A Look Through Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies Pt 1

Throughout 2021 and 2022, a book serialized at Comic Watch, chapter a week, which took on over thirty serially, or episodically, released franchises. Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies covered Star Trek, the Smurfs, The Matrix, Twin Peaks, Beetlejuice, and brand-worlds of branded authors, like Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, and Robert A Heinlein. First, the book considered what it would be like to live inside these worlds, to have the debts, fears, expectations, mores, and concessions of these worlds. Then, what does living in these worlds as much as we do, as audiences or even maybe just knowing they exist and are popular; what does that do to us? How does it affect how we navigate our own world, franchise as it, also, is?

Us Living began as another book, tentatively titled, Hollow (sometimes, Hallowed) Graphic Universes, which would have been about different shared universes in comics, mostly company-owned, and their unique physics, metaphysics, moral causalities and cosmic peculiarities. The “chronal drag” of “Marvel time,” and how the DC Universe is a multiverse with a literal, measurable moral causality to it (“good wins”).

Nobody is ever interested enough in that book to do anything with it, and to be fair, it would be even more niche than I usually go. And, I can go.

Comic Watch, and Matt Meyer, however, did bite for Us Living in Fictional Cosmogonies.

I was excited! I had a skeleton, but I also had two wonderful editors and an editor-in-chief backing me up and helping to build the Frankenstein’s creation. Like Victor, we would put skin and muscle up and walking again! Like Praetorius, we would put a fright wig and a dress on her!

Us Living would have thirty-two official parts, plus an introduction and an epilogue. Thirty-two being a good universal number. Most chapters would focus on one franchise world, some on thematically or otherwise related worlds, and two sets would take the slower road to fully breathe in and breathe out thoughts on Revolutionary Girl Utena and the “Fourth World” comics of Jack Kirby.

Attempts were made to keep example franchises from stepping on each other’s toes, too much. We were sadly limited in explicit horror, because the Nightmare on Elm St chapter really explained most horror worlds, especially the ones with sequels or second stories. Once you have done the Cheers-to-Frasier world, as we did, you have more or less done situation comedies.

Or, so my biases confirmed for me. It could be said that once you do Star Trek, you have done science fiction, and I kept doing science fiction.

Introduction: The Munsters and the Addams

Why did we begin with The Munsters and The Addams Family? Rob Zombie’s Munsters movie was on the way. And, the two families, whose television programs debuted side by side, remain a pair of reflections of basic middle-class American aspiration.

I wanted to delimit world and universe immediately. A family home can be a world; a family group, a universe.

Had I known there would be outcry that Zombie’s Munsters was cheesy and appropriate for children, I might have reminded people more than while the Addams come from semi-sophisticated single panel comics, the Munsters hail from vaudeville. I thought the concern would be that his Munsters would be too adult, or lacking in cheeseball humor, and once those were settled, the audience would settle in.

In case you believed I would be one hundred percent accurate in my summation of how fans and audiences respond to these franchises, I am glad we started right off with me getting something wrong.

Part I: Smurf Means

The little blue fellers are a midway point betwixt Hummel figurines and Funkos. Sr. Maria Innocentia Hummel was an anti-fascist Franciscan nun, but like all figure lines, the display items based on her art can be coopted or misunderstood as anything. Funko presents no context for their choices. The raped, murdered teenager central to Twin Peaks is only represented by two giant-headed figures, one an evil spirit and one of her dead, naked, wrapped in transparent plastic, for you to put on your desk at work or facing the bed at home.

Smurfs are a franchise first, overtaking their origin in comics, and any character beyond what is summed in each of their names - Brainy, Papa, Dreamy - largely comes out of us. If you do look at a comic book or a cartoon, especially as an adult; a bitter fearfulness.

The Smurfs chapter got us praise from Belgium straightaway. Surprise! That cheered me on, because by this time, the book was, to me, terrifying. Smurfs are beloved. Smurfs are innocuous. I was going to just step up and say the Smurfs are xenophobic fascists and judging by their diet, they are probably only recently moved to Europe, hailing from the western hemisphere?

We came close to being a Barlowe’s Guide, and I think, and I hope, we avoided it.

Part II: Nightmare on Elm St, Nightmare Logic

Fair or unfair, this is our horror chapter. It is the parts of the original The Nightmare on Elm Street and its remake, that many fans dislike, which, to me, makes it the perfect summation of all scary story.

In the original film, there is paperclipped to the denouement, a reveal that all the laid out rules are of suspect strictness. Nightmare is not about following rules, logic, or assessment, but their violation.

And, then, the remake, which takes away the charm, the laughs, the quotable cool phrases, and instead focuses clearly on Freddy Krueger as a manipulative, sadistic, gaslighting child torturer and rapist.

The end of the original hurts our security. The remake hurts our feelings.

Part III: Star Trek is for Closers

The first chapter that made people mad enough they told me so. I said Starfleet is military and the Federation not as qualitatively post-scarcity socialist as is sometimes claimed. Then, I said the Big Bird of the Galaxy, whose ashes are currently lost in space, was a speechwriter for one of the most corrupt eras of the Los Angeles Police Department and a misogynist and racist.

For decades, what Gene Roddenberry would have liked or disliked has been a Trek fan’s security. How to decide the real stuff, the canon inside the canon. Like with Star Trek regenerating the modern fanzine, convention, cosplay, and fanfiction, this adherence to Roddenberry as a kind of deity in conflict, wrestling with the manipulations to his world by strange, suspect hands, has done a lot to the way science fiction, or genre audiences in general, conceive of authorial ownership.

Ins or outs of Romulan political history or Klingon diet pale in affect. I couldn’t spend a paragraph on the arrowhead or delta symbol becoming the badge for all the Starfleet.

