BPRD Hell on Earth # 4
Written by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi and, credits page be damned, Guy Davis
Art by Guy Davis and Dave Stewart
Printed by Dark Horse Comics
0.0
We should start off with something from Proust, a guy who wrote a long serialized novel that doesn't feature any zombies despite the fact that a good portion of it was written in the middle of the night by a writer who didn't leave his bedroom for almost three years (which is a funny thing to write down, since it's from Wikipedia and while it has a source will eventually become, like all things Wikipedia based, further and further from the truth where it is assumed to be in relation to as the digital library of the future continues its rejection of archival evidence and resides further in the realm of whomever is most dedicated to maintaining its web listing which will of course be the most obsessive fans who are ultimately unreliable and unwilling to admit their unreliability, and will in fact defend their unreliability with the same amount of vitriol someone like Proust--who wasn't a very nice person, understandably so as he was a isolated writer who never got the chance to find out that Alain de Botton was going to write a popular book about him, and all isolated artists who invest massive amounts of creative energy into a project while struggling with physical ailments and happen to be, since we should be thorough, homosexual men at the turn of the century which wasn't a very easy time to be a homosexual although admittedly not as bad as it might be to be a homosexual right now in certain Middle Eastern and African countries to say nothing of small Texan towns, it's no surprise he could be a bit testy, so unused to interaction as he was--might defend their unreliability, as fandom carries with it what seems to be a natural sense of entitlement and ownership, and when this entitlement and ownership is combined with this decades overwhelming sense of entitlement and ownership wherein things that are free and new are roundly criticized for their failings as if they are in any way responsible towards the people who use them freely, one ends up in a situation where a nexus of preening and whining is crossed with a sense that the preening and whining is also a responsibility which means you basically get something akin to this, which looks like a math equation but is actually just a repurposed symbolic logic argument found in a textbook that was sitting on the street after a particularly upsetting fire-
x + y = x2 + y2
-and as you can see the example could make sense as a math equation because any remedial algebra student could immediately be able to tell that x and y could both stand for 1 or 0 or -1 and possibly some other numbers as well but since we're talking about a remedial math student they wouldn't make that leap or would only imply it by possibly raising their eyebrows in a way that implied "...or I guess it could be something else?" and we're beyond the pale here a bit so let's just say this, that the x stands for our imaginary Proust fan's sense of ownership over Proust-related information and the y stands for what's being described as the current generation's sense of ownership over everything their fingers and eyes can help them find even if they don't pay for it (while Louis CK's examples regarding internet access on airplane flights is obviously the funniest and best known of this type of argument, a more controversial one that seems more relevant in today's news cycle might be the occasional complaints regarding what Facebook does with "your private information", as if Facebook owes any of its users anything beyond not actually coming into their users homes and fingering their dog against their dog's will, because Facebook is something that's free that people opt into becoming commodities and advertisements for and it isn't in any way necessary to anyone's life, it's just another free way to waste time and now, essentially, to convince them to spend some of the money they so often claim is "hard-earned" despite the evidence to the contrary which is that they still have to pay for their clothes and ye gods what awful clothes they choose to wear), and as we return to our little logic equation that actually is working quite well as a math equation, we find the odd little magic thing where the numbers aren't 1 or negative 1 or even zero, but are something bigger like maybe a 4 or a 12 or even a 23 which was always a personal favorite and now the math doesn't work that well, it doesn't work at all--but it does work that well--because we have the loop, where people who are too crazy about Proust make a full stop and are no longer able to be objective at all about Proust, because the importance of Proust has been exchanged for the importance of one's personal Proustian fandom and now we make a million little compromises that eventually result in a Wikipedia page on Proust that is constructed out of a million little compromises that will eventually end up on a bunch of term papers about Proust due to the rampant plagiarism in today's university system (a problem that is only truly problematic if one still holds onto the belief that a college education is anything more than a life studies find-a-hobby program with no provable connection to one's future except in those cases of the medical and legal profession, and even then, you know, immigrants) and all our information about Proust will basically result in something like the history of comics, which is basically a rough trade amalgamation of what Art Spiegelman thinks the history of comics is, since nobody can find any copies of those hideous magazine things that Jim Steranko published about the original appearances of King Cop of Cop-Chop Police Comics, although it's always possible that Craig Yoe's "i'll do some research as a little present for myself when I've reached my 1,000th book" tactics might win out over Art's "nobody liked what they were doing and everything they were doing was shit except for some kickass layouts and line weights, except for the underground guys, and while that might have been because they were all high as fuck and screwing hippie chicks I prefer to think it's because they were all One True Artists and holy shit what do you mean I can't smoke in here it's not like you're birthing infants or running marathons" school of thought, which just goes to show you that making friends with people who don't have many will get you a whole lot of waved hands and "something is better than nothing" despite the clear evidentiary retort that is "we had nothing up until now, and nothing actually was better than this something since this may now be the only something we ever get and when, exactly, did you decide that selling your own fucking soul meant everybody who didn't get in line with your craven My Friends Keep Trying mentality was the problem instead of somebody else, like maybe you my god those pants one could plotz", and that's pretty much why comics are a lot more like contemporary poetry than they are music, which brings it all back to Proust who wrote Literature with a capital L which also means Long As Fucking Fuck:
"The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, about the relations we have had with them, about our motive for some action, formulated by us in totally different terms, the lie as to what we are, whom we love, what we feel with regard to people who love us and believe that they have fashioned us in their own image because they keep on kissing us morning, noon, and night - that lie is one of the few things in the world that can open windows for us on to what is new and unknown, that can awaken in us sleeping senses for the contemplation of universes that otherwise we should never have known."
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BPRD Hell on Earth 4 starts with the reveal of a lie, the kind of lie that Proust describes as being the perfect kind because it helps--in this case, it helps that woman move through life without having to experience the shattering loss that she had to face all on her own, and she's able to move through life as more than just a broken, ghostly shell, which puts her in stark contrast to the man she eventually faces in this comic's final pages, she's able to move through life as some kind of a mother, and only a monstrous one because of the monstrous thing that rides near her, she's able to be a primal mother, an instinctual one, one who protects and runs and fights and feeds a child, and it's the lie that keeps it alive, a lie that says that her baby is not dead and buried in the ground, buried in the ground by her, alone without her husband to hold and grieve with her when the dirt went down and the meat--it's BPRD, and Killing Ground and the Scorched Earth Trilogy and the way Guy Davis draws Benjamin Daimio's jagged sawblade teeth face will never let you forget this, we are meat, our best hope is that the pilots of this flesh are something that live on--decayed and fell apart down in a hole in one of those caskets that never looks right and if you've never had to see a baby get buried than god hope you never will because you will never ever forget what that's like and you will never ever feel sorry for anyone again no matter what happens to them because there is nothing in the world that looks as wrong as those little caskets when they go down and the dirt starts laying down on them, and so fuck off if she told herself a lie and she found herself something else and she kept on living and she went crazy and the way she went crazy is a way that makes so much sense that you almost feel bad for her even though you know in your heart of hearts that you don't care about her the way you care about the men she stands against, because those men wormed their way into your heart long before you heard her story and there's not enough room for all of the tragedies and victims in the world this story is set in, and in the back of it all you remember that this world isn't ours anyway, it never was ours, it wasn't a world at all but a playpen for Mike Mignola's stories and ideas and creature features and although he did a fine job making that world a visual, visceral place, a place you wanted to live in, it was John Arcudi who figured out how to make it a human place, he figured out how to take that fictional universe of horror whose borders never extended beyond the fighting and the screaming and the horror and he set up windows inside it, windows where human beings and human lives could matter, which is why the BPRD series is the one that feels like it might be set somewhere where the reader lives and Hellboy feels like one that's set just outside of it, and that's why you get somewhere like this and see one of those little coffins and the disgust lessens because it's Hell, and there's a million little coffins, because there were babies on those planes that went down in the Salton Sea
back in the fifth issue of King Of Fear and those babies are monsters now and the only people left to care about this little coffin are the crazy lady in the woods who keeps feeding little towns to oblivion and a broken US soldier who has to hunt his wife with a sack full of AK-47's alongside a couple of strangers who have spent the last decade wearing this world's hell in gloves of horror dripping off the ends of their forearms and that's how you know that what a story has done has done it well because you've realized right there that you went there and said that the little deaths would have to be unsung so that the magnitude of death itself can find itself squared off against the opponents that matter, those strangers, and while that woman--her name is Nessa, and her son's name was Jaxon--may be the star of a movie that is sad and tragic and a little too familiar, she is not the star of the movie that matters in this world, and if she has to die so that Benjamin Daimio and Abe Sapian can walk out of those woods as heroes than that will have to be and that is a trade that is willingly made with a mind that is clear and understands what that says, because this is tragedy but it is also soap, and soap isn't about learning new names but watching the old ones do it for us, and the window that Arcudi opened inside Mignola's word can only work if we feel human, and so we do, but in a way that is like Daimio, a way that says we can only pretend to be sorry so that the rest feel comfortable when sitting and talking at campfires, because we are not sorry anymore after what has been seen and what has been done and what must be done in the days to come.
