Reading The Wicked + The Divine (part 3, end of blind reading)

Big’ol spoiler warning

From ‘Mothering Invention’ onward, much of the narrative slides into flashback mode, which makes sense. The plot depends on a lot of things that happened off-camera and- if I hadn’t read ‘Old Is The New New’ between ‘Mothering Invention’ and ‘”Okay”‘ -I don’t know how the story would have hit me. Since the stories in ‘Old Is The New New’ were equal parts experimental fun time and retrospective storytelling, I wonder if a lot of fans simply went from ‘Mothering Invention’ to ‘”Okay”‘ during the original run.

Minus ‘Old Is The New New’, the majority of the plot does take place in the twentieth-to-twenty-first century. I’m starting with a nitpick because I’ve wrestled with similar issues in my own writing, lately. Sometimes there is no convenient place in the central narrative for things with too much distance from the main plot. In the absence of an opportune flashback occasion, what else is there to be done except simply write more stories covering the remote-yet-meaningful plot points?

Situating the ‘Old Is The New New’ anthology as volume eight in the collected editions makes sense…but it can also hit like a recap of a bunch of information that should have been better integrated. I suppose it looks conspicuous to me because there simply wasn’t that much non-linearity beforehand. Yes there have been big, complicated, explosive plots with lots of things to pay attention to…but it was all rather linear. The most obvious breaks from this are the flashbacks with Ananke and her sister, six-thousand years ago, in ‘Mothering Invention’.

Yet those ‘Mothering Invention’ flashbacks can function as a bridge.

Before then, The Wicked + The Divine never got metafictive but it played footsie with it. The 1234 panels in the early books remind me of conventions in comic-scripting. A few of the collected editions contain Kieron Gillen’s scripts at the end and he writes with care and intention: relatively few older comic-writing conventions are present. But those 1234 panels really remind me of certain Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman scripts, divorced from the actual comics. Panels are often numbered to denote sequencing and there are a lot of scripts where the most common things an illustrator will read are ‘panel 1…panel 2…panel 3…’. The 1234 panels also tend to appear during the moments that feel the most non-linear, like Dionysus’ first appearance in the story at the rave.

Another metafictive slow burn is the presence of the Pantheon fandom. No, characters dressing up as each other is not definitive metafiction but it’s always happening in the background. ‘Mothering Invention’ then foregrounds the possibility that the prior incarnations of the Pantheon all had loose resemblances to each other anyway. Sometimes, the appearance of one 2014 divinity may have been inherited from a prior incarnation of another one.

Then there’s the mystery of Ananke’s sister and the god of her sister. Six-thousand years ago, Ananke resolved to choose the divinities that “take the children”. Her sister adds that her god will always be among them. Once Ananke’s sister returns for the first time, a familiar topic comes up:

Ananke: “Would…you like to sing? It is your greatest gift.”

Sister: “To sing? It’s all I ever wanted.”

Then snap, like Persephone. Sixty-five times, over the millennia. Chapter 36 begins with sixty-six panels across eleven pages. Sixty-five of them are snap panels and nine of those depict Ananke’s sister escaping with a familiar set of tongue-tentacles in evidence (in an unfamiliar shade of green). Eight others show the “I’ve missed you” hug.

Chapter 37 starts with ninety panels of black across nine pages, beginning with Egypt 3127 BC. Directly after the 37 title page, there are a pair of distressed blue eyes (or eyes covered with blue transparency).

Among the sixty-five snap panels at the start of 36, one of them is dated Egypt 3128 BC. This is one of the panels with Ananke hugging her sister, saying “I missed you.”

Back in 37, another transition waits after the ninety black squares, dated Crete 3037 BC. Each one of the chapter 36 panels was marked with a date and location consistent with the intervals between recurrences. The black panels in chapter 37 are just one successive year after another, until Crete 3037 BC. If chapter 36 started with the recurrence intervals from Ananke’s perspective, then chapter 37 is portraying her sister’s perspective on an early interval between recurrences.

Crete 3037 BC brings us to a girl or a woman with blue eyes and reddish hair, kneeling on a beach and raking her face with her fingernails, saying “Never again.”

To me, that girl resembles 2014 Amaterasu. Yet 2014 Morrigan is known to claw at her face with her fingernails.

Shortly afterward, the visual pacing and panel arrangement slides neatly back into typical narrative context. During the Morrigan and Baphomet’s break-up fight, there is a succession of battle images and older relationship images. A positive relationship image circles around, Baphomet’s resolve wavers and the Morrigan claims the win. That’s at least one instance when the reader perspective is equated with a character perspective. This has happened before this point but not very often.

Then we step a bit closer to the fourth wall again, with Ananke meeting Robert Graves in 1944, which was a fun scene to read. The only Robert Graves I’ve ever read were the novels I, Claudius and Claudius The God but it was still cool to see him in a comic. He is approached by a mysterious stranger and they spend a night drinking and talking:

“The first of the gods was my sister’s. Maiden, mother, crone. An effective slight of hand. Easy to fall for. I thought…one could use that, eh? (…) Oh, I was everywhere. The things I’ve seen and the things that have seen me. This quiet white goddess, wandering around… (…) I offer them godhood. Choose the right verse, the divine poetry to recite. Of course they can’t resist it. (…) It’s our secret language. Like…trees? We’re like trees? I told the druids something like that…Twelve trees, and the thirteenth, the elder tree, which is death.”

At a glance, it looks like the perpetuating of the White Goddess lore and her connections to the triple goddess made by Graves was orchestrated by Ananke. She planted the idea in his head to give her chosen ruse the appearance of universal, mythic relevance.

Oh, wait…the last recurrence cycle before that point ended in ’23, didn’t it? Is there any reason in particular why Ananke might be either unusually desperate to cement her hold on the Pantheon, as well as feeling the need to vent to a sympathetic ear? Such as seeing something that conforms to a six-thousand year old lie that her sister left her with?

From ‘Of The Devil’s Party’. Is it just me or do the “cubist”, physics-defying freak-outs of 1923 Dionysus resemble the head-splodey illustrations from the same story?

In both 1923 and 2014, a psychic amplifier is built by Woden and the Norns which can easily be used for mind-control. Earlier, in ‘Of The Devil’s Party’, Ananke implies that gods do not create art: their existence and their actions are their art. The ripples of cause and effect from short, powerful lives.

Put a fucking pin in that, btw.

Baal, Set, Woden and the Norns agree with Ananke’s assessment of gods and art. They believe it generalizable to humanity, whom they see as entering an age of decadence, democracy, electric light and creative exuberance. This is the degenerate zeitgeist of the masses and it is- to their horror -in ascension.

Determine to head off this trend, Set and Baal begin killing other gods to siphon their powers and their remaining time, ala Prometheus gambit. Roughly five gods are sacrificed to create an apocalyptic summoning, to put humanity on the right track again. Woden dies with his hands on the machine, which may or may not function as a sixth sacrifice. Later that year, the four remaining Pantheon members agree to commit suicide as a means of countering the apocalyptic wish. It won’t cancel it out completely but- according to Ananke -if they can reduce five-to-six wishes for the apocalypse to one or two, then that can be managed eventually.

It may seem dubious to equate the 1923 amplifier with the 2014 amplifier…but they both have the same being locked in their cores.

This being dates back to the 1831 story ‘Modern Romance’ which was, for me, one of the sweetest moments in the whole comic.

In 1831, the Pantheon is mourning the passing of Hades. Not Lucifer- the Greek underworld deity called Hades. Lucifer himself is occupied trying to resurrect Hades.

According to context, the resurrection cannot be done because of Ananke’s harvest: such a thing would entail drawing the life force of Hades back out of her, which isn’t happening. What emerges is, in the words of romantic era Woden, a new being, made by the Pantheon. For the first time in their history, the Pantheon members reckon the prospect of familial legacy:

Woden: “It is not a monster. It is not Hades, returned. It is one who was created by us. (…) It is new. It deserves better. (…) You are alive. You will go on long after we are gone. (…) Do you understand?”

Romantic-era Woden disappears at the touch of the purple being and it assumes her likeness. Inanna approaches them. They say “You killed three children. You did it…as part of an accord. For power. For Glamour. For this…”

She extends a deadly hand to Inanna who begs mercy on behalf of the child of Lucifer, whom she carries in her womb. The new being with the lavender word balloons and the pale letters withdraws her hand. She says “You are not my sister” and walks away.

Much later, in Inanna’s journal:

“I find myself dwelling on my sister’s final words…whatever we made was not a monster but a creature. (…) Creatures are all that is created by God. Monsters are those that God rejects. (…) Instead, this creature rejected its gods.”

She goes on to muse about what to name her child when Ananke shows up with the snap.

Inanna: “I thought perhaps you would let us escape.”

Ananke: “No, Inanna. No one escapes. (…) Especially not you.”

‘Modern Romance’ made me question the origin and nature of 2014 Inanna. 2014 Inanna is the only one before then who had purple word balloons with white letters. 1831 Inanna speaks in normal black-and-white word balloons and her journal writing is white-on-purple.

It is obvious, at this point, that no Pantheon member has ever given birth to start a family of their own. Because of the six-thousand year old stipulation of her sister: sister’s god is always among those that “take the children”. I may have my sequencing wrong but I thought her sister’s stipulation about her personal god was a fundamental part of Ananke’s ruse over the years. Some variation of the triple goddess is always present and Ananke’s successive lifetimes hide in the shadow of the triple goddess. The triple goddess is the only Pantheon member whose name and nature could specify a woman at any stage of her life, after all, whose universality could function as an interpretive back door.

So no normal child-bearing families for the Pantheon but one of them inevitably does procreate. Ananke claimed the ability to specify the soul-harvester in each generation and her sister claimed one of those slots to forever belong to her god. Ananke simply stops this from ever happening by only permitting one child which she makes the avatar of Minerva- her younger self. No specific origin for any one Minerva is ever shown which almost makes me wonder if Ananke herself simply gives birth to Minerva each time.

Ananke’s sister told her something else, though. Before her first death, the divine sister is traveling with her grandson, whom she tells not to worry.

Divine sister’s grandson: “What final magic have you?”

Divine sister: “Oh, a simple lie. (…) It will lead her astray, as she thinks that my lie alone is what can eternally defeat her. The only hope is that one of the children will find the real way out of the trap.”

This lie was the last thing she spoke before dying: if her god ever gives birth, the recurrence will end. Ananke will be claimed, for all time, by a “great darkness”. Ananke considers this and says “The mother begetting a child other than me means, by definition, I will not be the child any more. The cycle breaks. I see. I can handle that.”

After that point, Ananke trots out the story of the great darkness now and then to keep the Pantheon in line. Ananke had no reason to consider the existence of such a thing until 1923, when the Baal-and-Set-gang enact five-to-six wishes for global catastrophe. This was also the first actual use of the purple girl amplifier. Ananke incorporates both the amplifier and its destructive magical payload into a great darkness puppet, should an object lesson be called for.

