#I sort of want to write a part 2 perhaps right after Mr. Spider

[too-much-tma-stuff]

For the fanfic requests—this isn't a ship, but if you don't mind kidfics, could you do Michael (pre-distorition) babysitting Jon as a kid? I got that scenario rooted in my brain because I apparently want sadness. The realization that someone else, someone Jon cared about got eaten by another DOOR would have probably wrecked him...and me. Feel free to ignore of this isn't your thing tho.

Michael liked kids, they were chaotic and unpredictable and normally he hated that! He himself was a bit timid and quiet, but he liked the chaos, they pushed him out of his comfort zone. They were funny about it too, and he could usually assume they meant no harm so the chaos could be a refreshing change from his usually rather ordered life. Not always, some kids could be cruel, but he could choose not to go back to those families when they weren't his own.

Baby-sitting had made the obvious choice as a job during university then. It wasn't the highest paying but it could be easily fit in around lectures and studying and it was really the brake he needed to keep him from going mad. He rather thought he found the release his peers found through partying through minding the good natured and frankly adorable chaos of children.

Of course his most common clients were parents looking for a date night away from the kids so he was rather surprised when he got a call from a frazzled sounding older woman. He had barely gotten out a greeting when she started to unload on him talking about her dead son and daughter-in-law and the son they had left behind. She took pains to clarify that he really was a good child, bright as anything! Before she exploded with how much trouble he was!

"He's curious about everything! He never listens about anything! Just the other day I told him not to touch the electrical outlet that broke and I way trying to keep an eye on him, but I only have two and there are other things in the world! I swear I only turned my back for a moment but when I turn back around he's standing there with a burned hand and that boy, he looked and me and said, he said "You're right. That did hurt.

"At least he didn't have the cheek to complain about it when he'd done it to himself! I just need another pair of eyes so I can close mine for a second! It feels like I haven't slept at all since he got here and I'm to old to be raising a child on my own!"

"Alright, that's no trouble at all ma'am. When would you like me to come in? We'll do a few trial nights and if we get along I wouldn't mind having a consistent schedule of nights I watch him so you can have some time off," Michael assured quickly while she was taking a breath.

"Oh thank goodness," She sighed, and Michael found himself helping the boy. This was clearly hard on the woman, but no doubt it was very hard on the child as well, he could use a friend. "Could you come tomorrow?"

"Yes, but lets talk about other things as well first. Does Jon have any allergies? What rate would you find acceptable?"

It took a little haggling to get to a hourly rate they could both agree on but it helped that she could admit Jon wasn't the easiest child. Some parents who thought too highly of their children seemed to think he should be paying them for the privilege of spending time with their children.

So on Wednesday he went to the address the woman provided where he was greeted by a well dressed woman. Some hair had come loose from her bun and there was a stain on her shirt which he got the feeling was as messy as she was willing to let anyone see her. Certainly more then she would have if it weren't for the grave-faced dark haired boy hovering behind her and staring at Michael.

"Hello. I'll give you a tour of the house and show you were everything is and then leave you to it. My number is on the fridge but do try not to call me unless something goes very wrong." She said seriously as she beckoned him in. The tour was brisk, and he just had to follow when he would have at least like to introduced himself to Jon first. He followed behind them, watching and not blinking as often as most children did, slightly unnerving but not unexpected.

"Alright, that's all you need to know I think. Jon try not to scare the nice young man away," She said with a thin smile to indicate it was supposed to be a joke. Inside Michael had to wince because he was rather sure Jon was too young to understand such subtleties of expression.

He watched her leave and then Jon looked back at him, solemn and wary, his eyes to old for his age. The poor kid had been through a lot. "Hello Jon, I'm Michael," he said, extending his hand with a friendly smile. Jon examined him again before reaching out and taking Michael's slim hand giving it a formal shake. Michael hoped that with time he would get to the point of being able to hug the boy and have him acting like a normal child. But not yet.

"Why don't you show me your favourite books?" Michael asked and watched as Jon's face light up even as he tried to suppress it. Michael didn't try to repress his answering smile.

When Mrs. Sims returned Michael was sitting on Jon's floor, long legs folded under him, surrounded by little piles of books as Jon babbled about the next book on the shelf. Michael couldn't possibly remember all of them, but what was important was the unrestrained joy on Jon's face. It hurt to see it shutter again when his grandmother made a comment about it being irritating.

"I don't mind," He promised immediately and firmly reviving a ghost of Jon's previous smile and making the grandmother look slightly chagrined. "I'll be happy to come back."

The grandmother being a non-nonsense sort of woman nodded, said they'd see him again same time next week, and shoved the money they'd agreed on into his hand. He saw himself out, and didn't notice that Jon was following him until he felt a small hand tug on his jacket, turning around obligingly to find a book being shoved into his stomach.

"I want to know what you think," Jon said before skittering back upstairs to get ready for bed. Michael promised himself that no matter how busy his course schedule was he would find time to read the book before he came back to see Jon again.

Part 2: here

#michael shelley #jonathan sims #the magnus archives #kid!jon #fanfiction request #I really enjoyed this #I sort of want to write a part 2 perhaps right after Mr. Spider #Let me know if you want that

[nazghoulz]

The Definitive Ranking of Richard Armitage’s Acting Roles, Rated Exclusively by How Hot I Find Him In Screengrabs

Richard Armitage. As a diehard Thorin Oakenshield fan I certainly have a complicated relationship with him, mainly because I can never decide if I find him inherently hot or not. On the one hand, I’m a hardcore Thorinfucker. On the other hand my gay ass sees a headshot of Mr. Armitage and I’m just like, “Oh, no thank you.” So in order to set myself to rights, I have gone through Mr. Armitage’s IMDB and done a definitive ranking of all his 44 screen roles on there, based completely and arbitrarily on how hot I find him in screenshots. (Thank you to all the hardcore Armitage Fuckers who keep wordpress blogs with screengrabs of his various cameos and bit parts; my respect for you cannot be put into words.) I haven’t seen like 90% of these properties, and I didn’t bother to research them, so these are mainly just gut first impressions. I hope this helps anyone else out there who as confused by him as I am. Enjoy ?

44. Father Quart in The Seville Communion/The Man From Rome (2020)   — ??/10

I don’t think this movie is out yet? Idk I haven’t been able to find any stills of him, let alone much information about the movie itself. It’s listed on his IMDB though! And apparently he’s playing a priest...which could be extremely  👁️👁️ if done correctly.

43. Unnamed Naboo Fighter Pilot in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) — 1/10

OH SWEETIE NO!!!!! This physically pains me to say this, because I unironically love this terrible movie with my whole heart, but unlike a yung Kiera Knightley’s role (pictured front and center) as Padmé’s loyal body double Sabé, this is probably a cameo that we would all like to forget about. The only thing Richard has to offer is this unfortunate turtle-faced realness. This helmet does him no favors.

42. Man in Pub in Boon (1992) — 2/10

As far as I know this is Richard’s first acting credit on IMDB, and he for sure is working the background extra energy. Go on girl give us nothing! He does have a decent backside though, and it’s better than looking at unfortunate turtle face, so I give this one a 2.

41. Paul Andrews in Between the Sheets (2003)  — 2/10

I can’t really articulate why, but I absolutely despise every screenshot I see of Richard Armitage in this role. He is completely unhot, and not even in a way I can laugh at. He takes no advantage of his assets, he has no charisma, no magnetism, no nothing. This is Richard Armitage at his most white bread rando, in a way that makes me actively dislike him. Pbbbbttth. Bad. Throw this whole thing away.

40. Craig Parker in Casualty (2001)  — 2/10

I don’t know, it’s like the perfect storm of the gelled 2001 hair, the terrible quarter? eighth? zip sweater, and overall, er, skeezy vibes that he gives off that makes him particularly unhot in this role. Perhaps not as reprehensible as Unhot Paul, but still. I think the sheer boringness of this has to count for something. Blech.

39. Dr. Tom Steele in Doctors (2001) — 2.5/10

He honestly looks like a villain in an early season of Alias, which... well. Quentin Tarantino was cast as a bit-part villain in Alias season one, so take that as you will. But at least he’s compelling here, which is why he gets half a point over Unhot Paul.

38. Steven in Frozen (2005) — 3/10

Get some rest, tall child! You can’t keep burning the candle at both ends! Also short haircuts do nothing for you, Richard. Styled like this, they just serve to make you look sort of like a sleaze.

37. Peter Macduff in ShakespeaRe-Told (2005) — 3/10

He honestly looks like he could be a guest star in Friends in this one, where he’s a guy named Jason who Ross meets in Central Perk where they find they have a lot in common. Ross introduces Jason to Monica and they really hit it off, but it all comes crashing down because while Jason is sensitive and writes poetry, he also thinks that the Earth is flat. The rest of the episode is trying to get rid of Jason while he becomes increasingly obsessed with Monica, and Ross cannot quite let go trying to prove to Jason that the world is round. Anyway. Macduff Flat Earth Jason isn’t quite as unhot as Unhot Paul, but he’s pretty much on the same level as Tired Steven.

36. Phillip Durrant in Marple (2007) — 3/10

Something about him in this image really makes me want to punch him in the face. It’s huge Peter Parker in Spider-Man 3 energy.

35. Young Claude Monet in The Impressionists (2006) — 3.5/10

I’M LOSING MY FUCKING MIND THE FIRST THING THAT COMES TO MIND IS !!! CARNIVAL BARKER !!!!! STEP RIGHT UP TO SEE THE WORST GOATEE IN HISTORY !!! I was actually going to give Yung Claude a 2 but the more I look at this terrible beard the more impressed I am with the boldness of this look, so I had to bump it up to 3.5. Idk. Just look at this. It’s incredible, especially knowing what kind of beard Armitage can grow himself !!!!!!!!

34. Heinz Kruger in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) — 3.5/10

This is definitely the best looking he’s been so far in this list, but he’s a Nazi in this one, which makes him unsexy on principle. But do I feel a little something when he gets pinned to the ground by jacked Chris Evans with the above look on his face right before he swallows his cyanide pill? Can neither confirm nor deny. They are also truly playing into his inherently sinister bone structure, so I can respect that.

33. Percy Courtney in Miss Marie Lloyd (2007) — 4/10

Even including Yung Claude and Nazi Heinz, I think Nothing Percy is probably the weakest of Richard’s period looks, mostly because he looks like, well, nothing. He certainly doesn’t pull off that top hat like he does in North and South, and the secret to that might be the lack of sideburns. In this one he just sort of reminds me of the asshole fiance in Titanic.

32. Philip Turner in The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (2005) — 4/10

He’s really giving off bargain bin Hugh Jackman as Wolverine vibes here, if Logan’s energy was more “murderer in a Hallmark channel mystery” than “superhero.” Though, given what sort of show this is, that may be the point! Idk, this isn’t the worst. At least he has a decent haircut in this one. Still, I feel absolutely nothing when I look at him. He’s simply royalty-free stock music given human form.

31. Dr. Alec Track in The Golden Hour (2005) — 4.5/10

I could see how this conceivably be sexy in this role, but to be honest, he’s still nothing to me, sorry. He gets some extra points because he obviously worked out for this role and the hard nips through a white undershirt is a commendable look. I whole-heartedly respect Doctor Alec’s thottitude.

