David Quammen, “Monster of God” (2003)

I mentioned in a previous post that I’m not a big fan of the subtle anthropomorphically-tinted view of nature often found in discourse, especially environmental discourse. I think it is unnecessary, quasi-New Age nonsense that robs the natural world of much of its majesty and puts humanity at an unjustifiable distance from the rest of the universe. Thankfully, this is something Quammen avoids in Monster of God – while he’s certainly interested and sympathetic with the world’s alpha predators, his text is light, non-reverential. It’s precisely because he’s interested in these animals and their relationship with humans that he can’t “sentimentalize” them – because sometimes that relationship is violent, and involves large carnivorous animals killing and eating people. That’s part of the fun, isn’t it? They’re the very real incarnations of the terrible monsters of our imaginations, which is why there are several tangents about the monsters of various cultural legends and (in the final section) of movies; they are simultaneously our victims and our victimizers, and have been so for millennia. There’s certainly something to be awed here – but it’s completely balanced out by the realization that this is nature at its basest, which Quammen wholeheartedly embraces.

Quammen’s approach to the material also reflects one of the sub-themes of the book – which a class-focused look at that human/man-eater relationship, well-communicated by the down-to-earth, empathetic view. In every section of the book, he talks to a group of people who are forced by tradition or circumstance to make a living alongside these animals, almost always low-income farmers – and it’s in these frank conversations where we learn that it’s hard to see the majesty of the predators when they eat your livestock, or your dog, or your family. Even so, it’s not always a wholly negative relationship being portrayed here – many of locals seem to have high regard for these animals, many having a religious tradition that does so (although there might be some problems there as well – Quammen mentions that while the North Australian aborigines he talked to were part of a group that see the gigantic Saltwater Crocodile as their chosen spirit animal, that can put them at odds with other aboriginal groups who do not, and might not be as willing to overlook crocodile attacks) or simple respect for nature. Not that their views are shown to matter in the bigger picture, as the animals being discussed (the Asiatic Lion, the Romanian Brown Bear, the Siberian Tiger, and the aforementioned Saltwater Crocodile) are or were heavily endangered, and are often government-protected in some way. This leads to another relationship in the book – between the locals and the environmental agencies tasked with monitoring and protecting these animals for various reasons. In the case of the bears and the crocodiles, the reasons are so they can sustain themselves by selling off the license to shoot those animals for fun and profit. It’s a cold, hard reality about how endangered animal protection often has to operate – and it seems especially sad in the instance of the Romanian park ranger who watches over the bears and even gives them names. Both the locals and those experts and government employees make up a colourful cast of the book – an amiable bunch, as lovingly-portrayed by Quammen, quirks and all, as the animals.

But what about that class focus (as well as the profit motive seen in the government protection) I mentioned? This is an especially interesting observation the author makes – tyng the ancient tradition of the great monster-slaying hero like Gilgamesh and Beowulf to the more recent tradition of imperialists and tyrants, who see themselves in the same way. The idea is that these “real monsters” are seen by those seeking power, especially the white explorers from the past couple centuries, as something to be conquered and used to subjugate the locals who fear/revere them. So warriors once proudly boasted about how many lions they’ve killed; so Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausecu made a habit of shooting bears (with assistance). And this trend continues to this day – as Quammen notes, the go-ahead to shoot many of these dangerous beasts ain’t cheap, certainly out of the price range of the people who have to put up with them, and making the act of killing the biggest-and-baddest of the animal kingdom a “luxury” of sorts to the rich and powerful. The imperialist angle of it maybe only be in the background these days, but the class issues are still all too clear: killing man-eating critters is something for rich people to do for fun. And those rich people are the ones Quammen doesn’t talk to – we get the perspective of the farmers, the government scientists, the park rangers, and the guys who make a living pickling crocodile heads for biker gangs; but the people who pay to go out and shoot the things are kept at a distance.