So…do I have to belabor the Frankenstein references, from ‘Modern Romance’? That story deconstructs both the Promethean myth that Frankenstein partakes of as well as an oft-repeated anecdote about how the book was written. Mary Shelley-Wollstoncraft, Percy Shelley, John Polidori, Lord Byron and Lord Byron’s wife are holed up for the winter and pass the time writing horror stories. Female Woden maps onto Mary Shelley, male Morrigan maps onto Mary’s husband Percy and Inanna and Lucifer are, of course, the Byrons. Maybe this is superficial but I liked it. Romantic era Lucifer tries to resurrect Greek Hades, fails and creates a beautiful and deadly enigma. Lady Woden is the only one of them to recognize how unprecedented this is and attempts to take the child in hand. Woden, in this comic, is quite the techie and romantic era Woden is like any of the others. She has robot ravens on her shoulders with visible rivets. Her missing eye has a mechanical replacement. There’s just something poetic about super-scientific Woden playing the role of Mary Shelley, welcoming the newborn into the world.

Eventually, though, the newborn is imprisoned and used to create the fictional great darkness. Ananke undoubtedly had the idea as part of her manipulation but I wondered if maybe she was playing catch-up with her own fears. A terrible moment in 1923 when she wonders if the great darkness was always real before getting it together enough to incorporate the new development. Perhaps she thought that the apocalyptic conspiracy of the Set-and-Baal-gang was, itself, the apparition of the great darkness.

This actually goes hand-in-hand with one of the oldest strengths of the comic: making the obvious less obvious. 2014 Woden was open about being a pervert and megalomaniac and being out for number one. He shouted his motives from the rooftops but almost nothing else about who he was or what he was doing was portrayed for the first half of the story. Of course he used the purple girl machine to turn hundreds of people into slaves. A good stage magician knows how to direct the attention of the audience, after all.

Another wonderful use of apparent truth and expectation is tongues. It is not immediately apparent what tongue-singing is but it is apparent what everyone thinks of it. It seems to be purely a matter of interpretation until Laura awakens as Persephone, with her black tentacles that appear whenever she sings (not to mention the only character who uses tongue-singing in combat). Before that confirmation arrives, though, we get a tiny and painful scene with Tara; known to all as Fucking Tara. At the time of her apparent death, she also appears to be the only Pantheon member whose performances are not immediately pacifying. If anything, the crowd hates her worse than anyone else. It’s easy to chalk up her devastation to frailty but no other Pantheon member ever experienced this. The average human has nothing bad to say about listening to the tongue-singing of any Pantheon member. Organic unpopularity is a factor but it cannot be the only one.

Tara had decided to actually compose music with intention. That was the problem. She simply chose to write music instead of singing tongues. In Tara’s journal she writes “If I had another second, I’d play another chord. (…) I’d write another line. (…) I’d try to drag what’s up here…” indicating her head, “…out here.”

Ananke also said that her nature as a member of the Pantheon is inscrutable to her. To Ananke, Tara just looks like a blob of random, echoing no particular god from antiquity. At the same time, Ananke needs four heads for her regeneration and Tara is a suicide risk. A vain, stupid blob who is too weird for comfort. No great loss.

I believe Ananke didn’t recognize Tara (nor anyone else) because Tara did not fall into an archetype like the others. The others all saw and heard things that they wanted to worship and embody.

There is a precedent for Tara, though: Ananke’s divine sister. Tara is the one character who actually heard the voice of the divine like Ananke’s sister did. Tara practices magic and spirituality through direct experimentation and observation. But the authenticity of discovery has no value in a world full of ideas of what the divine and the spiritual should be- not to mention the divinities who literally broadcast their psychic fingerprints.

Six-thousand years ago, the triple goddess had no wealth of names; only the solitary perception and the solitary spiritual practice of Ananke’s sister. Tara had the worst run out of any other 2014 Pantheon member but- by the end of the final volume, when all the other characters have decided to live normal human lives and be happy about it -Tara is the only one left with both a shot at immortality and an appetite for it.

The endings of all the other characters still make sense, though, and the meaning of Ananke’s name can tell us why.

Why do most people end up reducing themselves to definitions and functions to the exclusion of their souls? Necessity…or something close enough to be mistaken for it: the evil of convenience. The need to fit into the bullshit because ‘it’s the way things are.’

In the absence of those definitions, Laura and Cassandra fall in love in the long run. It’s interesting to me that only Persephone was able to reach Lucifer on the level she needed to be spoken to, in the end. Shortly before then, Laura saw Cassandra kiss her other Norn-selves goodbye and was momentarily jealous. Laura-Persephone has things in common with the triple goddess emanations like the Norns and the Morrigan. Like the triple goddesses, Persephone has concentric selves that loop through others.

Persephone’s emanations outside of herself appear to be what enabled her to make intimate psychic contact with Cassandra, Ananke and Lucifer. If a looping of selves has anything to do with that, though, it cannot be everything. Persephone is very much aware of how close her innermost self is to the other. I don’t think she would have been able to seduce Lucifer back to humanity if she didn’t respect the other enough to love them.

Reading The Wicked + The Divine (part 2)

Spoiler warnings for ‘The Faust Act’ through ‘Imperial Phase Part 2’

Something that I meant to spend more time on in the last post was “tongues”.

In The Wicked + The Divine, gods perform. There are tours and residencies and multitudes of people who follow these events. There are possessive and tribal fandoms. There are diverse movements and trends among them. No one (as of being about six books in) thus far has been able to describe what a divine performance consists of.

Externally, a big part seems to be standing around with your mouth open- apparently vocalizing. Our privileged narrative perspective reveals that everyone is receiving an outpouring from the deity. When Laura sees Amaterasu (her manifestation only a “couple of weeks” old at that point) for the first time, her mental narration says that “I don’t understand a word she’s saying. Nobody does. (…) All we know is that it means everything. (…) She’s been doing this for an hour, and it’s been all climax. (…) Every second is the best of my life so far…”

Laura realizes that orgasms and masses are pale three-dimensional shadows of the higher reality before her. A moment’s eye-contact with Amaterasu breaks a dividing line in her head: “I want everything you have.” The pure impact leaves a pure void: adoration and identification blended into child-like, frenzied desire.

What happens during these performances is an exertion of power but not control. A god becomes the center of gravity and the subjective quality of the performance varies depending on the personality and state of mind of that god. That is not the same as control. The performing god is often a fellow traveler on the journey; at most a conductor. More often, they are simply a conduit.

None of these experiences are the same as a hivemind- that specific talent is unique to Dionysus. Yet the resemblances are striking. In the Morrigan’s first ever interview (the beginning of ‘Imperial Phase Part 1’), the journalist finds herself alone with the Morrigan but far from lonely. The domain of the Morrigan includes a sequence of selves; communion with a line of yourselves going backward and forward through time. In the Morrigan, the interviewer sees versions of herself and others like her.

Also- the whole ‘selves through time’ thing? Is there a reason why it is usually portrayed, in fiction and folklore, as a feminine experience? Not that it necessarily must be, by any means- but there are a ton of female characters who go through stuff like this. In the cosmology of Frank Herbert’s Dune novels, Paul Atreides is unique specifically because he is a man who is capable of ancestral memory, which (the story posits) is a necessary ingredient for prophecy.

We’re also reading a comic with two simultaneous portrayals of the triple goddess: the Morrigan and the Norns. Two characters who routinely have conversations with themselves and others. Whose other selves address other people. Perhaps the natural resonance between gods and humans simply attracted the personality of a prospective worshiper to the Morrigan interview. Maybe this is how conversations between humans and gods usually go, anyway. In any event, that journalist did not simply see the Morrigan’s other aspects in her minds’ eye. She saw other versions of herself, reaching through time and space. Maybe this is not, specifically, a tongues moment but it feels kind of like one.

Meanwhile, the Norns? The other triple goddess? Her manifestation vector (Cassandra) has long insisted that the tongues are an ordinary group-think experience and nothing more. Even after she awakens as Urdr of the Norns, she does not experience it any differently until Persephone catches her off-guard.

Why does she do this? To show Cassandra memories. That appears to be a one-off use, though. ‘Rising Action’ starts with Persephone’s first concert after manifesting through Laura. She stands onstage like the rest of the Pantheon, opens her mouth like the rest of the Pantheon…and everyone feels the touch of darkness. Everyone is alone and in Hell, like Persephone. With Urdr of the Norns, though? It works as direct thought-transfer.

When Persephone is alone in the underworld with Baphomet, the panels are still divided with the black intertwined tentacles from when Persephone sent her memories to Cassandra. This is still part of the memory-transfer but the chapter-break nearly implies a scene change. The chapter with Persephone and Baphomet is called ‘Persephone In Hell’, as though Hell accompanies her thoughts and her heart no matter where she is. Y’know, kinda like not having free-reign on the surface after eating the pomegranate.

Persephone is also distinguished by the possible relationship between her tongues and her combat. The black tentacles appear everywhere she wants them yet the imagery is also paired with listening to Persephone’s tongues. She is the only Pantheon member who uses tongues in battle.

The mystery of tongues lends intrigue to ‘Imperial Phase’ parts one and two. ‘Rising Action’ was a perfectly good culmination of Ananke’s early villain arc. Ananke, a figure whom heads of state deferred to, was publicly revealed as the force behind the deaths of Lucifer, Inanna and Tara in the same breath that her death was announced. The erratic behavior and the violence was tolerated for the sake of spectacle but also because the world, in general, saw Ananke as the “adult in the room” who keeps the Pantheon from getting out of hand. As Dionysus put it: “We need a reason for people not to be afraid of us.”

(Speaking of: note how Amaterasu starts calling Persephone “the adult” after that point. I suspect a meaningful mis-recognition is at work)

A big’ol unprecedented tongues concert with the aid of a large, mysterious machine is definitely one way to approach that. Since the tongues performances often convey a sublime sense of oneness, perhaps it’s even a decent idea. Especially since Dionysus- a beloved performer whose tongues open a direct hivemind with all present -is at the center of things (with a giant machine understood only by Ananke and Woden). Maybe more to the point: after Persephone kills Ananke, Amaterasu asks “What do we do now?” Persephone: “Duh…(…) whatever we want.”

That line is huge foreshadowing for the end of ‘Imperial Phase Part 2’.

I just finished that book so this is all pretty fresh in my mind. Lots of obvious things happen by the end. Things that seem like they should have been obvious. Why weren’t they, though?

Because ineffability. The ineffable is intrinsically hard to define and are often described by reference and analogy. Once you get used to representations, it becomes possible to lose sight of things representing themselves. By the end of ‘Imperial Phase Part 2’, no one has behaved out of character. Everything everyone did in the end lines up with everything that they said, up front, about their motives.

