I'm monochrome myself, but

When you're in love you turn red.
When you're cold you turn blue.
When you're ill you turn green.
When you can't breathe you turn black.
When you're frightened you turn white.
When your courage fails you turn yellow.
When you're beaten you turn purple.
When you're in the sun you turn brown.
When there's nothing else you still make up a whole palette of pink and orange.
And you call them people of color.

An apology, or "If you love people so much why do you constantly shiv them in the balls?"

I'm not good at talking to people. That's the first thing you have to understand about me if we're going to have a meaningful relationship, you and me. I mean really, on a medical level, there's numerous parts of the subtle art of human communication that I do not get. When I say I have Asperger's Syndrome, that's not some haphazard self-diagnosis or a soundbite practiced to inspire pity, but a fact about the neuropsychological makeup of my brain that tells us I don't work like people are supposed to.

I notice different things. I operate in different channels. They're not necessarily better, shinier channels than the ones your think-meats are tuned to; just different. Different enough that a lot of signal may be lost in the process of transmitting data between our minds. In short, I'm not good at talking to people.

A Mister Havoc has been kind enough to write and remind me of this. Because, as it turns out, my blag here is not nice. I may be downright unpleasant to you, dear reader, and that's not what I want to be. But I may not notice when I'm doing these things until someone tells me about it.

See, I need you to tell me when you think I'm doing something wrong.

It's not so easy, I know. I love people more than anything (she said, as if making a segue), and I'm constantly telling everyone about what I think they're doing wrong. (Gee, I wonder why Lucia and Leon and I are separated.) I think that if you love someone, you have a duty to be honest with them. It's the only time it's appropriate to be honest - if not done out of love, you're just being cruel - and it's the component that separates love from sentimentality. There's a Danish saying about that which I'm sure I've touched on before.

Anyway, if you love me you'll kick me in the perineum sometimes.

And if you don't love me, or believe that I don't love you, I apologize if my ham-fisted attempts at telling you things are irritating to you.

The way I see it, there's a lot of things you know that I don't know, and a lot of things I know that you don't know. If we can let our guards down and let ourselves be vulnerable for a while, maybe we can exchange informations. That's what talking is for in my world.

Thing of the day: Freakangels Rating: 12 loveable misfits

I have, in my travels, observed two irreconcilable schools of writing. Let's call them the school of tight and the school of loose. They're contrary in that a story can't, to my knowledge, employ both of them; trying to do so will only ever reach a foggy middle ground, a no man's land where a story sits to the disappointment of everyone. The better defined a story's tightness or looseness, the easier it is to enjoy. I think.

On the tight end of the spectrum we have stories by Alan Moore or Edgar Wright, that strive for a clockwork precision where every single word and action, every single second and note fits in with everything else; nothing is wasted, everything is significant; everything that the story does and everything it doesn't do serves the plot. This is fascinating when it works, and very hard to do right.

And on the loose end we have James Joyce, Hideo Kojima and, perhaps a more uplifting example, the movie Apocalypse Now. This is even harder to do right; to lose sight of the goal and let the story drift in a shapeless sea of mood, reflection, characterization, observation, association, stories within stories, jokes, emotions, metaphors, fantasies, relationships, even dread poetry. This is my own school, but still not because of personal taste, you understand. It's just because I understand it better. I was built to see only parts of a whole.

I mention all this because this train of thought is what led me to remember Freakangels. It's a story that takes up 864 comic pages, loosely following a loose 2x2 panel grid, taking place over two days a week apart. The plot can be described thus:

Mark wants payback, and he wants to lord over people with his amazing powers. He's not well. His eleven brothers and sisters, plus a new recruit, are forced to get real in order to stop him. After a certain amount of sibling squabbles, our heroes step up and in a very painful way grow up. We are left with wonders and mysteries and a world to rebuild.

