You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2016.
Meg and Mogg in Amsterdam and Other Stories by Simon Hanselmann (2016) 164 p.
More of the same hilarious winning formula of drug abuse, suburban ennui, depression and Owl’s relentless bullying at the hands of his alleged friends. Possibly the best part of this volume is the introduction of Diesel and Jaxon, “the terrifying children of Werewolf Jones.”
Werewolf Jones is already such a terrible person – a cruel, narcissistic, obnoxious, mooching heroin addict – that the idea of him being a deadbeat dad to two actual children (who are utter terrors, considering their home environment) is brilliant.
I don’t have much more to say. Simon Hanselmann is a comic genius and you should buy his books.
His Illegal Self by Peter Carey (2008) 272 p.
Not one of Carey’s best efforts; indeed, one of his weakest. For the first few pages it seems like his writing might have finally caught up to his life: New York City, the Upper East Side, Bloomingdale’s, Lexington Avenue. A young boy in the 1970s, Che, being raised by his grandmother because his parents have waltzed off to join the Weathermen. Then the narrative twists and turns its way very shortly down to Queensland, where Che and his adpotive new mother Dial spend the next two hundred pages in a hippie commune near Nambour, as Carey himself did in the ‘70s.
Part of what made His Illegal Self a slog was that Carey’s prose seems to lack its usual spark. He writes from the perspectives of both Che and Dial and his characters have lost some of that loquacious charisma that always lets you know – whether it’s 19th century England or contemporary Australia or some completely fictional country – that this is a Peter Carey novel; give or take a few lectures Dial receives about American arrogance, or the occasional observational gem:
Then she waited for the lawyer, watching him stroke his mustache like a fool. She could not imagine how this man had ended up in this crappy little office with felt tiles on the floor. All those years in law school and then spend your life in fucking Nambour, staring through the window at the Woolworths loading dock.
Overall, though, this is a strangely flat outing from an author who is many things but rarely boring.
I think the last time I saw something slowly playing out on television and thought “this wasn’t supposed to happen” was the 2015 UK election. (Brexit, despite what people seem to think now, was always tight in the polls.) That was a mild version of this, because Cameron and Osborne cannot begin to compare to this. An election result that goes to the party you don’t support is a fluffy daydream compared to this. This is more like 9/11: watching something on your TV screen which you know cannot possibly be real. Something which, therefore, does not feel real. Something which makes you feel as though you’ve woken up in a nightmare. Something which makes you feel as though you are witnessing history in the making, and not in a good way; you are watching the dawn of a darker time.
We are all fucked. It is difficult to underscore how fucked we are. I am not American; by “we,” I mean everybody on the planet. Every human being.
This has nothing to do with being a left-winger. Of course I would prefer a Democrat in the White House. But this is not the same as if John McCain or Mitt Romney had won the presidency. This is a chilling, unprecedented catastrophe in the making. Every other Republican candidate in that race obeyed the norms and conventions of a liberal democracy. I’ve said throughout this election that if it were a vote between Trump and, say, Dick Cheney, I wouldn’t just vote for Cheney – I’d fucking volunteer for him. Donald Trump represents a historically unique threat to the United States and, therefore, to the world, and I am far from the first person to say this.
In the short term, I am frightened for the economy. Today the Dow Jones fell 750 points – more than the first day of trading after 9/11! I am frightened that the first year of Trump’s administration will usher in a global depression which will make 2008 look like a joke. I am frightened that now that Australia’s mining boom is over – and given that Trump has proposed 45% tariffs on Chinese imports – Australia will not, this time, be shielded from the worst of it. I am worried for my savings, my scant investments, my shitty job that I badly need. White male privilege, sure, whatever. Economic recession isn’t good for anybody anywhere in the world.
In the medium term I am worried about a man like Trump with access to America’s nuclear arsenal. Did you know that “the President has almost single authority to initiate a nuclear attack“? Is it beyond the realms of imagination that he might choose to nuke, say, Raqqa? Can you imagine him having a cool head to handle a potential crisis on the Korean peninsula? Would you be comfortable, as he apparently is, with an arms race in the Middle East or East Asia, with Saudi Arabia and South Korea and Japan developing nuclear weapons? This planet has gone 76 years without using a nuclear weapon in conflict. We all collectively came through the Cold War unscathed. Will that still be true in four years?
In the long-term, I am worried about society – human society, everybody’s society. The rise of populist nationalism across the Western world has been bad. Brexit was bad. Nothing has made me feel despair like this. Nothing has made me worry more that we are slouching towards a science fiction dystopia, a William Gibson novel, the end of The Bone Clocks, a dark and frightening world of inequality and hate and survival and despair. Americans have willingly voted for a man who ignores all democratic norms, who believes climate change is a hoax, who shows a disturbing love of authoritarian dictators like Vladimir Putin, who said he would only accept the election result if he won, who has called for the jailing of his political opponent for nonsensical reasons, who has willingly stoked racial division and bigotry in ways the Republican Party had previously only flirted with.
