Superhero movies part II

In our previous post slash episode we covered some childhood memories of candy company letterhead and failed comic book writing dreams in addition to the passing reference to the superhero movies. This week or month we may cover some higher level issues with the superhero movies that I’ve seen, as I have additionally and in the meantime between blog posts watched the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, all five of them, and have gained increased insight into the general trend in popular movie making in recent decades. 

Trend number one: Darker costumes, darker themes.  I call this theme the Darth Vaderization of American culture because I blame it all on the creepy sexualization slash worship of Darth Vader. Now it would be all too easy to blame George Lucas for all the wrong reasons, but I choose to blame him for more obscure and difficult and ultimately correct reasons. I noted the character’s paternal symbology almost immediately, even though I was ten when I saw the first movie. He was always lecturing people and pointing and using the dad voice when he walked in the room. And he’s walking around all these military guys and bossing them around and nobody refers to him as general or captain or admiral, and he never ducks when they’re shooting guns at each other! He’s just like a dad wandering around his kids playground while they play soldier. As you can imagine, I was not surprised by the big revelation in the second movie. I actually spoiled it for my friends, sad to say, by casually suggesting that he seemed to be letting Luke do better than he deserved in the duel.  “It’s like he’s his dad or something,” I said. They mocked me, but the big revelation hit them like a sledgehammer of comeuppance, leaving the popcorn and soda tasting like ashes in their shame silenced mouths. I would like to describe their ongoing due reverence for the wisdom of my insight, but the puncture sustained to their egos seems to have unseated their faculties, and they continue to claim that I did not predict anything. 

This darkness trend actually extends to professional sports, where the teams seem to be getting darker colored if not actually black design components, even the teams with cheerful happy mascots, birds and rodents, are doing makeovers with black pants and  redesigned, ominous, angry-looking birds and rodents. Of course the teams have changed their look this way to appeal to the American craving for darkness, for the release from fear that surrender to darkness affords. And also to scare their opponents. Does it work? Interesting possibility for a psychological study. See if the raiders have a better season wearing pastels, adjusting for injuries or key players fired for protesting. 

Enough about football. Live football is, blessedly, dying out. To be replaced by virtual sports. 

Trend number 2: Computerization of special effects, or “Sexy ghost people don’t have to explain themselves”. The pirates  movies span fifteen years of ghost zombies, and as the ghost zombies have become progressively more visually stunning and terrifyingly expensive looking, the plot elements and dialogue explaining their fantastic appearance have suffered some compensatory budget cuts.  The hokie skeletons of pirates number 1 had a whole crazy story and mechanism built up with Aztec coins of a certain quantity with clear rules that anyone could understand: take a coin and you turn into a skeleton pirate. The coins even have a skeleton on them, like a button symbol on a computer game, to show you what it does. 

Then the cool octopus and shark head guys from the next couple movies had a sort of mechanism, had rules they had to follow, with magic vital organs in fancy boxes that people could duel over.  But some of the details of those mechanisms began to get a little blurry as the story moved forward; specifically - and don’t ask me why I fixated on this because I don’t know and do not desire to illuminate that murky depth of my own personality - that the crew of the Flying Dutchman are monstrous conglomerations of undersea creatures because they are undead, so they have died and are some kind of ghost pirate, so like the other corpses of sailors lost at sea, they accumulate barnacles and little oozing weird creatures all over them. But then the main guy, or one of the main guy, gets stabbed and becomes the captain. So he’s undead, right? But then all the barnacles and sea slugs start falling off the crew, and they look normal, so they’re alive again, right?  Later on it turns out he has a kid with his wife, and it’s clear from earlier in the series that they were never physically man and wife until after he got cursed and joined the Flying Dutchman. So he’s definitely not undead. But then you see him and he has barnacles on him! He’s undead!  But no, he had a kid. 

By the last movie, the ghost pirates are so fantastic looking that they don’t bother with any coherent mechanism or explanation at all

Suphero movies part I

I’ve watched several of the Marvel Universe superhero movies now; Iron Man, Spider Man, Ant Man, the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the one where the bad Hulk conquers the universe.  I shouldn’t enjoy these as much as I do (except for Spider-Man), as I am over 50 and the plots are absurd, but I do, mostly for the fantastic special effects, which 

look exactly how I used to wish super hero shows would look back when I read the Incredible Hulk comics and watched the TV show with Lou Ferrigno, and I had to watch the slow motion action scenes they always used in those shows to show superhuman speed and strength, so the actors wouldn’t look ridiculous throwing styrofoam rocks and moving their legs super fast like looney tunes people. It never really worked. 