This isn't very difficult stuff. Anyone with access to pen and paper could probably tell this story in eight pages or less. Those other eight hundred fifty six pages are just Warren and Paul having fun. They goof around with the vital question of eggs - fruit or vegetable? - and the end of the world and Kait's Quincy masturbation fantasies, and page after page of these wonderful purple-eyed kids and their strange shared history. None of it is necessary, and yet nine hundred pages isn't nearly enough. It feels like we barely get to know them, and of course we don't. 12! equals 479 001 600; the twelve cuckoos have nearly half a billion different personal relationships between them, covering every day of the twenty-three years they have been alive. It's to Mr Ellis' credit as a writer that by the end of a comic we have even the faintest idea of what that would be like.

Humans and our relationships with each other is at the core of all Ellis' work, I think, and it's beautiful to read. He doesn't have a point or a moral*; he doesn't judge or label his characters, he just sets them loose and lets them figure things out themselves and lets us watch the interesting bits.

*Okay, it's possible that Freakangels presents a moral along the lines of "If you are stuck in one place together with other people, you're going to eventually have to admit the fact that you can only get along with each other by deciding to get along with each other." But I'm 80% sure I only made that up myself. After all it's not like us mortals are like the Freakangels, trapped in a world with no time or space and no way to ever, ever get away from each other, are we?

But oh, what interesting bits they are.

"Don't move. I'm going to cut your nipples off."
"Kait's being horrible to me!"
"I am not."
"She is! She said she was going to cut off my - what did you say you were going to do again?"
"Nipples"
"She said she was going to cut off my nipples."
"It's the law"

Downer post

Being a humanist is a pretty lonely business. You'd think that caring for us (humans) would be in our own best interests, but I'm surrounded by people who seem to want nothing more but condemn us at the slightest provocation, and since they're still human beings I have to love them anyway. Thieves, murderers, rapists and the people who want to kill them alike.

 If anyone wants to cheer me up, tell me about something you think speaks well of humanity.

So I'm doing a magic project

This is a sigil I've made. I'm posting this because I want your help to charge it, dear reader, and so I shall endeavor to explain.

It doesn't matter if you think there's no such thing as magic. There's nothing supernatural going on here. We're just going to imprint this symbol in the collective consciousness, thereby arranging an unknown number of superstrings to harmonize with the desire which the symbol represents, which increases the chances of it happening. This desire, my will, will then manifest itself in our world. It's basic imagination technology, nothing mysterious or clever about it. Also Grant Morrison told me it works so shut up.

Obviously you're wondering what the sigil represents, but it's possible that your knowing that will interfere with the process, so I'm going to have to ask you to trust me that it's nothing crazy or evil or even unreasonable. All I can tell you is that I wrote down a wish, and turned the letters spelling the words of that wish into the sigil you see by a process of random scribbling. The colors are a concentration aid.

So what do I want from you exactly? Orgasms, mostly. If I came up with this myself, I'd imagine that you just need to spread the sigil throughout the world and the minds of men; show it to people, think about it, meditate on it if you're feeling bold. Mr Morrison however has a more audacious theory: To hold the sigil firmly in your mind at the precise point your mind goes blank during an orgasm will engage the unconscious mind firmly with the sigil, to great effect. 

You do whatever you're comfortably with, and keep it to yourself. It's a slow, gradual spell; I expect our efforts will take effect over several months or maybe years, there's no real time limit on this thing. Just keep whacking away, so to speak, and it'll add up. 

And now for something totally different

How have you been, blag? I've been good. Getting a lot of writing done. And this thing:

(Image too wide; click to view about ten pixels more of it.)

