3 Great Books by my 3 Favorite Songwriters

Oof. Been doing a fair bit of hard work recently-- reading Foucault's Pendulum (which I am loving) and packing up my tiny apartment for a move this weekend. I'll probably take the next post off because of the latter-- look for your update around Thursday of next week or so. It'll probably be about Faulkner.

So what I am doing is listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen. New Skin For The Old Ceremony is definitely in my top-5-all-time-favorites list of albums. And it's been thunderstorming all day. And I just had a great dinner with a dear friend. So here's kind of a fluff list while I take it easy at the end of the day. Three of my favorite songwriters each happen to have a novel or two to their name. And they're all really fantastic books. I'd definitely advise you to pick them up.


Master of Reality, by John Darnielle
Yes, this is the umpteenth Darnielle shout-out on this blog. Deal with it.

Deal with it.

Master of Reality is a beautiful, beautiful book. It takes the form of the journal of a 16-year-old boy, who is writing said journal because the doctors at the mental institution he is in require it. They've locked him up, they've taken his shoelaces away, but worse-- they've taken his Walkman and all his Black Sabbath cassettes. So for the course of 100 pages, he describes what Sabbath's 3rd album, Master of Reality, means to him, how much it saves him and provides a reassurance of his humanity, in a desperate attempt to give his tapes back.

It's simple and it's powerful and it's true-- up until the release of We Shall All Be Healed, Darnielle worked as a nurse in a mental institution for young men. There's so much love in this book for the main character, so much contempt for the people who don't recognize the healing power of angry, bitter art. The voice of our narrator in particular is real and powerful, and I can't help but tremble sometimes at how much it made me think of the most miserable parts of my teenage experience. Besides the terrible haircut, I mean. It's about being 16 or 17 and getting up close and personal with the demons that are going to be inhabiting you the rest of your life, and about how Tony Iommi's guitar is sometimes the best weapon at hand for beating them into submission.

Pictured: the brightest light in the world.

I reread it recently during the hour of waiting around before my college graduation. It's 100 very small pages but it is still a pretty hard book to read at times.

And the Ass Saw The Angel, by Nick Cave
When I handed this book to my girlfriend and had her read the scene in which the main character, Euchrid Eucrow, is birthed with a dead twin in the back of a rusted-out car and sterilized with moonshine, her comment was "oh my god, it's like all the subject matter of Faulkner and O'Connor but with the  language of Marquez!" And that's why you should read And the Ass Saw the Angel (and why I should marry this girl someday, but that's neither here nor there).

"If you need more incentive, consider that I have a large collection of rocks, and some of 'em are killin' rocks."

If you've listened to any of mid-80's Nick Cave (and if you haven't, go get a copy of Tender Prey immediately and make peace with your God before you listen to it), you know what to expect: blood, God, the Bloodgod, God's Blood, whiskey, madness, whiskey-madness, and fire. The main character is a schizophrenic mute living with two abusive parents (his mother beats him for not speaking, his father catches animals in homemade traps and makes them fight) on the edge of a religious community in the Deep South.

It treads a line between the Southern Gothic and Magical Realism-- think the lush textuality of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the heat and the language of Absalom, Absalom!, and the shimmering madness of Wise Blood. It's definitely not a perfectly-constructed book (Cave was on a lot of heroin at the time and would usually write until he passed out facedown on the typewriter), but there's a relentless heat and force to it and the savage inevitability of its violence. It's also a beautiful spectacle, watching an Australian junkie living in London write about a South he only knows through Faulkner novels and bizarre stories.

"Wait, Mississippi's a real place?"

Beautiful Losers, by Leonard Coehn
This one's kind of cheating: one, unlike the other two, Cohen was actually a novelist and a poet before he became a musician, and two, it's a much better-known book. Still though, it's a pretty astonishing and emotionally raw novel and it would be unfair to leave it out. Also, I can't have a list with just two points.

I would say that Beautiful Losers is about sex and Judaism, but, c'mon. It's Leonard Cohen. You know it's about sex and Judaism. So it's also about a love triangle between our narrator, his wife (who he fetishized because he was an anthropologist who specialized on her tribe), and their mutual friend and lover F. Its language is and rich and raw as anything else Cohen wrote, and the characters as wry, bitter, and loving as those of his songs.

