The Used Cow Dealer (Seconds)

This week the 1001 Movies Blog Club is pleased to present for your consideration the feature film Seconds, directed by John Frankenheimer. If you happened to notice the Twilight Zone homage in that previous sentence, know that it’s no coincidence. For much of its running time, Seconds reminded me of an episode of Rod Serling’s spooky sci-fi anthology extended to 106 minutes, and featuring a prominent guest star in the person of Rock Hudson.

Seconds is a story about suburban middle-aged malaise, and a radical solution to it: faking one’s own death, undergoing radical plastic surgery, and stepping into a new, fully-formed and empirically superior identity. With that premise, Seconds is able to pose and attempt to answer two different hypotheticals. One, if a man could be handed his dream existence on a silver platter, would it bring him true happiness? And two, if a man could speak to his loved ones anonymously after his own death, and hear how they summed up his life, would it allow him to understand himself?

The latter question is only raised briefly, in a single scene near the end of the movie. The protagonist of the piece, who goes by the name Arthur Hamilton when he is played by John Randolph pre-surgery, and is called Tony Wilson once he is reconstructed as Rock Hudson, goes to visit Mrs. Hamilton, passing himself off as someone who made her husband’s acquaintance just before he died. Mrs. Hamilton reveals that she was always aware that her late husband felt something in his life was lacking, and wanted something which would always be out of reach. The common interpretation (or so it seems to me) is that this is the key point of the movie’s depiction of the protagonist’s quest for fulfillment. Arthur Hamilton conformed to society’s expectations and achieved all the things he was told he was supposed to want: a respectable career, material comfort, a devoted wife and daughter who grew up and married well. He never took the time to understand what wants and needs might naturally arise within him, let alone made any effort to satisfy those yearnings. All of which is fair enough (to a certain point), but to my mind the most crucial point that the “widowed” Mrs. Hamilton makes is this: “We never talked about it.” This is (or should be) the epiphany, an understanding that whether Arthur Hamilton would have been happier as a banker or a tennis pro, as a patriarch with six children and twenty grandkids or as a polyamorous swinger, his biggest mistake was burying such concerns within himself and not sharing them with his wife or anyone else. The most important, most lasting things we can do on this Earth are to forge connections with other human beings, to help one another shoulder the burdens piled on by existence. Everything else is secondary logistics. That is the opportunity that Arthur Hamilton squandered, not a career or a lifestyle but a chance at meaningful bonding. But the realization comes too late, as Mrs. Hamilton conducts a kind of psychological post-mortem at Tony Wilson’s request, finally giving voice to matters which she, too, could never speak aloud in her marriage.

Obviously, the answer to the former question is a resounding “no”. A radical, unearned upgrade of lifestyle, dropping into the chic Malibu bachelor pad of an established artist complete with an attractive, receptive female neighbor who can introduce him to a troupe of Bacchus-worshiping wine-and-free-love enthusiasts does almost nothing to make Tony Wilson any happier than Arthur Hamilton was. For a time while watching the second act of the film, I could not wrap my head around how the Company’s approach made any kind of sense. Wilson’s manservant continually suggests that he throw a cocktail party to get to know his neighbors, which Wilson resists at first but then agrees to, only to have it unravel as a total disaster: he drinks to excess, begins letting slip that he used to have another life, and then ultimately realizes that the various guests at the party are either “reborns” like himself or at the very least employees of the Company. So rather than providing the new life to Tony Wilson, wishing him luck and allowing him to find his own happiness, the Company micromanages him and effectively destroys any chance he might have at making the most of his “rebirth”. Then the nightmarish climax kicks into gear, and I realized: that’s the point. The Company sells the illusory idea of happiness, but of course the last thing the Company wants is for their clients to be happy. The Company wants their clients to be miserable, which in turn will make them hopelessly dependent on the Company, which will allow the Company to manipulate them into participating in the pyramid scheme which allows the Company to perpetuate its own existence, and so on. (In a more cynical mindset, I might very well argue that this is a metaphor for the three C’s of modern American society, capitalism and corporations and consumers, no different today than it was in 1966: all companies sell the American people the dream of happiness, but if everyone suddenly became completely happy with what they had, no one would buy anything, so the whole point of companies is not to give people what they want but to keep them perpetually wanting. But it’s almost Christmas, so let’s not go too far down that particularly dark rabbit hole.)