A comic strip inspired entirely by Escher Girls.It might not go anywhere in the long term, but for the moment I find it funny. It's interesting to try to create something without it being this enormous, monolithic thing you have to invest your body and soul in to even attempt to make it happen and know it's going to take years and years before it's finished. This strip doesn't have an end planned. It doesn't even have a middle. Or a name. I'm thinking of calling it Who are the Monsters? because, you know, monster girls, but they're just regular folks who have to do the weirdest quasi-porn photoshop modelling to pay the bills, because there is a market for such a thing in this world. Just like the comic book industry in our world oh ho ho

Some notes:
* Susannah here is one of the centaur girls. The main characters will also include a snake girl, a swivel-waist demon girl, a virginal angel girl and an ambiguously attractive dream girl.
* No boys as far as I've planned.
* "Horsey" and "Two-legs" are actually highly offensive terms and it won't help if you say some of your best friends are humanoids. I put them in to show how laid back a workplace this is. Susannah and the ptotographer (His name is Gil. They call him "Gay Gil".) may not be friends exactly, but they're committed to informality.
* I always thought The Homosexual Agenda was a hilarious villain. So I cleverly constructed this gag about a made-up comic book referencing a discontinued webcomic referencing a closed down MMO game and now you must read it.
* Before anyone writes any panicked letters to their pastor, I should point out that the homosexual agenda in reality involves nothing more insidious than a desire for homosexuals to be treated as human beings.
* If you extend the lines in your head, there's not nearly enough room on that cover for the "L" in "homosexual". I like to think Flex-men is just shitty enough to have that pass through their editor, even though I was the one who screwed it up and decided telling you this story would be easier than fixing it.

What if Scott did the "clever" thing and refused to fight the league of evil ex-boyfriends?

First, the most interesting person you've ever met goes "What the hell ever, weaksauce boy" and dumps your ass.

You continue to hang out with Knives until she realizes she hasn't had three meals a day all semester because you keep borrowing her lunch money, and she dumps your ass.

You realize you'll never know the touch of another woman for the rest of your life.

You cry a little bit.

You think you write a sad song, but Kim informs you it's more bitter than sad and maybe they should try to find a less pathetic bass player for the band.

With nothing more to do, ever, you sit around the apartment until even the heroic Wallace Wells grows to resent having to carry your worthless ass, and you realize every single friend you've ever had hates you.

Finally, the league tries to recruit you, and you refuse since you're a sensible person who don't get up to any crazy adventures, so they kick your ass. Maybe Gideon kills you.

Meanwhile, Ramona is cryogenically frozen and her family is left with unanswered questions and die heartbroken, along with the rest of the human wreckage left behind by Gideon, who gets to masturbate over his perfect frozen flower nightly and dream of the day he gets to brainwash everyone enough that he can pretend they love him.

Nice work, hero! Aren't you happy you made the sensible choice? You have to just walk away from those crazy chicks, am I right

What will be the next incarnation of Delirium of the Endless?

Dissociation seems too obvious, too gimmicky. I think it's something we don't quite have a word for yet, that describes that state past the Abyss, when a person has transcended madness. Del turned from mindless, blissful Delight into cracked Delirium when she learned everything in the entire universe all at once, you know, and I imagine that state of delirium was only a transitory shock upon gaining this premature enlightenment.

Now, past Going Inside, she's turning into something else. No one's quite sure what. She's more serene, thoughtful. Organizing all that knowledge, one would think, getting used to having an astronomically increased consciousness compared to Delight. Not only would that mental organization take vast amounts of time, but just thinking a clear thought can take forever when you have so much to cross-reference. I've noticed this myself, in my meditations.

(Some people like to learn more in a narrow field, to gain uniquely specialized knowledge and skills no one else can offer. I like to learn more about everything, to give up quick and fluid thoughts for big and slow thoughts. I call it the slow but sure method.)

So what is there beyond insanity? Well since everybody who perpetrates any psychological acticity whatsoever is more or less insane as far as we understand thoughts and feelings, I can only imagine it would have to be called sanity. The liberation of the mind from the constraints of neuroses, prejudices, expectations, context. Grant Morrison's "supercontext", perhaps, where we play the game of I/You from the vantage point of eternity.

