Spanner R4: Looking Back So Far: Mad Love, or Romantic Love as the Destruction of Society

I've posted on this theme before, but I never managed to fully integrate it into Spanner until Revision 4, including Chapters 22 and 23 which I'm racing to finish as I write this. André Breton, leader of the twentiety-century Surrealist literary and artistic movement, defined "mad love" (l'amour fou) as a love so extreme, so far beyond the limits even of unreason, it can destroy the entire social order itself. It drove Shira to her suicidal lover Leila, Leila to declare war against the Brinkman clan and erase her name, and the couple to copulate using a power crystal under the speaker's platform in Chapter 15 in order to fuse their boosted powers into a "binary system" that killed King Patriot. Now they are escalating their love into full-blown revolution, and bringing in Shira's blond cousin Jennifer to make their couple a threesome.

The Fourth Revision finds the couple/threesome doing insane things for the sake of mad love. In Revision 4.1, the final one-pass edit and ebook stylesheet hackathon, I intend to strengthen the last weak points in their love arc and integrate it better into the revolution and Student Union storylines which converge on the final three chapters of Book 1, as some weaknesses remain from Revisions 2 and 3; also, I should bring forward such counterpoint romances as the unstable one between Charmian and Bart that implodes in Chapter 20, or the four-sided love triangle centering on Corporate villain Oliver and involving a mad scientist, a high-school mean girl, and the world's most evil pop idol, and which used to be five-sided until Leila ditched her name and patriarch-arranged marriage and left him for her tempestuous lesbian romance with Shira.

One of the inspirations for importing "mad love" into the Shira-Leila romance was an analysis I read in a film book of Surrealist director Luis Buñuel's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire, in which the author speculated that, Buñuel being the Surrealist he was, this movie was at least in part about l'amour fou, and that though bourgeois French protagonist Mathieu and his tempestuous Spanish lover Concha (played by two actresses, one Spanish, one French, alternated at whim, sometimes even in mid-sentence) did have a crazy relationship involving mutual torture, Mathieu was too much the bourgeois Frenchman to let himself go and destroy the bourgeois French society to which he belonged. Since I had planned the Shira-Leila relationship as a lesbian romance since that fateful day in 1996 when I discovered yuri manga on the Internet, I realized the best way to fit that romance into the longer revolution plot was l'amour fou: a teenage lesbian mad romance between a prank-loving superslut and a suicidal fashion model. As Jennifer has been in love with Shira since childhood, she proved easy to suck in (and her role will be strengthened in Revision 4.1). Add the moral fascism of the Eugenics Institute and Shira's eight-year-old niece who happens to be a rare "true loli", and watch things go completely to hell — exactly (cackles the evil mad scientist) as planned.

As a side effect (whether fascinating or annoying depends on the reader), my quest for l'amour fou led me to the Surrealist poets (one of Breton's own poems is of course titled "L'amour Fou"), and from there to Allen Ginsberg and the Beats and American Modernist poetry in general (particularly William Carlos Williams and Sylvia Plath) — and when I started writing my own poetry under their influence, I suddenly found my poetic voice, and naturally it ended up all over Spanner R4, another of the ways it's so radically different from Revisions 2 and 3. For R4.1, I found myself re-editing the climactic moment of 1.6 as one of the surreal passages from a novel by science fiction writer Alfred Bester (that proto-cyberpunk who got a Babylon 5 villain named after him) in the form of a free-verse poem written by the likes of Breton or Ginsberg. Which seems appropriate enough, considering that Bester's short story "Fondly Fahrenheit", a major influence on the cyberpunks, is itself a complete Surrealist mindfuck involving wavering identity.

In La Révolution Surréaliste #12 (the final issue), the the editors posed these questions:

1. How would you judge a man who would go so far as to betray his convictions in order to please the woman he loved?
2. Do you believe in the victory of admirable love over sordid life or of sordid love over admirable life?

To which the only proper Surrealist answer is: yes.

