Under "scene two"

You all know the drill. We're doing a post of play--either a scene or an interlude--followed by a post of reflection on that scene.

There's this gimmick in Frank Caliendo's impression humor where he tries to combine disparate concepts with an obsessive's eye for obscurity. I think it's his Jon Gruden impression where he frequently brings in a series of references to comic book characters when supposedly breaking down football players. It's the surprise of diversity that creates the humor here: the idea of a football coach who would get up at 3am every day also reading about the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man. That's part of what I'm trying to do with Carl, but since Carl has always been a stand-in for me in a lot of ways, I use my own interests as a means for this surprise of diverse interests. Sports, comics, history, politics, movies... When you flow back and forth between these topics, you create the bathetic, unintentional humor on the part of Carl, but a bit more intended by his creator. Carl himself becomes a bit aware of this when he discusses slavery, women's rights, and then... Wonder Woman. You have to laugh at the stupidity of it. I feel this way a lot because so much of the metaphors and connections I make are to comix and I'm sure I give off the impression of having a one-track mind all the time.

I've never really consistently read comics at the bookstore, but I figured that Carl would. Carl does other things that I don't as well--I figure this is the way it is for many writers who use somewhat autobiographical characters. There are ways that you pattern characters after yourself and there are ways that you patently do not. Sometimes the character is a better version of yourself, but sometimes there are just ways the character just isn't you. That's maybe a theme in "Waiting for Gadot," as we have seven stand-ins for me in the play so far. You never are who you want to be, but then again, you never are who you think you are.

I've thought about the constant revising of Wonder Woman in the context of much of superhero comix in general--part of the interesting part of Marvel or DC comics is the universe the publishers have created and this big sense of continuity, of a big giant book of all the comic books that no one has completely read. Unfortunately (at least "unfortunately" in my opinion), so much of that gets thrown away every few years when origins are rewritten and stories are no longer canon. My interest in superheroes has always been on the side of continuity, of how the set-pieces come together. I like to imagine storylines every now and then that consider character's current statuses quo (is that how you write it?) and how they would come together given what has already been written. In many ways, this follows my growing belief that dramatic irony is the most impacting aspect of fiction--the anticipation or dread that you get from knowing more about the future than the characters is easily one of the strongest feelings we get from movies, books, television, or comix. It's something you can only really feel from fiction (or I guess to some extent from history? But I could argue that history is in some ways a fiction). It's distinctly not from life; when people confuse this feeling from fiction with life, they become judgmental prophets of the future who are rarely even aware of the leaps in logic they take to be so sure of themselves, yet it's such a common circumstance in fiction that we all end up thinking that way about life sometimes. That we know what's going to happen to people if they go to a certain place at a certain time or wear certain clothes in certain areas or do certain things to certain people, and we know it! Of that we're absolutely certain!

I realized while writing this part of the play what it is that Carl is actually doing. He's making a sort of podcast, though if what we hear from him is what he records or him sounding out his thoughts before recording we will probably never know. The script points out that we don't know if Carl turns on or turns off his recorder, when he takes it from his bag.

Oh, the odd reference: Ron Silliman is a language poet. I'm never going to find the quote I want to find from Silliman (but maybe one day I actually will and will edit it in here), but one of his claims is that the new voice of poetry is almost always a previous exiled voice. When poetry was once the voice of educated, white, straight, cis-gendered men, it could only speak to their experience. As we continue to champion equity and diversity, more voices come to poetry and suddenly what they speak of seems to come from a new perspective, not because it is new, but because it is newly being heard. I haven't read Delany's Wonder Woman (though I plan to get the two issues on Comixology soon and fix that), so I'm placing Silliman's logic over this circumstance without having read the books, but I think that's what Andrew would do too. Andrew is the kind of person who speaks as if he knows everything, but in a quick conversation you could name a few movies or books or what have you and get him to reply "haven't seen it," "haven't read it," etc. (There's a character like this at the beginning of Robert Altman's The Player.)

I don't actually buy that Taylor Swift is the embodiment of the teenage urge to make claims and declarative statements and then immediately walk them back, but that's certainly how she is viewed by many people. For that reason, she becomes the metaphor for Greg Rucka leaving DC and then returning. I like Rucka--he is a very good writer--but there is something about a figure like Alan Moore who only comes back to working at DC when he established a whole imprint of comix at another publisher, promised a lot of people work, and then DC bought the imprint. It wasn't like they could just offer him a character he liked!

I'm reading Rucka's Wolverine right now, which is an incredible run. It's drawn by Darick Robertson and the first arc has Logan going to a town in Oregon which is a direct reference visually to Twin Peaks. I randomly went back to reading this book last night, coincidentally a week before what is likely a week before the Twin Peaks finale (the end of a third season that was nearly thirty years in coming). Rucka's run also has Logan fighting gun-toting white nationalists, which seems all the more relevant today when the book is over twelve years old. There is a slight datedness to it, but unfortunately not enough, as I'm sure Rucka would love for a book like this not to have any meaning any more in a world that had left such horrible people far behind. The arc develops into Wolverine fighting against a cult and once again I'm randomly picking it up to read a week and a half before the premiere of American Horror Story: Cult. Some odd synchronicity there.

Grant Morrison is another good writer, but has a habit for bragging about how great his comic is going to be and giving it a description that doesn't pan out in any way, shape, or form. His Fantastic Four run was supposed to be Fantastic Four by Chris Ware. His Marvel Boy, well, let's let him describe his Marvel Boy:

Marvel Boy’s visual style becomes more like MTV and adverts; from #3 on it’s filled with all kinds of new techniques; rapid cuts, strobed lenticular panels, distressed layouts, 64 panel grids, whatever. We’ve only started to experiment but already MARVEL BOY looks like nothing else around. Some of the stuff J. G. is doing is like an update of the whole Steranko Pop Art approach to the comics page. Instead of Orson Welles, op art and spy movies, J.G.’s using digital editing effects, percussive rhythms, cutting the action closer and harder, illuminated by the frantic glow of the image-crazed hallucination of 21st century media culture and all that. Comics don’t need to be like films. They don’t need to look like storyboards. This is not to dis the many great comics which have used filmic narrative techniques but I wanted to go back and explore some of the possibilities of comics as music.

Which maybe it did? I seriously doubt it, but I don't remember Marvel Boy all that well. I wasn't the biggest fan, but you can see how Morrison talks big about his books. Which he did about his Wonder Woman, which was good but probably didn't fulfill the hype. When I realized Carl was going to be talking about this comic and the invisible plane, it reminded me of my thoughts about vehicles and the gender confusion of driving, as you see Carl muse about in the play. There's some incredible gender dynamics with cars in Stephen King's Christine (which is, yes, a book about a haunted car, but is also 2/3rds Stephen King first person point of view, which is a rare find and a true treat to read).

The dynamics between our writers here, Pandrio, Pasha, Andrew, and Fred, have been set in earlier stories I've written and some I've only conceived, but have changed a bit. Writing the play has given me a new grasp on Pasha and Pandrio, for example. We'll see how that plays out throughout the rest of the play.

Well, I think that's all I have for this autopsy! I'll see you after the interlude sometime soon. Coroner out!