That's not to say Delirium is now John-a-Dreams. She's still not quite anything, because she's turning into something we are not yet ready to name and understand. She is in the process of becoming a future state of human psychology, when we are ready to embrace the chaotic parts of the universe and learn from them as we have the harmonious parts.

Just a thought I had. But really, when the leading definition of "Chaos theory" as the science of disproving the very concept of disorder has as many followers as it does, it tells me we as a society are way too scared of ever encountering the slightest bit of uncertainty in our life.

Which is ironic, considering.

So if I'm going to have to make up a name for her based on soft future science that doesn't exist yet I'm going with Delchemy: The opposite of alchemy. The imperfection of knowledge. The marriage of entropy to optimism, of the ideal of the speed of light in a perfect vacuum to actual gravity. Turning lightness into gold.

Delchemy of the Endless. You're welcome.

Now I'm dreaming anime

GUILT TRIP

Min was bored. Why could her big brother not schedule his dates on days he was not babysitting like a normal person? That way everyone would be happier. Tetsuo could be making out with Tsukiko, little Lin could be playing with her pet turtle and Min could be playing her videogames. But now they were stuck in Tsukiko's apartment watching TV that no one wanted to watch, packed so tightly together that Min was thinking about asking Lin to scratch her nose instead of going through the trouble of freeing her arm.

Okay, that was an exaggeration. And Min had to grudgingly admit Tsukiko was the coolest person she knew, with her own apartment and everything. She said something flattering about the decor, pointing at a collection of wireframe monsters on a bookshelf, asking if their host has made those herself. She had, and she picked one down for Min to look closer.

Min held it as carefully as a butterfly, afraid the thin steel wires would snap under the weight of her fingers, and for a while she forgot to be bored. The creature was exquisitely designed, almost genuinely unsettling with its claws and its lack of a face. Lin saw what she was doing and wanted to look, but Min held it away from her, afraid to even think what clumsy seven year old hands would do to it. Tsukiko saved her from hearing Lin's betrayed bawl by returning the model to its place high on the wall. And Min got back to being bored. Olympic level boredom. The boredom of entire galaxies, spinning past her eyes. When the building shook under a thundering explosion she screamed almost in relief.

Something moved past the twentieth floor window, too fast to see properly, and the world seemed to fall apart. The four of them ran, even though there was nowhere to run to. For some reason and against all statistical wisdom they stopped in the kitchen, maybe because it had no windows. Monsters were walking through the city, the day had turned to night and the children were crying helplessly. Tetsuo picked Lin up, though she was too heavy for him, and she buried her face in his chest as if to escape from the world.

Min had a strange sensation of being underwater as a brilliant blue beam shot through the walls, leaving no mark. It hung in the air while Tsukiko fell to the side, still reaching to touch her elbow where the beam had passed through. Her face turned into a mask of confusion and then went slack, along with the rest of her, as she fell into the door frame with a crunching sound. Still falling, tumbling like a ragdoll through the air as if her apartment had been turned on its side just for her, she went out of sight and Min followed, without a thought, it seemed necessary just to see, and she saw Tsukiko fall out the window while the windowglass fell down and the sight made her dizzy.

But she stumbled to the window, vaguely noting a shard of glass cutting her foot, and in the strange dark daylight she watched the Tsukiko ragdoll be caught in an outstretched hand, a massive clawed hand attached to a faceless monster made of steel wires thicker than a man's leg. There were two of them, that she could see, and they tossed the rag toll between them as they walked past and their footsteps left holes in the world. As far as Min could see, at least the poor girl was falling down like a normal person should now.

Looking away, she noted a pink plastic pig on top of the TV she had not seen before and walked over to look at it, partly to distract herself from the death and insanity and all that but also because it seemed to fit badly with the rest of the stylish apartment. Curious, she took it in her hand and heard the jingle of coins. a piggy bank, that made sense, she thought, and a small voice in the back of her head and off to the side told her Tsukiko didn't need her money anymore and even if she couldn't find the key she could just break it and she put the piggy down firmly, angry with herself for even thinking such things.