Spanner R4: Looking Back So Far: The Nudefighters, or Fanservice as a Deadly Weapon

Here in the second of my weekend posts on plot threads that exploded in the Fourth Revision of Spanner Book 1 while I finish editing its penultimate chapter, there's the idea that I may have put into the Revision 2 version of Chapter 1 but didn't balloon into a central thread until the final version of Chapter 20: the concept of "nudefighting." In Chapters 1 and 3, it involved Shira and her martial-artist friends wearing minimal clothing that can be stripped off in a fight. In Chapter 6, they (and especially Jennifer) stripped down naked to make gangsters and cult priests irrational enough to beat. In Chapters 15 and 20, they took advantage of rainstorms because wet skin is so difficult to hold onto; if Shira had allowed Bart the traction clothes provide, she wouldn't have beaten him in Chapter 20's Team Challenge, and he knows it.

Like I said, wet skin, whether made wet by rain or sweat or other liquid, is very difficult to hold onto. Jennifer also explains that if one gets wounded by bullet or blade while fighting naked, fabric fibers don't get stuck in the wound and infect it, a traditional cause of soldier deaths.

But then from Chapter 21 on, the clothes stay off. The nudefighters leave even the minimal tearable clothing at home, neglected. They even come to school and spend the day as naked as they were when they fought off Klowns and cultists in Chapter 6. One reason given in Chapter 14 is that Jennifer got used to fighting nude when the victorious Conservative Revolutionaries made her a slave soldier and inadvertently made her a legendary warrior who killed 10,000 Caliphate jihadis and came back with a vendetta against the Party. And this dovetails with Shira's inborn perversity and the combination of hatred for her class and lack of prudery that Leila (now the anonymous beauty known as, among other things, the girl with the violet eyes) has. But somehow, as Brandi points out to Jennifer in Chapter 21, for them nudefighting has changed from a fighting tactic into a revolutionary stance against a Conservative Revolution already souring. And the nudefighters who have amazing superpowers use them to get away with it.

But of course it remains primarily a tactic to freak out raging men who hate women and drive them into the irrationality that spells easy defeat. No wonder Shira calls it "fanservice as a deadly weapon." But then, Spanner is after all a story of a revolution against a revolution...

Spanner R4: Looking Back So Far: The Women with No Name

While I'm continuing to ready Spanner Chapter 22 for its wild week ahead, I thought I'd look back at the new Fourth Revision plot threads that shocked even their author by popping into existence. My ever-perverse muse threw the first of these into Chapter 12 and proceeded to retrofit it into the beginning of Chapter 10. Three women moved next door to Shira and told her they didn't have names. By the end of Chapter 19, three major female characters, including Shira's major love interest, had ditched their names.

They call themselves "anonymous beauties" or "nameless beauties". It started with a sudden inspiration while I was idly reading through books at a local thrift store one day. One happened to be a novel called The Bride Stripped Bare, written as an anonymous diary of a woman's anonymous secret life of adultery. It was even written to be published anonymously, though the novelist's identity (Nikki Gemmell) eventually came out. The concept behind it is that anonymity in sexual matters is liberating and allows for greater authenticity. The author quotes Virginia Woolf, who described anonymity as a "refuge" for female authors:

Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them.

And so my muse latched onto the idea and threw it into the final version of Spanner. Being the compulsive thinker I am, naturally this intriguing notion that had now wormed its way into my labor of love got me thinking. So of course I got to arguing with Woolf: I took the idea of clothes as masks from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, developed it further, nad concluded that names are masks too; then I countered Mrs. Woolf's assertion that women want to be veiled by saying that names themselves are the veils, wrapping people in social roles as surely as clothes do. Out of the original inspiration and the idea of names as masks or veils, the anonymous beauties burst into the plot of Spanner

To remain free individuals, these women rely on a kind of trick. In place of names, they use a list of descriptive terms they believe accurately describe themselves which add up to their complete characterization. In authorial terms, they've replaced their names with their character profiles. The beauty of this is that since they no longer identify with names, they're no longer vulnerable to either the siren song of Egoism (which is about deifying the ego and then sacrificing one's self to this ego-god in order to become it) or the name-magic that certain superpowered villains such as Byron Scofield use and government control ultimately relies on. In the case of the major characters who went nameless, the ones formerly known as Leila Shelley, Amanda Currie, and Lucie Stenbeck, they used a kind of cheat: Leila and Lucie had Shira's formidable lawyer cousin Angela Coyne use an intellectual-property loophole to detach themselves from their names; Amanda simply let a celebrity-stalker look-alike steal her identity and replace her in the social role contained in her name. The Asian woman (I need better descriptives for her than that in Revision 4.1) next door to Shira may or may not have been originally named Anemone Izumi, but she used Shira's trick of using multiple names before she went nameless, though how she went nameless remains a mystery.