I wanted the shows to be like the comic books, with dramatic but dignified poses lovingly captured by the artists, like heroic sculptures. Not slowly tumbling stunt men, always getting thrown by the hulk. Never punched or squished. That would have looked horrible, but young me wanted to see that, because wouldn’t that happen?  It happens with cars. 

I tried to make my own hulk comics, on candy company paper that we had reams and reams of because my older brother brought it home from his job at a candy company. Every page had a huge banner that covered half the page that was the company’s difficult to see name and logo over a colorful photo of jellybeans. It didn’t seem to work very well from a design standpoint, because the banner dominated the page and you could barely read the company name. 

I later discovered that the candy banner paper had been my brother’s project at the candy company. He’d envisioned  the candy banner paper propelling him to the company presidency, currently occupied by his scoutmaster Brother Olsen, or at least to a manager position. But Brother Olsen had not taken to the expensively inked banners and limited useable space of the paper, and I ended up with reams of scratch paper that I had the bad grace to complain about to my disappointed brother, after he’d hoped to salvage at least some gratitude, a glow of pride for his generosity to his younger sibling, from the failed endeavor. 

So I ruined it with my complaining, or at least so I surmise, as he did not say anything at the time, just patiently told me how I could draw on the blank side of the pages. But the huge banners bothered me so much that I ended up cutting them off with scissors and only using the half pages for my drawings and calculations which were merely rows and tables and pages of the recorded results of dice rolls, a strange practice which I became addicted to in my youth and early teens, as I had independently discovered what the dungeons and dragons people had already found, that the rolls of the dice afforded a pseudo realistic counterpoint of contingent events to the life of fantasy.  I didn’t see the gaming possibilities of the dice roll determinant.  I thought I was perfecting the ultimate comic book writing technique, a random event generator that would make the Orange Giant’s (my entirely original ripoff of the hulk) adventures more believable with their lifelike unpredictability. Anyone who’s written or tried to write a story will immediately understand how time consuming this technique would be in practice, and I did not devote much time to it in the end, not nearly as much time as I did sitting on my bed in my bedroom with the blue shag carpet that I imagined was the ocean with a book and a half page of scratch paper with the candy banner cut off, pencil poised in the air above the beginnings of an inept rendering of Orange Giant, fantasizing about the incredible glory I would realize with my invention. And the dice rolls that I’d conceived as determining the plot of Orange Giant’s adventures began to determine random numbers like the number of Orange Giant comic books I would sell after publishing my first issue (I had no ten sided at the time, so I used twelve six-sided with results coded as 0-5, six being zero), the scores from the Orange Giant football team’s (one of several sport franchises begun by me after the success of my comic books) first few seasons, and of course my growing personal fortune (devoted to building Orange Giant toys and robot suits). 

Just basically a filler post to give blogger one more chance

Hagenart blog

I may as well admit that I don’t intend to finish the series of blog posts based on pictures I drew during our vacation to England and furthermore that I never really intended to finish it. I consider the whole endeavor to have wasted at least two hours of the precious time and blog space that I could have devoted to political commentary, which is what I should have been doing with this blog all along. 

I may occasionally include a graphic pertinent to the commentary, with a humorous caption if one occurs to me. And since I’m more likely to come up with an idea for a caption than I am to draw a whole picture, I’m thinking there might be more captions than pictures. 

This post has wasted at least two hours of the precious time and blog space that I could have devoted to political commentary, which I had planned to be doing with this post all along. So with whatever’s left of my time for this post, I’d like to do the commentary. So here’s the political commentary; about healthcare! That’s right, I’m taking on the big hairy bears. That would make a fabulous picture; myself as a tiny bunny, holding aloft a pen like a knight holds a sword, and I’m facing a huge bear with dripping fangs, and the words “Healthcare Crisis” are written on the bear’s teeth, or somewhere, it doesn’t matter, and the caption would be “I’ll face any beast with my pen in hand!”  

I will work on that idea and hopefully improve the caption before I draw anything. 