Not a particularly cheerful guy, as it turns out.

Beautiful Losers is about that wonderful drive towards self-immolation, the human need to burn away all our faults and become that which we love. It's incredibly Cohen-ish, touching on all those moments in his song where the individual strives to destroy itself with sex and G-d and passion-- think of the opening of "The Future" or all of "Who By Fire." If you like those songs (and if you don't then why the hell do you like me?), this is a book that'll hit you like a speeding car.

REVIEW: What I've Been Reading Lately

So this one'll be kind of oddball. I've been doing a lot of reading the past couple weeks, but none of the books has been as strange/wonderful or as perfectly fitting as most of the books I try and dedicate a full column to. But, not wanting to let all that reading go to waste, I still want to talk about them briefly. So instead (and, in part, inspired by the fact that my girlfriend got my Nick Hornby's Shakespeare Wrote for Money, which does the same thing), I thought I'd just do some short rundowns of the stuff I've been going through recently.

(Proper article next time, though. Either "3 Great Novels Written by Musicians" or an in-depth author profile).

The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler
This book is... different. It's intensely Victorian, like the ink was made from tea leaves and meat pie filling. However, one gets the feeling that, like Alasdair Gray's Poor Things or Alan Moore's From Hell, it's immersing itself so perfectly in the Victorian age in attempt to show the real Victorianism.

Just hollowed the old broad out and wore her as a suit.

The Way of All Flesh is ostensibly about the young man Ernest Pontifex and how he became a good, non-religious freethinker and charming gentleman just like Butler himself. The fact that the last 70 pages or so are about that makes me pretty sure Butler wanted us to take away that message. However, the real story-- the one that is far more emotionally powerful and forms the best parts of the novel --is Ernest's relationship with his abusive, overbearing father. Butler does an incredible job of showing the kind of power that a dominant parent can have over their child, and the scenes between Ernest and his father are far and away the most intense of the book.

Butler also does a great job of really digging into the roots of Ernest's father's cruelty, both in showing the origins of his need for power and constant affirmation of his importance (a childhood spent in the shadow of his own father, never having the courage to challenge those who were not dependent on him) and the reason's for his wife's meekness and the absolute need she has for her husband's happiness. Butler also ties these beautifully with Victorian ideals, making it absolutely clear that this domestic tyranny and cruelty is a natural extension of Victorian moralism and the sense of obligation.

"Have I mentioned that Jesus was a lie?"

The ending goes on for too long as Butler tries to make the story about religion and society instead of a fucked-up family-- if a good chunk of Ernest's college years had been removed, and the actual ending had been the moment where Ernest finally tells his parents that he doesn't need them and they have no right to control him, it would have been a much stronger book --but it's still a pretty great novel, and has some incredibly powerful moments in it.

The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks
Okay, I'm torn with this book. I really, really enjoyed it while I was reading it-- I picked it up at 11 at night, read the first 2/3rds, went to bed, and finished it immediately upon waking up --but I'm a little hesitant to wholeheartedly recommend it. In part because I'm not sure I want to go on record as having liked it.

The Wasp Factory contains some of the most brutal, fucked-up content I've ever read. Our narrator, Frank, is a teenage sociopath living on the West Coast of Scotland, getting drunk, killing animals, arranging their skulls on sticks along invisible ley lines, and reminiscing about the three children he murdered when he was younger.

Why are there people like Frank?

I don't mean to imply that it's just shock value, Bret Easton Ellis / post-Invisible Monters-Palahniuk style. This is a very, very good book. One of the most horrifying aspects of it is that we come to understand Frank's logic and, while never feeling that his acts of evil are right, the audience is able to see his rationale and understand the logic by which his world operates. At its core, I think it's a book about adolescence: to be 16 is to be creating a set of rituals, codes, and totems that are exclusive to you alone, and Frank, violent and brutal though he is, is trying to do this without the tools to do so in a way that prevents his rituals from being bloody and savage. He never takes joy in the three murders he committed, but recognized them as necessary acts for the pattern he sees in the world that no one else does. I mean, I just listened to a lot of Raw Power and took up the guitar, but the principle's the same.