Namelessness in Spanner represents one of two opposites: either removing the veil of name and social role in order to live an life of freedom lived without masks, or being stripped of one's identity as the sign of slavery, i.e. complete lack of freedom. The anonymous beauties, including the three major characters who stripped off their names in Chapters 13, 16, and 19, are the former. I'll deal with the latter in Book 2 when our heroines leave the school world behind and take their fight directly to the Corporate and Syndicate patriarchs. Bobbzilla the Klown may be too macho to own sex slaves; but the Russian mobster Vasily "the Rodfather" Rodchenko, left-wing terrorist Bram's brother and mortal enemy, not only owns sex slaves but has them soft-plastinated alive into necrophiliac sex dolls. This is related to the Corporate mania for polygamy. Against the patriarchs who rob women in their power of their identity, the anonymous beauties take a feminist stance in protecting their personal identities by getting rid of their names and abandoning their social identities. Freedom for them requires authenticity, and they reason that they cannot be authentic as long as they remain veiled by the social identities contained within their names.

Once Scofield starts seriously using his name magic in Book 2, expect more major female characters and even a few males to go nameless just like the nameless women who live next door to Shira. But before I plot that out, I still have those last two chapters of Book 1 and a final full-book edit to finish...

Spanner Themes: Superheroes and Revolution

The article: "The Dark Knight Rises: Nightmares of a Ruling Class in Crisis" (Peter Little, The Hooded Utilitarian)

First, a disclosure: I conceived of Chaos Angel Spanner in 1992, when Marvel and DC superheroes ruled the comic-book universe. Once I'd discovered anime and manga that year, I vowed to destroy the superhero universe with what I then conceived of as a comics or OEL manga series. Now on to the movie notes:

Over the past few months I've been learning about the right-wing subtext of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. The Dark Knight, for instance, is in part an allegory of the Terror War, starring the Joker as Osama bin Laden. Now it turns out that The Dark Knight Rises is how the American Overclass sees the Occupy movement. Naturally, they see it as a terrorist conspiracy led by... somebody evil. Like Bane. And the common people caught between the Man and the terrorists? Blank-out!

There are three dangerous (and traditional) assumptions behind this:

1. The Overclass is by definition the standard of the good.
2. It can only be opposed through terrorism, the political force of metaphysical evil.
3. Beneath the level of the financially (and therefore spiritually) blessed, humanity is either soulless (thus passive) or evil (and on the side of the terrorists). The Doctrine of Original Sin is true.

And these, of course, are the fundamental assumptions underlying the Conservative Revolution in Chaos Angel Spanner. But instead of a character like Batman, the reigning superhero over 2014 America is the second (Bronze Age/Cold War) successor the Golden Age superhero, the American Crusader, a cross between Superman and Captain America (and now in the public domain). Like Bruce Wayne, Henry Becket is the superhuman champion of the One Percent. But unlike him, he is a revolutionary hero. He is what Batman would be if he did successfully what Bane failed to do — which is what Batman is in Frank Miller's infamous Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again.

This seventy-something Cold War superhero, American Crusader III, sees himself as the last hope for Western civilization's survival against the onrushing barbarian hordes. He and his fellow billionaire revolutionaries refuse to realize that roots of their System's destruction lie deep within the structure of the System itself. Devout technocrats that they are, they see the Law of Entropy as not a law of nature but as metaphysical Evil. They see the suffering mundanes chafing under their control not as human beings but as "the threat from below", entropy made manifest; this is why they see liberalism, socialism, and Islamist theocracy as one and the same thing, for they see it metaphysically as entropic Evil, not as the rival alternatives to technocratic Corporatism (and to each other) they see themselves to be.

Like so many left-wing writers, Nolan cannot see his way out of the dilemma. The Corporatist System is failing, but the only alternative he sees is terrorism: either the grand terrorism of a Joker or a Bane, or the petty terrorism of a Catwoman. Like those left-wing writers, he sees the masses as passive and doomed to hopelessness — which is, in fact, one of the prerequisites for the coming of a superhero, for only a superhero can save the masses from enslavement to supervillains.

