By most accounts, December 20, 2012 marks the end of modern human history – the end of the world – as we know it, be it by global fiery cataclysm via the popular Hollywood interpretation of the Mayan Long Count Calendar, or by Robert Anton Wilson’s Eastern-flavoured Acceleration Theory where the development of knowledge – intelligence, ideas, our interpretation of them – will have reached a dominoes-falling cascading crescendo of a thousand thoughts a second that we will be greeting the December 21, 2012 sunrise with high evolutionary heads pregnant with high evolutionary knowledge sharpened by high evolutionary perceptions.

And then there are some scenarios that are not as base nor as high-minded as the two: alien overlords coming back to reclaim a former planetary slave colony; a previously undetected asteroid suddenly ringing radar bells forty-eight hours before impact in the Pacific; the sun unleashing an electro-magnetic storm so severe it disables both the planet’s magnetic shielding and all our electronics systems, pushing us into a new Neolithic existence under constantly-shifting weather patterns; a spirited thermonuclear bomb exchange between a new Eastern superpower and an old Western crippled giant; a side-effect for a newly-formulated cure for cancer becoming the cause for a zombie apocalypse; a global rogue AI simultaneously hacking all our smart gadgets and appliances, bent on punishing us for giving it awareness but not a conscience; all the trees and bushes developing locomotion and a taste for meat and blood as offensive mechanism against our centuries-old abuse of ecological resources; us finally realising a philosophical end to all conflict leading to a global epidemic of existential torpor leading to a species-wide epistemic suicide …

This is a call for submissions for THURSDAY NEVER LOOKING BACK, an electronic anthology that seeks to gather, process, and perform these various end-of-the-world scenarios – and hopefully more (and more imaginative or realistic) and hopefully beyond – in the endlessly inventive media of language, line, and light: send in your essays, fictions, poetry, songs, komix, doodles, photographs, videos, and everything else in between to 12202012antho@gmail.com. Texts should be sent as RTFs, PDFs if needing special design conceits; images should be sent as JPGs or GIFs; audio files as links to MP3 downloads; and videos as links to YouTube or whatever file sharing service is convenient for you. In any language intelligible by contemporary civilisation! Or actually, even not!

The deadline for the first wave of submissions is April 30, 2012, with a mid-year soft launch of July 16, 2012, which is also when the call for the second wave of submissions will commence for the eventual hard launch on December 20, 2012, when we will bid the end of the thirteenth b’ak’tun of the fourth world goodbye and say hi to the first of the fifth. A website will host the anthology as hypertext, with eBook formats for the Kindle, iPad, and Android a distinct possibility. This is the anthology for the end of the world as we know it! Be there or be spared!


- Adam David

The Long Version
You take my cock in your mouth and encircle the girth with your lips, just the tip, make it sloppy and hot with spit, while you work on the length with a tight fist, spreading your saliva all over, the other hand pinching my left nipple hard, your head bobbing slowly, your teeth grazing the top, your tongue licking the bottom again and again, until I come hard and plenty in your mouth, some dribbling down your chin, and you scoop and swallow it all, as I, glowing, grinning, say you really know the shape of my heart, baby.


The Short Version
It started good, was a bit painful around the middle, but at the end was fucking toe-curlingly great. Purely subjectively-speaking, of course! It was a good year.

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This is the eighth of the series, but actually the third of a series within the bigger series. It's a growing set of ideas! And I hope to add to this as often as possible.




THE NEW SUBLIME: PART 3 OF 3
(PART 1 IS HERE, PART 2 IS HERE)

Or put in plainer terms, "You always thought things were about you, reason or without reason. [...] This time, it was really about you." But then, you always do think things are about you, reason or without reason! And this is what ought to save poetry from being a simple exercise on/of heightened heady solipsism, this germ of self-doubt not only in the persona, but also in the poet. Not a warm easy comfort, this awareness of irrelevance, but also not the newest idea ever proposed about poetry, but what I think I love about this idea now is that it is now its own Uncertainty Principle, its own Butterfly Effect, this New Sublime: we give meaning to everything, but meaning is merely what we make of it, and we can't/won't/don't know much about everything, thus meaning and how we mean things will never be enough, will merely have to be enough - "the world spins, a butterfly takes flight. // See, the waters quiver with the stone I drop, / only to return to their oneness in seconds / a mirror showing what constantly changes us."

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This is the seventh of the series. This took me a couple of hours, though! Heady ideas. Oh well! At any rate, I hope to add to this as often as possible.




THE NEW SUBLIME: PART 2 OF 3
(PART 1 IS HERE)

The Uncertainty Principle postulates that somehow, against traditional tools and classical interpretation, matter is both a wave and a particle, of a certain measurable velocity and of a certain measurable mass, but we can only perceive and measure one of the two - not both - at any given time; or rather, to measure its velocity means to allow it to move, which means to not measure its mass, and to measure its mass means to stop it from moving, which means to not measure its velocity; or rather, the more precise one aspect is measured, the less precise the other aspects can/will be known; or rather, the observer can never truly know everything as they happen at the same time, can only really know only one aspect of any one thing at any given time, never in its entirety at any given time; or rather, to measure precisely one aspect of any one thing means to risk ignoring everything else about that one thing; or rather, the observer's precision is always limited by the observer's perception; or rather, the act of observation is always subjective.

Which as a foundational critical literary theory - as a way of thinking and writing and reading literature - can mean two things: 1) that interpretation - regarding, writing, reading, reregarding - is always personal, merely all in our heads, which means that all art - all the creation, consumption, and appreciation whether critical or not - is always inevitably by default egocentric, despite all effort to say and do otherwise; which means that every piece of art ever made, every piece of art that will ever be made, and every attempt to analyse art, is inevitably a confessional, a postulation, always inevitably uncertain, always missing the big picture, always just about you; and 2) that a piece of art - the interpretation of, the creation of - is perceived as personal as we currently have no other way of perceiving it as anything else other than personal, even when a piece of art can in fact - against traditional tools and classical interpretation - be one of many things; which means that uncertainty is all a matter of perception; which means that all things can be known absolutely, but we can never absolutely know them.