And Min noticed her cheeks were wet, and went back to the kitchen. Her siblings were sitting on the floor, hugging each other, and she sat down with them.

And after a while, the sun came back and the noises stopped. Just when the children stood up the upstairs apartment came down through the ceiling and Min jumped. Through some miracle no one was crushed, although the various broken bits of furniture and building materials closed them into a space small enough to make Min feel claustrofobic. Light shone through a roughly rectangular opening, and Lin climbed though it easy enough, followed by Tetsuo who squeezed through grunting and moaning, but when Min tried it she seemed to be stuck. Silently she cursed her budding breasts, amazed and irritated that she had manged to become less agile than her five years older brother. But he pulled her through in one piece, even if the experience left her feeling tenderized.

They decided, or Tetsuo decided, it was best to sit still and wait for the emergency services to find them a safe way down. Min had seen the crater down the street where the building where their parents worked used to be, and had pointed it out to him, so she could understand they were in no hurry. The firefighters and paramedics had enough to do without worrying about three kids who did, after all, have a well-stocked refrigerator and a mostly intact apartment  to themselves. And so Min and Tetsuo started clearing the debris out of the kitchen when she had her vision.

Min was no longer aware of the apartment, or her big brother or her little sister or herself. She looked down on a body in pieces, lying on a muddy field somewhere. She wanted to flinch, to blush, to do something against this stark image of a mangled, naked body, but she had not as much as two eyelids to close. She could do nothing but watch. After a while she recognized Tsukiko's face, under the bruises and gashes, and at the same moment Tsukiko began to move. Her dead flesh shivered, rippled like water, and stood up and grew and twisted into yet another monster, although one recognizable as human. The giant opened its mouth, and kept on opening it until the dark crevice of its mouth seemed to cover most of its head, and uttered a howl of such pain that Min wanted to cry for it, though she seemed to have no eyes with which to cry. Pain, hate, betrayal, blame, condemnation, righteous rage, the scream seemed to ring forever, and Min realized she heard it twice, with both whatever bodiless apparatus stood invisibly in front of the creature and her own ears, wherever she was. It had taken her several seconds to hear it the second time, and she had learned the broad strokes of the speed of sound last year and was able to calculate the distance between the monster and her body, correctly, as less than three kilometers.

Somewhere outside the city, in a muddy crater, the monster raised an arm. Its eyes swirled and rolled up under its mane of tangled, straggly wet hair and reapperared as a single, bulging red eye covering its forehead. The scream stopped and its eye seemed to focus and its finger pointed, accusing. Min seemed to fly backwards, her vision still focused on the monster as she traveled along the line of its finger. She flied backwards through building after building where people's heads burst and turned into red eyes that stared in the same direction she was going and as if from far away she heard her own voice, telling her it wasn't her fault, she didn't mean it, she was never going to do it, she was not a bad person, there was a lot out there who was a lot worse than her, why, why did it have to be her, it wasn't fair, it just was not fair.

And she still went backwards, through homes and offices, and everyone she saw turned into staring eyes, and she heard the monster's voice filling her head and it told her it knew what she did, or what she might have done, and she was a fool to think it mattered that she thought she would not have done it it, or that she thought there were people who did more wrong. And she stopped moving when she saw herself from outside, lying on the floor, her mouth making apologies while Tetsuo told her to wake up and slapped her cheeks with blows she felt from far away. She few closer to herself, and she knew she had to go back inside herself, but she didn't want to, she knew it would hurt less from outside, even though if she woke up her brother would stop slapping her and her sister would stop crying. She wanted to wake up and kiss the both and ask them to forgive her, but still she tried to fly away or at least slow down so she didn't have to go back inside herself and wake up because she knew it would hurt, she had no idea what they might do to her but she knew it would hurt and she would deserve it.

