Really good stuff.

Next in the queue is Ocean, I do believe.

Don’t get too excited.
Great set up, but a waste of potential.

Also, I completely buy your theory about Freud and the Death sex dream, so thanks very much for clearing that up. The only mystery that remains is Watson’s cat… the world may never know.

Freud considered “Eros”, the life/sex urge, and “Thanatos”, the death urge, to be the two fundamental psychological forces in a human being; the French call the orgasm “a little death”; and so on… There’s a long history of connecting sex and death, and I think the dream merely served as an illustration of that.

I think in his introduction that appears in the first DP book Morrison explains that when writing the series, he used the “cut-up” technique borrowed from William Burroughs. This technique involves cutting what you’ve written into pieces, throwing the pieces into air, and rearranging them into random order. I think a lot of the more random wordplay in DP comes from this technique, or from some other similarly random techinques such as “automatic writing”. So there’s no deeper meaning to those words. On the other hand, in the sort chaos magic Morrison practices I think nothing is completely random, so he might think even those randomly scattered words are significant in the larger whole of his work.

Morrison practices what you’d call “postmodern magic”, i.e. where modern items are equally potent with magic and capable of being part of a spell as traditional magical items such crystal balls, knives an pentagrams. You probably noticed that Willoughby Kipling’s magic also works like this. Being the primary medium of communication in the modern era, in Morrison’s view the telephone is probably loaded with magic, and the “summoning” of Watson is what initiated it all. Also, the connection between the Pentagon and telephones is in military intelligence (a big part of which is phone tapping), of wanting to know everything, all the secrets the world holds. As the final issue of Morrison’s DP show, he sees this ultimate will to knowledge, this urge to dissect everything into tiny pieces of controllable information, as destructive. For him, some things are better to remain mysteries, unknowable, unanalyzable.

It took a bit, but it’s started to get alright – just finished the flashback to his father as a child and the losing his tooth bit.

Fun to know that on whatever train I’m on, I’m reading the most interesting looking book, by far.

As for Mr. Evans – in that story, it feels like Morrison and Case were just chucking stuff out that made no sense. The summoning words seem meaningless, but perhaps it’s just the banality of it that makes them summoning words. As for his appearance … I think of Hugh Hefner, while he has that periscope that allows him to peep on everyone’s secret desires. I could be wrong, but that’s what I though of. As for the dream … beats me!

That’s the best I can do. If anyone else has answers, feel free to chime in.

There’s a lot of prose that’s batshit insane, so I’m not surprised Burroughs is (I’ve never read him). It’s tough to find comics from the Big Two that outdo Starlin in the 1970s, though. Although that Englehart stuff on Avengers sounds like it could come close …

That said, after more than half my life I still really appreciate Starlin’s first Warlock story arc. While I have enjoyed a lot of Jim’s comics over the years, I don’t think anything else has really matched up, over the long term, with his Captain Marvel vs. Thanos story and Warlock vs. The Universal Church. And in terms of insanity I think Warlock clearly bests CM. I think Starlin just poured an experimental, manic energy into those stories which never really returned.

Reading currently: let’s see, I’m reading “Hunting Eichmann” which is excellent. I just finished a spooky novel titled “The Ghost Writer” by John Harwood which was great. I have a bunch of comics for my birthday; just polished off the collected Necronomicon (not bad, although the final issue didn’t quite pull it off IMO) and Sleeper Season Two Volume 1. Every time I read Sleeper it stuns me how awesome that is. One of those rare cases where everyone was going on about “oh it’s so great all of you need to read this blah blah” and eventually it ends and the hype goes away and a few years later I check it out and, WHAM, yes it really was that good.

By coincidence, I’m also re-reading my hardcover copy of Final Crisis, and there are elements of it that I find not dissimilar to Burroughs free association, cut-up writings. I may have some further thoughts on that subject once I’ve done with both.

1) What was the deal with the telephone avatar and the whole Watson thing, especially the story about Watson’s stuffed cat, which just seemed out of the blue? And why telephones?

2) Was there a reference that I didn’t get with Shadowy Mr. Evans (his whole demeanor and physical apperance) and his words of summoning “kneecap,” “lottery,” and two others that escape me right now?

3) Also, in the Shadowy Mr. Evans story there’s a dream involving a personified Death chasing a gymnast down railroad tracks. The captions describe it, euphemistically of course, as basically a wet dream. I don’t really have a question, just “I don’t get it” or if we require a question mark, then “Can you explain this?”

Yes, I’m a total troglodyte for asking these questions – in fact, I’m a Keysmith – but I must know!

Anyway, while not as out-and-out crazy as Jim Starlin’s Captain Marvel and Warlock stuff, Englehart is pretty out there in places. The whole Celestial Madonna storyline ends with Mantis’ wedding to a telepathic alien tree who takes the form of her deceased ex-boyfriend. Um, yeah, when you actually write it out, wow, that is weird. All this, and Englehart’s run crosses over with Starlin’s Captain Marvel in a couple of places. So there you go, that ties in quite nicely

Next in the queue is Ocean, I do believe.