And the Company is extremely, insidiously good at what it does. By surrounding Wilson with plants loyal to the Company’s agenda, the Company effectively walls him off, which plays directly into my point above about meaningful human connections. So despite a pervasive feeling of being trapped in a surreal quasi-reality (which comes across in several sequences in which the fast intercutting of shots and exaggerated camera angles and other effects really hammer a sense of freak-out disorientation into the audience; heavy-handed, admittedly, but I would argue appropriate to the story and its subject matter), the events of the film make perfect sense, so long as you understand that from the very outset Arthur/Tony is doomed.

The title of this post comes from the slogan of one of the business fronts used by the Company. Arthur Hamilton follows a trail of cryptic clues to penetrate the inner heart of the Company, presumably as a means of testing his determination and suitability as a client. This includes traversing a slaughterhouse where partially butchered animal carcasses hang from hooks as they are shunted along to their final destination. The moment I saw the white coats and delivery van referring to a purveyor of meats as a “Used Cow Dealer” I was profoundly (if morbidly) amused and knew I needed to work it into my review. By the end of the movie, the slaughterhouse is revealed for the foreshadowing that it is, as the Company finds that Hamilton/Wilson’s only remaining usefulness to them is to serve as the manipulated cadaver stand-in for faking a new client’s death.

We are all chattel to the Company, and everything the Old Man says is a lie. We should really know this by now, as the precept that anything which seems too good to be true most likely isn’t true at all is a lesson stories teach us even from childhood. We can try to beat the game, but the house has the advantage and always wins in the long run. Yet it’s in our nature to believe we’re special enough to be the exception to the rule, even if it leads to our downfall. It’s hard to resist temptation, even inherently self-destructive temptation. Seconds illustrates that point, chillingly. But it also offers the tiniest glimpse of a counterpoint, the suggestion that we’re most susceptible to temptation when we’re most alone, and that attaching ourselves to others might help us weather the worst trials. Or so we have to hope.

Mixed holiday messages

Today is one of the two work holiday parties on my calendar this month. The DoD is a gigantically complex beastocracy, and there are parties organized at every level. Usually I only choose to attend the sit-down lunch for my specific agency, which is attended by a few dozen people whom I see every day. (After four or five years here, I can actually carry on a conversation with a few of them, at that.) Although I receive all the mass e-mail invites to the parties up and up the chain of command, I tend to skip those. Not only would they usually require a trek out to some other location on the rez, they would require two trips: one to RSVP and pay whatever nominal entry fee is required, and then one to the actual shindig. And both of those treks would involve a Metro ride at least, which of course I generally avoid as best I can.

But this year, the responsibilities for hosting the under-secretariat's holiday party has rotated around to my agency, so the potluck is here in our office, and it seemed like more effort to avoid attending than to just give in and take part. I make it sound terrible, I know, but I admit that it's no hardship under the circumstances, other than the mental toll of getting through the stilted artificial socializing without losing my dang mind.

What's funny (for certain definitions of "funny") is that, as I've alluded to in the past, my office is a secure workspace with numerous protocols in place to protect everything from the integrity of our assets to the lives of the workforce. Which means that in order to host a gathering of many people who don't take up cubespace here on a daily basis, we have to have a certain relaxing of the standard rules. But not too much relaxing, per an e-mail that went out earlier this week:

Remember to be vigilant of your surroundings, but to have a good time; and if you see something suspicious - report it.

I barely passed the philosophy course on symbolic logic that I took in college, but I'm pretty sure that the construction "A, and yet also B, but REALLY A" essentially boils down to "just A". Peace on earth, goodwill toward man, TRUST NO ONE.

SMALLVILLE NO MORE

As of sometime around the middle of last week, I have officially seen all 218 episodes of the television series Smallville. It's taken me a little while to process the finality of it (including the requisite scouring of the internet to read other geeks' thoughts on the tenth season) and it's still somewhat strange to think that I'm done, there's no more to catch up on, I am forever spoiler-proof (though, fair warning, this post will not be) and will no longer have Smallville frequently popping up in the rotation of Things I Watch on the Daily Commute.

I watched the pilot episode of Smallville when it was broadcast, in October of 2001 when I was living with my mom in New Jersey after being laid off that spring and agreeing to a marital break (that would end up in divorce) that summer. I tuned in faithfully for most of that first season, and (interpret this with what pathos as you will) it was a dumb yet entertaining bright spot in a year that I often retrospectively refer to as rock bottom. Then the following fall I moved back to Virginia to take a much better job than the one I was killing time with in NJ, and I didn't have as much time for weeknight teen soap operas. But when I bought my own place a couple of years later, and my own tv and my own DVD player, I picked up the box sets of the first three seasons of Smallville and started reacquainting myself with it. At the time, I had a couple of other friends who were watching the show live, and I held some nebulous goal in mind of catching up with them so we could discuss the finer points of the series from a comics fan's perspective. But I never quite managed to re-sync with the broadcast version. I was always a year or three behind at least, as evidenced by my viewing in December 2013 of a season finale which originally aired in May of 2011. The pop cultural moment for Smallville, if ever there was one, has since passed.

