Rumors and Strangers

Comics, a movie, more of that epic poem, an excellent children's book and a round of Roulette.

Comics Canoe

I’m still enjoying Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Three. I also read Pro Wrestling Comics 2 in 1 by my friendly cartooning acquaintance and online-chess-playing partner Pat Aulisio.

Aulisio is a venerable cartoonist, designer and printmaker whom I’ve known on and off and respected for years, including a period when we were represented by the same small press comics publisher. We’ve only met in person about three times but have been playing a lot of chess online together and also trading some art in the mail, with him being nice enough to send me a copy of this great wrestling-themed comic book which tells two stories of various wrestlers demolishing one another.

I wouldn’t have quite understood just what I was reading if this comic book hadn’t first been read in my presence by another friend and skilled cartoonist who is a also wrestling enthusiast, my close buddy Kevin Uehlein, author of the comics wrestling newsletter Pencil Neck Weekly. Kevin happened to be driving from Portland to Los Angeles and I asked if I could host him for a visit to break up the drive; I had recently gotten Pat’s comic in the mail and Kevin read it and explained to me that most (or is it all?) of the wrestlers fighting in these two stories are real pro wrestlers.

This helped contextualize Pro Wrestling Comics 2 in 1 as hyperbolic, fever dream fan fiction when I otherwise would have recognized only Hulk Hogan in its pages and misunderstood the narrative as some kind of Johnny Ryan-inspired gratuitous comics bloodlust. Which would have been fine, but I’m glad I was hipped to the fan fiction angle because it makes what Aulisio is up to narratively much more interesting, and that’s leaving aside the unique layout and maximalist illustrations. Pat has a great flair for overlaying a printmaker’s elegant sense of design overtop an underground cartoonist’s raw, aggressive mark-making, suiting him well for conjuring his own ultraviolent and dystopian pro wrestling scenarios.

Pro Wrestling Comics 2 in 1 by Aulisio and Pencil Neck Weekly (itself recently collected into a handsome bound volume but still putting out new installments online) by Uehlein are well worth your attention if you’re into comics or wrestling. If you’re into both, you are the target demo for these projects and would be a stupid idiot not to give my friends money for them. (I respectively castled and hosted my way into free copies of each, which took more time and finesse.)

Picture Pedalo

I finally got around to watching The Lost Boys, the 1987 Joel Schumacher-directed teenager-vampire movie I’ve been hearing about for decades.

I’m a bit out of my depth here, so can someone refute my conjectures for me if I’m way off? Was this the turning point where cinematic vampires stopped being Lugosi-style heterosexual aristocrats and became young, sexy, campy and gay? It looks that way to me, which would position The Lost Boys upstream of much of the vampire aesthetic of the succeeding decades. While The Lost Boys failed to spawn a franchise, its influence seems to live on in other smashingly successful multimedia series that all made the leap from fiction to cinema and/or prestige television, such as True Blood, Interview with the Vampire and Twilight.

Here’s my suspicion. The Lost Boys had the insight to make its vampires a metaphor for gayness and also to orient the vampire story toward adolescence, both a coming-of-age and coming-out story. The True Blood and Interview with the Vampire people kept the gay themes and ratcheted up the camp aesthetic while making the stories about adults, freeing them up to get sexier, more violent and more viscerally unsettling. Twilight reverted to the teenage burgeoning-sexuality template that The Lost Boys laid out but dropped most or all of the gayness, which would explain why I’ve always gotten the impression that the Twilight books and movies aren’t in on their own joke.

In any event, while I don’t think The Lost Boys amounts to anything other than a pretty okay movie, it does seem bracingly original and clever if situated in the context I’ve outlined. Presumably in 1987 it was even less acceptable than it is now to make a movie about a teenaged boy coming to terms with his non-heterosexuality, but those kinds of textual constraints are often what make a good piece of narrative art better anyway, since the creators have to find more interesting ways to elucidate their subtext. Having to smuggle in their point leaves it more open to interpretation, which makes it more possible for everyone to enjoy the movie on its surface-level merits whether they’re in on the joke or not.

The Lost Boys finds two brothers played by Jason Patric and Corey Haim being relocated by their recently-divorced mother to the home of their morbid, lively and eccentric grandfather in a bustling and culturally-diverse coastal California town with a long-standing vampire infestation. Patric’s character is the more manly and handsome of the brothers and so it is fitting that he is the one who experiences a crisis of sexuality, represented in the film by his being turned halfway into a vampire and wrestling with his new identity, which compels him to literally closet himself indoors lest he come out in public and get burned by the sun. Haim’s character is younger and nerdier; his expertise in comics and horror tropes leads him to make new friends (two other brothers around his own age, unsubtly named “Edgar” and “Alan”) who eventually help the protagonists root out and defeat the vampire cell.

These cave-dwelling teen vampires, led by the coolest, most vicious and most stylistically androgynous of their pack played by Kiefer Sutherland, maraud the town’s boardwalks and clubs being campy, cocky and bitchily cruel: if read as gay boys, they are the brave ones who don’t care who in the community knows what they are, while as vampires they simply don’t have to because they are immortal, possess the power of flight and enjoy feasting on human flesh. They draw Patric’s character into their clique partly through the power of girlish seduction with the aid of their sexy female hanger-on played by Jami Gertz, which on the surface level reassures us that Patric’s character digs chicks and on the subtextual level can either be disregarded or can be parsed to suggest that he’s more bisexual than homosexual. With the help of Edgar, Alan and Gertz’s sexy ingenue the protagonists ultimately destroy their cool gay vampire enemies, which makes Patric’s and Gertz’s characters, who have already fucked and therefore been bonded heterosexually to one another, revert to being fully human instead of part-vampire.

