by Jarett Kobek
Almost all of these anti-hero vigilantes had suffered family trauma at the hands of criminals. Dead wives and dead children were very common.
Wild Dog was good with guns, he was ex-military, he wore a hockey mask and a sports jersey that featured an angry cartoon dog.
The mafia had killed his fiancée. Now he walked the streets of the Quad Cities, waging his one man war on crime. Killing domestic terrorists was his business. And business was good.
Jeremy presumed he’d gotten the gig because of a perceived linguistic similarity between the titles of Wild Dog and Trill.
He was working a post-economic crash angle with an al-Qaeda overlay.
WHEN HE WASN’T WORKING, Jeremy had developed an interest in early recorded American music. He was also in the process of reading all the books by a writer named Anna Kavan.
Jeremy liked Anna Kavan because he thought that her best work was the most exact representation of heroin’s psychoactive effects.
Characters in books by Anna Kavan went out on the nod, experiencing elaborate psychoactive fantasies that spiraled out from the moment when they nodded off.
Anna Kavan was fierce. Her prose was ferocious. She was Gothic at a time when no one wanted Gothic fiction. She was the greatest.
AND JEREMY HAD a very active sex life. This active sex life occurred with both his wife Minerva and other partners. Jeremy and Minerva were a Bay Area couple. They had adopted a non-traditional sexual lifestyle.
Which made sense, really, when one considered that they’d met back in 1989, when they were both in their early twenties.
THEY’D NEVER ADOPTED any of the ideological terms that developed in the Twentieth Century to describe arrangements which had existed since the dawn of marriage.
They had never called themselves polyamorous, which was another stupid word like homosexual with a Greek prefix and a Latin root.
They had never said they were in an open marriage. One time Minerva had suggested they make up their own word and self-apply it.
“What word?” Jeremy asked his wife.
“Winterbloss,” said his wife, “Why not fuckmasters?”
For obvious reasons, they didn’t call themselves fuckmasters. They did fool around with other people. Sometimes together.
POLYAMOROUS WAS A WORD made up by a witch named Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart. The word first appeared in her 1990 article entitled, “A Bouquet of Lovers.”
Like Jeremy and Minerva, Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart had lived in Marin County.
Unlike Jeremy and Minerva, Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart had filled much of her life in Marin County with the systematic torture of goats.
Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart and her husband Oberon Zell-Ravenheart had tortured goats by surgically altering the beasts’ horn buds to ensure the growth of a single horn centered in the middle of the skull.
The Zell-Ravenhearts wanted to create living approximations of unicorns, which were mythical creatures akin to universal health care, gender pay equity, and the democratic acceptance of dissenting opinions.
In 1985, four of the goats tortured by Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart went on tour with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. The most famous of these goats was named Lancelot.
The circus said Lancelot was a unicorn.
But Lancelot wasn’t a unicorn. Lancelot was a goat that had been tortured by the person who would later invent the word polyamorous.
This is 100% true.
NEITHER MINERVA NOR JEREMY liked threesomes. Threesomes required an awful lot of negotiation. You had to work with the feelings of the other person in the marriage and with the feelings of the third party. There was an unfathomable amount of checking-in and touching base.
Talk before the sex, talk during the sex, talk after the sex.
There was the twosome sex after the threesomes, with Jeremy and Minerva making sure that the original equilibrium wasn’t disrupted.
Then there was dealing with the inevitable development of better chemistry between the third person and either Jeremy or Minerva.
They gave up on threesomes and started seeing other people on an individual basis.
JEREMY MET WOMEN through a website called OKCupid.
OKCupid asked Jeremy banal questions about his hobbies and religious beliefs. Then the website compared Jeremy’s answers with the answers of its female userbase. The website calculated a percentage of shared banality.
Jeremy would send messages to attractive women with whom he shared a high percentage of banality. Or the women would message him.
If the messaging worked out, Jeremy would meet the women in person.
If he met a woman in person and the interpersonal interaction worked out, Jeremy and the woman might have sex.
If Jeremy and the woman had sex, then they would be sharing a new banality beyond their original shared banality.
They would be sharing the futility of the orgasm and its pursuit.
MOST OF THE WOMEN on OKCupid were not interested in having sex with a married man whose wife knew that her husband was having sex beyond the marital bed.
Still, Jeremy learned that if he was upfront and told women about the situation, a sizeable amount would be intrigued and interested. A subsection of that sizeable amount would have sex with him.
THE ARRANGEMENT worked, despite its shaky moments, because Jeremy and Minerva had developed a fairly realistic assessment of human biology and the nature of relationships.
They had been having sex with each other for almost thirty years.
MANY OF THE PEOPLE with whom they slept did not have a realistic assessment of human biology or the nature of relationships.
Lots of Minerva’s sexual partners, by-and-large men, were almost psychotic in their need.