Truth: I don’t actually know what to do about healthcare. I am hoping they’ll be able to put my brain in a robot body someday, similar to the scenario in “The Jameson Satellite”, a short story included by Isaac Asimov in his anthology “Before the Golden Age” (not sure about the title).   I won’t expect the reader to go read that anytime soon, unless they’re older than me (maybe 30% of the US population, even less of the world in general), and happen to be an atheist (much less of the population) they probably wouldn’t like the idea very much and it’s one of those stories that’s all ideas. So I’ll just summarize the central idea of the story, that space robots put a dead scientist’s brain in a space robot body so he’s a space robot too, and he travels around the universe with them. Arthur C Clarke later took the idea a few fantastic steps further in 2001 (THE BOOK) where the astronaut gets captured by entities of pure thought who turn him into a godlike being of pure thought himself (right on!) and he can travel around the universe without refueling and do whatever he wants. 2001 is a fantastic revision of “The Jameson Satellite” really, and then David Bowie expanded the idea in 1972 with what I consider his supreme number, “Starman”, about a godlike being of pure thought that can compose, play, and broadcast awesome electro pop to Earth radios.  Great Song! Come blow our minds Starman! Deliver us from our Healthcare woes!

That’s enough preaching for now I reckon. 

Conversation on a train

Conversation on a train,

By A. Hagen

Authors note: I will eventually convert this drawing into a webcomic and after that a web serial, with an expanded script and emphasis on the inner turmoil that you don’t see when you read a webcomic except in those clever subtle ways that they taught me about in school that I’ve never really understood all the way. 

If the web serial takes off, who knows? Because I can definitely see the potential for a video game even if those jerks at EA don’t or won’t (even after I removed a whole portion of the game comprising seven or eight levels that completely stumped even the hardcore gamers in my extended family, and I did it just to make one junior flunky art director happy, a low level stooge who probably went to some fancy east coast art school who’s probably green lighted all kinds of satanic gore fest first person shooters with fancy 3D effects but who all of the sudden can’t handle a few poo jokes spoken by lovingly crafted but highly pixilated characters with incredibly deep emotional layers that he will never be able to fathom), and if the game makes a splash, why not think big?  I’ll just say it; serial podcast, PBS masters edition, Ken Burns visuals, Ira Glass narrates. 

I’m getting carried away, the script actually needs some work. 

Dramatis personae 

Kid 1, younger

Kid 2, older

Scene 1

Kid 1: what are you looking at?

(No response)

Kid 1: hey kid 2, what are you looking at?

Kid 1: KID 2!

Kid 2: WHAT?

Kid 1: you shouted at me...KID 2!

Kid 2: What do you want?

Kid 1: you shouted at me, that wasn’t nice...

Kid 2: I shouted because I’m reading and you keep talking when I’m trying to read. 

Kid 1: You weren’t reading, you were looking out the window. 

Kid 2: then why did you ask me?

Kid 1: ask you what?

Kid 2: aaaarregghh

Author edit: And right there I’ve already identified a problem, ie the names Kid 1 and Kid 2.  They just don’t ring true, in a conversational flow kind of way. We’ll try it again with names: 

Conversation on a train,

By A. Hagen

Dramatis personae 

Psycho-Babel (Kid 1, younger)

Babel (Kid 2, older)

Scene 1

Psycho-Babel : what are you looking at?

(No response)

Psycho-Babel: hey Babel, what are you looking at?

Psycho-Babel: Babel!

Babel: WHAT?

Psycho-Babel: you shouted at me...Babel!

Babel: What do you want?

Psycho-Babel: you shouted at me, that wasn’t nice...

Babel: I shouted because I’m reading and you keep talking when I’m trying to read. 

Psycho-Babel: You weren’t reading, you were looking out the window. 

Babel: then why did you ask me?

Psycho-Babel: ask you what?

Babel: aaaarregghh

Und so. I don’t want to give away too much of the comic except to admit that there’s really not much more to it, just more of the same for a few frames, and it ends with Psycho Babel hitting Babel. It’s about something something American politics, mumble capitalism mumble free press. 

Addendum to above:

I wrote this material for the drawing that I included in my last post, which probably had nothing to do with that drawing and it’s a sign of how low the quality of content that I’ve grown content to publish for this blog that I couldn’t be bothered to go in and change the picture to whatever I had in mind when I wrote the last post which was so meandering that I could not fathom what drawing I had in mind, and it’s a sign of how disconnected my written content has become from the visual content that I myself can’t figure out which picture the written content belongs to. And that I’m so content with this level of content and that I’ll even describe my contentedness for the content within the content itself, well, that’s really really a sign that I really do not have the willpower or the wherewithal to make some kind of webcomic out of something 

Conservation on a Train in Merry Oulde Anglande, part 2:

Kid 1 plays Clarence

Kid 2 plays Jimmy Stewart

Clarence: ask you what?