Us Living’s Trek chapter had to be about Gene Roddenberry, about Rick Berman, and it had to be about fans. When you look at those, in context or isolation, ugliness rises up to meet you. Sometimes, when you gaze into an abyss, you remember how a producer got Tasha Yar’s comm badge.

Part IV: Shoujo Kakumei Utena: Trust

Let’s do all the Girls Revolution Utena commentary together, later. There are seven chapters and I still only scratched the scratches on the surface.

Part V: Waiting on Frasier

Show writers for Frasier, Cheers, and Wings, on the other hand, liked this! It’s always nice when someone from a classic sitcom writes to you, “Et tu, Niles?” and says their career is going great because they are not involved with the then-upcoming program of the same name as the last.

Alan Moore barely modified a sitcom joke into one of the meanest moments in his bibliography.

Cheers, it’s spiritual predecessor, Taxi, and the sequel shows, including the new Frasier, which was not out at all when I wrote Us Living, they’re all macho shows. They can be queer macho, they can gesture to being feminist macho, indulge in swish macho, but they begin and end on machismo. On unearned, but certain swagger and reward.

Part VII: Looking Back at Future History

We took a risk. By the end of his career, Robert A Heinlein had tied together all of his own writing, and in a way, all fiction and story ever, into a set of of nested realities/continuities, including his early Future History, a revolutionary technique in storytelling, which mapped out, as the term implies, a timeline, a history, of things in the future.

World as Myth, the nesting and interwining collective of Heinlein’s fictions and all our fictions, not only tied everything he wrote to his Future History regardless of apparent continuity or canonization, it canonized all fiction, all story, all pretense, and all misreading. Not only is, for example, Star Trek, real, but any of our misunderstanding about a part of Star Trek is real. What we forgot about Dune or The Scarlet Pimpernel or the French Revolution or the Boxer Rebellion or our ancestor’s arrival on new shores, or the 34th President of the United States, or the price in context of 1951 issues of Galaxy Science Fiction is as real as what is remembered, what can be learned anew or again, or again anew.

I wrote the chapter satirically, and truthfully, in a vein Heinlein was no stranger to, and this confused people who cared the most about Robert A Heinlein. Or, cared enough to keep commenting and sharing it around as an example of the Devil’s dire work.

Part IX: The Movies of Prince

An absurdly strong and wide-ranging filmography, some of Prince’s movies – both feature-length and shorts which double as extended music videos – are connected by character names, others themes; by metaphysics.

A thing I supremely like about movies with Prince in them, is that you get to make a lot of it up. Is the angel in Graffiti Bridge another girlfriend-muse off the factory line or is she a refutation of Apollonia? Your call! Can Prince resurrect the dead or escape death by transfiguration? Your call! Can Prince levitate himself!?! People say.

People say.

Part XI: You’ll Feel Better & You Might See Rainbow Brite

I was nervous, again.

I love Rainbow Brite. And, I am most unusually affected, in terms of adults, by things which are cheesy, camp, kitsch, or otherwise less sellable as real, to adults. I believe as much in stage presentations or children in minimal costumes standing in the middle of a classroom forgetting their lines, as I believe in the most naturalist, committed professional filmmaking.

I cry during at least two parts of both theatrical My Little Pony movies, every time.

William Blake wanted to sell you something as much, if not more, than Hallmark wants to sell you things. And, Hallmark really wants to sell you things. This does not diminish the magic or psychological cache of Blake’s deities and sprites or GG Santiago’s Rainbow, the Color Kids, and her sprites.

If you need more of a middle ground, there are Santiago’s many Madonna and Child works.

But, you shouldn’t need. Just believe.

Part XII: Writing The Invisibles

I did not want to write this chapter!

No, true facts. True story.

I had written a piece on The Invisibles as self-fanfiction, as a way of rewriting or redrawing, rooted in Ragged Robin writing fanfic of the real past and then entering (herself) into it, and how, in Gideon’s last moments, or his always moment, he builds Robin out of commercially-available magic mirror ectoplasm, pornoplasm, as a trans woman or a force-feminized man. At the time, I was annoying people, behind the scenes, referring to the writer of The Invisibles as, “nominally cishet,” because there had not been a serious public declaration.

One public declaration in the midst of preparing for publication caused an abrupt editorial note, but I had built some thing into the essay which kept it, I hope, relevant and afloat.

That had been recent enough for me.

But, it would be disingenuous for me to do a book like this, a series of these kinds of articles, and not address The Invisibles, because, look, I’ll be honest, I fucking live there. (And, that’s how Comic Watch’s new Editor in Chief asking me to do a series of articles on the comic turned into the incredibly long There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles), which was also titled a riff called The Incredibly Long Adventure of Two Girls in The Invisibles. I was going never reveal which, or who, those “two girls,” because it’s girls all the way down.

Part XIII: My Friend Sailor Moon

Did I go too short on this one? I think the purity of Sailor Moon is why some audiences erase how queer it is; why some audiences get anxious with when it’s more childish or for children, or more adult but still for children. The purity probably keeps alive the myth that Naoko Takeuchi was very lonely and sad and made up the Sailor Moon characters as her friends.

Sailor Moon is about friends. It is about being friends with your romantic partners, friends with your family, friends with neighbors, classmates, even strangers you meet.

Sailor Moon is a way of looking at other people like you are looking to yourself.

Soon: Twin Peaks! Sun Ra! Jack Kirby! The Matrix! Captain Harlock! Malcolm Dragon! The Princess Bride!

Sooner: Revolutionary Girl Utena! Shoujo Kakumei Utena! Utena, La Fillette Révolutionnaire! Girls Revolution Utena! Ursula’s Kiss!