But the book is not just putting them at a distance – it’s also doing the same to the readers, as Quammen recognizes that he himself, and the English-speaking audience, are not separated from this class divide, either. The fascination with the alpha predators shared by Quammen, the imperialist hunters, and the Western culture at large all originate far from the actual presence of these animals. Of course, we have some big predators over here, but none on the level the lion, crocodile, or tiger; as well, mass urbanization has made it so that our interaction with predators big and small are kept to a minimum (although not entirely – back to the bears, one chapter chronicles a neighbourhood in Romania where bears regularly raid people’s garbage, much to the delight of tourists; but, as noted in some of the stories of grizzly attacks in Yellowstone, this crossing of the urban threshold may not be a good thing). We the readers are implicated in this – our interest in or even affection for these animals often goes without really considering the people, who as mentioned are usually poor farmers, who have to put up with them. It’s a human socio-political ecosystem, whose own history is intertwined with that of the animal’s. And of course, it’s all these considerations, the human animal and the non-human animal, taken in tandem that makes Monster of God so compelling.

The preservation of the alpha predators is certainly something that Quammen is advocating, with the final section providing some of the experiments that show how taking the top off a ecosystem can be incredibly damaging (which the book portrays mainly by conflation, but can be seen directly in the depletion of sharks and the rising numbers of jellyfish in the world’s oceans). But that’s the scientifically rational why, which is only part of the argument. It’s made quite clear that the developing human culture has always been taken with these animals, and if current trends continue, we would be losing something. That sounds very close to that sentimentalizing, but in this case, it feels earned – these aren’t prettied-up images of nature, and the book seems to accept that tough decisions must be made in some cases to keep these things alive (like the bear and crocodile hunting). It’s less about telling us why we should love these things, but why we do anyway. Humanity and the great monsters of nature are an inseparable pair, it seems.

Osamu Tezuka, “Phoenix: Strange Beings/Life” (1980-1981, 2006)

I have been looking for copies of Viz’s Phoenix translations for some time, but I haven’t been having much luck (are they out of print or something? That might explain the exorbitant prices for them on Amazon). I was lucky enough to find some at the excellent Legends Comics in Victoria back in January, but not being someone who likes throwing money around, I only ended up picking one of a varied assortment of the books. Since there was no real order present, and it was the only one that looked like it was self-contained, I picked up the ninth volume.

The base structure of both stories in this book, as seen through my myopic cultural lens, is a Twilight Zone episode based around Buddhism-inspired ideas of karma, repentance, and respect for all life. As is true for all the stories in the Phoenix series, one story (“Strange Beings”) is set in a specific historical period in Japan, and the other (“Life”) is set in the far future, so we get to see those themes put through a historical fiction and science fiction filter, and they come out pretty much the same in both instances. The stories can appear pretty heavy-handed at times, but Tezuka is actually able to address some more nuanced points as well; all the years working on this overarching story obviously gave him time to consider all the different facets to explore.

I specifically consider “Strange Beings” in this regard: there’s a lot of different ideas at work here that seem to grow organically from each other. Broadly, the story is about the inhumanity of war and callous disregard for human life – but consider the moral complexity of the situation: Sakon Suke kills the nun so that her murderous tyrant of a father will die, which would would certainly be a good thing for a lot of people (even though Sakon Suke’s own reasoning for her actions are selfish – her wanting to stop the whole “pretending-to-be-a-man” ruse). Would killing one innocent person to the possible benefit of many be a truly evil act? Tezuka seems to fall on the side of “yes” – as his protagonist gets struck down with a case poetic justice (which is blatantly metaphorical for the Buddhist life cycle), and is ultimately learns empathy for all things in the process. It’s an absolutist position, to be sure, but I find it interesting how Tezuka uses it while his story borders on war – such mass acts of violence pose a number of questions, and it doesn’t seem like he’s trying to avoid them. The whole segment where maimed war refugees are shown to look like demons is a pretty good image for what war does to people (something that I’m sure resonates with Tezuka, who was child during WWII) – and then, to really take advantage of the theme of empathy and the time loop plot, a younger version of Sakon Suke’s father is among them. The whole sequence is not just visually interesting – I think the deformed people and then the real demons showing up makes good use of Tezuka’s cartooning and fantastic design sense to help him make his point – but also puts the author’s pacifism to the test.

