Original Sins #3

One of the most refreshing comic books I have read lately is the limited series Original Sins. A collection of shorts, each of the five issues contained a narrative featuring Young Avengers Hulkling, Marvey Boy Noh-Varr, and Prodigy facing off against the Hood. The Original Sin story arc has to do with the strange cognitive dissonance set off by the detonation of one of the Watcher's eyeballs.

In the Young Avengers narrative tenement junkies have been zapped into a zombie state by being caught in the blast zone of the Watcher's eyeball. The Hood convinces the Young Avengers to try to save the brain-bleached junkies by building a "cerebro," a device that can scoop all the information out of their brains. Needless to say the Hood has ulterior motives.

What is noteworthy here is the art of Ramon Villalobos. Ryan North's storytelling is vibrant and Jordan Gibson's colors are superb, but Villalobos' work is totally reinvigorating, a reboot of the Golden Age superhero yarn vis-à-vis underground comix.

I want to hypothesize that this visual style holds a key to deciphering the dire straits of our present age, or as Heracleitus philosophized, "The way up and the way down is one and the same."

Below are scans of eight pages from Original Sins #3:

Danger Bird

I returned home from work tonight and was dressing to go out for a run when I noticed that my answering machine light was blinking. As I've mentioned in a previous post this is usually an indication that I have a solicitation from a credit card company. But tonight it was a terse message from a friend and former coworker who in a somber voice asked that I call her. I did so at once and learned that the woman who replaced me at the local prior to the one I am at now had just died. Apparently she was at a party with her boyfriend over the weekend when she started to feel ill. She went to the bathroom and locked the door. They found her 45-minutes later unconscious; she had inhaled her own vomit. Comatose, on life support at the hospital since then, they pulled the plug yesterday.

This woman had the reputation for being a party girl. I met her once. Her father, who is a retired union member, I knew well; he spent quite a bit of time at the local. He grew up in a small town in Southern California at a time when old-fashioned derricks still pumped oil next to residential homes. He told me a story one time about a raven that he befriended and how the raven followed him home and became his pet; when he would go out to play around the oil derricks with his buddies the raven would follow.

This guy had a lot of stories. I listened. They were good stories. They usually had a climax where he would beat the shit out of somebody. And it wasn't as if he was posturing and spouting bullshit machismo, though there was some of that; it was more as if he was revealing -- unburdening himself of -- a deep rage, an obsessive hostility, a misanthropy that in his stories would flare up and burn down some unsuspecting fool who had crossed him.

I spoke with the daughter a few times on the phone. Before she took my job she worked for the same union but a different local. I figured out right away that it was best to be polite and steer well clear.

Shall we end the day where we began it, with a quote from Heracleitus? Let's.

Why not one of my favorites, Fragment 60: "The way up and down is one and the same."

End Times

There is a persistent feeling of never having enough time. I am constantly watching my wristwatch. Is this how time ends, with an exhausted, stressed longing for more? It would be nice to quote Heracleitus here but I don't know where my English-translation copy of Fragmente der Vorsokratiker is.

Ah, I found it! It's where I thought it was.

Heracleitus, Fragment 123: "Nature likes to hide."