Walpurgis night, 2007

I.
Tonight is Walpurgis night (supposing you’re one for pagan gods and such), which means good old Nick is sitting atop some mountain in Europe raising hell and stuff (I mean the prince of darkness, not Vladimir Putin), and I’ve got The Ghost of Frankenstein on DVD, with Lon Chaney as the creature (the first non-Karloff movie) and Bela Lugosi doing this kickass interpretation of the hunchback. Jesus, Bela Lugosi kicks ass anytime!
Anyway, it’s certainly not as good as the James Whale-directed features (the first two), but on the other hand all that homoer*tic innuendo is way too spooky for a night in bald mountain…

…Which, by the way, was made into a Fantasia segment by Walt Disney and the animators actually used Bela Lugosi as the inspiration for the über-ass-kicker who was Chernobog.
It’s kind of funny because people always refer to Fantasia as “the one in which Mickey is a wizard”, but I’ve always thought of it as, “the one with the badass dem*n in the ending”.


II.
Have I told you of when, one Saturday afternoon, this drop-dead gorgeous blonde knocked on my door and said she did Disney plays for the stage, for children, and was asking for contributions from everyone in the building for this show about the Disney villains she was thinking of doing…?
My first impulse was to thank good ol’ Nick for having such a hot neighbor in the first place, because she was pretty much combining my two favorite topics in life: slender hot blondes and cartoon villains. Then I asked her whether she’d let me do Chernobog: That I’d probably let her paint me all black from head to toe and paste up big cardboard bat-like wings on my back.
She had no idea of what I was talking about. I think she thought I was hitting on her. Which I was. But the whole “Mickey as a wizard” bit was such a turnoff I ended up giving her just five bucks, and that was that.

But hey, she did show me some photographs of past gigs she’d done and there was one in which she was dressed up as Alice from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland and god almighty… It was even better than seeing those p*rn flicks in which Asian p*rnstars in their mid-20s play High School girls with those skirts and stuff. The ensuing dialogue was something like this:

Me: “Can I keep the photograph?”
Girl: “No.”


III.
Anyhow.
Walpurgis night tonight and Bela Lugosi in gorgeous b&w in lieu of the hot neighbor blonde dressed like a Victorian pre-pubescent girl. But hey we surf any zeitgeist we got, man.
Walpurgis night usually means we’re taking the next day off (tomorrow), or course: “May Day” and all that, because of that funny quirk civilization’s got of turning pagan holidays into boring official stuff all drenched in red-tape and the mundane.
Like Christmas, you know?

But hey a day off work is a day off work is a day off work, just as a rose is a rose is a rose…


IV. This just in:
Well, scratch the Bela Lugosi DVD plans. This guy B**** just invited me over for pizza and I told him sure, great, but also that if he were not married we could sacrifice live goats in his apartment then smear their fresh blood all over the walls, and call in some h**kers for an *rgy. But since he’s married pizza’s good, too.
I think that’s probably how Patrick Bateman spends his Walpurgis nights, by the way.


(And in the back of my head Bauhaus starts singing, ”Bela Lugosi is dead… Bela Lugosi is dead…”)

In the beginning… pt.V (excerpt from an imaginary screenplay)

The following piece is an excerpt from an imaginary screenplay, obviously done in (faux-)screenplay format, which sort of backdates some of the events described in this week’s series and serves not only as a prequel both in chronological content and foreshadowing, but also as a thematic coda of some sort, to them.

Like all other posts here, it is only as true as the reader is willing to believe…


INT. LOWER FLOOR OF LOFT AT THE BEACH – DAWN
Enter G**** (girl) and M**** (boy), who are both 19 and slightly more than just “best friends” at this point in time, coming down the circular staircase and through the living room overlooking the balcony. There’s no lighting save from the still-faint glow from the sun rising outside.

SUPERIMPOSE: G****’s father apartment. Early morning, December 30th, 1999.

G****
(adjusts her nightgown, fixes her hair with her hands)
…And this is what I think the problem is, in the end: That perfect moment when you think you’ve found somebody and it’s all so special and you think it’s this holy thing that will eventually end up in marriage and kids or something and all of a sudden it just ends. Because people change. I don’t know. I mean, I would know, since I’ve just come from this awful break-up.

M****
(scratches the back of his head)
Yeah. Like, life gets in the way or something.