This is the fundamental premise of the entire superhero genre.

The corollary is that the superhero can never be the protagonist. He is the hero, but not the protagonist. He reacts to the actions of supervillains. Like the white-hatted gunslinger hero of the archetypical Western, the hero must never shoot first; that privilege is reserved for the black hats. The supervillain gets to be the protagonist, but at a cost: he can never be the hero, and he can never be allowed to win. The supervillain is the very archetype of terrorism: Lex Luthor demands $2 billion in 48 hours, or he will nuke Metropolis.

So what happens when a superhero defies that fundamental rule and becomes the protagonist? Watchmen is about precisely that. When Ozymandias — another billionaire superhero, like Batman and Crusader III — concludes that the Cold War will end in nuclear annihilation if he does not act, he creates his own weapon of mass destruction and destroys Manhattan. A superhero protagonist is every bit as deadly as any supervillain. And what is any terrorist in their own mind but a superhero protagonist?

The root of superheroism, and more broadly of terrorism, is substitutionism: the belief that the heroic action of a few can substitute for the collective mass action required to bring down a system as oppressive as Corporatism. Che Guevara, for instance, believed that the working masses were useless and that a small guerrilla faction fighting in rural backwaters and fired by Latin machismo was sufficient to destroy Corporatism. In fact, he wrote the book on it (called Guerrilla Warfare). Never mind that despite the Cuban anomaly, both he and his disciples failed over and over and over. Terrorists, and superheroes such as Batman and the Crusader, believe that the masses are so inherently passive that only a heroic elite, or a heroic superman, can liberate them.

The problem being that once the heroes liberate the passive masses, they remain passive and incapable of heroism. Thus the revolutionary superheroes end up becoming the same kind of oppressors the enemies they overthrew were. That's because they're acting on the identical premises.

This is where Henry Becket and his Conservative Revolution begin. The American Crusader of the Cold War era is now the savior of the American Empire. Now what? Being the black-and-white thinker he is, he can only be offended by the accusation (also thrown at his ancestor Oliver Cromwell) that he is now the oppressor. But he, superheroic defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, cannot see himself as anything but the epitome of all that is good and righteous! Therefore, his accusers are by definition evil, in the metaphysical sense. And so he throws the Populists, a category to which the Occupy movement properly belongs, into the same category as the terrorists of Al-Qaeda in America and the Socialist Revolutionary Organization, and sends the United States Police Force (a military branch) to crush them accordingly.

Now you know why Spanner must misdirect. The right-wing vanguardist tyranny of revolutionary righteousness, which could as easily have been left-wing (Green Arrow instead of Batman, the Proletarian instead of the American Crusader), has no tolerance of the unheroic masses; nor can it see them as anything but the passive instrument of the enemy left- (or right-)wing vanguardist tyranny of revolutionary righteousness. It's a black-and-white double bind. Into this stalemate, Spanner throws his monkeywrench.

Now here is the key to understanding Spanner — let's think dialectically, the way Marxists were supposed to once upon a time:

1. Thesis: the oppressive Corporatist System.
2. Antithesis: the terrorist program of violent heroic resistance.
3. Synthesis: the collective revolt of the masses, properly against both sides.

The relevant trope is, of course, Take a Third Option. The choice between tyranny and terrorism is lose-lose. The only way out is for the masses to stop being passive and taking control of society for themselves, in effect telling the tyrants and the terrorists to butt out or face the consequences. Only the "threat from below", the "mundanes", despised and feared by tyrants and terrorists alike, can pull a successful and genuine revolution.

Spanner is really the epic clash between two kinds of heroes: those (both right-wing revolutionaries and left-wing counterrevolutionaries) who believe that only heroes deserve to rule and the unheroic may not even deserve to exist, and those who in effect sacrifice their own heroism in order to call the masses to action. The latter are the protagonists and the heroes of Spanner. To Shira, Jennifer, and Karen, Batman and Bane are just the two sides of Two-Face's defaced coin.