But I hung in there out of a combination of sheer stubbornness and genuine attachment, and in the process I amassed a shelf's worth of box sets which I will now own forever (and which will give me reason to hope that all next-gen successors to Blu-ray technology continue to be backward compatible for reading DVDs). My wife suggested I might make Smallville available for our kids to watch some day, and that I'd possibly revisit it with them, which is certainly true enough. The question remains open at what age I would consider the sheer amounts of cheesecake and fan service to be age-appropriate for our little angels, but I've got several years yet to figure that out (or for the coarse vulgarity of society to simply overwhelm everything and make the question moot).

At any rate, as tempting as it is to perform an in-depth examination of the entire ten-year run of Smallville, I tend to think there are so many hooks upon which I could hang such musings that it would be a full-time job (or at least a separate blog) in and of itself. It's not like I haven't posted extensively about Smallville in the past as I was working my way through (see various links scattered throughout this post, for starters), and it's also not as if getting to the end of the series caused a myriad of things to click into place and fundamentally shifted my understanding of the whole. But it was a good ending, and since I'm marking the end of my serial consumption of the show I might as well just focus in on how well the show stuck the landing.

It's interesting to think how much Smallville changed over the years. It started out as yet another melodrama on the WB overflowing with teen angst and an emo soundtrack which also happened to have mysteries and monsters and (brief) action sequences. It also borrowed a lot of iconography from Superman, although it concerned itself with examining what it would be like to be a young Clark Kent, discovering each of his powers above and beyond mortal men, slowly piecing together the lost history of Krypton, grappling with being the last of an alien race living secretly among humans, &c. Obviously as the show progressed all of Clark's powers had been mastered (or almost all; they kept delaying true flight until the bitter end, believing it should be the big payoff to the series) and he became the foremost expert on all things Kryptonian, not to mention sharing his secret identity and extraterrestrial origins with at least half a dozen people. The teen melodrama fell away as well, and as I commented on elsewhere they even pulled the trigger on getting Lois and Clark together in a permanent romantic relationship, so by the end there was neither unrequited love nor any other font of adolescent agony. By the time the series concluded, the only way to be invested in the fates of the characters was to have been following along from the start.

But for all that the showrunners allowed the heroic career of Clark Kent to progress at the same time that the emotional plots matured, they remained insistent that Smallville would never be a show about Superman, but instead a show about Before He Was Superman or How He Became Superman. That was the high concept of the premise, and to deviate from it would have been a step too far. To comics fans who wanted to see the S-shield, the red cape, the archetypal costumed superhero saving the world, this was infuriating. To anyone with a sense of how long stories should spend on prologues before moving on to main narratives, this was maddening. But it was consistent, for TEN YEARS, because it wasn't a movie or a miniseries, it was a television show that had great financial interest in running as many seasons as it possibly could. The writers tied themselves in knots within knots of pretzel logic to stay within the confines of the concept for as long as they did and still work in tons of comic book references which would normally only make sense in a world After Superman, and whether that's seen as an impressive feat in and of itself or completely pointless, I have 60 discs of proof in my possession that this was a thing that happened, on network television, for the vast majority of the 00's.

(Seriously, the Green Arrow and Hawkman characters on Smallville had a contentious relationship which very much mirrored the one they had in the comics, which is a minor bit of characterization for a couple of C-list superheroes, yet Smallville put it on screen. Smallville also, in the final season, went through not one but two different plots involving Lex Luthor's cloning technology from the comics, by combining them into one arc that ran through much of Season 10. I admit, I come down on the side of being impressed by the sheer audacity of it all.)

