Super 8 vs. USAF

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Russ Maheras

If you knew anything at all about me, you’d probably think I’d be the one guy in the world who should have enjoyed something like the new J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg film, Super 8.

After all, I’ve been a science fiction fan since at least as far back as 1962, when I scraped together every nickel I could to try and buy enough packs to get a complete set of the original Mars Attacks cards.

I’ve also been an avid comic book fan and illustrator since about 1967, and my wheelhouse is drawing science fiction- and space-related illustrations – particularly of alien life forms and alien monsters.

In addition, I’ve been an avid film buff since 1967, and have seen thousands of films over the years. This includes almost every classic science fiction and horror film – particularly most of the iconic Universal horror films from the 1930s and 1940s. Even more to the point, I’ve been a huge Steven Spielberg fan since his breakout hit Jaws, and I’ve enjoyed a number of J.J. Abrams’ projects over the years, starting with his science fiction blockbuster Armageddon.

I also owned my own super 8 camera during the 1970s, and like many other film buffs back then, I fooled around with it, filmed my friends and myself hamming it up, and experimented with in-camera special effects.

And if all of the above isn’t enough to convince you that I should have been the demographic sweet spot for a film like Super 8, how about the fact that I was actually brimming with child-like excitement and anticipation all the way to the theater to see it?

So what went wrong? Why was I disappointed and angry afterwards?

The answer is simple: I’m also a big fan of the U.S. Air Force, which I’ve voluntarily worked for in one capacity or another, active-duty and civilian, for nearly 30 years.

Super 8 – a period piece set in 1979 – was not at all kind to the USAF, whose make-believe role in the film was massive. America’s youngest service was not just the omnipresent and chief villain, it was portrayed as the thoroughly despicable omnipresent and chief villain.

One could have easily swapped out the olive-drab U.S. Air Force uniforms from that era with the black uniforms of Hitler’s Waffen SS from World War II and it would have made little difference to the plot.

Strong words? Or am I simply too close to the subject matter to be objective? I’ll concede that could be part of it, but I think there are plenty of other non-military folks who have also noticed Hollywood’s trend in recent years of depicting the U.S. military in an almost overwhelmingly heavy-handed fashion.

For example, just a few weeks ago, First Lady Michelle Obama was a featured guest at a Hollywood panel hosted by the industry’s major guilds, and her primary message to the executives and creators in the audience was a plea for them to try and be more fair and realistic in their portrayals of servicemembers and their families.

In Super 8, I assume J.J. Abrams imbued his film’s Airmen, and their ringleader Col. Nelec, with extreme, almost Storm Trooper-like behavior because that’s how he believes real Airmen would act to protect the secrets of a “black program” from being discovered by members of the civilian populace.

But as someone who worked in three black or highly classified programs during my active-duty days (the SR-71, the U-2 and the RC-135), the entire portrayal was not just uncharacteristic, it was totally stupid. The Airmen I saw portrayed on screen bore little resemblance to those real Airmen I’d worked with over the years at the more than 48 military installations where I’ve been stationed, visited, or temporarily worked at while on official duty.

I worked almost daily with classified material for more than a dozen years, had a Top Secret clearance, and worked on three special-access required (SAR) programs that required signed non-disclosure statements. And because of the compartmentalized nature of such SAR programs, I had to be thoroughly familiar with each program’s classification guide so I knew exactly what I could and could not discuss with civilians and other members of the military who did not have the that specific SAR clearance.

So I believe I can say with some authority that real Airmen who work with classified material, regardless of its classification level, are not trained to murder those who accidentally or intentionally obtain unauthorized access. Airmen are trained to report it so the unauthorized individuals can be questioned, detained, or arrested, and, if tried and found guilty, jailed.

As a matter of fact, while it may be more dramatic for Hollywood to show or infer otherwise, in all of my years associated with the Air Force I never saw, or even heard of, anyone ever being killed trying to get into a secure installation or classified area. And believe me, as tight a community as the Air Force can be, such big news would travel faster than an SR-71 in full afterburner. Of course, I’m not saying that historically it has never happened. All I’m saying is that if it did, it had to be a rarity, and it was probably either an accident or it was justified (i.e., the intruder was armed).

I think the reason popular culture creators fantasize about such things is because every base or secure area has signs posted on the fences or doors stating ominously, “Use of Deadly Force Authorized,” so they assume the use of deadly force is routinely used. But in reality, it isn’t.