Little writes: "Who is Batman in this context? The dream of a technocratic solution to a problem of social contradictions." What I learned from John Ralston Saul is that the one-size-fits-all technocratic solution eventually ends up being worse than the problem. Little also admits that he agrees with both the tyrants and the terrorists when they insist that the working masses are passive, petty, and malicious "sheeple".

Now a Voltaire quote goes: "When the masses begin to reason, all is lost!" Enter a certain charismatic Charmer with an apparently unrealistic confidence that she can wake the sleepers up...

Ayn Rand, the Psychology of Fangirlism, and How America Lost Its Freedom

The article: this one on Ayn Rand as serial killer groupie.

I've been upset enough about the Republican Party's jihad against the poor and the middle class on behalf of the ultra-rich to write Spanner. Turns out their overclass supremacism, Social Darwinism, hatred of democracy, and lust for corporatist tyranny come ultimately from Ayn Rand. And then I read the above linked article, which claims that her entire philosophy of Objectivism stems from her hero worship of a serial killer. That's right: not long after she fled Stalin's Russia for America in 1926, Ayn Rand became a serial killer groupie. Turns out she was so busy fangirling the sadistic murderer William Hickman that she blanked out the fact that his moral retardation made him too dumb to live.

I myself didn't realize the truth till early afternoon today, when I was drinking my second cup of coffee. There's a pattern here. 9-year-old Alissa Rosenbaum became a huge fangirl of the arrogant British-imperialist hero (named Cyrus, no less) of a serial adventure novel called The Mysterious Valley. Her earliest essays in Russian? On Hollywood stars. When she left for America to become Ayn Rand, where did she go? Right straight to Hollywood, where she became a scriptwriter. In her late essay "On a Woman President", she denounces the idea of female leadership because, she claims, the function of woman is to hero-worship a man. In other words, she defines fangirlism as the essence of female nature. In her manifesto "The Goal of My Writing", she says the purpose of fiction, or at least her fiction, is the creation of an Ideal Man—capitalized, of course—in order to hero-worship him with her fiction. In her lectures and essays, she constantly quotes not other philosophers, but her own heroes: Howard Roark, John Galt, Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia—they, not all those "lesser" philosophers she despised (meaning all the rest), were the authorities to turn to in philosophy.

Is the picture becoming clear to you already? If not, I'll tell you. I realized with a shock: who is Ayn Rand? The most famous and influential Ascended Psycho Fangirl in history. Her entire philosophy is geared toward fangirling the oligarchs of Big Business. Sure enough, she was quickly surrounded by a worshipful cult of psycho fanboys and fangirls, which eventually expanded to include the oligarchs themselves. After all, she made them (along with herself) the object of worship of the entire American civil religion. Is it any wonder that she became far more influential than her fellow/rival Angry Atheist Battleaxe, Madalyn Murray O'Hair?

It all came together in this line spoken by my character Willa, talking about her early rock 'n' roll days in Spanner:

I remember narrowly escaping being murdered by psycho fangirls repeatedly. About the same time, I became intrigued by this Ayn Rand. Then I read her essay on why she thought a woman president would be a bad idea. Turns out she hated the idea of female leadership because she believed women were supposed to worship male heroes. In other words, if you're not a fangirl, you're not a woman, period, by definition, so saith Ayn Rand. She lost me there. I wasn't the least bit surprised to find out later that she was once a serial killer groupie.

And so I find that when I write a character to resemble an Ayn Rand hero, he turns out to be a villain. Conversely, though some of my heroes (including not just Shira but Willa as well) share some of the Rand hero's ruthlessness, I can't write them like Rand heroes because they're not antisocial enough. The most important Spanner characters "born without the ability to consider others" are vampires, whose disease has eaten away the moral centers of their brains.

I also find myself witnessing (and, in Spanner, writing) an unfortunate parallel between the ideal Randian political system the Republicans are trying to impose (by brute force if necessary, as in the 2012 coup in Spanner's backstory) and the Stalinist dictatorship Rand fled. In fact, the political structure turns out to be identical to her hated Soviet Russia, with corporations replacing soviets, Republican neocons replacing Communists, and big businessmen becoming the new nomenklatura—which, it turns out, is exactly what happened in Russia after the fall of Communism. The GOP's trying to turn America from the flawed democracy we've got now into a corporatist dictatorship modelled after authoritarian Russia and China. In the name of Ayn Rand, mortal enemy of Communism, America is turning into the right-wing version of the Soviet Union, with the Corporate oligarchs as the new master race (see her "Big Business: A Persecuted Minority").

