In a lecture titled, We are who we choose to be,” Eric Berlatsky remarks on the strange construction of time in superhero narratives and the way it undermines any sense of moral responsibility. Heroes make choices, and choices have consequences; but in superhero stories, Berlatsky notes, “rarely, if ever, are these consequences permanent.” He provides several examples: the death and return of numerous heroes (most notably Superman), Peter Parker’s repeated reversion to high school, marriages that do not end but are simply forgotten, Superman rewinding the world to save Lois Lane. Sometimes these miracles are achieved through time travel, sometimes heroes are literally resurrected. Sometimes such “events happen . . . ‘in the continuity’ of the basic Marvel or DC universes,” sometimes “in ‘alternative continuities’ in the comics,” and sometimes in “other media like video games, television shows, and movies.” Occasionally, the existing continuity is scrapped altogether and a new one introduced. But whatever the mechanism, “all of [them] continually elaborate new paths forking.”
The result, Berlatsky argues, is the decay of the idea of artistic choice:
like their own characters, the editorial staff of Marvel and DC never have to live with the ethical and material consequences of decisions they make about characters and worlds. Instead, time can be rewound, universes rebooted, and/or alternatives created, allowing mutually contradictory outcomes to coexist, just as they do when Superman both fails to save Lois and rescues her.
The observation brings to mind a comment Stanley Cavell made about television:
“serial procedure can be thought of as the establishing of a stable condition punctuated by repeated crises or events that are not developments of the situation requiring a single resolution, but intrusions or emergencies — of humor, or adventure, or talent, or misery — each of which runs a natural course and thereupon rejoins the realm of the uneventful. . . .1
The conservatism of such a structure is obvious: There is a permanently stable universe — an established cast of characters, a consistent setting, a predictable range of interests and concerns. Anything that disrupts this order is a threat, whether it is explicitly treated as such or not, and the plot will largely consist of finding the means to eliminate it. In the end the status quo is reestablished and even the characters themselves remain unaltered. In the perfect case, the cycle will repeat a week later, with no acknowledgment (and seemingly, no memory) of what had occurred before. And it will go on that way indefinitely — episode after episode, in perpetual stasis, with no connection between them and so no development.
Television has partly outgrown this pattern, but superhero comics have been slower to mature. The Marvel/DC business model — selling Spiderman and Superman stories forever — has had a distorting effect on the genre. The paradox of superhero time is that the stories require action and drama, and yet the universe the heroes inhabit and even the basic structures of their lives must retain or return to a stable form. Something has to happen, yet nothing can change. New Spiderman stories come out every month, for years and decades, but Peter Parker is eternally, essentially, a teenaged boy. Complicating things further: to sustain dramatic tension, and audience attention, it isn’t enough to just have new adventures, the stakes have to rise over time: The hero cannot simply punch out this month’s villain. Secrets must be revealed, alliances formed and broken, worlds imperiled. People must die. But at the end of the game, all the pieces need to be returned to their original position so that play can begin anew.
In a way, it makes sense that our Superman fantasies would take this form. Nietzsche proposes:
the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably da capo —2
— from the top, from the beginning.
Nietzsche’s point, as I understand it, was to give our lives a timeless, mythic quality — and to give our decisions a kind of eternal weight. Choosing this now means acceding to it for all time. So perhaps it is fitting that our quasi-mythic hero stories would take much the same form. Professor X is forever striving for inter-species peace; Batman is eternally matching wits with the Joker. Those struggles define the characters, and the mythic nature of those stories requires that the conflicts not be resolved.3
Yet it’s not as though the characters and the stories never change. Frank Miller’s Batman is not Neal Adams’ Batman, not to mention Adam West’s — and nevertheless he is. The challenge for creators is to make something new of these stories, to reinterpret and thus change the characters, while also keeping them recognizably the same.
