Comics are fun.

So, after a pretty long interregnum I have suddenly gotten back into superhero comics. In a big way.  Specifically, Marvel Comics.  I don't know if this is some slow-burning response to the Avengers movie reactivated by Iron Man 3 or what, but I recently spent like a day reading wikipedia articles and the back histories of tons Marvel characters and suddenly found myself interested in what was happening to the characters in Marvel comics RIGHT NOW, (or what's happening in Marvel Now, Ha!) and started reading articles trying to figure out was would be a good jumping on point, which lead to reading about Marvel Now and how that was basically set up by the Avengers Vs. X-Men crossover event.  So I went on Amazon, where they tend to mark comic volumes down twenty to forty percent, and ordered that in hardcover (there are more comics included if you order the hardcover, also the pages are bigger), and well as some other Marvel Now titles that looked interesting, artist and writers I liked or had heard good things about. 

Thinking back on it, I think one of the main motivators was some tumblr I had stumbled upon that posted pages and scenes from various Marvel comics, including stuff from All-New X-Men, one o the first additional volumes I got.  Huh? Cyclops is a villain?! The Original Team has been transported into the present, which means Jean Grey is back, and a boss?  Where when why? How can I figure out what is going on here? 

So that's why I wanted to read Avengers Vs. X-men.  I hadn't read superhero comics in 6 years, I realized, and I simply missed the characters.  I mean, the movies are nice, and those are new versions of the characters, not the one that I grew up with and watched grow and change, that grew and changed, apparently, without me.  I had originally given up on them because I decided, what with the Civil War, World War Hulk, the Initiative, Captain America dying, Spider-Man's arc with the revealing of his identity and then apparently (I later found out) the in-continuity retcon of his marriage, that in some sense the Marvel universe had passed me by.  The stories, the characters, as I had grown up with them, the themes I had associated with them, they were gone.  The people working on them now just did not value them or think of them in the same way I did.  The Civil War, in a sense, seemed to me to be a nice to conclusion to the Marvel Universe as I knew it. I could get off the merry-go-round.  There were other, outside personal stuff, going on as well: my comic shop closing, moving to a new state, suddenly not having any money.  But even with all that I could have easily started up again, found a new comic shop, bought just the main titles I liked, spent money on comics instead of beer (probably would have been a wise move).  But I didn't.  I just stopped. 

So I got Avengers Vs. X-men and within a couple of pages the Scarlet Witch is fighting MODOK across a double-page spread, drawn by Frank Cho, with the White House centered in the background, and I just started giggling.  What I was looking at was just so delirious and ridiculous that I finally rediscovered everything I had been missing, I don't think I had had a moment of just such pure FUN from a piece of entertainment in years.  I mean, MODOK!  MODOK as a concept is just so completely fucking mad that I find it impossible not to smile whenever he pops up or even gets mentioned in anything.  And the Scarlet Witch?  I mean, following everything that had been happening to her with Avengers Disassembled and House of M, having her back in action was like a weird kind of relief, like characters can bounce back!  They eventually all come back!  Also, in front of the White House.  Yes.  And come on! Double Page spreads!  Way to take advantage of that canvas, Cho!