I think I made a passing comment earlier to Season 10 being like a victory lap for Smallville, and I stand by that, but I will acknowledge that they did a couple of clever things in the final run which I would in no way accuse of being any kind of phoning it in because the pressure to get renewed was off. One of the episodes in the back half of the season was a blatant ripoff of The Hangover, because of course the whole season was building to Clark and Lois's wedding and so there needed to be some kind of bachelor/bachelorette party riff. The structure of the episode is almost exactly like the movie: friends gather, a toast is made, and then everyone wakes up with no memory of the night before and must retrace steps and reconstruct events. The Smallville version is barely funny at all (and clearly, as a prime time show, can't remotely replicate the R-rated movie humor) and the plot is borderline nonsensical, but set all that aside. If I retroactively could, I would nominate the episode for an Emmy in costume design. When the revelers wake up the next day, they are mostly in wacky new clothes. Clark is in the same classic black suit, slightly worse for wear, but nerdy Dr. Emil and high-strung Tess are in costume as Elvis and a go-go girl. Oliver Queen is in a lime-green tuxedo with a ruffled shirt. Chloe is in a wedding dress a la Madonna circa Like a Virgin. Lois is in the same leopard-print dress she was in the night before, although her high heels have been stolen and replaced by a homeless person's boots.

OK, this is probably giving way too much credit where none is due, but I felt like the writers and costumers were collaborating to point out how one of the great things about Superman is how timeless he is. Superman has been around since 1938 and there have been great Superman stories in every decade since, from the 40's (Lois's leopard-print) to the 50's (Emil's Elvis) to the 60's (Tess) to the 70's (Ollie) to the 80's (Chloe) to the 90's (Lois again, as things come back around, plus clunky grunge boots) and through it all simple, classic Superman (Clark) endures. If that wasn't deliberate, it's a phenomenal coincidence to pick up on (even for an overthinker).

Another interesting tack taken as the show readied itself for the end was to face head-on the fact that it wasn't the end, that by design and by admission of its own concept, whenever the final curtain fell on Smallville it would only be so that it could be raised on the next act, the actual career of Superman As Superman. To a certain extent it seemed as though young, un-codenamed Clark Kent had already hit all the major high points of the Superman mythos which might beg the question as to what there would be left for Superman to do. So an entire episode was dedicated to foiling a plot in which several minor supervillains who hadn't been permanently vanquished banded together, in a direct homage to the Legion of Doom from the old Challenge of the Super-Friends cartoons. Granted, given the need for decisive victories over Big Bads in the course of ten seasons, they had to slot in the Toyman as the leader of this Legion. (I could do another couple thousand words on Superman's rogues gallery and how Smallville handled it over the years, believe me.) But the point is, the Legion of Doom was introduced as a concept toward the end of the episode, and never heard from again, with the obvious implication being that the audience shouldn't worry about post-Smallville Superman, as he will have plenty of bad guys to keep him busy in the never-ending battle.

But the thing that hit me the hardest about the end of Smallville, specifically the double-sized finale, was that they brought it full circle and made it once again all about fathers and sons, about the House of El and the Kents and the Luthors. Lionel and Lex had both been killed off in previous seasons, but between the cloning subplot and a couple of episodes with a recurring motif of an evil mirror universes, both Luthors were there for the final chapter. Lionel ended up being murdered by Lex's illegitimate half-sister, then reanimated by a cosmic god of evil to face off one last time against Clark, while Lex threatened to embrace his destiny as Clark's antithesis forevermore, until that same half-sister dosed him with neurotoxin that caused him to forget he knew Clark's secrets. Crazy comic book stuff, in other words, but intertwined with notions of twisted love and loyalty and legacies of pain. Which was counterbalanced by the ghosts of both of Clark's father figures, and Clark ultimately embracing his two families equally and finding untapped reserves of inner strength there, learning that he could be more than either Jor-El or Jonathan Kent and that in doing so he would be revering them, not disrespecting them. (i.e., Clark grows up.) In the time between discovering Smallville and finishing it, I became a father myself, and even something as cheesy as a disembodied Jor-El telling his son "The greatest honor a father can have is to be humbled by his child" can get to me.

And so with mere minutes to go in the life of the Smallville series, Clark finally reaches a state of peace with who he is, where he came from, where he needs to go and how he's going to get there, and he finally learns to fly. He punches the Lionel/evil god hard enough to vaporize him, and then puts on the red and blue tights for the first time because the evil god's home planet is about to crash into Earth and the world needs a beacon of hope. Also, Lois Lane is on Air Force One as the President is being taken to a secure facility so they can launch U.S. nukes at the evil planet. So Superman flies up to alter the course of the incoming evil planet but before he does he saves the plane. If you remember my dissection of the problems with the Man of Steel movie, you might recall how important I think the symbolism of Superman saving the plane is. I wrote that back in June, before I had any idea that Smallville had managed to latch onto that idea as well. And, honestly, it's kind of shoehorned awkwardly in there, a way to connect Lois to this outsized physical contest between Superman and AN EVIL PLANET so that she's there in the middle of it when Clark debuts the Superman look at the hour of humanity's greatest need. But still, somebody knew it was important enough that it was better to cram it in than leave it out. Smallville got it. Man of Steel seriously has no excuse.