In terms of stories as stories that is not all bad. Why not find new and inventive ways of telling old tales? No one complains that after a million productions Romeo and Juliet are no wiser, and no older. No one is surprised that each new performance begins with them alive again and just as foolish as before. The play’s the thing — not just the script, but the production, the performance. We know at the outset that the lovers always die, but to some degree understanding Shakespeare means appreciating the variations, even the accidents — pigeons invading the stage at the Globe, as I once witnessed. There is no question as to whether Charlie Brown will kick the football, or as to what Ignatz intends to do with that brick. The interest, the drama, the art resides precisely in the tension between what we know must happen and the seemingly endless variations on how it happens.4
And yet, as a worldview the eternal recurrence is deeply conservative. As Orwell observed:
the theory that civilisation moves in recurring cycles is one way out for people who hate the concept of human equality. If it is true that ‘all this’, or something like it, ‘has happened before’, then science and the modern world are debunked at one stroke and progress becomes forever impossible. It does not much matter if the lower orders are getting above themselves, for, after all, we shall soon be returning to an age of tyranny.5
The problem, I think, is that Marvel and DC — or perhaps, their readers — do not conceive of their products simply as stories, but as composing a “Universe.” The stories, so strangely resistant to change, nevertheless do interlock, as separate performances of a play or purely episodic television shows do not. Therefore time both does and does not exist, or occur, or move, or whatever it is that time does. Even catastrophic events have few and typically short-lived consequences. Heroism, sacrifice, and risk lose their meaning. Tragedy becomes well nigh impossible. It is not a coincidence, then, that the best stories are nearly always those that occur outside the continuity.
That is also, Berlatsky, suggests, where racial and other forms of diversity exist. Yet rather than view the multiple continuities and resulting indeterminacy as a way of creating a world in which many worlds can fit,6 Berlatsky sees it as just another way of preserving white supremacy, elevating select representatives of minority groups to esteemed but marginalized positions while leaving the overall structure in place.
He writes: “diversity is almost always presented in the form of a ‘What if’ question. What if, for instance, Spider-Man were black?” Such is the case in one Spiderman title. The white Peter Parker dies, leaving the black Miles Morales to take on the superhero role. That, however, “is only one ‘forking path’ and, in fact white, straight, male Peter Parker remains as Spider-Man in the primary Marvel Universe. . . . [D]iversity here becomes a consumer option,” not a challenge to white supremacy. So long as there is a white Spiderman, Berlatsky suggests, a black Spiderman will always be apocryphal.
That’s a depressing thought, but if it’s true I think that says more about the collective interpretation of readers, and which stories they canonize — or should I say, privilege? — than it does about the stories, or the heroes, or even the Big Two publishers.
Berlatsky describes the indeterminate variety of the multiverse in terms of “forking paths” and he suggests that such a structure exists so that we can, morally and politically, “have things ‘both ways'” — and thus dodge difficult choices and avoid necessary sacrifices. But he misunderstands his own allusion. Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” famously conveys an idea of time, not “absolute and uniform” as conceived by “Newton and Schopenhauer,” but as
an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time — the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other though the centuries — embraces every possibility.7
This idea, we are told, is conveyed in a novel that takes the form of “a shapeless mass of contradictory rough drafts,” but which in reality manifests a “symbolic labyrinth.”8 We get only a glimpse of the labyrinth, relating contradictory accounts of the same epic battle — but these stories, and the idea of the novel/labyrinth, and the thesis about time, are all themselves embedded in a short story. That narrative is not merely a framing device, but supplies, in fact, the plot — and the moral. Significantly, the story is presented as a confession. “Dr. Yu Tsun, former teacher of English at the Tsingtao Hochschule,” is living in England and spying for the Germans.9 He has learned the plans for a British offensive and, adding urgency, fears that he is about to be discovered. As a cryptic signal to his Chief, he murders a fellow scholar, the man who tells him about the novel, the labyrinth, and time.
