Scraps of love / Fists of the future

Photo: Joe MacLeod

Today: Luke O’Neil, author of the story collection A Creature Wanting Form and the newsletter Welcome to Hell World; and Harry Siegel, Senior Editor at THE CITY and co-host of FAQ NYC podcast.

Issue No. 264

Believing you will receive
Luke O’Neil

What The King (of Comics) Saw Coming
Harry Siegel

Believing you will receive

by Luke O’Neil

I was sitting on the porch in the dark with a friend who had stopped by to tell me he was getting a divorce. No no no he didn’t want to come inside and disturb the kids he said. Out here is fine he said. I brought out a couple of ice cold cold ones and listened to a story about the collapse of an entire world. I confess I teared up more than he did. 

Then again it was sudden news to me. You would figure it had settled in for him by now. Hopefully being one of the first people to know about the slow dissolution of his own marriage. 

A person can become accustomed to almost any kind of pain. Novelty is pain’s cruelest device. 

We hugged differently than we had ever hugged. 

A decent enough man will hug his friends routinely albeit quickly and percussively but there is still a kind of hug we keep in reserve for when it is called for. 

A special occasion when the rare bottle is brought up from the cellar and decanted. 

We bullshitted for a while as the night bugs screamed in car alarm. Like someone was breaking into every tree and bush and nest on the block one by one. How panic is infectious like that. How it pollutes. How animals flee. Birds explode into the sky in unison at a rifle’s crack.

No there was nothing to be done about it he said after some interviewing. Wasn’t sure if he wanted there to be anymore. 

I was trying to solve it for him like a 1,000 piece puzzle I wasn’t even at the table doing. Shouting out instructions blindly from the other room. 

Everything was going to be alright he said. 

Trying to reassure me more than himself it seemed like.  

He was walking around downtown earlier trying to clear his head and he saw the funniest thing he said. He passed by a wedding in the park where the groom was reciting the lyrics to Nothing Else Matters as part of his vows. But doing it in the thickest Massachusetts accent he’d ever heard. 

That’s honestly so beautiful to me I said.  

I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh he said. 

He sounded like you he said. 

No matter how far I sang and we each laughed a half of a laugh.

Love is the only thing that is real he said in a suddenly different voice and I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. 

I said damn right. A subdued damn right. A mournful damn right.

Looks like the pope is about to die he said and I said that I had heard that. 

They put out a statement asking for everyone’s prayers he said. But if he can’t even get his calls picked up then what were any of us supposed to do about it? 

Then we talked about how much the Patriots fucking sucked for a while. 

After he had retreated to his suddenly unfamiliar home I went back into my very familiar home and debriefed my wife and told her I was gonna go back and sit out on the porch for a while to decompress. I got myself another can and turned my playlist on shuffle. 

“It don’t make you do a thing it just lets you.”

The next morning my doctor’s office emailed to remind me that my upcoming free annual preventative health exam may not be technically free as per recent federal guidelines. The appointment is this week and I’m worried she’s going to tell me all my numbers look fine. That there is nothing wrong with me that I have the power to fix. 

Just over the hill deer were busy shedding their velvet. Agitating their antlers against the bark and brush and stripping off the protective layer messily and bloodily. 

Have you seen this? The draped flesh hanging like red rags off of their sharpened points. Doing it over and over again every year. 

Had he not already existed you would have had to invent the Devil himself if you ever came across such a sight in the woods. 

Maybe that’s where they originally got the idea I don’t know.

Sometimes they eat it too. So that nothing is wasted. And later in the year when the antlers fall off completely other smaller animals will congregate and each in their turn eat of them for their calcium and protein and to shave down their own constantly growing teeth.  

And it’s a chilly dry morning at the end of the mildest summer I can remember and I can’t fully appreciate its comfort because it all feels like a bill that will soon come due.

FLAMES OF YORE

Julian the Apostate, image via Wikimedia Commons

Miles Klee has a gnarly, absorbing, and sobering talk with historians regarding the parallels to our current moment. At Rolling Stone.

What The King (of Comics) Saw Coming

by Harry Siegel

OMAC (One Man Army Corps) is a footnote in the storied and colorful history of Jacob Kurtzberg, who’d long before settled on the pen name Jack Kirby, because it echoed James Cagney.

Jack "King" Kirby, the “William Blake of comics,” was 57 years old in 1974, decades removed from his younger self, who in 1940 had created Captain America with Joe Simon, shortly before going off to fight in Europe himself as an Army Scout after America entered the war. 

OMAC was apparently a contractual obligation for the King of Comics. The suits at D.C. who’d poached him from Marvel with great fanfare, had cancelled New Gods and the two other original titles he’d been using, along with the Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen title, which together comprise his now legendary “Fourth World,” a metaseries more revered than read.

So The King dusted off an idea for connecting Captain America to a super-computer satellite, and introduced another stringbean transformed by a scientific miracle into a super-soldier smashing evil-doers.

But OMAC did his smashing not for the United States, but for the literally faceless members of the Global Peace Agency (a remarkably Wellsian name). This putatively nonviolent organization was nonetheless happy to have OMAC beat up bad guys with the help of Brother Eye—that’s the name of the satellite—up in the sky. 

The comic book, billed as “A Look Into the World That’s Coming,” lasted just eight issues before it too was unceremoniously cancelled. Kirby briefly returned to Marvel before leaving the work-for-hire comic-book industry to do animation designs—including for some of the Scooby-Doo gang—and finally get some decent health insurance. 

I read OMAC for the first time earlier this month, a half-century after it was published, and it’s uncanny how much Kirby foresaw about the world that’s arrived—and how spectacular each issue’s double splash page is. 

Here are a few pages and panels, arranged around parts of his one-page “Welcome to OMAC” note that appeared at the start of the first issue. Kirby, then pushing 60, was grappling with urgent questions within the confines of a four-color power-fantasy for children and childish adults:  

POW!! If you love this newsletter and the principles of press freedom and independence it supports, subscribe, donate!! We will use the money to pay writers and artists for a better future.