at all. We lost our coveted low box number at Excalibur because one day we realized it had been six months since we’d been in to pick up new comics.

So while I knew things were bad in the trenches, I had no real idea how bad.

In the meanwhile, strange and weird things have been happening online. In 1998, it was but one of three possible ways out of the woods (along with returnability—still a no-hoper—and breaking into the book trade, which is actually humming along), but back then I was thinking of it mostly as a way of selling physical comics. And sure, great strides have been made along those lines (which helps, perhaps, explain some of the drop in the number of brick-and-mortar retail shops in Portland). Yes, I knew the web would also be used to actually publish comics—I’d seen Argon Zark (in a paperbound collection, but I’d seen it). I just never imagined webcomics would have all that much of an impact. Not until broadband was more widespread, and bigger, better, cheaper monitors, and above all, some sort of cheap, convenient, secure system of payment…

—Silly me. Anyone who knew from zines and minicomics should never underestimate what determined artists will give away for free, when the market can’t bend itself to accommodate them.

Sure, no one’s making a living. Few are making any money at all. And Sturgeon’s Law applies as much here as it does to pop music, movies, and presidential candidates. But the explosion of talent is nonetheless dizzying. Scott McCloud likes to joke that there are more good cartoonists named Jason now than there were good cartoonists at all in 1986. —Hyperbole aside, he is not without his point. There are more people doing comics now, and of more varied backgrounds, than ever before, and if you know anything about comics as they have been, you can’t help but thrill at the sheer scope and variety of it all, even as you get lost in a thicket of links. The most inbred art is cross-pollinating for the first time in decades, and the results are spreading and growing and changing, thick and fast. We are on the cusp of a new Age of comics—the Fibroin Age, maybe? (Much as I dislike Age-ing comics. It’s a tool of canonization, a backwards-looking tool, striking each subsequent Age from baser and baser metals as we march onward away from some dim and misty Golden Age. And wrong, to boot—have you ever tried to read a Golden Age comic? —I came of age (comics-wise) in that fabled Annus Mirabilis, 1986; I walked into a comics shop for the first time and saw Dark Knight and Watchmen and Elektra: Assassin and Cerebus and American Flagg and Maus. [Actually, I had to go to a bookstore to find Maus.] Heady days. We didn’t need Ages, dammit! Comics were growing up, stepping back from the kiddie table, going to The Show! Bang! Zowie!)

But for all the enthusiasm and excitement and inchoate boosterism over the vast potential we haven’t had time to fuck up and fuck over, we still haven’t gotten around to that question I set out to answer five years ago—

Why don’t you read comics?

Oh, chances are better now than ever before that you do. On the web, if not on paper. But if you do, you’re still in the stunted audience of a tiny, neglected corner of the entertainment industry; Buffy fandom on a bad day outweighs comics fandom by a whole order of magnitude.

Still. Things are better for comics as a medium now than I ever dreamed possible in 1998. (As an industry, it’s a different story, but it always has been.) —So. Motivated in part by the recent surge in what the invaluable Dirk Deppey calls “the comics blogosphere,” I dredged up this five-year-old piece. My own take on where comics were then, how we got there, and where we might have been headed. If you like, return with me to those thrilling days of yesteryear—and when we get back, maybe go to Scott McCloud’s links page as a start and just, you know. Surf the comics. See what there is to see.

Deal?

From Stan Lee’s “Soapbox,” November, 1968:

So, that sinks it! From now on, whenever we have something to get off our collective chest, we’ll assume we have a magniloquent mandate to sock it to ya, and let the chips fall where they may.

Excelsior!
Smiley

From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Excelsior,” 1841:

A traveller, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
       Excelsior!

The comics industry is dying, and it’s all Stan Lee’s fault. Or maybe Todd McFarlane’s.

Actually, Fredric Wertham is to blame. And the Comics Code Authority—butchering comics, hounding EC out of business. We’d have made it if not for them.

Oh, and the fanboys. Those pasty-faced mouth-breathing zombies, demanding ream after ream of poorly drawn tits and spandex. And the speculators—Christ! Don’t talk to me about speculators. Just thank God they’ve moved on to Beanie Babies.

And the retailers. Think of how many comics we’d move if they’d just clean up their stores, get off their fat asses, and sell some fucking product! Of course, that might be easier if the publishers were putting ads someplace other than the freakin’ distributor’s catalog. Or if Marvel Comics hadn’t tried so hard to drive retailers out of business, with their stupid vertical integration plan. At least they went bankrupt—ha!

Why can’t it be like Japan? Everybody loves comics in Japan. And France.

It’s Image’s fault. It’s the artists who can’t draw and the writers who can’t write. It’s the superheroes; it’s the bad girls. It’s all Superman’s fault, and Batman’s. And Shi, and Lady Death, and Spawn. But it’s Harvey Pekar’s fault, and R. Crumb’s, too.

It’s way too easy to blame Diamond.

It’s your fault. Chances are you don’t read the damn things. Do you?

Hell, it’s my fault, too.

“It was Hiroshima.”

Summer of 1991; I’m working for a comics shop in Boston. This guy walks in and starts scanning the wall books, looking for a hot prospect. Some copies of the recently released Spider-man #1 are already selling for $250, and he wants a taste of that action.