That said... I'd be careful with this book, if I were you. It may be understandable and ring uncomfortably true, but it is still a brutal, brutal novel. I'm not even going to describe any of the most chilling scenes in it because I don't want to be responsible for putting them in your head. Just know that, if you do read it, there is a reason behind all of it and it does have a point. And it's a book you will almost certainly tear through in a white heat and be very, very glad to finish.

"I write about spaceships! And five-year-olds being blown to pieces!"

Wigfield: The Can-Do Town That Just May Not, by Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, and Paul Dinello

Several years ago, when the three of them were all just starting out as actors, the authors of this book did a TV show. It ran from 1999 to 2003. It was a parody of after-school specials called Strangers With Candy, and it was wonderful: surreal, strange, and operating by its own beautiful, inexplicable logic. It was easily one of the best TV comedies of all time and it's astounding that something as dark and weird as it ever made it onto television in the first place.

The character on the right never moves on camera and always makes that face.

Wigfield, their print follow-up, is not the same level of brilliant nonsense. It's still a damn fine book though.

Wigfield is the story of Russell Hokes, former highway line painter turned writer, who signs a contract to write 50,000 words about the disappearing American small town and rapidly discovers he can neither write about nor care about the disappearing American small town. Hokes's narrative voice is the best part about the book: he's a terrible, terrible writer who thinks he's a great one, and most of the book's best jokes come from his attempts to sound eloquent (and pad his word count), such as his claim that "with the future in my rearview mirror, I set a course for the past," or the fact that you can clearly identify the passages in which Hokes has attempted to use a thesaurus (usually in trying to find synonyms for "small town").

The town Hokes alights in, Wigfield, is "a charming architectural melange, the overall effect being that of a series of children's forts made from stolen highway equipment"-- a hastily-constructed shantytown/trailer park constructed at the base of a soon-to-be-destroyed dam as an obvious insurance scam. The book becomes an absolutely vicious satire on the "small town" and, moreso, on our love for the town. One of the biggest recurring jokes is the moment at which one of Wigfield's vaguely insane residents (there's supposedly a local serial killer, but it could be pretty much any citizen) will say something absolutely horrible, following it with a proclamation of small-town pride. Wigfield is essentially the worst place on earth, and Hokes is able to convince himself, and hopes to convince his reader, that it's "charming" and "quaint" just because very, very few people want to live there.

And then Stephen Colbert is in this picture.

Essentially, if you enjoy Strangers With Candy, or if Tina Fey's and Jon Stewart's endorsements on the back sound like pretty good advice, check it out. Wigfield is fun, weird, and, at times, unspeakably vicious satire. Also, it stops mid-moral because Hokes reaches 50,000 words, which is a pretty beautiful joke.

The 5 Most Badass Classic Authors

One of my favorite posts I've done here was my list of The 5 Most Badass Modern Writers. It was a helluva lot of fun to write and research, and I think the end result was pretty freakin' great. That said, though... look, I don't think that we're becoming emasculated by the passage of time or that we need to "reclaim our manliness" or any of that quasi-macho bullshit.

But I do think that, back when everyone knew how to use a sword, there were probably a lot more terrifyingly insane geniuses.

I mean, I'm a Douglas. Clearly, there's been some watering-down over the years.

So with that in mind, here's a companion to this piece: in no particular order, 5 men who lived before the 20th century and were able to totally tear up an age without anesthesia or basic hygiene. They may scare us, but hey, a Ford Taurus would make them puke in terror so at least we have that advantage should they declare war on our modern poets.

Spoiler alert: 4 of these men had sex with men. Ain't literary history fun!

5 Things I Love About Goethe's Faust

"How lucky we were,
We hit the cathouses and we sampled their wares
We got as drunk as a couple of Tsars,
that night I swallowed my lucky stars.
Who's that dancin' on the jailhouse roof
Stampin' on the ramping with a cloven hoof?"
--Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Up Jumped the Devil."

