Unexpected treat; CS Lewis HP Lovecraft mashup

I actually have a grand plan in mind for the CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft series, wherein we delve into some wild theories about their inner mind and homosexual tendencies and all that spicy stuff, but before we do that I have to re-read the books again.  But before I do that, I believe it’s time for a mashup, wherein we attempt to tell a short story as if the two of them got together for some kind of literary retreat in 1925, when Lovecraft was falling apart financially and about to leave New York, and Lewis had just become a professor at Oxford. For the purposes of the mashup, in this scenario they get married. Why? Because it seems to me that the differences in the philosophies of the two of them would ordinarily make it extremely unlikely that they could ever willingly collaborate, but people tend to overlook all types of differences if they have romantic feelings for someone, so I believe they would have fall in love and get married in order for the mashup to happen. After getting married they live in England where Lewis can support them, since Lewis in reality had a far better job than Lovecraft did.
And they write a story together:

Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet
I write these sentences supine, lying in a bed in the Miskatonic University Center for Invalids and Convalescent Scholars. The daily effort to lift pen to paper drains the last vestiges of my waning strength, yet a fierce desire to warn the public of the threat from within, while seeking to protect and advocate for the furry peoples of Malacandra, impels me to my painful, remorselessly damaging daily toil.
For the Reader’s sake I will attempt to organize and cohere my tangled memories into an understandable narrative.
To begin: My name is Elwin A Ransom. I am a professor of linguistics at Magdalene College, Miskatonic Campus. Until recently, I had been immersed in my studies and my teaching duties, living my quiet, inoffensive life, writing the occasional short story about magic elves and sharing them with close friends and never dreaming that I would someday visit another world where I would meet ghastly aliens that turned out to be Anglicans and perfectly reasonable if you overlooked their tendency to be a bit judgmental and a kind of purposeful abtrusiveness that set me on edge at times but I’m not really a people person and I’ve come to terms with that.
My adventures began when I - against my better judgement - accepted an invitation for late tea from an old schoolmate who I ran into at a tavern whilst on a walking tour of New England. He claimed to live on an estate, which turned out to be true, with his friend , a genius named Weston, which turned out to be only partially true. The estate was an old mansion, filthy in a grand old way, one of those old houses that looks as if it had somehow enjoyed more weather than any of the houses around it. Weston turned out to be a sociopath, but not in an interesting-conversation-over-bottle-of-wine sort of way. I was drunk enough to misconstrue his offer to show me “the spaceship” and follow him into the backyard, where I passed out. I came to on the spaceship, on route to Mars, if you can believe it. Pretending to have Stockholm Syndrome to get their guard down, I cooked a delicious lasagne, with the unintended result that my old friend Devine developed reverse Stockholm syndrome and tried to set me free immediately, and Weston developed Oslo syndrome, consuming so much pasta that he could not fit through the kitchen doorway, in effect kidnapping himself. At this point Weston admitted that they had planned to sell me to the native Martians for meat, which is what atheists do. Devine said he was sorry and told me I could go and tried to push me into the airlock. We fought, but the ship crash landed on Mars at the exact moment that my knee liberated his front teeth. “Take that, Dicky!” I shouted, and regretted it instantly. I spent my first day on a new planet trying to think up a better line. Eventually I sought Devine out after dinner and shouted “Welcome to Mars, Dicky! Love, the Tooth Fairy!” I tried to kick his mouth again, but he dodged and heeled my instep, dropping me like a sack. We stopped speaking after that, except for making fart noises whenever Weston asked for help moving supplies. Weston eventually produced a pistol and motioned me into the nearby trees, where we met several inhumanly tall, monstrously countenanced creatures who intoned unnerving syllables in a ghastly, unknown language. Sensing that my end credits were commencing to roll, I resolved that my screams would haunt these abominations to the end of their unearthly days.

And so on... it’s a special thrill to read the collaboration of these Gand masters!