We hung the expensive back issues on the wall, from hooks, in stiff mylar sleeves, out of reach of grubby fanboy fingers. Right up in the front of the store he finds what he’s looking for: the issue of Superman where Clark proposed to Lois. We’d known it was going to be hot, and we’d sold out of our inflated orders in a couple of days. So the last seven are hanging from a hook and he wants me to pull one down so he can check it out. I do. It’s priced to move at $10. (He could have gotten it for a buck fifty the previous week, if he’d been quick enough.)

And he’s holding it up to the light, looking at it edge-on, making sure there’s no creases or microscopic tears, that I’m not trying to foist off a mere near-mint at that price, when he sees the copy of the self-same issue that had been hanging behind the one he’s got; it’s priced at $11.

“Can you get that one down, too?” he asks. I shrug. I do.

Now, this is basic economics, right? As long as demand stays constant, and the supply dwindles with every purchase, well, the price will go up. And we’d marked the issues accordingly, each one going up a dollar a pop. Supply and demand.

Anyway, he’s comparing those two issues, holding them up to the light, trying to discern God knows what difference between the two, when he sees the third issue of Superman on that hook. Priced at $12.

You see where this is going, don’t you.

The last one on the hook, the one that was priced at $16—what we’d figured it would sell for after all the others had sold—that was the one he bought. It was the most expensive. Therefore, it must have been the most valuable.

And I let him.

“It was Hiroshima,” says Bob Schreck, publisher at Oni Press. “The way everybody was going ‘wink, wink, nudge, nudge,’ and raping any idiot who wanted to buy a crate of Spawn #1 or Spider-man #1.”

If you want an immediate explanation for why comics are in such a sorry state, the speculator frenzy of the early ’90s isn’t a bad place to start. When Todd McFarlane’s Spider-man #1 was released, the back-issue market moved into an insanely fast turn-around. Comics were going to make everybody rich; rumored “hot” issues would sell out the day they arrived and then go up on the wall, at 1000% or 2000% mark-ups. To start. Demand was high, but artificially so; everybody had to have multiple copies—selling one at a high price was a coup, but selling a bunch was even better. We had people buying stacks of ten or twenty at a time. We let them.

Spider-man #1 sold three million copies to an estimated 500,000 people. You do the math. And that was just the beginning.

“The whole speculator thing was codependent, it was enabled by retailers, publishers, creators, everybody all the way down,” says Schreck. “Those speculators came in, got raped, and left. And a lot of fans who got burned left, too.”

And we let them.

Why you don’t read comics.

Which starts to explain why roughly half to two-thirds of American comics shops went under in the last five years; why direct market sales of comics dropped ten to twenty-five percent last year alone; why Alternative Comics and Black Eye, two of the premier comics publishers, are respectively cutting way back and contemplating shutting down; why it’s harder and harder these days for cartoonists to make a living. Not to mention editors, or publishers, or retailers (or critics).

But it doesn’t explain why you don’t read comics. (Of course you read comics. It’s the first section of the paper you turn to, right? Peanuts, Doonesbury, Rose is Rose, Mutts. And you know what comics books are all about: Batman, Superman, Spider-man, yadda yadda. You probably even know that Crumb guy, the one they made the movie about. Keep on truckin’! So sure, you read comics—like somebody who watches only Letterman’s monologues three or four times a week watches TV.)

So why don’t you read comics?

Because comics are crap. They always have been. We all know it; it’s an open secret.

“If I wanted to make money, it would be easy,” says Jeff Mason, publisher at Alternative Press. “I’d do T and A. I’d do what comics are designed to do these days. It’s not hard to draw two gigantic breasts. If there’s some blood, it’s even better.”

“Comics have always been aiming at themselves for so long,” says Zander Cannon, who writes and draws Replacement God. “It’s all boys who wanted to be cartoonists writing for themselves the way they were ten years ago.”

“They’re holding this coarse mirror up to people and saying, ‘This is your life,’” says Tom Hart, who’s written and drawn Hutch Owen’s Working Hard, among other things. “And they say, ‘Yeah!’ and buy it.”

Tom Spurgeon, executive editor of The Comics Journal, used to review any comic sent his way on the Journal’s website. “You Send It, We’ll Read It,” it was called. He gave up after six months. “I’d rather eat glass than read so many awful comics again,” he posted by way of explanation.

This, from people who genuinely love comics, who spend their days neck-deep in comics. If this is their reaction, what’s there for you to get excited about?

Marvelism is fast becoming a philosophical movement. A prime example of this can be found in the Silver Surfer, one of the most moralistic characters ever created. Marvel Comics are the voice of a new breed of intellectual.

—Achille D. DiBacco, in a letter to Marvel, 1968

And trapped upon this world of madness... stand I! How much longer am I destined to endure a fate I cannot even comprehend!

—The Silver Surfer, as written by Stan (the Man) Lee, 1968

Sequential art.

So. Comics are crap; comics are juvenile; comics are coarse superhero bullshit; comics are tits and ass. Comics are for 12-year-old boys and alienated navel-gazers. Comics are those things you cut out of the paper and stick on the fridge.

All of which is untrue. Or rather, all of which is true, but it’s not the whole truth.

Comics are nothing more than one picture set next to another.