2
The other thing that Proust is referring to in his statement is a more authorial thing, he's saying that writing openly about homosexuality--which is part of what he was doing in the multiple volumes of his gigantic book, and why all of the women have men's names with vowels on the end of them--opened up a world to him where he was not only truly free as an author but truly free as a human being, able to punch through the world he lived in and towards the world that he and everyone else like him deserved, which is also oddly mirrored in the freedom that Guy Davis has to design massive, drill-like vaginal worms that eat people and forests and why--despite their failings as a publisher in terms of meeting release dates or not publishing deeply shitty licensed comics or keeping things available after people have decided that they might possibly want them--Dark Horse is ultimately a better thing for the world, because it provides a home where people like Mignola are left to create an empire that can sustain an artist like Davis, who is so incredibly gifted and consistently interesting that the fact that his career exists and operates the way it does works as a constant, unchanging reminder that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, you can actually work in comics and be somewhat rewarded for being talented even while everyone around you builds gigantic sandcastles of buck-passing blame-throwing huckster-promoting ass-kissing burger-whoring here's another piece of shit won't you please fucking buy it so the next piece of shit might actually be something that I'm not ashamed to send copies of to the few friends I have who actually tell the truth to me and question why I'm wasting my fucking life stacking corny nonsense into a statue called my corny nonsense hacked out legacy, and that window, that window of opportunity that split open a part of our world and created a place where John Arcudi might be rescued (despite his occasional relapse into Aliens comics) from an industry that seemed to decide the guy who wrote a comic that made a million dollar Jim Carrey movie didn't have a place at a company that puts 3rd string Nightwing fill-ins on 1st tier t-shirt characters, and Guy Davis could be given a forever free pass, that window was originally only opened out of Mignola's desire to do something that looked "cool" that belonged to him and him alone (that thing being Hellboy) and that thing divided and procreated and gave birth, making Mignola a teller of his own kind of perfect lie, a lie that said he had nothing to bring but a drawing and maybe a story but a story that he would need help with, and he did, and then this, and one has to admit, that even though the model for the franchise was supposedly what Marvel used to do (but is obviously more like what Mignola misremembers or wishes Marvel used to do), this never would've happened there or any place like it, because this is a story that is untouched by the grubby hands of today's modern comics editors, almost all of whom are failed or wanna-be comics writers working with failed or wanna-be screenwriters, a group of people who can only be guaranteed to agree on one thing, which is that they all really hate people who know how to draw.