30. Daryl in Staged (1999) — 4.5/10

Speaking of thottitude!!!!! This is one cream-faced business boy that I can certainly get into! He looks like the love interest in a pre-Hayes code homoerotic thriller from the early 1930s. I’m sure that’s just because of the lighting and general staging of this production, but hm... demure. Love it.

29. Capt. Ian Macalwain in Ultimate Force (2003) — 4.5/10

Well, he looks like a character from M*A*S*H but with no charisma, or like an extra in The Great Escape who snitches on Steve McQueen to the Nazis. Also in half the pictures I find of him from this he’s wearing this terrible beret, which I know he can pull off because of a role that ranks much higher on this list. Whoever styles this man really needs to pay attention to what sort of headgear they put on him.  

28. Epiphanes in Cleopatra (1999) — 5/10

Speaking of headgear, you know what?? He doesn’t look awful here. A solid 5, perfectly acceptable. I think the helmet does a lot to accentuate the sharpness of his face in this extremely bit part, though the eyeliner definitely also helps as well.

27. John Mulligan in Moving On (2009) — 5/10

Mr. Armitage’s characters can really have potential when a production’s stylist allows him to wear scruff (IN A WAY THAT LOOKS NATURAL, LOOKING AT YOU YUNG CLAUDE). However, as it is with John Mulligan in Moving On here, he just sort of looks like a rando? They’re not playing into the inherent angularity of his face, which for me makes it sort of confusing regarding what sort of emotion I’m supposed to feel while looking at him. As it is, I’m just like, “Yup, that sure is a regular human man, right there.”

26. Smug Man at Party in This Year’s Love (1999) — 5/10

This is the face of a man who less smug and is more DRUNK OUT OF HIS MIND !!!! Idk. He’s cute here, I’ll admit. That’s all I have to say about it.

25. John Standring in Sparkhouse (2002) — 5.5/10

I enjoy the bold choice of giving him wavy hair in this one, but I’m not sure he quite pulls it off. It doesn’t look bad, per se, just... he looks completely nonthreatening. Which I guess could be someone’s thing, but not mine. He honestly looks like a knock-off Will Graham, sans dogs and trauma.

24. Gary in Into the Storm (2014) — 5.5/10

I think the thing that really gets me is that this character’s name is Gary. Who on God’s green Earth looks at Richard Armitage and goes, “Ah yes, you do look like a Gary” ??? I don’t think I know of a single non-American Gary, especially since the name Gary only got popularized after Gary Cooper renamed himself after his hometown of Gary, Indiana!!!! It wasn’t really a name for human men before that!!!! I want to live in the alternate universe where Frank Cooper was originally from Albuquerque and named himself Albuquerque Cooper and this character is named as such. Gary. Really.

23. King Oleron in Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) — 5.5/10

I truly hate how much his facial expressions in these stills remind me of Thorin, considering how bad he looks otherwise. Like his face his fine, I guess, especially since this is the first instance of his full beard. I’m charmed despite myself! Take me to wonderland, O King.

22. Adam Price in The Stranger (2020) — 5.5/10

For as compelling as people call this series, Richard here isn’t very much so imo. But despite my utter lack of interest, he doesn’t look bad per se. He just sort of has that stubbly white man blandness that colors a lot of his more recent roles. Like, at least his bad mid-2000′s styling had character. This is just the visual representation of a vague handwave.

21. Harry Kennedy in The Vicar of Dibley (2006)  — 6/10

Gosh... floppy hair, cute sweaters... he also seems to be smiling a lot in this one, which is nice! The only thing I have to complain about is that he looks very much like if Bradley Cooper and Hugh Jackman circa Kate and Leopold had a baby, which may not necessarily be too much of a bad thing, but I can’t unsee it.

20. Sgt. John Porter in Strike Back (2010)  — 6/10

Ah, back to poorly suited haircuts. At least he’s a little bit gritter and grimier than we’ve seen so far, and I will say Richard Armitage does look good covered in dirt, as we will see later on. Also he’s got biceps in this one, which, hell yeah.

19.  Ricky Deeming in Inspector George Gently (2007)  — 6/10

I’M HAVING THE HARDEST TIME RIGHT NOW RANKING THIS ONE BC OF THIS INCREDIBLE LITTLE WHITE SCARF-RIDING LEATHERS COMBO!!! WHICH ABSOLUTE GENIUS DECIDED THIS!!!! EVERY SCREENSHOT OF HIM IN HIS EPISODE HAS THIS!!! Part of me just wants to give Stylish Ricky a big fat 10 because I’m gay and adore the sheer audacity of this look, but I still have to be fair and rank his overall aura accordingly. I think he’s a handsome extremely gay-coded motorcycle lad in this one, but he doesn’t exactly rev my engine, so to speak.

18. Lucas North in Spooks (2008) — 6/10

The tattoos really spice this one up. Luke could have been plagued by the problems inherent in Regular Mulligan’s Moving On styling, but this guy has an edge to him. He has a good haircut and 5′ o’clock shadow, which is something I’ve figured out is integral to Armitage Hotness. I feel like if I got to know this character I could possibly find him sexy.

17. Raymond de Merville in Pilgrimage (2017) — 6.5/10

Speaking of bad haircuts, this one is his undoing. This is almost the perfect balance between full beard and short haircut, which is the only way a short haircut works on this man, but they ruined it with this one! They gave him a bad bowl fade, which completely undoes any inherent sexiness that comes with being a knight. Not even the fact that he’s covered in dirt can turn me on at this point, ugh. Guy of Gisbourne he is not!!!

16. Tom Calahan in Brain on Fire (2016) — 6.5/10

Oh hell yes, WELCUM 2 DA DILF ZONE!!! I’m not super duper thrilled with the looks I’ve seen from this movie, but he seems scruffy and comfy in a way that is slightly refreshing for ol’ Richard. This is certainly the best of his normie looks so far. I’m just sad it took them 24 years to figure out how to style him properly for sympathetic roles in a contemporary setting.

15. James in My Zoe (2019) — 6.5/10

It’s another DILF look, slightly edgier than Comfy Tom but none of that sexy tired energy that we’ll see from Ocean’s 8. I don’t know !! Jimmy here doesn’t exactly thrill me, I think I prefer Tom’s flannels to this sharp bomber jacket/white t shirt combo seen here. Oh well! I am extremely  👀 👀 👀 👀 👀 that he can just casually palm that soccer ball like that.

14. John Thornton in North & South (2004)  — 7/10

Alright. I’m sorry. I just don’t find him that hot in this role. Like yeah, he’s got the scruff and the sideburns that work to his advantage, and the setting does make this character inherently sexy, but in some screenshots he screams too much of an aforementioned Kate and Leopold (the best Meg Ryan movie, imo) era Hugh Jackman to me. And if I was particularly into that, I would just watch Kate and Leopold again. I will admit, however, that this rating could be subject to change if I actually took the time to watch this show.

13. Chop in Urban and the Shed Crew (2015) — 7/10

...I’M??? INTO IT??? He’s dirty and scruffy but also has kind eyes.... I feel like this is knock off Will Graham who has blossomed into his own. His run down, grime-covered own. He’s back edging into Bradley Cooper territory, but somehow it works for him in this one. Like, I’m 89% sure it’s the DILF vibes I’ve been getting from the other screengrabs I’ve seen of this role, and this particular flavor of DILF is way sexier than Jimmy or Comfy Tom.

12. Francis Dolarhyde in Hannibal (2015) — 7/10

His Caesar cut doesn’t bother me quite so much in this, probably because he is pretty explicitly playing a villain in a series that doesn’t have any basis in reality. A villain who is ripped, and who can effortlessly throw real Will Graham around. Armitage uses his inherent sinisterness to great effect as the Red Dragon, which is good actually! I think a lot of how hot he is in any particular role really depends on whether the styling allows him to play to his strengths...idk! I’m not usually a huge fan of clean shaven Armitage, but it works for Frank here.

11. Daniel Miller in Berlin Station (2016) — 7/10

As much as I adore this particular look (beard + fade + green army jacket), I have to compromise and give Danny a 7/10 because it seems like the first season they styled him in usual stubbly white man blandness. I’d say screengrabs from s1 are a solid 6, while this might be an 8, so the average is a 7. That’s all I have to say about this!

10. Claude Becker in Ocean’s 8 (2018) — 7.5/10

!!!!! I love him in this role, I about had a conniption in the theater because I absolutely was not expecting him!! He looks perfectly ruffled and scruffy, edgier than either Comfy Tom or Jimmy, which I’m very into. That plus his two borzois (objectively the best looking dogs on the planet) really put Old Claude over the top for me. Thank you, thank you Hollywood stylists for finally figuring out what to do with him for roles as a Normal Man.

9. Richard Hall in The Lodge (2019) — 7.5/10

I don’t know anything about this movie, but it seems pretty spooky, which I’m into. I think Richard is well suited for this sort of horror/thriller role, where his angular features can play into the overall vibe rather than some hapless stylist trying to work around them. He looks like another cozy DILF here but with a bite to him, like someone who would do anything to protect his brood. I mean, he’s teaching this child to shoot! But idk, he also has the potential for Jack Nicholson in The Shining energy, which I also could be....hm... into. Idk. Is this on Netflix??

8. Lee in Cold Feet (2003) — 7.5/10

FUN!!! FLIRTY!!!! OTTER VIBES!!!!! I LOVE THIS, he seems so goofy here, and Armitage doesn’t usually pull off goofy that well! I’ve giggled at literally every screenshot I could find from the four episodes he was in this show, he seems like a real himbo. I’m a huge fan, even if it comes at the cost of dehydration abs.

7. William Chatford in Malice Aforethought (2005) — 7.5/10

Hoo hoo HOO DO NOT JUDGE ME!!!!!!! Maybe it’s just because I’ve been watching the new season of The Alienist and the new dark and gritty HBO reboot of Perry Mason back to back, but sue me, I love the bold choice they made with giving him a pencil moustache here. He looks like a hot Howard Hughes; if cream-faced business boy Daryl from Staged is the young ingenue in the pre-Hayes Code thriller I cast him in, Bill here is the sexy antagonist. I desperately want to hear a perfect Transatlantic accent coming out out of that  mouth. This look fucks and I’m sticking to that no matter what.

6. Trevor Belmont in Castlevania (2017) — 8/10

Ah, yes, speaking of king himbos... do me a favor and look me right in the eye and tell me that you wouldn’t fuck Trevor Belmont. You can’t, can you?????? At least 80% of Richard Armitage’s inherent hotness stems from his voice, and you can’t tell me there isn’t anything sexier than thinking about letting that guy loose in a recording studio and letting him say fuck. Look, Trevor may be drawn that way, but it’s the absolute stupidity coming out of his mouth in that sweet baritone that makes me want to be raw-dogged by 100% pure Romanian beef.

5. Dr. Scott White in Sleepwalker (2017) — 8/10 

Much like I had intimated when talking about Hot Danny in Berlin Station, this is Peak contemporary normie Richard Armitage styling. I honestly think The Hobbit either awakened something in him, or casting directors finally figured out he looks way good with a full beard. His crew cut even works with his whole look, which is a miracle!!!! I think he should be contractually obligated to have a full beard in all of his future roles, but that’s just me.