That’s it; that’s the essence of comics. Any time you put one picture next to another, and you make the jump, the connection between them—you’ve just encountered the one thing that defines comics; the only limit they have.

Which helps to explain some of the confusion they cause. When Madison Clell shows non-comics fans issues of Cuckoo, her autobiographical comic about dealing with dissociative identity disorder, they usually say something like, “That’s not a comic. It’s a—it’s a, a graphic story.” When Art Spiegelman’s Maus was reviewed in the New York Review of Books, the first sentence proclaimed, “Maus is not a comic book.”

If it’s good, it can’t be a comic, because—well, because we already know what comics are: crap. QED.

Maybe it’s the name. Lord knows it’s the only medium that has to share a moniker with practitioners of stand-up comedy (by coincidence, the one thing less popular with Anodyne readers than comics—I suppose I should be glad we weren’t dead last). But attempts to erase the stigma of comics by changing the name haven’t taken hold. Spiegelman still persists in “comix,” dragging it with him to his new job as comix editor at Details. (From the co-mixing of words and pictures—get it?) Will Eisner, one of the few undisputed masters of the medium, prefers “sequential art,” but that’s too dry. Good for academic discussions, though. Donna Barr has high hopes for “drawn books,” and while I’d never bet against her, I’m not holding my breath. Marketers came up with “graphic novel” for those trade paperbacks they tried to sell to bookstores, then promptly killed the term by using it for everything from 48-page “premium” X-Men books to Dave Sim’s 500-page Cerebus tomes. Besides, “graphic novel” makes people think of Jackie Collins. “Manga” is appropriate—it means “pictures drawn in spite of oneself”—but we need it to differentiate Japanese comics from everybody else.

“Funnies,” anyone?

We’re pretty much stuck with “comics”; it’s one more hurdle we’ll have to overcome. Everybody recognizes what it means, for good or ill. “People ask what you do,” says Anina Bennett, who’s worked as an editor for First Comics, and Dark Horse, and now writes her own comic, called Heartbreakers. “And maybe you look away and you say ‘publishing.’ And they say, ‘What kind?’ And you admit it: ‘Comics.’ And they say, ‘Hey, comics! Cool!’ There’s a lot of people out there fascinated by talk of the medium.”

So let’s accept for the moment that comics have almost no limit to what they can do or say, like any other medium; let’s accept that good comics have been made, and read, and loved, by intelligent adults; let’s even take it as read there’s an interest out there in comics. (There are two different images we can put on an Anodyne cover, to guarantee it’ll fly off the shelves: a woman, or a cartoon.)

What happened? Why is the industry in such dire straits? Why are cartoonists reluctantly quitting the medium to find viable jobs elsewhere?

Why don’t you read comics?

The front lines.

There are roughly twenty to twenty-five comics shops in the Portland metro area, which makes us one of the healthiest comics retail markets in the country. Visitors from the East Coast are surprised, especially when they walk into a shop like Excalibur, on SE Hawthorne; it’s so big. The relative health can probably be attributed to the fact that Portland, in general, is a reading city; we have the largest number of bookstores per capita (with, I understand, the possible exception of Washington, DC) and comics piggy-back on that.

But of those shops, maybe two count comics as more than half of their sales. The rest have branched out, and comics make up 50%, 40%, even as low as 20% of what they move. And while diversity is good—eggs in one basket, and all that—take a closer look at what they’re selling: role-playing games and war games, trading cards and collectible card games (Magic: the Gathering and its ilk), action figures and other collectible toys, even Beanie Babies. Far from learning from the speculator crash and burn, retailers seem determined to repeat it again, dangling bright new baubles that will someday, some way, make you rich. They haven’t—with the exception of the Beanie Babies—even tried to reach outside their habitual customer base, the 14-to-24–year–old males.

There are exceptions to this mix: Ancient Wonders, on SW Boones Ferry Road, sells comics, used CDs, and used video games; Blood Moon, on SE 39th, offers coffee and comics, a mix tried by Coyote Comics in Seattle; they’re further focusing their efforts on the goth community, slipping them Chaos! comics and the Crow while they’re browsing for lipsticks and sipping au laits. But the overall pattern seems discouragingly entrenched.

And even if you wanted to go into a comics shop and buy a comic, you might have a hard time finding one you wanted. Portland’s retailers, like comics retailers all over the country, maintain subscription boxes, or reserve boxes, for their regular customers. It works like this: the regular customer guarantees to buy certain titles each month, or every time they appear. In return, he gets a 10% or a 20% discount, and the retailer sets the copies aside, so they can’t be sold before the customer can come in and get them. It’s not a bad perk for your regulars, but shops in Portland sell 50%, 75%, as high as 90% of their comics through the boxes—not off the shelves, where walk-in customers could find them, where impulse purchases could be made. The lowest percentage reported was about a third of total sales, which is about the highest you’d expect a healthy retail store to have.

The comics industry is, rather notoriously, an industry staffed by fans. This is especially true of the retail end of things; nobody opens a comics store to make money. But while there’s a lot of horror stories floating around out there, there’s really no more stupidity or bloody-mindedness in comics retailers than there is in any other group of small retailers. The problem isn’t the way the retailers run their businesses; the problem is the business itself.

The Franklin Mint.

The direct sales market—which is how most comics are sold these days, and which is what every comics shop in America is part of—was a complete accident.