Just to keep things neat: let’s define the ineffable as that which is real but either exceeds context or is distinct from it.

Baal is a Boyscout, at heart. He likes his house to be in order and errs on the side of tradition, precedent and authority. He obeys Ananke on principle until Baphomet tells him something that he could only know if he were close enough to see what happened during Inanna’s death. Baal wastes no time after he realizes that everyone else is right about Ananke.

Still…afterward, there is a vacuum. The Pantheon is used to having a single, authoritative voice and Baal readily steps into the role. They also want to make sure that all of their usual boundaries are in place and intact and that they still have the power to control internal information and dynamics. This is why Sakhmet wasn’t told about Persephone’s role in Ananke’s death. It wasn’t to exclude Sakhmet; only to maintain elective control of the information during a transitional era in their family. Someone is stepping in to do the same things that Ananke did…but what of it? We found out where his true loyalties were in ‘Rising Action’ and he’s cool, right? The Pantheon has no precedent for this and they’re doing their best with what they have. Why shouldn’t they use the old way of doing things as a jumping-off point?

The entire Pantheon appears rattled by Ananke’s death. None more so than Woden who limits his perspective to a very specific research project with Dionysus: the tongues machine. Maybe Baal’s example- a former underling of Ananke doing the right thing once they know better -helps us ignore certain motives of his, which he never kept hidden in the first place (come to think of it- his motives are the only thing he’s ever been open about, aren’t they?).

Later, the Morrigan tells Persephone to keep her distance, after Baphomet revealed their fling. “He never should have told me. Beware the honest, Destroyer… (…) …they will hurt you just to feel clean.”

Sakhmet is the other end of the spectrum. One reason why Baphomet has a single, exclusive partner and confidant is because he cannot keep things to himself and- if he must choose a side -desires only to be on the side of the Morrigan. If even pragmatic secret-keeping is more deception than Baphomet has stamina for…maybe that says something about what he has in common with Sakhmet.

Baphomet has one relationship that he prioritizes over everything. That is how he manages both his boundaries and his lack thereof. Sakhmet is not exclusive- she is promiscuous. Everyone else is either equally in or equally out and she is always number one. Persephone has had a number of flings and crushes. Early in ‘Rising Action’, I wondered if Baphomet and Persephone were going to be a Thing. Baal started out as a sky god and was eventually reclassified as a demon with the rise of Abrahamic religion. Baal has slept with Persephone. No, Baal is not an underworld god but there is still a certain consistency with Persephone being with him. Neither of those hold and Persephone’s first, sustained relationship of the comic is with Sakhmet, after Ananke’s death.

Baphomet controls his feelings by controlling his circle. Sakhmet controls hers by treating everyone like (either mortal or sexual) prey. Then she gets a partner who’s not part of her usual orgy nest. She brings her unregulated feelings to Persephone like she brings them everywhere. Like Baphomet, she is honest: her boundaries and standards are simple. Don’t hurt her and don’t lie to her. Then she finds out (from sweet, well-intentioned Amaterasu) that Persephone killed Ananke and starts ripping out throats. Sakhmet might not live in a black void like Baphomet and the Morrigan but she is just as paranoid about who she gives her trust to. Baphomet cannot keep secrets; he simply does not have it in him. Sakhmet does not have it in her to tolerate any level of exclusion or secret-keeping. Much less concerning secrets that leak to several other people before getting to her.

Amaterasu has nothing but good intentions…but she was still the one who told Sakhmet something that Sakhmet interpreted as a collective lie perpetrated by her family. It doesn’t go well. This divides resources and surveillance at the worst possible time during the tongues-machine concert, brought to you by Dionysus and Woden. Remember when we first met Dionysus, at the beginning of ‘Fandemonium’? Woden fumes because all he can do is create things for other people. On that level, he would rather be any other Pantheon member than himself. Dionysus can thread his consciousness through anyone who hears his tongues. How did Laura-Persephone put it? “Woden thinks he’s got the worst hand…you’ve got the best.”

Woden appropriates what he can’t emulate. Also, what do people go to the tongues-concerts for if not to experience the ineffable? Something that is often described by comparison to something else?

I feel like there is something going on with Amaterasu that began on the first book and ended on ‘Imperial Phase Part 2’. Amaterasu awakened within Hazel a “couple of weeks” before ‘The Faust Act’. The story, thus far, may have covered all of Amaterasu’s life and career in the Pantheon.

A few days ago I saw a YouTube video about Kate Bush. The story behind the song ‘Cloudbusting’ jumped out at me: an anecdote from the autobiography of Wilhelm Reich’s son Peter. According to Peter Reich, his father took him out to test a machine built to force clouds to rain. A ‘cloudbuster’. Peter avowed that this was what he and his father were doing when Wilhelm was detained by FBI agents and driven away. The incident was played down as a case of mistaken identity; evidently another man named Wilhelm Reich lived in the area, who was suspected of distributing communist literature. Wilhelm Reich had been persecuted in Nazi Germany over his research but this was, evidently, not one of those times, even if it did leave an indelible mark on his son.

Kate Bush herself portrayed the young Peter Reich, opposite Donald Sutherland as Wilhelm. It was the kind of creative decision that usually appeals to me. It reminded me, vaguely, of one of my favorite movies: Les Enfants terribles, in which Renee Cosima plays both a male childhood friend of the main character and a woman whom he falls in love with in adulthood. None of these things really add up to why it stuck with me, though.

No matter what the historical facts of the situation were, the emotional tone of Peter Reich’s anecdote and Kate Bush’s song prioritize strength and brilliance in the face of overwhelming odds. In the magazine section of ‘Imperial Phase Part 1’, the interview with Amaterasu is called ‘Cloudbusting’. The interviewer and Amaterasu herself wrestle with the question of the Pantheon’s apparent hubris.

The interviewer writes that Amaterasu “makes the world she believes in real by sheer force of will. The perpetual crescendo of her shows, like a sunrise that somehow lasts for hours -it is driven by the urgency of someone who is trying to save us all, and buoyed by the joy of someone who is sure that they will. You could call this hubris. You could also call it faith.”

This feels relevant to the mystery of tongues. Dionysus is one of the greatest tongues-singers and he understands that tongues cannot be purely alpha-beta: the god is also a participant, shoulder to shoulder with everyone else.

I still wonder how much of all this tongue stuff holds true for Persephone. Her tongues are unlike anyone else’s. After awakening as Persephone, she only got to sing tongues for a few seconds before someone tried to kill her.

Click the right hand arrow down there for the end of the reading

Ah Pook Is Here: the graphic lit project of William S. Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill

Content warning

William S. Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill spent a solid chunk of the seventies working on this only to lose the interest of every prospective publisher. It was not to be a typical ‘panels and word balloons’ comic nor a prose book with accompanying illustrations. According to Burroughs, there would have been roughly a hundred pages of art with no text- thirty of which would be in full color -and around fifty pages of only text and an unspecified range of combined images and text.

In the spring of 1970, Malcolm McNeill began publishing Cyclops: an adult comics anthology in his native England. McNeill met Burroughs when they began collaborating over mail on a comic strip called The Unspeakable Mr. Hart.

The tone of the collaboration changed once Burroughs got his first glimpse of the comic. McNeill seemed to have drawn the villain-protagonist John Stanley Hart with a surprising resemblance to Burroughs himself, with no prior knowledge of what the author looked like. After that, Burroughs insisted on an in-person meeting and the project grew.

I, at least, wonder if the Unspeakable Mr. Hart strips from Cyclops would have made it into the finished product. The art is memorable but obviously dated. If there’s anything that looks like this in modern comics, I’m not aware of it. It is vaguely reminiscent of the black-and-white drawings of Moebius from the late seventies. It also reminds me of a certain kind of black-and-white art style common in pornographic comics from the early twentieth century through (I suspect…?) the eighties. Seventies and eighties issues of Heavy Metal were full of comic strips that looked vaguely like The Unspeakable Mr. Hart. I remember watching the movie The Green Mile which featured an abusive prison guard with a fondness for so-called “Tijuana Bibles”- short pornographic comic strips from the early twentieth century, usually depicting scenes with the famous faces of the day. In the visual language of The Green Mile, that Tijuana Bible is a visual cue that this is not the present.

Maybe those art styles didn’t look quite so antiquated in the seventies…but the antiquated vibe fits the time travel themes. Especially in a story about manipulating the psychic intersection between language and time.

Ah Pook Is Here encapsulates several fixtures that date back as early as The Yage Letters and the word hoard (Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Dead Fingers Talk, The Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express).

In those sophomore works, the collective subconscious is gate-kept by non-corporeal outsiders. The psychological and metabolic need of addiction is a leash that humans wear when their demiurgic keepers take them out for walks on the astral plane. This is a recurring narrative through-line in the word hoard but it is also the backdrop for several of the word hoard’s most memorable uses of visual language.

One of these is the consistency of colors up and down the dimensional ladder. One of the more memorable establishing instances from The Ticket That Exploded happens in the ‘in a strange bed’ vignette. ‘In a strange bed’ begins with two characters- Lykin and Bradley -arriving on a foreign planet after the controls of their craft were seized by an outside force. Lykin surveys their surroundings:

“-A fantastic landscape of multicolored rock carved like statues of molten blue lava interspaced with stalagmites of a pearly white intensity he had never experienced in his previous explorations – The sky was like a green ocean – There were four suns on the horizon around the plateau, each sun of a different color – Blue, green, red, and one (much larger than the others) a brilliant silver -“

Lykin accepts an adaptive mutation from two humanoids in a swamp and the viewpoint character is now different- a boy called Ali, in a separate, recognizably urban, Earthling environment. All of the colors which were simultaneous in the prior section are now paired with separate, sequential dimensional planes explored by Ali. Throughout the word hoard, these dimensional color pairings remain consistent (most visibly within Nova Express).

Similar uses of color and layout are evident in Malcolm McNeill’s art for Ah Pook Is Here. Many of these instances are expressed through reflections of the sky visible in water or within implied symmetry in images without reflective surfaces. This starts out fairly normal with reflections within mud puddles and large bodies of water and develop into imaginative, dream-like panoramas that spread both vertically and horizontally.

This nuance feels particularly relevant since a glimpse at this material inspired Alan Moore to write Watchmen. Moore believed Ah Pook Is Here mapped out the far boundaries of what is conceptually possible through picture-and-text storytelling. He then wanted to write his own exploration of those boundaries which eventually developed into Watchmen. Similarities between the art of Malcolm McNeill and Dave Gibbons are apparent in how horizons look throughout Watchmen, the Black Freighter comic-within-a-comic and in the alternating colors of the panels and divided halves in the chapter ‘Fearful Symmetry’ which is eventually worked into the overall comic.

