A world, Stuck with me

"Get Stuck and Love It!"

What's my birthday wish?

Whenever everyone in the world feels stuck, they get STuck instead! Just grit your teeth, empty your eyes of jaded views, smile till your cheeks get sore, and express your mental calamity you call your conscious mind without letting your teeth part, and anything you say with your face stuck that way is going to sound hilarious! See if you don't make yourself laugh!

Once you start this practice, it creeps up regularly; you start smiling as vacantly as possible, and let yourself become someone who doesn't even understand your life, your mind, nor need you care!

My sister and I started all this many years ago, calling our imaginative race of characters "Uglies" and playing out different ones, mostly based around funny ideas more than any sense of a life story. Ah-hah! You see? North, South, Central, East and West Uglyland (with Pooverdoo, the puppy-people Canada, I guess, to the north), were just a place we shared to compile our many warped gags, as thought out ingeniously by our deliberately stupified minds, and not only the universally-feared, mighty, furious Saga herself, but all Uglies, were just ways to make each other laugh!

Once the Marc Kane realized they weren't Ugly, they were Stuck, it all fell into place!

Humanity at large often seems stuck in ways, and some ways are useful to remember, and some are just dominant because they've become the big, new, but mostly wrong way to do things. If our imaginary people are doing things the wrong way, in every way they know how, at least these Stuckwayze are true to themselves.


Does it still work! Hell yeah it does! So Angel and her sister have their dolphin connection. Well, as she sat and watched the ocean, a flock of gulls, at least thirty or more, flew parallel to the shoreline, and she called to them. "They're going to come right at you," I said, with my teeth stuck firmly together. Sure enough, here they turn the next second, diving in on us as close as possible before soaring away into the sky! Ugh, dell me that's not magic! It's well documented (thumbs up). Wherever my sister may be, whenever she remembers her Uglies and goes Stuckwayze, too, she completes OUR spell, as the magic of the little faces such as the one drawn in my Aunt Linda's bathroom on the wall at eye level when you sat on the toilet continues to bring these strange imaginary people to life in our smiles.


If we’re going to share a state of mental illness, why not devote it to comedy?!?

It really worked for me, ugghhh!!


I used to feel ill or contrary sometimes, or even just silly, but maybe I didn't know the right way to let it go! Then I learned from the Uglies in the Good Old Days. The Stuck Angels I saw and reached to even touched me and made me fish out one night, but that's another story.

As I grew used to making the Stuckwayze smile and taking my disagreeable nature for humor rather than anything able to disrupt the harmony, I certainly realized I was neither angry nor sad, but rather, inspired now, for the sTux have long waited to come into the world, and always to serve a purpose! They are my daily embrace of elasticity, so I am not weighted down too much by the guy I think I am here being. It works; as Ogie likes to say with a thumbs up, "It's Well Documented!"


That sounds great, ugh!! How do I get Stuck?


So, how can you help? How can you adopt a Stuckwayze today?

Make your face look like this, as much as possible:

(remember to make drawing to put here! Work truly hard on it.)

That's how you adopt a Stuckwayze! Give them homes---your homes---with a donation from your heart, as well as your face.

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Holidaze and Stuckwayze

One big box at a time I walk them to the nearby post office, assembling each set of contents with care and thought for the people getting them. It is true that if this were a job---for me to play Santa---I could do it every day.


Most of all, as I dig through our store of drawings, I hope I can touch some expressive impulse in each and every one. I would so enjoy seeing the results. Best of all, the inspiration may take them all in different ways than drawing or stories, but they will always have that piece of personal time together, which they can add to on their own.


The search for an address led me into two positive and affirming phone calls with people who may have never known how very much I did not want to let them down. Sometimes I have to wait for the steps forward; perhaps I should make fun phone calls like that a more regular part of my time.



I took a three hour phone call with my old friend Dixie, a cheery sister with whom I felt at ease, sketching away at these character designs, challenging myself with a bit of architecture, pleased to be back drawing Stuckwayze again for the first time since I left for Georgia. It could be I left some little part of myself back there that I could not do without before I felt at home again. These were the last three characters I needed to design to finish Stuckwayze #1 (which I plan to redraw, anyway). Lou Swimmie, Sapreena, and Princess Malace await inside "Big Secret Mountain"! That is, if Saga doesn't pulverise Ogie for his dine-n-dash stunt back in Uglytown.

One thing that got redrawn is the first page of D'n'A #1. I found it too weak, as it was done on a smaller page than the bristol boards that host the rest of the tale. The extra space also allowed me to letter the page more clearly, with other changes to reveal the title and correct the anatomy lost in the inking process. Much better!



Anyway, hope you have a cool holiday season so far.
Your friend Lue

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Are you stuckwayze? I'm not; I mean I am!

