Child Star

 The graphic novel Child Star by Brian "Box" Brown is a synthesis of traumatic tragedy of the life of a child star, especially from the '80s onwards. The art is in black and white and red only, a simplified palette to reflect the simplified view of a real human being. The focus character is a white version of Gary Coleman (or male version of Punky Brewster) called Owen Eugene. Every trauma experienced by a child star or former child star occurs, much like a media-focused version of The Handmaid's Tale. The story is largely told through posthumous interviews with his parents, his coworkers, and other barely disguised celebrities. It is a sobering work indeed, yet one worth reading.

Flamer

 This is my review of Flamer, a graphic novel by Eagle Scout Mike Curato about being a closeted gay Scout at summer camp in the '90s. What qualifies me to assess this book? I was there as a little nerdy kid. The non-spoiler part of the review - it is an accurate portrayal of one kid's experience. I recommend this book to modern middle schoolers and lowly high school freshmen.

Now for the spoiler review. Our protagonist is Aiden, a pudgy rising freshman at Scout camp whose hormones are awakening. He loves the X-Men, but especially Jean Grey, the sole girl of the original lineup who evolves from the Girl to the cosmically powerful and iconically flaming Phoenix.  Aiden's patrol is the Flaming Arrows. This is, or at least was, a fairly common name for a Scout patrol. The name matches the flame theme and the reference to the slur of the title, but that nobody in Aiden's patrol chose the name - they are, in fact, quite unhappy about it - is a telling detail. Some Troops have ever-changing patrol names; but some long-established Troops have a stock of patrol names which are recycled. The patrol name Flaming Arrows would have lacked the potentially provocative connotation of Aiden's generation's slang and serves as a callback to the heavier influence of Native American customs in the Scouting tradition.

An important detail to note is that Aiden is enjoying Scout camp. Many accounts of summer camp for graphic novels and  YA books present camp as a universally awful experience except for the supportive best friend. Aiden participates in all the expected activities of that era, both the Scouting ones and the ones which are more questionable but unsurprising among boys of that age. Aidan is good at some of them and not at others, and he enjoys the camaraderie.

This positive background, however, is just that, and the conflict of the story cannot lack challenges. Just as if this were set at CYO camp, there would be a heterosexual crush, here, in the all-male environment, there is a homosexual one. Teenage hormones are indeed merciless! Aiden develops a crush on his fellow patrol member, who handles it as poorly as one would expect in that time and place - but he does not take the opportunity to get Aiden expelled from Scouts. None of the Flaming Arrows do - and they ultimately back their fellow patrol member in his verse of Boom-Chick-A-Boom. The same cannot be said of Aiden's mentor and archery instructor, who suffers the fate of so many gay counselors closeted at camp - he is expelled after someone read his letters home.

Here is why I use the phrase "closeted at camp." At the time when this book is set, the Mormon church (their preferred name at the time) and other conservative organizations held an outsized influence on the BSA. There was also more lingering military influence than at present. The military of that time had a policy known as "don't ask, don't tell." This meant that  the authorities would only remove a member from service if they outed themselves, intentionally or accidentally. Thus there were counselors at Scout camp whom many knew were gay but said nothing. Why betray the best connselor you have? I don't know what the policy at the author's camp was, but reading somebody else's mail seems like a violation of privacy.

Flamer is one man's portrayal of this time and place but I would urge any readers to take away two lessons from this graphic novel. The first is that the change in attitude towards gay Scouts has been exponential. The second is that the program, despite its glaring flaws, had positive aspects - the author, after all, remained in the program long enough to become an Eagle Scout!