In the text Burroughs wrote for Ah Pook Is Here, inside/outside color associations are established in events that immediately succeed the exploits of Mr. Hart.

Now, the core of the plot: sympathetic magic. Summoning or establishing contact through the resonance of mirroring. To modern humans, the limits of psychic energy can only be discerned through the conceptual limits of language. A belief based on external observation becomes linguistically codified and its reality after that point is most readily expressed through investment in the linguistic architecture of belief.

What follows from this point depends on Burroughs’ own idiosyncratic reading of the Mayan codices. According to Burroughs, divine concepts such as the Seed God, the young Corn God and the Death God began as observational categories of cyclical events but eventually became monoliths of belief. A monolithic belief summons its own reality. Because of the hermetic seal on literacy dividing the Mayan priesthood and the rest of the population, these symbols were only read and interpreted by people who were taught the context of the cosmology and the calendar system through which these concepts first emerged. Thousands of years of data, distilled into a condensed symbol system to be read only by people who are trained to read it. This granularity allows the priesthood to know what they are looking at but- because of the messiness of knowledge transmission -these categories become abstracted over time (however specific the data behind those abstractions may have been). This priesthood also had strict control over the symbol systems that ordinary people could regularly read and interpret and all such symbols were necessarily derived from the priesthood. The uniformity puts unanimous weight behind the factor of sympathetic magic.

Burroughs seemed to describe these things as inferences that followed his reading of the Mayan codices, rather than literal content. I’ve been an avid reader of Burroughs for much of my life and I can only explain what he thought of the Mayan codices. I can theorize as to why he thought those things but I certainly can’t speak to degrees of literal accuracy or inaccuracy.

In any event- Mr. Hart makes the same connections and resolves to use the symbol system of the Mayan codices to control and neutralize death itself. Death itself is a condensed concept / symbol because death necessarily entails the amount of time behind the existence of things it acts on. Death, in this paradigm, has no face without contact via identification. A startled face beholding the end. The repetition of symbols associated with the deity Ah Pook in response to Mr. Hart’s studies and machinations are one of our major visual themes in both the treatment within Ah Pook Is Here and other texts and The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here by McNeill.

Teeth and eyes come up a lot. While studying the Dresden Codex, Mr. Hart “glimpses the death formula. Across the table a gawky youth drops his glasses on the floor. One lens is broken.”

Mr. Hart kills his friend and companion, Clinch Smith, to maintain control over his discoveries. He then decides to play it safe and simply wipe out the entire Smith family. A younger brother named Guy flees to South America where he “joins Audrey Carsons in a remote finca in the Andes.

Audrey Carsons: Eerie ghostly rotten vulnerable reckless he possesses at the same time the cold intelligence of Mr. Hart. He is Hart’s alter ego and nemesis.

Guy Smith: He is the buck-toothed Mayan Death God before the face was broken and twisted by altered pressure, features wrenched out of focus, body emaciated by distant hungers. A face where time has never been.

Old Sarge: Has the close-cropped iron-gray hair and ruddy complexion of a regular army man. There is also a suggestion of the Polar Star God in his appearance.”

Earlier, after John Hart shot Clinch and then asked nobody in particular “‘How did this happen?’

Ghost voice of Clinch Smith: ‘Death asked to be paid in kind, John.'”

Sure enough, Clinch’s younger brother Guy becomes a partial avatar of the Mayan Death God.

Audrey Carsons is “Hart’s alter ego and nemesis.” Remember how McNeill drew Mr. Hart with an uncanny resemblance to Burroughs, sight-unseen?

In other letters and conversations, Burroughs said that Kim Carsons, the main character of The Place of Dead Roads which he wrote later, was the closest thing he ever wrote to a character that represented himself and his aspirations. If Audrey is a forerunner of Kim and Malcolm McNeill actually did unknowingly draw Burroughs’ face onto Mr. Hart…that would be some rich synchronicity.

It is just as likely, though, that McNeill’s rendering of Hart was simply an uncanny coincidence which planted a seed in the mind of Burroughs.

This is one of the things that makes me wonder about the shadow cast by Ah Pook Is Here over Burroughs’ latter-day trilogy Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands…not to mention earlier work like The Wild Boys and Port of Saints. Old Sarge is one of the first characters introduced in Port of Saints. Five novels, at least, between the late seventies and the early nineties, were influenced by Ah Pook Is Here or derived from it (we could, if we wanted, split hairs about The Wild Boys and Port of Saints, since Burroughs said later that they would have made more sense if they were published as a single novel).

A preoccupation with the Mayan codices and their alleged insights into timeline manipulation were present in his work going back to The Soft Machine. Related concepts were detailed in Naked Lunch but The Soft Machine contained the first specific references (as far as I can tell). The Soft Machine also marks the first explicit mention of the possibility of things from other timelines (diseases and other forms of life, weather phenomena, etc.) punching through into ours in ‘Pretend an interest’. The very last reference to this in Burroughs’ bibliography was in Ghost of Chance (“I will loose on them the blood of Christ!”).

The story treatment by Burroughs and the images of McNeill begin to line up more specifically after Mr. Hart is gone from the center of the narrative. An “iguana boy” called Cumhu often occupies the foreground after that point. Like the resonances between Lykin and Ali in The Ticket That Exploded, Cumhu’s visionary journey sends ripples through adjacent timelines, usually in the vicinity of other emanations of his own soul.

The vignettes detailing the travels of Cumhu and his cohort (other humanoids such as Jimmy the Shrew and various other-timeline versions of Audrey and Guy) sometimes alternate with the version of Guy in the timeline we last saw him in, who is engaged in similar astral travel. Like many psychic visionary testimonials, there is mention of being shut out, as though your brain can make phone calls to other planes but- if no one picks up the phone -you’re just kind of stuck waiting. Guy enters a familiar but empty estate where he “hardly expects Audrey Carsons to be there.” Sure enough, Audrey is gone, as though the ‘phone call’ with the location denoted by the finca imagery is now over with.

The works of Burroughs furnish other possibilities, of course. Usually, when this happens in Burroughs, it signifies the foreclosure of a timeline; a moment in which someone realizes that they survived a timeline edit. What that means is that the circumstances that shaped you are now gone from the past but the consequences remain in your perspective, such as in ‘Hauser and O’Brien’ at the end of Naked Lunch or at the beginning of Dead Fingers Talk.

After Cumhu steals the timeline manipulation texts from his father, he is assailed by “two pot-bellied green guards” whom he promptly shoots full of arrows. Later, in Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs would write of Venusian combatants called the Green Guard. “Genetic eunuchs: pot-bellied and strong.” Cities of the Red Night also features characters called Audrey Carsons, Clinch Todd and a later arrival called Guy.

Given the importance of ancient linguistic constructs invested with the psychic energy of belief, I suspect the blank-verse fragments in Burroughs’ treatment represent markers on a temporal map, accessed through associative resonance with whoever hears them. Since these sections are derived from earlier text within Ah Pook Is Here, the original placement and meaning is clearly meant to inform the cut-up / fold-in meaning; creating an effect comparable to associatively-spliced film.

Cracks in the surface of space-time above temporal fault lines appear to be a factor in how avatars of deities manifest through currently living humans. Deities are timeless beings. When their timelessness is forced to intersect with the third dimension, it makes sense that their personalities would simply “gather” around corresponding three-dimensional occasions. No divine avatar mentioned in Ah Pook Is Here (or anywhere else in Burroughs) was specifically born to be that avatar. Anyone could be an avatar depending on circumstance. It follows that avatars such as Guy Smith and Old Sarge were occasioned by the timeline fuckery of Mr. Hart. Guy Smith appears to have embodied Ah Pook / Ah Puch as a direct consequence of his brother’s murder.

Oh hey- another name listed for Ah Pook in the notes republished in The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here is The Undoer. What’s one of the key experiences written about by Burroughs? Surviving timeline edits. Realizing that the past occasions for your present self no longer exist. In other words: the realization that a fundamental part of your existence has been undone. Both forceful influence and undoing can proliferate on the same associative, linguistic basis.

Ripples through other timelines soon accumulate and effect the timeline of origin and Mr. Hart is back at the center of things, doing his best to fight back which serves only as engagement bait for his opposition throughout the space-time continuum. He does not fare well in the ensuing timeline shuffles. His proxies are haunted by shadow-people-like entities called Black Captains, which causes him to drum up racist fervor at “American First” rallies (I shit you not: this was in a story treatment for a comic from the late seventies. Check out Ah Pook Is Here and other texts if the rare book prices aren’t too scary).

The proposed narrative ends with a scene reminiscent of the early chapters of Cities of the Red Night–

“Red brick buildings and a blue canal where the Mary Celeste floats at anchor. The boys, with sea bags and costumes of 19th century seamen, walk up the gang plank. The Garden is a red glow of ruined cities in the distance. The sails are raised and the anchor hoisted. Young Guy plays taps as the sun fades and blue twilight settles. The boat is moving. The boys wave from the rigging. An 1890 reporter rushes up.

‘What about Mr. Hart?‘

Audrey is in the crow’s nest with a telescope. He points with his left hand.

Mr. Hart’s deserted and ruined mansion, graffiti on the walls.

AH POOK WAS HERE

Here lived a stupid vulgar son of a bitch who

thought he could hire DEATH as a company cop.”

Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads both revolve around the sudden editing and the sudden foreclosure of timelines. The Western Lands may feel like a quieter read since there are less radically imaginative and immersive settings. Much of The Western Lands feels like a ‘creative non-fiction’ approach to the same material.

‘Creative non-fiction’ is a phrase that usually describes the subjective gray areas in things like autobiographies and memoirs in which personal subjectivity takes the foreground. The content of a brain is most readily known to others through personal testimony. We all have a personal point of view. We know others have them largely through inductive reasoning from our own experiences. Personal thoughts and reactions happen but- in the context of something like a memoir -they have to be taken on faith. Many of these ideas were real and deadly serious to Burroughs himself.

While The Soft Machine may mark his first explicit comments on timelines and the Mayan codices, they intersect with other ideas which go back further in his work. Burroughs was also fond of the painter Bryon Gysin’s remarks about how painting was decades ahead of writing. Many of Burroughs most daring literary experiments depend on treating literature and linguistic constructs like three-dimensional objects: something that can be turned around, looked at (and perhaps entered) from various angles. After the death of Gysin, Burroughs threw himself into painting (his reverence for Gysin was such that he dared not paint while Gysin was alive). He gave David Cronenberg his blessing for adapting Naked Lunch but declined to participate in it. Before then, Burroughs attempted several other breakthroughs into visual mediums without success and Ah Pook Is Here was likely his most ambitious and full-hearted effort.

Let’s read ‘The Wicked + The Divine’ (part 1)

Spoiler warnings for ‘The Faust Act’, ‘Fandemonium’ and ‘Commercial Suicide’

The Wicked + The Divine makes an interesting first impression. Like Watchmen, the succession of individual stories in the foreground has progressively bigger implications for the world in takes place in. Por exemplo-

Not every deity is included in every version of the recurrence.