These ideas are carried over to the next story (which is technically the preceding story, published a year before “Strange Beings”, but whatever), as you get to a millionaire explaining how slightly altering a human clone’s appearance makes it okay to hunt them for entertainment. It’s not the only connecting element between the two (we also get another character suffering from nose tumors – which I think is used just to give Tezuka an excuse to draw people with large noses), but it’s the most significant – observing what constitutes humanity, and overcoming such a sense of callousness. In the context of “Life”, though, this idea might be more distressing, as war has been replaced with a more contemporary (even for us) theme of cruelty as entertainment and a source of revenue, as well as apathy among the populace. Human cloning and variations of The Most Dangerous Game-as-Television-show seems well-worn as sci-fi tropes now, but I think “Life” manages to feel distinct enough – the whole sequence in South America is pretty strange for a science fiction story of this type, but I guess it allows Tezuka to keep the cloning technology in his world in check, and to introduce something related to the Phoenix character itself.

There’s another thing in “Life” that stuck with me – the part where the millionaire-mistaken-for-a-clone Aoi meets a little girl living in an old folks home, with her grandma essentially a brain stuck in a clunky-looking immobile robot body. This is a take on the themes of searching for immortality that would logically be present in a series called “Phoenix”, which I’m sure is expounded upon in the other books (an interesting take on it is in “Strange Beings” as well – but uses a form of immortality as a punishment). Not long after the introduction, the grandma dies when a cockroach crawls into the robot brain case – that’s pretty disturbing, a very sly final word on that kind of human advancement as it is undone in such a horrible accidental way. It almost seems more cruel than watching clones get repeatedly exploded by weird springy lasers (Tezuka’s visual choices are certainly interesting, even if they seem to clash with the heaviness of the story – see all the exaggerated cues he uses, especially with the side characters).

Throughout all that, though, there are also some…troubling aspects of these stories. As mentioned before, “Life” has its protagonist meet a young girl while hiding, and then running away with said young girl to the wilderness. We get a large passage of time in the anachronistic woods, where Aoi grows a beard and the toddler becomes a buxom young woman. She calls him “father”, and he starts having paranoid delusions about her going off and meeting another man, among other questionable attitudes towards her. It’s all on the surface, and although there could be some commentary about roles vs desires in there, it is still, as I said, a very troubling segment of the book. The same could also be said for “Strange Beings” and Sakon Suke’s stated desire to “be a woman again” (another thing – maybe it’s just me, but it appears that Sakon Suke is drawn more overtly masculine or feminine depending on the scene).

That aside, these two stories do make me want to read more – just to see how the other stories connect and comment on each other as these do. The back of this volume also has a message from Tezuka himself to help keep us interested in the series, saying “I don’t know how many more years Phoenix will continue, but after it is completed, please go back and read through the whole series again. Otherwise, it will be difficult for me to respond to criticism”. Well, unfortunately, Tezuka being deceased makes it more difficult for him to respond to criticism – and it also leaves the “Phoenix” series woefully incomplete, even at a dozen collected books. Still, there seems to be enough in the stories he did finish to get to the heart of his humanism – which is one of the reasons I’ll still be trying to track down the rest.

Tom Stoppard, “The Real Inspector Hound and Other Plays” (1968-1979, 1993)

There is an atmosphere of dread running through many of the plays collected here, so as funny as Stoppard makes them (and a lot of have some truly great sequences), I can’t help but feel slightly horrified at the same time.

Take, for example, the titular play; it milks the ridiculous contrivances and paranoia present in the standard whodunit to great comedic ends (dig how the almost all the character dialogue serves no purpose other than to contrive the situation) – and we recognize that these stories ARE ridiculous, which is why sending them is good fun. However, when that paranoia invades the world outside the play in the fourth wall-breaking story about the theater critics, it starts losing it’s ridiculous quality and becomes slightly frightening; a situation that is contrived and silly doesn’t seem so contrived and silly when it happens to you. So when the blustery Birdboot, a figure of obvious comedy much like the mystery play parody, steps onto the stage and is suddenly forced to reenact the previous scene, something feels amiss. I think most of us would probably feel uncomfortable in a situation where we have lost all control of our surroundings – everything keeps on moving, and we there’s no way to stop it or alter it’s path or anything, we’re just swept away with it.