4. Guy of Gisbourne in Robin Hood (2006) — 8.5/10

I honestly can’t believe I’m ranking Guy so far up here, but honestly, THIS RULES!!!!!! THIS FUCKS!!!!!!!!! Which is incredible due to Guy’s lack of beard, but I’m weirdly okay with it? Like sure, he looks like he’d probably call me a slur in front of his shitty friends, but he also looks like he could tenderly pound me into the mattress in a way that would have me questioning my commitment to the “no emotions” clause of our clandestine no-strings-attached sex agreement. Anyway. Guy of Gisbourne if you see this im free thursday night. please message me back if you’re free thursday night when i am fr

3. Angus in Macbeth (1999) — 8.5/10

HHHNGHGNHNGHGN HE’S SO HOT.....!!! HE’S SO HOT!!!!! Leather jacket!!! Scruff!! Dirt!!!! Flattering beret!!!!! He’s so hot, and the worst part about this is that this was filmed in NINETEEN NINETY NINE!!!!!!!!!!!! Which means we could have always had this, had stylists and makeup artists PLAYED TO HIS STRENGTHS!!!!! He’s so hot I’m getting legitimately angry. Without scruff and dirt this man is nothing. N o t h i n g.

2. John Proctor in The Crucible (2014) — 9/10

Look, I know I have a type. But... this guy is just so hot, Daniel Day Lewis please step aside!!!! Contemporary theater historians describe John Proctor as a “strong beast of a man,” and... hhhHHOOOGH HELL YEAH!!! HELL !!!! YEAH !!!!! Like, his dick got almost his entire Puritan village, including himself, accused of witchcraft and like, looking at this guy, I kind of get it. I would probably go to war over the raw animal beauty of this horrible dirty, greasy man. Sue me, I confess. I saw Goody Osburn with the devil.

1. Thorin II Oakenshield in The Hobbit Trilogy  — 9.5/10

Come on. You knew it was going to be this guy. Look at my icon for christ’s sake. I am completely biased, I cannot look at his pictures objectively. Anyway. Thank you so much for reading, this was a very stupid list.

#rene rambles #this is the worst thing ive ever done tbh #richard armitage

[redditnosleep]

Has Anyone Heard of The Left/Right Game?

by NeonTempo

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 (Final)

A few points before we start.

Firstly, I am not the protagonist of this story. I just went to university with her, and though she went on to become a professional writer, I most certainly did not. She'll be taking over from me further down but, until then, please forgive my slightly awkward delivery while I give you guys the necessary context.

Secondly, I don't know what you will make of the following events, and I'm sure many of you might consider it all some sort of hoax. I wasn't present for any of what transpired in Phoenix, Arizona but I can vouch for the person who wrote the following logs. She is not, and has never been, a fantasist.

Ok so I once knew a girl called Alice Sharma. She was an undergrad at Edinburgh Uni the same time I was. My educational poison was History, a degree which has greatly benefited my career as a bicycle repairman. Alice Sharma studied journalism, though perhaps "studied" isn't the word. It's not an exaggeration to say that she lived and breathed the subject. Editor-in-chief of the campus paper, recognisable voice of student radio. She was frustratingly tunnel visioned, and she was a journalist in her own right before anyone gave her a professional shot.

We met in student halls and became friends almost immediately. A meandering waster trying to stay off his parent's farm and an intrepid, ambitious reporter may not seem the most obvious pairing, but I learned not to question it. She was inspiring, and smart and she proofread all my essays. I’m not too sure what she saw in me.

We were eventually flatmates down in London where she chased her dream and I chased my tail. She got a few jobs here and there, but nothing befitting of her skills. After months of fruitless internships and rejections, Alice called a flat meeting, telling us that she was moving to America, accepting a position chasing stories for National Public Radio. The job had come out of the blue, the result of a hail mary application she thought had been dismissed out of hand. We threw her a bittersweet going away party and put the room up for rent.

That party was the last time I saw Alice Sharma. She dropped out of contact a few months after her departure. Complete radio silence. I assumed she was just busy so I carried on with my small but happy life, and waited for her to pop up on television with some important words below her name; Chief Correspondent, Senior Analyst… something like that.

The radio silence was broken last week, and, for reasons you’ll glean further down, I’m less happy about it than I would’ve thought.

Arriving home from work I found a lone email in my otherwise bare inbox. An email that would later be described as "suspicious" by my tech literate friends. Despite being born in the early 1990's I didn't own a computer until uni, and I've missed several important lessons in the world of cyberspace. Lessons like "Don't call it Cyberspace" of course and more importantly, "Don't open emails with no text, no subject and no sender's address."

I realise most of you would have deleted this anonymous, blank email immediately, my friends certainly would have, but beyond my basic ignorance about online safety, something further compelled me to open it. The only thing of substance in the entire message was a zipped folder, labeled:

Left.Right.AS

I don't have to explain what I was hoping those final initials stood for.

Opening the zipped folder I found myself staring at a stack of text files. Each one titled with a date, continuing sequentially from the very earliest file "07-02-2017". (To any Americans in the room this is the 7th of February).

I’ve since read the files a few times, and shown them to some friends. They don't know what to make of it either, but they certainly aren't as concerned as me. They think Alice is just in a creative writing phase and, if I didn't know her, I’d have to agree. But the thing is, I do know her. Alice Sharma only cares about the truth and if that's the case with these files, insane as it may sound, then it’s very possible my friend has documented her own disappearance.

The people who suggested this forum said you discuss strange occurrences etc. If you guys have come across anything to do with the below, or know any of the people involved, then please send any information my way.

Has anyone here heard of the Left/Right Game?

The Left/Right Game [DRAFT 1] 07/02/2017

They say great stories happen to those who can tell them. Robert J. Guthard is an exception to that rule. As I sit at his table, sip his coffee and listen to him recount the past 65 years it sounds like he's reading off a shopping list. Every event, his first job, his second wedding, his third divorce, none of them receive more than one or two sentences. Rob plows through the years, the curt, dispassionate curator of his own personal history. Yet the story itself is so fascinating, so rich with moments and so wildly meandering that it somehow stands on its own merits.

It's a great story, no matter how you tell it.

By the time Rob was 21, he'd gotten married, had a son, worked as a farmer, a mover, a boat engineer, and grown estranged from his spouse... Here's him talking about that.

ROB: Course my wife started to get dissatisfied, I was away a while.

AS: For work?

ROB:Vietnam.

AS: You were in Vietnam? How was that for you?

ROB: I ain't never been back since.

That was everything he had to say concerning his first divorce, and the entire Vietnam war.

Rob had four marriages after that, and even more professions. After the war he worked with a firm of private detectives, got shot at once by the mob, then he became a courier, which is how a poor boy from Alabama got to see the world.

ROB: I been to most of the continents with that job. I been to India. You from India?

AS: My mum and dad are from India yeah.

ROB: See I could tell.

He'd been arrested once in Singapore, after one of his packages had been found to be full of white powder. He spent three days locked up before someone got around to checking the substance. It was chalk.

A friend he made during his brief custody, Hiroji Sato, invited Rob to stay with him in Japan. Just getting over the breakup of his third marriage, Rob took the offer. He stayed in Japan for another 5 years.

ROB: The Japanese are good people. Good manners. But they got all these urban legends and ghost stories that Hiroji was crazy for, spent all his free time chasing them down. Like, you heard of Jorogumo?

AS: I don't think so"

ROB: Well she's this spider lady lives in the Joro Falls round Izu. Meant to be real pretty but real dangerous. Hiroji took us out there to get a picture of her.

AS: Did you ever meet Jorogumo?

ROB Nah she didn't show. None of them did. I didn't believe at all until we went to Aokigahara

Aokigahara, affectionately titled the Suicide Forest. The next stop on Rob's adventure. It's an area of woodland at the base of Mount Fuji, a notorious hotspot for young people looking to take their own lives. Hiroji, Rob's ghost obsessed jailmate turned best friend, took him to Aokigahara to chase "yurei" the ghosts of the forest.

AS: Did you find anything? In Aokigahara?

ROB: Well I ain't gonna ask you to believe me. But I was a PI. Professional cynic. Even I can't deny there was a spirit in those woods.

From that moment on, Rob's sentences start getting longer. A childlike excitement creeps into his voice. I get the distinct feeling we're moving beyond background, beyond Rob Guthard's old life, and towards his new one. The one he wants to talk about. The one that led him to contact the show.

ROB: It walked up to me through the trees. Looked like static you see on a TV screen but it had a human shape almost.

AS: Almost?

ROB: It was missing an arm. It reached out to me but I bolted outta that forest so fast. Hiroji never saw it, holds it against me to this day.

Hiroji had good reason to be annoyed. Rob says that Mr Sato had been going to the forest 2-3 times per year for three decades. To have a rookie come along and claim to have seen a yurei on his first trip? I'd be more than a little cranky.

But Rob didn't stay a rookie for long. In fact, it was in those woods that he discovered his current passion. The supernatural, or more accurately, the documentation and investigation of urban legends. Legends like Bloody Mary, the Jersey Devil, Sasquatch. Rob has looked into them all.

ROB: I figured if one was true then who knows how many others could be.

AS: How many have you proven so far?

ROB: Since Aokigahara? Ain't none of em had any proof to em. Except for one. That's why I called you guys up.

At this point, Rob can’t hope to repress his smile.

The Left/Right game appeared on a paranormal message board in June 2016. Only a few people frequently visited the forum and, of these regulars, only Rob took an interest in the post.

ROB: The whole thing had a level of detail you don't see in other stories.

AS: What details grabbed your interest?

ROB: Logs. High quality pictures. The guy documented everything, said he wasn't gonna play the game anymore. I think he wanted somebody to keep investigating.

AS: And you were that somebody.

ROB: That's right. I set about trying to verify his information right away.

AS: And how did it go?

ROB: Well... It didn't take long to realise the Left/Right Game is the real thing.

The rules of the Left/Right game are simple. Get in your car and take a drive. Take a left, then the next possible road on the right, then the next possible left. Repeat the process ad infinitum, until you wind up somewhere... new. The rules are easy to understand, but Rob says their not so easy to follow.

ROB: There ain't all that many roads where you can turn left and right and left and right and keep going. Most of the time you find yourself at a dead end or needing to turn in the wrong direction. Phoenix is built on a grid system so you can keep going left and right as long as you need to.

AS: Did you move to Phoenix for the Left/Right game?

ROB: That's right.

I try not to seem incredulous. Selling your house in another state, packing up and moving your whole life to Phoenix, Arizona just to play a game you saw on the internet? It seems like insanity. Rob smiles as he reads my expression. I can clearly read his expression too. "You'll see." It says. "Just wait."

I wouldn't have to wait long. Included within the 9 page submission Rob sent our show, was a long list of suggested items the chosen reporter should bring with them. Clothes for three days, a pocket knife, matches, bandages. There were also a set of qualifications the reporter should have. The ability to drive, basic vehicle maintenance and its human equivalent... first aid training. He didn't just want to talk about the Left/Right Game. He wanted to take one of us along.