Hagenart comi 12/12/19

More on CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft

So last week we began a series on CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft
Usually when people publish a blog post on a topic, they draw upon years of professional experience and study, or upon painstaking research on the subject they wish to discuss. I’m saying this in a knowitall tone, as of if I’m an expert in these things, but I just recently found this out, in the last few days or so actually, because It did not occur to me to research the subject I wanted to write about until after I had attempted to write about it, that is until I re-read what I had written and found it to be paragraph after paragraph of utter nonsense without any discernible point. Appalled, I dug out the CS Lewis space trilogy and the Lovecraft compilation, and also searched the web to see what smart people had already said about CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft.  
I read some interesting stuff, all apparently written by Christians who ultimately disagreed with Lovecraft but still said nice things about his stories. Lovecraft depressed them, they all said, and then Lewis talked them away from the window. I completely agree with their immediate emotional reaction to reading Lovecraft, his stories will leave you with a feeling of queasy disquiet, and then Lewis inevitably reassures you. But his reassurance only works if you’re religious, it’s all about how god will take care of the scary stuff.  And so I have to wonder how come those religious people got depressed by Lovecraft at all. Don’t you have to find his point of view compelling to find it depressing and scary? 
If you believe in God, how can you be frightened of ghosts and spirits?   But if you believe in God, but are also frightened of supernatural gibberish, you may like to have protective mental walls around you, and Lewis paints a beautiful wall of stained glass with renaissance scenes all around the universe.  Wherever you go in his stories, you’re still in church. I do not personally like that feeling. My memories of church are of groaning inside while I  struggled to stay awake during the interminable sermons. No matter how compelling I find the imagery of his worlds, I find myself repeatedly disappointed by his mental cloistering of his own stories. But for a religious person, that is an intelligent religious person who reads and therefore probably thinks about things from time to time, I believe this cloistering is a comfort, a shelter. 
Lovecraft seems to completely understand the terror of ideas. His narrators often express a desire not to know what they have discovered. But Lovecraft was not his narrators, and he couldn’t possibly have agreed with that sentiment, since all the monsters in his stories came out of his own head.  What his narrators found horrible and uncanny, he may have found magical and beautiful.  His protagonists often end up embracing their monstrous, otherworldly fate. The narrator in Shadow over Innsmouth speaks euphorically of his future life as a grotesque fish-person, in the ending passages. The narrator in Mountains of Madness speaks of the Old Ones as fellow creatures, as “men, of a sort.”  And he waxes euphoric over the achievements and civilization of the “Great Race” in the Shadow Out of Time. It’s actually a little disturbing how sympathetic he is with aliens who switch minds with creatures against their will, but there’s an undeniable joy in his writing, a delight with the ideas for their own sake. I think Lovecraft secretly found the universe to be a much more wonderful place than he let’s on in his stories. But in his fiction he’s always speaking in character as the narrator, and his narrators are basically 19th century gentlemen, who see the world through a very moralistic lens.  Was that Lovecraft? It seems to be part of him, but he had an uncanny side, a side with tentacles dripping ichor and and scaly skin and multiple staring eyes.

Hagenart comic 12/03/19

Hagenart comic 11/23/19

CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft

Several years ago I purchased an odd book by CS Lewis called That Hideous Strength. I bought it because I had read the Narnia series and enjoyed most of them, and I’d read some of his pro-Christian work like The Great Divorce and the Screwtape Letters, and enjoyed them even though I had long ago stopped going to church or even caring about it and CS Lewis didn’t convince me because once you’ve read Carl Sagan, any Religious apologist just sounds like someone who hasn’t read Carl Sagan. I just realized that Carl Sagan’s initials are “C.S.” Just now, because I was deciding how to refer to CS Lewis. 

I bought it in spite of the hideous front cover illustration which reminds me, looking at it now, of the old English Sci-Fi TV shows like Doctor Who with the great ideas and the terrible special effects that the filmmakers know are terrible and they know you know so they kind of do symbolic special effects that are like signposts that say “this guy is supposed to be an alien, use your imagination and pretend he looks like one.” That’s the cover of That Hideous Strength, with the colored ribbons and what looks like a metal screw plate bracket of some kind hovering over picturesque college-type buildings and phantom chess pieces and and a poster on an easel. The bracket looked like one of those brackets where the screw holes make it look like a face but it’s really just a bracket, but after reading the book I realized it was a actually supposed to be a spirit face, which I liked, and thought it must be representing the devil, because metal bracket faces with screw holes certainly don’t look friendly. But now I’m thinking it might be representing god, who is kind of a super alien in the book. I did a google search to obtain the truth about the cover and failed, but I did get to see some other covers that have been published with the book over the years, some of which I liked better and some of which, unbelievably, I did not. 