G****
Yeah, exactly. Something like that. You would think that, since you’ve seen it happening before with a friend or in a song or whatever and you have thought it over a hundred times, it just won’t happen to you. As if, once life hits you’d be ready, you’d know what to say and you’d know what to do and more important, the person you’re with would feel exactly the same way…

She heads over to the balcony, slides open the double glass doors, and walks outside to see the sun rise.

G**** (CONT’D)
…It’s just that, in the end, it doesn’t work that way. Change comes to one and all, you know? It’s like you’re in this perfect situation and give or take a few years wham!, there’s this magnetic pull forcing everybody apart and the perfect situation simply doesn’t exist anymore. Why do you think that kind of stuff happens anyway?

M****
(quoting)
”When you grow up, your heart dies.”

G****
(looks back at him and smiles)
I guess. Where did you get that from?

M****
(shrugs)
Some movie.

G****
Cool.

M****
Yeah. Pretty cool.

The screen begins to fade to black, bleeding from the borders towards the center, and the volume to subside with it: we’re near the end.

G****
So. What about that girl you were telling me about?

M****
Yeah. Name’s F****. She’s friends with B****’s girlfriend, and really cute too. I met her at this bar last month and we sort of saw each other a lot afterwards. I called her just before Christmas and I really have a good feeling about it and…

Cut to black.
THE END.

In the beginning… pt.IV

And this is how those days ended:

I sort of lost myself, permanently spacing out in late ‘99 then somehow hooked up with this incredible girl named F**** in early 2000, and just like with G**** before I sort of thought I was in love with her too only I’m not really sure- not really sure up until this day & age- whether I was really in love with her because when I think about it, I think I was in love with everybody back then.
In hindsight, I mean.

Whatever happened afterwards happened fast and scattered us all forward many years into the future where some of our best & our brightest stand over the hilltops of materialism and close to the cliffs of forgetfulness:

Sometimes when I’m alone in bed late at night & wide awake I wonder what F**** would ever think of me if she saw me now: In my head I can see her green eyes tinted crimson from crying and she’s asking me Whatever happened to the sweet kid with the big brown eyes who saw her through all the mess of her own life and never seemed to veer off righteousness and seldom lost his child’s smile and always, always, always knew what to say because he was so damn smart while she was so damn ordinary, and he seemed to know of everything back in those days and taught her so much, and- she was certain- would become such a wonderful father for their own children some day…?

And now she is (or would be) looking at this zero who’s taken the place of that bright kid and feeds on his own ego and doesn’t care about anybody or anything anymore, and all the adventures have long since ended because thrillseeking has been cut short to over-achieving in a very small way at the office, and sneering at everybody else who Can’t.


That poem I wrote back in 2000…
That poem I wrote back in 2000 ended with the following question: Who’s there to save the world?, and whenever I think back of F**** and God whenever I think back of G**** or even of you too, or hell even of L**** or K**** or D**** or B**** or A**** or R**** or P**** or the rest of the guys, I grow up a little.

Only, I grow up in the shade.



(TO BE CONCLUDED…)

In the beginning… pt.III

I clearly remember waking up on one of those mornings in the days after I’d hooked up with F****, back in early 2000, with a very specific verse in my mind and it was a line I’d never read or heard before and yet was singed in my brain as if by a laser: Campbell’s heroes stand sitting in the dark silently sipping their Campbell soup, Warhol stew to go Boom! just like a supernova in not even a thousand seconds’ worth of media exposure, it said and I can still recall it to this day with pinpoint accuracy.
So I pretty much got up from bed, brushed my teeth- and oddly enough, went to College.

That morning back in 2000 at school I wrote that verse into a poem; I actually got to write down two poems (the second one being about this girl I knew when I was 16) and about a dozen Haikus on my notebook and the pages were also more often than not decorated with random sketchings of comicbook superheroes (The Flash, Dr. Fate, Black Adam) and the occasional funny doodle about the professor dying in an acid vat or hit by machine g*n fire.

Whenever I attended classes I sat in the back and you, you sat equidistant to me and the door like the secret La Grange queen of the Grail buried in ennui in the dead center of the world:

We knew everything back in those days.
We knew nothing at all.


(TO BE CONTINUED…)

In the beginning… pt.II

By the end of that year, there around late October or early November 1999 the poor, doomed promise of ever finding that last, lost double-screen X-Men vid*o-game fell through and was ultimately discarded altogether.