Sorry, not to get sidetracked. For some reason Smallville felt the need to append a weird "seven years later" epilogue to the series, showing that the story they had just finished telling for a decade did in fact result in the familiar Superman status quo, including Perry White as editor in chief of the Daily Planet (Perry was introduced on the show but not in the newspaper's management) and Jimmy Olsen as photographer and cub reporter (despite Jimmy having been killed as a season-ending shocker a couple years earlier; some awkward dialogue explain this is his near-identical cousin or somesuch) and Lois as star reporter and Lex Luthor as President of the United States (loooooooong story) and ... Clark and Lois as romantically involved but still unmarried. Their wedding was interrupted in the finale (because of course it was, by Soap Opera Laws of Nature) and for some reason they never completed the ceremony, although they talk to each other about intending to, only for Clark to be called away on a Superman emergency, implying a seven-year running gag that this always happens. I suppose that allows the fans to have their cake and eat it too, with those who prefer Superman unmarried having just that and those who prefer Clark and Lois hitched seeing that it's just about to happen. Personally, I thought the whole epilogue was unnecessary, although I get that only by advancing some amount of time and getting Clark out of his wedding suit and back to the Daily Planet can they end on this rooftop image:

But the romantic in me found the not-married bit highly disappointing.

But now I've devolved to quibbling, when really my main point was that Smallville stayed true to itself for ten bugboink insane seasons and carried that through right to the end, which delivered on the most important expectations as satisfyingly as could be expected. That still somehow sounds like faint praise, and maybe more than a little conflicted and confused. But that's pretty much Smallville for you.

I shall wear my trousers rolled

It is yet another sign of how I'm getting old (and a completely unnecessary one, as I believe the point has been proven, thanks) that last night I had dreams about waking up and checking my cell phone, specifically my phone's web browser, which was pointed at the Office of Personnel Management site, which posts information about government office closings due to inclement weather. I had climbed into bed last night still obsessively refreshing the screen until I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer, but the site continued to have no news about Monday one way or the other. So I drifted off, and instead of dreaming about armies of yetis or sugarplum blizzards or anything fancifully dream-journal-worthy like that, my brain simply continued to replay the same monotonous routine of rolling over, picking up my phone from the nightstand, and checking OPM.

I suppose if one were feeling generous one could argue that I have retained a modicum of inner child because even in my dreams I was hoping to see a CLOSED notification; an irredeemably mature grown-up would hope in their heart of hearts that the offices would be open so that they could be productive. (or something. I guess. I wouldn't know!)

As it turned out, the federal government decided to open offices two hours late today, presumably to give the ice on the roads a chance to melt. So I got to spend some leisurely time at home this morning, have a sit down breakfast with my lovely wife, and see my kids when they woke up before I had to hit the road. By then it was too late to take the train, but the drive in wasn't bad at all, and the frosted ice limning every branch of ever tree was actually quite lovely. I'm sure that when I drive home this evening I'll be cursing every one of my fellow human beings, but so it goes.

Marvel Comics: My Untold Story (3) - Libraries

When my Little Bro and I were fairly young and both into comics, we were pretty annoyed with our father for not having saved any of his comics from when he was a kid. This was in the early 80’s, well before the speculation boom and quite possibly before the earliest auctions of collectible comics for ridiculous sums of money, so this was not a matter of faulting our dad for not taking better care of a potential source of financial wealth. On the contrary, we just wanted to be able to read older comics, which at that point was difficult if not impossible. Almost all old comics, much like our dad’s, had simply been thrown away in their time. The comics that had come and gone before our time seemed gone for good. Reprints were all but unheard of, books like those from Children’s Press notwithstanding. Yet there were a precious few reproductions scattered around here and there, as well.

My uncle Shep owned a large, hardcover volume which was sort of like a grown-up version of the Secret Story of Marvel’s World Famous Wall Crawler book he had given me for Christmas, except that his covered numerous characters from the so-called Golden Age, the ‘30’s and ‘40’s. I am about 98% sure that this book was Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes, published in 1965. I discovered Shep’s copy one day when our family visited his, and I was fascinated by it. Compared to my Spider-Man book, it was more mature in its approach, almost scholarly and certainly written with an adult audience interested in the history of comics in mind. And it focused on comics from long before Spider-Man’s time. Marvel Comics didn’t really come into being until the 60’s, so most of those comics from a generation earlier were DC properties (there have always been other publishers of superhero stories besides DC and Marvel, but they don’t call them the Big Two for nothing): Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the original Green Lantern, the Spectre, Plastic-Man, and possibly some others I am forgetting.