Every situation I know of where unauthorized people have been detained (or “jacked up,” in Air Force parlance) for stepping into a secure area – intentionally or otherwise – security forces have followed their standard protocol. This does not include mindlessly shooting people on sight.

As a matter of fact, most Airmen who have spent any time at all in aircraft maintenance, or in job specialties involving regular access to secure areas, have either been “jacked up,” or know someone who has. Hell, back when I was part of Strategic Air Command during the 1980s, base security forces themselves would regularly test their guards/response forces by intentionally making random and unannounced attempts to penetrate secure areas in various ways.

Do you really think such things would be the norm if the standard procedure for the Air Force sentries was to shoot first, and ask questions later?

Yet, despite reality, we have major popular culture projects like Super 8’s depicting military servicemembers as cold and ruthless monsters who will do anything to protect a secret. It was this incessant misrepresentative undercurrent throughout Super 8 that kept me from enjoying what was otherwise a fairly entertaining film.

The bash-fest started early on when the teenage film crew the story revolves around witnesses a pick-up truck intentionally ramming and de-railing an Air Force train that’s zooming through the Ohio countryside at night. The kids survive, and as they stumble through the train’s wreckage, they suddenly find the nearly demolished truck. The vehicle’s driver, who just happens to be their science teacher, is badly hurt, but miraculously alive. As flashlights of approaching Air Force search teams flicker in the distance, he ominously warns the kids to run away because if caught, both they and their families would be killed for what they saw.

As we soon find out, the science teacher happens to be an authority on such things, because we’re shown in an old classified film the kids find that he was once one of the scientists who worked on the secret Air Force project being carried by the train: An alien monster who years ago crash-landed on Earth.

And to hammer home how the Air Force will stop at nothing to protect a classified project, J.J. Abrams has the Air Force search teams take the teacher prisoner, stabilize him medically, and strap him to a hospital bed. Then, after a Col. Nelec interrogation squeezes out all useful information, the colonel orders the former scientist executed.

But the Air Force-created mayhem does not stop there. Col. Nelec and his men continue to lie to the townspeople and local cops about what’s really going on, raid the school office and home of the dead teacher, and find other creative ways to trample on his, and everyone else’s, Constitutional rights.

Then, in one final quest to find the alien monster, Col. Nelec decides he needs to clear everyone out of town, so he has his men use flamethrowers to start a massive wildfire all over the surrounding countryside. This blaze gives him the pretext to round up all of the townspeople and bus them off to a nearby Air Force base as detained “refugees.”

There’s more, but I think you get the idea.

In short, Super 8 is just the latest example of a popular culture creator re-hashing popular culture stereotypes (you know, making a copy of a copy of a copy, ad infinitum) because it’s apparently a heckuva lot easier than doing the research necessary to create characters with some sort of realism.

Speaking of realism in film, guess who the moderator was for the First Lady’s aforementioned panel where she exhorted filmmakers to treat military people and their families more realistically on screen? It was none other than J.J. Abrams!

You just can’t make this stuff up!
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Editor’s Note: This is an expanded version of a piece that ran on Russ’ blog.

Ten Types of Stupid

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Richard Cook

Stupidity Type I: The Thoughtless Consumer

Last Saturday I purchased a ticket for Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon. I admit that I did this of my own free will, even though I knew the movie was about robots that turn into overpriced toys, and even though I was supporting the career of Michael Bay. I was bored, my friends were bored, and we had disposable income that must be spent.

Stupidity Type II: Jingoism

The Autobots (good Transformers) are apparently working for the U.S. government, which includes destroying an “illegal” nuclear weapon site in “The Middle East.” I’m fairly certain there’s more than one country in “The Middle East,” but the movie doesn’t specify which one. Nor does it specify under which law the nuclear site is “illegal,” but I’m going to assume its the Muslims Can’t Have Anything Unless We Say So Act (MCHAUWSSA). But all that really matters is that the Autobots blow up some uppity brown people, proving that they’re the good guys.