Preparing himself for this “atrocious enterprise,” Tsun resolves to “act as if it were already accomplished. . . [and] impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”10 He remains resolute, but his deterministic outlook does not free him from his sense of responsibility. Perhaps the story of the forking paths shook his confidence, revealing to him that many futures are possible and, while all are also inevitable, by his action he chooses one — and only one — for himself. That path becomes his, even as other paths remain for other versions of himself. Subjectively — in his life as he lives it — his decision has committed him to one course and ruled out all others. He is a single point of view, within a single story — even if other Tsun’s have their own perspectives, their own stories. As he reflected, earlier in his journey, “all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men. . . , and all that really happens, happens to me.”11
At the end, he is despondent, waiting to be hanged, suffering “infinite penitence and sickness of the heart.”12
The choices we make matter, and the stories we tell matter — but they do not matter in the same way. Some stories are better than others. One might even say that some are more true than others. Some are read once, and forgotten; others are told and re-told, taking on mythic importance or calcifying into cliché. But no story that we tell can ever rule out any other story that might be told. The best, instead, fire the imagination, tantalize us with possibilities, and invite contradiction.
Life is something else. You only get the one. And the things you do cannot be undone. We choose, we act, we live with the consequences — or the consequences come, at any rate, whether we survive to witness them or not. As time unfolds, we create, often unconsciously, a different kind of story. It’s the story that makes sense of what we’ve done and reveals the kind of person that one becomes.
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1.Stanley Cavell, “The Fact of Television,” Daedalus (Fall 1982) 89.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and EvilI, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1992) 258.
3. Albert Camus offered a different vision of the Eternal Recurrence, and another sort of superman. Sisyphus, too, is locked in an endless cycle, repeating the same set of actions again and again for eternity. And as he contemplates his fate, he is, “One must imagine. . . happy.” (Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1960) 91.) But where Nietzsche implores us to say Yes “without reservation, even to suffering, even to guilt, even to everything that is questionable and strange in existence,” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, in Basic Writings, 725), Camus recognizes “to say yes to both slave and master. . . was to give one’s blessing to the stronger of the two the master.” (Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1991) 77.) Sisyphus, in contrast, was a rebel. He is not reconciled to the world, but is resigned to his struggle: “His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. . . . One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. . . . The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” (Camus, “Myth of Sisyphus,” 91).
4. I am grateful to EmilyJane Dawson for raising this point, with the Charlie Brown example in particular.
5.George Orwell, “W.B. Yeats,” in Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Volume II: My Country Right or Left, 19401943, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968) 274.
6. “Many words walk in the world. Many worlds are made. . . . In the world we want many worlds to fit.” Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, “Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle,” January 1, 1996 [http://schoolsforchiapas.org].
7.Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962) 100.
8.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 96.
9.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 89.
10.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 923.
11.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 90.
12.Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” 101.
This is great and reminds me of my focus on Spider-Man after his recent Doc-Ock-tification in Superior Spider-Man in Superior Responsibility: Spider-Man & the Thread of Identity.
However, I do think this ignores the degrees of change that do happen in comics continuity. The return to a kind of status quo that undermines all ethical choices is exacerbated by what IS allowed to change. . . moving the time period that events happen in and the erasure of their own historical contexts, for example the ambiguity of the attitude towards the Vietnam War seen in Flash Thompson’s being conscripted in the late 60s becomes the straight “Support our troops” rhetoric of the First Gulf War and then the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. Spider-Man does not remain a HS teenager, but graduates and goes to college and graduates that too, but never finishes grad school (until he does, but only while Doc Ock has possession of his body), but he shifts from being in his early 30s to back to his 20s (maybe). There is an accretion of change. It might be superficial change, but it is change nonetheless – so when some kinds of change are allowed while others must be undone or made temporary tell us something in that prioritizing of certain elements of the status quo.
In other words, the claim that “things don’t change in Marvel/DC” comics is an oversimplification – rather it is the frequent superficiality of change that builds over time into something that writers and artists are not necessarily trying to do that help indicate the cultural values that are embedded in these serials at different times.