Reading through the rest of the arc, seeing characters I had like and even loved, fighting and getting on the wrong side of everything, having Professor X die, Captain America matching up against Cyclops, of all people (One of my biggest problems with the X-Men movies is that they failed to give proper due to Cyclops.  In there actual X-Men comics themselves, as the original team leader, Cyclops is pretty much THE most important character, even more so that Professor X, or Jean Grey, who is dead half that time and needs to be brought back NOW, and definitely Wolverine, who though central to the Marvel Universe as a whole, has ultimately, in the context of the X-Men been basically a loose cannon, a great side character.  You're not properly adapting the X-Men unless Cyclops has a fairly large role.  Seeing that the comics had, with their mutant properties, evolved Cyclops to a point where he was basically leading all mutantkind and was thus a character with enough stature to be pitted against Captain America, [nice to see him back and running things again, by the way. Stay in your lab building stuff, Tony.] of all people, was a nice sign to me that the Marvel U was doing a good job now of building on what had come before, even if this meant Cyclops had completely lost his gourd.  Though that was actually kind of in character too, what with M-Day and Cyclops having evolved over time into being a bit of a dick.) made me realize something about comics, about all the deaths and retcons and stuff.  I learned to just stop worrying about that stuff and love it.  They're superheroes!  They are like Celtic gods, constantly fighting and dying and being reborn in the Cauldron of Plenty, or at least the equivalent of it in a world of science fiction and magic.  I mean, of course heroes in such a world would keep dying and coming back. of course they would keep having their allegiances shift and mutate over time, that's just the way of Heroic Cycles.  Death is just something that happens and gets conquered in the course of a story.  Right now, in comics, Peter Parker is dead.  Doctor Octopus switched bodies with him and Peter died while in Doctor Octopus' body.  But Doctor Octopus has all of Spider-Man's memories and is now trying to be a hero in his place, even though he is still a tool.  Now, that doesn't mean that Peter is gone forever!  This is an arc!  An arc where Peter is dead, but don't worry, he will still figure a way or this, and come back and be Spider-Man again, and then Doctor Octopus with go back to being dead again, and a new arc with come after that one.  These just fun stories about impossible people, why not have them  conquer death a couple of times along the way? It doesn't cheapen anything, and if it's really bad and ruins a character, well, it can always be retconned.  Say it's something Mephisto did or something.  Or MODOK.  Seriously, why complain about death not meaning anything in a world where there is MODOK? 

So, after reading all that I was hooked, and started ordering more and more volumes online, and also, I started trying to work my way forward, ordering volumes starting with where I left off and moving forward, starting with a the first deluxe volume of Mighty Avengers (whose first arc was drawn by Frank Cho. I think after that one panel I just wanted more Frank Cho.).  After reading that, I saw just how tied in it was to New Avengers, so I was reading, that, which meant I had to read Secret Invasion, and wow.  Secret Invasion was an insane thing to read, because it basically turned all those new Avengers comics into a single story, going back to the first issue and on through to the end of Scret Invasion.  I had left off right in the middle of a massive story!  One that stretched from Secret War and Avengers Disassembled through New Avengers and and on, and one that was sandwiched inside of another massive story that ran from Avengers Disassembled through to Avengers Vs. X-Men.  (Avengers Vs. X-Men really does seem to wrap up a ton of long running story arcs, both in the world of the Avengers and in the world of the X-Men.  It's kind of awesome.)  I was totally wrong to think that the stories I was reading were over and done with.  Now I have a new hobby, trying to get complete runs of collected additions of comics off Amazon for the least amount of money possible.  I have now spent like 4 hundred dollars on comic volumes on the internet, and everyday is like waiting for Christmas now. I have the entirety of Avengers comics heading up until the present coming to me in the mail, as well as a fair chunk of X-Men and Thor comics coming was well. 

It is fun. 

I don't have the time to waste time like that

Well, this post really spoke to me. (Not for long though. It's quite short.) When I am sitting home, alone, I spend almost all my casual time surfing the net, and reading small things and avoiding long things and clicking on websites I just read to see if they have posted anything new. "They haven't! Well, let's see if someone responded to my comment!" The whole time, in the back of my head, there is a voice screaming to read a book, just sit down and read a book. Last week, I showed up for work six hours early, and, not wanting to go home, I went to Barnes and Noble. After browsing a bit, I settled down in a big comfy chair and read the first 180 pages of Edgar Rice Burrough's The Martian Tales Trilogy. It was awesome. For nearly six hours, I was immersed—immersed—on the moss-covered terrain of Mars, with a naked Confederate soldier, his naked Martian lady-love, and fifteen foot tall, eight-limbed, green aliens. Then I got up, bought the book, and it has sat atop a pile on my floor for nearly a week now, untouched. It just seems like so much effort! I would much rather read the same things over and over again! When not forced to by circumstances, reading long-form peices just seems like too much committment, too much effort, now. I need to be plugged in, man! Connected! Like a shark, always having to be moving. But sometimes I just want to be a moss-covered stone.

A History of Magic

So lately I have been feeling like I need to commit myself more firmly to reading and finishing books. So I have taken upon myself the slightly off-kilter choice of reading The History of Magic by Eliphas Lévi, translated into English and with footnotes by A.E. Waite (yep, as in the famous Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, that guy). What with all this talk about the death of David Foster Wallace, I have had to resist the urge to go out and read some of his stuff, or at least make another attempt at Pynchon's behemoth Against the Day. But it's okay. My will is good.