Goethe's Faust is one of the great triumphs of human literature. It is a damn shame that it's not omnipresent in American education-- it's every bit the equal of Shakespeare's best. Honestly, if Germany had won the war, we could take cold comfort in the fact that at least Americans could grow up knowing their Goethe.

"The Spacebots told me about a universe where that happened! And we all did the I Chi!"
Yes...yes Philip. We know.

I was considering trying to a guide to the work, but let's be honest-- I cannot. I spent a semester taking a course on this book and it was still fairly hurried. Goethe spent 60 years of life reading it, the most I can do to try and shepherd you through is to tell you to pick up the most recent Norton Critical Edition, which is a really great translation with hundreds of pages of notes, annotations, and help.

Instead, I'm going to revert to the method of communication that watching High Fidelity every Friday when I was 16 instilled in me: Top 5 lists. There's a huge amount to go into, but here's 5 things from the epic that are my favorite parts.

On Franzenfreude

Ages and ages ago, in my endorsement of Secondhand World, I promised I'd eventually try and talk about the whole "Franzenfreude" subject, especially now that enough time has passed since the accusations were going around on Freedom's publication that there's been some other really good journalism on the subject... that I can steal. Then, the author of Secondhand World mentioned personally that she'd love to see that article,so I really should. But then the chair of my department bought me a beer and the head of the Honors department bought me another beer (which is a good bit classier than that time we were hanging out and I was drinking absinthe out of a Pepsi bottle), so I have an excuse for my perpetual forgetting-to-write-this-post.

Your move, Bukowski.

Fanzenfreude is the (technically incorrect, if you care about German) term that got created when everyone was heaping laurels on Jonathan Franzen's Freedom as the new Great American Novel. It mainly refers to the way that women writers are treated in publishing and the literary world, and is your basic de Beauvoir-style second sex treatment: male writers are Writers, women are Women Writers. Not only is there an assumption that the Great American Novel will be written by a man, but, specifically, there's the fact that Franzen's novel is one of domestic drama, aesthetics, nature, and marriage. When a woman writes about these subjects, her books are about domestic life, love, and the human condition. When Franzen does, his books are about America.

Gonna kick some butt, gonna drive a big truck.

One of the best articles on the subject comes from (of course) The Guardian's book page( well, originally from The Millions, but The Guardian's edited version gets to the gender point more cleanly), in their article "How to turn a great American novel into a Great one". One of the points that the author makes (in part unintentionally) is that the things we look for in "great" novels are the things that we also expect from and encourage in male writers: daring, braggadocio, ironic detachment, brutal honesty. And when a man writes a book those things are what we look for: publishers and readers expect "masculine" writing and so they expect these traits.

Let's look, for example, at the collection of poetry on my bedside table, Jean Valentine's Break the Glass. The publisher copy and blurbs describe it as "quiet" (Publisher's Weekly) "graceful" (Library Journal), and The New Yorker praises Valentine for moving away from "the confessional poets who influenced her earliest verses" and writing more "skeletal...terse fragments."

Meanwhile, the other poetry collection I've been reading and adoring lately is the 2000 edition of Edwin Morgan's New Selected Poems. I love Morgan (more than Valentine, but let's put that aside for the time being), but reading Alex Salmond's eulogy for him from last year it's hard not to notice that he is praised for the scope and passion of his work, his long narrative explorations of death and violence, and his blunt honesty.

And yet Morgan wrote in "Strawberries" (to a male lover, no less):

"abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you"

And Valentine gave us the brutal, chilling opening of "Diana":

"The tab on the tea bag said
'Love what is ahead
by loving what came before.'
But what came before was no dream
you wake from, it was human sacrifice..."

We ignore the tenderness in Morgan and we ignore the shocking in Valentine and we do them both a disservice.

Edwin Morgan was important: he was the National poet of Scotland. New Selected Poems is implied by its back copy to be a sort of anthem, a symbol of Scottish independence and national pride, whereas Break The Glass is pitched by its copy as a warm, comforting book. Valentine has a National Book Award and a Pulitzer nomination but the "femininity" of her work guarantees that she's not going to make the cover of Time as a nationally important writer in the way that Franzen did.

