Guardian 2
From Barbelith
chipas "Homeless Superior"
Barbelith thread: Iiiiammmyuuuhuamiiiii (http://www.barbelith.com/topic/20483)
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Background & General Commentary
Synopsis:
It's Jake Jordan's first day on the job as the Guardian and already he has been dragged deep into the heart of Manhattan's Secret Subways to rescue his wife Carla from the clutches of the dread subway pirate All-Beard. In order to catch up with All-Beard's speeding subway train, The Guardian is forced to cooperate with All-Beard's piratical rival, No-Beard, as the two race to retrieve a legendary artifact called the Foundation Stone of Manhattan. Though Jake gives his all to rescue his family and loved ones, in the end he can't help but feel loss and guilt over those he cannot save.
General Thoughts:
In Seven Soldiers #0, Shelly Gaynor, the modern-aged Whip, asked "How do you tell when you've become a super-hero and not just a crazy fetish person with a death wish?" The Guardian and the subway pirates seem to walk the same line between role-play and reality. When does Jake stop being a walking marketing gimmick for a trashy tabloid and become a real hero? What separates a crazy homeless guy from a genuine pirate? For all three -- for Shelley, for Jake, and even for No-Beard -- the hero game becomes a source of dignity and a route of escape from the stagnation of their former lives. At some point, the game becomes real. Last issue we saw how putting on the uniform of the Guardian gave Jake his dignity back. Playing dress-up saved Jake. This issue we see how No-Beard, when stripped of his pirate trappings, has nothing left to live for. It destroys him. For these characters, the "crazy fetish" roleplay has the power to save or destroy each one's sense of identity.
Is Jake "just pretending" to be a hero? Is No-Beard "just pretending" to be a pirate? When do the roles they play become reality? Does it matter?
I think No-Beard and All-Beard represent the eternal fight between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore.
Annotations
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Page 1
Rats show up repeatedly in this issue. Here they are an example of blind greed. In No-Beard's story, the Puritan kiddie-snatchers did trade with "talking rats." There is a rat perched on the switch controlling the rails at Dead Man's Junction, and two rats look on during the final confrontation of No-Beard and All-Beard in the radioactive chamber of the Foundation Stone.
There is more to these rats than meets the eye, as we will learn in Klarion #2. The rats of the Secret Subways are intelligent, having developed their own civilization after being mutated by discarded chemicals.
Page 6
It appears that No-Beard's youthful assistant, "Hands," performs all the mundane tasks that the pirate captain can't manage with his twin hooks. The name is a reference to Israel Hands, a Jewish member of the traitorous crew of the Hispaniola in R.L.Stevenson's Treasure Island.
The secret codeword that No-Beard uses to open the entrance to the Secret Subways, "IIIAMMMYUUUHUAMIIIII," could be translated as "I am you. Who am I?" ...or possibly as all one sentence: "I am you who am I." Given No-Beard's reference to words spoken by God, I am vaguely reminded of "I am who am," a translation of the sacred name for God.
Page 7
PANEL 2: "What names we call us is our own business. If I says I'm a swash-me-own-buckle pirate and proud captain of the President Clinton, I expect you to respect that!"
Later in this issue we will see how important their outlandish names and sailor lingo are to pirates. Indeed, they are the basis for the pirates' "human dignity" and without them No-Beard/All-Beard is "only some old homeless guy. Sick and soon to die."
PANEL 4: "What in Hell was that?"
The monster that No-Beard runs down on the tracks is almost certainly Horigal, the monster pursuing Klarion in his series. This collision is seen again from a different perspective in Klarion #2.
Page 8
PANEL 3: "Back in Falsebeard's day, they told tales of underground markets where Puritan kiddie-snatchers from hell came to trade with talking rats."
This is a reference to High Market and the inhabitants of Limbo Town. We won't find out who the talking rats are until Klarion #2, where we see one of the Rat Kings in person.