Some became jealous of Jeremy. This would happen when a new sexual partner had known Minerva for, at most, a few weeks.
The situation with Jeremy’s partners was different. There was a sizeable number of White women who were interested in having sex with a Black man for very unpleasant reasons. These women were to be avoided.
Some of the women he dated had eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises. These were Black women and some of them found themselves unhappy about being in a situation where they were having sex with a Black man who had a White wife.
The whole society was idiotic and had created an enormous amount of madness around people from one social construct having sex with people from other social constructs.
This is because American society had an extraordinarily warped idea of beauty that tended to exclude and marginalize women of color.
Especially Black women. Which was manifestly fucking nuts.
EVEN WITHOUT Adeline’s ill-fated excursion as an online race commentator, Blackness had been on Jeremy’s mind. More than usual. And race was always on Jeremy’s mind.
In addition to Wild Dog, he was working on a new creator owned comic.
There wasn’t a title but Jeremy had written a few scripts.
It was going to be a comic without any supernatural or supranatural or crime elements. It was going to be a realistic depiction of a middle class African-American family.
He’d thought about asking Adeline if she wanted to do the art.
Now that her WaNks Index Score was so low, he was having second thoughts.
DESPITE THE THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS and thousands of titles published each year, despite almost a century of the comic book, Jeremy’s idea was new to the medium.
Comic books were as valid a medium of expression as any other and thus could encompass the simple joys and mistake of a family. Regardless of race.
But it was 2013 and it still hadn’t happened.
JEREMY GREW UP as the youngest child of two parents who had attended Howard University.
Much to their later discomfort, Jeremy’s parents had met at a brown paper bag party, a campus event where the only individuals in attendance were people whose skin color was lighter in shade than
a brown paper bag.
Anyway, because of the eumelanin distribution in the basale strata of their epidermises, and because they had earned degrees from an elite institution of higher education, Jeremy’s parents had entered the Black middle class and moved to a White neighborhood in Virginia, near Washington, D.C.
They were the only family in the neighborhood with eumelanin in the basale strata of the epidermises.
When Jeremy met Nash Mac, the two men bonded over the fact that their childhood homes were less than forty miles apart.
JEREMY WAS RAISED with access to money. The money had fostered a love for junk media like comic books and Science Fiction.
At his private high school, Jeremy’s interest in junk media helped carve out a protective niche.
He was part of a group of kids who sat around and talked about the shifting loyalties of Raistlin Majere, a chaotic-neutral mage, and the seemingly doomed love between Tanis Half-Elven and Lauralanthalasa Kanan, a princess of the Qualinesti elves.
Students at Jeremy’s high school hated and feared him because he was Black, but everyone found the situation more socially acceptable if the kids who hated Jeremy pretended that their hatred emerged from his interest in the novels of Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis.
On the face of things, Jeremy was not a target of victimization and bullying because of his race. He was a target of victimization and bullying because of his Red Sonja t-shirt.
WHEN JEREMY went to work for Marvel Comics, he wasn’t particularly surprised by racism in the comic book industry.
With the exception of Larry Hama and Jim Owsley, both of who had eumelanin in the basale stratum of their epidermises, the employees at Marvel were adult versions of the people from his high school clique.
And despite a superior attitude derived from their dogged adherence to corporate owned intellectual properties, the kids in Jeremy’s high school social clique had been clueless about race. Jeremy had suffered some awful shit at the hands of his friends.
People touching his hair without permission. People who talked about their parents marching with Martin Luther King at Selma and then remarking about how Jeremy acted so White. People calling Jeremy their “Negro High Bard of Endor.” People asking him if John M. Ford’s The Dragon Waiting was a popular novel in the ghetto. People telling him that Octavia Butler’s Kindred was okay, for what it was. People asking him if Samuel Delaney was his favorite author.
JEREMY’S INSPIRATION for his new comic was “My Black Mama,” a 78 record by Son House.
Son House was a blues musician from the Mississippi Delta. Son House recorded for the Paramount record label of Grafton, Wisconsin in 1930. He had tons of eumelanin in the basal stratum of his epidermis.
A 78 release was a vinyl disc with enough space for one short song on each of its two sides. In the case of “My Black Mama,” the vinyl record contained “My Black Mama, Part I” and “My Black Mama, Part II.”
The album was meant for an African-American audience but it was released at a time of economic catastrophe. Its sales were worse than the sales of Hot Mill Steam.
Decades later, there arose a general belief amongst record collectors without much eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises that musicians like Son House offered an authenticity which rebuked the increasing commercialization of American culture.
There was a general belief that Son House was a primitive with a direct line to pickaninny suffering, an ancientness rural goodness that existed beyond the modern world.
This was, of course, intolerable bullshit.
Son House was a modernist master. He was a genius. Both sides of “My Black Mama” were profound works.
Part II of the 78 release of “My Black Mama” was famous. It became Son House’s signature song in later years when White record collectors found him living in Rochester, NY.