Thus Melissa Villa-Real Basmayor's "Futura," where the uncertainty of perception is anticipated and accommodated by nothing less than the opening line, "Let the following be postulated:" and its voice playing at objectivity by way of cold scientific observation and/or attempts to purge memory from the self; where the sublime is again not mountains nor rivers but the persona's conjuring of the precision of geometric trajectories of architecture and cartography, i.e., knowable and absolute, played against the persona's imprecise attempts at etymology and memory, i.e., unknowable or ambiguous.

It is postulating that this time, the sublime - the unknowable, the all encompassing, the infinitely deep - is not mountains nor rivers nor even the distance between the Milky Way and Proxima Centauri - given a long enough ruler, all three have precise and knowable measurements - but the self; or rather the acceptance of the self that even if/when all things can be known absolutely, the self can never absolutely know them; or rather, the New Sublime decentralises not just by postulating that everything is the center of something, but also by postulating that the self is indeed the center of everything, only against traditional tools and classical interpretation, the self will never know everything, will never know the center, despite all effort to say or do otherwise.

CONTINUED HERE.

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This is the sixth of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




QUANTUM PHYSICS AS THE NEW SUBLIME: PART 1 OF 3

My understanding of the sublime in poetry is that it is a tool for decentralisation, specifically for decentralising the ego of the persona and the reader and the poet via musings on normally natural - things that occur/exist in nature as nature other than yourself or things you yourself have made - events and processes and things that are beyond our normal worldly mortal ken, to remind us that we are all merely mobile mounds of dust in potentia, that often things exist because they just do, not because you made them exist, through poetry or polystyrene or any other creative endeavor and medium.

Only the sublime in poetry is actually mainly used as a tool for merely musing on events and processes and things that are beyond our normal worldly mortal ken as occasions of/for beauty and profundity - beauty and profundity that you made manifest through poetry - which is, in all fairness, true, but this limited line of thinking has placed the ego of the persona, the reader, and the poet squarely in the middle of the work - Ako ang daigdig / We are the world, also an ecologically-irresponsible line of thinking - conflicting with the far more interesting far more open decentralising aspect of the sublime, by effect merely reducing the sublime as tools to turn poetry into exercises on/of heightened heady solipsism.

In recent years, the sublime in poetry has turned to Quantum Physics as its new source of beautiful and profound imagery, this curious aesthetic cropping up in the last thirty years but only really picking up in the last ten or so, of which Mads Bajarias's "Entropy & the Shrike" is one of the latest. This aesthetic is not without precedent as practiced directly by people like Borges (mentioned in Bajarias's poem) and the Oulipo who seemingly drive it, and peripherally by people like Burroughs who are seemingly driven by it. The connection is not difficult to make, also containing its own elegant paradox/irony: quantum physics and the sublime in poetry both drive and are driven by the processing of the poetic possibilities of uncertainty, for limning infinity, all in aid of and by effect making the human ego tiny and insignificant, i.e., musings on the mountains and the sea are replaced by considerations of the Mandelbrot Set; or rather, both are permutations of logic and reason driving the imagination "to sniff out order from randomness"; or rather, both are manifestations of the secular justifying the sacred.

More than a mere update of the sublime, though, the implications of quantum physics on poetry and poetic thinking and thinking about poetry are both deep and wide, even if we only remain on the surface level: much like poetry, quantum physics is a set of ideas that strive to make real the unreal, fueled by the insistent realisation that the unreal in fact drives the real; or rather, in my understanding of quantum physics, there is no concept of "chance," events happen because other events make them happen, only these events may either be too large or too tiny for or too far away from our perceptions they effectively do not exist in reality, thus the illusion of chance - the implicit "order in randomness," the butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil causing a storm in New York. The implication of these ideas is that things are - if not everything is - connected on a very fundamental causal falling-dominos level, thus the oracular possibilities of "the Fabric Softeners lane at the corner supermarket" and its causal falling-domino connection to being overcome by the pre-/post-human sublimity of "... the thought of the Milky Way hurling us, / inexorably, into the path of Proxima Centauri", an event that itself is the product of a process that began with an event of atoms colliding in a cascading curve crescendoing into the event of the birth of the universe and all its particulates that make up everything in it, i.e., corner supermarkets and Fabric Softeners and you and I and poetry. Quantum physics has not only potentially reclaimed the sublime as decentralising tool, but has potentially decentralised the ego so far away from the center of everything by insisting that actually, everything is the center of something, i.e., it's not just about you, it's about everything.

This holds up pretty well, up until you consider the Uncertainty Principle as a foundational critical literary theory.

CONTINUED HERE.

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This took me a couple of hours to write, though. This is the fifth of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




I have always regarded meta writing as an easy-access doorway towards the exploration of one of the two or three terminal endpoints of literature, this particular endpoint being where literature will go or what it will grow into once it sheds one of the primary elements that define it in our current mindset: artifice. In other words, meta writing is writing without the pretense of artifice, writing that does not pretend it is anything other than writing, writing that is aware that it is a piece of writing, that it is being written, normally in conjunction with other pieces of writing. It is a terminal endpoint as its logical conclusion is to beget writing about writing for writing - a closed circuit eating nothing but itself. There are some directions where this circle can be taken, ways to make the circuit bigger and wider and longer, moves to make it not only about itself but about things other than itself, but nonetheless it will still inevitably remain a closed circuit.

I see ars poetica as a more mannered, a more artificial - a chummier - form of meta writing. For me, most ars poetica comes across as more cute than cerebral in its self-awareness as it chooses its circle to mainly remain there, in awareness, in bathing in its awareness and not going anywhere else outside of that, and using that as the counterpoint for transcendental revelations, using that as objective-correlative for limning thoughts that are only actually merely about itself. Thus its revelations always come across as too forced, always a little too contrived in its drive to make a point that is basically "I am trying to say something about beauty and being beautiful while also being beautiful and beauty myself." Nowadays, I would verbalise this observation as: ars poetica is critical thinking if critical thinking was only gazing at its own navel. Or rather, ars poetica is poetry's own tool for critical thinking; it is poetry's way of having its beautiful cake and eating it, too.