Cameron Stewart claims that the entire idea of Subway Pirates sprung from the Monty Python sketch in The Meaning Of Life featuring accountants-turned-pirates. Possibly the legendary Captain Falsebeard could then be equated with Monty Python's Life Of Brian, where several jokes were centred around the selling of false beards for disguise, or the comedy group's general habit of creating characters with outlandishly silly-looking false beards, as well as other visual cues.
PANEL 5: "Cenozoic Station"
The Cenozoic period is the prehistoric time-period that runs from 45 million years ago up to the present day. As Jake ventures deeper into the earth he seems to find things that are much older than the city above.
Page 13
PANEL 2: "Can't you see I'm walking barefoot on scalding tiles of radioactive pearl? There's a god, in burning shackles! He lifts his awful, star-maned head and says..."
All-Beard's prophecies may be drug-induced ravings, but occasionally there seems to be more to them. Later in this issue, All-Beard finds the radioactive chamber and the burning shackles of which he speaks. The imprisoned, star-maned god, however, is missing. Did the Imprisoned God escape? Could this be a reference to Neh-Buh-Loh, whose body is filled with stars? Or could the title "star-maned" apply to All-Beard himself, whose beard is alight with a dozen tiny flames when he speaks his prophecy?
We will see the Chamber of the Imprisoned God again in Klarion #2, at which time we will learn that the missing deity is the one known to the Limbo Townies as Croatoan the Witch-God.
In Mister Miracle #4, we will meet an Enchained God named Oracle who may be the one imprisoned by the Sheeda in the Chamber long ago. In Seven Soldiers #1, this imprisoned God turns out to be Aurakles, the first hero - 'Oracle' a phonetic corruption of his name - and the die to be one of the Seven Treasures he was entrusted with.
Could All-Beard be using the same blue mold Tom-O-Bedlam gives Dane during the underground initiation in The Invisibles?
Note All-Beard's beard is covered in lighted tapers - the trademark of the infamous Blackbeard, the real-life pirate credited with inventing the 'name yourself after the state of your beard' tradition in Pirate Captains.
Page 17
PANEL 4: "I prepared myself for this with a fiery cocktail of absinthe and crack."
Comic book writers such as Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and others have been renowned for their alleged use of addictive substances as inspiration for their more creative or wacky writings, to the extent that the term 'crack' - referring to crack cocaine - became a slang word to describe any story or story element that reads as if the author had been high on crack cocaine while writing it; e.g., popular website scans_daily (http://community.livejournal.com/scans_daily/) claims to have been "Bringing the crack since December 2003".
Morrison himself has unabashedly admitted (http://www.dosenation.com/listing.php?id=4932) to his previous drug use:
"I was a very straightedge kid until I was 30 years old — I didn't touch anything, and I was anti-drinking, anti-drugs, everything. But I got to 30 and I kind of decided to treat myself as a laboratory and become something else — I wondered how much you could mess with your own personality. I became a tranny for awhile; I used to dress up as a girl, and I was beautiful! I just started to take tons of psychadelic[sic] drugs, though I was never into amphetamines or anything. But I'm getting old now, so I don't do so much of that."
Page 18
PANEL 2-3: " 'Six-sided god-machine,' they called it. Controller of destiny, they called it. The hidden eternal heart of New York! Did they lie?"
The Foundation Stone of Manhattan turns out to be a six-sided die. The die is a fitting symbol of chance. This could imply that men's fates are left entirely up to chance and no man is in control of his own destiny. However, I haven't ruled out the possibility that the Foundation Stone is a magical artifact of some kind. It is related to the die used by Zatanna's apprentice, Misty Kilgore (as revealed in Seven Soldiers #1, in that they are both examples of the New God's "Fatherbox", a weapon of Aurakles, and both will only work when in close proximity with each other.