Tom Strong, Part One

There seems to be a resurgence of interest in Tom Strong, one of Alan Moore's lesser known franchises. So I thought I would take a spin at analyzing the literary elements. Although none of the YouTube videos I have watched on this topic have been wrong, I think many of them are missing the connection to Alan Quartermain and his creator H. Rider Haggard. The most obvious reference is the use of the addictive root that grants extraordinary power. Strong, unlike The League of Extraordinary Gentleman's Quartermain, appears to suffers no detrimental effects from consumption of his magic power root. But the key to unlocking the rest lies in Solomon, the enhanced gorilla companion of Tom Strong, whose full name is King Solomon. This is a reference to Haggard's book King Solomon's Mines. A gorilla companion of our very white hero recalls Quartermain's black companion Umbopa. As with much of Strong's story, implicit and explicit race is present in the narrative, not to be ignored, but rather interrogated. Quartermain's companion Umbopa is a warrior for whom he had great respect and whom he defends against the stronger racist comments within his own adventures. H. Rider Haggard's relationship with everyone's favorite colonial  baron, Cecil Rhodes, will have to wait for another day. 

To continue: Tom Strong has one parent, Susan Strong, who actually loves him and one, Sinclair, who sees him as a grand experiment. He loses both in an earthquake, which serves as the destruction of his old home and the initial call to adventure. Although his father Sinclair has a conversation with his mother, Susan, as they are crushed and dying, it is Susan who reaches out with love. This is similar to the ending of King Solomon's Mines, where Foulata, the Kukuana princess whose skin forbids a sustained romance with the subtly named Captain Good is stabbed to death before the evil witch Gagool is crushed. In this case it is not merely her blackness, but her origin in the magical hidden kingdom. From Sinclair's point of view, the normal compassion of Susan is the witchcraft that must be eliminated to produce the desired ending. Susan's whiteness is an inversion of the Kukuana's women's blackness, but necessary for the journey that her son Tom must undertake. The collapse of the cave in Tom Strong's tale occurs as he is about to enter the hidden magical kingdom rather than as Quartermain leaves it.

and, in particular, of Sinclair who views people as things. In the case of 

The Birth of the Cessative (An Encomium)

 It is long-established in the development of color that the first third way to emerge from the binary of black and white, light and dark, is red. From this point, all other colors flow. In the same way aspect begins as a binary: perfective and imperfective. The first views an event as that which is completed, while the second views an event as that which is ongoing. Aspect is decoupled from absolute time, but within this binary there is relative time: the imperfective is not yet perfective. Yet the only ground from which a new aspect can arise to form a trinity is the imperfective. The boundary, the borderlands where the imperfective and perfective touch, is not at the beginning, but the end of imperfective spectrum: it is meet, therefore, that a language with three core aspects would add the cessative rather than the inchoative. The cessative indicates 'to stop doing', an imperfective range on the marches of the perfective, which binds the binary aspects to a more temporal mode. Once the imperfective has borne the cessative, more aspects may come; but it is ironic that the aspect that begins a multiplicity of others should be the one associated with ceasing!

On the Nose ...

 Creole languages are often stereotyped as simpler than the languages from which they are derived (not simpler than the pidgin from which they evolved not the language which the audience happens to speak), but this does not rule out the retention or development of individual complexities. In the case of Haitian Creole, this complexity was attention to the nasality or orality of consonants or entire words. The Creole word janmen 'never' is transparently the French word jamais in which neither vowel is nasal but there is a nasal consonant. I am still not certain from what origin the verb renmen 'to like' possesses. This contrast of orality and nasality is particularly conspicuous in the definite article, whose nasality or orality depends on the commensurate nature of the syllables in the noun. There are five possible articles - a, la, an, lan, and the apparently rare nan, postposed rather than preposed. Examples are mesye a 'the gentleman', liv la 'the book', tifi a 'the girl', tigason an 'the boy', nant lan 'the watch', and dam nan 'the lady'. I do not yet fully understand the parameters of the fourfold (and occassionally fivefold) distinction, but there is no denying that it is more complex than the binary distinction of Continental French.

U Are Not Alone ...

 Haitian Creole is French as she is (was) spoke, which is a great relief to those who had to suffer through French conjugations. Even if one kept the distinction between singular and plural, the subtractive morphology, in which the plural contains a consonant absent in the singular, is unpredictable and complicated from the default direction of pluralization. The simplification of spelling is welcome, but it has one unanticipated side effect: the elimination of u as a singular vowel. In Creole, the solitary vowel u becomes i, as is the fate of most high rounded vowels. A learner who failed to distinguish between orthography and speech might miss this feature altogether.