Comics in the early ’70s were, like today, facing a slow but steady slump in sales. Comics were sold then from newsstands, on a returnable basis, like the magazine and book trades—the retailer paid only for the copies actually sold; the rest were shipped back to the publisher or destroyed. And newsstands hated comics. They made less money off them than anything else but TV Guide, which sold more than enough copies to justify its cheap price. So the newsstands were giving prime placement to TIME and Life and other magazines that actually made them money, and comics publishers were watching up to half or two-thirds of their print runs go unsold.

So, when Phil Sueling made his offer to DC Comics in 1973, DC jumped at it. Seuling had organized one of the first comics conventions, a place where fans could meet to talk about favorite comics and trade back issues, dickering over the valuable ones. And there was a lot of money for one person to make in those back issues, even then; enough to support a couple of hundred specialty shops.

Seuling’s idea was that DC should sell directly to him, at a better discount than the newsstand distributors got. In exchange, Sueling wouldn’t return the unsold books. He was gambling he could sell all he bought, and any left over he could use as trading stock for conventions.

That deal became the basis for the direct market. Publishers loved the increased cash flow, and loved transferring the risk to the retailers; the big discounts encouraged other fans to open their own stores, which spread like wildfire; the break-even point on comics got lower, and black-and-white comics were viable for the first time ever, putting comics publishing within the reach of anyone with a couple of thousand dollars. New publishers flourished; once the direct market got organized, they could base their print runs directly on orders from comics shops, and be assured of a sell-out. New ideas were appearing in comics, new voices were being heard. That deal made possible just about every good comic that’s been done since.

It also sealed comics away, hermetically, into shops only the cognoscenti knew about. It reinforced the milk-the-fanboy strategy pioneered by Marvel Comics: if fanboys are all you’re reaching, you’d better squeeze them as hard as you can. The variant cover gimmicks, the glow-in-the-dark specials and the platinum inks, the trading cards, the movie tie-ins, the massive cross-over special editions, the fixation on spandex and tits, the $16 Superman you could probably buy for $4 today, if that—it was a speculator’s market from the very start, and like any house of cards, the crash was inevitable.

The funny thing is, Wertham saw it coming.

Dr. Fredric Wertham is a favorite demon of comics fans; his infamous 1945 book, Seduction of the Innocent, and his testimony before the US Senate scared comics publishers enough to create and enforce the dreaded Comics Code Authority—a draconian list of prohibitions, hypocritical morals, and imposed happy endings. It scuppered comics’ chances of ever reaching beyond its perceived audience: kids.

But Wertham never hated comics per se; just the violent ones he saw as the prime factor behind juvenile delinquency. (And comics in the ’50s were pretty raw and violent; shock sells, no matter what the time or place. Or medium.) In 1969, when Wertham was contacted by Dwight Decker, a comics fan looking for an interview, the dreaded doctor was delighted to discover the existence of comics fandom—self-motivated teens and young adults getting together peaceably to share their enthusiasm for comics. He wrote his last book about the phenomenon—1974’s The World of Fanzines—which contained this warning:

Comic-book collecting, which started as a nice nostalgic hobby, is in danger of becoming an overpriced, overcommercialized transaction…

Phil Seuling’s deal was never meant to last, or to become the new paradigm, but short-term gains blinded everybody to long-term effects. That deal turned comics from a faltering mass medium into the fucking Franklin Mint. It isn’t surprising that it finally crashed as spectacularly as it did; the only surprise is how long it stood, and how much we got out of it.

Quite possibly… comic books may emerge as the most natural, the most influential form of teaching known to man. They may jump boundaries of language; they may help to bind a broken world together.

—Coulton Waugh, 1947

There is a war going on today throughout the comic book industry. And the personalities interviewed for Comic Book Rebels are among those who have shot the most telling blows against the empire.

—Stanley Wiater and Stephen R. Bissette, Comic Book Rebels, 1993

Waiting for Superman.

“At this point, it won’t get worse,” says Peter Fagnant, owner of Excalibur. “We’re far from out of it, but it’s definitely reached bottom. The only question is whether this is the new status quo, or will it grow from here?”

There are signs that the industry’s freefall has slowed, and maybe stopped: Diamond claims that comics sales have held steady so far for 1998, and that enough new stores are now opening up to balance the current rate of closure. But let’s look around at where we are—

One company, Quebecor, prints 80% or more of all American comics. Canadian subsidies in paper and printing make it cheaper to print in Canada, and Quebecor has been aggressive in pursuing comics companies, being the only major printer with a department devoted to comics printing. One company, Diamond Comics, distributes up to 95% of all American comics to retailers. And one company, Another Universe, with its strong mail-order sales, accounts for 10% of all retail sales in the country.

This is not healthy. This is not viable. If something happens to any one of those companies it could trigger another round of freefall—and make no mistake, there’s a lot further to fall.

So we’re in a bad place, but maybe we’ve got some breathing room here, a chance to take stock and find a way out of this mess. And actually, there have been some suggestions.

1. A return to returnability. This one’s making the most noise right now; retailers want to turn over the basic precept of Phil Seuling’s deal, and go back to the way things were—at least part of the way. Most proposals call for partial returns, up to 25% of an order, limited to certain titles at the publisher’s discretion, good only 30 or 60 or 90 days after purchase. It’s too little, too late. It might’ve worked to take advantage of the flush times, and go back to 100% returnability in the late ’80s or early ’90s; that didn’t happen.