Anyway, I purchased the book and eventually opened the book and read it in spite of the cover, and just as you might expect from the hideous cover and the terrible title (really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?), That Hideous Strength is mostly an unpleasant read. It covers a whole lot of academic politics stuff that almost nobody on Earth could find interesting, inner university doings that probably seemed important to CS Lewis and riled him up and comprised the emotional focus of a lot of his tea time musings but that I skimmed through with rising resentment and anger until I reached the interesting parts in the last few chapters. I would have given up on the book long before but I’d happened to read the author’s note, or the Author’s Lame Apology as I later referred to it, where CS admits that he purposely left the fantasy stuff out of the first part of the book on purpose because that’s the way old timey fairy stories used to be written but nobody notices because they use old timey words like “cottage” and “castle” that used to be normal everyday boring things but you young folk don’t get it because of TV. So after reading that intro I knew that something interesting might happen later, and it did, and it was interesting enough that I later purchased the other two books in the series, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, which I loved so much that I forgave CS for the first part of THS. 

I loved the other books because they’re fun and they don’t force the reader to endure multiple chapters of the most uninteresting college faculty in history, but also and mostly for Lewis’s big idea that makes it all worth it and makes you wish he’d not been such a subservient Christian with his stories and loosened up a bit with the Bible-validating that ruined a lot of his stuff. But back to the idea:

Any science fiction slash fantasy story needs one or more great, original, world changing ideas that makes the whole ridiculous and implausible storyline work, and the Space Trilogy, as I believe it is referred to by literary snobs, has the Macrobes, or the Eldils. I think he might have used “Macrobes” in THS, and only as spoken by Macphee, the terrific Scot Professor that made the book so much more bearable. (The only character in the book with an active heartbeat, as far as I could tell). The Eldils are superior alien beings, hyperdimensional energy creatures that Lewis takes great pains to make as non-humanoid as possible, and I found the idea of of angels (and also the gods of classical mythology) as alien superhuman energy beings (made of matter with ‘different movements’, as described in Out of the Silent Planet) to be a very fascinating idea, because it is also very terrifying. The terror makes the fascination. And Lewis seems to get that, because he describes something similar when he talks about the “numinous” in “The Problem of Pain”, the numinous being something that evokes awe and uncanny fear. But he also seems to kind of side step the truth about the feeling. In his passage describing “numinous”, he starts by referring to the fear a person feels when they hear there is a ghost in the next room. The “numinous” sensation is a magnified version of that fear, he describes it as the feeling you’d have if you heard it described as a “Great Spirit”, instead of just a ghost. Interestingly, he uses non-religious terms here to describe these feelings, which are instinctive, although he asserts that these are actually religious feelings. And this is one of those passages where you feel Lewis recoiling from his own mental imagery. Ghosts and spirits evoke uncanny fear in humans, but if you paste a religious doctrinal structure over them you remove the fear, and you also remove a lot of the fascination. Lewis does that with every vivid, spine-chilling, uncanny image he comes up with. So in the space trilogy, he says; “the angels are inhuman hyper dimensional energies, they are great spirits as far above you as you are from a mouse, these entities are also the beings that steer planets, they are called Eldils on other planets, where they rule alien creatures, but we have given them the names of gods. The greatest of them is called Maleldil, He’s a mysterious being with unimaginable...Don’t worry, he’s god. Just go to church”. Really? 