I eventually flunked that semester almost entirely in College and never told my parents about it. I also quit my internship doing second-rate web-sites at some other College across town and once vacations hit I was pretty much penniless because I had squandered away my last money on a Paul Simon video and a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

I lasted a week and a half on the bread & cheese I could get at half-price at some nearby supermarket and some leftover milk from one of my roommates, and returned to my parents’ for Christmas, then spent New Year’s Eve with G**** and a few friends of hers at this fancy loft G****’s father owned at some snappy beach.
That’s where I bought the travel toothbrush.


Bottom line is…
Bottom line is, I had everywhere to go to and I felt like I could be in a thousand places at the same time and it would never be close to enough back in those days.


(TO BE CONTINUED…)

In the beginning… pt.I

A couple of weeks ago I was back at my parents’ for a few days, just kicking around with not much to do- vacations and all that- and there’s this old toothbrush, actually a travel toothbrush (one of those that fold over themselves so that the brush is stored inside the box-like handle) and I’ve always thought of it to be F****’s and the idea was to have something of F****’s close just so as I’d remember her by- nearly four & a half years together and almost no pictures- but then I recalled that the toothbrush was not F****’s, not actually, but in fact mine from that trip to the beach at G****’s dad’s place during New Year’s Eve, 1999.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I first met F**** in late 1999, a few weeks after my ultimatum to this guy B**** (who was close to a brother back then) so that he’d finally get his girlfriend to introduce me to some of her only-alleged-until-that-point hot female friends from College, and 1999 was also the year I thought I was mostly in love with this other girl G**** (who happened to be my best friend) only not really, because G**** sort of wasted that year away getting acquainted with gay boys she took for straight while trying to get into College herself, and I started skipping classes to go to shabby arcades downtown instead, in a stone-drunk quest to find that last, lost double-screen X-Men vid*o-game at ten o’clock in the mornings while quoting from Beatnik poetry to people who did not want to listen.

I was 19 years old.



(TO BE CONTINUED…)

Reading list for Jan-Apr, 2007

I should do this monthly or at least bi-monthly but I kind of got carried away doing other stuff, so here goes nothing:


Title: Lunar Park
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Year: 2005
Publisher: Vintage (softcover)
What: This is part-memoir and part-fiction, in which the character Bret Easton Ellis (the author himself) leads a dysfunctional and fictional life in the suburbs with a wife and kids (all fictional), up until the moment his creation Patrick Bateman (from his other book, American Psych*) bleeds into life and the author-character is haunted by his (real-life) past, and ultimately has to face long-buried feelings towards his dead father.
Comments: This guy is good! This guy is very good... Picture Less Than Zero (another book by Ellis) as if written by Stephen King.
I find it really amazing that this writer- who is my favorite writer, bar none- is actually able not only to cross genres but actually come across them. The book is fiction, of course, but fiction strictly based on reality, then becomes this really spooky ghost story, with a very poignant and emotional ending regarding father-son relationships.
This book is just screaming to become a movie, by the way!


Title: Short Stories
Author: Edith Wharton
Year: (several, see below)
Publisher: Didn’t pay attention
What: It’s a collection of short stories by American author Edith Wharton, ranging from the late 19th-century to the dawn of the 20th. They are mostly comical, a satire on marriage, divorce, high-society life, etc.
Comments: It was indeed better than I expected. I’d only read Wharton’s The Age of Innocence until that point, and I was sort of expecting the tales to be good but to drag a little too slow, but no! The lady actually delivers fast tales with rather caustic lines and wow, makes you say, “Whoa this lady knows how to strut her stuff!”.


Title: Notes From Underground
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Year: 1864
Publisher: I guess it was one of those Penguin things…
What: This is sort of a short novel divided in two parts. In the first one the author rants and raves about… stuff, I don’t know. About not fitting in, I guess.
The second part is mostly this story which sort of illustrates the points made in the first part, in which the author comes to terms with his life on the outskirts of society and how this parallel-existence of his eventually blends over the real world itself.
I don’t know. I think Dostoevsky is kinda beyond my grasp and I should stick to Batman & Robin instead. Hehh.
Comments: Actually it’s sort of like a blog, you know? It kind of predates all those anti-hero characters of literature that came afterwards: the outsider not in-synch with the rest of the world due to the philosophical beliefs he holds sacred and yet hurt him so much. It feels like you’re reading from the fossils for guys like Salinger and Kerouac and even Bret Easton Ellis himself.
But I don’t know, really.