Every ninety years, you see, twelve deities will seize a mortal avatar in which they will exist for two years before dying. Perhaps more accurately, the twelve will surface from below a living person’s identity. Such a person will realize that their life has been a straight arrow leading to that moment and they typically experience this as the emergence of their one true self.

To be sure, the recurrence has regulars. Ananke, Baal, Minerva, the Morrigan, Amaterasu and a few others have been present for nearly all of the story thus far. Susanoo-no-Mikoto, the Japanese storm god, was briefly present in the beginning but (as of the end of volume three) never again. The present rendering of Odin is (so far) constantly wearing a human-scale, Daft Punk-like mech suit. Odin is also a passive, willing cat’s paw for Ananke which requires that he not be known well by anyone but Ananke (he’s also morally and emotionally bankrupt which is a happy accident under the circumstances).

His rapport with Ananke the matriarch, combined with the mech suit…makes me wonder if his life is prolonged without any participation in the recurrence (he says, in ‘Fandemonium’, that he would trade his two years for Luci’s months but who knows if that can be trusted). Ananke wouldn’t want him getting too close to anyone, after all, especially if the rest of the Pantheon are potential targets. If the suit is technology than that could have wonky world-building consequences…which may be on-brand. So far, we have no idea what the historical timeline looks like even if the subject matter tempts assumptions. You can approach The Wicked + The Divine with no knowledge of mythology and- so long as you’re willing to read closely and carefully -be okay.

Most people who pick this up, though, will likely have some familiarity with the subject matter. Which is, itself, incorporated into the backdrop. Contextual recognition is funny, though. As of the end of ‘Commercial Suicide’, we don’t know what the ancient world even looked like in this story, even though it’s easy to slide into assuming that these characters must have had some cumulative background going back to the dawn of humanity (at least) to the present. So far, though, no such thing has actually been spelled out.

There’s probably no reason to be that corrosively skeptical, right? Just because contextual knowledge puts you at ease does not make it definitionally wrong. The hope of confirmation or denial of context makes things exciting, though. Maybe I’ve been reading too many hyper-subjective comics for too long but I get excited when second and third parties within the story confirm things. While speaking with the media, Ananke implies that there is an institutional relationship between the Pantheon and nation-states.

So the Pantheon is not hermetically distinct from the “rest of the world”. It operates within it. At the beginning of ‘The Faust Act’, Cassandra the journalist approaches Amaterasu as if the Pantheon must be a bunch of deluded, dipshit humans. Her words and behavior, later on, reveal that this must have been a ruse. Even if she never believed that they are “gods” in the sense that most people mean it, she still understood from the begining that something supernatural is at work.

Cassandra, btw, gets really interesting really quick. She gets shafted by the implicit narrative sympathies of a few different scenes in book one. That, alone, ends up making her really mysterious. Then, as time passes, we see that Cassandra’s experience with the divinities is far deeper than it looked. She knows that they are supernatural beings whom goverments defer to and she’s unafraid of them. Kind of a Constantine vibe.

Cassandra’s constant narrative sidelining in ‘The Faust Act’ stands out, especially among all the other characters for whom strength is being seen and embodied. She is one of two characters (beside Laura, the apparent protagonist) who are perpetually outside looking in. Laura wants to join the Pantheon; Cassandra doesn’t. Because Cassandra is more willing to get her hands dirty, though, she seems to fall into the Pantheon’s orbit faster.

Oh, those groups of twelve that reincarnate every ninety years? They are permitted up to two years per cycle; dying early is definitely a thing. When Cassandra awakens as Urdr of the Norns in ‘Fandemonium’, it lines up with the looming deaths of Inanna and Tara, as if an absence is being filled. After Lucifer’s death, Laura briefly manages to conjure fire with a snap of the fingers and eventually awakens as Persephone. Three gods die early, two more emerge and Ananke is always present but never counted among the twelve.

Ananke appeared to kill Persephone as soon as she manifested but the first page of ‘Rising Action’ has a diagram of all fourteen deities that we’ve seen so far. Lucifer, Inanna and Tara are colored over in red and Persephone’s image is not.

The way in which some characters appear to come and go from the twelve feels important. It even echoes the ways in which character interactions happen consistently through euphemism, literal description and withheld contact. We’re probably getting way too close to the ‘real life analogues’ to be taken seriously but…the Pantheon seems to represent the highest echelon of power through embodiment and attention. However elevated the Pantheon may be in the mind of someone like Laura, it is not the end of the game: it is the one true game board and- while many rules are spelled out -just as many rules need to be discovered through practice. What the Pantheon represents, to most people, is unanimous: ultimate power and indulgence beyond which calculation doesn’t matter. That means all calculations behind that line happen in a kind of void. In that void, it is best to take everything with a grain of salt. No rule book, after all.

Which brings me back to how skillfully The Wicked + The Divine uses expectation. The familiar connotations of many of these names (Inanna, Lucifer, Odin, etc.) create the illusion of a logical starting point. Sort of like “Oh look, it’s this character and now they’re like this.”

Once I learned how precarious that line of thought was, every other apparent reference stood out. The actual mythology of Inanna plays a subtle but inescapable role in my main non-blog writing project. Then, during Inanna’s first appearance in this comic, there is a star design over one of his eyes, which reminded me of the star from Bowie’s Blackstar album. There’s a brick on this site about that one and its thematic treatment of ceremonial sacrifice. A friend who is more visually attentive than I pointed out several of the celebrity musician character designs. Turns out I was way off on a few of them. The way Amaterasu interacts with other people and how other people treat her made me think of Grimes, at first. Kate Bush is a better match, though. Odin has an obvious Daft Punk thing. Lucifer and Tara are immediately evocative (to me, anyway) of associative groups of celebrities rather than specific ones. Lucifer and Tara are celebrities that put everyone’s teeth on edge: one of them thrives on animosity and Tara brings it out in other people no matter what she does or says.

Speaking of Tara- her associated references don’t work on the same level as anyone else’s. Other people can’t even agree on what deity she represents or if she is somehow an original one. Baphomet is a recent emergence, after all.

Inanna’s actual appearance and diction is more reminiscent of Prince. Prince diction is not the same as Bowie diction. An anal person could spiral out from that. No, the Prince/Bowie stuff are just references; this is Inanna. Inanna is just a reference; this is actually an original character. The visual nods to famous musicians are just a thematic expression of the analogues with the cult of celebrity; don’t overthink it. The analogues with the cult of celebrity are modern lead-ins to timeless subject matter; don’t overthink it.

That cycle can easily cause someone to over-correct in the other direction: every visual and textual reference is REAL and immediately relevant. The dialogue between characters expresses itself in tiers of language, including exclusion. Perpetual dialogue that weaves in and out of language sews the seeds of a collective subconscious cosmology.

Part 2

Dead Boy Detectives, volume one: Schoolboy Terrors (comic review)

light spoilers

Since these comics were released in 2013, there is necessarily a bit of a tone shift if you first met Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland in the ‘Season Of Mists’ Sandman arc. There were also a number of distinct limited run series between ‘Season Of Mists’ and ‘Schoolboy Terrors’, which shouldn’t trip you up too much if you just assume ‘stuff happened’ in the intervening decades. Since I read the 2024 Sandman Universe Dead Boy Detectives story and saw the only season of the Netflix show before this, it was neat to see the “origin story” of Crystal Palace.

Things begin (pretty much) in the treehouse office of the detective agency. A clairvoyant toddler loses her ghost cat and Edwin’s notes are instantly evocative of the client and the payment from the Sandman Universe story:

“CASE Number 42

Clients: Maggie Rosendale and her little sister Libby.

Payment: TBC

Request: Find Libby’s cat, Twinkle.

Further note: Please, PLEASE find Twinkle!

Twinkle is a cat.

Twinkle is a very special cat.”

In the SU story, the majority of the plot is far-removed from the chatty little boy who initially contracted them at the price of a “shiny card of MAGIC made of FOIL!” (They were “informed that it was VERY rare.”) Basically, the kid wants to know where his neighborhood friend went. Once they find her, the actual story begins.

In ‘Schoolboy Terrors’, the client relationship largely comes through in where the dead boys decide to set up shop. By the end of volume one, the detective agency exists in a Japanese teahouse in a tree; a gift for Crystal Palace from her erratic, famous, absentee parents. It is decent plot-economy but the efficiency is quietly morbid. Charles and Edwin know how unstable Crystal’s home life is but Charles, Edwin and Crystal are still obviously kids- no matter what their chronological ages are. The reaction to the teahouse is therefore kid-like: it’s like a tiny furnished apartment with video games and an internet connection. It is simply ‘cool’. Crystal, meanwhile, gets two live-in ghost friends, which is also ‘cool’. At the same time, the reader can’t help but notice that the only reason the detective agency has a fancy new office and a third (living) detective is because Crystal hasn’t had a friend her own age in forever and her family is never present.

A Sandman reader will also notice that the ‘Schoolboy Terrors’ arc doubles as both Crystal’s portrayed origin story and a retrospective origin story for Edwin and Charles.

As it happens, Crystal asks her parents to enroll her at Saint Hilarion’s- the very school where Charles and Edwin were killed. The Netflix show did its own version in its final episode and it’s perfectly consistant with the show. While we don’t get a ton of flashbacks to the ‘Season Of Mists’ stuff, there are a few. There is also a great moment with Despair of the Endless.

I think I like the ‘Schoolboy Terrors’ version better, though. We actually get “on screen” appearances from the 1916 Headmaster Parkinson and the bullies Cheeseman, Skinner and Barrow- not to mention Headmaster Theodore, from Charles’ lifetime (very old and possessed by Parkinson). Since these ghosts returned to the site of their deaths after being turned out of Hell, they’ve maintained certain relationships with the authors of their misery.

(Note: ‘Schoolboy Terrors’ places Edwin’s death and the lifetimes of Cheeseman and Headmaster Parkinson in 1916. In the Sandman story ‘Season Of Mists’, the date is 1915. Not necessarily important; I just couldn’t help but notice)

Portraying Crystal’s online gaming in pictures and word balloons was a neat touch, especially given the relevance of psychic constructs and the other planes they can lead to. Speaking of that: the last story of volume one (issues five and six) connects Edwin’s memories of Hell with the psychic domain of cats. Issues five and six also feature the ghost roads, which I had hoped would appear in the Netlflix series. It even seems to lead into potential future stories. Without spoiling too much- Edwin, Charles, Crystal and two other ghosts need a last-minute escape route. Charles and Edwin can normally travel through the ghost roads instantaneously (“sqwooshing”) with little awareness of the disintegrating, conglomerating souls of which they are made. In the last story in volume one, they are forced to beg for passage, offering to carry messages and investigate things for the ghosts that let them through. Not quite as cool as the ghost roads and the kumanthongs in the SU story but a nice touch nonetheless.