I’m prompted to think of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons, where nothing ever changes either, but where the formula serves an anti-establishment end in various ways: Son of privilege Elmer Fudd will always have the power of the establishment behind him, but he’ll never be able to succeed in crushing working class New Yorker Bugs Bunny. (Maybe the difference here is that Bugs is essentially about the weak surviving by their wits, while superhero stories are essentially about the strong.) Conversely, the universe is clearly conspiring with Road Runner and against Wiley Coyote, but with the result that everybody sympathizes with Wiley. (Maybe there’s a case to be made that Batman stories often work somewhat like this.)
Side note: For the record, Romeo and Juliet are not foolish. People who think Romeo and Juliet are foolish – represented in the play by Mercutio and the nurse, both dead inside, and by the friar, who is at least sincerely altruistic, but whose schemes end in disaster because he fatuously imagines that his dispassionate affect makes him an objective expert on love, when in fact it means he doesn’t understand love at all – are foolish.
Osvaldo — You may be right that I overstated the immovable quality of Big Two superhero stories, but that’s because Eric Berlatsky already pretty well covered the ways they change but don’t change. My response here was meant to largely accept (and briefly restate) that part of his analysis while rejecting and correcting his argument about what that distortion of time means.
Graham — I started to discuss the Warner Bros, then ended up with a thousand-word footnote on the couple of times Coyote *did* catch Road Runner, and felt myself tempted to start watching hundreds of hours of cartoons in the name of research. So I decided to just leave that aside.
As for Romeo and Juliet: I think exposing oneself to mortal danger out of love for a person you’ve barely spoken to is, to put it mildly, imprudent. But they’re sweet, romantic, dopey kids, so it’s forgivable. You’re right, of course, that the adults in the story are also foolish, maybe even more foolish, and certainly less forgivably so. Word choice aside, however, my point is that no matter how many times they do it, they never seem to learn.
They aren’t dopey. And it’s not that the adults in the play (and Mercutio, who is no more an adult than Romeo) just so happen to be foolish too. They’re foolish exactly because they think the lovers are dopey. The “barely know each other” complaint that everybody makes today is exactly the objection made by Friar Lawrence (twice) (“…young men’s love then lies /
Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.”; “Therefore love moderately [!!!]; long love doth so; / Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.”)
There’s nothing for Romeo and Juliet to “learn.” Though it’s of course true that supporting cast, some of whom have plenty to learn, never do no matter how many times the play is performed; and evidently neither does some of the audience.
Yes. I am with you on the possibilities of those “What Ifs” and other stories
Graham — By your own argument, “don’t take romantic advice from a life-long celibate” might be one lesson. We might also add something about the wisdom of using suicide as a means of manipulating your parents.
But, you know, nothing really depends on the particular example. (And this is surely not the argument I expected to have over my essay.)
Nice essay. Lots of forking paths theories focus on the fact that in the physics-y sense, if we believe in multiple universes (nay infinite universes!), then all choices and their attendant consequences exist somewhere. If I choose suicide, that has consequences, but there would always be a universe in which I did so (and always many universes in which I did not). In terms of the universe I live in, it seems like an important choice…but in the larger view of the infinite multiverse, my choice was more of an inevitable iteration that had to happen somewhere. Marie Laure-Ryan talks about this in her exploration of forking paths narratives, and I’ve been thinking about it in relation to Marvel/DC model multiverses. By taking the “larger view” of infinite universes, I still think it does diminish the potential import of acts in any single universe. I wouldn’t call myself an anti-multiverser in all senses…but the way DC/Marvel have these things set up does mitigate against agency, choice, and diversity in multiple ways. It seems to provide these things in certain ways, with one hand, while taking them away with the other.
So…I don’t think I misunderstand my allusion. I just think Borges’ story works quite a bit differently from Marvel/DC superhero comics (not shockingly).
Hey Eric — thanks for the comments.
I think it’s interesting that Nietzsche also argued that, given the limits of physics “In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times”, leading him to postulate “the world as a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game ad infinitum” (Will to Power, 1066). For some reason, though, he was more intrigued by the repetition than by the variation.
I guess my question for you is, if “Borges’ story works quite differently” than Spiderman — why is that the allusion you chose in mounting your critique?