Amethyst (Amy Reeder, Wonder Comics)

        Amethyst, written and drawn by Amy Reeder under the Wonder Comics imprint, is elaboration and evolution of the reliable but basic plot of the original Amethyst Princess of Gemworld miniseries. This seems to be a good way to handle characters who cannot sustain ongoing series: the non-ubiquity of the character permits the possibility of growth, both personal and political - and politics is critical to the Gemworld saga! For such an example, one can look at the evolution of the Shazam series; unlike the Shazam series, however, the Wonder Comics series avoided the edginess of the New 52. The original Amethyst Princess of Gemworld series was a gem-themed lost princess tale, suitable for a thirteen-year-old protagonist - although Amy Winston ages up in Gemworld much like Shazam or, more contemporary, She-Ra. The protagonist of Reeder's Amethyst is sixteen, a three-year difference which marks great change in a teenager's life while still limiting the aging of comic characters.

          The inciting incident of Reeder's Amethyst is another basic idea which many fantasy sequels use: the land is in chaos or distress when the protagonist returns. Every television or movie sequel to MGM's The Wizard of Oz is an example. Another example is Stephen Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Amethyst discovers her subjects missing and her alleged allies shockingly hostile. The threat is well-balanced: the subjects are not dead, but could die easily. Then Amethyst finds out that she is not as orphaned as she previously believed. This revelation and following ones connect to the title of the original maxiseries, Amethyst Princess of Gemworld: they confirm why she is a princess rather than a queen as seen in the other realms, and that the appellation "of Gemworld"  might be presumptuous in-world as ppposed to an Earthly perspective. Amethyst's journey exposes a more complex and ambiguous history of Gemworld than the Twelve Kingdoms and fantasy Travelers, along with the Good/Evil and Order/Chaos axes, might suggest. None of it, however, is presented in a gritty or "mature" manner, and the climax allows further development of Gemworld without undermining the foundational principles of this fantasy realm.

         This is a good introduction to the history and politics of Gemworld, past and present. A great aid to this introduction is the map, which provides a reference for the itinerary while still keeping some things secret. Any adults with young daughters who grew up in the eighties with She-Ra, The Never-Ending Story, and Return to Oz should consider buying this book.

In Your Eyes I See ...

 In Haitian Creole, aka Kre`yol, the official language of the Republic of Haiti, the words for 'man' and 'woman' are not derived from l'homme and la femme, as one might expect from something so deeply French. Instead, the words are gason and fi, an indication of the legacy of oppression. But if 'boy' and 'girl' have become 'man' and 'woman', what does one use for actual boys and girls? An application of the word ti from French petit produces tigason and tifi. This use of diminutives and pejoration does have one happy result: the Creole word for child is timoun, in which the moun comes from French monde '(entire) world'. If a child is one's entire world, perhaps that sentiment allays some bitterness of that country's history.

Ghost Machine

 Ghost Machine is a preview anthology of multiple related series. The first character to appear is a preexisting one, Geiger, whose name evokes the post-apocalyptic setting. The Unnamed timeline, however, is expanding the Geiger universe with other immortals and rivals, most notably Redcoat. The immortals include Benedict Arnold, Albert Einstein (shown as a child), Davy Crockett, The Northerner (a Union soldier), Annie Oakley, and Simon Pure, Redcoat himself. War connects these figures and others who are committed to the Unknown War. There is a timeline which includes characters not already mentioned in Ghost Machine, such as American Widow X and the First Ghost. The immortality of the characters in the Unnamed War seems to be less than absolute, since Benedict Arnold is described as the only immortal, other than Redcoat, to survive the Revolutionary War. What litte is said about the encounter between the Northerner and Redcoat suggests that Simon Pure was a Confederate or at least a sympathizer. First Ghost is an intriguing concept: a female veteran goes to space and then becomes president of the United States. Her experience inspires her to become the First Ghost. Given the timeline, she is the last of next-to-last President before the start of the Unknown War.