UFO’s, Turing Test (artificial intelligence), Gliese S281 (the first likely planet to contain places with Earth-like conditions), even TVC-15 (couple of jokes about David Bowie music-as-transmitter)---this, along with inspiration from Kirby’s Eternals and my own parallel race of mockeries of Man, all took packed places in my mind, like shirts from which I might choose. The hard AI didn’t get harder than Autocron Rover Ten-For, Japanese robot movie and American comic book crashed into the present-day based pages of Machine Man. The world has definitely changed in thirty years, and an old comic book or science fiction story can just as easily serve as a mirror to altered theories and “but if’s!” lapping like waves on the consciousness shore.



With maybe one more day where she felt better, Dixie would’ve happily chimed in on responses to these---which together form an essay yet written---with facts we know, some each other didn’t, and a healthy share of wonder, with intermittent bursts of prophet-lipped excoriations of ways and unintentionally dark comedies of society. I had a short story that, given one more time with each of them, I could’ve worked on, discussed, having all the business of hearing about their lives and routines clear, found another layer of old memories (Remember seeing Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, at the movie theater across from the hotel where you stayed and we all swam?), and started plotting! At least, I figured, I should soak in my friends and family in ways that would remind me later of them as I peered into the myths and myth stakes.

As it so happened, though, that “mockery of Man”, that Stuckwayze disposition, had played so much a part of our ways of late out here that its humor and insight was much closer at hand, with just enough time to think out loud alike and make jokes quickly while we forget about dying and illness and sorrow for a spell. We made
Stuckwayze faces from our own, like Man made in God’s Image, laughing already and so inspired to make more fun, and sure enough, everyone we left back there in Georgia still has a Stuckwayze face on hand they can show you!
So now, when I finish my “Stuckwayze Forev-uhghh!?!” tale, it will be so much better, its actions lit as the ways of my friends, parading around the Crib in their Stuckwayze Vases, uhghh.


Our adventures making t-shirts and the nature of taking creations to comics conventions poured from my lips as Charlotte kicked the boredom creeps with my company. I made eye contact but also worked through about thirty five yoga poses over the dog and cat loved carpet over the next hour or so, joyous, frankly, to have a listener, and one thing you can count on, you know when Charlotte is listening. I heard about life with Punk and Marley and Ginger and Sebastian, dogs and cats in harmony and relative balance: that’s another thousand words I could probably pull up on its own, because pets are a big part of your home life, and these days your home life’s quality is inescapable, right?


We had a fun Peace bracelet each; I drew Dixie and Charlie, a rough sketch, from a promise tucked away for just this moment, on pad and paper and pencil supplied by Dixie. Man, anything they had we needed or might even want, it was ours for the asking, if even that! You can’t abuse such hospitality and you’d do well to reward it, so taking down a wallet-sized portrait I drew my two friends before we all took off to return improperly crushed pills to the vet, take a look at the sad remains of Jeffery and Bobby’s old place so close by, and finally to devour Taco Bell and speak freely of things I just knew some fellow patrons wondered about!



Finally, the Peek’s Park location had become, by virtue of being closest to our sure attendees, the most likely place for the picnic Eric had dubbed Cecilpalooza. Taking a look around, we found it cozy and enjoyed hearing how they brought David, Austin and Ci Ci out to have fun and hazard in the water spout (built to replace the less-tenable public pool) centered in the shallow ampitheater half-circling it.


Half a circle, half a moon: I look at both and see a point where you need context to know does it wax or wane, but in its balance it’s a fine place to suggest a new beginning, such as our performer sides needed after two intense seasons filled with drawings, even stories, but mostly home quiet, while music we make is encouraged to be loud and played in places much larger than the Apartment of Ideas. We talked of ideas of children, children in our lives, children we’ve never had, and walked off our modest fast food lunches under trees and breeze.


A text: Peek’s Park, checking it out. Coming to your house next, Bean!

Next:First welcome to Gypsy Cave

(my conservative estimates, a hundred words per topic, served their purpose. Unbridled creation of kind memories in word came as 843 more words before I'm half out of events! There's a lot of set-up of the week as a whole as well as by the hour, and this is but a rough draft of what could be done)

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In ways, they're stuck

So, finding his old partner-in-shennanigans Willie coming home from his job at the coconut plantation, Ogie convinces him to spend his off days climbing the mountain of the Crib, where the mysterious first clues to their existence begin.

[IMG]http://i53.tinypic.com/k56ee1.jpg[/IMG]
While they are stuck on the ledge too far below the next, Willie and Ogie recite the hogwashed legends of the founding of Uglyland (by George Ugly w'ah?-Shin-Tongue). The visitor to the Crib who either freed them, found them, or created them appears here in flashback. I like to call him the Plunderer of the Order of the Masters of Relic of the Ancient Tooth.