Alone at Sam’s – An Evening With… + The Colours (album review)

The abstraction of the lyrics are poetic.

So is their non-abstraction. Just like Island Of The Dead and Death and Flamingos, the writing is more conversational and direct than in a lot of older Sopor Aeternus material. In the opening track ‘Evening’, the only lyrics are “Hello children, we are Anna-Varney…and you are not!”

One similarity to older Sopor lyrics comes through, though. On my vinyl copy of Ehjeh Ascher Ehjeh, the lyrics of ‘Watch your Step’ look a lot like something you would see on a sign in a national park: “Please, don’t take anything with you, except for maybe some photographs, and please don’t leave anything behind, save your own footprints in the sand.”

Alone at Sam’s uses similar double entendres with official-sounding language. On this album though, the models for inspiration are board game instruction booklets from Anna’s childhood. Lots of pieces with rules for moving in this or that direction and what their roles are in regard to one another and dice rolls. Since this is a longer body of work than Ehjeh Ascher Ehjeh, a little more author’s presence comes through than on ‘Watch your Step’. In the middle of all the pieces and boards and rules, there are also souls and bodies with all the dice numbers and space numbers and instructions. The use of Roman numerals on the four sides of the LP lead me to wonder about the song ‘Column’, in particlar, which deals with a game where no two pieces can occupy the same space.

A few months before this album dropped in October 2023, Anna-Varney posted a blog entry about rediscovering a rare collection of surviving toys and games from childhood. These survived, to hear Anna tell it, because of their obscurity. This means that the survivors were toys that they specifically did not care for as a child. Only the least appreciated and most mistaken gift ideas continued to represent what toys were to them as a child. They ended the post with a small phonograph which they would use, mostly, to listen to records of spoken-word stories with (at least with the Disney records) background music. Their mother threw away their childhood record collection. Last sentence of the post: “Well, I make my OWN records now. :)”

This emotional journey is present on the album.

As for the music- this is not a specific genre exploration like Death and Flamingos or a discrete palette of genres like Island of the Dead. If I had to look for a basis of comparison from the Sopor Aeternus discography, I find myself seeing similarities with Children of the Corn, The Spiral Sacrifice and- suprisingly for me –Mitternacht.

Mitternacht is a beautiful album but it is painfully intense for me, which is ironic. Anna said in an interview that the prior album, POETICA: All Beauty Sleeps ended on too dark a note for them to be at peace with. I found the opposite to be true for me. POETICA has been my favorite Sopor Aeternus album for awhile now. It’s like a well of imagination. It’s my favorite Sopor album to write to. To me this makes sense, given the role that the work of Edgar Allen Poe has played in their life. The energy exchange between their music and the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe would likely not permit it to resemble anything else in their discography. It has a sense of place and size that is unlike anything else by Sopor Aeternus.

Other Sopor albums have a sense of place and size, obviously; just nothing like POETICA. Mitternacht has those things to. Anna has described POETICA as an exploration of dreams while Mitternacht was that dream-realm transitioning into the waking world. Maybe Mitternacht hit me too emotionally for me to think about it clearly or critically…but I believe Anna intended to portray a shift to waking wisdom or maturity. To value someone else’s happiness over your own pain. It’s a tall order and it’s worth doing but the ending feels masochistically fair. The point of view, at the end, endeavors to be equitable and forgiving to all involved. Yet the pain of the loneliness, rejection and self-loathing still come through in that ending, in their voice, even while their words are reaching further.

Yes I’ve been in comparable situations and yes it can be every bit as bad as that. It can be worth doing, under the right circumstances. Yet I find my experiences have made me less forgiving to the prospect rather than more.

Perhaps a similar realization unleashed the venom of Island of the Dead and its staunch reclamation of personal agency.

The sense of place and size of Alone at Sam’s– the emotive world-building -can be most readily compared with Children of the Corn. Children of the Corn is- obviously -filled with allusions to horror tropes, in multiple lyrics and song titles. The alternation between the songs with Anna’s voice and the instrumental songs introduces something like an AB pattern. Like with Bowie’s Blackstar, the alternating gives Children of the Corn a sense of intimate, procedural immersion. Almost as if each sung piece is a character-encounter or monologue and the instrumental pieces are connective action.

This comes through most powerfully in the ending. ‘To walk behind the Rows’ is like a moment of spoken audio-drama. Anna’s voice is quiet, earnest and determined and they are clearly embodying a character, in a place, doing things. The subject matter evokes, for me, lots of very specific references to transfeminine dysphoria and its potential to wall you into a pit of futility…and what release from that futility can feel like. ‘Harvest Moon (Cornflowers II)’ conveys that release. To date, it is my favorite instrumental Sopor Aeternus song. Children of the Corn is set in an inhumane and inhospitable world. The unrequited desire, horror allusions and overall tone give the ending the release of fully submitting to destruction and coming out the other side. The sweet ineffibility of the ‘other side’ is expressed far more beautifully as an instrumental than it could have been with lyrics. Part of me softens when I hear ‘Harvest Moon (Cornflowers II)’. It evokes the ghost of a sob…but it is a relieved, joyous sob: the weight of permanent misery falling away.

There is an emotional nuance in Alone at Sam’s that hits me as hard as Mitternacht yet contains some of the bottomless peace of ‘Harvest Moon (Cornflowers II)’.

The first time I tried to listen to Alone at Sam’s, I stopped after the first two songs. Track one, ‘Evening’, is our moment of induction. I don’t know which specific Disney audio drama records they listened to as a child…but the musical cues, here, somehow feel like the background music for such a record. ‘Come and Play With Us’ can be thought of as the “post-intro” beginning. Perfectly strong, perfectly good point-of-view / character introduction. Then, at the end, there is a line that is sung repeatedly: “You don’t have to be alone”. Simple lyric. Yet something about the poetic language of games and rules beforehand invests it with…something. I tend to remember this line as “you don’t have to play alone”.

I recently heard of an alien abduction account, in which an old woman sees a younger man, on a couch, lying asleep, who then appears to rotate as if the couch and the wall were now a one-dimensional background and he was magically rotating in three dimensions. The woman was so shocked by what she saw that she began banging her head on the floor.

That line, “you don’t have to be / play alone” triggers a similar response in me.

At present, I am in no way ‘alone’. Whatever feelings ‘Come and Play With Us’ addresses in me are likely decades in the past. But the implied pain is so deep and the potential relief so acute that it feels cruel to bring it up. To mention it is to do so in vain…but what if it wasn’t? What if such a thing could be said with confidence?

So much sweeter and so much worse, at the same time. That is why I listened to this album once, three years ago when it came out, then never again until today.

Now that I have, I wish I hadn’t waited so long.

Like Children of the Corn, there is an alternating / procedural format but it is less of an AB pattern. ‘Evening’ through ‘Column’ can be classified as the first half, in which Anna’s narration is front-and-center and most songs contain their voice. Anna is both a narrator and an ever-present arbiter. In the second half, the centralization budges. The narration still speaks largely in double-entendres that sound like outdated board game rules but instrumental digressions become more common and more vivid. ‘The House of Poe’ has sparse lyrics that merge the narrated perspective with the non-verbal, procedural one, which is followed by ‘Squares of HA!’- an instrumental that seems to echo ‘Tanz der Grausamkeit’. After this comes ‘The Beast’: a vocal song describing gaming rules which are similar to ‘Column’. While ‘Column’ and ‘The Beast’ are on different sides on the vinyl version, their lyrics are beside one another in the gatefold. Correction: ‘Column’ is above ‘The Beast’ (no overlapping, remember?).

These lyrical themes continue in the final act. ‘The Spell’ returns to the recurring sixes of the die-rolls. If you show up having already rolled a six, the spell loses its hold on you- yet no bonus roll for you.

Showing up without one and continuing to roll a six will maintain the hold of the spell. “Moobs” seem to be non-player pieces that can be deployed to take the hit of a bad roll for you. Each player only has so many and they tend to come in groups of two (lol).

“When you are under a spell,

and you come to a square of HA!,

you must follow the sign,

no matter what colour you are”

(It may be appropriate here to remember the resemblance shared between ‘Squares of HA!’ and ‘Tanz der Grausamkeit’, which in English means ‘dance of cruelty’)

The ‘Colours’ represent four different players: purple, black, white and orange. The accompanying EP, The Colours, is instrumental except for one song: ‘Orange’, which builds on the last line of the song called ‘The Colours’ on the LP:

“Purple: queer and fabulous.

White: mostly insane.

Black: alone and a little sad.

Orange: the spirit of the game.“

The sole lyrics on the Colours EP describe ineffible blank spaces between ceremonial associations (“the cult of pumpkins / is what you might call / The true spirit of / Halloween”). ‘Orange’ also shares motifs with ‘Squares of HA!’, creating another association in addition to ‘Tanz der Grausamkeit’.

The thematic references of Alone at Sam’s are as ever-present as those on Children of the Corn but are less on-the-nose. The narrated album is the gameboard and the narration is the rules. Players do not speak on this level; they are spoken to. The Colours is more action-driven and therefore less verbal.

Since the centralizing voice on the LP backs up a little in the second act, I wonder if the “player perspective” is more relevant in the second act. The last words spoken by the narrator of Alone at Sam’s are in the song ‘Counter: Spell’. If, while moving backwards, you encounter another spell square “then the spell you’re under is reversed / by the magic of a counter-spell.” You roll your die again “but now you move forward, / like you used to do. / Roll your die again, / but if you roll a six, / there’ll be no gift for you!”

The sparse appearances of the narrator in the second act, combined with the less-verbal player perspective in The Colours, create an association between references that shines brighter than the associative references on Children of the Corn. Both of them contain references with easy resonance for many Western listeners yet with enough semantic drift to make you wonder if this is really the same mythic landscape you remember. If so, it is a remote and wild corner of it, bordering a completely different country.

Here’s the blog post from Anna I mentioned

Reading Requiem: Vampire Knight (part 2)

Content warning

Four volumes in, we know that realms analogous to different planets in a solar system exist in Resurrection. Yet going from planet to planet does not necessarily entail regional departure. At a glance, each named location in Resurrection potentially has its own version of interstellar space. This also seems to be the medium through which different vessels pass. To travel from Necropolis to Lemuria may be equivelant to entering a different galaxy.

As Rebecca intimated in volume one, different transmigrants end up in different places in Resurrection. Rebecca herself went to Lemuria, where we see both variable weather and daylight. Unlike the vampires of Necropolis, who see Resurrection as a shot at eternal life, a vampire hunter in Lemuria looks forward to ending their stint and transmigrating elsewhere. Often, they are assigned a specific vampire or group of them, whose deaths will allow them to trasmigrate beyond Resurrection. Because they look forward to a next step, they have no interest in establishing permanent settlements like the vampires or establishing new, Resurrection-based identities. Lemurians frequently discuss their human lives and bond with other dead people over their shared humanity, which raises questions about the ghouls.