Does anyone else get serious Dexter vibes from Franzen, or is that just me?

Men's books are books, women's books are women's books. To bring this back to where it started, I know for a fact from talking to the author that two of the biggest influences on Secondhand World are Yukio Mishima and James Baldwin, but the review selected for the back of the book compares it to three different minority women writers because it is a minority woman's story of the alienation and loneliness of adolescence-- never mind that, as a white man, there were moments in it that resonated with an incredible shock of familiarity with my own painful adolescence. Publishers-- and writers, and readers --make the mistake of assuming that men write more universal stories than women, that a writer's gender informs the tone of their voice, and that male readers can't really connect to a woman's writing.

Or, at its core, Franzenfreude is the fact that I can't think of a single woman who's been marketed as a Great Writer to a level that transcends the fact that she is a woman. I can't name a woman poet or novelist who is held up by "the establishment" as an artist before she is held up as a woman artist. We-- readers, writers, and publishers --are keeping women writers, ironically enough, in a room of their own instead of letting them enter a discourse with the literary world as a whole.

And to do that to Rodereda, Adrienne Rich, McCullers, Valentine, Sexton, Woolf, Octavia Butler, and Anna Akhmatova is a goddamn crime against art.

I was going to let Virgina Woolf tell you this, but... it just seemed more serious when I said it for some reason.

"You're a little shit, you know that Jasper?"

"Webster was much posessed by death..."

"John Webster was
one of the best there was.
He was the author of
two major tragedies."
--Echo and the Bunnymen, "My White Devil"

Let me apologize up-front for the lack of posts lately. I've been jetting around the state, visiting family and friends and trying desperately to get a job, preferably one where I don't end up feeling that the last four years of school were an absolute waste (does anyone out there need someone to hang around and be condescending?), and so I haven't gotten around to some of the writing I've been meaning to.

But I've wanted to do this post for a while. And trust me, your world will be a little better for having read it. I hope. I'm about to introduce you to a wonderful and terrifying man and the bloody world he ruled.

Pretty much me. But less tweedy and smug.

First things first-- careful historical research suggests that there may, in fact, have been other people writing in late 16th/ early 17th-century England besides Shakespeare. I know it seems crazy, but there were some fairly well-supported sightings of Marlowe and we're all but convinced that John Donne existed in some form. And then there's the stories-- dark, bloody, gruesome stories --of Webster.

Okay, I'm being an ass here. But the fact remains that it's pretty hard to look at that era without the Bard's shadow. Algernon Swinburne's The Age of Shakespeare, published in 1926, has the following to say of Webster:

"Webster, it may be said, was but as it were a limb of Shakespeare: but that limb, it might be replied, was the right arm. 'The kingly-crownèd head, the vigilant eye,' whose empire of thought and whose reach of vision no other man's faculty has ever been found competent to match, are Shakespeare's alone for ever: but the force of hand, the fire of heart, the fervour of pity, the sympathy of passion, not poetic or theatric merely, but actual and immediate, are qualities in which the lesser poet is not less certainly or less unmistakably pre-eminent than the greater."

 Essentially, the basic viewpoint seems to be that Webster's alright, but he's no Will; Webster may be the Raekwon of the Jacobian stage, but when Voltron formed in 1605 like 90% of it was Shakespeare. Not even the Genius got to be the head.

I have a degree, and I chose to do this.

Bullshit, says I. Yes, Webster's no Shakespeare, but pretty much nobody is. Let's not do Webster a disservice by assuming that just because he wrote at the same time as Shakespeare he should have had his talent, that he's not worth paying attention to because one of his contemporaries happened to be the most influential writer in human history. Instead, let's look at what makes Webster so goddamn great in his own right.

Webster is dark and brutal and incredibly perceptive about human evil. Eliot-- a man perhaps more keenly aware of the tenuousness of light and life than any other artist --praised Webster for his incredible grasp on humanity's frailty and mortality (moments and images from Webster's The White Devil  are scattered throughout The Waste Land). His work is bloody in ways that few other artists of his day were. When someone dies in Shakespeare, there's a purpose and a cause; there is a natural order and violence arises as a consequence of godless chaos. Webster's world rejects this: the notion of divine punishment still implies the too-comforting existence of some kind of natural order and authority, whereas Webster's plays see the world as a realm without government or reason, driven only by the base needs and frantic scrabblings of humanity.