Rob leaves a short while later to embark on a few errands, "Prepping the Run", as he calls it. He shows me to the guest room and we part ways, on good terms but very much aware of the other's poorly veiled opinions. He knew I saw him as a charming obsessive, chasing after a fairy tale. He saw me as a naive cynic, on the cusp of a new world. All I could think as I heard the front door close is that by tomorrow afternoon, one of us would be right.

More after this.

When I wake up the next morning, Rob is in my room, holding a tray which he'd knocked on the bottom of to rouse me. I don't manage to record the start of our conversation.

ROB: - I got bananas, strawberries, chocolate syrup. We got some more downstairs but I wanted you to wake up to something good. We won't be eatin' this stuff on the road."

Rob has made me waffles. He sets them down on the night stand and talks through the coming day as I eat. I'll admit it feels a little uncomfortable, waking up in a stranger's home to find said stranger already standing over me, but I quickly move past it. I tell myself that he’s an older man, accustomed to living alone in his own house, not usually having to think about boundaries. Anyway, he certainly knows his way around a waffle iron.

ROB: We hit the road at 9. I wanted to give you time to get ready before everyone shows up.

AS: There are other people coming?

ROB: We got a 5 car convoy on the road today. They'll be here in an hour.

This is the first I’ve heard of a convoy, and to be honest I’m surprised. The game is Rob's obsession, and I’m here at his request. The idea that anyone else would have an interest in today's drive is a little perplexing.

Half an hour later, sated, showered and dressed in the "functional clothing" Rob had so painstakingly outlined, I take my pack out to the porch. Rob’s already there, waiting for his associates to show up.

AS: I thought you'd be conducting a few more errands.

ROB: If you ain't prepared by the morning of, you ain't prepared.

AS: Hah ok I guess that's fair. Oh, Rob is the garage locked? The inside door won't budge and I wanted to mic up the car.

ROB: Yeah it's locked up I'll open it for ya.

AS: Thank you.

ROB: In fact it's about time I wheeled her out. Fair warning Ms Sharma, she's a thing of beauty.

To Rob Guthard, beauty took the form of a dark green Jeep Wrangler. Rob climbs in and lets it roll out of the garage, where it dominates every inch of driveway. The car is large; four doors with a roof enclosing the entire compartment. It’s also been modified extensively, yet another example of Rob's dedication to the game.

ROB: What're you thinking?

AS: I think you're two caterpillar treads short of driving a tank.

ROB: Hah yeah I fixed her up good. I put the winch in, heavy duty tires, the light rig on top is LED's. They'll make midnight look like noon but they don't use hardly any power.

AS: Aren't Jeeps open top usually?

ROB: Not all. This is the Unlimited. I like to have a covered car when I head on the road.

I climb in and stow my pack. Rob had removed the back seats to afford more storage space. The place is packed to the brim. Jerry cans of gasoline, barrels of water, rope, snacks and his own neatly packed set of clothes.

I wonder if the rest of our convoy would take the game so seriously.

ROB: We got Apollo coming up in 10 minutes. No one else has given me a time. I sent the schedule weeks ago, this always happens.

AS: His name's Apollo?

ROB: That's his call sign. Apollo Creed I think he said.

AS: Why are you using call signs?

ROB: Did I not tell you? Oh yeah we're gonna use call signs on the road, keep communication clear.

AS: What's your callsign?

ROB: Ferryman.

AS: ... What's my call sign?

ROB: I thought about it. I was thinking London, you're from London right?

AS: I'm from Bristol.

ROB: Bristol? That’s fine I guess.

It’s less than ten minutes before Apollo turns the corner. Rob jumps out of his chair and paces briskly over to the edge of his property, as his first guest pulls up and steps onto the sidewalk.

Apollo vaguely resembles his namesake, dark skinned, tall and noticeably well built, though it’s clear he couldn’t be less of a fighter. This Apollo Creed is all smiles and seems to have a penchant for laughing at his own jokes.

AS: How far have you come?

APOLLO: I've come out of Chicago. Took three days hard driving.

AS: And you know Rob from the forums?

APOLLO: Everybody knows Rob, Rob's the god! Ahaha

Rob walks over to Apollo's car, gesturing him over to talk shop. Rob’s clearly impressed with Apollo's choice of vehicle, a blue Range Rover packed to the ceiling with kit. I was more impressed with Rob himself. Somehow this 65 year old farmer's son had become respected in a vast online community. My dad is Rob’s age and he's just discovered copy and paste.

The rest don't take long to arrive. Two Minnesotan librarians, also around Rob's age, pull up in a grey Ford Focus. They’re brother and sister, and they've shared ghost hunting as a hobby their entire lives. I find it hard to suppress a smile when they meekly introduce themselves as Bonnie and Clyde.

CLYDE: We would have gotten here sooner we had to drop by to get some blankets. Pleasure to meet you ma'am.

AS: Pleasure to meet you too.

CLYDE: Would you be the journalist?

AS: That's right.

CLYDE: You used to write for the town paper didn't you?

He's talking to his sister there, she nods. Clyde is clearly the spokesperson for the pair, yet they both seem incredibly shy. Whether they admire the famous outlaws, or just the name, it's pretty clear they couldn't be more different from the real thing.

Next to show up are Lilith and Eve, English Lit students at New York University and proprietors of the YouTube channel Paranormicon. Unlike Bonnie and Clyde, Lilith and Eve have no issue holding a conversation. As soon as they learn who I am, and what I do for a living, they attempt to conscript me for an expedition to Roswell.

LILITH: We have a friend there, he's been seeing some-

EVE: -He's a seismologist

LILITH: Yeah and he's been recording readings over the years that show subterranean movement. Predictable movement.

EVE: We're going to see him in July, but we could work it around you if you're free.

AS: I'll have to check my schedule

EVE: OK cool let me give you my email...

They quickly hurry off to film an intro for their latest video, featuring a quick interview with Rob, who seems pretty welcoming of the attention.

The last two cars arrive within a few seconds of each other. A lithe, strong willed older lady who goes by Bluejay and a younger man going by the callsign “Ace”. Bluejay has arrived in a grey Ford Explorer. Ace, much to Rob's annoyance, has arrived in a Porsche.

ROB: Did you think that's gonna help on the road? I didn't write that-

ACE: It's my car. What am I meant to do,? It's my car.

ROB: You didn't read my itinerary, you got nothing packed in there.

ACE: I did read it sir OK? Calm down. I have a bag, I won't ask you for anything.

ROB: Well I know that's true.

Ace and Rob were off to a bad start. Ace takes a phone call, and despite my best efforts to get an interview with Bluejay, she doesn't seem interested in talking to a journalist.

With five cars, and seven travellers waiting for a green light, Rob hands out radios and charging packs, then launches into a quick safety briefing. Wear seatbelts. Stay in position. Communicate clearly and often. It’s at this moment I start to feel a little dismay. I like Rob, and clearly so does everyone else. He'd convinced all of them to drive across the country to join in with his game. I start to worry what will happen in the likely event that the whole thing isn’t real. Would Rob lose the respect of his peers? Would he accept failure when it comes? After seeing the effort he’s put into these runs, the next few hours have the potential to be wildly uncomfortable.

With a smile and a few encouraging words, Rob ends his briefing and beckons me over to the Wrangler. I clamber inside and make myself as comfortable as possible.

ROB: You ready for this Bristol?

AS: I'm ready.

ROB: Ok then let's hit the road.

The Wrangler pulls out of the driveway, and the convoy follows in order of arrival. Apollo, Bonnie & Clyde, Lilith & Eve, Bluejay and Ace keep a steady pace behind us as we come up to the first corner.

Rob slowly and deliberately turns left, checking on the others in his rear view mirror. He looks back to the road as Ace’s Porsche completes the first turn of the game. Shortly afterwards, Apollo checks in on the CB radio.

APOLLO: This is Apollo for Ferryman. How many to more go Rob? ahahaha

ROB: Hah as many as it takes.

I can tell Rob wanted the to reserve the radio for something other than Apollo's quips. But he seems to like Apollo enough to let it slide. I'm not sure Ace would have received the same treatment. We take the next right, then another left. Now safely assured that everyone's following correctly, Rob speaks my thoughts aloud.

ROB: You're wondering the same thing Apollo is.

AS: What do you mean?

ROB: You're wondering how many turns we're gonna take before we hit some wall or something. Before you find out this is all just a story.

AS: Does that disappoint you?

ROB: I'd be disappointed if you weren't thinking something like it. But now we're on the road I gotta say something and you gotta listen to it.

AS: OK...

ROB: We're coming up to a tunnel soon. Any time before we reach it you can get out, walk in any direction you like, and you won’t be in the game no more. Once we go through, you gotta retrace the route we took to get yourself back out that tunnel. That's when you’re home. And you gotta convince someone to take you back in a car coz I ain't ferrying you back 20 minutes in. You got till the tunnel to skip out on this, understand?

AS: I understand. Though I have to say I'm getting little nervous.

ROB: Ain't nothing wrong with a little nervous.

We've taken 23 turns by this point. Already I feel like we're traversing the city pretty effectively. Rob's heavily modified Wrangler solicits a few impressed glances from passersby, as well as several honks of respect from other Jeep drivers. Other than those few moments, everything seems completely indistinguishable from a regular morning drive. I even start to worry if there’ll be anything at all for this story. “Reporter Takes Drive With Interesting Man” isn’t exactly Pulitzer worthy.

Turn 33 leads us onto a short, unassuming street. A row of small businesses in a quiet Phoenician neighbourhood; liquor, second hand clothing, tools and, at the end of the street, a little shop selling antique mirrors. Ten or so people shuffle along the sidewalk, smiling, talking, planning their weekends. The only lone person is a young woman in a grey coat..

I briefly glimpse her at the end of the street, standing on our next corner, the back of her coat reflected in fifty old mirrors. Even from a distance I can see that she’s sullen, wide eyed and nervous. She shifts constantly on her feet, tugging at the button of her coat.

I look away to write some notes as we roll down the street. When I look up again, the woman is standing by my window, staring right at me. She’s smiling, a wide, unfaltering grin that seems almost offensive in its complete insincerity.

GREYWOMAN: Lambs at the gate. Hoping for something better than clover when all they find are things worse than slaughter.

AS: Rob what's happening?

ROB: Ignore her.

GREYWOMAN: He wanted to leave me so I cut him out. The lake was hungry it drank the wound clean.

AS: Miss, are you alright?

The smile vanishes, it snaps from her face and suddenly, the woman is furious.

GREYWOMAN: What do you think you're doing?! Have you gone mad?!

I reflexively press myself back in my chair as the woman, wild eyed and gaunt, slams her fists against my window, with every intent of breaking through.

GREYWOMAN: Would you dance down the lion’s tongue? It will shred you, you whore! It will shred you down to your sins! You fucking bastard!

Rob puts his foot down, and the Wrangler rolls defiantly away from the woman. As we turn the corner I watch her as she wretches, her every movement cradled in abject hysteria. She yells despairingly at the rest of the convoy, bursting into tears when the last car passes her by.

As she shrinks into the rear view mirror, I see her turn to a large mirror on the side of the shop, which the owner is in the process of polishing. I watch as she walks up to it, and with a convulsant scream, slams her head into the glass.