And if you suspect there's a strong element here of what literary theorist Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence"—that is, the artist's war against his strongest influences (John Milton, in the case of the English Romantic poets)—you hit it on the nose. It's supposed to be unconscious according to Bloom's theory, but my case is so bad I'm fully conscious of it. My villains all think they're Rand heroes because their real-life counterparts in the New Right believe they are. The Rand hero takes the American frontier ideal of "rugged individualism" to the sociopathic extreme; this explains why the Corporate elite are hellbent on not just stealing all the money in the world but seizing absolute power as well. They don't care if they make enemies out of the entire American middle class; after all, they can always follow the example of John Galt and kill off all of humanity except for the chosen ones in Galt's Gulch.

Fandom can go psycho. Science fiction author Harlan Ellison once wrote a famous but now rare essay on the phenomenon. But now America's ruled by an ideology based entirely on psycho fannism, created by the Ascended Psycho Fangirl named Ayn Rand. So why am I writing this in my project blog rather than my opinion blog? Because I happen to be something of an "ascending fanboy" myself, and I riff off various fanfics and doujinshi. You think psycho Twilight fangirls are bad enough? Now think of America turning into a dictatorship ruled by psycho Ayn Rand fanboys. You get the picture...

Spanner: When Power Corrupts

Lord Acton famously said: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Sure, he was writing to a bishop about the then new Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, but it applies to any organization. If someone gains too much power, they are bound to become corrupt. The famous Peter Principle explains why: In any hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. The mechanism is groupthink, or collective narcissism resulting from the leader's delusion that the fact that he is in power makes everything right and his increasing intolerance for negative feedback.

Spanner: With Great Power...

Last entry, I brought up one of the major themes of Spanner: the never-ending conflict between those who try to raise ordinary people to their level and those merely content to oppress them. That's the basic conflict, and I'll write a few more things about it later in this post. The theme I'm concerned with, though, is closely related and should be familiar:

With great power comes great responsibility.

Spanner and the Incident at Wold Newton

On December 13, 1795, a meteor fell near the village of Wold Newton in the Wolds of East Yorkshire, England. According to the late Philip José Farmer, science fiction author (of Riverworld fame) and genealogist, these people were nearby at the time:

• John Clayton, third Duke of Greystoke, and his wife Alicia (né Rutherford), sister of...
• George Edward Rutherford, eleventh Baron Tennington, and his wife, Elizabeth Cavendish;
• Honoré Delargardie and his wife, Philippa Drummond;
• Fitzwilliam Darcy and his wife, Elizabeth Bennet;
• Sir Percy Blakeney (the Scarlet Pimpernel) and his second wife, Alice Clarke Raffles;
• Sir Hugh Drummond (Philippa's brother) and his wife, Georgia Dewhurst;
• Dr. Siger Holmes and his wife, Violet Clarke Raffles (Alice's sister);
• Sebastian Noel, a friend and student of Dr. Holmes; and
• four coachmen: Louis Lupin, Albert Lecoq, Arthur Blake, and Simon MacNichols.

The radiation from the meteor mutated these people, who became the ancestors of several of the greatest heroes in literature and pop culture. Farmer focuses in particular on three of them: Sherlock Holmes, descendant of Siger, and two Greystoke scions: John Clayton-Wilder, the eighth Duke of Greystoke, better known under the name Tarzan; and Dr. James Clayton "Doc" Wilder, Jr., whose adventures were fictionalized first as "Doc Ardan" (in French) and then, more famously, as Doc Savage.

Spanner: What Is Leila Doing?

Shira's gorgeous girlfriend Leila Shelley is a very important character in Spanner — but you wouldn't know it from the JulNoWriMo incomplete draft. Right now, if I remember right, I've only written two scenes for her. They're very big scenes, but still just two. The pivotal one has Shira catching her by the hand when she tries to jump off a bridge. After that, the two girls are stuck together for the rest of the story, at least.

