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SLEEPERS_WAKE

                                             October 3, 2007

I've been re-reading the
three Alan Moore volumes of
"Miracleman" lately...                   I hear that these are
                                         out-of-print, paralyzed in
The immediately striking thing           yet-another tedious legal
about reading this stuff is how          wrangle.
*good* it is, despite the
unpromising material, and the
fairly slight conceptual work
behind transforming it into
it's present form:

  You start with a British knock-off
  of the old "Captain Marvel", and
  then revive it with a notion like
  "what would it be like if                    I've also just read the
  superheros like this *really*                (more recent) "Soldiers
  existed" -- which on the face of             Seven" series, which makes
  it, would seem to be a really                a telling comparison.
  silly thing to speculate about,
  since they don't exist, and are                 The notion that in a
  unlikely to ever do so (to put it               world of superheroes,
  mildly).                                        people would develop
                                                  strange sexual obsessions
     And yet, and yet...                          about them them just
                                                  doesn't seem all that
     It might be that this is                     earth-shaking.
     another case similar to
     what I've said about                           Why would I care about
     "Iron-Man" -- that even                        the authenticity of
     given an absurd premise,                       a super-hero scenario?
     you can still say things
     about the real world.                            (And anyway, some
                                                      people already
     Something about the                              *do* have such
     nature of power, the                             obsessions.)
     nature of worship...



I find myself wondering about
"The Red King Syndrome": It
appears to be one of the least
interesting story of the Moore
Miracleman saga:

   The enslaved sleepwalkers are struggling
   to wake-up... but then are suddenly sung
   to sleep again by the silliest of silly
   stories: they dream that they *have*
   woken up, and that their struggles to
   wake were all just a nightmare... and
   hence they remain asleep.


       Perhaps Moore was getting at something there, eh?

          And what songs sing you to sleep?


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