The mirror cracks around her forehead, the owner jumps back in shock, and as the woman pulls her head from the mirror's surface, the fractured spider’s web is dripping red. It all happens in a split second, and she quickly swerves from my view as we take the next left.

AS: Rob, what was that?

ROB: She's there sometimes.

AS: On that street?

ROB: On the 34th turn.

AS: Who is she?

ROB: I don't know. She's never acted out that much before though. Must be a special trip.

I find Rob's lack of concern a little unpleasant, and his implication that this woman's ravings were the symptom of an internet game leaves me more than a little perturbed. As I see it, there are a few explanations for what just happened, and none of them lead to a comforting conclusion.

If we had just encountered a bonafide crazy person, then one could argue that Rob is just seeing what he wants to see. Maybe he'd bought into the game’s story so much that every strange but explainable occurrence would be rationalised as the next step in his favourite paranormal narrative.

Alternatively, the woman could have been an actor, a more elaborate theory sure, but not unheard of. People have lied to the show before and Rob was receiving a tonne of publicity for this attempt from Lilith, Eve and I. I admit, Rob didn't seem like a liar, but good liars never do.

There is a third alternative however. An alternative which, if you put logic aside, explains the all troubling little details that I couldn't help but notice. Because as strange as the grey woman was, isn't it stranger that no one on the street would react? I couldn't recall a single glance in her direction by anybody on the sidewalk. Perhaps that theory falls apart when you consider the shock on the mirror seller's face but, when I think about it, he only reacted once the mirror shattered, and even then, I feel like his attention was on the mirror itself.

The radio crackles.

LILITH: Lillith to Bristol. Sara... Eve got that on camera! Do you have audio?

AS: I think it picked her up.

LILITH: My god that was so weird. Can you send us the file when we stop? Can you ask Ferryman when we're stopping?

AS: When's our stopping point?

ROB: For them, in about 30 minutes. For you? Well, you tell me.

Rob turns off a busy street just before a large intersection, onto a much quieter stretch of two lane road. Ahead of us the road slopes downward, leading into an underpass, which disappears into darkness.

We'd arrived at the tunnel.

AS: What is this supposed to pass under?

ROB: Ain't supposed to pass under anything, it's just there.

AS: And if we weren't playing the game?

ROB: Then it won't show. The question is, are you playing the game or not?

Rob turns to me. It’s the first time he’s taken his eyes off the road since we started. He pulls the car to a slow stop at the mouth of the tunnel.

ROB: You get out now you can go wherever you wanna go, but through there you'll need a car to get yourself home and, like I said, mine ain't turnin round for a long while. You understand?

It’s a dramatic statement, but unsettlingly, it doesn’t feel like he’s attempting to dramatise. It feels like I’m having something genuinely asked of me. Am I ready for what’s to come? Do I accept the risks involved? Do I consent to be taken down this road, and the next road, and the next? Am I prepared to see this game through, real or otherwise, to its end?

AS: What are you waiting for?

Rob smiles, and turns back to the road. He picks up the CB radio holds down the button on the side. The microphone crackles.

ROB: This is Ferryman to all cars. Anyone want to step out then pull to the side now. Otherwise, stay in formation and have some supplies at hand. We got a long ways to go.

Much like the game I’m so tentatively playing, my view of Robert J. Guthard seems to change direction frequently. I’d heard all about his life, but I’m sure that I know him. I like the guy, but I’m not certain that I trust him. And though I admire his dedication to the Left/Right Game, I’m not sure I’ll like where it might lead us. Yet as he takes us into the tunnel, his face vanishing and reappearing under the dim sodium lights, I can that tell he expects this trip to be a major step in his already impressive story, and this time, for better or for worse, I’m along for the ride.

#creepy #horror story #series #left right game series #author: NeonTempo

[comic-book-gal]

November 1961 to August 1962 in Marvel Comics

Note: I’m not a native English speaker. If you find mistakes or errors in my writing, please do tell me. Also, everything I've written here is my own interpretation and my own opinion. You don’t have to agree with anything I’m saying.

This synthesis references the following comic book issues:

[1161] Fantastic Four #1 (Fantastic Four)

[0162] Fantastic Four #2 (Fantastic Four)

[0162] Tales to Astonish #27 (Ant Man)

[0362] Fantastic Four #3 (Fantastic Four)

[0562] Fantastic Four #4 (Fantastic Four)

[0562] Incredible Hulk #1 (Hulk)

[0762] Fantastic Four #5 (Fantastic Four)

[0762] Incredible Hulk #2 (Hulk)

[0862] Amazing Fantasy #15 (Spider-Man)

[0862] Journey into Mystery #83 (Thor)

Here’s the thing: if you’re like me and want to get into super hero comics and don’t really want to follow some shady reading order list on some equally shady website that claims you should skip over two decades of comic history, but prefer reading the right way, following the publication order, you’re going to be surprised at how unclear everything is at first.

When I started reading Marvel comics I was very lost, reading the beginning of a series, only to find later that it hardly makes sense and it’s not, in fact, the beginning. I remember I followed one of those reading order list on Thor, after reading some expert’s claim that you should read only what you like, and I liked Thor so I decided to start with Thor #1 (1966) only to find out that what I’m reading makes no sense. After some research I found out about Journey into Mystery and how Marvel liked playing around with their titles and I began reading that, however, nothing got clearer. In fact, I was getting more upset to find out I can’t really get invested in the story when every other issue there is a cameo from some other super hero or villain that I know nothing about and I feel completely left out, like I’m missing something big.

So I started reading everything in the publication order, and so far it works. I’m not saying you should too; this has worked for me and made my comic book reading experience far better than it was before but that doesn't mean it will do the same to you. Most people will stick to what they believe is mandatory for understanding the story, to only a certain series and will follow perhaps one or two superheroes and that is okay. I realize reading every issue Marvel had published is very, and I mean very time-consuming and to some might feel pointless and I totally agree. Instead, what I’d like you to get from my little story is that you should keep an open mind. If you see something like a cameo in the comic you’re reading that piques your interest a little bit, perhaps you could try and go back a little and find more. For example, I’m not a big fan of Hulk, like, at all and I wasn't to happy to read it, but I was surprised how much I enjoyed Incredible Hulk #1 & #2. I did not expect that at all, and I would probably overlooked it had I kept my old way and that’s a shame.

Now, going back to the actual comics, the reason I decided to group this then issues together is because they have a lot in common, presenting the origin stories of some of our favorite characters, but also because the publication pattern up to Fantastic Four #6 was rather inconsistent. If you look at the list I made and the dates corresponding each issue, you’ll see they were not released every month, and some of them won’t make any significant appearance any time soon. Once Fantastic Four #6 is released, there is a little bit more order in publication, so I’ll most likely do these post by month. Now I decided it would be best to group them together and make a big post on origin stories.

Besides that, we got a lot of alien invasion - the Skrulls, the Toad Men and the Stone Men from Saturn try to conquer the Earth in just about an issue each and I’m not gonna lie to you, it’s kind of bad. More of that soon.

Fantastic Four #1 is considered to be the issue that marked the beginning of the Silver Age of comics (at least for Marvel - I know nothing about DC). Here we learn about the origin of the team and follow their very first adventure versus the Mole Man (undoubtedly, a very strange villain). To summarize it, we learn that Dr. Reed Richard has built a ship that is supposed to take the Americans into space, but he’s eager to do it before the communists, despite not knowing a lot about cosmic rays. Nevertheless, he embarks into the ship along with Dr. Ben Grimm who is totally against it (it’s weird seeing the Thing being the only reasoning one in the team for once), his girlfriend, Susan Storm and his little brother, Johnny Storm. Just as Grimm predicted, they are hit by the rays and crash back to earth, finding out they now have weird but super cool powers: Johnny has became a human torch, Sue can get invisible, Reed is elastic and Ben Grimm is now a very powerful but fugly thing. They decide to form a team in order to help mankind from whatever threats come up and call them Fantastic Four. I’d go over the battle versus the Mole Man but there isn't any point in it - he’s a weak villain even for the Silver Age. If you decide to read this issue, the origin story is enough.

The following year in January, Fantastic Four #2 is published. This time we learn that the team is already known through all of country and deeply respected by the people. That’s bad considering they have to deal with four impostors who commit ill deeds under their names. Apparently, they are shape-shifting aliens called Skrulls that plan on conquering the earth, but before, they have to get rid of their only obstacle, the Fantastic Four. The team infiltrates into their ship and dissuade the aliens from landing their ship and carrying on with their plan and everything’s good. Reading this is not really mandatory, but from what I gathered the Skrulls will make a comeback sometime so you might want to know where did that come from (hopefully they would be worthy villains then).

In Tales to Astonish #27 we get a prelude to what’s gonna become the Ant Man, with Henry Pym discovering a serum that can change anything size. He tests it on himself and gets trapped in an ant colony, almost getting killed by the insects but also being saved by them??? At the end, he deems the serum as too dangerous for humans to use so he destroys it. It’s a cute and easy to read story so you might want to check it out.

The events in Fantastic Four #3 lead to the team fighting the Miracle Man who doesn't actually perform miracles, but is a very talented hypnotist. The only reason this issue is important is because it introduces the Fantasticar, their new headquarters and some colorful and recognizable costumes Sue made for the team, making this evil fighting business seem more official. Also, in this issue Human Torch gets fed up with the Thing and decides to quit the team. Obviously, it won’t last but until the next issue, Fantastic Four #4 when Johnny, running away from the Fantastic Three who are trying to persuade him to rejoin the team, discovers the Sub-Mariner in the form of an amnesiac hobo. He regains his memories and gets pissed when he learns the humans destroyed his underwater home so he decides to take revenge on all mankind. A little excessive if you ask me. Eventually, he agrees to calm down if Sue marries him but is stopped by Johnny who is now part of the team again.

A side note: The Sub-Mariner is a character mostly present in the Golden Age. He was a part of that time’s super hero trio along with Captain America and the original Human Torch. However, super hero might not be the best way to describe him; he’s not necessary a one, but rather an antihero, allying himself with various villains through the years. Apparently, he did stuff during WWII, but to be honest, I don’t care enough to read his old comics considering how atrocious I find Golden Age stuff. The thing to remember: he lives underwater in a kingdom called Atlantis, can talk to dolphins and he isn’t a very likable guy.

Hulk also makes his first appearance around this time in Incredible Hulk #1 where the readers get to know his origin story. Dr. Bruce Banner is going to test a gamma bomb of some sort and ends up being exposed to it when he saves Rick Jones, a teenager that somehow got into the ray of action of the bomb. The gamma rays make him turn into this brute creature that will later be named Hulk at night. Hulk’s very first adventure, accompanied by the very indebted Rick Jones is his confrontation with the Gargoyle, some very smart but ugly (and I mean hideous) Soviet scientist whom Bruce Banner helps get a more human appearance, burning the smart out of his brain in the process so he’s no use to the Soviets anymore. Definitely recommend reading this issue.