And she cried even though her fear was an arm's length away and she could see the tears run down her own cheeks, she cried as she watched the ripples in the skin run through the faces of her sister and then her brother.

So I'm trying out WoW again

One reflection after watching the intro to Mists of Pandaria: "Do not ask why we fight, blah blah blah, leaves fall, the better question is what's worth fighting for?" What's the matter with you? You come up a new race who are marketed as a) obsessed with fighting and b) unique in being able to choose which faction to join, and you don't make their introduction go "Ask not why we fight, but who we should fight for"? Come on guys, who writes this crap?

Oh yeah, that'd be the concept artist.

So I guess I should tell you

When we made up that poll over there to the left, roughly one thousand and one nights ago, it was as an attempt to gauge if anyone was reading the blag. We didn't have these fancy built-in stat trackers back in those days, and those poll answers were actually the only indication that a reader existed.

So it was a trick question. All twelve of you who voted "Obviously not" (insensitive jerks) didn't take into account that answering the poll at all proved that you were in fact reading it. Your insults have backfired. Don't you feel foolish now.

And to those eight people who voted "Badger", I hope that works out for you.

No one voted "Maybe", so at least we can claim to be indecision-free.

And to the one person who voted "[Orgasm sounds] yes", thank you. You're the funniest and the nicest. You win at being polled.

Let's cast Nextwave: The Movie

Lisa Bonet - Monica Rambeau
Anna Faris - Tabby Smith
Angelina Jolie - Elsa Bloodstone
Simon Pegg - Aaron Stack
Nick Frost - The Captain
Christian Bale - Dirk Anger
Stephen Colbert - Devil Dinosaur
Neil Patrick Harris - Broccolimen
Jack Black - Captions

I'll admit my choice of Lisa Bonet for the team leader comes mostly from a desire to see her in more and bigger movies than any particular skill I think she may bring to the table. I don't really know what she can do,  which may be because I've only actually ever seen her in Angel Heart, but I know parts of that movie scared me in ways that few movies before or since have done and parts of that is probably due to her skill. There's that psychedelic sex/murder scene where Bonet manages to sell her character's feeling lust and ecstasy and utter terror all at once - with her tits hanging out no less - which haunts me to the point where I've yet to watch the movie twice. And I'm inclined to believe an actor who can do something so hard so well can do anything reasonably well.

Now, Monica I picture as a slightly faded star, trying to act all serious and businesslike to avoid thinking about how easy things used to be back when she was part of a far less ridiculous and more glamorous team. She's having to necessarily reinvent her powers to be an effective fighter rather than the near-superfluous scout/damsel in distress/Captain America's sandwich bringer she was to the Avengers. A lot like a mid-life crisis when you look beyond the superhero stuff, which Bonet - pushing fifty years in a business where so much of what a woman can do depends on her body - may understand better than any of us.

Anna Faris, though, is an easier choice for an easier role. Tabby is dumb as a sack of bricks, and in the Scary Movies we've seen Faris is very very good at being dumb. There's more to it, like every nuance of Tabby's entire being screams Cindy Campbell, from the top of her bleached tops to the roots of her superhero alias. (She doesn't use one because she can't think of a good one.) (Or maybe because she can't remember it.) There's a core of brutality to her, but I like to think she's not really aware of the explosive broccoli murders she commits. There's no killer instinct behind it, just the innocent breathless wide-eyed enthusiasm of a five year old on a constant caffeine high.

And the choice of Angelina Jolie is even simpler. Who better to play a self-aware parody of Lara Croft than Lara Croft, now that we're done laughing at the games and the movies and the comics? The stiffer and more unnatural her body language, the more obvious her cosmetic surgery, the more fake and grating her British accent, the better.

I think I have trouble taking either Elsa or Angelina seriously.