Part II is about the singer learning that the girl he loves is dead. He takes off down the road and finds his good ol’ gal in a morgue. She’s laying on a cooling board.
Basically, it’s a reworking of “St. James Infirmary,” which in turn was a reworking of “The Unfortunate Rake.” When Son House performed Part II in later decades, after he was found by White record collectors, he used the title “Death Letter Blues.”
It became a classic. It was covered by hundreds of musicians. By and large, the great percentage of musicians who covered “Death Letter Blues” did not have eumelanin in the basal strata of the epidermises.
No one talked about Part I, which was a song about the singer’s preference for a woman with a heavier distribution of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis over a woman with less eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. It expressed an ideology in exact opposition to that of the brown paper bag parties attended by Jeremy’s parents.
The focus on Part II fell into very common receptions of African-Americans and their culture. Everyone wanted to hear about Black people dying and being sad. Everyone wanted a Black woman dead on a cooling board.
Part I was a song about how the singer lusted for his black mama, regardless of the consequences, worldly or spiritual.
Jeremy liked the conjunction of the following verses:
You take a brown-skinned woman
Will make a rabbit move to town
Say but a jet Black woman
Will make a mule kick his stable down
Oh brown skinned woman
Will make a rabbit move to town
Oh but a real Black woman
Will make a mule kick his stable down
There tain’t no Heaven, there ain’t no burning Hell
Said where I’m going when I die, can’t nobody tell
Lord, ain’t no Heaven now, ain’t no burning Hell
Oh, where I’m going when I die, can’t nobody tell
Jeremy recognized the humor. It was the humor of his family. Not his nuclear family. His parents and sisters were uptight.
But his extended family.
His uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents.
Part I was the humor of normal people in normal houses trying to keep on keeping on. It was a humor that did not emasculate the African-American male. It was a humor that had always been there but ignored in favor of good ol’ gals on a cooling board.
IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to launch a new book about an African-American family. It might be possible to go with a traditional publisher and have distribution in regular book stores.
But Jeremy had grown up in the direct market. He had worked for Marvel. Trill had succeeded on the strength of the comic book store.
The mentally backwards who made up the comics market were his people. He wanted to do a book that would help bring them to the light and might attract new customers to the stores.
He wanted to do a comic for the Twenty-First Century versions of Jeremy Winterbloss, for the kids who were experiencing the peculiar loneliness of being young and Black and a reader of J.R.R. Tolkien.
NONE OF THIS would be any easier if Adeline kept using the Internet. Nothing about her tweeting made Jeremy’s life any less stressful.
“Haven’t I increased our sales?” asked Adeline.
“You have,” said Jeremy.
“Then here’s what I shall do,” she said. “I shall stay away from the race issue as much as I find possible. I can’t promise you the Moon, darling, but I shall do my damndest. I shall not tweet about the word %&$#?@.”
“I wish you’d quit,” said Jeremy. “Go cold turkey.”
“Darling,” said Adeline, “Who told me to use Twitter? Who made me a Facebook account?”
“Me,” said Jeremy.
“I’m only trying to make us some money. If I’m going to help Google earn out its filthy lucre then I might as well embrace the future. We all must serve somebody. And ain’t that the God’s honest, mon oncle?”
THEY LEFT COFFEE TO THE PEOPLE and walked to Buena Vista Park.
Buena Vista Park was one of the city’s treasures, a
sprawling verdant mass built on a hill and filled with ancient trees. Entering it was like passing through a veil into another world.
“Do you remember,” asked Jeremy, “when we went to the Grant Morrison signing at Comic Relief?”
“Only vaguely,” said Adeline.
GRANT MORRISON was a comic book writer without eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. Other than the oodles of quality which seeped from his work, Morrison’s principle distinguishing feature was that he had the bad luck of being a comic book writer at the same time as Alan Moore.
To paraphrase the preeminent comics critic Andrew Hickey, who had no eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis, if Alan Moore had not existed, Grant Morrison would have been considered the single greatest writer in the history of the medium.
But Alan Moore did exist.
He had no eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.
And he really was the single greatest writer in the history of the medium. There was Alan Moore and then there was everyone else.
Grant Morrison was doomed to play Number Two.
Life was cruel.
THE SIGNING IN QUESTION happened back in 1993. Grant Morrison was on tour with Vertigo, the more experimentally inclined imprint of DC Comics.
The modern incarnation of DC Comics was distinguished, principally, by having fucked over Alan Moore. They stole his most valuable intellectual property, Watchmen
Having committed this theft, the company cheapened Watchmen in the typical fashion: (1) Terrible merchandise. (2) A terrible film. (3) Terrible, creator-unauthorized prequels.
This theft and cheapening was achieved through a series of complex contractual gymnastics which occurred in 1985 between a multinational corporation and someone who had grown up without indoor plumbing.
