Deathlok #2

Friday is a special day of the week. A few days away from the rat race beckon. Whether because a lot of people work a four-ten-hour-day schedule or the recurring happenstance of workers taking Friday off, the commute is always lighter on a Friday.

So there is a sense of relief. But there is also a feeling of exhaustion and regret: exhaustion from going to work Monday through Friday, week in and week out, year in and year and out, and all the stress and hostility that entails; and regret from the realization that one's life boils down to this.

And what is work? Let's not gussy it up here. Work is exploitation, and sometimes it is crass. I work for a labor union. So I have a collective bargaining agreement with a wage scale and benefits. But the indignities and injustices of society at large are not absent from my office. We recapitulate all the errors of hierarchy and the impediments of the ego. Some get the company car, the gas card, expense account, private office and flexible schedule, while others punch the clock and do the work in a constant state of anxiety over punishment and new demands.

Yesterday after I disembarked from the train and was waiting for the bus on International Boulevard, I watched a pot-bellied man with a black handle-bar mustache and a fat wallet attached to a chain hooked to his belt labor his way through oncoming traffic until he arrived at the safety of the median. He waited there for a while until traffic cleared and then he crossed the three lanes to the bus stop where I stood.

Once the bus arrived and we boarded, we sat in the back with a couple of young guys -- one white, the other black -- wearing the obligatory gear of professional sports franchises. There were also two young black women, one wearing a headscarf.

The back of the bus is an urban drain grate, the place where society's detritus accumulates. It is not an accident that I am there. This week I lumbered through the days with a badly pulled hamstring and a burst eardrum.

Music from one of the young men's phone filled the back of the bus -- tinny, whiny, simple synthesized sounds like those that accompany early-generation video games such as Donkey Kong, Asteroids or Space Invaders. Neil Young is right. Music is dying. I have noticed more young people, shunning earbuds, walking around holding their phones, listening to this flat screeching noise.

The pot-bellied man with the black handle-bar mustache talked on his phone to whom I assume was his lover: "I want you to be happy. Can you do that? I just want you to be happy."

He kept saying, "I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy. I want you to be happy," as if it were an incantation.

The young men ignored him.

When Deathlok first appeared in Astonishing Tales (cover date, August 1974) I, a grade-school kid, read it. It was different from other super-hero titles of the time. Darker, dystopian, a The Six Million Dollar Man meets Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in a near future where multinational corporations and the military rule over a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

As a boy I knew right then, situated as I was in the sunshine of Watergate America, that Deathlok announced a new era. As Nixon helicoptered away from the White House that August, we were on the cusp of something radically different. Artist Rich Buckler and writer Doug Moench successfully captured what that was to be: Cyborgs toiling in service of a corporate-military nexus reigning over a planet of failed states. One might argue that this is the default landscape depicted in today's comic books.

What I a particularly enjoyed as a kid was the dialogue that Deathlok carried on with himself; or, I should say, the conservation that Colonel Luther Manning, the body and mind of Deathlok, carried on with the sentient computer implanted in his head. It was at once futuristic, like an internalized HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and primitive, capturing the basic everyday self-consciousness of our species.

Deathlok has been through many iterations and character cycles since I stopped collecting comic books. The latest incarnation features a black man named Henry Hayes who works for an NGO like Doctors Without Borders. He is an ex-soldier with a prosthetic leg, a single father raising a wayward teenage daughter. That is his cover. But secretly -- unknown even to himself -- he is a super-agent, like a Jason Bourne, who conducts assassinations and grand theft for a shadowy organization; an attractive female keyboard jockey dispatches and coordinates Deathlok's operations from a darkened computer room.

Nathan Edmonson, who does excellent work on The Punisher and Black Widow, is the author. Mike Perkins, provides the art, which I particularly enjoy; it is as grand as Mike Deodato's. Take a look at the scans below. Deathlok deals with a drone attack at sea while trying to extract an asset from a downed aircraft. Note Perkins' study of the ocean horizon. Very evocative.

Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #2

November is already upon us. Halloween has come and gone. Walking home from work last night I passed several young couples in costume: the women in full regalia with face paint and wigs; the men, half-assed, a cape here, a rodeo-rider belt buckle there.

After finishing up Aronofsky's Noah -- which I recommend, despite its short comings (no people of color cast), for its compelling and innovative advocacy of vegetarianism -- I went to bed and was hardly disturbed by the drunken revelry emanating from the homeward-bound debauched on the street below.

Up at the usual rat-race time of four o'clock to do two loads of laundry, everything was going smoothly until 5 AM when I upturned a large glass of Odwalla juice that was next to my mattress on the floor. The accident soaked the rug and several stacks of books by the bedside, necessitating stripping my mattress, pulling it up off the floor, and giving a bucket-of-hot-water wipe down to the books, hardwood and portions of the rug hit by the juice.

That done, I traveled down to the basement laundry room to fetch my clothes out of the dryer. On the way back up the stairs I ran into the building super, Dave. Dave is my age. Middle-aged. We were both dressed in cargo shorts, t-shirt and flip flops. Both of us prefer to move about in the early morning before the rest of the building is awake. Dave was changing a light bulb. He asked how my Halloween was. I said quiet. He agreed. I asked what he thought about Oakland coming to town. He said, "They're zero-and-seven. It shouldn't be a problem."

I replied, "Yes, but they're playing better. And Derek Carr lit us up. Hopefully, that Panthers win got us back on track."

"That was a big win. It was messy but impressive."

"Good seeing you, Dave."

With that we said goodbye and I returned to my apartment to fold my clothes.

Last Saturday after I got home from a going door to door for a Democrat in a race against an incumbent Republican that is noteworthy because the outcome will factor in who controls the state senate (the campaign has also received attention because it is one that the PAC of billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer has donated to), I was so wiped out from a lingering flu that I went to bed. When I woke up I read the first two issues of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, a four-issue series put out this year by Marvel.

Deadly Hands of Kung Fu was originally a black-and-white comic book magazine published from 1974 to 1977 by non-Comics Code Authority Marvel-imprint Curtis Magazines.

As a grade-school kid, I didn't read Marvel's Curtis stuff. It seemed too adult and slightly seamy and pornographic to me. Now and then I would glance at Dracula Lives!, Tales of the Zombie and Crazy Magazine at the 7/11 in my neighborhood. I think I owned an issue of Tales of the Zombie that I purchased at a garage sale. But I much preferred the color of the standard comic book to the black-and-white magazine illustrations.

The Curtis Magazines period is an interesting one in Marvel history and U.S. culture in general coinciding as it does with the demise of the Hippies and the gathering storm of a business-dominated Rightist counterrevolution. Really the only Curtis Magazines title to make it past the early 1980s is Savage Sword of Conan, probably owing to the popularity of the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.

An abiding interest of mine is how in the 1970s there was a "massification of bohemia" in America as the Hippie counterculture along with Black Power cracked the white privilege Cracker militaristic paradigm and then how this massification of bohemia was rolled back by the plutocratic elite. Signposts of this struggle are Hippies vs. Punks, which I have been sporadically exploring on this page, as well as the proliferation of monsters, mystics and masters of kung fu in comic books. By the beginning of the 1980s as Reaganism and Thatcherism -- neoliberlism -- lock in for the long haul, all these freakish comic-book characters have had their titles cancelled.

I loved Master of Kung Fu as a kid, particularly the issues by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy. (Check out this blog devoted to Shang-Chi, the Master of Kung Fu.) Moench, who also worked on Werewolf By Night, Morbius and Ka-Zar, together with Steve Gerber and his Man-Thing comic, made Marvel a potent vehicle of counterculture ideology.

So it was a profound sense of disappointment I felt after finishing the first two issues of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu. Written by Mike Benson with art by Tan Eng Huat, the comic book is utterly lifeless. It is like reading a newspaper comic strip splashed up with some cereal-box-bright colors.

You can judge for yourself. Below is the cover plus seven pages of a Chopsocky street brawl pitting Shang-Chi and Daughters of the Dragon against Razor Fist and his minions.