Mindless Ones

This is happening now. As I type.

The first draft is always the most immediate, isn’t it? That’s why serialised comics are a more interesting form than the graphic novel. You can’t go back and fix things. You can retcon, of course — like the politician’s denial, “what I meant to say when I said I wouldn’t raise taxes is that I wouldn’t raise taxes unless I need to” — but you can’t go back and edit what you’ve already written. (I just wrote “edit the past” and then changed it. You can still do that when you’re writing a first draft). You have to keep pushing forward. Embrace the mistakes. Embrace the errors.

So this is a real-time look at Multiversity. This is the take on it I am writing today, Monday 4th May 2015, 10:53 AM as I type this. From this perspective, here and now, Multiversity is the latest part of a story Grant Morrison, one of the most interesting writers to work in the comics medium, has been working on for decades. It’s fair to say that in many ways he’s been telling the same story over and over — a story of idealism turned to dirt, and of a multiverse that hints at a secret conspiracy behind reality, and of the dirty, bedraggled, idealism reasserting itself. Of betrayal and redemption. Of the difference between the physical and the spiritual. And of the multiplicity of viewpoints.

In Morrison’s work there’s often a struggle between two giant warring factions which are revealed to be aspects of the same thing, while real change comes from those opposed to both viewpoints. The significance of this, in election week, is left to the reader.

But the story has been told in a variety of different ways, and this version of the story is the one that Grant Morrison started in 1988 with Animal Man, and told in the 1990s with JLA, and in the 2000s with Seven Soldiers of Victory, JLA: Classified, 52, All-Star Superman, and Final Crisis. In many ways it’s a leftover from those years — it’s a story that was conceived as a follow-up to Final Crisis, and was originally meant to come out in 2010. It’s a profligate, luxurious, expansive story, of a kind that no-one, not even Morrison, is telling any longer in DC comics. After the economic crash in 2008 we’ve had a kind of austerity of the mind in DC’s work, with the “New 52” comics line that started in 2011 being fifty-two flavours of the same grim, gritty, dull, dim-witted hopelessness.

Multiversity has its darkness, of course, as all Morrison’s work does, but there’s hope in there still. It’s a very 2008 kind of comic, from before hope was revealed to be a bad joke.

But maybe that’s what we need right now. To be told it’ll all be all right. That things can get better.

As I write this, we’re in the middle of an election campaign in the UK. The Conservative Party are campaigning on a platform of austerity, cutting benefits, demonising immigrants, and increased authoritarianism. The Labour Party are, in order to provide people with a real choice, campaigning on a platform of austerity, cutting benefits, demonising immigrants, and increased authoritarianism. My own party, the Liberal Democrats, has had a campaign that has mostly ignored the pretty sensible policies its members have voted for in favour of messaging saying “you know how you can’t get a cigarette paper between those other two parties? We want to be that cigarette paper!”. Everyone wants change, but no-one believes it’s possible. The world has been taken over by the anti-life equation, and we need a way out.

As you may have guessed by now, this is not one of those books that annotates everything, saying “the Batman of Earth-793 first appeared in Batman #793, from 1954, in the story Batman’s Bat-Trousers!”. There’ll be some of that, but this is more a response to Multiversity, a reaction to it, and a guide through the thoughts behind it, rather than a catalogue. Those of you who’ve read my earlier books dealing with Morrison’s work, An Incomprehensible Condition and Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!, know what I’m doing here. The rest of you can either jump off now or come along for the ride.

Do I have your complete attention yet?

Whose voice is this speaking in your head, anyway?

Yours?

[Over a ten-day period I will be posting my long piece on Multiversity. Those who want it in one piece can buy the whole thing as an epub from Smashwords right now for $1, it will be available for Kindle from tomorrow (the link will be in tomorrow’s piece), and my Patreons get it for free]

What’s The Story?

False-Face, a master of disguise who loves all kinds of falsehood, is planning a complicated caper

Here at Mindless Ones, we have a fairly broad range of opinions on most things. But a few things we’re pretty much all agreed on. Most of us agree, I think, that science fiction, or fantastic fiction generally, can sometimes be pretty great — give us a few giant robots, or spaceships, or time-travelling aliens, and we’ll be pretty happy.

And one thing that I know we absolutely all agree on is that fascists are evil scum bastards. We don’t like them. We also don’t like men’s rights’ activists, gamergaters, pick-up artists, neoreactionaries, or any of the other current labels being used by overentitled whingeing white men who can’t cope with the idea that someone, somewhere, who isn’t a cishet white man might be having fun, and who are for the most part either witting or unwitting allies with the fascists.

So, imagine our disgust that the Hugo Awards, the main SF fan-voted awards, got taken over this year by block-voting entryist fascists, so that in almost all categories the only options were books either by, or endorsed by, neofascists. It’s like eating a nice big chocolate ice cream, only to find the ice cream is actually made of dogshit. And the dogshit’s screaming “The Taliban were right to shoot Malala Yousafzai! Homosexuality is a birth defect! Feminists should have acid thrown in their faces! There is no such thing as marital rape!”

I posted something to this effect on my own blog, and Jack Graham, whose blog about Doctor Who and Marxism, Shabogan Graffiti, you should all read, invited me to be on his podcast to discuss this with him and Phil Sandifer.

Here’s the podcast (description Jack’s). It was recorded between midnight and 2AM last night, after a long and stressful day, and I’ve not listened to it since and don’t remember much of what I said, so please don’t take anything I say as being the final word on anything. I undoubtedly made mistakes both factual and logical, and unlike with a blog post there’s no way to rewrite it if I did. Just think of it as a chat between friends in a bar, rather than an attempt at something definitive.

All of which said, there’s one thing I remember for certain, which is that the conclusion from all three of us was “fuck Fascism”. As the first and last word on the subject, that’s pretty reasonable.

A Marxist, a postmodernist and liberal walk into a bar… and form a united front. Join Jack Graham, Phil Sandifer and the superb Andrew Hickey for an unexpected emergency Shabcast on the subject of the recent fascist incursion on the Hugo Awards nominations.

What’s The Story?
The Joker, on his release from prison, has bought a company that makes slot machines.

What’s The Story?

Jervis Tetch, the Mad Hatter, has been let out of prison and immediately gone back to his old ways.

What’s The Story?

King Boris, the monarch of an unnamed European country (though he has an English accent) is visiting Gotham on a goodwill visit, and bringing with him a miniature replica, in gold and jewels, of the famous Queen of Freedom monument, to be placed in the monument itself. The Riddler kidnaps Boris, in what turns out to be a fiendishly complicated plan.

What’s The Story?

Every April 1st, an unknown bank robber steals $100,000, sometimes from banks which have much more money, and no-one knows why

What’s The Story?
This story is loosely based on The Ice Crimes of Mr Zero by Dave Wood and Sheldon Moldoff, from 1959’s Batman #121.

What’s The Story?
After being sprung from jail — using an actual giant spring to escape — the Joker returns to his life of crime