Clarence: ASK You What?!

Jimmy Stewart: Why did you ask me what I was doing if you already knew what I was doing?

Clarence: I didn’t ask you that!

Clarence: Jimmy Stewart, I didn’t ask you that!

Jimmy Stewart: Okay, fine!

Clarence: Jimmy Stewart!

Clarence: you have to answer my question because it’s not nice to ignore a person’s question. 

Clarence: you have to answer my question!

Jimmy Stewart: What is the question?

Clarence: I don’t remember now!  (Weeps)

Jimmy Stewart: aaaaarrrrrggghh

Clarence: I remember now.

Jimmy Stewart: What? What is it?

Clarence: I remember now! What are you doing?

Jimmy Stewart: trying to read!

Clarence: No, you were looking out the window at something! 

Jimmy Stewart: if you already know what I was doing then why did you ask me?

Clarence: because I was asking what you were looking at!

Jimmy Stewart: I wasn’t looking at anything!

Clarence:  No! No no no, you were looking at something! (Weeps and hits Jimmy Stewart

Blog in need of fifth wheel

I had hoped to come up with a new storyline for the continuing saga of our vacation but I suddenly realized that I’ve begun a large percentage of the posts in this blog with a whiny prologue about what I had actually wanted to do, followed by my reasons for failing to do it along with a kind of meandering description of whatever inner turmoil had induced me to do what I actually did, which was nothing. I won’t do it this time, by which I mean I won’t whine about what I meant to do, anymore than I already have, and I will stop trying to describe my inner turmoil, and I will most certainly not do nothing in this particular post. I will do something. Which I have already done. 

The other thing I intended to do, the big idea I had for the future direction of the story of our trip, is a comic strip based on the pictures, something I’ve talked about doing many many times before but haven’t because it involved a lot of work. But now I will do it, and by now I mean I will begin to think about how to prepare to do it now, I will not do it by actually doing it during this blog post, other than to post the first picture of the series, which I intend to alter using the magic of iPhone drawing apps to be a comic strip of two kids talking on a train, something like this picture but more alive:

Then after I alter the picture I will add the word bubbles which will depict some of those darn things kids say to each other while their parents smile at each other and nod. As I get older and see all the neat digital art people do I have come to see myself as less of an artist and more of an art critic who draws to help with his criticism of really good artists, and as I read more and more and write less and less I have come to think of myself as more of a critic of literature than a writer per se, and in order to critic literature I see myself more and more as a cartoonist who has opinions about literature that I like to think about while I draw, than as an actual critic of literature. 

If I give up in the comic strip idea, which now that I’ve given myself permission to give up is all but definitely as good as given up on, I plan to veer this blog onto a literary criticism course, and away from any artistic pretensions completely. 

Which now that I have actually explicitly stated that I will do I might as well do, because if I even try to do anything else I will know at the back of my mind that I am just killing time before I start the literary criticism. And now that I have decided to do the literary criticism right now, I find myself looking back fondly at my artistic days, my lonely nights toiling away at my cherished dreams of being a webcomic creator. 

And voila, those good old days are back!  Maybes . Or maybe not. 

The mace of authority

The mace of authority 

I said some pretty harsh things about the readers of this blog in my last post, which in TV shows and book series is a pretty sure harbinger of doom for the production, a sign that the crucial relationship between the readers and the auteur, the business and its customers, has degenerated so badly that the business has given up on customer service and will just start ripping out huge bogus fees and resentful passive aggressive advertising just to unleash all their pent up frustrations, much like Comcast or the US healthcare system, or in the case of this week's presentation; the British House of Commons. That's right, I just did last week's complaining about my beloved and intelligent readers in order to thematically introduce this week's episode of the magical family visiting the house of non-magical "frumpity grumps", which is how we in the magical community of less popular writers have to refer to nonmagical people without being sued. 