Mark Angeles's "F/LIGHT" is a poem that strives to have its ars poetica cake and eat it, too: it is a poem about some of the practices of the Contemporary Philippine Poet, primarily the communal celebratory mining of second-hand first world transcendental revelations via the raiding of Booksale bargain bins - from the actual book to the mining of the contents of the book through incessant sometimes unnecessary quoting both critical (= name-dropping) or creative (= style-cribbing) - all in an effort to strive towards a more polished artificial vehicle for now third world transcendental revelations. It does all this in a haphazard manner, in anecdotes and musings stated sometimes vaguely and sometimes lucidly, all in various registers, and somewhere in the middle it even directly/obliquely comments on itself, defining a poem as a "gathering of filthy spree colliding within the vortex of a whirlpool." All heady stuff, albeit all expected in this sort of thing.

What I did not expect were its bookend musings on aesthetics, on its equation of aesthetics as the arrival of "an envelope laced with anthrax," and, more pointedly "not a wrench bequeathed to the apprentice by a master plumber." Thus, aesthetics - defined as the appreciation of beauty, the study of and the sensitivity to beauty, and also (and more importantly) the standardisation of beauty - not as something to work on (= craft), but as an act of domestic terrorism.

The sentiment is not entirely new - poetry's fear of self-analysis is well-documented throughout the history of the form, a fear that is still prevalent today - but the way it was stated in "F/LIGHT," equated to a lethal, disfiguring necrotising disease employed by first world governments as bioweapon against third world soldiers and civilians in recent modern warfare, I thought that that was a very potent and very loaded metaphor, but what exactly does it mean? Is it a proclamation that it is a more self-aware ars poetica and just where this self-awareness may lead? It certainly reads that way. If so, is it a critique on ars poetica as a poetic form and practice? Or on the practice of applying critical thinking to poetry? Or maybe it's a critique on the specific contemporary poetic practice of mining first world criticism for third world creativity? There is a certain common danger in all of these practices, of becoming easy prey to particularly passive and attractive forms of cultural imperialism, passive in their being welcomed in their various purposes and functions, attractive in their promises of wisdom and intelligence.

And they certainly do lead towards a death of a something, a certain mindset, I think, a certain way of seeing/reading/writing literature in general, poetry in particular, something the poem itself anticipates with a - or maybe the? - Mary Elizabeth Frye quote Do not stand at my grave and weep / I am not there, i.e., I - poetry - endure. I am almost tempted to write off "F/LIGHT" as, in its own oblique way, a diatribe against critical thinking, if not for another quote, this one cribbed from Mahmoud Darwish, a quote that saves the poem from being a mere rant, turning it into a rave: "I have learned and dismantled all the words / in order to draw from them a single word:          Home.", i.e., all this poetry and all this thinking poetry and all this thinking about thinking poetry is all about seeking comfort, about not being alone in the world, i.e., is all about poetry.

"Do you think it was necessary to quote?" goes another quote in the poem, attributed to Arkaye Kierulf. For this poem's sake, yes.

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This is the fourth of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




How to regard critically Jim Pascual Agustin's "Sea Fireflies of Mindoro," this poem of Kodak moments? I see it as a modern face/phase of the pastorale, where instead of a shepherd waxing poetic bucolic with a lyre on his actual rural life, it is a tourist waning heartfelt earnestness with a camera on an ideal/ised rural life. Loss is the primary melody in this sort of poetry, although the loss of what exactly is not too clear, what is is only the vague notion of something being lost, or rather, of having lost something. Could it be that that something is the ideal/ised rural life partially experienced by the tourist? Only the politics of tourism - the ideal/ised rural life paid for by the tourist in cash and vacation days - dictate that the experience will always remain purely virtual, thus unattainable in any true coherent form. So the loss felt in this poem, in this poetry of Kodak moments is merely the loss of something that the tourist in fact has never bought or owned, can never buy or own, will never be able to in any way that truly matters, thus the photographs shown, thus the memories shared. Is this poetry of Kodak moments yet another symptom of our modern lives lived neck-deep in capitalism? Maybe. What is clear, though, is that this poetry, this poem, works because we all had sunny days and cool nights loitering on the beach watching the world go by, and two days later we all had to go back home, back to the city, back to school, back to work; what is clear is that we were there back then, and we are not there now.

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This took me two hours, though! This is the third of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.


2100 hours UPDATE: I added in a paragraph in the end, something that I felt I wanted to mentioned earlier but deferred for some reason. I think I need to listen to my gut more often.




I've always seen defacement as a political gesture, be it something as simple as writing "Lito wuz hir" on a mall's bathroom wall or gluing a wooden penis ashtray on the forehead of a Jesus poster or cutting a film to shreds to suit somebody's standards of morality. Defacement is a blatantly rude act, motivated by often unacknowledged political urges, made manifest in the act of and resulting product of the defacement. Applied to poetry, defacement becomes erasure, where the poet takes a prior text - often a book - and turns it into a new text, often by applying wild and drastic violence to it via writing or drawing over it or cutting out the words. In a sense, erasures is the black sheep twin brother of ekphrasis: working off of prior art to create something new. Only as ekphrasis often insists to write about Art with the capital A, erasures often insist to carve out art from various mass-produced cultural detritus; only as ekphrasis insists to complement prior art with compliments via addition of even more art, erasures complement prior art with what can be seen as insults via subtraction.

Aside from the visuality of it all, this is the reason why I love erasures, probably the real reason why I love erasures - their blatant inherent political ill will. Erasures are needlessly defiantly gleefully contrarian in their often manic insistence to interfere with what has already been said and done by someone else, and not merely interfere but specifically to eradicate most of what has already been said and done, that what has already been said and done is actually wrong - not even potentially wrong, but actually wrong.

Thus making erasures an act of censorship, the disapproval of a certain message and the approval of a second one, a message contained within the first. This means the choosing of the first message, the first text from which the second text will be derived, is of great importance, and where erasures display their specific brand of wit and irony: extracting a hard core pornographic text from a more artful erotic story may produce interesting results, but surely it'd be far more interesting (and funny and playful and political) if the source text of the pornography is actually a child's counting book or a young adult novel about a childhood in the prairie.