Like I said: dark, dark stuff, but incredible. When you pick up The Duchess of Malfi there's this terrible momentum to the work: whereas in most other tragedies the heroes are noble and the bloodshed dignified, Malfi begins by demonstrating that the noble court-- and all of humanity --are selfish, petty, and grotesque. Then it gets worse. Mankind, at least to the eloquently cynical Bosola, are filth, worse than the lowest animal because we have reason and intelligence and choose to be bestial, with souls as rotten as the corpses we walk around in.

"I do wonder you do not loathe yourselves.
Observe my meditation now:
What thing is in this outward form of man
To be belov'd? We account it ominous,
If nature do produce a colt, or lamb,
A fawn, or goat, in any limb resembling
A man, and fly from't as a prodigy.
Man stands amaz'd to see his deformity
In any other creature but himself.
But in our own flesh, though we bear diseases
Which have their true names only ta'en from beasts,
As the most ulcerous wolf and swinish measle;
Though we are eaten up of lice and worms,
And though continually we bear about us
A rotten and dead body, we delight
To hide it in rich tissue; all our fear,
Nay all our terror, is, lest our physician
Should put us in the ground, to be made sweet."

 Malfi is like The Departed of the Elizabethan stage-- bloody, chaotic, this swirling cycle of pain and retribution and petty, human, evil. It's also really hard to follow and has a lot of similar characters, but that's just an expansion of the chaos inside the play itself; Webster forces you to be lost, confused, and afraid in his world.

"Your brother and yourself are worthy men:
You have a pair of hearts are hollow graves,
Rotten, and rotting others."

What makes Webster so astonishing is that he was writing his characters as lost souls in a broken world centuries before Modernism made that the popular viewpoint of literature. He paints the nobility as corrupt, restrictive sexual "morality" as a perverse obsession with purity, God as nonexistent and justice as a joke. In 1612-- when just saying that maybe God didn't directly appoint King James to rule over the British Empire for the good of all its subjects and as a defense against the Papacy was treasonous.

It's not all dark and gloom and sinister, though-- well, it mostly is, but it's not brutal for brutality's sake. Webster's aim isn't to shock his audience, but to remind them of their own frailty, of their own base humanity. One of his best moments--one of the best moments of Elizabethan drama--is the final scene of Malfi, by which point every major character is dead, except for the two who are bleeding to death as the play closes. Ferdinand, the villain of the piece, remarks that mankind is not brought down by devils (as was the case in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, 30 years earlier), or by karmic retribution for transgressions against order (as in Macbeth, c.1605), but instead says that

"I do account this world but a dog-kennel...
Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust."

There's some stranglin' about to happen.

The play's ending is Godfather levels of dark: the one innocent, the Duchess's child son who stands a chance at escaping the den of killers and traitors that is the noble court, is instead guaranteed a position of high stature in the wake of everyone else's death. There's no redemption, no hero to come in and impose justice as there is in Macbeth, no ironic retribution for the nobility's sin as in Coriolanus.

Webster refuses to offer the audience an out. He refuses to let us make exceptions or walk away with a lesson learned and a comfortable resolution. Instead there's just everything wrong with the rich and powerful, and the silent promise that nothing about that is going to change.

"Now my revenge is perfect. Sink, thou main cause
Of my undoing. The last part of my life
Hath done me best service."

Webster's work is unique in its time-- ugly, crude, inordinately bloody, chaotic, rejecting any claims to moral authority and divine order. Reading it, one is reminded of J.G. Ballard's comment on his novel Crash, when he said that "I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror." Although he never lacks for beautiful language, and can even rival Will himself at his brightest moments, Webster never thinks for a moment that the beauty of his words can mask the evil that humanity is capable of, or that eloquence, money, or a fancy uniform somehow transforms someone into a moral person.

Pick him up, essentially. It's the most anti-authority British writing you're going to get until Milton comes along, and it's fascinating to see this kind of blood, hate, and anger in an era of drama that we associate almost solely with Shakespeare.