I had worked up a fair amount of excitement for the opportunity to render the seat of power for a country as we entered the chamber, but as we sat and angrily berated our offspring for noise they hadn't made yet, in the hissing snake language that magical parents use to shout in places where they can't shout, and sat down with a scattering handful of other bored spectators, and intoned "Renderanis!" in as unobtrusive a manner as possible while I waved my elf spine wand, I was overcome with a feeling that I was being bamboozled. We sat overlooking a chamber where the representatives of the country, an entire island and a half of millions of people, met to debate and vote with total authority on the disposition of oceans of money, large armies, millions of lives, and it felt exactly as interesting and vital to my existence as a Sunday school lesson. Meanwhile, earlier in the day, we had happened to walk by an enormous beautiful palace, gated and closed to the surrounding multitudes who gazed raptly through the gates like stray dogs staring through a pastry shop window, where a royal family stripped - according to all reputable accounts - of any real power a hundred years before occasionally resided. At one point while we stood at the fence staring at suffering guards in the silly hats, there was a commotion, a flurry of excitement, as an honest to God horse drawn carriage rolled up to the gates from nowhere and a bunch of very real looking cops with guns shooed people out of its way. The people shuffled aside by this outmoded vehicle loved it. They clamored for a view of the superior beings inside the carriage (who, seriously, could not possibly have had any serious business to conduct) and stared in awe as the carriage pulled inside the gates. 

Remembering this inexplicably exciting event, and surveying the intense boredom with which the purported center of power conducted business, I could not help but hypothesize that some kind of vast scam had been implemented upon the populace of this country and of the international community in general, and that the bored functionaries welcomed people to freely enter the viewing gallery and stare down at their somnambulant performance in order to camouflage the true workings, conducted in secret behind the massive gates by people so contemptuous of the modern world that they are able to ignore its existence, preferring to play pretend with ancient animal powered devices that are lovingly protected and made way for by the armed constabulary. 

And so I present my sad depiction of the camouflage, a prey animal rendering the tiger’s stripes from the safety of the shrubbery, wondering at their movement - surely that isn’t foliage there, what could it be?

I blame the readers of this blog for everything wrong

We've had to halt the beloved Dr Hagenstein series for a while, due to some fairly severe and possibly deranged reviews that have frankly cut me to the quick, at an emotional level that I don't know if I will ever get over. This series meant a lot to me and you people have killed it, and even if you beg and plead for an encore I don't think it will ever be the same as that first time in the full bloom of summer and everyone was young and beautiful and full of that nauseatingly egotistical hope for the future that older people think they've lost because no one likes them as much as they thought everyone would. 

So I need a new backstory for the set of illustrations that I created whilst traveling, and I feel compelled to explain again why I don't want to just describe the trip as it occurred, and just record the events as accurately as I can, to strain with words to hold a mirror to nature as Shakespeare himself said, and let the truth create its own art, and with that art to find truth, and let the truth come back to art again, in this ecstatic embrace of mirror images flipping back and forth at each other and sending we mortals into a delirium of experience-ness and awe with nature and the universe.  I just read what I just wrote, and in the spirit of total honesty that has not characterized any of my previous writing on this blog I now feel compelled to admit that I have changed my mind completely and I will now strain with words to do exactly all that. 

So chapter 1: the adventures of the true to life Hagen magical wizard family in Angle-Stan, or Angle-Reich as they would say over the water. Let the truth flow! I drew this picture with aid of a draw-spell. Renderanis! I shouted, waving my elf-spine wand in devious retrograde motion. The tiny witch coven in the picture had gathered in a little group on the floor of the magically moving painting museum in London. The paintings moved so vigorously that I didn't get a good render of any of them, and my wizard offspring kept grabbing at my wizard cloak and demanding treats and water and bathroom breaks so I never even had a moment to think! And every time I found a really beautiful painting with amazing masterful brushstrokes that I wanted to copy by painstaking hand to appreciate and learn from and I would whip out my elf-spine wand that had been fermented in virgin troll tears and sprinkled with finely ground fairie by a dimuitive master wizard of indeterminate age and sex and ethnicity who told me they preferred to kill the adolescent griffins by hand in the back of the magicke shop to verify perfect freshness of the feathers, then tiny hands would pull insistently at my wizard jacket and even grab at the magic wand as I tried to wave it and whiny voices would ask if they could have it and then in the spirit of demented competition both of my wizard offspring would demand to get to wave the wand while I tried to swat them away and say very loudly in the middle of the museum that it was my elf-spine wand and only I get to use it and my wife would berate me with her disgusted eyes that would shoot magical flames at me and singe my feelings and I would pull away from them and try to aim at the closest masterpiece and shout Renderanis! but I'm also swatting at my kids with the elf spine wand which emits sparkling dust and misses the masterpiece and humorously renders a group of kids with their parents who are gathered on the floor like it's a park or something and a grown woman in silly clothes is telling a pointless fairy tail in the exaggerated voice you make to morons in the seriously mistaken belief that old times storytelling is so neat that it can convince kids that paintings done to impress grown ups are more interesting than video games, as if by magic