Stupidity Type III: Pathetic Male Fantasies

Shia LaBeouf returns as Sam Witwicky, who’s in a serious relationship with The Girl (I can’t remember the character’s name, and it doesn’t really matter). The Girl is insanely gorgeous, gainfully employed, and quite wealthy, given that she can afford a building (not just an apartment, an entire fucking building) in the heart of Washington, D.C. Sam is average-looking, unemployed, and spends the first hour of the movie constantly complaining that the world does not appreciate his awesomeness. Naturally, The Girl is crazy about Sam. She allows him to live rent free in her palace, props up his ego by getting herself captured (so he can rescue her), and she spends the entire movie reassuring him that he is, indeed, awesome, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Stupidity Type IV: Infantile Nostalgia

Leonard Nimoy does the voice of Sentinel Prime. Or maybe it was Spock Prime, I can’t remember. More importantly, Nimoy also did a voice in the animated Transformers movie back in 1986. Do you know who else was in it? Robert Stack! And Judd Nelson! And Eric Idle! And Casey Kasem! And Orson Welles! And the soundtrack had a song by Weird Al’ Yankovic! That shit was cool. Oh, and one of the characters actually said “shit,” which was also cool. Best. Transformers movie. Ever.

Stupidity Type V: Homophobia

The last Transformers movie was racist. But mocking black people through jive-talking robots is no longer acceptable. It’s okay to mock gay people though, because queerness is funny. Like the scene where the crazy Chinese guy drops his pants and rubs up against Witwicky in the workplace bathroom, and then his boss (John Malkovitch!) walks in, and he thinks Witwicky is gay! It’s funny because Witwicky is a supermodel-dating straight dude. And there’s the character named Dutch (played by Alan Tudyk, for all you Browncoats), who’s the very exemplar of the mincing queer stereotype. The movie doesn’t overtly acknowledge that he’s gay though, because that would make people uncomfortable.

Stupidity Type VI: Enthusiasm for Mass Destruction

I’m glad that Chicago got fucked up. Every alien invasion movie takes place in either New York or Washington. America has plenty of great cities, and they deserve to be devastated too.

Stupidity Type VII: Music Videos

Michael Bay began his career doing music videos, which is where he learned that no shot should last more than three seconds. Who needs pacing or spatial relationships when you have rapid-fire editing to remind you that every scene is just as exciting as the last one? One hour into this extended music video and I started to feel dizzy. Another hour in and my eyes felt like they were popping out of my skull. And there was still another half hour to go. By the end of the movie my brain was leaking out my ears but at least it no longer hurt.

Stupidity Type VIII: Bill O’Reilly

Bill O’Reilly has a cameo.

Stupidity Type IX: Anthropocentrism

In a movie called Transformers, you would think that the big climax would involve the titular Transformers. But actually, the big climax is a fight between Witwicky and McDreamy (a.k.a. Patrick Dempsey). Someone thought that the audience actually wanted to see that rather than more scenes of giant robots smashing Chicago. I find that doubtful, but maybe people hate Grey’s Anatomy so much they want to see McDreamy beaten up by the crappy lead character? I’ve never watched Grey’s Anatomy so I can’t say I hate it, but I do hate the nickname McDreamy. The point is humans always have to be the center of the story, even when they all suck.

Stupidity Type X: It’s Not Evil When Good Guys Do It

At the end of the film, Optimus Prime kills Spock Prime. And it isn’t “heat of battle” killing. It’s “busting a cap in Spock’s head while he’s injured and begging for mercy” killing. But it’s okay, because Optimus is the good guy. And after 157 minutes of mind-numbing idiocy, would it really be appropriate to include an ending with taste, decency, and a modicum of intelligence? This was the only way Transformers 3 could end and remain true to its principles.

Music for Middle-Brow Snobs: An Embarrassment of Neo-Soul

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

As the title suggests, I’ve got very mixed feelings about neo-soul…but I found an hours worth of it I like anyway. So download an Embarrassment of Neo-Soul.

1. I Walk on Guilded Splinters — Cher
2. Let Them Knock — Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings
3. Stronger than Me — Amy Winehouse
4. Like a Dream — Chrissette Michelle
5. My Place — Tweet
6. No One Said (Intro) — Shareefa
7. No One Said — Shareefa
8. Can’t Believe — Faith Evans and Carl Thomas
9. Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder) — Maxwell
10. I’m Goin’ Down — Mary J. Blige
11. Guess What? — Syleena Johnson
12.Brotha — Jill Scott
13. Headturner — Joss Stone
14. I’m Not Really Lookin’ — Truth Hurts
15. Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!) — Blu Cantrell
16. Luv Back — Jazmine Sullivan

Imaginary Wandering

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

A couple of weeks back, Michael Arthur wrote an appreciation of Wandering Son by Shimura Takako, recently translated by Matt Thorn for Fantagraphics. Michael said:

That makes Wandering Son a most compelling fantasy, one in which the gentle-hearted are protected by their friends and youths hold the key to wisdom and self-knowledge in the form of a headband Would that every profoundly different kid were granted the same freedom and gentleness by society that pushes them in conflicting directions. Even this first volume, which focuses on the most flexible time in a kid’s life, is keenly aware of the unfairness of this system, which looms over a sissy or a tomboy like a distant god’s arbitrary cruelty. Wandering Son chooses for the most part to dwell on the possibility of choice, of self-knowledge and the love of a friend who knows your secret.