Spanner: Gods of Light vs. Gods of Power

The world of Spanner has two parallel worlds, known as virtual reality and dream reality, each of them with different laws (or physics) from each other and from physical reality. Anybody can be anything in virtual reality, as is well known. Dream reality is the shared reality one enters in a lucid dream or a shamanic journey; it is the home of the gods and other beings usually considered supernatural. But it is in physical reality where two tribes of gods clash. One tribe seek power over others; they take the form of corporations and are worshipped by the Corporates. The other tribe, alarmed at the danger the gods of power pose to all the realities, seek the enlightenment of others and incarnate as humans. The war between the gods of light and the gods of power parallels the world class war waged by the Corporates against the rest of humanity.

Spanner and the Problem with Superheroes

I'm an aspiring cartoonist, and superheroes are all the rage again in popular culture. I'm putting public domain superheroes, and some heroes of my own invention, into the plot of Spanner, complete with Golden, Silver, and Bronze Age versions. However, I do not allow any of my superheroes to become the protagonist. Why? you ask. Because superheroes are not cut out to be protagonists. The protagonist is the main character, the one whose crucial decision is the event that begins the story, either as a result of the Inciting Incident or as the Inciting Incident itself. If the superhero is the protagonist, he faces the danger that he will become a revolutionary tyrant, a one-man vanguard who is the very embodiment of substitutionism, the belief that a revolutionary vanguard can substitute for mass action and the heroism of ordinary people. In Watchmen, this hero turned villain is Ozymandias, the all-powerful utopian. So in Spanner, it's the slutty teenage prankster on a hoverboard who gets the leading role, and not one of the superpowered characters.

The Problem with Political Thrillers

There's a kind of suspense thriller that focuses on political problems and even protest. It is, of course, the political thriller. But from what I've read about political thrillers, most of them, especially the left-wing ones, share a commmon problem. It's inherent in the structure of the standard thriller:

There's only one hero.

Why is having just one hero (or a few at most) a problem? Well, political problems are collective problems. Thus, the ideal protagonist of a (left-wing) political thriller is the catalyst hero, a hero whose purpose is to call for other people to fight the Evil as to fight the Evil themself. This is Shira in Spanner. She may be effective enough at subverting the power system (e.g., the United State and its state-capitalist corporate raider controllers), but to destroy it she needs to get a critical mass of the people onto her side. So she must act as herald, bringing the "call to adventure" (in this case, revolution) to as many people as possible. She must be a catalyst.

The Family Feud, 4: Eleanor Richter vs. Drusilla Becket

Perhaps the most titanic battle in the entire Spanner cycle is the recurring magic war between Eleanor Richter, the Richter-Thomas matriarch, a shaman and witch, and Drusilla Becket, channeller and designated guru to the Becket clan and their cult. Their first matchup in the series is during the middle of Bad Company; their battle, occurring in what in Spanner I call "dream reality", is over the souls of Nelly's lost granddaughters and Dru's prodigal daughters, the main characters of the novel, Charlie and Desiree Richter-Thomas. No doubt the two bitter enemies, rival leaders in the New Age movement, at least in the Seattle area, will have several rematches and grudge matches before the cycle ends. Who knows — they might even deserve their own story dedicated entirely to their decades-long war, somewhat in the tradition of the Thing vs. the Hulk in superhero comics.

Character Profile: Shira Thomas (revised 8/25/2010)

Shira Miranda Thomas, main character of Spanner, was born on September 9, 1999 to Cedric Anthony Thomas III (the legendary rocker Ric Thomas/"Red Mercury") and Hope Maureen Reston. This red-haired, dark-skinned, large-nosed beauty was a wild and mischievous child who attracted all kinds of controversy and scandal to herself. Today (i.e., during the Spanner timeline that starts in late August 2014), Hope Reston is the liberal Populist mayor of Metropolitan Seattle, making Shira a major player in the struggle to keep Seattle and the entire State of Cascadia from falling under the theocratic tyranny of the reconstituted Confederate States of America and still escape the rival tyranny of the United Corporations cartel that rules the EuroAmerican Union under the state-socialist system of Corporatism. As a leading champion of democratic Populism, Shira strives to rally people to her side through music, dance, style, and direct persuasion. But those who try to stop her in the name of Authority will find out that she is a legendary prankster for a reason...

Sketch of Shira from 2002