Next up we are introduced, in Fantastic Four #5, to one of the most influential villains in the Marvel history, Doctor Doom. We he traps the team in their tower and takes Sue as a hostage we learn that he and Reed Richards were colleagues at the University and the guy, as smart as he was, was pretty deranged. Doctor Doom is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but this particular issue doesn't do him justice. His great plan is using his time traveling machine to send the Thing, Mr. Fantastic and Human Torch to the past and have them get Blackbeard’s treasure. Yeah. We learn that there are some magic gems that will aid Dr. Doom in his future plans but that doesn't make it less stupid. Anyways, the team brings back the chest but there’s no way they’ll let Doom have the treasure, so they fill it up with old and rusty chains. Doom gets angry and tries to kill the trio, but they are saved by the Invisible Girl and escape the villain’s castle. The story is not the best, but Dr. Doom is to great of a villain not to read this one.

Next, we get another alien invasion that Hulk has to deal with this time in Incredible Hulk #2. The story is rather confusing but goes like this: The Toad Men want to conquer Earth but are not sure what level of technological advancement the planet has reached so they kidnap the smartest man they can find, Dr. Bruce Banners to find the necessary information from him. While on their ship, Bruce becomes Hulk and smashes things. Because of that the ship crashes and the aliens escape before the humans arrive, leaving Bruce behind. He’s accused of treason and locked up, but escapes once the night falls and he becomes Hulk. While Hulk smashes things, the aliens let humans know of their presence and their plan to use some magnetic ray to bring the moon closer to the Earth if the humans do not surrender. Later, Bruce uses his gamma ray in order to pulverize the alien ships from Earth’s orbit and saves the planet, being cleared of his accusations.

One of the most beloved superhero in history makes his debut in Amazing Fantasy #15. Peter Parker is very smart teenager, but lacking social skills. His only friends are his aunt and uncle who spoil him plenty. When he goes to a science exhibit, he gets bitten by a spider who before that, was right in the ray of a radioactive ray gun that was being used at the exhibit. Because of that, he develops special abilities, but is rather immature in using them. He then makes his costume, his web shooters and creates this persona of Spider-Man in order to appear on TV and get famous. One day he sees a policeman chasing a burglar and does nothing to stop the later. A few days pass and when he gets home he learns that his uncle has been killed by a burglar. He chases him, finding out he’s the same one he didn't stop that time. At this point, Peter Parker learns that with great power comes great responsibility.

The last comic I’m gonna talk about is Journey into Mystery #83, the very first appearance of Thor. In this comic we deal with yet another alien invasion when the Stone Men from Saturn come to Earth, somewhere on the coast of Norway. As proof that everyone is a doctor and bourgeoisie is going strong, we are introduced to Dr. Donald Blake who happens to discover the aliens. When running away from them he finds himself trapped in a cave where he finds an old cane. When the gets a hold of it, both himself and the cane transform, and Dr. Blake has now the powers of Thor, God of Thunder and his mighty hammer, Mjolnir. He fights the aliens in about two pages and they get scared and run. This issue presents the origin of Thor, but it’s far from great (more of that later). Nevertheless, you might want to read it.

Now that we’re over with summarizing stuff, I’d like to point out a few things:

The writing is not great, even for comic books. This is mostly present in Hulk, where the events presented in the stories don’t really lead up to anything. A lot of stuff could have been left out and the story would make sense still. Hulk is indeed Banner’s alter ego, but in those two issues he does absolutely nothing except being salty and punching random people. Of course, this is what Hulk does and one might argue that we’re being shown this for the sake of character development, but there isn’t any. Hulk walking aimlessly in the woods and the town, scaring the crap out of everyone doesn’t show us something we haven’t figured out from the beginning: he’s a brute and he hates mankind. Instead, we get little to no Banner time, only to find out Banner is the guy who actually saves people through his intellect and not through Hulk smash. It is certainly interesting to see how he deals with his dual existence, with this part of him that he cannot control and I understand that this is about Hulk, but I think things could have been handled better.

Another thing I figured out is that Stan Lee liked alien invasions, as much as to have three different super heroes or teams fight them. I like me some alien invasions, I think they’re epic, but considering the format they are delivered it, it was rather lame. Thor stops an entire alien civilization invading Earth in about six pages and that tells us a lot about how these stories were handled.

Now, there is another reason why Thor is worse compared to other comics released before; it’s not written by Stan Lee but by this brother, Larry. It’s not bad writing per se, but I feel like had Stan handled Thor as a character, it would have received a very different start. In his very first couple of issues, he’s dull and brings nothing new except for a very peculiar costume.

Another thing I want to talk about is Susan Storm, the Invisible Girl. Most of the times, I’ve seen, he’s not taken seriously by Fantastic Four’s enemies. At first, that bugged me a little; I’m not too big on the feminist thing (and I’m taking into consideration this was written in the 60s), but considering she’s the only woman in the team, there seems to be a logical explanation. As I read more I understood that her not being taken seriously is a rather good thing for the team. She’s seen as weak and fragile by the villains and they often underestimate her. I could see this the best when Dr. Doom took her as a hostage, completely forgetting about her at some point, considering her to be too weak to do anything. She sees this as an opportunity and saves the rest of the team. I don’t know if this was made on purpose, but I see it as a great detail.

What you should read:

Fantastic Four #1 for the team’s origin story, Incredible Hulk #1 for Hulk’s origin story, Fantastic Four #5 for Dr. Doom’s introduction, Amazing Fantasy #15 for Spider-Man’s origin story and Journey into Mystery #83 for Thor’s origin story.

You might want to check out Fantastic Four #2 for the Skrull invasion story. 

That was a lot. I’m glad I found the time to read and enjoy these comic issues and actually writing something about them. I’d like to keep writing these things and find a schedule. I probably won’t read everything, but I’m pretty happy to summarize and talk about what I do read.

#1961 #1962 #fantastic four #spider-man #hulk #thor #ant man

[dan-wreck]

BOWIE #2 - STARDUST MEMORIES 

Photo by Mick Rock

Oh stop groaning, you can name a piece of writing with a Woody Allen pun when the person you're writing it about is a cultural Zelig.

Soon there's going to be a whole generation where the Bowie they remember is the dead Bowie. The sanitised version who is forming in the popular imagination. Then after that there's going to be a generation who don't have a Bowie. Figuratively and literally, kids born into a post Bowie era. Pity them more. I guess how you first encountered him is a question of when you grew up and your surroundings: a guy I worked with at my last job, 20 years older than me, announced "That guy from Labyrinth is dead!". Presumably, somewhere, there's a die hard Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence fan who was mourning the death of Jack Celliers. We may never know.

For many people the Bowie they remember is Ziggy Bowie, whether they were alive to see him bringing bisexuality onto the BBC or not. Maybe this is one of the reasons behind the recent cringeworthy trend of calling him "the Starman" the same way that faux-matey twats call Paul Weller the Modfather. Maybe it's just that these people are idiots. Bowie himself didn't really seem to think of Ziggy as an enduring character or perhaps he just felt like he’d said all he could through that conduit. He laid him to rest after Aladdin Sane after all: around 42 years before he finished creating. Ziggy was really strictly speaking a footnote. The relatively anonymous figure of Major Tom, however, was one he kept returning to: after Space Oddity he came back in Ashes To Ashes, then again in Hallo Spaceboy (the Pet Shop Boys remix particularly) and then finally we see him dead in the Blackstar video.

Ashes To Ashes for instance: Major Tom is strung out in heaven's high and hitting an all time low. This, though, at a time when Bowie's cultural stock was quite high. He was incredibly cool. He was still selling a lot of records. He was the one person who could hang out in the living room of a confused and senile Bing Crosby or at a tiny punk gig and fit equally well with either. There was no point reviving Ziggy because a whole load of New Romantics and Goths were doing it. The fact that this new flock of painted birds were very inspired by him was something that'd become crushingly obvious when Bauhaus did their borderline karaoke version of Ziggy Stardust in 82. Bowie embraced his bastard children with open arms, casting them as his grim entourage in his video, with one notable exception.

Gary Numan. A huge fan who wound up getting thrown off the set of a TV show they were both on and being dismissed as the "same old thing in brand new drag" in Teenage Wildlife because our man was feeling a bit insecure about this new pretender. Which is a bit rich, really, considering that young Bowie himself was a fusion of Iggy, Newley, Scott Walker and whoever else he could latch onto. Numan was certainly no more derivative than Bowie and it wasn’t just Bowie he was drawing from: he drew as much from JG Ballard and Philip K Dick novels and John Foxx as he did from the Spider from Bromley. It’s allso amusing considering that he sings Teenage Wildlife in a voice uncannily similar to that of Billy MacKenzie, who his people had recognised the grand high art high camp potential of when they heard the Associates cover of Boys Keep Swinging and offered them a publishing deal; then later on "The midwives to history put on their bloody robes" is delivered in the voice of another Bowie acolyte, Richard Butler.

Make no mistake, Ashes to Ashes is simultaneously a high water mark, a brilliant pop record and the point where Bowie stopped being ahead of trends and started chasing them. It just so happened that a lot of these trends were started by people catching up to him. Confusing, no? In fact, this is the one point where you could maybe give some credence to the lazy critics idea of Bowie as "chameleon". Now at his best Bowie was never a chameleon. Especially when he was first Ziggy, actually because there's no way Bowie / Ziggy was blending into the background: he was an incredibly beautiful, sexually ambiguous peacock character. But during the 80s he did blend in quite a lot. He was just another one of the rank and file whether prancing about onstage with anonymous session hacks on the Glass Spider tour or just being "one of the guys" with Tin Machine. It didn't really suit him. It was unnerving. It still seemed like a costume but a very lazy one. The equivalent of Bowie turning up to the macabre Halloween coke party of 80s pop in casual clothes and saying "I came as David Jones".

So the next time we saw Major Tom in a lot of people's eyes he really was hitting an all-time low. Not everyone's, not the die-hards and not people who buy and listen to music based on what they hear, not what they're told by a music press who had been swallowed up by the sexless and jingoistic Britpop craze. See, with Outside what he'd done is released an elaborate concept album rife with pervy sexualised violence, violent sex, drugs, strange invented characters and references to obscure artists and art movements like Chris Burden (already visited in the Berlin days on Joe The Lion), Herman Nitsch and the Vienna Actionists. The visual component was a huge part of it all again, with unnerving videos like Samuel Bayer’s The Hearts Filthy Lesson. In interviews he was talking up Tricky and The Young Gods and saying how much he wanted to work with Glenn Branca. Being ahead of the curve by talking about the power of the internet as everyone thought he was nuts. He was even working extensively with Eno again.

You know - the sort of thing you want from Bowie!

This isn't what the British music press wanted. They wanted safe flag-waving and to be told what they knew to make them feel like they hadn't dumbed down to a degree which is still marring pop music with waves of Oasis clones because for a while it was acceptable to make bland drivel devoid of imagination or sensuality. They smeared Bowie's dabbling with jungle and drum'n'bass as a sad old man trying to stay in touch when in reality it was really just in continuity with him learning to play sax as a teenager because that's what all the cool jazz musicians he looked up to did, making "plastic soul" on Young Americans and welding the cold European sensibility of Low, "Heroes" and Lodger to the beating heart of the black American rhythm section of Davis, Murray and Alomar. Cultural segregation, two world wars and one world cup was what they wanted and they didn't want ageing mavericks showing up and demonstrating how hopelessly conservative they were.