Having now read the book myself, I think that’s basically right: Wandering Son is a very gentle story. If anything, Michael overemphasizes the possibility of cruelty in the narrative. There is no bullying in this first volume, either physical or mental. No one expresses real outrage at the idea of queerness or cross-dressing. Nitori’s parents are a comforting, distant presence; his sister a typical sit-com older sister, spunky and sometimes cranky, but ultimately spporting. Nitori’s friends not only accept his dress-up impulses, but actively encourage them. Chiba seems positively titillated, and pushes girl’s clothes on him; Takatsuki is a soul mate, who wants to switch genders herself. The art, too, is insistently light; violence (a bicycle wreck, a brief fight) are pushed off panel; what remains is grade schoolers rendered in clear lines against often empty backgrounds, circular giant-eyed faces flecked with appealing blush marks staring limpidly as their noses disappear into their own radiant neoteny.

If I sound a little sardonic there at the end…well, what can I say. I am not categorically opposed to tweeness; Donovan is one of my favorite performers and I have a place in my heart for Cardcaptor Sakura. But even by those standards, Wandering Son’s preciousness can feel oppressive. Everyone is just so nice; so unwaveringly adorable. And that adorableness is tied ineluctably to the cross-dressing. Nitori’s fascination with girls’ clothes and Takako’s fascination with boys’ clothes serve as a metonymy for trans desires — a metonymy which is thoroughly externalized and fetishized. Their desires are certainly validated, but there’s a queasy sense in which they’re validated in the context of, and through, their cuteness. Queerness is swaddled in kawaii, lovingly packaged for a saccharine rush. It starts to feel ingratiating to the point of condescension.

Of course, the point of pop culture is, in a lot of ways, to be ingratiating. Superman caters to little boys’ gratuitous fantasies of power; Twilight caters to tween girls’ gratuitous fantasies of safety and romance. Wandering Son caters to the queer communities’ fantasies of acceptance. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, fulfilling the dreams of a marginalized group has a political charge that’s certainly significantly braver and more needed than reassuring the privileged of their own wonderfulness a la Clark and Bella. But though I can appreciate what Takako is doing politically, aesthetically I much prefer something like Moto Hagio’s “Hanshin: Half-God,” with its much less comforting insights into children, gender, friendship, and desire.
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Not to end on a sour note…I did appreciate the skill with which Takako uses the comics medium to fulfill her remit. I was particularly struck by images like this:

So is that a boy or a girl?

Presumably, the question is a tip off. And, indeed, it’s Nitori dressed in girl’s clothes. But the genius of it is that if you didn’t know the character, there would be no way to tell. Drawing a cartoon boy in girl’s clothes is no different than drawing a cartoon girl in girl’s clothes. The image is the same.

I’ve been reading a little bit of Lacan, and in his essay on the mirror stage he argues (to the extent I can figure out what he’s talking about) for the primacy of the image as self. That is, the child, for Lacan, sees itself in the mirror, and is overjoyed; it misidentifies the beautiful thing is sees as its being. This misidentification echoes, or anticipates, the later creation, through language and social connections, of the ego, which is also a misidentification of the self.

The point is that Takako seems to be channeling some of that magic, that joy, that Lacan attributes to the child looking in the mirror. Nitori is that image of a girl. If that’s what he looks like, that’s what she is. The imaginary can trump the social. Which is an empowering message, even if I wish it weren’t maybe quite so demure or noseless.

Krazy as Muse: Walter Darby Bannard and the Comics of George Herriman

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Franklin Einspruch

Walter Darby Bannard is an abstract painter. He was a longtime friend of the critic Clement Greenberg and the painter Jules Olitski, and you could place him squarely in that camp, however you might label it: modernist, formalist, Abstract Expressionist. Conventional wisdom about this style of art has been rendered worthless for reasons beyond the scope of this essay, but it holds that it is concerned with pure essence of painting, excluding all content, referring only to its heroic self.

As a practitioner, it’s a different story. One doesn’t worry about purity. One casts one’s line in the creative waters and tries not to complain about the species of fish that comes up as long as it’s edible. The process entails more humility than heroism, more idle musing than grand inspiration. Bannard’s work took a significant turn two years ago when his line reeled in Krazy Kat.