3
Which, though it doesn't really work as a segue-way into Daryl, it does bring up the very notion of Davis as cruelly disgusting monster designing artiste, of which Daryl and the (one assumes) soon to return jaguar spirit are excellent representations of, even more so per the artist's off hand mention back in the days of the Universal Machine that the character "worked out from the first series of sketches" which lends to the ever popular (because it's a really stupid fucking thing to say, which is why you always know you're talking to somebody really fucking stupid when they say it) kind of remark about Davis being a weird guy into weird things because he's able to come up with stuff that's kind of gross or scary or just straight up unusual, and Daryl, who is a wendigo with what looks like a bib made out of blood and gore matted into his white fur (because he eats living things, like people, and your mother, she's people) is as weird and gross and scary as drawings of things can get, even more so when you first met him back in Universal Machine and you couldn't help but feel sorry for him when they took him back and put him in a cell and said you're never getting out, and you'll never die, and this is the rest of your life for all eternity and the only thing we can say is "sorry", and yeah, if you're stupid, the immediate response is probably going to be something like "hey, the guy who made this weird strange thing must be weird and strange", because that's a lot more comforting than sitting back and admitting that The Incredibles was right, and some people are special and some people aren't special, and you can spend the rest of your life believing that isn't so and that everybody is the same except for hard work and luck, but the truth is that no, loving something doesn't mean that you should make it or could or would even be good at it, and while it's nice and all that the Internet broke down some barriers of entrance, most of us will never sketch a Daryl in black and white and end up creating something special, but at the end of the day, that can be okay too, because if you clean yourself up and find somebody to fucking bang with on a regular to semi-regular basis, you'll find out that creating art and creating comics and writing screenplays and running marathons and doing standing backflips is nowhere near as fucking sweet as sex sex sex sexxxy sex all the time, no matter how many pictures of pre-release Sinestro Geoff Johns might get on his phone, and anyone who tries to tell you different, or even tries to tell you that there's a contest, holy shit kid do not believe them because like wow, big time liar, big time liar.
4
"It seemed, in the end, that all this world, with all its inhabitants, both the strong and the weak, with all their habitations, whether beggars' shelters or gilded palaces, at this hour of twilight resembled a fantastic, enchanted vision, a dream which in its turn would instantly vanish and waste away as vapor into the dark blue heaven. Suddenly a strange thought began to stir inside me. I started and my heart was as if flooded in that instant by a hot jet of blood which had suddenly boiled up from the influx of a mighty sensation which until now had been unknown to me. In that moment, as it were, I understood something which up to that time had only stirred in me, but had not as yet been fully comprehended. I saw clearly, as it were, into something new, a completely new world, unfamiliar to me and known only through some obscure hearsay, through a certain mysterious sign. I think that in those precious minutes, my real existence began..." Dostoevsky, a dead guy who wrote books when he wasn't gambling
One of the primary keys in the way the BPRD sinks into the consciousness of the reader isn't in any of its more recognizable characters or events, but in the way that a character like Tom Manning, the rarely seen, rarely mentioned Director of the organization that gives the title its name seamlessly transitions from the on-panel fictional world he truly inhabits and the maintenance memory of the reader's brain, where the stories live after the reader's initial ingestion of the stories--it's a nefarious trick that Mignola and Arcudi devised, trusting in the way American's have so completed rejected a factual relationship with the very real bureaucracies that govern their world (hence why a Tea Partier might decry "welfare" completely except for when something like social security, disability, or farm subsidies are questioned, because they fail to see the connection, because for them, like the staunch liberal that believes Dick Cheney's pendulous old man ballskin tightened around his testicles everytime he pushed for more no-option ex-industrial children to be gorged upon in the ravenous maw of two wars that pumped up his income, as if the death of teenagers was the primary goal, doesn't exist, the tea party doesn't see social security as welfare and Cheney didn't see his Blackwater options as blood money and the liberal's brain doesn't process human life as fiscal equation the way our former vp so often did, connections, empathy, the ability to suspend one's brain and understand the other so rife with these equations, so toxic in its constant screaming death, death, death, the same way one man's relaxing fuck the world and turn up the Yes joint is another man's extended middle finger to the blood drenched tale of Miss Sinola which is quoted here for purposes of disgust "The police took her and raped her for three days. Eight policemen, over and over...by the time they got her to the asylum, Miss Sinola's buttocks bore the handprints of many men. There were bite marks all over her breasts.", and it is the fallout from these revulsions that the hand squirts up like one in a cliched restaurant when the cliched waiter asks if you want more, because everyone always wants more, and the hand up and the head shake and the voice, croaking, enough, enough, i must take no more and i need much less and i can no longer bear it i no longer can bear any of it, i say to you ha ha i will make a joke of it, i will not give up like the boy in dead poets society, i will look my father in the face and i will be the doctor he asks me to be ten years you say, i can do ten years of obedience on my head, just no more of this news and these stories and these equations and these people, no more of their realities of horror i must have fiction, i will eat my fill of death in stories at home, and then these things escape and evacuate us as we retreat, like turtles, like ostriches, and say that it is self-care and self-medication when all we have done is the same as the boy, we have killed ourselves alive, and the place where we understand the difference is gone and dead forever and we are left with something that is even less human, before we at least had rage, now you have what, a blog), trusting that the place where Tom Manning lives when he doesn't appear in the comic becomes intrinsically mixed with the place that all UN talking, White House visiting, gimme-some-of-those-appropriated-fund type government employees live, inside a part of the brain that is rarely visited, to the point where Manning's name has to be labeled as being one relating to a fictional person every time it comes up--and it's that area, that place that Manning lives which can be labeled as the new world old Fyoder is referring to: it's the zone of complete fiction that's been endowed with actual life, first witnessed by its creators and now managed by the individual reader (only in part is it connected by the title of the mini-series this issue, only in part but somehow whole), they were the travelers, and while they found this new world, what has been done is infection, a viral mode of storytelling, one where our memory, the core of it that we do not confront unless the face of past failings (because that is what shapes us, change is pain, change is failure, no one remembers the average sandwich), that core memory turns the wheels of the Tom Manning's on its own steam, forever and forever and forever.