Like vampires, ghouls have settled territory in Resurrection and intend to hold on to it, perhaps explaining in part why the ghoul pirates are historical enemies of Necropolis. Ghouls intend to settle down as permanently as vampires, without the crafting of a secondary identity. They swap stories of their human lives and bond over them, like the Lemurians, but ghouls mostly dwell on how injustices suffered in life made them what they are. Constantly refreshing their anger and bitterness from their human lives seems to give them a parallel edge to the vampires. If combat, to Necropolitan vampires, represents a carnal indulgence- a battlefield packed with victims with new Resurrection bodies circulating perfectly edible blood -then for ghouls it is a cathartic indulgence. Vampires simply enjoy drinking blood and holding on to their territory. Combat has the easy mental access of pleasure-seeking. For ghouls, it has the easy mental access of releasing long-suppressed rage.

When extra-dimensional rifts open in Resurrection, many are happy comb through the Earthling wreckage for technology and then destroy the remaining evidence. Necropolis has a whole professional caste dedicated to this called Archeologists, who understand this as both a duty and a natural law: Resurrection has a backward time flow. There is probably some truth to this, since vampires appear to age backward (unless they die in battle or suffer intrigues at home, in which case their soul may be either annihilated or go back to Earth, potentially to arrive in Resurrection again, like our main character). Cryptos, after all, is a creepy little ancient baby that reminds me of Garlic Jr. from Dragon Ball Z. Vampires worry about suffering the “senility” of becoming a teenager, child or infant again. Another sign that Resurrection stands beside the Earthly time flow is the spectrum of weapons which Necropolis has hoarded and reverse engineered: everything from far-future lasers to firearms to swords and maces.

Despite the ubiquitous fear of growing young and the visibility and power of Cryptos…it’s hard not to wonder about the whole truth. Early in volume one, Otto tells Heinrich that the fragments of Earth that show up through the dimensional rifts are “uncreated” by the backward time flow. That, at least, appears to be a lie, since the duties of the Archeologists include burying all traces of the fragments of Earth from different eras and timelines after looting them. If not a strict lie, than a cultural / institutional construct, since the disappearance of the Earth fragments is enforced.

Then…in the company of a recently transmigrated vampire, Otto says that the same cosmic tide that causes these rifts will also attract demons and dragons all over Resurrection. These cosmic tide / wave events require everyone to barricade themselves and wait it out.

Just like vampires, vampire hunters and ghouls…this usage of ‘demons’ and ‘dragons’ has specific in-world meaning. They are manifestations of negative emotions from sentient beings. Demons and dragons serve beings we’ve heard about a few times but have heard nothing specific about until now: the gods of Limbo. Otto explains further that the gods of Limbo are extra-dimensional beings that cannot be perceived from the third dimension. From the dimensional vantage point of Resurrection, they are some of the most deadly beings in that universe.

Parallels with the collective subconscious emerge and an insinuation that Resurrection is directly adjacent. Close enough for the puncture of one to two barriers to make all the difference. We’ve encountered other claims about the cosmology, though, such as the backward time flow. One wonders how much of the apparent ‘collective subconscious’ is organic and how much may be either misunderstood or institutionally enforced. There seem to be ordinary gaps between perception and understanding, as in real science.

The possibility of a timeline of these discoveries is intriguing: on one hand, Resurrection clearly exists outside of the time flow that contains the three-dimensional point of view. The diversity of the relics taken by the Archeologists indicate that Resurrection is, in fact, independent of any timeline or era. Yet institutional behavior and the intrigues and vendettas of the Necropolitan court tell us that Resurrection must have its own, subjective timeline.

Once upon a time, when the soul called Thurim had only just transmigrated from a lifetime as Heinrich Barbarossa, the vampire Nero annoyed him with his music. Nero took offense, challenged him to a duel and got his right arm chopped off. Since Nero ranked higher in the court, Barbarossa Thurim was tortured to the point of apparent obliteration by Nero. When the soul of Barbarossa returns as Heinrich Requiem, who became an SS officer and died on the Eastern Front during an attempted rape…memories start returning. Heinrich Requiem realizes it is essential that neither Nero nor Dracula ever learn that he carries the soul of Thurim.

Like the relative differences in progress between institutions in Resurrection, the existence of these vendettas also prove that Resurrection has its own hermetically-sealed time flow (whichever direction it goes in).

During the second half of volume four, Heinrich Requiem experiences his first conflict between duty and conviction. When Requiem was a living Nazi, he hid a Jewish lover in his personal estate. This woman was Rebecca. Eventually, Requiem himself is the one who rats her out to the Gestapo: he simply became a Nazi of conviction after a while.

Yet he is still dwelling on Rebecca’s memory and punishing himself for it just before dying on the Eastern Front. He mourns for the death and destruction he caused but cannot resist renewing his damnation when he encounters a Russian woman who happens to resemble Rebecca. As his soul descends to Hell for the second time, all illusions flee from him: all he ever did was take victims for his own benefit. He is a soul-deep predator and he refuses to look his after-death destiny in the face without accepting that fact. That acceptance made him a vampire in Resurrection (reminder: vampires are souls who were aware of their evil and are unrepentant).

Rebecca, having been dead for some time, is now a Lemurian vampire hunter. She tells him, telepathically, that if he kills his first vampire companion (Otto), then he can leave Resurrection with her when her time comes. He cannot bring himself to do this and once again they are separated by his inequity. All done already, in the past, never to be negotiated with.

Otto informs him that this is the healthy path for a vampire: the destruction of human identity and the establishment of an infernal one. The destruction of one’s mortal self is equated with the authenticity and credibility of their vampiric self. Part of this is black opium, harvested from a world in Resurrection called Atlantis. Black opium is used, by every vampire, to keep memories and feelings from their human lifetimes permenantly suppressed.

After Atlantis is surrounded by anti-Necropolis partisans who destroy their black opium stockpiles, Dracula is forced to consider other options. As a temporary stop gap measure, he launches a victim raid on Lemuria to soften the blow with more blood to go around. We are soon in the company of Rebecca and a new Lemurian flame: Sean, who lived and died in a different era. Rebecca and Sean get the jump on a company of vampires and- as Sean is running a massive sword through one of them -says “Let’s see how well his (Dracula’s) vampires fight without opium to help them forget their crimes.”

The regular use of the black opium is a genuine preference for most vampires and maybe most of them do it for the reason Otto said. Yet like the time flow, one wonders if there are other factors beyond the obvious. That early instance of Sean butchering a vampire implies that the black opium has another role that is more functional and less indulgent. I wonder if the whole taboo around suppressing and replacing human identity was engineered specifically to control vampires in the best way possible: leashing them with their own desire.

Throughout all this: Heinrich and Otto are two peas in a pod. Neither one seems to have a closer friend in Necropolis than each other. They even knew each other as humans: both were SS officers. Otto seems to be taking Heinrich in hand as simply a “younger vampire”…yet if their identities are meant to be wholly separate from your human self…maintaining human relationships (even ones that pushed you further toward evil) sounds iffy.

I’m doing my usual thing where I go through a comic / book / video game / whatever at my own pace and post as things occur to me. I like figuring things out and even the twists and turns of misunderstanding have their charm. I get that there’s online lore sources I could easily check this against. From where things stand now, though…it would not surprise me if Otto recognized Thurim for who he was, immediately. In that event, all he would have to do to ingratiate himself to the Necropolitan court would be to hand the soul of Thurim over to Nero and Dracula. What Otto may be doing is maintaining a private confidence between himself and Heinrich, in which one can express disloyal thoughts under the guise of one not knowing any better and the other correcting him. Otto is, by his own standards, undermining Heinrich’s vampire identity while creating a personal channel through which Heinrich may “leak” revealing information to him.

At the end of book four, Heinrich flees Necropolis with Rebecca, who was taken captive after the Lemurian raid. If Otto was surveiling and undermining Heinrich, his success or failure may soon be apparent.

Another Bowie/Uematsu playlist experiment

I ended up making this playlist while trying to figure out what a fictional album “feels” like. For a story I’m writing. Obviously this isn’t meant to be literally representative. More like an associative-emotive vibe-print. My musician character is someone whose imaginative and expressive range equals (if not surpasses) Bowie and Uematsu.

The first track derives from Bowie’s 1.Outside demos. The Final Fantasy music consists mostly of covers from ocremix.com. Like the last playlist with ocremix stuff, the original basis for the song is in parenetheses. Only two tracks come directly from an Uematsu soundtrack (Final Fantasy IX). ‘Journey Through the Lifestream’ incorporates a number of musical quotes and ideas from Uematsu.

Concerning the ocremix songs- ‘Enchanted Espers’ dates back to the late oughtties. ‘Now is the Winter’ and ‘Courage, Failure, Rosebud’ are from the ocremix compilation album Final Fantasy VI: Balance and Ruin and ‘Deliverance of the Heart’ comes from the ocremix album Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream.

I Am With Name/Hide Me/Creep Together- David Bowie (fan edit)

Now is the Winter (The Mines of Narshe)- Mustin

Strangers When We Meet (1.Outside version)- David Bowie

Another Nightmare (FFIX soundtrack)- Nobuo Uematsu

Breaking Glass- David Bowie

Courage, Failure, Rosebud (Under Martial Law)- DragonAvenger, OA

Loving the Alien (2003 live version from A Reality Tour)- David Bowie

Enchanted Espers (Another World of Beasts)- Protricity

Always Crashing in the Same Car- David Bowie

Not Alone (FFIX soundtrack)- Nobuo Uematsu

As the World Falls Down (Labyrinth soundtrack)- David Bowie

Moss Garden- David Bowie

Deliverance of the Heart (Heart of Anxiety)- pixietricks, zircon

Neukoln- David Bowie

Journey Through the Lifestream (VII Rebirth soundtrack)

“Heroes”- David Bowie

Playing Baroque part 3 (mostly theorizing)

Content warning

Here’s the opening post if you want to get caught up with my passes through the Nerve Tower and blind analysis

The Nerve Tower is visible in the opening cut scene, with three Sense Spheres visible on the top.

The view of the Nerve Tower upon spawning into existence likewise appears bracketed by two structures, like the alley in the opening cut scene. Even the three Sense Spheres are in evidence (I think…?).

In light of subsequent passes through the Tower, the symbiosis and separation of the main character from another half (potentially Alice) is referred to in the opening cut scene as well. The opening cut scene ends with a look at what appears to be a white Distorted One or grotesque resembling a pair of conjoined twins, bleeding from their mouths. The Distorted One is cut down by the apparent viewpoint character. A bloody feather see-saws to the ground. The camera pans up toward the Nerve Tower, seen at roughly the same angle as the earlier alley perspective and the perspective of the player character once the game starts.

