Supergods and devils

So I read Supergod the other week. Then today I read it again just cause I couldn't remember if the name of Jerry Craven, the American Jesus. And then my mind was blown like it's not been blown in months. It was only because I, like everyone else, wanted the comic to have been more about Dajjal that I went to read up on him. But then it started making wonderful, brain-wrinking sense.

I think I'm addicted to wonder.

Anyway, Masih ad-Dajjal, The False Messiah, is not the character in the book. The scientists who built him merely called him Dajjal, False. He is Lie incarnate. He is Disbelief, Cheating, Betrayal and Illusion; he is all that is not.

Literally, as it were.

The name turns out fittingly prophetic when we learn that he possesses a consciousness made up of all possible timelines. An awareness made up of everything that happens, has happened, will happen and can happen. All the infinite possible realities that we could previously say with some certainty don't actually happen, as opposed to the one that does, are now manifest. In his mind, they happen. Them happening is his mind.

Do you understand the depth of the contradiction now present? It defies the very concept of language, the very tool we developed to define contradictions and abstractions, impossibilities and negations. There's no way to describe what's happening that actually makes grammatical sense.

Everything in all possible worlds that don't happen, no longer fail to happen. The property of not being real, which things could possess, much like the property of wetness, or size, or consciousness, is no longer possessed. Things that don't exist now exist. False exists. Lies are true.

Lies can even be said to be more true than anything else. The number of false timelines making up False's consciousness is infinitely greater than the number of true ones, after all.

False knows this, too. He knows people are watching him in some future timelines where remote viewing backwards in time is possible. He speaks to them, and us. This is just a comic book, but False is real - there's no getting around the fact that his fictional presence has real world implications. I suspect Ellis gives him as little stage room as possible, and kills him as soon as possible, so that he doesn't have to face his creation more than necessary.

Dept. of deliriously deft comic books

I mentioned like seven seconds ago that I've read a bunch of good comics today. There was a momentary tickle from that Sinfest strip, but on second thoughts it's not going to be the thing that's had the greatest impression of the day. That glimmer of honor I feel goes to Daytripper, a far more vast work that's taken a few moments to really sink in. It's an entirely self-contained story by largely unknown twin authors Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba that doesn't have any superheroes in it.

You know how rare it is for anyone in the English-speaking world to have even heard of such things? We praise comic books to the heavens for just not being directly about superheroes. Transmetropolitan is one of the most popular suggestions for rookie comic book readers to get into because the drug prodigal, unflappable, essentially invisible visionary and superhumanly skilled writer Spider Jerusalem in his iconic outfit of crazy 3D goggles, tattos, crooked teeth, bald head and black clothes isn't explicitly referred to as a superhero. Scott Pilgrim inhibits a world of superhero comic book physics, but we're cool with that just being the backdrop to a fantastic character-driven love story. Even Sandman had to include Superman and the gang in its periphery, if only to assure readers that it was all happening in the same fictional world. It's not that superhero comic books are inherently bad, they're just saturating the medium of the comic book to the point that we don't know what to do with a comic that doesn't ground itself in superheroes in one way or another.

Except for Daytripper. It's set in a perfectly ordinary world. Nothing happens in it that we couldn't read about in any given newspaper today. It's telling, not to mention super fun and cool and sweet, that the collected series has a foreword drawn by the author of the (also terrific) autobio comic Blankets.

Well, there is the part where almost every chapter of the comic ends with the main character dying. That's pretty weird. But it's not necessarily literally what's happening. He's an obituary writer, see, and he could just be morbidly writing his own as he imagines himself dying. Would it be a spoiler if I said that after reading the comic, I'm still not sure? Not revealing what happens, or revealing what you don't think happens, shouldn't be a spoiler. It reveals the fact that the story is a mystery which doesn't solve itself for the reader, but the mystery still lingers. Maybe that's the great thing about mysteries.

The story isn't about solving the mystery of what exactly happens in the story, anyway. It's about the most intense, electric moments in life, the kind that accompanies the awareness of the presence of death. Our hero Bras lives a perfectly ordinary life, in several variations. He mourns his father, he raises a son, he travels, he falls in love, he falls out, he searches for lost friends, he steals a moment of forbidden love, he dreams, he flies a kite; at the end of a long joyous life he finds a letter his father wrote on the day of his son's birth; he is born in a blackout, and the lights come back when he takes his first breath. Not necessarily in that order.

But every single day of that life seems momentous. Every single day is charged with emotional weight, charged with nearly magic significance, spilling over the pages and into our heart. At the end I felt as though I had lived a lifetime more than I had before. Ten lifetimes more.

Funny story, I pirated the comic as it came out, 24 pages at a time. I'd forget about it in between every read and only check the Internet for it once every month or two, and then steal the latest and read it in ten minutes and forget it again. I accidentally remembered it again yesterday and found I could now steal the final two issues all in one go. And I did, and then I went to bed without reading them. And then I found the book today in the bookstore, and bought it without a second thought. Without a second glance, even. I guessed by the weight that the one volume contained the whole series; it didn't occur to me to check exactly what I was buying or what it cost me until I was on the way home. I just wanted to find out how it ended, and do it reclining in my comfy couch holding the book in my hands.