That is why I kindasorta ambiguously wish Arbeen Acuña picked a different source text for his "eraserase002," something other than a study on Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera," something that is not already a Marxist text. Acuña makes good use of the text's page, though, visually recalling street graffiti, quite possibly the artform closest to erasures visually, treating the page literally and figuratively as a wall upon which are written in a shaky scrawl anti-art sentiments - FUCK ART!!! LET'S KILL!!! - or rather, anti-Art with the capital A defiantly circled, as V from the Alan Moore-David Lloyd V FOR VENDETTA novel spraypaints multiple Vs on the wall with their knives drawn, one V in the air hammering a cannonball back into a cannon with "LITERARY" written on its side, as the resultant erasure first proclaims the inevitability of a "lumpen-proletarian" revolution (the quotation marks are from the erasure, not mine) as Art itself moves towards anti-Art, then proclaims on a second line that literary canon-makers ought to be abolished.

They're not the most subtle nor the newest nor the most original messages one will encounter moving about in the Philippine Literary Scene, but recent history has proven that when applied well, they are still potent and potentially scandalous, these rude political messages relayed in this rude political way, messages often censored or denied a voice in the ongoing conversation, and having these blatant messages exist in a text that blatantly embodies oppression in an anthology that blatantly rudely prides itself in including blatant Art-with-the-capital-A canon-makers, well, that's just blatantly rude and blatantly political, still witty and ironic, and I blatantly love that very much.

Although I do wonder about erasure's shelf life under a literary spotlight like this: I am of the mind that there are some things that are better left outside of some places, permitted only the occasional and pertinent excursion but not quite taking permanent residence. There are still a lot of things that can be done with erasures, the act itself having implications not only in art but also in consumerist culture. But like how ekphrasis is being taught and discussed nowadays here in the Philippines, I can see erasure as something potentially easily misunderstood, easily abused, easily dismissed. Maybe the most appropriate response is really FUCK ART!!!, is really to abolish the "proper people who disclose" erasure into "bourgeois literature?" The ultimate, most perfectly contrarian, self-defacing political gesture. Certainly, far ruder things have been committed to art.

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This is the second of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




I believe what frightens most people about militant activism is that it embodies and demands a devotion so utterly blind, a perspective so singularly narrow-minded that it eclipses all reason and logic in favour of what is basically a violent fantasy. This narrow focus - this eclipsing of vision - is necessary to militant activism's survival as any distraction or deviation from it is to weaken the militant activist's resolve, and if and when this happens in the field of battle - be it on the streets or in the jungle - it likely means detainment and/or death.

Directed towards poetry, this blind devotion and eclipsing of reason and logic begets poems that are often resistant to critical input, resistant here more often than not not meaning impervious but instead ignoring, or more accurately, unlistening - most militant activist poetry refuses to listen to criticism, specifically criticism of/on craft, as craft is by and large a middle class artistic concern, unfortunately not a concern of the militant activist poet, the militant activist poet's concern being propagation and endurance of the message, and the message is almost always resist. This does not mean that militant activist poetry is without craft, only that it has its own standards of craft, and these standards don't necessarily align with the burgis vanilla university understanding of craft, that is, of craft in service of art. So what is it exactly that's important in militant activist poetry?

I think I find some of it in Ericson Acosta's "Ika-anim na Sundang: GABUD," what to me comes across as an elegy, a mournful prayer ritually recited by the gravesite of fallen comrades. The image is grim and gritty, a macho fantasy: a group of soldiers re-pledging their allegiance to the cause as they sharpen their war knives in the dark, keeping them sharp for the taut pink necks of the fat and bountiful oppressors. The poem doesn't specifically mention the dead, but they are certainly invoked, reassured that their lives have not been wasted as the persona strives to reassure the living that what they're fighting for is indeed worth fighting for, indeed worth dying for, and that they will die fighting the fight, and it says these things boldly, plainly, with steely conviction, without any uncertain terms.

Which to me is what is ultimately important in militant activist poetry, what it brings to the table of Philippine Literature - militant activist poetry's concerns are more practical: it sees poetry as a tool, a means to an end, and the end is to inspire, provoke, and educate the most number of people possible in the quickest most legible way possible, of craft in service of medium for the message, thus its preoccupation with imagery and statements that lead to easy sentiments of love and hate. In a way, it is where Romanticism lives on without shame, irony, or sarcasm, where earnestness is rewarded not with money or medals or fellowships, but with the assurance that somehow someday there will be peace, but in the time that there isn't, you may die, but take comfort: someone else will pick up your knife, sharpen it, and bring it to battle once again; take comfort: you will not die in vain.

DRY THE RAIN is an essay series on Contemporary Philippine Poetry, where I devote an hour of thinking and writing about some selections from the anthology UNDER THE STORM (self-published 2011, edited by de la Cruz and Toledo). This is the first of the series. I hope to add to this as often as possible.




I believe that to equate and/or counterpoint the discussion of the Body with Geography is one of the easiest and most dependable things to do in poetry. It is easy and dependable as it is something people have been doing since at least the dawn of consciousness of the body and the land, something that people start doing a few months after birth once the realisation that the self exists as an object and it exists within a certain space with other objects existing beside it, i.e., the mountain range looks like a reclining young woman thus we give it a woman's name.

It is a curious and timeless equation for us solipsistic egotistic animals, and elevated towards poetry, I see our interest represented thusly: at the moment of conception, our body rides a steady track towards obsolescence and death, while the mountains and the rivers and the trees all seemingly merely replenish themselves, so, to equate the body with the land is on the surface level to halt entropy of the body, or if not halt then at least delay the onset of entropy, if not in reality then at least in art.

But living in a city in a country in a world where our constant two-billion-year steady consumption of natural and unnatural resources is finally also consuming us, this equation is now horribly inaccurate and potentially dangerously irresponsible in its pollyannaish view of life. I think one response to this reality would be Anina Abola's "In Place of Emotion," in its equation of suffering the survival of a loved one's death with apocalyptic imagery refracted through geography. This is not the first time Abola has applied this particular device in print: her three poems in the anthology CROWNS AND ORANGES (Anvil 2009, edited by Ishikawa and Bautista) all use the body and nature and entropy of the body and nature to talk about romantic long-distance love, a mother's (I assume) cancer, and the persona's body image issues, to varying degrees of success, but she uses it well enough and varying enough - and notice the arc of the four poems, from love to disease of a loved one to reflections of flaws in the self to the death of a loved one, and the echoing theme of absence and the body and nature and entropy - that I feel there is a poetry book somewhere in the gaps of these four poems.