@ Kristian – But Romeo and Juliet most definitely don’t take Friar Lawrence’s romantic advice. (Not that celibacy necessarily precludes insight into love, but I guess that was a joke.) And even at that early stage in his career, Shakespeare was much too intelligent an artist to sincerely promote anything so barrenly normative as wisdom.
A qualified apology for hijacking your comment section. I take the opportunities to cast protest votes against the vices of our time where I can get them.
To pick up on Graham’s initial point, this isn’t really accurate:
“The Marvel/DC business model — selling Spiderman and Superman stories forever — has had a distorting effect on the genre”
because that’s a model that goes well beyond Marvel/DC. The same thing happens in the Smurfs, Asterix, Golgo 13, Little Lulu, etc. (and, like you say, Krazy Kat, but also Nancy, Garfield…), not to mention narrative works outside comics.
Not to defend Marvel/DC, just to say that that aspect is actually quite common in (broadly construed) serial narratives.
(By the by, I’m pretty sure that Nietzsche was wrong about the inevitability of every world-state in an eternal universe. A room full of infinitely many typewriting monkeys might still never come up with Shakespeare; they might not even come up with Joss Whedon)
I find this far too kind to superhero comic publishers, people who profit from printing and reprinting White male power fantasies ad nauseam. The fans deserve condemnation, to be sure — no one need support an industry so hostile to human difference. But when DC Comics promotes Clark Kent as Superman, as opposed to John Henry Irons or Calvin Ellis or Icon or any other racial minority pastiche, they create the impression held by fans and laymen alike that their Superman is a White boy, pardon the plug. DC’s marketing does not identify Clark Kent as a Superman, and DC arguably embraces alternate reality superhero continuities more than other major publishers. For DC, Kent is the Superman, triumphant and all-powerful and good, sold to children on lunchboxes and footie pajamas as an unerring and family-friendly symbol of virtue. This is as much a corporate branding decision as a political one, born of the same White male power fantasies that animate the genre itself.
Again, it’s fair to blame superhero comic fans for much of this, but they are consumers, not producers. Further, their interest in superhero narratives has been cultivated by the major publishers to respect and enjoy and defend the White male power fantasies those publishers sell over nearly eight decades. Everything in the superhero comic industry — all the writers and editors and artists and inkers and pencillers and animators and voice coaches and screenwriters and costume designers and special effects wizards and makeup artists and actors and producers and publishers and shop owners and fans — reiterate and reinforce militaristic White masculinity through their interactions with superhero comics. To single out fans for their preference for narrative continuity over plausible character diversity in panel appears needlessly selective, in my view. The decision to promote straight White men with extra-normal abilities in sequential comic art panels occurred long before kids flocked to local comic shops to buy Justice League issues for $3.99 plus tax this Wednesday.
Eric Berlatsky is correct to view alternative superhero comic continuities as more marketing ploy than meaningful diversity. Miles Morales’ separate but equal introduction in Ultimate Marvel offers a stunning recent example. For blerds enamored with his stories, Morales’ appeal stemmed in part from the fact that he was Spider-Man for that universe, without qualification. Sure, it was cowl-rental. But for people who craved a superhero ‘like themselves’ part of the appeal involves the ascension of someone like them into a high office/ persona that all must respect. Call it a superhero Obama effect: in 2008, much of the endlessly reported and televised in-the-streets joy shown from Black citizens derived from the fact that a man they respected and claimed as ‘like themselves’ ascended to the highest office in the land, that federal power was now Black power symbolically, if nothing else.
Superhero narratives can’t deliver minority superheroes that all readers and viewers must respect as the definitive article, without qualification, after they’ve invested so much money and marketing in their original White male pantheon over generations. Miles Morales is ultimately a ploy, a crass grab for good press and emerging minority markets, nothing more. Kamala Khan is a ploy. Sam Wilson is a ploy. The new female Thor is a ploy. And quicker than we can say ‘Excelsior!’, all these ploys revert to type. The fans don’t choose this boring heroic monochrome; they support it and defend it, but they do not choose it. Superhero narrative canonization involves readers and fans to some degree, but publishers make these decisions, and deserve condemnation for their actions.