Title: Pride & Prejudice
Author: Jane Austen
Year: 1813
Publisher: Chalk one more to those Penguin things, I assume.
What: This love story about this girl who has a certain number of sisters, to whom the family is sort of facing difficulties finding suitors, etc, and one of this girl falls fall this really rich guy whom she sorts of snobs at first because he’s somewhat of a dick himself.
Comments: Jesus, this book is a little morose, isn’t it? I sort of grew a love-hate relation with it while reading it because I’m more of a character-oriented guy and I generally don’t really care too much for the plots. But as the book progresses the characters start to grow on you, so...
Anyway, I think Jane Austen is kinda beyond my grasp as well.
Else this is just a chick book, hah!


Title: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Year: 1886
Publisher: Penguin again? I’m not sure.
What: Well, unless you’ve been living on the dark side of the moon for the last century or so this bit is totally pointless…
Comments: It’s shorter than I expected, for one thing. Which I think it's not bad at all because it’s a little like wading through molasses, a little too slow. I mean, it once took me forever to get to page two of Treasure Island (also by Stevenson) and I pretty much ditched it.
But anyway, it’s interesting. I think my rather-negative feelings to the book come in fact from being eclipsed by the so many adaptations, either in print or screen, that ensued. But it’s a classic, anyway.
I was particularly fascinated by the fact Mr. Hyde is actually a lot smaller than Jekyll, especially at first… not the big, strong guy you picture him to be due to everything that came afterwards. He’s in fact all shriveled and twisted because he represents the dark side of the mostly-good Dr. Jekyll, and starts to get larger as Jekyll’s good influence fades away and he, who was the person at first, becomes the persona and gives way to sin, and to Hyde.


Title: Last Chance to See
Author: Douglas Adams, with Mark Cawardine
Year: 1990
Publisher: No idea.
What: Neither fiction nor comedy (per se), which coming from Adams is what you’d expect. It’s actually a collection of reports about the experiences Adams and ecologist Mark Cawardine had in visiting over many efforts to save endangered species such as the Komodo dragon, the Yangtze river blind dolphin, white rhinos in Zaire, etc. But of course it’s written in a very tongue-in-cheek manner, which makes the book absolutely fascinating!
Comments: Now Douglas Adams was probably… wow. I think it was Neil Gaiman that called him a true genius, and I completely agree. This is a guy who’s a writer of sci-fi comedy and he’s actually writing about real-world, serious problems, and he accomplishes it… the best thing is that he makes you laugh before and after he makes you cry: It’s all written as a series of extremely hilarious mis-adventures by Adams himself and he clumsily follows the field-experienced Cawardine, while he instructs the reader about the animals per se, their environment, dangers to their survival and etc.
I absolutely recommend this book to anybody! In fact, I’m probably posting a few of his quotes in a few weeks.


Title: Dracula
Author: Bram Stoker
Year: 1897
Publisher: Penguin again? Who cares.
What: Well…
Comments: A helluva lot better than I expected, and surprisingly a fast-paced, action-packed story at that, especially considering we’re talking 19th-century material here.
Despite being rather lengthy the chapters are short and narrated by a plethora of characters, often ending in cliffhangers.
Dracula, the creature himself, is more of an animal or a force of nature than we’re used to from seeing in the movies (either with Bela Lugosi or Gary Oldman). He actually has fewer lines than you expect and doesn’t appear much, but instead the effects of his doings affect the other characters like ripples in a pond.
I keep wondering of how this book was received back in the day. Clive Barker once joked that it was probably the “trashy novel” of the period and makes me think of stuff like, the Da Vinci Code or something.
But it’s solid, good stuff: It’s just that’s incredibly accessible, that’s all.