Some other possible theories about the six-sided stone:
Mr Tricks -- Would that six sided stone be related to the 6 sided sun seen in Zatanna?
vajramukti -- I just reread zatanna, and when they do the big ritual, king ra man references a 'magic stone' floating behind him, that looks like a hexagon but is in his words actually a flattened projection of a cube...
Though the feud between All-Beard and No-Beard will ultimately lead to the death of both pirates, the Foundation Stone will not remain missing for long. It will soon be picked up by a curious Witch-Boy in Klarion #2.
Page 19
PANEL 4: "But I'm hoping everybody understands a trade-off."
Jake is correct in his interpretation of Secret Subway etiquette: a trade is appropriate in this situation. What he doesn't know is that the cart he borrows belongs not to the Subway Pirates but to the Lost Children of Leviathan.
Page 20
PANEL 1 - "RIP -rraro",
"McLeod",
"Shannon",
"Murray",
"Bluth",
"In Loving Memory, Christine Taylor"
At the funeral of Jake's would-be father-in-law, Larry Marcus, the inscriptions on six of the gravestones are legible. Cameron Stewart had this to say on the choice of names:
Cameron Stewart - "The names Carraro, McLeod, Shannon, and Murray are the surnames of all the people with whom I share my studio (Kagan McLeod and Steve Murray are also caricatured in the comic). Bluth comes from Arrested Development, which I was watching at the time I drew that page, and the particular episode was guest starring Christine Taylor (Ben Stiller's wife)."
Flyboy -- "There's something very appealing about how hard Jake is on himself - unlike, say, Uncle Ben's death, Larry's death really wasn't his fault, but you know he doesn't see it that way. He doesn't have any powers, he's just a guy who grits his teeth and pushes himself to get it done - that in itself could be a cliche, but somehow Morrison & Stewart have made it work for me."
Page 21
PANELS 3-4: "We're telling stories about human dignity, Jake. Stories of how human beings make culture and meaning for ourselves, even down there in the garbage."
Jake not only saves the girl, he brings home the STORY, which helps define his purpose as a hero. The world Jake inhabits is very mundane, but apparently there are readers out there who look to the fantastical stories in The Guardian for some sense of higher meaning. (The parallel to comic books, i.e. mythic story-telling in the form of disposable, "garbage" entertainment, is fairly obvious.) Carla preserves All-Beard's own words on his little note-pad and through The Manhattan Guardian's sensationalist reporting, the subway pirates become more than crazy homeless guys -- they become Legend, or urban legend at the very least. Is there meaning to be found in the pirate's story, as Ed. Stargard assures Jake, or is their fate as forgotten cast-offs of society really as bleak as the last page suggests?
Page 22
Notice that the tabloid headline in the first panel is exactly the same as the title of the comic book in which it appears. This implies that the stories we read in The Manhattan Guardian comic book and the stories that appear in The Manhattan Guardian tabloid are in fact one and the same, making the reader feel like part of Jake Jordan's world.
Series artist Cameron Stewart had this to say concerning the pirate in the last panel:
"In the script Grant said that for the final image of the rotting zombie pirate piloting the train, the readers shouldn't be able to tell if it's No-Beard or All-Beard. Only after I started drawing it did I discover that trying to make an ambiguous image of two characters that are visual polar opposites of one another is pretty difficult. Also I was already over my deadline so I kind of had to blast it out in a couple hours...apologies if the image and its point is kind of unclear."
And he verified another comment on the outcome of All-Beard vs. No-Beard:
Haus, Hearth, Home, Heart -- "In the final analysis, it doesn't really seem to matter who wins the battle over the magic stone - it's just mad old homeless guys, and they'll be dead soon. The pirates are casualties of a greater storyline the edges of which they inhabit, as the homeless more generally are casualties of a normal world the edges of which they inhabit."
Were the earlier theorem (that All-Beard and No-Beard are manifestations of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, respectively) indeed correct, then this ending could be seen as Morrison's subtle comment on the supposed 'feud', in that neither person is the better writer, and both are mere humans underneath.
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