The Simon Pegg/ Nick Frost team may or may not add a dimension of camraderie between Aaron and the Captain, depending on who writes or directs the movie. I thought of them separate from each other myself. Aaron is, of course, funny in a tragic way, pretending to hate humans as a robot pride-thing when he really doesn't feel any different from us than Warren Ellis does; all the painful and smelly things happen to him and we could really feel for him, except he also happens to be the most capable, cool, wisecracking and coldly manipulative guy around. He's everything, in a shocking package of contradiction, and he does everything better than everyone and steals the hearts of the audience, and I can think of no one who perfectly embodies all this than Simon Pegg. Heck, just watch the free-for-all fake firefight in Spaced and tell me Pegg isn't doing a greenscreen fight scene as Aaron.

And as for Nick Frost, I simply thought "Why shouldn't The Captain be a lethargic lardass?" The heroic build may work in a comic, but we've had Batman's nipple armor to teach us how oddly some things translate to the screen. Cap was a dirt poor, semi-literate, unshaved, alcoholic caveman from Bronx who was given cosmic powers by space aliens and then beat them up, puked on them and robbed them; Nick Frost (or the one character he tends to play, at least) would fit these shoes so hard Nike would cry.

And before you think me unkind, remember this is the guy who gets to do unspeakable things to Dormammu with a toilet brush like a big damn hero.

Christian Bale, then, has the difficult job of portraying a Nick Fury in the middle of a complete nervous breakdown - the most powerful man in the world given an unlimited arsenal of surrealistic weapons system, a flying submarine, a life after death and a blank charter to blow up large parts of the country in the war for freedom, financed by the terrorists. So really he'd just have to reprise his role as Batman.

No but seriously, the throaty growling, the forceful movements, the self-assured authority, I can easily see this working. The key element to Dirk Anger I think is the desperate clinging to the transparent delusion that the things he does are right and good; that even injecting himself with liquefied fluffy little birdies is just and necessary. He knows how insane he must be to believe this, but he needs to believe it anyway. And Bale can  obviously do manic obsession. Well, it could work.

Stephen Colbert, meanwhile, has more experience than anyone in the role of an ancient fossil living past his time, who hates people more than anything. Yes, I'd cast him as Devil Dinosaur just as a joke at the expense of the US Republicans.

And Neil Patrick Harris, who is better than you at everything, shall be given a chance to shine as brightly as he ever can by playing roughly five hundred different characters who laugh, cry, sing, love, die and shoot stuff with more heart than anyone would have thought broccoli clone cannon fodder ever had. The Beyond Corporation's "human resources" include broccolimen of all kinds, from the slick corporate execs to the quirky miniboss squads to the lowly grunts with the machineguns. I imagine them all looking and speaking exactly the same, enough that it makes sense to have one actor play them, but with some little differences in their learned mannerisms and vocabulary and such that that one actor would have to be the best. Also this best actor would have to be able to sing. Neil Patrick Harris is basically the only choice.

And the small but crucial part of narrating the self-aware narration could only be self-aware enough to be funny if done by Jack Black playing Jack Black trying to be funny. Obviously.

Let's talk about Alan Moore

I did mention a while back that we were going to say a word about Mr Alan Moore. The fascinating thing is that all the most outrageous things imaginable have already been said, with great style, by a wide variety of people. Alan Moore lives forever by beating up Death and taking his lunch money. Alan Moore is a wizard from the blue dimension who has the universe in his back yard. And so on. At one point I thought I'd replicate the Vin Diesel fact list with Alan Moore, but it was too much trouble tracking down that many facts. Also I was scared he wouldn't think it was funny.

The thing that's so great about Alan Moore is that through his work and his reputation and his magic we get the impression that all these funny facts are completely true. It would not surprise me at all if the next volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which Alan Moore will probably write in 2070 or so, will involve Alan Moore himself as a character, necessarily included because of his status as a living legend, who in being fictionalized inside a story where all fictions are true will turn defictionalize the real life Alan Moore into an actual wizard with the power to materialize the Blazing World.