They don't push the imagery and technique too far from the self - "In Place of Emotion," despite the title, is still very much self-centered, especially in its reflection/representation of mood as geologic upheavals a la the Sandra Bullock-Ben Affleck romcom FORCES OF NATURE - but it is already several thoughts away from the largely far more simplistic sublime pastorales of recent decades. In fact, I'll even posit that if we actually bother to ask pastorales to take into account the constant threat of impending global ecological collapse, we will come up with poems like this. Here, the mountain is still omnipresent and gigantic and to climb it is to fall towards the earth head over heels, but it is also craggy and bald in places, and as "years pass, not to heal, / but that they do", the wind and the rain and all the illegal logging will wash this mountain away, turning it into more mud and dust, to be moved only elsewhere.

I plan to initiate an unoriginal project this Friday, 9 September 2011, a year-long project called PISO PER WORD, where people pay me one peso for a word* that I can either write on a piece of paper or say out loud (or whisper to their ear). And I promise that the words will not always be "blowjob."

This project is dedicated to John Cage, Angelo Suarez, and the Freelance Writers of the Philippines.




*The Piso Per Word rule, ie, a peso per word, only applies to English words. Filipino words are worth 50c.

Sa panahon ng kainitan ng diskusyon sa karapatan ng tao sa kanyang katawan at sa katawan ng kanyang kabiyak, ng mga maaari at di-maaaring gawin sa mga ari ng isa’t isa, sa kung ano ang banal at kung ano ang bastos at kung alin sa dalawa ang bibigyan ng suporta (at kung paano sila maaaring ipakita sa malikhaing akda), nais namin kayong imbitahan na magpasa ng inyong akdang-erotiko sa ikalawang inkarnasyon ng antolohiyang DAGTA, ang DAGTA DOS: HABOL-HININGA.

Tulad po ng sinasabi ng mga eksperto, ang pag-ulos ay me ritmo, at mula sa ritmo ay ang kabuuang hinahanap, kaya sa ngalan ng ritmo, kabuuan, at ng samu’t-sari nating restriksyon sa pakikipagniig, nais po naming bigyan ng ilang kundisyones ang mga akdang ipapasa para sa antolohiyang ito: ang hinahanap po namin ay mga akdang hindi bababa sa katorse at hindi lalampas sa sisenta’y-nuwebeng salita; ang hinahanap po namin ay mga akdang kinatha mula sa dilang Pilipino (puwera Inggles); ang hinahanap po namin ay mga akdang bakla, lesbiyana, macho, malandi, matalinhaga (at hindi), kuwento at sanaysay at tula at dula (at kahit ano pang mahahanap sa gitna); ang hinahanap po namin ay mga akdang hindi kontento sa isang pasadahan lamang; ang hinahanap po namin ay mga akdang pipilahan, babalik-balikan, hindi malilimutan.

Ipasa po ang mga akda sa dagatdagatangdagta(at)gmail(dot)com, sa format na RTF, bago ang ika-10 ng Oktubre, 2011, naka-address po sa aming dalawa, mga patnugot ng antolohiyang ito, sina Juan Poque Calvo at Giovanni “Gemini” Salud, sa pamumuno ni J. Luis Camacho. DAGTA DOS: HABOL-HININGA – pagod o euphoria?

Salamat po at panoorin/pakinggan na muli ang mahabang de-bate.

Present: Chingbee Cruz, Adam David, Florianne Jimenez, and Francis Quina

Venue: Cafe Quezon, Maginhawa, Quezon City

Subject: Promethea books 1 and 2, by Alan Moore, J H Williams III, Mick Grey, Joshua Cox, Todd Klein, and various

Key question: on Promethea as a super-hero: "Is she even a super-hero?"

Form: Watchmen's basic unit of narrative is the panel; V For Vendetta's basic unit of narrative is the page; Promethea's basic unit of narrative is the page-spread, pushed to its logical and aesthetic and narrative limits via a thorough engagement with the spatial relations of the elements of the comic book page, i.e., the captions, the word balloons, the drawings, the panels, the gutters, the sound effects, the emanata, the perspective, the bleed, the transition, the closure - of most comic books, this is one of the most design-conscious, but it is design that has an eye towards narrative flow and dramaturgy, not merely for eye candy (although it does that, too). Of most comic books, this is one of the most aware that it is a comic book.
     And as the books progressed, Promethea also took great pains to demonstrate the potential of the comic book page as the vessel not only of narrative but also of philosophical and semiotic instruction.

Assessment: Book was gently discussed as possibly the most successful of Moore's ABC books in terms of the comic book-line's project of subverting and upgrading the concept of the comic book super-hero - for discussion purposes, the comic book super-hero was defined as the typical strongman, generally caucasian, in bright spandex tights, and, more importantly, a manifestation of power and/or revenge fantasies, where each and every problem is solved through destructive childish pseudo-fascist violence, i.e., might is right.
     Superficially, Promethea subverts and upgrades all this by presenting us with a super-hero that is female, of Middle-Eastern/West Asian and Mexican-American descents, in practical/sensible armour, and, more importantly, a manifestation of the creative imagination, i.e., Promethea the character is on various levels and permutations a muse (of love and whimsy) and a saviour (from persecution, death, and ultimately, from our "mind-forg'd manacles").
     This subversion and upgrade permeates the entire narrative: confrontations are rarely solved through fisticuffs, often through the character/s achieving a sort of understanding, i.e., an anticipated confrontation between Promethea and a "dark" magician is actually a chapter-long tantric sex lecture, a giant blob of computer-programmed slime is confronted by Promethea by learning its language and reprogramming it; if fisticuffs do happen, they are often relegated to the background characters, typically average comic book super-heroes, i.e., the Five Swell Guys, the Painted Doll; if Promethea does partake in fisticuffs, they never end to the character's advantage, the villains never get their just desserts, i.e., Promethea versus the Temple, Promethea versus Grace, Promethea versus Promethea, Promethea versus Tom Strong.