Lévi is really an Frenchman named Alphonse Louis Constant, writing in the mid-nineteenth century. He writing style bears a lot of the stylistic tics I associate with that period by way of Marx: a circumlocutory style that talked around a subject without through line or goal, that manages to encompass its topic without elucidating it, and totally bereft of conclusion, instead relying upon bald, unsubstantiated statement or opinion*. It's really an horrible, horrible approach to approaching a non-fiction topic.

About that non-fiction topic. Lévi believes vampires exist. Vampires, dude. Among other things. There is actually something quite exhilarating about reading an old book that believes thing nobody does today. It's like traveling back in time and finding yourself in a another universe as well. I suppose I could spend all my time trying to debate Lévi's worldview and form one of my own in opposition to it, but at the moment it's enough to simply enter that world and get a taste of it before returning to my own.

More troubling is dealing with Lévi's worldview. It's kind of weird, because one doesn't usually think of magicians in these terms, but Lévi is very "traditional," in a sense. He thinks that hierarchy in knowledge is necessary for a properly functioning society, that it is not possible for the people to all be fully informed, and metaphysical knowledge must be held by a select few. However, this doesn't mean that he thinks all hierarchy is good; he thinks it's easy for it to be corrupted, and has no real suggestions for how to make things function better (at least not yet), beyond believing that those in possession of have the necessary training to use it wisely. Constant was Catholic, and a failed priest, so this view is probably a mixture of the support for the priesthood as a source of divine knowledge and of Transcendental Magic's approach to magical initiation.

Lévi also seems to have a pretty old idea of the roles of the sexes. He talks much about how Goëtic, or Black Magic, is magic used outside the proper priestly initiation and thus most magicians and all witches really are trafficking with the devil. I was kind of expecting some kind of defense of people that had been persecuted as witches throughout history, but no, Lévi seems to really seem to think these are women who don't know their place. He also has a chapter, albeit a short one, devoted to the sacred power of virginity and chastity, and it seems to go without saying that men just be chaste, but women need to be virgins. There is also quite a bit on how evil spirits, incubi and succubi, are drawn to and created by repressed sexual energy and bodily emissions (that's some old-school terminology right there). Basically sexual energy is tied up a lot with bad things and evil and stuff, and there is definitely a gendered component to it all.

I am still trying to figure out what Lévi's basic view of things is, but there is a lot of talk of the Astral Light, which isn't precisely light but seems to be the building block of physical reality, and also the form of spirit (you can definitely see here the building blocks of the connections people draw between magical thinking and quantum theory). This Astral Light, however, is tied to the serpent from the Garden of Eden somehow, and is juxtaposition to some other force, with is the more "divine" force. And the Devil, in the section on him—well, Lévi isn't really clear on what the devil is, precisely, although he seems dismissive of the conception of the devil as an actual figure and seems knowledgeable of the origins of the character of Lucifer Morningstar. But the personage of Lucifer Morningstar is somehow connected to the idea of the Astral Light, the source of it, so the Light seems somehow tied to "evil," as, to a certain degree, magic itself, or Black Magic, which seems to be manipulation of Astral Light in such a way that it corrupts the soul and make it hard to communicate with God, somehow. (I wish he would spell this stuff out clearer, I feel more like I am hunting and pecking for little bits of information from a cloud of verbiage.) This seems to be basically consistent with Lévi's opinions of mediums, which is that they are people whose souls are so tied up in knots that they draws other spirits to them like a whirlpool, and thus should be avoided by the rest of us.

It's weird. Lévi was a magician, yet he seems to have a very low opinion of most magicians, and not in an egotistical sense. I suppose at some later point in the book Lévi will will give a fuller account of Transcendental Magic and how this relates to other occult phenomena; I'm only around halfway through, after all.

*Though the work is translated by Waite, the style seems to carry through the specific level of word choices; it's more a matter of construction than diction. However, it probably exists on the level of word choice as well. Waite's various footnotes, incredibly useful, as they often correct Lévi's errors—and yes it is a bit annoying reading a book knowing you might be getting the wrong information—are much more direct and concise than his translation of Lévi's French, leading me to believe that his diction in translation is more a manner of capturing Lévi's tone than exchanging it for his own.