Title: Krypton Companion
Author: Michael Eury (editor)
Year: 2007
Publisher: Two Morrows Publishing
What: A collection of (all-new) interviews, articles and indexes regarding Superman during the Silver and Bronze ages of comics, ranging from the second part of the years the character was edited by Mort Weisinger (from 1958 on) up to the last days under Julius Schwartz in ‘86 (before the John Byrne reboot).
Comments: This is gold for any comics reader. Wow. Extensive interviews and articles about Marv Wolfman, Denny O’Neil, Len Wein, Jerry Siegel (obviously), Murphy Anderson, Curt Swan, Gerry Conway, Wayne Boring, George Perez, Alan Moore, etc etc etc etc. This is an amazing back-stage pass at the moment in time when Superman’s mythology was still cooling down and forming from raw dreamstuff… It’s all in this book: The introduction of Supergirl, Krypto, the Fortress of Solitude, and so on, up to the aftershocks of the Christopher Reeve movies, and well beyond that. It is just packed with never seen before artwork, it’s very richly-illustrated (even though it’s b&w).
But the best part? The book is incredibly light on indexes and technical stuff, and 90% focused on the creators themselves. There’s a long “roundtable discussion” among many Superman professionals talking simultaneously about the same Superman-related subjects. So you got Mark Waid and Kurt Busiek and John Byrne and Roy Thomas and Jon Bogdanove, and many others, just going at it and letting it all out at each other. Fantastic!
I recommend this book to anyone who’s ever wondered where Superman’s popularity stems from, and why and how the character got to become part of worldwide popular culture and he’s today.


Title: All-Star Companion, vol.II
Author: Roy Thomas (editor)
Year: 2006
Publisher: Two Morrows Publishing
What: A follow up to the previous volume in the series. This one has index for all issues pertaining to the Thomas’ penned All-Star Squadron series from the mid-1980s and other satellite series, and also has more incredibly obscure material regarding artwork analysis from 1940s artwork.
Comments: Unlike the Superman book above, this is more heavy on the technical stuff and therefore reaches a narrower audience. But it’s still very good. I loved it anyway!
Even though I’m not really into Roy Thomas as a comics writer, but once he starts writing about his life-long love (the Justice Society of America in the 1940s All-Star Comics), he really hits the mark.
Of course vol.I was better, because they covered most of the 1940s stuff there… with this one he goes deep in some details, speculations and trivia, while remaining very respectful for the legacy that ensued.


- - - - - - - -
Due to time and space restrictions I’m letting go of the comics I’ve read in the period, but I’d like to make two very strong recommendations: The first one goes for the SUPERMAN: UP, UP AND AWAY tradepaperback, collecting the first “One Year Later” storyline with the Man of Steel as written by Kurt Busiek and Geoff Johns: Very powerful stuff there- a bold, dashing, heroic, sexy Superman written more in touch with the movies than as the boring boy scout he’s most normally depicted in today’s comics. The story follows a powerless Clark Kent as he comes upon a dangerous plot by power-hungry Lex Luthor and can’t really do much about it up until he (slowly) regains his powers and… it’s just amazing, actually. Trust me on this one. Beautiful artwork as well.
The second recommendation goes, as always, for EX MACHINA vol.IV: MARCH TO WAR but of course I don’t have to tell you that.You got me hooked on EM in the first place. But just for posterity, you know. (Other people out there: Go read Ex Machina because it’s a terrific post-9/11 political thriller thinly-veiled as a post-9/11 superhero book. Or is it the other way around? Either way, it works. It’s in fact the only comic book out there that really captures the bona fide zeitgeist of the problems of today’s world.)

The once and future… whatever, we’re back anyway!

So the 10-day vacations ended and amounted, in the end, to nothing special apart from sleeping 12 or 13-hour periods and having the weirdest nightmares ever. Also saw some terrific movies, read a lot, and even went back to my parents’ for a few days and got to stick with their car for the duration and it was so cool, to the point I’m actually having a hard time convincing myself that I shouldn’t buy myself one of those because it’d be so much smarter to save my money and go for the whole real state thing instead.
I mean, in the long run.
When I grow up, that is.Eventually.

Also got an MRI done on my knees the other day, on both of them. The pain has long since subsided but it still feels a bit odd and I’m sort of scared to resume running.
Of course since I also stopped working out altogether and cut back on my diet to the point I’ve actually become quite partial again to chocolate cake and ice-cream, here comes the neighborhood once more. Around my gut area, that is.

On a more sh*tty sidenote, novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died the other day. Coincidentally in the same day I bought one of his books (Breakfast of Champions).
This kind of sucks because he was (is!) slowly becoming one of my favorite writers and it’s so damn sad to see such a talented man go. Sort of ups the ante on us readers you know, and more than that, for us amateur writers.


Anyway, do stick around.
We got some great stuff coming up here:

I’ll get the long-overdue reading list for Jan-Apr ‘07 up tomorrow, and next week we’re doing this very interesting and rather personal five-parter called “In the beginning” which should cover some stuff that went down in 1999 and 2000, mostly with F****, and G****, and College (brrr!) and stuff. After that, apart from the usual insanity the idea is to plunge head-on on actually writing a comic script. Or four. And walking you by the whole process.