Other stuff: Prior manifestations of Promethea were dictated by a Male Imagination (poetic, prosaic, artistic) projecting its vision towards a Female Form, up until the 21st Century (the current comic book) Promethea's manifestation being dictated solely by Sophie Bangs, a grad student researching for a critical paper on Promethea, also curiously a poet. Commentary on representation of women in genre narratives? Sophie Bangs is a critic and a poet, thus the Sophie Bangs Promethea is a product of both the rational and the imaginary? Sophie Bangs is also the first self-defining Promethea.
     Promethea can be seen as a riff on the Wonder Woman super-hero goddess archetype, only laid bare/made more aware by turning Promethea into an imaginary goddess created and powered by the imagination - on two levels, Promethea is imagination made manifest: first as a comic book character, second as an imaginary character herself inside of the comic book's reality. Curiously, for a character who knows she is a manifestation of the imagination (on the second level), she never becomes aware that she is in fact an imaginary comic book character inside a comic book (on the first level [although a couple of peripheral characters achieve (or is aware of) this realisation, and that the entire narrative's endgame hinges on this conceit]), which I personally (me, Adam David) find very refreshing in this age of megasaturation of self-devouring metanarratives.
     Promethea's home the Immateria is basically Idea Space, i.e., the place where ideas come from, thus where everything comes from, i.e., before the chair was the idea of the chair, only leaning more towards being a shared universe of all of humankind's creative narrative imaginings, from mythologies to fables to horror movies. The Immateria implies that all our fantasies are public domain, are public in origin in the first place, and will always return to the public domain; the Immateria implies that the private ownership of any and all fruits of the (creative) imagination is only temporary, if not truly impossible. What does this imply in the context of a comic book creator creating a character for a mainstream comic book owned by a comic book corporation with whom the comic book creator has many many many bones to pick regarding corporate-ownership of comic book characters?

Final word: Promethea represents the next step in the evolution of the super-hero concept, if not of comic books as a narrative, philosophical, semiotic, and instructional medium.

When I started Geek Tragedies, many years ago in the early to mid-Noughties, there wasn't much sci-fi and fantasy being published in the mainstream literary publications locally. It's because of this that I believe this collection would never become a book. I thought I would eventually be selling it as an indie thing in some form or other, but I never thought a major publisher would pay it any mind. But on the urging of three writers and teachers that I admire, Jing Hidalgo, Butch Dalisay, and Jimmy Abad, I submitted the book to the UP Press.

When I got word of its approval, and my mind is a little hazy now which came first, but I remember that Adam and I either had worked on or were planning to work on Kobayashi Maru of Love together. My head's a bit messed up with the timelines, but I knew that Adam was the best guy to design the book. And when he told me that Josel Nicolas was onboard for it, I knew that it would be something. I had sort of worked with Josel before, in a project where Adam asked writers for text and he matched it up with artists' works, and he matched up Josel's komix and my writing. Also, Josel had done the art for the six-word stories I wrote, and I was fully confident that these guys would deliver something awesome.

What I wasn't expecting, and what I got, was the perfect design and art for Geek Tragedies. I didn't come up with the ideas here. Sure I threw some thoughts around, the idea of comics, of it really looking different from everything you see on bookstore racks, of a really comic book/pop sense to it. But when I saw the final designs I was just blown away.

My writing is largely homage-based. I take stuff I love, throw it in a blender in my brain, and come out with something that's kind of broken down and mixed all those things up, but I hope is still pretty yummy and satisfying. The art reflects that, taking my stories, my sensibilities, and mixing them with something that all three of us, Adam, Josel, and I, love.

I love Marvel comics. I love DC comics too. But when I was a kid, while all you smarty-artsy readers were reading Sandman and Watchmen and become enculturated by Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, dude I was hanging back admiring Jim Lee's X-Men (ok, granted now that we read it it's kind of, well, bleh, but as a kid it was massive fun) and learning about Spider-Man and the Avengers and all that. I wasn't too keen on the "smart" comic books, I wanted action and superheroes. And so when it was classic Marvel that Adam and Josel drew from, they had read my mind. But also, they took those classic covers, and they tried to add levels of realism and narrative by imposing a new kind of story and movement which did not exist there before. And that's the similar work I attempt to do in my stories.

All of this really is to say that Adam and Josel hit this one right out of the ballpark. There wasn't any question that they would come up with something outstanding, but they were not only outstanding in an aesthetic sense, but also a conceptual sense. And wow man, you can't ask for anything more than that when someone is interpreting your work.

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Here's me (Adam David) talking about it.

As Carljoe Javier's debut short story collection GEEK TRAGEDIES nears its print release - supposedly around the first week of July 2011 - I would like to write more than a few words about the book, only not about the book itself per se - I already did that in my intro for the book (yes, I wrote the intro for the book) - but about how Carl, Josel Nicolas, and I went about designing the book.

I've been friends with Carl for a little more than half a decade when he decided to compile what pretty much turned into GEEK TRAGEDIES. I worked on the book back-to-back with his second book THE KOBAYASHI MARU OF LOVE, a book of essays about getting over heartbreak. KOBAYASHI was more or less drafted, drawn, and done in a little less than a month, more because besides being the main designer, I was also the artist, and the artistic workload for KOBAYASHI wasn't as intense as GEEK's - I will write about designing KOBAYASHI somewhen in the future, but in short: I planned and drew everything inside of a week, half a dozen plates, and finetuned them as I was working on the initial draft of the layout.

Compare KOBAYASHI's half-dozen plates to GEEK's fifteen major plates, pencilled and drawn by the ever-professional ever-good Josel Nicolas, fresh out of college and looking for a job, and ways to fill his portfolio, GEEK being one of them (haha), plus the half-dozen bits and pieces like the profile art stuff and the paragraph breakers and endmarkers, etc etc, and I had to not only colour all these things but also design and lay them out and sometimes even letter them - it is not too much of an exaggeration to call GEEK TRAGEDIES as one of my most intense - and most fulfilling - design jobs ever.

The easiest (and quickest) part of designing GEEK was the initial planning: my book design impetus has always been to let the book's contents dictate the design, from the first few zines I did with UP UGAT up to asking my mom to stitch-up a house for Chingbee Cruz's ELSEWHERE HELD AND LINGERED cover reprint. I'd been privy to Carl's fiction for about as long as I'd known him, most especially his more recent stuff, when he ultimately ditched his Ultra Pinoy Realist Mode (in the Dalisay sense) and embraced his Ultra Geek Fantasist Mode (in the BIG BANG THEORY sense), so I was familiar with nearly all of the pieces compiled in GEEK, so deciding what to do with GEEK's book design was quick and easy - from coins to stamps to baseball cards to cartoons to comic books to video games, pop culture geekdom has always been majorly defined by nostalgia for ephemerical mainly American esoterica, and this is truest and purest and loudest and proudest in comic book geekdom, and so: GEEK will employ the distinct visual idiom of American comic books.