For real.

But kidding aside, what I actually wanted to talk about was The League. Seeing as I've just finished the latest volume, there's probably some hundred thousand things that happens in the comic that I'm going to have to have explained to me to even have any idea that they're there, so it's a good thing I don't really want to say anything about the series as a whole but just the character of Black-a-Jack.

Black-a-Jack, aka. "the former Galley-wag", aka "the nameless sky pirate previously known as Jackboy-60". You know, the little black guy with the giant round head who can make peoples' brains run out of their ears by talking loudly. I like to call him Black-a-Jack since that seems to be the closest thing to a name that anyone calls him on the page.

Now, I realize people may be unhappy about Alan Moore appropriating this character from the cesspool of history as he was created to be one of the most insulting, inhumane, disempowering and grotesquely pandering racist caricatures any human has ever thought up. But that's not the point. Yes, it's insensitive writing and Alan Moore should feel bad. But the character of Black-a-Jack is, and I'll put a quarter in the jar for saying this, awesome.

We might make the case that Alan Moore is a champion of social justice for making this once crappy caricature into the single most interesting, possibly most in depth, inarguably by far the most intelligent, most funny, outrageous, sexy, free-spirited not to mention most phenomenally powerful character encountered in this work of infinite fiction. I'll leave that for wiser folks than me. I just know I like everything about him.

If you haven't had the patience to read all these comics with page after page of text, which is where Black-a-Jack first and most commonly shows up, I'll summarize his story. He used to be a galley slave down in an infra-universe made up of mountains of dark matter countless billions of light years deep. He escaped with his cleverness, which we're led to believe was extraordinary even by the standards of this world populated by creatures with neutron star-dense neuron clusters in their brains. I want to impress on you the immensity of this intellect, which the story goes out of its way to explain: Black-a-Jack can outthink a black hole. Figuratively speaking. He ends up in the Toy Kingdom on the south pole of Earth, learns English, presumably learns to step lightly so he doesn't crack the planet in half with his footsteps; learns woodworking, builds himself a spaceworthy flying ship seemingly powered by the scent of roses; builds himself a language of his own that seems to splice and synthesize English and Dutch at will, because saying just one word at a time is a dullinquent waste of vocablishment and sets out to sail the many worlds looking for I don't know what.

Black-a-Jack is nobody's Magical Negro, you understand. See how brilliantly and fearlessly he rejects everyone and everything that could bind him. It's the language most of all, I think, that shows his wholehearted rebellion; how deeply he is not a slave anymore and committed to being not a slave, not even a freed slave, but simply free in every way imaginable. He speaks as he likes, and he doesn't give a shit how much you understand. Understanding is your problem. He certainly doesn't have any problem understanding the flat, predictable mouth noises you produce.

And more than that, he doesn't really have a name. You can call him, and he may answer, but you can never bind him. And we don't actually know what he wants. It's easy to assume, because we do so love to know the motivations of our characters and on the surface it seems he should be easy to figure out, but ultimately he keeps to himself and all we have is conjecture. And his Rose of Nowhere takes him anywhere and everywhere. No place in all the dimensions of time, space and money is out of reach. Not even the narrative structure of his own story can contain him, because he doesn't show up nearly as much as we'd like. We might attribute this to his many, varied and immeasurable powers making a mockery out of any conflict the heroes encounter, and so any halfway competent writer would know to contrive to keep him out of the action as much as possible, but there doesn't seem to be much reason to do so - the struggles of the League tend more towards the esoteric, that not even Black-a-Jack's tremendous resources would be overly useful to resolve - nor is any reason given for not including him. I think it's more that he comes and goes as he likes.

Probably he's taking it easy in the Blazing World as we speak, charming ladies left and right with his great personality, building higher dimensional computers and singing a song that makes the Earth orgasm. Or something along those lines.

Here's to you, Black-a-Jack, you crazy sumbitch. We can't take the sky from you.