If like most people my age I had grown up on this movie, I would probably have a certain amount of reverent affection for it. Having only just seen it now, I was impressed by the above-outlined subtext, struck by the obvious Lost Boys influences that continue to echo down through the culture and rather placidly unmoved by the production itself, which ricochets between corny and sophisticated, crude and adroit, childish and insightful. To me it’s the deep cultural influence and gay themes that are most interesting here; everything else amounts to a competent, pretty fun, sometimes quite dumb and very dated teen horror movie.

(Salient enough to mention: one of the best things in the movie, which has pretty much nothing to do with anything else I’ve mentioned, is that when something is happening that genuinely terrifies or disgusts the band of teenaged protagonists, they all scream and cry overtop one another in a way that is somehow very engaging and convincing. This struck me as actually kinda unusual to see in a movie and as something that must have been an intentional choice that required gusto and teamwork from director and cast to pull off.)

Literature Lifeboat

I haven’t made as much progress on The Aeneid of Virgil: A verse translation by Rolfe Humphries as I would have liked. I’m through Book III, when Aeneas continues to recount what happened after he and his band of refugees escaped from the destruction of Troy and wandered the seas in search of their new home. They follow misinterpreted prophecies, battle monsters and run into other Trojan dispossessed whom they knew back home. This helps Aeneas fill in missing pieces of the story of Troy’s fall that he didn’t have, which he is in turn relating to Dido in their coterminous narrative present.

When the poem moves from Book III into Book IV the story becomes about Dido falling for Aeneas. Goddesses working at cross-purposes conspire to use the opportunity of the two noble houses trotting out for a celebratory hunt to launch a storm that herds Aeneas and Dido into a presighted cave together. Dido is “unconcerned with fame, with reputation, With how it seems to others. This is marriage For her, not hole-and-corner guilt; she covers Her folly with this name.” Forbidden love in a cave during a thunderstorm. Thereupon Virgil presents a wonderful and insane image of Rumor embodied, “swift of foot, Deadly of wing, a huge and terrible monster, With an eye below each feather in her body, A tongue, a mouth, for every eye, and ears Double that number,” flitting about the land talking shit and half-truth about what is or isn’t going on between Aeneas and Dido. Presumably this will shortly ratchet up the drama by underscoring the fact that Aeneas and Dido themselves aren’t on the same page about just exactly what went down in that cave.

I also read one of the best children’s books I’ve ever seen, the 2021 book Out of the Blue: How Animals Evolved from Prehistoric Seas by Elizabeth Shreeve and illustrated by Frann Preston-Gannon. It’s a beautifully-illustrated and -designed book that makes scholarly analysis of scientific history quite engaging and accessible for children and for this interested adult layman. It’s packed full of wonderful pictures of all sorts of prehistoric creatures from various ages and provides succinct explanations of the evolutionary process that ties all animal life on earth together — in other words how aquatic microbes that lived billions of years in the past gave rise to an ongoing process that resulted in the evolution of human beings. The book is so engagingly written and illustrated as to make this story genuinely charming, thrilling and fascinating. And like any worthwhile scientific writer, Shreeve makes sure to point to the junctures where the current working theory hasn’t yet filled in all the gaps, making occasional reference to differing and irreconcilable explanations of what might have happened at certain points in the evolutionary record and, in mentioning “the Great Dying” of the extinction that punctuated the Permian Period, notes that “scientists aren’t sure why” this event happened. The author and illustrator are correctly weaving into this very fun book the fact that scientists currently don’t and never will know everything, itself the funnest part of the scientific process — everything we figure out by developing a good working theory is subject to revision when new information comes in; everything we learn exposes more of the infinity of things we still don’t know but that are out there waiting to be discovered. Shreeve and Preston-Gannon make a great team and have created a great book for readers of all ages. Highly recommended. Has dinosaurs.

Roulette

Little Stranger by Edie Fake, read in 2018. Fake is a skilled, offbeat cartoonist, zinester and gallery artist and author of a great and strange graphic novel called Gaylord Phoenix. If I remember right, Little Stranger is a compact paperback collection of several of Fake’s cool zines collected in a single volume. Strong work by a great cartoonist.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, read in 2020. Speaking of evolutionary biology, Richard Dawkins is an individual I’ve admired for a long time as a public intellectual. But it wasn’t until 2018 that I finally read one of his books and found that I admire him most of all for being a witty, forthright and eloquent writer.

The first book I read was the first volume of his two-part memoir series, a hardback copy of which my then-girlfriend had an opportunity to get for free through her job and give to me as a gift. I read the second memoir book immediately thereafter, another of Dawkins’s books in 2019 and then found a copy of probably his most famous or second-most famous book The God Delusion in a Little Free Library in Seattle in 2020. I didn’t need any particular convincing of the book’s thesis, with which I already agreed, that a god or gods almost certainly don’t exist and that we shouldn’t squander our lives lying to ourselves about that. But I kept the Little Free Library copy on my bookshelf for a while to decorate my bedroom and eventually felt like I should just read it so I could add it to my complete reading list. It was an okay read but I would recommend the memoirs first; Dawkins has led a wonderfully fascinating and exciting life and is intellect and writer enough to comment invitingly upon all of them. He’s also very funny and cracked me up a few times.

Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon, read in 2020. I was in Portland for a couple of days (to see other friends; Kevin was in L.A. at the time), during which time I killed some time at Powell’s Books, that well-known huge independent bookstore they have there. I took from the shelf and read in the coffee shop this self-help artistic motivation book by Kleon, a fabulously successful gallery artist and graphic designer of dubious talent and skill. I don’t remember it especially vividly; I think it’s just the usual creative advice we all know deep down but manage to forget regularly about process over result, journey over destination, gratitude over desire and present over past or future.