And that brings me full circle to HP Lovecraft, CS Lewis’s twisted American cousin (I can say full circle because I mentioned Lovecraft in the title, so don’t even comment on it. Please? Kidding, I really don’t care about commitment...I mean comments! That was autocorrect!). I could list all their similarities like you do with Lincoln and Kennedy, but I’ll leave that as a game for crazy people (hint: start with similarities in their names). I’ll summarize my opinion by saying that whereas CS Lewis, at his best, starts with an eery and compelling image in his mind and labors to describe it to you, and sometimes, unforgettably, succeeds, Lovecraft begins with an eery idea that he hints at, and never even tries to describe, leaving it entirely up to the reader’s mind to evoke. Because he knows that no monster could ever look as terrifying as his central tenet, the big truth of his writing; We are small, and the Universe is old and vast and unfriendly. 

If Lovecraft had written the Space Trilogy, you wouldn’t get the marvelous images that Lewis conjures, and Maleldil would not end up as a Sunday school story. Ransom might survive Out of the Silent Planet with sanity intact, but he would have been a shattered, neurotic mess in the Perelandra, which would have ended with the Un-man in charge of the planet, or possessing the Queen. The creatures of Malacandra might look like Lewis imagined, but they wouldn’t be boring noble savages anymore, and the book would most certainly end with a ghastly sacrifice that the reader would hear about second hand, because of course, it would destroy the sanity of the narrator to describe it. Interestingly, Lewis does describe, vividly of course, a rather horrible possession in the next novel, by no less than the devil himself. But here’s the difference; In Lovecraft’s universe, there’s no god above the devil, refereeing the story and making sure it all ends okay. Lewis makes it clear that his “dark lord” is a rebel against the just and all-powerful Maleldil/God. Lovecraftian gods are completely opaque if not malevolent. We would never know if one was rebelling against the other, and all their actions would appear inscrutably horrifying to the narrator. 

I would enjoy reading Lovecraft’s version of the Space Trilogy, but after I started writing this post, I of course decided to re-read the Space Trilogy, and I realized that it was possible that Lewis might have read Lovecraft, and that his Space Trilogy might be seen as a reply to Lovecraft, a Christian mashup of the Chronicles of Narnia and the call of Cthulhu. He describes very inhuman, hyper-dimensional entities with vastly superior intelligence to ours, and describes alien creatures and landscapes. But every time his protagonist, Ransom, experiences a pseudo-lovecraftian horror to the aliens, it’s analyzed and dismissed as a parochial, simple-minded response by Ransom, and 

he suddenly sees the reality of the alien creatures as beautiful in their own way. 

Lovecraft says “we are small, the universe is vast and horrible and malevolent.”

Lewis replies “Its okay to be small, God’s in charge and he’ll take care of you. The universe is a big beautiful garden of wonder”. 

Lovecraft never got a chance to reply. He died under fairly miserable conditions before the space trilogy was published. I would feel sorry for him, but he said a lot of awful racist things in his lifetime, and fully believed what he said. But he was also miserable and crazy and pathetic. Lewis actually might have been somewhat racist too, actually. He was a friend of Tolkien.  But more later... writing in blogger on an iPad is inscrutably unpleasant 

Hagenart comic 11/10/19

Hagenart comic 10/20/19

Hagenart Comic 10/12/19

Hagenart comic 09/30/19

Hagenart comic 09/24/19

Hagentarot, the Ultimate vision

I’ve performed some thought experiments in preparation for the new hagenart website, developing a vision for the future site - not the new site, but the ultimate hagenart site. I should make it clear that the new site and the future, ultimate site, are not the same. The new site is a rapidly approaching reality, whereas the future site, the ultimate site, exists only in my mind and now, for one page on the new website, hagentarot, in spine tingling verbal form on this blog.  Hagentarot is a virtual tarot card reading that uses the hagenart value card deck

Ultimate vision for hagentarot intro: 

The game begins as first person: you begin in the middle of a foresty, looking into a glade, or a glen, or a fen. A nondescript hoofed animal wanders across your field of view. It stops to gambol. Suddenly crosshairs appear over the animal’s head. You see the words “target acquired” flash on the screen in the red scoreboard font. If you press any button, a white flash appears on the animal’s head where the crosshairs were, and blood spurts from the wound. The animal drops to the grass, while horrible jangly music plays. It turns into bad 80s guitar riffs. You find yourself able to move around, and if you move toward the animal, at a certain point a silver proboscus extrudes from the bottom of the screen, as if it’s your nose or your tongue, and stabs the animal’s corpse. The corpse changes colors, to silvery colors, and then the animal reanimates and gets back up. It makes a horrible screeching sound and then bounds off into the shrubbery with disquieting speed. 