Serendipity aside, I just wanted to explain what a great victory for Internet piracy this has been.

So many questions

The Devil doesn't want to enter the "reality zone". Is it because he's worried he'll cease to exist? Or die or something? A few strips earlier a flying pitchfork seems to lose consciousness when it flies over the reality zone, but come on, he's the fucking Devil. I doubt high definition poses any danger to him.

Would a real life Devil be too much? Too cruel? More evil than the world can stand? Somehow I think that's his concern. Out of respect for either humanity or the universal balance, the Devil chooses not to go too far.

I've read a lot of good comics today. Deliciously, deliriously, definitely excellent comics in fact. I'll have to tell you about them later. It's almost sad that a simple gag from a safe, cuddly, cartoony, cookie cutter Sinfest strip from over a year ago should be the one thing from today that stays with me. But there you have it. Sometimes life surprises you. Even when you're reading syndicate-ready comic strips that could have come from a newspaper. It's just such a breathtaking, paradigm-making brand new idea.

The Devil does something good.

You people are weird

I'm going to quote some of this site's statistics at you. Keep in mind that it's you, dear reader, who creates these numbers.

Number of visitors per month: ~300. This has been quite stable for as long as I can remember, even in the months when we haven't put up anything. I'm not sure what is weirder, having such faithful readers or not hearing a peep from you. Correction: There has been one peep, once, from someone I did not personally coerce to visit the site.

Most popular post: My Kefka fanfiction. That exploded after someone put up a review of it on TVtropes, which I guess is understandable. But it's closely followed by the Gary Busey post which disturbs me on like, four levels. The most popular search engine input that's led people here, by a bizarre 80% majority, is "Gary Busey". That's not even counting variants such as "Gary Busey mad", "Gary Busey scary" or "Gary Busey cool story bro".

By the way the second most popular search term, at around 4%, is "jlandl.blogspot.com", which leads me to believe a whole bunch of you weirdos have memorized the exact url, but instead of typing it into the url field like the pros do it you type it into Google and search for the link you already have in your head. Get with the program, you non-nerds.

More random is a number of visitors from Russia and China. I had my email hacked by someone in China once. I suspect I've made it on the party's list of the party's enemies, possibly for some outburst I may have had around the time of the Olympics in Beijing, which I'm counting as a victory for democracy. No idea what our Russian fans are about, though.

Also for some reason dozens of people have found their way here from Rock Beyond Belief, and I have no idea how or why we've been referenced there. I thought I was an Atheist once, but it turns out that was just a sensible rejection of organized religion.

And then there's that one freak who found their way here searching for "woman with dragon". Not that we don't feature the odd bit of draxploitation, but it's all very tastefully done and always in service of the story. We don't make dragon-on-woman porn, we make dragon-on-woman erotica.

On madness

There's a lovely little stain of horror in the comics world called Fell. This one episode has a guy (left) who moves to Snowtown because it's what they call a feral city. Because the absence of law enforcement and child services and doctors with ethics gives him the freedom to take a woman on the fringe of society and use her to make him a baby and then turn her into a crack addict and throw her out and get a restraining order against her and live without a phone and claim that the girl is too sick to leave the house so that there's no way for the mother to contact her daughter so that he can get away with doing anything he wants to his child.

Now, for a normal everyday scumsack this would be a sex thing. I'm not saying he doesn't rape her every day. I would be surprised if he doesn't. But that's not the point of this mad plan. He actually manages to out-creepify pedophilia. It would be hard to conceive of a crime that could be a more gross violation of your child's personal boundaries, more offensive to its basic dignity, more contrary to its existence as an individual of free will. But he does it.

What he does is get a doctor to say she has diabetes so he can give her daily injections. With his shit.

You can't make these things up. Not even a comic book author could make it up; it's based on a true story.

You can see his defense in the picture over there. Apparently he thought that his daughter needed to be made up of his physical substance in a more direct sense than sharing some bits of his DNA. Either because it would make her more his property or more his creation. I'm leaning towards something along the lines of the latter. He wants to make more of himself. Being just a single body isn't enough. He's just self-absorbed enough to think that the world needs more than one of him in it.

I think most people want to have babies because we want to make something better than ourselves. It's what I think defines the human condition. But this guy doesn't want that, he just wants himself to be more. I wonder if he lacks imagination or courage; if he is incapable of considering that injecting turds in his child's bloodstream might not be the best thing he can do for her, or if that prospect scares him.

I mean, if his shit is not as a matter of fact a superior biomass to another person's flesh and blood, it could be a devastating blow to his preposterous ego. Imagine the horror of being forced to contemplate that other people may be just as good as you. Or your poop.

I think that's what's going on here. Maybe it's the careful planning and execution of his crime, maybe it's the fact that he has the massive muscles and belly of the complete narcissist; someone obsessed not with making himself big or pretty, but strong, with the calculating determined pragmatic mindset of a shark. But I don't see this guy as a tragic case of untreated mental disorders. He's an predatory ego monster with a sense of entitlement that can only be treated by framing him for child molesting and putting him in prison.

Which is exactly what Fell does to him by the end of the story. Happy endings all over.