Bannard calls his current painting method “brush/cut/fill.” He begins by stretching canvases on the floor and staining them with thinned acrylics. Next, he applies high volumes of paint dispersed in gel medium using large brushes, even brooms. While the paint is wet, he cuts into it with squeegees, opening spaces and exposing the stained backgrounds. Finally, he fills these spaces with foreground elements by various means, brushing, pouring, or slinging the paint as necessary.

“When I evolved this brush/cut/fill method a couple years ago, the forms started looking organic and figurative because the method just made it so,” says Bannard. “I was not comfortable with this, but I tried to go with it. I began to feel that I needed some kind of centering element, like a landscape painter has landscapes, just to narrow the range of forms. I got the idea to look at Krazy Kat again in the spring of 2009.” Bannard went on the Internet and to the library, printing out and photocopying George Herriman drawings that caught his attention. By June, Krazy Kat characters began to show up in the paintings, albeit in a highly abstracted form.

Why Krazy Kat? “I have loved Krazy Kat since I was a young kid, when it was current in the funnies. I love the drawing, the weird forms and landscapes, and the eccentric color. It was a kind of surrealism that got to me much more than ‘art’ surrealism ever did. In fact, cartoon techniques always interested me more than ‘art’ techniques, aside from heavy stuff like Impressionism, Cubism and some Abstract Expressionism. I love skills and all the drawing tricks and gimmicks and technical things. When I was a cartoonist in college I made a real study of them, when I should have been studying for courses.”

It proved effective. “I struggled somewhat with this new figuration in my painting, and Krazy Kat gave me something I found affecting and could use as a formal reference. There is surrealism that really works and is full of humor in Steinberg and Herriman and Miro and a few others, ‘literary’ without being annoyingly ‘meaningful,’ even in Tanguy, although he was a lousy painter.”

Such inspirations, however useful, have a finite lifespan. Bannard has moved on. “The Krazy Kat references seem to have faded away early last year and now I don’t look at them at all. The paintings have gotten more abstract, through no deliberate process, but once again, just by letting them go where they will go.”

All paintings are 2009,copyright Walter Darby Bannard, acrylic on canvas.

Gasoline Alley- Nostalgia for the Unknown

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Sean Michael Robinson

A String of Moment (Context)

Take the days, all of the days, and cut away all but what pleases you. Those moments of pleasure are strung together now, one by one, a trail of memory stretching uninterrupted from one year to the next. Together for the first time, they are new again.

Are you surprised at how much has been spent at the same task? Or did you cut all of that away, leaving only the odds and ends, a collection of punchlines for jokes never stated? There’s little variety or excitement in obligation. Just row after row of perfectly formed boxed filled with perfectly on-model cats gorging themselves on perfectly inked lasagna. Ack!

A Stranger Comes to Town

I have it on good authority that serial newspaper strips are not built in a day. Popeye, for instance, didn’t hitch his wagon to Thimble Theatre until more than nine years into its run. Gasoline Alley didn’t take quite that long to get going, at almost a year and a half into the strip. Allegedly it was Frank King’s editor who suggested the change, which seems ludicrous on its surface. “Let’s see—we’ve got this gag strip about men hanging about a garage discussing their flivvers and occasionally enacting a repair or two. How are we gonna make this appeal to women as well?” Well, why not add an orphan, and make him an infant for good measure?

It seems so crass, so misguidedly commercial, that it is both impossible and perfectly natural that it was really a demand from on-high. Ludicrous, but also functional. Previous to baby Skeezix’s arrival King’s observational abilities, and his eye for nuance, were primarily turned towards the ostensible subjects of the strip—the hardware, the gadgetry. The cars are lovingly discussed, examined, used and abused and eventually sold or discarded—another model on the horizon to discuss and dissect. But with Skeezix that great eye turned towards the people of the story, including this little infant who at first is so helpless, but who will eventually stand, walk, talk and play.

This innovation, this device of incredible power and utility that is the source of so much of the richness of the strip, the aging, seems to be, ultimately, an accident of Skeezix’s infancy.

Wading/Changes

I’ve read the first three volumes of Drawn + Quarterly’s Walt and Skeezix, collecting in total six years of the strip. I’ve watched Skeezix go from an infant in the arms of the confused and reluctant father Walt to seeing him run and play and talk with his newly-extended family—Walt, his wife Blossom, their maid and Skeezix’s caretaker Rachel, and their dog Pal. The deepness of this experience of shallow time, the slow accumulation of event, creates a very strange feeling of completeness, of reality, even through the melodrama, through the broad characterizations. The effect is that of reading a daily diary, dipping into the stream of days, wading, until it is a thing of itself, each one indistinguishable from the other.