You move through crashing, snapping bushes and undergrowth. There doesn’t seem to be a path, when you suddenly come across a pavilion in the middle of the wilderness. There is a shadowy figure sitting at one of the tables. If you approach the figure, it makes a movement and deals a card onto the small tablecloth spread on the filthy metal park table. There are numerous old and overlapping stains, of disturbing colors, covering the table. 

If you don’t approach the dark figure at the table, you can wander around the pavilion and the other tables, or go crashing through the shrubbery. Nothing more happens until you approach the figure and take the card. 

Wow. Yes, no question, the implementation could never live up to that verbal description. What a testament to the power of words, that even the author of the paragraph gives up on the reality!

Hagenart comic 09/19/19

If you’re looking under the hood, you’re not driving the car

We’ve moved to a completely graphic format in the blog recently. I’d intermittently threatened to do this many times in the past, due to the incredibly tight time constraints on my writing time nowadays, but I don’t know if anyone took those threats seriously because I don’t know if anyone actually read them besides myself and I know I didn’t take them seriously until I actually began to do it. And I still don’t really take them seriously. 

So the move to a graphic comic book format seems to have cut the blog readership by about 50%; a metric which, if viewed from the standpoint of a businessman assessing the blog as a business venture would definitely indicate that the sole proprietor of the blog, myself, had made a serious mistake. On the upside, if we look at our cash conversion rate per customer, which is zero, and multiply by that by the lost readership, we find that we actually haven’t experienced any decline in blog income. Heartening news! 

But I’ve decided to compromise on the blog format somewhat, in order to lure my mother or other random family members back to the customer base. So from this post on we will be providing written content as a supplement to the comics. 

This week’s Comic:

Written supplement to this week’s comic:

Not my best comic, and I say that with deepest respect and appreciation for the artistic struggles that accompanied this comic from conception to its moment of publication on the World Wide Web. I actually produced three versions of this comic in an effort to find some kind of punchline, and if I haven’t deleted those versions I will insert them at some inappropriate or ill-timed juncture of this post, so the reader can view and appreciate the difficulty of joke making. Actually I think the previous sentence, that I just wrote down mere moments before, illustrates my difficulties better than the actual mis-fires could. No one with a running joke engine in their head could write “the difficulty of joke making”. If you’re looking under the hood, you’re not driving the car.   

I will use that sentence as the title of this post, and perhaps as the epitaph of this blog. We have reached the solipsistic wind down of the blog, after the failed surge to comic greatness has washed back into the dirty sea of the internets 

Hagenart comic Labor Day

Hagenart Comic 08/19/19

Hagenart Comic 08/11/19

Hagenart Comic 08/01/19

Hagenart comic 07/28/19

Hagenart Comic 07/22/19

Hagenart Comic 07/17/19

Hagenart Comic 07/11/19

Hagenart Comic 07/06/19

Hagenart Comic 06/26/19

Hagenart Comic 06/19/19

Hagenart Comic 06/09/19

Hagenart Comic 06/02/19

Hagenart Comic 05/30/19

Hagenart Comic 05/24/19

Hagenart Comic 05/18/19

Hagenart Comic 05/15/19

Hagenart Comic 05/10/19

Hagenart Comic 05/05/19

Hagenart Comic 04/29/19

Hagenart Easter Comic 2019

Comic 04/16/19

Hagenart Comic 04/13/19

Hagenart Comic 04/10/19

Hagenart Comic 04/07/19

Hagenart Comic 04/02/19

Ranking superhero comics, not movies

Ranking of Superhero Movies

Several friends have requested that I codify and post the All-time Superhero Movie rankings that I’ve been talking about for some time and been referring to knowingly as if I had already put it together and they should know all about it already. But I couldn’t possibly rank all the Superhero movies without first ranking the Superheroes themselves. So first, top ten Superheroes:

1. Fantastic Four:  I know, you hated the movie.  I don’t care about the movies. This is a ranking of the characters themselves, their backstory, their suit, their artist and inker. And I don’t care who would beat who in a fight, morons!  If I accomplish anything with this modest list, I hope it will be to introduce a higher level of critical rigor in comic book discussion. Don’t message me with your sub-mental fight scenarios, I don’t care! Why are the Fantastic Four the best? It’s complicated. A complicated vortex of comic book reasons. I loved the Thing, as he reminded me of the Hulk, but tortured in a different way; Banner could be a normal human sometimes, go on dates and eat dinner. The Thing was an outcast, a monster, always, with an intelligent man inside. The Four’s leader, Reed Richards, had my all-time favorite superpower (see Plastic man below), and could invent super science weapons and vehicles, so I forgave him for the weird grey sideburns that made him look too old for his wife the Invisible Woman. I didn’t understand the Invisible Woman and ten year old me found her uninteresting as a character, except for being a girl that the guys in the group would try to impress, until the memorable issue where I saw an image of her riding one of her magic force fields like a hovercraft or something and I thought; ‘Wait, she’s been able to move them all this time?’ and it seemed to me that it - ‘it’ being every fight the Four had ever fought with the Invisible Woman in attendance - was all a lie because she could move impenetrable force fields around at will and could crush anyone like a bug instead of fooling around Invisibly and occasionally throwing up a boring, momentary wall when Johnny got himself in trouble. Was she just being modest? How could you possibly justify this person just standing around in her blue outfit when she could immediately win every fight?  I didn’t much care for the Human Torch, speaking of Johnny. I found his personality trying and his superpower bothered me as terribly dangerous. What if he burned someone? What if he burned one of his friends?  There were very few villains, even, that I felt deserved to actually be set on fire.  Why have a hero flying around even threatening people with that? Especially since his sister could easily smash anyone with her magic force fields. My review isn’t sounding particularly rave about the FF so far, but that’s because I saved the best one for last; that’s right, Doctor Doom!  The greatest marvel character ever! The villain who regularly goes into hell and fights the devil for his mother’s soul! The inspiration for Darth Vader - you heard me! A wizard and inventor of robots. The King of his own country. I could go on and on. The miraculous Fifth member of the Fantastic Four, archenemy of the Four, and - wait for it - no actual superpowers, besides being a king and super rich and knowing magic.  The one Fantastic Four movie I saw (it was enough) completely screwed up Doctor Doom. I still can’t get over it, it’s as if they wanted to fail. Anyway, besides the best villain ever, there’s the Fantastic Four’s origin story (second best origin story ever, see 6 million dollar man below) Best comic book ever. Even better than - 
2. The Incredible Hulk: My second favorite comic book as a child, actually the first comic book I read, until I began to find the Hulk’s lack of intelligence a little tiresome. As an intelligent kid, or at least a kid who valued intelligence enough to enjoy thinking of himself as intelligent, I didn’t have the soft spot for stupid people that a lot of Americans have, so I began dislike the way Hulk talked, even while I deeply emphasized with Banner because he was smart and tortured. And of course as a smart guy he got picked on by dumb guys, and for a little boy the whole point of the Hulk comic book (and later the TV show) was the building anticipation, the delicious anticipation, that you felt when you came to a part where someone started to pick on Banner and you knew, you could feel the Hulk clock ticking and you knew he was going to explode and grow to giant size and shred his shirt and start pounding the crap out of the guy and all the surrounding buildings, and as a little kid, this anticipation constituted one of the 3 prime pleasures, along with eating sugar and scratching bug bites.   The Hulk had an appropriately awesome origin story too, second in grandeur and scope to the Fantastic Four’s. 
3. Spider-Man: I read Spider-Man after the Fantastic Four, after the Four began their late Beetles phase and Sue Storm began to trouble me (see above). I appreciated Spider-Man as a loner, a smart kid who got picked on, and as a loser with an unrequited love. Later, of course, the writers tossed out everything good about Peter Parker in order to write a teen soap opera about him and a pinup. Compared to the FF, Hulk, $6MM, and Moses, Spider-Man’s Origin story sucks. As a matter of fact, it’s the worst origin story, compared to the quality of the comic book in general, ever. The radioactive spider idea is just plain lame, and the subsequent “Uncle Ben” episode is just ripped off from Batman. And Batman’s origin story sucks too!  Another sad example of the basic truth, that a person might be a kind, loving, mentally healthy human being, and still write crap. But immediately after that origin unpleasantness, Spider-Man was great fun. His superpowers were minimal and confused, especially the wall crawling with gloves and socks on, a major disconnect for me - how the hell did that work again? Did they eventually figure out some kind of explanation?  It was supposed to be a physical ability, and he would often take off his shoes and socks to climb walls, but then what’s with the gloves and socks?  And why couldn’t he just invent wall- climbing gloves and socks? After all, he invented his best superpower - the webshooters. Probably the best superhero weapon, as a plot device, in any comic book. Think about it, he’s not actually hurting anyone, a big no no in the old comic books, just trussing them up, and he can use them at a distance, and he gets to swing around on the webs like jungle vines, looking awesome, unlike Superman with his ridiculous mid-air synchronized swimming poses. I liked almost all the villains in Spider-Man too, especially Doctor Octopus, who ranks right after Doctor Doom on my all-time villains list, and Green Goblin too. Actually all three of those guys wore green, which is weird. 
4. Plastic man: My all-time favorite superpower, and one of my personal favorite “small-scale” origin stories, since Plastic man began as a petty thief. And the old Plastic man comics are funny.  
5. 6 million dollar man: Best origin story ever
6. Ant man and the Wasp
7. 1969 Batman and LEGO Batman
8. King Kong
9. Moses: Specifically from the Ten Commandments as depicted by Charlton Heston
10. Gandalf