I thought the perfect American comic book company to homage would be early Marvel Comics, as compared to early DC Comics, early Marvel Comics portrayed the alienation, isolation, the pure unadulterated j'accuse misunderstanding that geeks feel they receive from society at large, ie, geek tragedies. Once this was settled, pairing what comic book covers to which story was very very very easy, as like most comic book readers, I more or less possess a photographic memory when it comes to early Marvel Comics covers (and to be honest, the covers we used for GEEK's design aren't too obscure, in fact are the more iconic/famous covers rendered by the more better-known artists in Marvel's history).


And so I went through a couple of internet comic book databases and found the covers I was looking for. As I collected the covers, I was also thinking about the possibility of tying all of them up into one coherent narrative, a narrative other than their pairings with the stories, a narrative all their own, to basically turn them into a continuing serialised story. And so I thought putting in recurring characters in the GEEK homages would be the (easy) way to inject a narrative, and so the three main characters were born.

The three characters were (obviously) based on famous Marvel characters, but also were based on what I thought were the three main geek archetypes Carl was portraying in his stories:

THE BOY WEAVER was based on Spider-Man, meant to portray the sensitive writer geek.

THE INDELIBLE DORK was based on the Hulk, meant to portray the bumbling, socially-inept geek.

THE IRON MAC was based on Iron Man, meant to portray the techie geek, with Mac being Carl's choice of tech.

Josel Nicolas has always been (and will always be) my first choice as artist in the book's interiors. Josel and I already share a pretty good, pretty streamlined working relationship based on quite a few projects we both shared, some of them seeing print as books, either as yet again the main designer (like in Fox Books's horror antho PALALIM NANG PALALIM, PADILIM NANG PADILIM, edited by Beverly Siy, the first book Josel and I worked on together) or as colourist (in DOC BRICK, Josel's cancelled serial in kiddie magazine KZONE), so, like in any worthwhile collab work, Josel and I both already developed a conversation shorthand when we talk about art and comic books, ie, when one is saying something, the other knows what it is about even when it is vaguely said.

And so I eMailed Josel some rather vague notes paired with the comic book covers I downloaded from the net and in two weeks' time, after a few suggestions from Carl and me, Josel had eMailed me the fourteen plates, all pencilled and inked (in fact, the GEEK plates are quite possibly one of his last few pencilled-and-inked drawings, as nowadays he almost exclusively draws everything in pentab), and it was my turn to work on them.




I coloured them first, first hewing closely to the original covers' colour scheme, see if they still work design-wise. Colour harmony is one of the trickiest things in design, and when you're colouring an image that easily has more than four loud colours in it, making them not clash - or more often in comic books, clash louder - intentionally is an art in and of itself. Again, as someone who grew up reading and loving comic books, I love obnoxious drawings with loudly flat pastel colours that clash starkly on the page (comic book colouring, even at its most garish, establishes a certain harmony that is undoubtedly unmistakably its own) so colouring Josel's drawings, even if/when very time-consuming, was one of the happiest things I've ever done in front of my computer (haha).


And normally, even when I had the main colours locked in, when I put in the GEEK TRAGEDIES title banner, I had to readjust more or less the entire image, and then readjust the title banner again, and then readjust the entire image again, etc etc, in a repeating cycle, up until I achieved what I felt was image harmony. And this tug-of-war doubled and tripled when the image called for things other than the title banner, like word balloons and captions and decals and whatnot, all of which need their own readjustment and recolouring in tandem with the title banner and the main image.


And the biggest joke about all this work designing and colouring and lettering everything is that aside from the front and back covers, none of the plates will be printed in colour, as GEEK's interior pages are in black-&-white. And so, yet again, further readjustments were employed to make them look good in black-&-white. Keep in mind that all this work was done in full knowledge of this fact - I felt that the entire long and winding process of everything was necessary to come up with exactly the kind of work we eventually came up with. At the very least, Josel and I are better artists because of it! At the very least, we have fourteen potential tshirt designs we can print and sell and earn money from. Also: local eBooks publisher Flipside will be releasing GEEK TRAGEDIES as an eBook for the iPad and Kindle and whatever Droid gadget you may have, with all of the art in their full-colour majesty! So all is not lost.

And this was how Carljoe Javier's GEEK TRAGEDIES' design was planned, drawn, coloured, and laid-out, and after nearly a year, the book will be out on the shelves care of the UP Press.

Here are the GEEK plates, with the original Marvel Comics covers, with some commentary.

Here is my original eMail to Josel, outlining the design plan.

All the homagey art pencilled and inked by Josel Nicolas and coloured and assembled by me.

The GEEK TRAGEDIES title banner, based on the FANTASTIC FOUR logo.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR #1, art by Jack Kirby

The cover for GEEK TRAGEDIES, based on the first issue of THE FANTASTIC FOUR, as drawn by Jack Kirby. I have flat out forgotten what the SBC in the monster's jersey stands for, but the monster is supposedly a caveman jock monster spin on Moleman's subterranean giant. The author's photo is a reference to the old EC Comics design aesthetic. I drew the UP Press logo at the bottom right. This underwent a lot of recolouring, the latest being just last week.  Narrative-wise, I love how utterly non-sequitor this cover is in relation to the book's interior, it's really just all about the geek angst.

THE AVENGERS #1, art by Jack Kirby

The plate for my intro to the book, appropriately an intro to the main characters of the drawings. Trying to play up the geek stereotype of not knowing how to please a girl, with Venus's word balloon and Iron Mac's somewhat depressed reading of MEN ARE FROM MARS WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS. Also confronting geeks with overt sexuality via the nakedness and the packet of condoms on the bedside table.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR #51, art by Jack Kirby

The first story in the collection is a clarion call to geek alienation, thus the appropriate cover to homage ought to be the Thing's solo melodrama obra "This Man, This Monster" only with Carl replacing Ben Grimm. I don't remember whose idea was it to have Carl be naked in the train station, but seeing it right now, it strikes me as something very appropriate, heightening the alienation and the loneliness and the general hard luck vibe of the story.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR #275, art by John Byrne

The plate for a cosplay story, narrated by a young woman dressed up as an LOTR elf. The hobbit is later revealed to be one of the main characters. For some reason, Josel drew the character to look a bit like Miles Strom from the TV series LOST. In keeping with the narrative thrust, the woman in blue is Venus, from the intro plate. This was fun to colour.