The fans should just stop buying this crap, in my view.
“For the record, Romeo and Juliet are not foolish”
Have you read this piece, Graham? http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/in-defense-of-i-romeo-and-juliet-i-its-not-childish-its-about-childishness/274836/
For those who don’t want to click the link, I enthusiastically endorse Graham’s reading; the adults in R&J are the idiots. Juliet, especially, deserves much better than she gets from all of them.
Probably not the greatest answer, but lots of folks, particularly narrative theorists, who discuss multiple timelines use “forking paths” as shorthand. It seemed like a convenient term to start with, though there are other options. Bordwell uses “multiple draft” stories, for instance… I dunno. I’m ok with “forking paths” as a term, though I can see why you launch your critique from that platform.
@ Noah – I most definitely had not read that piece, but I have now. It’s fantastic! Thank you!
Various thoughts:
-I’ve noticed a remarkable number of series in all mediums hit a multiverse/meta point if they go on long enough, particularly if they contain a semi-fixed premise. I wonder if it’s a product of the author’s aging or how storytelling becomes about storytelling if the tale goes on long enough (which may explain DC).
-Even Ed McBain put a toe in the garden of forking paths. One of the final 87th Precinct novels, Fat Ollie’s Book, has the character try to write a hit detective series which is a pastiche of other authors and ends up influencing events in the precinct.
-I’m restating something HU readers likely know, but I find it fascinating how American fiction involved multiverse/meta narratives quite early on. Hawthorn wrote one of the first alternate history/universe tales in which the narrator was aware of other versions of himself. It’s almost a Flash of Two Worlds, but with the great Romantic Writers instead of superheros. I’m sure someone could spin an essay out of this.
-This post also makes me thing of this HU essay from 2009:
https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2009/02/never-ending-swamp/
Good lord; I have no recollection of writing that at all.
And Graham might like this one too…
https://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/05/the-tragedy-of-juliet/
Now that one I’ve read before, and recently, too – I may have unconsciously stolen some of my above characterization of Friar Laurence from it [“Lawrence” – Jesus, what’s wrong with me?] – though I’d already forgotten that it was here.
Well … I turn off the computer for part of the day, and look what happens!
Graham — no need to apologize. If I can launch an essay-length attack on Eric B’s argument based on a literary allusion, you can flood the comments with articles countering my off-the-cuff example.
Eric — There’s a part of me that thinks “okay, fair enough.” But there’s another part of me that goes back and re-reads the story and writes a whole essay about how it doesn’t support your point. You can probably guess which part is stronger. But we can each console ourselves that in another possible world, we agree.
Jones — I never meant to imply that the sin was unique to Marvel and DC, or that Nietzsche’s metaphysics (or even his physics) made any damn sense. (I’m not sure from your comment if you took me that way, but please don’t.)
Lamb — Hey, there’s plenty of blame to go around! And I think your point about merchandizing and promotion is a good one. I was thinking more about the characters as characters, and stories as stories, as opposed to as brands. You’re right, of course, that they are both, and that fans interact with them both ways. My essay, though, was really only looking at the one aspect and not the other. I’ll leave it to you do decide whether that is a defense of an admission of defeat.
Oh, yeah, sure. I remember my bitter disappointment, as a teenager, that, after writing all these (hilarious) jeremiads against ridiculous made-up metaphysics, Nietzsche turned around and churned out his own ridiculous made-up metaphysics of eternal return and will to power and all that stuff. What a sell-out. It used to be about the music, man
nice piece — i tried to parse out some of problems out more from an industrial perspective in a set of posts i wrote some time ago considering claremont’s x-men:
https://mijoclarke.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/chris-claremonts-x-men-and-the-tragedy-of-formula-characters-part-two/
https://mijoclarke.wordpress.com/2014/09/26/chris-claremonts-x-men-and-the-tragedy-of-formula-characters-part-two/
Thanks for the links, Michael. I like your blog. Left you a comment over there.