Thanks for stopping by, and be kind to animals and old comics.

Nothing to say, then out for 10 days

Okay, I'll let you in on this secret:
This whole "minimalist approach" to writing is just because I'm really a lousy plotter and can't come up with good stories for the life of me.

And I'm taking 10 days off work.
Not that it's got anything to do with it, but anyway... back two Thursdays from now, et. al.

Everything I need to know about girls I learned with the Silver Age Superman

Superman’s Silver Age period debuted with the “Super-Key to Fort Superman" story from the June, 1958 issue of Action Comics (#241) and lasted until editor Julius Schwartz took the reigns of the character’s editorship in the June, 1971 issue of Superman (#233).
Mort Weisinger had been the character’s previous editor, from the mid-40s all the way to 1970. He was the main driving force for establishing the mostly-recognized aspects of the Man of Steel such as the artic fortress, Supergirl, Krypton, the imaginary stories, Bizarro, etc etc etc. Weisinger, of course, had a cadre of probably the best comics writers at his disposal, among them Ed Hamilton, Otto Binder, Superman’s creator Jerry Siegel himself and many others (among the artists, Wayne Boring, Kurt Schaffenberger and Curt Swan soared to new heights). Weisinger’s style has been described as very controlling, knee-deep involved in what his team was doing and that is probably the reason for the Superman books of his day sporting the best, most concise continuity ever seen in comics.

Weisinger’s plots usually featured one recurring element: The many loves of Superman, which, if you think about it, make for a very interesting analysis of the feminine mind through the establishing of Jungian-like Archetypes… and I’m only half-kidding here… What I mean is, one can easily pick the main girlfriends Superman’s had, especially their portrayal during Weisinger’s tenure to actually, well, understand girls.

Here are the Archetypes, at least according to my personal vision and experience with the fair sex:


Lois Lane debuted alongside Superman in Action Comics #1, in June, 1938 and has been the character’s main romantic interest ever since. I don’t like Lois, though. In fact, I think the only person who ever made me care for her was artist Kurt Schaffenberger, the #1 good-girl artist in all of comicdom history.
Lois, see, is pretty much obsessed with the big guy: She’s got this relentless drive that says must-get-Superman, period. It’s like she doesn’t love the man, only hates the idea of not having him. I’m perfectly aware I see Lois in a totally biased manner but let’s be honest here: The post-Crisis Lois Lane sucks, right? Because she has no personality whatsoever! And ever since the mid-‘90s when she finally married the Man of Steel she’s been below zero in the characterization department. I’m still to see an interesting Lois after the marriage. The character’s lost her raison d’etre, lost her meaning, lost herself once she finally got the object of her affection.
For Lois (that b*tch!) it’s not really about loving, but indeed about possessing, about controlling… otherwise why all the mad plots and crazy schemes to expose Superman’s secret identity, to trick him into marriage, and the works?
The way I see it, Superman should sort of resent all the time and effort he put in his relationship with Lois, because in the end it wouldn’t really amount to anything special.
I know I would, and maybe I do. I don’t know.

Lana Lang also heralded from before the Silver Age and was, first and foremost, Superboy’s answer to Lois Lane, ergo, she was introduced in Superboy #10 (Sep.50) to play Clark Kent’s lead romantic interest when he was a boy, in a sort of retroactive-continuity way. Like Lois, Lana’s infatuation makes her do all sorts of cretin plans to expose the Boy of Steel’s alter-ego, that kind of stuff… But unlike Lois, Lana’s just a girl, see, she’s the girl next door, she’s the girl that made Clark like girls in the first place.
That said, I will wholeheartedly disagree with anyone that claims Lana as Superman’s true love… but I will, however, stand by Lana’s side as worthy of Clark’s love: Lana definitely has a place in Clark’s heart.
I vouch for her; she’s special in that in-hindsight sort of way. She was there first, after all, she was his first love.

Lori Lemaris was Superman’s Mermaid Sweetheart right from her first appearance in Superman #129 in May '59 and serves to describe the whole rest of the girls in anybody’s life not fitting within the Lois or Lana.
The story went like this: Clark Kent fell in love with a girl. She was perfect. She seemed like heaven… but to make a long story short, he then discovered she was not a regular girl, she was a mermaid who then went to live with her own people and fell in love with some guy like her.
Even though I’m really fond of Lori (though not up to Lyla’s extent), she is like most of the girls I’ve been attracted to in my life: They all seem wonderful, incredible, smart, etc… up until the point they have fish tails, and are revealed not to be what they seemed at first.
The Archetype of Lori Lemaris would thus befit all the girls one’s been disappointed with- and sadly they are legion.