   Plus, returnability will have some nasty repercussions. Publishers, already conservative, would take less chances with comics, and retreat into what they think they can sell: tits and spandex. And it doesn’t address one of the basic problems in comics marketing: they’re still sold as periodicals, when it makes much more sense to sell them as perennials. “Alternative” comics shops like Million Year Picnic, Quimby’s, Page 45, and Reading Frenzy have proven you can build considerable audiences for even “unsellable” books by leaving them on the shelves, where people can find them. Some comic books see a fifth to half of their sales carried by three or four stores alone. The people around those stores aren’t any different than people elsewhere; those stores just took the time to build an audience.

   How can you do that if you’re returning unsold books after only 30 days?

2. The web. This is the wild card. Like everybody else, comics are looking to the web for answers, but they aren’t even sure what questions to formulate. It’s all too big. There are already comic strips being distributed on the web, and some interesting formal experiments in what comics would look like without the boundaries of paper or ink. And there’s a number of attempts to market physical comics on the web. Cartoonist Rick Veitch and Steve Conley have started comicon.com, an online comics convention, to allow folks to chat with pros and visit online booths where they can buy original art and comics. They’ve got some big names lined up: Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, Moebius, Charles Vess, Shannon Wheeler, Batton Lash, and more, but it seems more like a neat feature for fans than a way to draw in new readers. Some dream of the day when all comics will be sold through the web, eliminating the middlemen between creator and audience; we’ve got a lot to do before that can happen. Secure electronic transactions, for instance, and getting everybody computers and modems, for another.

3. New formats and new venues. You can get comics in three different ways: in the newspaper, in comic books, or in trade paperback or hardcover collections of strips or comic books. Why limit ourselves to that? Why force people to follow stories in 22-page chunks once a month for $2.50 (or more)? Where’s the cheaply printed 200-page manga-style anthologies? Where are the book-length comics?

   How about stores other than comics shops? The industry has been trying to crack the bookstore market for years, and there’s good news on that front: DC reports that its bookstore sales were up 70% last year; Fantagraphics sold 3500 copies of Dan Clowes’s Ghost World through bookstores; Dark Horse got 7000 copies of the new Too Much Coffee Man collection on their shelves. But these are all collections of stories reprinted from ongoing periodicals; to my knowledge, there’s only been two attempts so far to create and market comics the way books are created and marketed, by paying the author an advance to create a single, cohesive work that’s then sold as a single, cohesive work: Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby. McCloud’s book did phenomenally well; Stuck Rubber Baby, though it hasn’t yet earned back its production costs, is still on the shelves, selling. “I hope to start earning royalties in a decade or so,” jokes Cruse. Both have reached more new readers than Superman’s death and change of costume combined. And Joe Sacco’s next story will be done as a book at Fantagraphics. Where’s everybody else?

   Other ideas, other venues? Fantagraphics (again) has been slowly pushing its way into music stores; they have regular accounts set up with about fifty across the country. It’s a new venue, and it reaches new readers. How about newspapers? Glyph, a venture from Seattle’s Labor of Love collective, is taking the tabloid format of weekly alternative papers and applying it to comics: giving them away for free, and supporting itself through advertising. Its trial run of 10,000 issues has generated a flurry of enthusiastic phone calls and emails; it remains to be seen if enough advertisers will trust the new idea to keep it going.

And that’s pretty much it. The tenor for the most part is wait-and-see, looking for someone, anyone, to come flying in out of the sunset and set it right. The comics industry, rather than biting the bullet and changing a system that clearly isn’t working anymore, seems wedded to the idea of making it work the way it used to. That isn’t going to happen. (Almost forgot: Buddy Saunders, who runs the Lone Star retail chain in Texas, thinks the industry would be saved if every retailer bought his computer inventory software. And Brian Pulido, publisher at Chaos! Comics, is trying to sell product placement spots in his comics—which feature characters like Lady Death, Evil Ernie, and Purgatori—to shoe and car companies.)

“Maybe it’s time to let the industry rot on the branch,” says Scott McCloud, “let it fall and let the seeds scatter, to grow into something new, or several things.”

Maybe it is.

As visceral as film, as silent as a book, and as easy to produce as finding an idle photocopier, the comic book is inherently subversive.

—Pagan Kennedy, “P.C. Comics,” 1990

Great, I’m in the music industry and the comics industry. I’m getting fucked in both ends.

—Keith Knight, cartoonist and rapper, 1998

A room of our own.

When we talk about the “industry,” after all, we’re talking about the whole wheezing mechanism of the direct market. If it disappeared tomorrow, comics would still be made, and read, and appreciated; an idea as simple and powerful as comics can’t be killed.

“Instead of looking at what they can do, people are looking at how much they’ll lose or make. The greed is depressing,” says Shannon Wheeler, cartoonist of Too Much Coffee Man. “I mean, you can put out a comic now for $1300. You can put out hundreds of minicomics for next to nothing.” Comics have always been the most democratic of media; efforts of The Comics Journal notwithstanding, we haven’t been an “art” long enough to develop much snobbery.