REVIEW: Fletcher Hanks's I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!

"This is a song about a superhero named Tony
It's called 'Tony's Theme'!
I can look at the sun
If you give me some bad sunglasses
I'm back on the road"
--The Pixies, "Tony's Theme"

Thanks for letting me take graduation week off, everyone. I had a lot of fun, got some good stuff done, and I've come back bearing treasures.

I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets is one of the most astounding comic books I've ever read. Not the best-- not by a long shot --but astounding in the literal sense. The fact that it was written, drawn, published, and collected staggers the mind; the comics within seem so strange and otherworldly that it's hard to believe they ever existed.

Fletcher Hanks was a drunk, a moonshiner, and a manic-depressive bastard who, despite having some decent artistic talent (the comic reproduces a nature sketch of some ducks that he did) turned his ambitions towards crude, insane superhero comics in the 1930's, at the dawn of the American comics industry. Like a lot of outsider artists-- Darger especially comes to mind, although Hanks's work is nowhere near as beautiful --there's this incredibly primal energy to his work, this pure drive by someone trying to tell stories and make up fantasies when they don't have the best grip on how the real world functions to begin with.

Jesus, that comic looks the way that Black Sabbath sounds.

Primal really is the word that leaps to mind here. The artwork is this bizarre mix of beauty and crudity--the colors are incredibly vibrant, the line work is strong and some of the cityscapes and panoramas are actually pretty good-looking, but every character has only one expression and the body language is painfully stiff. Similarly, the actual stories are bloody and mad and feel like this grindhouse blend of early Superman, Ayn Rand, and death metal lyrics. In nearly every story of Stardust the Super-Wizard, "whose scientific use of rays has made him a master of space," Hanks's main character, a cabal of the enemies of business and America hatch some scheme to take over the earth (the best of which being when they chain themselves to the ground, magnetize every car and plane and ocean to make them stay in place, and then stop the Earth's rotation in order to fling every other person into space and rule it alone), Stardust stops them with his "fusing ray" or "boomerang ray" or somesuch, and then spends literally half the comic-- almost always more time than the actual crime took --forcing them to suffer ironic punishments.

I'm sorry, did you think I was making that up?

There's an incredible anger to these works, and you get the feeling that Hanks, who was a chronic alcoholic and a violent man, is desperately trying to lash out at the people he blames for the state of the world. In every story, the corrupt industrialists, gangsters, and evil conspiracy leaders are seized by some all-powerful being and treated as filth like them deserve. The highlight is probably the punishment for the man who used an anti-oxygen ray to try to suffocate the president, congress, and every doctor and soldier in the US: his body is condensed into a giant head, thrown into "the space pocket of living death," and is then captured by a giant headless headhunter who attaches the gangster's head to his shoulders and absorbs it into him.

Seriously-- I cannot put into words how mad and beautiful this thing is. 50,000 panthers are unleashed on New York. Stardust turns his hand into an octopus so he can grab someone with it. 5 criminals are condensed into one man so that punishing them will be easier.

Thank you, Stardust the Super Wizard. That makes perfect sense.

The closest comparison I can make to anything contemporary is Axe Cop. And Axe Cop is deliberately over-the-top and written by a 6-year-old, whereas Hanks seems to have put a lot of sincere heart and soul into his madness. He's also an influence on contemporary cartoonists like the ever-wonderful KC Green, who also loves to mix absurd violence, blunt art, and illogical cosmic disaster. It's hard not to compare him to HP Lovecraft at times, too-- just some drunken madman, holed up in New York, churning out these insane stories that you're not entirely sure he believes are fiction.

For anyone who's into comics, or into weird, transgressive art, I can't recommend this anthology highly enough. It's a strange, shocking trip-- these are comics that unintentionally accomplish the ugly, shocking beauty that cartoonists like R. Crumb and Spiegelman's early work sought so hard to embody. They're magical and strange and every page is dripping with absurd wonderment and shock. They're incredibly fun, but also get pretty deeply unsettling at times. It's childish wonder and grown-up insanity, all condensed into one technicolor package.