A lot of the incredibly dull music being hyped up to the skies was, just like it was with the New Romantics, made by Bowie fans. So the time was right for him to come back but could he have not just have given them Ziggy again? Something with nice short songs, loud guitars, some dramatic strings. This time a bit more hetero, though, so the lads mag readers weren’t left shifting about uncomfortably again the way they were whenever they saw Richey James Edwards.

"Do you like girls or boys? It's confusing these days"

If you're not paying attention you can almost miss it but Hallo Spaceboy is, in fact, mentioning Ziggy / Bowie as much as it mentions Major Tom if not more. In those two lines we see Bowie cagily re-opening the closet door now it's safe for him to do so, and doing so on a mind-fuck of a concept album closer to the spirit of Ziggy or Diamond Dogs than almost anything he'd done since (The Thin White Duke was as much coke psychosis as an actual character). Before this the last time he was really clear about this was on Scream Like A Baby where he talked about queer bashing ("They came down on the faggots") and obliquely mentioned a gay love affair. Then let's look at the remix: it doesn't get much gayer than The Pet Shop Boys, really, does it? The Pet Shop Boys remixing a song from a polymorphously perverse album where he sings from the point of view of various genders: just listen to his alarming pitched-up Baby Grace voice or the strange androgynous Vocoderised ice queen voice of Ramona A Stone. 

Most offensively of all, though, however much you laughed at him it didn’t really work because he was very aware that it was funny. The segues between tracks were full of gallows humour and the Algeria Touchshriek voice sounds like nothing so much as Peter Cook’s E.L. Wisty character; it’s very serious stuff but as you hear Bowie intone “The screw is a tightening atrocity, I shake as the reeking flesh is as romantic as hell” in The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) there’s a faint smirk under it. He is always aware of his own absurdity.

1.Outside didn't spawn any of the sequels he talked about doing but it's no surprise: artists tend to talk about at least five times as many ideas as they actually follow through and work on. There were drum'n'bass and jungle rhythms creeping in on I'm Deranged and We Prick You, some classic Bowie ballads like Strangers when We Meet (itself, like Teenage Wildlife, in the "Heroes" continuum and one of my favourite Bowie songs) and some homages to what Scott Walker was up to at the moment like The Motel or A Small Plot of Land. He wasn't setting the trends now: he was following them and the best you can hope for is that rather than trying to assimilate into it as he did in the 80s he was putting them into the Bowie blender.

This, however, misses the point that he was never that original in the first place! The way he presented his ideas was, and he had a unique singing voice but the fact is that he just had his ear to the underground and did these things to a mass audience so they just looked new. In that respect Outside is no more or less original than Low or one of the records everyone goes on about it just happens that when it came out it wasn't the first time the masses were hearing these sounds as it was when he made the second side of Low which sounds like Cluster or Harmonia. Bowie’s value wasn’t as an inventor of new sounds it was as a way of making them digestible and emotionally accessible to everyone in a way which may then allow the actual innovators (and he did always cite his sources) to break through to more success: this is quite laudable.

So then of course he went on tour with NIN, continuing to refuse to "act like a man his age". Now this raises an interesting question about Bowie's public perception. How is it that he was an old man 20 years ago when he was in his late 40's - early 50's but then when he died he was too young to go? Could it be that as rock'n'roll, still a young artform, develops that our perceptions of performers capability changes? The fact is that for a pervy old man, as he was labelled at the time, he still looked very youthful and very vital. Far sexier, far more dangerous than any of the Britpop boys who'd grown up on his music but who shuffled about in tracksuit tops and shapeless jeans. As this live TV clip shows, with Gail Ann Dorsey looking just as androgynous and unworldly as he ever did but with seemingly the minimum of effort; and Mike Garson looking deranged.

The right people were listening: Fincher saw the potential to run The Heart’s Filthy Lesson over the credits of Se7en and Lynch used I’m Deranged in Lost Highway. Both were similarly grim end of the 20th Century blues, meditations on madness. Both soundtracks, coincidentally enough, featured the work of NIN and Coil: it’s a little frustrating how close in terms of interests Bowie and Coil are, how few degrees of separation there are between these immensely influential queer occultist artists and that they never actually worked together. 

He continued in this vein with Earthling, still upsetting everyone by continuing to do what he felt like doing rather than digging up old characters. A subtle “fuck you” to the beige whitewashed sounds of Brit-pop in the cover where he wears a stained and tattered Union Jack coat as he looks out over an idealised version of England’s green (screened) and pleasant land. This on an album as infused with contemporary black music as Young Americans was. Even his huge 50th birthday show was as much of a celebration of Bowie present and looking forward as a fond look at what had been. Then, of course, "Hours" came.

Now "Hours" is perhaps an unfairly maligned album: if anyone else had put out an album with songs as great as Thursday's Child and Survive on they'd be praised to the skies and rightly so. They are moving, perfectly constructed pop songs but there's no real fire or spark of innovation in them. What little emotional impact there is has been drowned in high-tech production that covers everything in an unpleasant sheen. This is possibly as much Mark Plati and Reeves Gabrels fault as Bowie's as this is his most straightforwardly collaborative album (with every song co-credited to Gabrels) but I'm not sure. I feel like Reeves Gabrels gets unfairly criticised as he's been involved in some of the most ridiculous things Bowie has done (i.e. Tin Machine) and he appeared onstage in daft outfits playing wanky guitar solos.

He's also been involved in some of my favourite Bowie songs, however, and if you see him playing with The Cure he's not as huge a presence. He’s not jumping all over everything with fretboard tapping and lunging around waggling his tongue like Gene Simmons with a PhD: this implies that he cut such a larger than life figure because his boss wanted him to as much as anything else. So despite his persona bordering on that of a middle-aged man enthusiastically demonstrating FX pedals to you in a guitar shop, blaming him too much is misguided.

According to the excellent Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog, it was around this time Bowie started thinking about making a Ziggy Stardust film and as such he was annoyed by Velvet Goldmine's fictionalised steps into the same territory. Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine is an enjoyable film but I can see why he'd be so annoyed with it: it is clearly the work of a gay fan feeling betrayed by him “going back in” circa Let’s Dance. Possibly the great man was realising this wasn’t one of his best moves however well it worked at the time. After "Hours" was out and around the time of Heathen in 2002, Bowie changed his tune regarding Ziggy: “I’m running like fuck from that…Can you imagine anything uglier than a nearly 60-year-old Ziggy Stardust? I don’t think so!".

Similar ambivalence towards the idea is hinted at by the shelving of the video for the Pretty Things Are Going To Hell (itself a dual reference to The Stooges and Hunky Dory) where Bowie is menaced by huge puppets of past characters: the Pierrot from Ashes To Ashes, The Man Who Sold The World, The Thin White Duke and of course Ziggy. Maybe he judged it to be a bit on the nose.

It is an interesting change in perception we've undergone. In 1996 he was too old to be performing like he used to do but in 2013, at the age of 66, there were whispers about how great it'd be if he toured again. Not in any other industry do you expect a 66 year old man to get up onstage and dance about trying to be sexy for two or three hours a night. He could've done it like Dylan or Cohen (who only started touring again when he was much older than Bowie, true) but it wouldn't really have been his style: here was a man for who dance and mime and stagecraft had been an integral part of what made him a star. It’s still very present in his last videos and one of his final works was an honest to God musical after all.

So in the Blackstar video when we see that Major Tom is dead and at peace at last what are we to make of it? Clearing house for a whole new phase of experimentation and new ideas or a man on his last legs knowing that even if he didn't die straight after making this album he didn't have forever and was in the winter of his years? This is where we start to maybe give him too much credit. He was a man, and a great man but not a superhero. Superheroes don’t do things like release terrible covers of Iggy Pop songs with Tina Turner bolted onto them. “Ah but he only did that to keep his good friend financially solvent.”. Okay, good point.

He was a very intelligent man but not some towering inhuman intellect who could've predicted the moment Blackstar's "Something happened on the day he died, his spirit rose a metre and stepped aside" soundtracking the moment we knew we knew we knew. Maybe he predicted that it'd be a long while before somebody else took his place because things aren't set up that way. The industry has no interest in promoting bravery, the shock of the new. But he can't possibly have predicted that he was soundtracking millions of people thinking "He's gone, isn't he?" when he wrote that in remission. To think that he did is ridiculous, isn't it?

Isn't it?

#david bowie #1. outside #ashes to ashes #ziggy stardust #blackstar #brit pop #jungle

[afutureinnoise]

DAVID BOWIE, PART 2

BY DAN WRECK

Photo by Mick Rock

BOWIE #2 - STARDUST MEMORIES 

Oh stop groaning, you can name a piece of writing with a Woody Allen pun when the person you're writing it about is a cultural Zelig.

Soon there's going to be a whole generation where the Bowie they remember is the dead Bowie. The sanitised version who is forming in the popular imagination. Then after that there's going to be a generation who don't have a Bowie. Figuratively and literally, kids born into a post Bowie era. Pity them more. I guess how you first encountered him is a question of when you grew up and your surroundings: a guy I worked with at my last job, 20 years older than me, announced "That guy from Labyrinth is dead!". Presumably, somewhere, there's a die hard Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence fan who was mourning the death of Jack Celliers. We may never know.

For many people the Bowie they remember is Ziggy Bowie, whether they were alive to see him bringing bisexuality onto the BBC or not. Maybe this is one of the reasons behind the recent cringeworthy trend of calling him "the Starman" the same way that faux-matey twats call Paul Weller the Modfather. Maybe it's just that these people are idiots. Bowie himself didn't really seem to think of Ziggy as an enduring character or perhaps he just felt like he’d said all he could through that conduit. He laid him to rest after Aladdin Sane after all: around 42 years before he finished creating. Ziggy was really strictly speaking a footnote. The relatively anonymous figure of Major Tom, however, was one he kept returning to: after Space Oddity he came back in Ashes To Ashes, then again in Hallo Spaceboy (the Pet Shop Boys remix particularly) and then finally we see him dead in the Blackstar video.

Ashes To Ashes for instance: Major Tom is strung out in heaven's high and hitting an all time low. This, though, at a time when Bowie's cultural stock was quite high. He was incredibly cool. He was still selling a lot of records. He was the one person who could hang out in the living room of a confused and senile Bing Crosby or at a tiny punk gig and fit equally well with either. There was no point reviving Ziggy because a whole load of New Romantics and Goths were doing it. The fact that this new flock of painted birds were very inspired by him was something that'd become crushingly obvious when Bauhaus did their borderline karaoke version of Ziggy Stardust in 82. Bowie embraced his bastard children with open arms, casting them as his grim entourage in his video, with one notable exception.

Gary Numan. A huge fan who wound up getting thrown off the set of a TV show they were both on and being dismissed as the "same old thing in brand new drag" in Teenage Wildlife because our man was feeling a bit insecure about this new pretender. Which is a bit rich, really, considering that young Bowie himself was a fusion of Iggy, Newley, Scott Walker and whoever else he could latch onto. Numan was certainly no more derivative than Bowie and it wasn’t just Bowie he was drawing from: he drew as much from JG Ballard and Philip K Dick novels and John Foxx as he did from the Spider from Bromley. It’s allso amusing considering that he sings Teenage Wildlife in a voice uncannily similar to that of Billy MacKenzie, who his people had recognised the grand high art high camp potential of when they heard the Associates cover of Boys Keep Swinging and offered them a publishing deal; then later on "The midwives to history put on their bloody robes" is delivered in the voice of another Bowie acolyte, Richard Butler.