History Without Intention

When Skeezix first arrived on Walt Wallet’s doorstop, what was the world like? America in 1919. Tell me. How did the air taste? How did the buildings look? How did people travel? How did they court? What did they wear? What did they swim in? What did they do for fun? Where were the hem lines, who were the heroes, and how was justice served?

The intimacy of scale encourages an inhabiting of the environment, an environment that would have largely been invisible to his readers at the time as it may have been largely familiar. After six years I feel as though I know this place in a way that would be impossible otherwise.

But what is the place that I know? Is it the unnamed town that Walt and his family inhabit? Is it all of small-town America? Or is it King’s imaginings of this place, his simplifications, his fictional yearnings and need for dramatic situation?

In 2041 will someone write a introspective retrospective on the recently unearthed T.J. Hooker, discussing all of the things they learned from the show about California in the 1980s?

Things I Learned From T.J. Hooker

In the early eighties motor vehicles were extremely dangerous. If one were to roll over, it will in a matter of seconds burst into flame and then burn.
In the early eighties policemen routinely fought vehicles in hand to vehicle combat, including but not limited to cars, trucks, forklifts, ¾ scale trains in amusement parks, planes and school buses. If any of these vehicles were to roll over on their backs in the course of this combat, they would very shortly burst into flame.
In the early eighties certain police officers had extrasensory powers of perception that enabled them to discern, almost immediately and with no externally visible evaluation or investigation, the true nature of the various criminals they confronted, and whether such criminals were good people set upon a bad path, or irredeemable scum that should be punished by all means possible.

To Unwrap and Enfold

Has there ever been a book series so well-loved, so nurtured and cared for and sensitively addressed, by its designer? Ware’s designs for his own books are virtuoso pastiches of styles long past and fallen from favor; his work on the Krazy and Ignatz series seems showy and ostentatious, not so much supporting the work within but wrapping it like a confectionist, and occasionally smothering it. But the Walt and Skeezix books use his great powers of pastiche and adaptation and put them solely in the service of the books themselves, the color and the scope of the scenery bridging the gap between the intimacy of scale of the dailies and the grandness and lush color of the Sundays.

Changes Again

When I bought these books, only a few years ago now, I was a married high school art teacher; I kept them on the lower shelf to the left of my drawing board, near the closet that we had to keep closed, so that our cat wouldn’t climb inside to nest in our belongings. The Walt and Skeezix volumes were her favorite books—she would play with the slim red ribbon that hangs from the binding of each volume. Now she’s dead, buried in the backyard, and I’m no longer married. Nor am I a high school teacher. As for the books, they were boxed up and put into the basement when I cleared out all my stuff out of the work room. Maybe I’ll sell them when I move out. I don’t think I would keep them now even if I could afford them—there’s just no place for them now.

So What Exactly Is It You Do? You Know, For A Living?

I read almost four year’s worth of these strips before it suddenly occurs to me—what does Walt do for a living? Does he have a job? If so, how does he get all of that time off for his cross-country jaunts? Maybe he’s independently wealthy—he’s certainly well-off enough to take care of his family and have plenty of dough left over for buying a new car, purchasing land or investing in one of Avery’s schemes. And yet he talks continually about money being tight, about having to save and manage and scrimp.

Is it that King felt the details of a profession would bog the strip down and leave it with less latitude for geographical change and impulsive spectacle? Is the grind of a profession a step too far toward realism and true monotony? Or perhaps King’s relentless observation had prepared him to thoroughly examine only a single man’s day to day work—his own.

It’s not immediate, but this realization fundamentally changes the way I perceive the strip. Or it could be the increasingly complex dramatic plot lines. But whatever the cause, the spell is broken. A friend of mine has her first child. I find the occasion surprisingly moving, greeting the news with a wave of elation and jealousy and confusion. I briefly consider buying her the first volume of Walt and Skeezix on remainder, and then think again, write a song instead.

Today

I did not draw. I did no work for money, had no goals, no expected outcomes. I played music, then biked to the house of a new friend, played more for sheer experience. Later we road down to the lake, wandered the park, climbed a concrete embankment, and swam in the chilly water until the sun went down around us.

It was blinding behind the trees. I didn’t think to draw it.