5
Blanchot described the true experience of Proust as being one of a "fragment of time in a pure state", and it is in spite, actual spite, visceral, delightful, pointless, infantile, wet drenched down the thighs spite that his words are used in reference again, to the pages of BPRD King of Fear, where a character (the firestarter, the twisted firestarter, fear addicted, danger illustrated) happens upon pictures of the future, pictures that the pages of Hell On Earth New World constantly recognize and reinforce by the maybe-a-little-heavy-handed-this-time mention of Carlo Giarocco, who is no longer a dead burned out ashen carcass, but a living fictional character whose name is printed in bold letters to insure that the reader understands she means something even if they can't remember one panel from King Of Fear, which is understandable enough considering that the one panel was surrounded by pictures of fucked up things, exciting things, and changes, one of which is most noticeable by absence, the status of our friend and compatriot Johann Krauss, the defacto funny character and unfortunately enough the target of Panya, who never really has panned out as a bonus for the BPRD and may no actively be seeking to do them ill, even though those pictures, of the future and of now and of the past, as all time is one, according to the man who seems to have been truthful when he said he would never tell a lie (he was killed even then), showcase Panya as some kind of stern and embittered member of the team, but it is in Panya, the living embodiment of forever, that Johann's torture lies--he is the one who she no longer hides her machinations from, the sad victim of the cruel villainess who is witness to her evil, the Elijah Wood to Macaulay Culkin, with no David Morse on the horizon, and it is her fundamental disconnect from kindness (the trick was played early, when her only request was for a "little kitty", but she is not your sweet old grandmother, she's over a thousand years old and has played games with the rest of the mortals for them all) that renders her the antithesis of Proust's fragment, she is that thing without that purity, she is a black thing, a diseased thing, and as she grows stronger, so does her cruelty--spreading, migrating, expanding--she is the fragment of time as destructive force, and Johann is the object of her initial assault, the first victim of what she no longer recognizes as cruelty, the eyeless man, more fragile than he realizes, who finds himself helpless in his desire for a life he can only glimpse in the strands of hope that are mirrored in the circulatory system he fantasizes for himself.
0.1
-Tucker Stone, 2010
Man, I love everything in the Magnola Universe which isn't Hellboy so much it's wierd how damn dull I find the King Bean of Apocalypse Mountain. He's boring, and making him Rightefule Kinge of Englande is not an improvement. He'd just defuse Armageddon by pulling off his horns again, the killjoy...
Posted by: AComment | 2010.11.16 at 07:41
Anyway, you seem struck with this latest. Difference from the earlier 3, or just the overflowing aggregate?
Posted by: AComment | 2010.11.16 at 08:30
Oh, and I don't think that statement actually works with -1
-1 + -1 = -2
-1^2 + -1^2 = 2
Posted by: AComment | 2010.11.16 at 14:52
It's a circle centered at (1/2,1/2).
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x%2By%3Dx%5E2%2By%5E2
Posted by: kag | 2010.11.21 at 13:49