Make no mistake, Ashes to Ashes is simultaneously a high water mark, a brilliant pop record and the point where Bowie stopped being ahead of trends and started chasing them. It just so happened that a lot of these trends were started by people catching up to him. Confusing, no? In fact, this is the one point where you could maybe give some credence to the lazy critics idea of Bowie as "chameleon". Now at his best Bowie was never a chameleon. Especially when he was first Ziggy, actually because there's no way Bowie / Ziggy was blending into the background: he was an incredibly beautiful, sexually ambiguous peacock character. But during the 80s he did blend in quite a lot. He was just another one of the rank and file whether prancing about onstage with anonymous session hacks on the Glass Spider tour or just being "one of the guys" with Tin Machine. It didn't really suit him. It was unnerving. It still seemed like a costume but a very lazy one. The equivalent of Bowie turning up to the macabre Halloween coke party of 80s pop in casual clothes and saying "I came as David Jones".

So the next time we saw Major Tom in a lot of people's eyes he really was hitting an all-time low. Not everyone's, not the die-hards and not people who buy and listen to music based on what they hear, not what they're told by a music press who had been swallowed up by the sexless and jingoistic Britpop craze. See, with Outside what he'd done is released an elaborate concept album rife with pervy sexualised violence, violent sex, drugs, strange invented characters and references to obscure artists and art movements like Chris Burden (already visited in the Berlin days on Joe The Lion), Herman Nitsch and the Vienna Actionists. The visual component was a huge part of it all again, with unnerving videos like Samuel Bayer’s The Hearts Filthy Lesson. In interviews he was talking up Tricky and The Young Gods and saying how much he wanted to work with Glenn Branca. Being ahead of the curve by talking about the power of the internet as everyone thought he was nuts. He was even working extensively with Eno again.

You know - the sort of thing you want from Bowie!

This isn't what the British music press wanted. They wanted safe flag-waving and to be told what they knew to make them feel like they hadn't dumbed down to a degree which is still marring pop music with waves of Oasis clones because for a while it was acceptable to make bland drivel devoid of imagination or sensuality. They smeared Bowie's dabbling with jungle and drum'n'bass as a sad old man trying to stay in touch when in reality it was really just in continuity with him learning to play sax as a teenager because that's what all the cool jazz musicians he looked up to did, making "plastic soul" on Young Americans and welding the cold European sensibility of Low, "Heroes" and Lodger to the beating heart of the black American rhythm section of Davis, Murray and Alomar. Cultural segregation, two world wars and one world cup was what they wanted and they didn't want ageing mavericks showing up and demonstrating how hopelessly conservative they were.

A lot of the incredibly dull music being hyped up to the skies was, just like it was with the New Romantics, made by Bowie fans. So the time was right for him to come back but could he have not just have given them Ziggy again? Something with nice short songs, loud guitars, some dramatic strings. This time a bit more hetero, though, so the lads mag readers weren’t left shifting about uncomfortably again the way they were whenever they saw Richey James Edwards.

"Do you like girls or boys? It's confusing these days"

If you're not paying attention you can almost miss it but Hallo Spaceboy is, in fact, mentioning Ziggy / Bowie as much as it mentions Major Tom if not more. In those two lines we see Bowie cagily re-opening the closet door now it's safe for him to do so, and doing so on a mind-fuck of a concept album closer to the spirit of Ziggy or Diamond Dogs than almost anything he'd done since (The Thin White Duke was as much coke psychosis as an actual character). Before this the last time he was really clear about this was on Scream Like A Baby where he talked about queer bashing ("They came down on the faggots") and obliquely mentioned a gay love affair. Then let's look at the remix: it doesn't get much gayer than The Pet Shop Boys, really, does it? The Pet Shop Boys remixing a song from a polymorphously perverse album where he sings from the point of view of various genders: just listen to his alarming pitched-up Baby Grace voice or the strange androgynous Vocoderised ice queen voice of Ramona A Stone. 

Most offensively of all, though, however much you laughed at him it didn’t really work because he was very aware that it was funny. The segues between tracks were full of gallows humour and the Algeria Touchshriek voice sounds like nothing so much as Peter Cook’s E.L. Wisty character; it’s very serious stuff but as you hear Bowie intone “The screw is a tightening atrocity, I shake as the reeking flesh is as romantic as hell” in The Voyeur Of Utter Destruction (As Beauty) there’s a faint smirk under it. He is always aware of his own absurdity.

Outside didn't spawn any of the sequels he talked about doing but it's no surprise: artists tend to talk about at least five times as many ideas as they actually follow through and work on. There were drum'n'bass and jungle rhythms creeping in on I'm Deranged and We Prick You, some classic Bowie ballads like Strangers when We Meet (itself, like Teenage Wildlife, in the "Heroes" continuum and one of my favourite Bowie songs) and some homages to what Scott Walker was up to at the moment like The Motel or A Small Plot of Land. He wasn't setting the trends now: he was following them and the best you can hope for is that rather than trying to assimilate into it as he did in the 80s he was putting them into the Bowie blender.

This, however, misses the point that he was never that original in the first place! The way he presented his ideas was, and he had a unique singing voice but the fact is that he just had his ear to the underground and did these things to a mass audience so they just looked new. In that respect Outside is no more or less original than Low or one of the records everyone goes on about it just happens that when it came out it wasn't the first time the masses were hearing these sounds as it was when he made the second side of Low which sounds like Cluster or Harmonia. Bowie’s value wasn’t as an inventor of new sounds it was as a way of making them digestible and emotionally accessible to everyone in a way which may then allow the actual innovators (and he did always cite his sources) to break through to more success: this is quite laudable.

So then of course he went on tour with NIN, continuing to refuse to "act like a man his age". Now this raises an interesting question about Bowie's public perception. How is it that he was an old man 20 years ago when he was in his late 40's - early 50's but then when he died he was too young to go? Could it be that as rock'n'roll, still a young artform, develops that our perceptions of performers capability changes? The fact is that for a pervy old man, as he was labelled at the time, he still looked very youthful and very vital. Far sexier, far more dangerous than any of the Britpop boys who'd grown up on his music but who shuffled about in tracksuit tops and shapeless jeans. As this live TV clip shows, with Gail Ann Dorsey looking just as androgynous and unworldly as he ever did but with seemingly the minimum of effort; and Mike Garson looking deranged.

The right people were listening: Fincher saw the potential to run The Heart’s Filthy Lesson over the credits of Se7en and Lynch used I’m Deranged in Lost Highway. Both were similarly grim end of the 20th Century blues, meditations on madness. Both soundtracks, coincidentally enough, featured the work of NIN and Coil: it’s a little frustrating how close in terms of interests Bowie and Coil are, how few degrees of separation there are between these immensely influential queer occultist artists and that they never actually worked together. 

He continued in this vein with Earthling, still upsetting everyone by continuing to do what he felt like doing rather than digging up old characters. A subtle “fuck you” to the beige whitewashed sounds of Brit-pop in the cover where he wears a stained and tattered Union Jack coat as he looks out over an idealised version of England’s green (screened) and pleasant land. This on an album as infused with contemporary black music as Young Americans was. Even his huge 50th birthday show was as much of a celebration of Bowie present and looking forward as a fond look at what had been. Then, of course, "Hours" came.

Now "Hours" is perhaps an unfairly maligned album: if anyone else had put out an album with songs as great as Thursday's Child and Survive on they'd be praised to the skies and rightly so. They are moving, perfectly constructed pop songs but there's no real fire or spark of innovation in them. What little emotional impact there is has been drowned in high-tech production that covers everything in an unpleasant sheen. This is possibly as much Mark Plati and Reeves Gabrels fault as Bowie's as this is his most straightforwardly collaborative album (with every song co-credited to Gabrels) but I'm not sure. I feel like Reeves Gabrels gets unfairly criticised as he's been involved in some of the most ridiculous things Bowie has done (i.e. Tin Machine) and he appeared onstage in daft outfits playing wanky guitar solos.

He's also been involved in some of my favourite Bowie songs, however, and if you see him playing with The Cure he's not as huge a presence. He’s not jumping all over everything with fretboard tapping and lunging around waggling his tongue like Gene Simmons with a PhD: this implies that he cut such a larger than life figure because his boss wanted him to as much as anything else. So despite his persona bordering on that of a middle-aged man enthusiastically demonstrating FX pedals to you in a guitar shop, blaming him too much is misguided.

According to the excellent Pushing Ahead of the Dame blog, it was around this time Bowie started thinking about making a Ziggy Stardust film and as such he was annoyed by Velvet Goldmine's fictionalised steps into the same territory. Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine is an enjoyable film but I can see why he'd be so annoyed with it: it is clearly the work of a gay fan feeling betrayed by him “going back in” circa Let’s Dance. Possibly the great man was realising this wasn’t one of his best moves however well it worked at the time. After "Hours" was out and around the time of Heathen in 2002, Bowie changed his tune regarding Ziggy: “I’m running like fuck from that…Can you imagine anything uglier than a nearly 60-year-old Ziggy Stardust? I don’t think so!".

Similar ambivalence towards the idea is hinted at by the shelving of the video for the Pretty Things Are Going To Hell (itself a dual reference to The Stooges and Hunky Dory) where Bowie is menaced by huge puppets of past characters: the Pierrot from Ashes To Ashes, The Man Who Sold The World, The Thin White Duke and of course Ziggy. Maybe he judged it to be a bit on the nose.

It is an interesting change in perception we've undergone. In 1996 he was too old to be performing like he used to do but in 2013, at the age of 66, there were whispers about how great it'd be if he toured again. Not in any other industry do you expect a 66 year old man to get up onstage and dance about trying to be sexy for two or three hours a night. He could've done it like Dylan or Cohen (who only started touring again when he was much older than Bowie, true) but it wouldn't really have been his style: here was a man for who dance and mime and stagecraft had been an integral part of what made him a star. It’s still very present in his last videos and one of his final works was an honest to God musical after all.

So in the Blackstar video when we see that Major Tom is dead and at peace at last what are we to make of it? Clearing house for a whole new phase of experimentation and new ideas or a man on his last legs knowing that even if he didn't die straight after making this album he didn't have forever and was in the winter of his years? This is where we start to maybe give him too much credit. He was a man, and a great man but not a superhero. Superheroes don’t do things like release terrible covers of Iggy Pop songs with Tina Turner bolted onto them.

“Ah but he only did that to keep his good friend financially solvent.”.

Okay, good point.

He was a very intelligent man but not some towering inhuman intellect who could've predicted the moment Blackstar's "Something happened on the day he died, his spirit rose a metre and stepped aside" soundtracking the moment we knew we knew we knew. Maybe he predicted that it'd be a long while before somebody else took his place because things aren't set up that way. The industry has no interest in promoting bravery, the shock of the new. But he can't possibly have predicted that he was soundtracking millions of people thinking "He's gone, isn't he?" when he wrote that in remission. To think that he did is ridiculous, isn't it?

Isn't it?

#david bowie #by dan wreck