Lyla Lerrol, on the other hand, is a whole different ballgame: Now this gal is Superman’s true love as odd as it might sound, because probably 99% of the audience would frown at the sound of her name and ask, who is this girl anyway?
Lyla Lerrol had but one appearance during the Silver Age, back in Superman #141 (Nov.60): Superman, while chasing a weird alien being, traveled faster than light and through time, and ended up in orbit around Krypton’s red sun shortly before the planet exploded. Superman loses his powers under a red sun, obviously, and was therefore unable to return to the present. In Krypton’s past he befriended Jor-El, his own father (but never let he know he was his time-displaced son), and got to know this actress called Lyla Lerrol. They fell in love for each other and lived a perfect life for a few weeks… up until the point when he was thrown back to the present in a strange accident, leaving Lyla back in Krypton’s past.
Now Lyla was a perfect match for Superman in every sense: She was smart, had both her feet firmly on the ground as opposed to the madcap Lois and Lana, she was a sweet, intelligent girl and also damn cute. She was, also, Kryptonian like Superman. So why didn’t things work out for Superman and Lyla Lerrol? That’s pretty much the billion-dollar question and all in all it can only be answered to Fate’s “sorry sport, it just wasn’t meant to be”. Lyla belongs to a different world, all senses implied.
Lyla did make a cameo back in a story published in December, 1985 (Superman Annual #11), Alan Moore’s classic For the Man Who Has Everything, which is Superman’s greatest story ever told, in which Superman falls victim to an alien parasite which locks him inside his own mind, living out the perfect fantasy while his body perishes… and it’s with Lyla he’s living in his fantasy world. Not Lana. Certainly not with Lois.
The point is, after Lyla, how the hell can Superman even think of another girl?! Lois, Lana and the likes of them just pale before the memory of her…
Lyla Lerrol is the archetype for “the one that got away”, with the added bonus, “because Superman was too damn dumb”.

More disturbing things to tell other people

I woke up the other day, got out of bed in a rush and shut off the alarm. I stood bare naked for a moment or two then went to the bathroom for a quick cold shower.
I looked myself in the mirror to check whether the dark circles under my eyes had gotten even darker, then said the following bit out aloud to my own reflection:
“Hitler in a Boy-Band”.


Later that day I decided that, if I’m ever to come up with a computer Font, any kind of Font at all, I’ll call it Hitler in a Boy-Band for no specific reason whatsoever other than, it sure sounds like the name of a computer Font.

A brief troubleshooting guide to Life

I.
You breeze through the first day but in a bad way and not entirely unlike a straw in a hurricane: Heuristics has long since given way to brute force as the matter at hand is tackled head-on despite your sheer meeting against every brick in the great wall of Chance amounting to nothing.
Blind rage is the first tenet of problem-solving and its color is fiery red. Speed is its main attribute and the visible world is the hunting ground under the solar aegis of your conscience, and maybe luck.
The words slipping from your lips ultimately come from the Bhagavad-Gita when the clock hits six pm and the final score amounts to failure and dust: “And I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.”

On the second day you shed your skin off and cut through rational thought with the Occam’s razor of your muse shining bright under the lunar sphere: Where brute force and conventional thinking have both struggled to no avail and every single detail has already been meditated upon all it takes you is one step sideways in order to gaze at the big picture from a different angle and baby, it gazes right back at you- Not the abyss in itself but the Truth shinning bright in all of its mathematical splendor.

It’s really in thinking every problem has its own answer somewhere dormant in its entirety- Every coded message carries its own decryption key- It speaks in signals and it speaks in signs.
It passes close, it grazes you by.
You stop babbling away your tomorrows to listen- The problem speaks to you and eternity beckons, only a keystroke away- You don’t learn by taking it in, but in letting it out.

I think it’s how scientists found out about Dark Matter, by the way.


II.
There are two secret meanings to the Universe and the first one is encoded in tiny bits of “1” and “0” truisms and carried upon the atoms we inherited out of dead stars.
The second one is, of course, the secret Batman-joke God himself hid within Creation and told Lilith but not Adam.