There was a debate in the pages of the Journal last year which boiled down to whether or not comics should try to become a mass medium again. A better question is whether or not we can. A lot of money would have to be pumped into the industry, with no immediate return foreseeable, as whole new formats of comics are launched, and attempts made to educate the public, to inculcate a taste for comics. Where’s the money going to come from? Nobody makes long-term investments anymore.

And even if the industry gets the money, there’s an entertainment glut on. There’s more stuff to do out there than there is time to do it; new diversions sprout like mushrooms while the average working week, according to a Harris Poll, has increased from 40.6 hours in 1973 to 50.8 hours today, while real wages have either stagnated or dropped. Everybody’s feeling the pinch: movies, books, music, television, video games—comics just feel it the worst, because we’re so small, and we never had much of a chance to get big.

So do comics stay small, stay in their little niche, with only the occasional break-out success like Maus or Johnny the Homicidal Maniac? Problem with that is, cartoonists need rooms of their own like any other artist. It’d be nice to have that room paid for without having to take, say, a part-time job in a coffee shop, or scrounging free-lance illustration work. “If the industry is serious about shepherding the artform,” says Howard Cruse, “it’s got to solve the problem of making a living.”

There’s a growing trend in Hollywood these days. When a production team wants to shop a script around, they’ll commission a comic based on it. Apparently, they’re great selling tools for lawyers and producers. Which says a lot about comics’ ability to communicate a lot of information quickly and clearly, but doesn’t do much for their reputation as sub-literate trash. Still, there’s a lot of money to be made in animation and licensing deals; to a lot of cartoonists, it’s like hitting the lottery. And with the entertainment glut on, the other media are hungry for something to grab attention, and looking everywhere for it. Maybe that’s the future of comics: as the farm team for other media, a place for movie tie-ins and marketing ploys, a chance to try a concept’s street cred before risking it on more expensive, bigger things.

I’d agree with you on a good day. But not today. I’m afraid it’ll be something rotten. Hardcore pornography using funny animal faces. “Furious Familial Fucking Funny Animals.” Something like that.

—Jim Valentino, cartoonist, on the possible future of the industry, as quoted in Paul Pope’s journal, 1994

The Vamperotica Dare to Bare Special features provocative nude illustrations of Luxura. Also available in a Nude and Virgin Nude Edition. NOTE: The Nude Edition is not available in Hong Kong.

—one of the comics available in the Diamond Previews catalog, May, 1998

Why you don’t read comics.

But I’ve digressed. We were talking about why you don’t read comics.

I don’t know. There’s a lot of prejudice to overcome, prejudice that was built into comics from the start. It’s no wonder you think comics are disposable trash, because for the longest time that’s all comics were. Comic strips began in the 1890s as a marketing gimmick, a huckster’s shill to get more people to buy newspapers. Comic books got started in the late ’20s and early ’30s when somebody figured out a good way to make a buck off the downtime of the giant color presses every major newspaper had. Comics in America leaped out of the gate as a full-blown mass medium with no idea what they were or how they worked, and they’ve been falling behind ever since.

And yet. “My husband doesn’t read comics a lot,” says Martha Thomases, publicity manager for DC Comics, “but he has to put up with me bringing them home all the time. But he says there’s more good comics now than ever before. There’s more variety. We’re taking more chances.”

We’re doing something right. Artistically, as a medium, comics have never been healthier. It’s no wonder there’s a fascination about comics; enough of the good stuff has been leaking through, whether it’s Hate or Calvin and Hobbes or Dan Clowes doing a story in Esquire, that it’s bound to pique people’s interest. It’d be nice if the industry could somehow tap that interest, even a little bit, and climb out of its hole.

So why don’t you read comics? Heck, why do I read them? It doesn’t have anything to do with brain chemistry, or arrested development, or some weird, cult-like initiation. “I feel like a missionary for the cult of comics sometimes,” says Anina Bennett, and Martha Thomases says much the same thing; and I know what they mean. But really, it’s nothing like that. It’s quite simple:

Somewhere along the way, I acquired a taste for comics. You didn’t.

Do me a favor. The next time you think about it, go to a comics shop. Look in the yellow pages, or call Diamond’s comics shop locator number (888-COMIC BOOK). Don’t worry about looking foolish; nobody you know will see you. You can park you car on a side street, if you like.

Go inside. Don’t be put off by the posters, or the garish covers on the shelves. Ignore the tits and spandex. Poke around. Talk to the clerks. Let them know what you like, what you’re interested in. They’ll more than likely have a suggestion or three. Buy one. Take it home. Read it.

If you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy another. I promise.

There. I’m done. That’s pretty much all I wanted to say. I’m going to go re-read Pickle now.

Let me know if something interesting happens.

—Filed 8174 days ago to Sequentualities; Comments [28].

Why I love the Antic Muse.

Second of all, could Anthony Scalia be any gayer? Why isn’t he posting in the Corner—he’s that gay.

It’s not just her Snoopy dance over the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, though; it’s also her review of the latest album by someone I might once have been to the same Tank party as at Oberlin, only we didn’t run with the same crowds because she was, like, really into Bitch Magnet, and I was a total geek. —The review, of course, is about more than just Liz Phair. Or Liz Phair, for that matter.

(There’s something—heartening, somehow, about the fact that I can go put Exile in Guyville on and press play and what comes out is still that kick-ass album I first heard in the wee hours of one dark morning in the booth at WMUA.)