Trump is already a disgrace to his office and to his country simply by being what he is: an arrogant, bloviating, bullying, cruel, erratic, hypocritical, ignorant, inexperienced, lying, narcissistic, vindictive, racist, sexist, sleazy, swaggering, tax-avoiding, thin-skinned monster. He is a monster. Nearly every bad adjective you can say about somebody applies to him, and I literally cannot think of a good one. (He’s not even a good businessman, he just plays one on TV – if he’d invested his inheritance in index funds and played golf for the past 40 years he’d have more money than he does now.)
He is a man who dodged the Vietnam draft and then went on to criticise POW John McCain, and the family of a deceased veteran.
He is a man who has been caught on tape talking about committing sexual assault, and has been accused of sexual assault by dozens of women.
He is a man who appears to be running for president – who has won the presidency, Jesus fucking Christ! – simply to serve his own ego, his narcissism, his desperate need for fame and adulation.
I don’t know why I’m writing this. I don’t know why I’m linking to examples, when everybody already knows all this, after the last torturous year which turned out to be merely a harbinger for the horror about to descend on us.
Maybe I can’t fathom what has happened. I don’t understand how a country which voted for Obama twice could vote for this. I can’t believe that a majority of Americans looked at this self-entitled piece of shit; this dangerous, know-nothing braggart; this man who is plainly, obviously unfit for any kind of public office, who clearly never thinks of anyone else but himself, and thought: “Yes, OK. Let’s give him what he wants. Let’s let him live in the White House and sit in the Oval Office. Let’s let him have the nuclear codes. Let’s make him President of the United States.”
This is beyond satire. This is beyond nightmares. This feels like a rejected Hollywood script. This is a waking nightmare for intelligent people all over the world. I do not know what is going to happen in the next four years and I do not particularly want to find out. I do not want to see white supremacists given carte blanche to harass and assault African-Americans and Muslim-Americans and Hispanic-Americans. I do not want the economy to crater. I do not want to see nuclear weapons used. I do not want to see agreements on climate change rolled back, I do not want to see the world cope with billions of climate refugees by the time I’m in my old age. I do not want this horrid, awful man to feel the satisfaction of once again getting exactly what he wanted. I do not want to see the democratic norms of the United States undermined by voter suppression continuing, by Trump considering bullshit criminal charges against Clinton, by Trump appointing some crackpot alt-right judge to the Supreme Court. I do not want to feel the horrible, sickening sensation of my planet, my species, my lifetime, pitching forward off a cliff and into a dark and ugly void.
Megahex by Simon Hanselmann (2014) 211 p.
“Meg, Mogg and Owl” sets a pretty close record for me for the shortest amount of time between discovering an online comic, reading as much of it as I could find, and then buying the book and reading all of that. It’s been floating around on the internet for a few years, on Tumblr and VICE and so on, but Megahex collects a few dozen of Simon Hanselmann’s more polished earlier works into a single hardback volume.
Based on the characters from an innocuous 1970s British children’s cartoon, “Meg, Mogg and Owl” re-imagines them as deadbeat drug addicts slouching around a sharehouse and getting into various revolting hijinks. The heart of the series, for me, is Owl: the most responsible of the friends, still a stoner and a deadbeat, but someone who at least manages to hold down a full-time job and tries to keep the house clean. In return, his friends consider him a stupid nerd and mercilessly torment him.
Lots of this goes into some pretty dark and horrible territory, and this is most definitely not a comic for everyone. A litmus test of whether or not you’ll find MMO compelling or just sick is the comic “Boston Clanger” (not part of Megahex) which neatly encompasses all the main dynamics at play in the broader series: Owl’s abuse at the hands of his friends, the gross-out comedy, but also the more subtle levels of characterisation and comedic timing. Because the funniest part of “Boston Clanger” – go read it now if you haven’t already – is not Werewolf Jones and his children messily shitting on Owl’s bed, as funny as that is. It’s the following twenty-four panels in which Owl is left to painstakingly mop up their mess, singing the Frasier theme song to himself as he goes through the kitchen cabinets for cleaning products, scrubs his floor, hoses his blanket off against the back fence, etc. It’s horribly pathetic and sympathetic at the same time and it absolutely cracked me up.
I completely get that some people would just be turned off by this, or don’t have a sense of humour dark enough to find the torment of others funny, or – even among people who do – would find the cumulative effect of Owl’s personal hell a bit too much. That’s fine. But oddly enough, the more MMO I read, the more sympathetic I find the characters and the more comfortable I feel with it. Meg and Mogg do actually care about Owl, but seem oblivious to how awful their treatment of him is. Owl himself is no saint. Even Werewolf Jones, whirlwind of disgusting chaos that he is, has a core of wretched neediness alongside his malice.
Part of what makes it easy to enjoy humour this disturbing is that it’s rendered in the form of children’s cartoons – a witch, a cat, an owl, a werewolf. Hanselmann has said in interviews that many of his comics are based on real life, on experiences he had with friends and housemates growing up in Hobart and Melbourne. I doubt it would appeal to me as much if I were reading the awful adventures of actual human beings, but Owl – an inherently risible figure, a ludicrous bird man – yeah, sure, I can laugh at him all day.
Which is not to say that Megahex is nothing but button-pushing comedy; I’ve weirdly come to actually care about the characters, and the final comic in the book is surprisingly affecting. Like I said, it’s not for everyone, but if you can stomach it then it’s something wonderful and unique.
Grub Street 