In a sense, uncle Shep’s tome (seriously, to a seven year old it was pretty massive) could have tilted me in either of two directions. It could have inspired in me a deeper, respectful appreciation for DC Comics by granting me access to its origins, or it could have pushed me farther into the Marvel camp by highlighting the differences between the two companies and making the parameters of choice apparent. Clearly it was the second scenario which won out. While the first appearances of Superman and Batman are bona fide classics (and while I was intrigued by weirder heroes like the Spectre as well), compared to the modern storytelling in Spider-Man those forerunners seemed almost inert and hopelessly uninteresting. I would come around eventually, but as a child, the superiority of Marvel was obvious.

Uncle Shep was born in 1953, so those Golden Age comics were before his time as well. But he was buying comics on the newsstand in the 60’s and even the early 70’s, and once he realized just how ardently I loved the medium he let me in on something: unlike my dad, he had saved a fair number of comics in a box in his closet, despite moving from New York to Oregon and back east again. He let me read these relics, and I remember a couple in particular. One was an issue of The Flash where the scarlet speedster battled Doctor Light, and completely broke Einsteinian physics (even as an elementary schooler I knew this was dodgy storytelling), and the other was the #1 issue of Marvel Team-Up from 1972. Once again, the comic book featuring Spider-Man (and the Human Torch) struck me as dynamic and sophisticated where the Flash’s adventure seemed all-too hokey. Additionally, there was the allure of a #1 issue, a collector’s item, and that helped set me on the path of being not just a reader but a curator, which I will return to in due course.

By Christmas of 1983 my family had moved from New York to New Jersey, and to a suburb which was much easier for a fourth-grader to get around independently either on foot or by bicycle. I pretty quickly became familiar with the town’s public library, and spent a lot of time there feeling very much at home. Nowadays, libraries have entire catalogs of graphic novels and trade paperbacks making comics available to their patrons, but that was only able to happen when those formats became ubiquitous. In the early 80’s, a library might have a book like Feiffer’s if you were lucky, one which contained comics within its pages but purported to be something more erudite, to be classified under “American art history” or somesuch. Our library lacked a copy of The Great Comic Book Heroes, but it had something arguably better: Son of Origins of Marvel Comics, by Stan Lee.

This is one of the omissions from Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story which I take significant exception with, because I think it fits so well into the narrative that Howe constructs. Stan Lee always fancied himself a writer in the artiest sense of the word, and at various points in his life envisioned someday penning the Great American Novel. He’s most famous for working in a medium which works best with impactful, yet minimal text broken up by lots of art. Alternatively, he’s most famous for being the ultimate huckster, channeling the undeniable force of his exuberant personality not only into the melodrama in the comic book stories he scripted, but into representing the company of Marvel Comics as salesman-in-chief and main booster of his own fan club. All of these facets come together in the series of Origins books that Stan Lee wrote between 1974 and 1977.

Feiffer was writing about other people’s creations, but Stan Lee was writing about his own. Each volume reprinted classic issues of Marvel comics, usually the first appearance of a major character, and between each reprint was pages and pages of Lee’s own hyperbolic prose, explaining how he came up with the ideas and what the characters meant to him. In recent years, it has become more and more apparent that Lee, a legend in his own mind, has at the very least exaggerated his role as the sole visionary who conceived the iconic characters and epic adventures which thrilled generations of Marvel fans. But in the Origins books, he took to the pulpit and preached his own gospel. It must have been something like a dream come true for him, writing an actual book, not just a funny book but a classy, hardbound book-book, about his favorite subject (himself) and with a built-in audience, not to mention half the material and selling point of the book (the comics) already done a decade before.