But Stoppard never really tries to call attention to this in the play – Birdboot never acknowledges the strangeness of his situation once he walks on the stage, being far too concerned with his own personal dealings that he has been projecting onto the play from the beginning. Then he’s shot dead. It’s played entirely for laughs, though, with the exaggerated characters now set right up against Birdboot’s infidelity and groveling – two different jokes that just seem to co-exist rather than bounce off each other. It’s funny because Birdboot just seems to be going along with it while still trying to shack up with the lead actresses – even so, there’s the sense of the normal trapped in the surreal that gives it a dark tinge.

Once the second critic, Moon, walks onto the stage, the situation changes slightly – he’s also supposed to fill one of the absent roles on the stage (with the two absent characters from the play briefly occupying the critics’ seats), but he seems to be actually trying to take charge, while simultaneously showing off what a good critic he is (which goes hand-in-hand with his earlier philosophical wanking about being the second-string critic) by solving the mystery. Of course, he’s wrong – not just because the satirical ending is unpredictably over-the-top (and stolen from Agatha Christie), but also because it was HIS inferior behind it all. So, even when he tries to take control of the situation, he fails and is killed off in a fit of irony. Like I said, it’s bizarre and entertaining – but also a tad distressing, setting up a situation where the characters have no way of escaping – much like the characters in the silly play they were watching.

“The Real Inspector Hound” derives its dread from its subject matter – allowing it to seep through the fourth wall – but the theme of the uncontrollable situation continues on in “Dogg’s Hamlet/Cahoot’s Macbeth”, which focuses on how we understand language. As explained in the preamble, the concept of “Dogg’s Hamlet” is based on the idea that even when we think we understand a set of code words – in this case, the ones used by builders when passing on materials – they may mean something completely different, and that even our own language can be construed in such a way. This of course leads to a comedy of errors and silly language substitutions (I can imagine how difficult it would be for the people acting this thing out – how can you figure out how to properly inflect when you’re talking what appears to be utter nonsense?). That Stoppard is able to keep that whole thing going and never miss a beat is a testament to his own skill with language (evident throughout the entire collection) – but he is also able to bring the dread once again with this scenario. It invokes a similar feeling to “Inspector Hound”, but this time it’s caused by linguistic barriers. But simply not understanding another language is one thing; this is pretty much about someone misunderstanding his own language when all the traditional meanings have been remixed, and getting into awkward situations because of it. It’s like a dyslexic nightmare. But since the characters are never able to realize this, the situation is once again played entirely for goofy fun, and is then deflated when it’s followed by a brilliantly truncated Hamlet that feels like the actors are just repeating catchphrases (which goes along with the whole language barrier theme), and is then followed by an encore, which is an even more truncated version of Hamlet.

That is then followed by “Cahoot’s Macbeth”, which deals with a more widely-recognized problem played up for comedy (with secret police bursting in on the stage) and is more of its own thing. That is, until near the end, when the English-speaking character from “Dogg’s Hamlet” shows up, now speaking the alternate English from the previous play (I guess there’s no situation where he gets to properly communicate with everyone else), continuing the themes from “Dogg’s” while wacky-ing up the current play (the fact that he flusters the police officer, interrupting the interrupter, is a nice touch). Then one of the actors explains that Dogg, the alternate English, is something you “pick up”, going back to Stoppard’s original idea. And with the Dogg-speak alongside the police and the few remaining players trying to finish “Macbeth”, the whole thing ends in complete chaos – which, despite being an uncontrollable situation just like in “Inspector Hound”, is portrayed in such a way that it is almost reassuring. In complete chaos, at least, either everyone or no one is in on the joke, which wasn’t the case before.

Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely, “Flex Mentallo: Man of Muscle Mystery” (1995, 2012)

One of the great tragedies of Grant Morrison’s recent fall from grace is that he has seemingly fallen for his own superhero theology in practice rather than in theory – he’s become part of the mainstream comic chaff-producing machine, the same one that once produced the works that inspired him, but no longer does. For us, the optimistic, liberating ideas found in the comic book concepts that Morrison trumpeted in Doom Patrol, Animal Man, All-Star Superman, and this book were inspiring in the same way those old Superman and Fourth World books were for him; we can believe that superheroes show us a better future, because Morrison himself was able to show us how and why.

But behind those wondrous stories, the truth of the matter is that they are the products of corporations that see them simply as a source of revenue, often after wrenching them from the control of the people who brought them to life in the first place. In his love of the superhero, Morrison has let himself become subordinated by the corporations that control them, and in the process dismisses the claims of his predecessors. And for what? So he can write who-gives-a-fuck stories about Batman and Superman drawn by middling artists forever?