—Filed 8174 days ago to Poprocks; Comments [1].

If this be treason—

So I got a copy of Oskar Tennis Champion and now I’m playing track no. 9 to death—

In the Soviet Union
There’s a lightswitch on the wall
In the Soviet Union
And a canteen down the hall
In the Soviet Union
I make faces with a torch
In the Soviet Union
In the mirror on the back of the bathroom door
In the Soviet Union
Shining up the lino on the corridor floor
In the Soviet Union
Eating dead pigeons cold and raw
In the Soviet Union
Drinking vodka through a straw
In the Soviet Union
Weeping for the visions Lenin saw

I like it here, I like it fine
The radiator’s warm
The bus is on time

And healthcare is free
A job is for life
The caretaker is me
I’m switching on the lights

Me, I blame the pernicious influence of Ann “Treason” Coulter.

Today I’m alone
The war hasn’t even begun
But your king hasn’t won
One day you’ll come…

—Bonus pop culture up-to-the-moment meme in Oskar Tennis Champion: lots of pirates.

—Filed 8175 days ago to Poprocks; .

The road to hell runs through the Arkansas legislature.

It could open up a can of worms, there’s no doubt about that. But our intentions were pure.

That’s Arkansas state Rep. Shirley Borhauer, a 76-year-old grandmother and former schoolteacher, on Arkansas’s latest law: Act 858, which modifies Arkansas Code § 5-68-502, rendering it unlawful to—

display material which is harmful to minors in such a way that minors, as a part of the invited general public, will be exposed to view such material… provided, however, that a person shall be deemed not to have displayed material harmful to minors if the… lower two-thirds (2/3) of the material is not exposed to view and segregated in a manner that physically prohibits access to the material by minors…

It also forbids allowing a minor to view, “with or without consideration, any material which is harmful to minors.”

You’ll be wanting to know how Arkansas law defines what is “harmful to minors.”

...that quality of any description or representation, in whatever form, of nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse, when the material or performance, taken as a whole, has the following characteristics:

(a)The average person eighteen (18) years of age or older applying contemporary community standards would find that the material or performance has a predominant tendency to appeal to a prurient interest in sex to minors;

(b)The average person eighteen (18) years of age or older applying contemporary community standards would find that the material or performance depicts or describes nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sadomasochistic abuse in a manner that is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community with respect to what is suitable for minors; and

(c)The material or performance lacks serious literary, scientific, medical, artistic, or political value for minors.

Oh, well. That’s nice and precise, isn’t it. Hard to see how anyone could ever quibble over those terms.

Most of these quotes nicked from Newsarama’s excellent summary of what this dreadful law could mean for comics (“Best-case scenario—some kids may not get their hands on a Penthouse. Worst case—every single comic book retailer in the state is brought up on charges by the close of business Thursday”). There’s also the possibility that bookstores and libraries will have to set up “adults-only” sections, behind which they can hide such dangerous material as Of Mice and Men. And every librarian and small retailer in the state will have to stay up late with all their new acquisitions, vetting them, trying to figure out if some “average” Arkansas cop with an axe to grind, or DA with an election coming up, if one of them walks into the store and sees this out where minors can view it, will it land me in a ruinous lawsuit?

The ACLU is on the case, of course. The Times-Record has some coverage, and also includes some choice quotes from the sponsor of Act 858, Rep. Kevin Anderson (R [of course!]-Rogers), who calls it a “parents’ rights bill”:

The intent was not to make any dramatic conflicts or limitations in folks’ rights or consumer’s rights. The intent was to get it out of the reach of minors. I tried to take a common-sense approach to addressing the problem to make sure parents’ rights are protected without dramatically affecting the right to free speech.

Kevin? Buddy? Word of advice? You want to avoid dramatic conflicts and limitations in folks’ First Amendment rights, you know what? You don’t pass dumbass laws like this. Okay? You have a problem with your kid seeing whatever-it-is you see on comic books that’s harmful to minors? Don’t let your kid go to comic book shops. Don’t want your kid seeing the Dixie Chicks naked on the cover of Entertainment Weekly? Keep your kid away from magazine racks. Uncomfortable with the idea of your kid picking up new ideas from books you haven’t approved? Forbid your own damn kid from going into bookstores and libraries. Leave the rest of us alone, okay? I don’t care how “pure” your intentions are, you don’t pass a sweeping law aimed at censoring reality and the way we look at it and talk about it with each other in support of your own stunted, futile, horribly limited idea of protecting minors and then get to claim you “tried to take a common-sense approach.”

And one more thing? I don’t care how many rules you put into place, how stringently you try to shield your kid’s eyes from the nature of the world as it is—your kid already knows what the word “fuck” means. Your kid’s seen a picture of a naked woman lying back all come-hither on satin sheets, a picture that’s almost falling apart from where it’s been folded six or eight times and stuffed in a wallet. Your kid’s sat at the back of the bus on the way to camp and giggled when the dog-eared copy of Lace got passed to them, the one with the crease in the spine that falls open to that scene with the playboy and the goldfish. Okay? Your kid already knows. You can either admit that, deal with it, give your kid the benefit of your own insight and experience in dealing with this seamy side of pop culture that we will always have with us, you can try to communicate the principles you think your kid will need to make it past this Scylla and Charybdis we all negotiated ourselves back in the day—or you can pop your fingers in your ears and cry “La la la la la la la” and stick your head in the sand until it all goes away and your kid is 18 and magically able to handle this stuff and you don’t have to think about it ever. It’s your choice, what you want to do yourself, with your own kid.