My local library did not have a copy of Origins of Marvel Comics, which covered the biggest stars of the Marvel Universe: Spider-Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four. But I knew those stories already, anyway. Son of Origins, the book I did find on the shelves, was devoted to slightly more obscure super-heroes: Iron Man (strange to think he was ever obscure before 2008, but he very much was), Daredevil, the Silver Surfer, and the X-Men (also little-loved in 1975, although they were on the rise in 1984). As it turned out, the library had two more books in the same vein: Bring on the Bad Guys, which gave super-villain origins the same treatment, and the Superhero Women, which presumably tried to hop on the women’s lib bandwagon by celebrating the virtuous females of the Marvel universe. In retrospect, The Superhero Women seems to not quite make it onto the wagon. In order to fill an entire book, after highlighting the obvious candidates like the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Girl and the Avengers’ Wasp and the relatively new feminine (and “feminist”) version of Captain Marvel, the volume goes on to cover: Medusa and Black Widow, who had both started out as femme fatales before eventually becoming good gals; Hela, an unequivocally bad Norse death-goddess; Red Sonja, a licensed Conan the Barbarian character; Lyra, a sci-fi Femizon; and Shanna the She-Devil. In other words, despite the title, not all of the women featured in the book were superheroes, and a few weren’t heroes at all, because Marvel was overwhelmingly stories for boys about boys. (Admittedly, The Superhero Women became one of the books I checked out of the library most frequently, as by fifth grade I found artwork depicting half-naked jungle girls almost unsettlingly compelling, but perhaps best to leave that be.)

The Origins books were the culmination of my indoctrination as a True Believer, because they were pitched right down the middle between the child-friendly condescension of Kraft’s Secret Story books and the highly literate borderline pretension of Feiffer’s Great Comic Book Heroes. They were written in the voice of an articulate, excitable adolescent, which is the general tenor of Marvel Comics overall (and Stan Lee, as well, the two entities exceedingly difficult to differentiate) and which I was on the cusp of becoming. I had already found a character I could identify with, but now the fundamental philosophy of the publisher had its hooks in me.

Coincidentally, I was also about to start earning a regular allowance and the ability to spend it on whatever I wanted. When it was no longer a question of what comics I happened to run across in other people’s libraries, or as random gifts, but my own powers of discernment as a paying customer, my loyalties became even more ingrained, which I will elaborate on next post.

Saturday Grab Bag Leftovers

One of the (many) things that irks me about my current gig is that the civilian employees and the contractors really operate under very different rulesets, for various logistical reasons. As a result I will often receive e-mails which are completely irrelevant to me; they will address something specific only to the civilian government employees and yet will be blasted out to everyone, civilian and contractor alike, because we are all part of the "Agency - All" e-mail distribution list. I don't know if there is a "Civilian Agency Employees Only" mailing list in existence or not; maybe there isn't, or maybe there is but no one bothers to use it.

Regardless, I got an e-mail last week which, as usual, spoke only to the civilian workforce, specifically addressing the fact that an unacceptably large number of people were not up-to-date on recording their time and attendance in the official government payroll system. Time. Attendance. Got that?

The subject line of the e-mail was "Missing Civilian T&A" which ... man, I just wish I had thought of that as the subject for my post about La Grande Illusion. Hardships of war and all that.

+++

Tuesday of this week I was pretty late getting home because my usual train suffered an engine breakdown and they had to hook up a second engine to the front of it at L'Enfant Plaza, to pull the busted engine and all the cars down the line. All told the delay was about 75 minutes, which was unpleasant but could have been worse (e.g. longer, or it could have been raining or freezing cold or both, &c.) and I really didn't have much of a reaction to the whole thing. The VRE is usually very reliable and a comfortingly sane way for me to negotiate the distance between home and work five days a week. Every once in a blue moon, something catastrophically disruptive happens, but that's life.

The most noteworthy thing about the whole incident was that I had to stand on the train platform for close to an hour and a half. And as old and out of shape as I am, just standing with no support for more than 20 minutes or so is a kind of physical exertion I'm unaccustomed to suffering. At various points I thought about bailing, but where would I go? I could take the Metro as far as Vienna, but in addition to loathing the Orange Line I would then need my wife to load all the kids in the car right around dinner time and fight 66 there and back to pick me up. Or I could foot the hefty fare for a taxi. But I waited it out. I also thought about giving up my spot on the platform's edge in order to lean my decrepit bulkitude against the rear wall of the station, but I resisted the temptation out of fear that if I didn't stay put and guarantee my position as one of the first people on the train, I might not get on the train at all, because the delays had allowed at least two trains' worth of riders to assemble in waiting.

There are actually two rail lines that run through the Crystal City station, and the way the delay recovery worked they sent through a jam-packed train on the line I ride, without stopping in Crystal City, then they sent through the train on the other line that would normally follow mine, and then another train on my line that did stop at our station. So when the other train arrived and opened its doors, because I was standing right in front of them I had to find as non-awkward a way as possible to keep my spot while letting other riders board their train. It was not graceful, but I managed it. Then the train on my line arrived ... and overshot the usual stopping point so badly that rather than standing in front of a set of doors I was at almost the exact midpoint between two sets of doors. All for naught! (cried my aching lower back) but I still ended up getting a seat on the train, so no harm no foul.