Rook: Exodus is an extrasolar corporate dystopia; specifically, the dystopia after the corporation's terraforming engine has failed and the corporation has abandoned the Wardens, its own employees. The Wardens are animal-themed and have helmets which control their associated animals - a reversal of the usual functions of a totemic mask. The Wardens disagree on how to handle the dwindling resources and each Warden has oversized animals at their command, so it's clear that a War of the Wardens would be ugly. What is not so clear is why the corporation chose oversized animals to colonize a partially terraformed planet.

The Family Universe is less clear as a shared universe, although Peter J Tomasi is credited on both books. That does inspire confidence. The first title, The Rocketfellers, is about a family from the Twenty-Fifth Century in a temporal witness program in the present day: the future is not secure. It seems a family-friendly series, although  it's not clear whether the movie of Junkyard Joe in the final panel is an easter egg or a connection to the timeline of the Unknown War. The other Family Universe series, Hornsby & Halo, seems to be based on the child swap of the New Gods, only set on Earth, involving Heaven & Hell rather than their cosmic analogs, and centered on Little League baseball, Both series are written by Peter J Tomasi, so that is promising on the family front. His depiction of Clark and Jon Kent's relationship was terrific.

The last shared universe, that of Hyde Street and Devour, seems more fluid and ambiguous. The third year definitely-not-Boy-Scout is well designed but almost certainly not his true form. The image on the neckerchief slide is appropriately creepy. Devour seems to be a series about eating disorders, while Hyde Street takes advantage of the repetitiveness of American street names to allow a freedom of location for terror tales.

Thursday Night Adventures

    On a recent Thursday, I ventured to Mission Bay for a high school alumni function. I had believed that this event was, in fact, indoors. When my Lyft driver dropped me off, I noted with dismay that this was an area of the city where my phone did not work well. The pouring rain did not help. After a substantial wandering on both sides of a block, one well-maintained, the other shattered and uneven, and through a passageway, I established that the meeting spot was SF Social, a food park across from the shattered sidewalk. I crossed to it, but still failed to find my alleged party. I rechecked the invitation and belatedly noted that it was "casual." There was no note of cancellation, so I could only conclude that the event was stillborn due to the weather. I had already braved the weather and was in the midst of a food court, so I decided to reap some benefit from my journey. After I had eaten, I went to the stop for the 22, but I just missed it. I explored the longer block across from the food park, which turned out to be a minigolf course. The 22 home was less crowded and less questionable than I was accustomed to. The event may have been a bust, but I did learn about recreational places easily accessed.

Scout Sunday 2024

 On the first Sunday of February, a large contingent of the Troop attended Scout Sunday at our sponsor, a church. Unit Commissioner D. H. played the prelude, a work of his own creation dedicated to a late friend in Scouting. The hymn after the Call to Worship, Hymn 351, "All Who Love and Serve This City," was labeled in the genre of 'urban hymn', a genre hitherto unknown to yours truly. Some of the verses, however, though no doubt well-intentioned, could be misinterpreted in a less than Christian spirit. The scripture was Mark 1:35-45, the tale of Jesus and the leper who did not follow protocol and could not keep his mouth shut. The sermon, "Change of Plans," was well delivered with an ending that provoked further thought. Growing up, I thought that when in this passage Jesus could no longer work openly in these towns, it was due to his fame, rather than his infamy. This is not the case! The leper's failure to go to the priestly authorities was bad enough, since Jesus' healing would be widely known soon, but his indiscretion spread it faster. Jesus could no longer operate within the system. The leper's failure established Jesus as a challenger rather than an ally to the authorities on a time table he did not choose.

The service extended longer than usual because the church was ordaining its new elders and deacons. All church terms are subject to change in meaning, both subtle and gross, depending on denomination, and this was no different. In the language of the writer's home church, ordination is permanent status, but in the sponsoring church ordination, while confirming a sacred duty, is temporary. Nor are their elders young men on mission! The Scouts served the congregation coffee and pastries in the main hall and overall charmed those who had little to no interaction with Scouts or Scouting.