What you can’t do is drag the rest of us into the sand with you. Okay?

—Filed 8175 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [1].

Beginning at home.

Max Sawicky manages to make me feel better about the decision I’d already made regarding tomorrow’s MoveOn.org primary. (And Chas—who really ought to post something new to Alas, already—has a good point about the Freepers’ plans to stuff the primary: it’d be much smarter for them to vote Lieberman, for God’s sake.)

So I’ll go on to further legitimize for myself, at least, the efforts of a dotcom bubble hold-over to play hardball with the big boys, by quoting some progressively patriotic platitudes, so I can think I’m Doing Something, and anyway I missed the interview the first time ’round—

My government, my country and the current political international crises are my problems because I’m an adult American. I find that, unwittingly sometimes, I feel more connected to the superstructures of society. We’re born into these systems, but we’re very much outside them when we’re young. It’s like it’s not our society. We have no power. We’re only learning, really, how it works and what our role in it is. I’m writing about big-P politics for the first time, just because it’s more a part of my life now. Suddenly I’m a voting adult and it’s my job to fix it.

After all, she did say every tool is a weapon, if you hold it right.

—Filed 8177 days ago to Squawkbox; .

And you will know me by the peals of laughter.

Past the halfway mark in the new Potter (I’ve also been prepping a kitchen for priming and painting this week and prepping my office to put in a new ceiling, and there was that rented copy of Topkapi we had to watch, so I haven’t been lying around reading all day as I’d otherwise like to have been) (and oh, yeah, I’m not spilling much by way of beans, but if you haven’t yet dug in and want to remain hermetically spoiler-free, you might want to take a pass on this one), and I’ve been amusing myself by pondering: how on earth—given the spectre of leave-no-child-behind teaching-to-the-test education reform haunting the book, the problems caused by officious politicians too small for the task at hand running around doing something because being seen as doing something right now is better than taking the time to think about what it is you really ought to be doing and why, to say nothing of haring off after convenient “bad guys” that can be found and caught and dealt with rather than facing up to more difficult and inconvenient though much more dangerous antagonists, the running thread of Big Content journalism being co-opted as governmental propaganda, and the overarching threat of Voldemort’s ideas as regards wiping clean the wizarding world and drowning its ministries and education system in the bathtub—I’ve been amusing myself, see, in between turning pages with an enjoyable alacrity, by trying to suss out how, exactly, the usual suspects will get around to spinning this as Harry Bush. (George W. Potter, perhaps, for those of a less juvenile bent.)

It hit me, yesterday, as I was working my way through my second cup of coffee. Ladies and gentlemen of the various pundit watches, your assignment, should you choose to accept it: keep a weather-eye out for the first to take us liberal nattering nabobs of negativity, who insist that those pesky WMDs were never there, and this is a problem, and, hem hem, compare us with Dolores Jane Umbridge, Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic and High Inquisitor at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, asking impertinent questions at all the wrong moments and just generally getting in the way of George W. Potter and his plucky Coalition of the Phoenix, keeping them from Doing Whatever It Is That Needs Getting Done.

—Until then, back to Severus and the Order of Phoenix. —I mean, Harry. Yeah. (Snape does not yet seem too terribly incorporeal, Sam. And Julia: you still owe us some theorizing, unless I missed it. Pony up, would you?)

—Filed 8178 days ago to Paralitticisms; Comments [2].

Rinsing certain tastes out of my mouth.

Tomorrow is the solstice, of course. The sun will reach the zenith of its analemma; the Oak King, distracted, will show the Holly King (who says, I only want to be sure you’re safe; I only want to know how very hard it is to harm you) the one way he can be killed, and the Holly King will turn treacher and strike. And then the days will grow shorter—so slowly that at first we will not notice, tumbling headlong through the high white heat of summer—until the first crisp breeze nips our nose, and we’re well on our way toward the cold dead end of the year.

If anything interesting happens to you in all of that, and you manage to wrap it up in 250 words of less-than-fictional prose by 28 June, slip it into a Word document and email it to Dale Keiger for consideration in the Microstories Summer Solstice 2003 project, would you? I think he’d like that.

—Filed 8180 days ago to Poprocks; .

Morons.

Democrats are ponying up for the 2004 GOP convention—out of their pride in New York City.

They’re paying out of their own pockets to support a party that’s capitalized in an incredibly ugly fashion on the greatest tragedy ever to strike the city, or the country, milking it for political capital in the greatest roll-back of civil liberties this country has ever seen. They’re paying out of their own pockets to support a party that intends to use the memorial of 3000 New Yorkers as a backdrop for the 2004 presidential campaign. They’re paying out of their own pockets to support a party that’s starving New York City at every turn of basic funding—to say nothing of the extra monies needed to keep it, and all the rest of us, safe.

If they had any pride in New York City at all, they’d put their money back in their pockets and tell the GOP to go fuck themselves.

—Filed 8181 days ago to Squawkbox; Comments [3].

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