+++

Follow-up to my post on Thursday about my children and their exposure to gender parity and whatnot: so the other day the little guy and the little girl were playing and, as usual, the little guy was directing what was supposed to happen at every turn, though he does deserve some credit for at least hearing out what his sister wants to do, even if he does at times (read: frequently) overrule her. I was in an adjacent room listening in as the little guy explained that he was the superhero and the little girl was the princess. (I am not being coy and avoiding brand names of characters here, the little guy literally was using the archetypal terms.) Atone point the little girl said she wanted to be a superhero too and the little guy said, "No, princesses can't be superheroes!"

I of course did not miss a beat and called out, "Wonder Woman is a princess!"

And again, credit where it's due, the little guy's response was, "Oh yeah, that's right, she's Princess Diana!" Which is something he learned from a Wonder Woman board book that my Little Bro gave my daughter as a gift one Christmas. So, he may forget sometimes in the heat of the moment, but at least he's paying attention during the study sessions as I try to impart my heritage on the children.

The names stay the same, just the faces change

In the offseason between the 1992 and 1993 MLB seasons, the New York Yankees acquired Wade Boggs from the Boston Red Sox. I know full well that only fans of one team or the other care at all about the rivalry between the two teams, but I’d argue that even the most jaded “I hate them both equally” observer would acknowledge that it is at least a storied rivalry, a colorful one, going all the way back to the trade of Babe Ruth from Boston to New York and the ensuing Curse of the Bambino. So, on the one hand, there wouldn’t be so much of a Red Sox/Yankees rivalry without the possibility of players defecting from one team to the other, and yet on the other hand, whenever it happens (though it almost always happens in a north-to-south direction) it feels a little bit unnerving.

Certainly that had been the case for me with Boggs. He had only ever played for the Red Sox at that point and was thoroughly and utterly identified with the team. He had been a member of the squad that made it to the World Series for the first time in sixty-eight years, only to lose to the Mets, a defeat that would live in infamy (and was cold comfort, but comfort nonetheless, to Yankees fans who were rooting for a less-than-mediocre lineup at the time). When Boggs traded his scarlet stockings for pinstripes I just had no idea how I was supposed to react. Could I bring myself to cheer for him when he came to bat or took the field as a Yankee? And if I could, was that allowed? You would think since I was almost 18 years old when this happened it wouldn’t perplex me so, but between my own dearth of playing organized sports as a kid and no one ever explaining it to me, I struggled.

Boggs ended up being pretty good for the Yankees for a few years, and ten years after he failed to get the Red Sox their first championship in seven decades, he helped get the Yanks their first in two. Obviously I got over my initial cognitive dissonance and realized what I believe most sports fans intrinsically assume: you root for a team (for whatever reasons: geographical loyalty, familial tradition, bandwagon jumping, &c.) and the players on that team, but players come and go and the team remains the object of the fandom rather than the individual.

This might not make actual, logical sense! Why shouldn’t I be a fan, for example, of Peyton Manning irrespective of whether it’s the Colts’ organization or the Broncos’ signing his paychecks? Or more to the point of the example I led off with, why would I suddenly start liking Tom Brady if (through some bizarre turn of events which I can’t even hypothetically construct) he became the starting QB for the Giants? Rooting for a specific team, in the era when teams as often as not have fire sales on their top players immediately after winning the championship, seems like an oddly mindless form of consumer brand loyalty. It’s the players who go out and make the plays and win the games, and the team is an abstraction, a color scheme for the uniforms, and maybe in the case of some baseball teams a particularly charming home stadium. And yet. The owners of the teams sell the concept of the team first, and the personalities on its roster second, because if the need should arise to wheel and deal on those human commodities, they need to be absolutely free to do so. That’s just the way it is.

And I know that, and I accept it, although this week I could really use another word for “accept” that does not encompass being completely at peace with something. On Tuesday the Yankees signed Jacoby Ellsbury away from the Red Sox as a free agent, and sometime last night or this morning Robinson Cano signed a deal with the Seattle Mariners (whattheWHAT?!), so basically my little AL East-centric world is in upheaval at just about the deadest part of the year between baseball seasons. I have to assume that by the time April rolls around I will be fully up to the dictionary definition of “acceptance”, but right now I’m feeling about twice as loopy as I was in ‘92.