I’m thinking that in order to fully develop and explore numbers 4 - 10, we’ll have to stop and continue the discussion in another post. I have a history of promising to cover something in a post and then not ever getting back to it, but this won’t happen here because I don’t really have anything else to cover or discuss so I should have all the time in the world for this analysis. So next week; 4 through 10

Hagenart Comic 03/17/19

Hagenart comic 03/11/19

Hagenart Comic 02/17/19

Hagenart Comic 02/010/19

Day at the Museum

The man moved blankly through the running, screeching three year olds and the moms on phones and the older kids dragging their younger siblings back and forth, into the jungle gyms and out, into the play zones and out, smelling the innumerable feet, seeing and unseeing it all, marshaling all the considerable powers of disassociation that he’d built up over years of effort, years of his life’s work, sculpting the mental pectorals, or would it be mental calf muscles? to a remarkably swoll state, symbolically speaking, mental muscles like steel cables, like mighty springs, able to propel his awareness far away, to other cities, other countries, other historical eras where he could spend his time in relaxed conversation with Yoda and Carl Sagan. A blissfully peaceful, almost Buddha-like expression covered his face, often mistaken for staggering levels of inner profundity by others, or so he inferred from the admiring looks that people invariably gave him when their eyes met in passing. 

Actually they might be concerned looks, he told himself. He’d always had difficulty reading facial expressions in others, a mental issue his wife had mid-diagnosed as autism but which was most likely another symptom of the retina scorching and emotionally disfiguring number of cartoons he’d watched as a child, resulting in a permanently disabled perceptive faculty.

Maybe he looked high. Maybe someone would call the police, and he’d have to explain that he was high on his own mentally generated reality, and it would be like in Hair, or Ace Ventura. These intrusive thoughts began to short circuit the sci fi daydream, and the reality of the crowded, filthy, odiferous kid town began to appear in bursts through Carl Sagan’s deep, ever-pondering face.

He waved goodbye in the Vulcan salute as the sci fi looking planet he was standing on rolled away.

I composed this imagery while I was trapped at the Museum of Natural Curiosity with my kids. It’s one of those expensive babysitting places in Lehi, which now qualifies as one of the worst places in the state due to the awful roads and software engineers everywhere. I took such a liking to the sheer power and scope of the passage that I decided to create a comic loosely based on the themes dissected therein, which I will  publish with my next blog post