No matter how much you want to look up at Superman, to call him the model for the next step in human evolution and the new mythology, he is still a fictional character. And you should never put fake people before real people.

All of the difficulties I mentioned before is why I will probably never read Morrison’s Supergods, despite loving so many of his comics. There are other reasons, though: an entire book devoted to saluting the glory of the superhero seems pointless when Morrison and Frank Quitely, probably his number one collaborator, already did that well enough in Flex Mentallo. With this book, I can truly understand why these silly stories matter, without the thing being stopped dead in its tracks by a casual brushing aside of Siegel and Shuster.

Just as they would do again over a decade later in All-Star Superman, Morrison and Quitely produced a taut, beautiful little story that extols that aforementioned glory, that idea that superheroes could really make a difference in the world. But unlike All-Star, which had the benefit of over 70 years of iconography to exploit, this books gets to play exclusively with the ideas of the superheroes, wholly separated from the established brand names; they appear familiar, but are almost like the platonic ideal of those classic characters. Free to create whatever they want, both Morrison and Quitely show that they understand what makes these characters work, so much so that even incidental/background character exudes charm and personality. Quitely has designed the hell out of every facet of this series, and it’s hard to argue against something this gorgeous (although apparently it’s been recoloured, leading to some unfortunate changes that sort of rob the thing of its mid-90s candy-coloured appeal. Oh well, you win some you lose some.)

But what really struck me about the story is how little has aged. The little sections about sex and violence in superhero comics feels well-tread at this point (maybe that’s because Morrison himself made the exact same point before), but they serve their purpose in the story. But it’s the interaction between the world of the comics and the “real” world still feels incredibly relevant – I don’t think we’ve gotten any less cynical, or have lost that feeling of the end of the world coming very soon. Everything still seems fucked – maybe for slightly different reasons than in 1995, but I doubt anyone cares about the minute details of that rotting, pathetic burnout we all seem to be experiencing as a collective. Wouldn’t we still all want to find out that we took M&Ms instead of the drugs, so we aren’t dying after all? That once we get back on our feet, we can overcome the great cultural dread and save everything? That all we have to do is find out where our ideas come from?

I think a lot of us who love the imaginative side of things have felt like Wally Sage at one point…or, more likely, still feel that way. It’s all the exuberance, all those pathetic moments, all the fond memories of reading our favourite stories or doodling our own, and then wondering where all those heroes were when we needed them most, pessimistically denouncing them for being “pathetic fucking power fantasies” while wanting to do nothing but talk to other people about them. Simultaneously our greatest love and the only things keeping us from love. Then we reach the point, the deciding point, where we consider everything we know about them, the stories and us, and whether we can reconcile our adult sensibilities and these goofy characters. Sometimes it can work, sometimes it can’t. But Flex asks us to take a chance with them – “Gamble a stamp…I can show you how to be a real man!”

The book has a life-affirming quality – that we can take the good and the bad, that we can overcome death of many kinds, and that we can use imagination and optimism, those two childhood qualities that had seemingly left us long ago, to do it all. Even as Sage is dying in the rain, off his mind on drugs and covered in vomit, he has his memories of his comics, of all the characters whose adventures continue just a page away, and that keeps him alive throughout the entire story. Just knowing that there is someone not very far looking after things – does it matter how true it is? If it can keep you going, it’s worthwhile. It’s not simply a matter of regression; I would say that we always need ideals, something to look up to, so that even in the face of a world of little but pain and ugliness, we can confront it knowing that there’s more out there. There are other worlds; we just need to remember them.

What finally getting to read Flex Mentallo reminded me is that those qualities exist wherever you are – and in my life, they existed in the comics of Morrison and Quitely, Morrison and Stewart, Morrison and Yeowell, etc. Maybe I didn’t get to grow up reading the great superhero comics Morrison did, but I did get to read his comics in many of my formative years – and they had a very similar effect on my imagination and my outlook on life as the comics Flex Mentallo and others like it are meant to invoke. It was a great reminder that these comics still inspire me, no matter how much their writer has seemingly set out to ruin the experience these days. There must be something to these pathetic power fantasies after all.