Cosmic muck

It was an amazing comic. A man has become a muck-monster, his humanity just a memory, seemingly limited to minor human-interest horror-adventures in a swamp, but somehow a magnet for society’s psychological ills, even attuned to cosmic insights, and eventually limping, looming into the central intersection of ultimate forces … Yeah, it’s great, man, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing was really someth — wait, you’re talking about 1973?

… to see something really scary?

Why whatever do you mean, “that’s fucked-up?”

There is, in so many of the cosmic-y comics I like so much, the notion of a “node,” or “critical turning point.” It can be an object, it can be a person, it can be an event or set of events. Maybe it’s Hegelian or Nietzschean or some other 19th-century German-ian – as in its operation, there’s reconciliation with the past, but also a distinct discontinuity; there’s redemption and transformation and realization, but also a dramatic necessity for blood-and-guts violent confrontation; there’s the sense of throwing off all the taboos to find both the depths of depravity and the chorus of angels all in the same moment. It’s idealism and excess, horror and exaltation. Plus boobies.

Go to hell and burn

During my senior year of college, I was 22, reading a story about a man drinking alone on his 50th birthday, visited by the ghosts of those he’d killed, presented with no particular interest or revelation concerning whether they’re “real” or not. I sit here now just after my 51st birthday and the story is as good today.