Also concerning symbiosis and entanglement: if you attack Alice, she says “I shouldn’t have been born. There are times when I think that. (…) I want to remember the times before I met you, when we were melded with each other.”

When you fire the Angelic Rifle at the God of Preservation and Creation on the seveneteenth basement floor, she says she wanted to be “one with you” again before she dies.

Alice only “met you” once she was separated from “you”. Under your onslought, she seeks a comforting memory: the time when “you” were both “melded with each other.” It sounds like a yearning for a time before the separation but what to make of the use of “melded”? Were they somehow combined from separate entities to begin with?

From the way Alice and others talk about this event, you would think it was a trauma inflicted from without, as if they were the same being and always had been. It could have been an externally imposed trauma simultaneously with the initial “melding” not being original. There’s that glimpse of the naked man and woman embracing- perhaps they joined together as a kind of corporeal marriage? If so, the pain of the separation leads us to think that this existence was harmonious. Whatever was done to them was done against their will.

Some of the Distorted Ones (like the Sack Thing) talk about your experience, in particular. According to them, you suffered horribly.

The Sack Thing also attributes the following quote to the Archangel: “If the Creator and Preserver has a core, then the world can be remade as many times as one pleases. The next world will be created and preserved by me. I will return the world to normality in an instant.”

Some of Sack Thing’s earlier dialogue: “The Pretend angels are speaking. They’re saying ‘Go to the Nerve Tower’.”

Eliza wants to give birth to a Sense Sphere to heal her mother’s insanity. She also makes cryptic mention of an “insane Sense Sphere”. Where else have we heard discussions of insanity? The God of Preservation and Creation has gone mad. This is the player character’s “sin”, according to the Archangel.

How did the God of Creation and Preservation go mad? Getting torn in half. Kinda like the player character. Oh yeah, and Eliza and the Archangel resemble each other as closely as the player character and Alice. Maybe they were similarly torn in half. Beside Eliza are multiple non-funcitoning Sense Spheres.

Alice, who appears in a room with a single functioning green Sense Sphere, says that the Archangel is the one who tore you apart. “In order to drive the Creater and Preserver mad. In order to become the Creator and Preserver himself.”

Alice, on the fifteenth basement floor: “You’ve been torn apart twice now.”

The Mind Reading Thing, on the sixth basement floor during either my fifth or sixth pass, says “(t)he image of another can sometimes be seen within master. Nearly identical, and yet quite an entirely different person, it seems.” Evocative of both the player character and the Archangel.

On a different occasion, the Mind Reading Thing says “(m)aster’s mind is quite like a landscape, painted with layer upon layer of grief. (…) There is a scar on master’s waist, yes, a large scar under your clothes which was not caused by the Great Heat Wave. Master is haunted by that large scar from so long ago…alas, pitiful.”

On the early basement floors, a ghostly, feminine face appears and says “(d)o you remember our wounds? Have we forgotten the origin of that scar?” (…) “I recall that pain, even now. My final day with you, when I was murdered!” (…) “We used to play chess, didn’t we? We’d take a turn as we awoke one by one.”

In our simulation paradigm, our obvious representatives of the simulation’s function appear to be the Archangel and the Nerve Tower. What do nerves do? Connect brains to bodies. Some of the Horned Woman’s dialogue after the fourth pass: “Regret. Distortion. Archangel. Dabar Fusion.”

In Baroque, there are characters that have other beings or worlds inside of themselves. This includes the player, the angels, Distorted Ones and the Koriel. They have things inside of themselves or a receptacle that they wish to suppress, manage or embody. The Box Thing describes this exactly, the Mind Reading Thing describes someone called “the master” experiencing this. Eliza wants to “give birth” to a Sense Sphere and the confined, metal-plated angel in the lower basement levels (held before an off-limits Sense Sphere by a black and a white bird) says that the memory of their “SINS” are in the “SENSE SPHERE”.

They say they cannot be “PURIFIED”. I wonder if to “purify” is to separate something from yourself. It gets kicked down the ladder of nesting-doll worlds (becomes an Idea Sefirot) and you regenerate healthy tissue like a starfish and remain intact on your own level. Should you die on your level, you will go up the ladder and emerge from a Sense Sphere. The spheres from space (Idea Sefirot and Sense Sphere) are the ladder.

In the world of Baroque, Sense Spheres are treated like objects that can send and receive matter between two different points. If I’m right about the design of the Nerve Tower, then Sense Spheres and their matter transmission were incorporated into engineering and technological infrastructure. Just before the Great Heat Wave.

This may have occurred “historically” but this is also clearly reflected on the first level of nested Nerve-circuits, within what may be a biomechanical simulation, hosted by a dreaming mind.

The Sense Spheres could have been employed for total control over matter: move it, store it in an information state or wipe it from existence. Thing Thing’s behavior implies that Sense Spheres can be a bottomless source of stuff…but Thing Thing appears to just wait outside of them and see what randomly pops out. Maybe this was done with more intention, once upon a time.

And what was our theorized eliminative use of Sense Spheres, again? It appears to be dividing things from oneself; a scalpel of the soul. On your plane, the excised information-matter is reduced to an Idea Sefirot. Its existence goes down a level. Does it then become possible for you to emerge from a Sense Sphere, one level above? Are your hands now on the ladder?

If the God of Preservation and Creation is the outermost layer, then the dreamer in the suspension chamber may be that very woman. Her subconscious channeling of the simulation embodies half of the world and she herself embodies the other half.

The Queen of the Damned comic reaction

Spoiler warning

While the absence of Lestat as the narrator makes things less immersive than the Vampire Lestat comic…the original Queen of the Damned easily translates into pictures and word balloons, what with the number and diversity of characters, events connected by vast distances and vampires breaking cover. Anyone looking for a straight-laced adaptation would have little to complain about. To the best of my memory of the book…I think every single scene made it into the comic with varying (but admissible) degrees of faithfullness.

The art is neat to. A few scenes, like Maharet visiting Jesse in the hospital, almost remind me of Dave McKean, who would have been a rising star in comics at the time. The scene below reminds me of McKean’s art in Neil Gaiman’s Black Orchid, which felt equidistant between genre-savvy comic art and photo-realism. And, of course, a ton of shadows and pale lighting (most of Black Orchid happened at night to).

The degree of realism also roots us in the present of the book- 1984. I was a little surprised by Armand’s twentieth century presentation, here. My impression of Armand (as depicted in the books) was of someone who is recognizably non-binary, erring slightly toward femininity.

This is where the diminished immersion became a bit more clear to me. When I first read The Queen of the Damned, the relationship between Armand and Daniel was one of the sweetest and most engaging parts of the whole book. That was probably when he started to become one of my favorite characters.

Armand, on the lower right, in the white shirt. Admissible but I don’t think I ever imagined him with hair like that

One thing they could have done was spend more time in the early stages of the rapport, when it was at its most chaotic. The restaurant encounter- when Armand orders literally everything on the menu because he wanted to order for Daniel but didn’t know what he liked -should be its own scene. It’s depicted here but I would have liked to have spent more time in that moment. It also would have been nice to see more of the early, late-night visitations, when Armand surprises him at one in the morning because he wants to talk about the book he saw on Daniel’s nightstand. Or shaking Daniel awake because he wants to talk history and philosophy. Spending more time in the early, uncomfortable stages would have made the tender moments hit harder. To be fair; all of those moments are depicted in the comic but only briefly.

Not endemic to the comic but Anne Rice in general: a lot of her vampire-human relationships are more interesting for not having the moral framing of recent stories. There’s a huge market out there for people who love morally inoffensive vampires. Anne Rice never made any bones, whatsoever, about vampires being non-human beings with non-human perspectives. If Armand and Daniel are an example of the encounter ending (relatively) well then The Tale of the Body Thief shows us both the delicious and horrific possibilities. A happy ending is possible but it can end a million other ways to.

I wonder if Stephanie Meyer would have triggered the backlash she did if she was less eager to make Edward Cullen morally white. I never read Twilight but I saw parts of the movie and it seemed so determined to make Edward cuddly that his predatory, vampiric behavior was just…a bald inconsistency. So when he started doing predatory things to Bella, it smacked of hypocrisy and Meyer’s determination not to acknowledge that darkness raises the spectre of actual, sublimated misogyny.

This was also neat. I really liked the Stan Rice poetry that Anne used as epigraphs so often. The Cannibal poem is the only Stan Rice epigraph here but its usage establishes a nice, solitary and emotional beat before we see Lestat in the arms of Akasha for the first time.

Only eleven of these comics were commercially released before Innovation Comics went under but the twelfth surfaced online last summer.

As of this writing, the portrayal of the final confrontation is the most faithful out of any adaptation (fingers crossed for some later season of the AMC show?).

The Queen of the Damned film didn’t even make an effort. Just a giant vampire brawl.

See…the confrontation in the novel was a debate. Not a single vampire can resist Akasha on their own so they spend most of their energy trying to talk her out of reducing the male population by ninety-percent and assuming autocratic control over the globe. No film studio at the time was going to portray a supervillain that specifically targets men.

What gets lost in translation are the moral stakes. When Lestat wakes up in the twentieth century, he is delighted by the rise of secular humanism and at least some progress being made in gender equality. Those were things he never would have anticipated happening during his human lifetime. He saw humanity begin- however awkwardly -to graduate from the world he once took for granted. This theme reappears when he finds Marius, who believes that the Enlightenment was the greastest step forward the west had taken thus far.

Confronting Akasha was the first time that we got to see this optimism challenged. Marius had some of his most glorious lines in that battle. To paraphrase: humanity has fucked up a lot in both the ancient and modern world. But look at the new ground that was broken in the twentieth century. Do we really want to take humanity’s destiny from them just as they’re starting to peck out of the shell?

The dignity of humanity versus the belief that humans are stupid and helpless and need a stern parent to keep them in line. Yes it’s a debate. Yes a debate is people talking. But it was one of the best scenes Anne Rice ever wrote. No it is not Helm’s Deep but it is a climactic fantasy battle.

The comic keeps it concise: most of the lines are spoken by Akasha, Maharet and Marius. Objectively, you can’t complain. I missed Louis’s appearance, though. In the book he is silent for most of the debate and then butts in assertively. Louis was the weakest vampire present and Lestat was shitting bricks because he thought Akasha was going to incinerate him on principle. Akasha herself appreciates his bravery even if she’s not convinced by him.

That’s my one note for the ending and I guess its more of a nitpick. Otherwise: wonderful comic

Among the portrayals of the Children of the Millennia, Pandora matched my mental image the closest

On issue 12:

https://www.comicartfans.com/galleryroom.asp?gsub=241532