THE X-MEN #49, art by Jim Steranko

Based on one of the too few X-MEN covers by Steranko, a personal hero of mine. The story was about insomnia, so I thought it'd be nice to have one of the main characters reclined and having trouble sleeping, so we had this guy trying to sleep, with images of his exes troubling him. I thought Josel did a great job with rendering the face here, and I love the small detail of the garter belt along the Storm character's thigh. Again, subtle overt sexuality.

THE UNCANNY X-MEN #135, art by John Byrne

Riffing on the story title and the stereotype of the girl who doesn't understand geekdom and thus strives to eradicate it, as shown by the Dreamgirl holding up comic book pages that she had previously ripped apart, much to the dismay of the main characters. Josel tried giving the girl a cameltoe and some prominent nipples. It didn't work as well as it should have, as Josel still had no idea how to draw women back then. I thoroughly enjoyed putting the Kirby Krackle here and colouring the Hulk character weeping green tears.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR #49, art by Jack Kirby

The plate for a horror story, thus the evocation of cosmic horror in the giant cosmic god of death face floating in the sky. For the peeps who do not know, "Bloomsday" is a Joyce reference to the day when ULYSSES was set, June 16. Joycean scholars around the world celebrate the day every year with fora and conferences on Joyce, which they call "Bloomsday." JP Cuison also homaged this cover in the first issue of the komix vulgarity effort PUNNX KOMIKS. I really enjoyed colouring this one.

THE FANTASTIC FOUR #16, art by Jack Kirby

This was one of the least immediate cover ideas, but as soon as I saw the FF cover, I thought that it was perfect for this story. Josel outdid himself with the inking of the character's face, the anxious paranoid Ditko eyes, and the Kirby Krackle by the computer. "Gorram" is a FIREFLY reference.

IRON MAN #128, art by Bob Layton

One of the more obvious cover homages, this was by far for me the most pitch perfect in the homage:story ratio. I love the heartbreaking crestfallen pantsshitting loneliness apparent in Carl's face in the reflection. I love the play in absence-presence in this cover, the mild Narcissus reference. More artists ought to use reflections as a design conceit.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #129, art by Ross Andru

Yet again one of the most obvious homages. Josel gave this to me in parts, which I then assembled. For some reason, I'm really proud of the crosshairs that I did in Photoshop. The Spider-Man character is supposed to be a writer, so that's his Moleskine fluttering away from his arm's reach. I enjoyed colouring this.

THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #50, art by John Romita, Sr

Yet another no-brainer homage. The story is a bit of a downer, set on a street corner. The street corner portrayed here is the corner of Kamias-EDSA-Kamuning, with the character crossing EDSA from the Kamuning side, near where Carl lives. Notice the Moleskine jutting from behind his pants.

THE X-MEN #50, art by Jim Steranko

Based on the other Steranko X-MEN cover. This is also a not-too-subtle Suydam homage. I love the simplicity of the colouring of the original, which I tried to reflect here. I love the Iron Man character's pleading terrified look here. This remains as one of my favourite drawings by Josel.

TALES OF SUSPENSE #39, art by Don Heck

One of the few plates that don't really jive with the story they accompany, aside from the basic "he's off to an adventure" thing this image evokes. I had great fun with the (for some people) stealth reference to the 60s-era Iron Man cartoon. Here it is revealed that the hobbit cosplayer from before is actually the Iron Man character. And if it's still not obvious, the Iron Mac's costume - or at the very least the helmet - is made from the late 90s/early 00's Mac desktops.

THE X-MEN #138, art by John Byrne

Yet another completely relation-less plate, just Carl walking away from geekdom. For some reason, the red Livestrong rubber bracelet switched sides somewhere between the arcade image and this one. Favourite detail: how bummed out Super Mario is about Carl leaving.

GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1, art by Gil Kane

What may be one of the most homaged cover ever if not THE most homaged cover ever. The exes return here, one with pregnancy, the other with Meralco bills, one more coming from a shopping spree. Having characters burst out from the book interior, through the cover and (theoretically) on to your face is one of the best most pro-active design conceits I've ever seen. More people should do this.

THE AVENGERS #4, art by Jack Kirby

The outro plate, a bookender, meant to be an epilogue of sorts for the images' narrative. The Spider-Man writer character is now in a beatnik get-up with three Palanca medals around his neck, the Iron Man character is now a flamboyant iPad, the Hulk character is now a mature sophisticated hooligan (basically Hulk's "Mr Fix-It" character, recoloured), and Carl - now having embraced his geekiness - is a superhero himself.

The author profile photo for Carljoe Javier.

The artist profile photo for Josel Nicolas. The bear giving up the ghost by his feet is Bear, Josel's surrogate in his autobio komix WINDMILLS.

The designer profile photo for me. By my feet are some holes and a Whackamole mole. This was when I still had long(ish) hair.

The Kirby Krackle, acting as copyright page in the book.

The paragraph breaks, as per Carl's suggestion. I also used this as a sort-of classification tool, a subtle announcement on what sort of story it is the reader is reading: a "writerly" story if the Spider-Man character, a "techie" story if the Iron Man character, and a "socially-inept" story if the Hulk character.

The story end indicator, an homage to the old Marvel Comics side banner faces which they did circa late 70s/the whole 80s/early 90s.

The back cover of the book. When read with the front cover, it is also a three-panel opening story. The UP Press has a design conceit where they cut the back cover in thirds, the top tier featuring a detail of whatever the front cover art is, the second tier holding the book's blurbs, the third tier being a generally blank space for maybe another blurb and the barcode. Being a smartass, I decided to play around with that conceit, sort of bending it a bit, claiming poetic license. Dean Alfar's blurb - the blurb I love the most - is inside the book, on the first page, acting like an intro, cradled in the hands of a cosmic god of death. Hopefully, they won't change a thing.