Next: call him...Evil Lord Johann! (Really! Feel free to do so!)

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Brother, can you spare a conscious moment?

Brother can you spare a conscious moment?


Jack Kirby’s Machine Man, and Knight Rider’s KITT and the Enterprise’s Data and any consciousness-carrying fictional Artificial Intelligence may all seem to think like men, but while we can explore their behavioral overlap, they are not strictly, logically categorized as human. But while Marvel’s Avenger mainstay the Vision might wrestle with his love for the Scarlet Witch and androids from Bladerunner to Johnny Five may have humane reactions such as exploring the soul’s existence and nature--- how we determine if "Five is Alive" is either a matter of religious persuasion or the slant of your inner will...
to empower whatever fantasies you prefer.

The question of "is he intelligent?" is one more squarely in line with tested scientific inquiry. But if the principle question's "is he conscious?" we find a much-more inclusive category of life. We will quickly explore some of its definitions.

But with those situations, we’re discussing psychological space. To do that, we need a mind. So before we skirt a few issues with that experience, let’s ask the question first: can anything that is not human be conscious? Even humans, when unconscious, are not ruled out of humanity by definition.



Can anything conscious ...not be people?



Well, consider the paramecium. We can dive into the inorganic-supported consciousness in a bit. The paramecium somehow knows how to mate, fight, feed, move, and many other things that we find in creatures with brains. The paramecium has no brain. It depends on the information’s organic basis in organelles called microtubules. Information concurrent with a general disposition to prolong life does not require a brain.

We may not understand consciousness well enough yet to say for certain about how much the paramecium’s microscopic body, too small for neurons, contains a state of existence that overlaps with human consciousness, but I’ve already mentioned the similarities that come to mind quickly.



Are we not MACHINE men?



Now, the paramecium and the machine, with their programs dictating parameters for behavior, are very much alike in practice. Yet machine life, as we have so far known it, has yet to take on self-preservation, much less the full complement of rich life enjoyed by the paramecium. But Japanese artificial intelligence tends to present researches feeling a bond with their subjects that reflects the animism traditionally found in their culture. That is to say: everything is part of life, and all things contain some part of life within them, and so, all things are living.


I like to consider Jack Kirby’s decision to make Machine Man in 1977, especially inspired somehow by Kubrick’s 2001 property. His new super hero heralds the massive invasion of Japanese robots coming over the next decade---and with just a few groundbreaking “robot” animations pioneered in the vein of science fiction cartoons such as the one translated into English as “Battle of the Planets,” the late 1970s, with its Godzilla-filled afternoons, “The Space Giants” and “Ultra Man” and more in syndication, a soul or mind or consciousness wandering into a confused but heartfelt chunk of machine man touches the spirit of the times faithfully.



Kirby also has a hero he doesn’t have to give a soap opera romance; indeed, initially he is meant to be the metallic Adam, traversing his father’s world, sometimes drawing him up from his circuits in moments of anguish. X-51 carries a consciousness that thinks of itself as Aaron Stack, but, bluntly dealing with the reality of his existence, tells others to call him Machine Man. What is he? Well, he insists, if you just deal with him as you would like any person to deal with you, all that will matter is, “are we not men?” And he really sees no reason you and he shouldn’t do just that.


Knob Hunting



Paola Zizzi, an Italian physicist, has taken descriptions from Hammeroff’s work on O-R theory (the microtubules thing discussed above) and done some calculations. The tiny ten to the negative thirty third power-second, directly after the Big Bang, contains a moment where reality is suspended above all multiple realities. Now, bear with me, okay? In that tiny window of time, everything that is becoming existence, the universe, and more, has a instance of consciousness. From that instant, all consciousness discovered within the universe exists.





Now, if that is true, we can only postulate that any vehicle for consciousness shares a basic source. So there is an existential kinship, in light of her theory, among all that generate consciousness through their given native apparatus---be it a microtubule, in a sea of differing amounts of other microtubules, perhaps grouping as neurons, perhaps emulating the structure in some new way. In other words, whether you have the brains of a paramecium, or something else along the spectrum of thinking existence, Zizzi speculates we all share parts of a common consciousness, though ownership is only determined by experience, which is the stimulant of individuation.



In other words, you need to live your own life, to be your own person, but we are all visitors to a greater corridor, in which our choices of doors depend chiefly on our means of discovering the knobs.



That knob hunting is the driving principle in the adventures of my surreal and silly cohorts, the Stuckwayze people in our Integr8d Soul comics, just as it drove Aaron Stack to look for a place in a world he never made---that made HIM, for that matter. What can you do but go on the road and find your own beat? You are, after all, like no one else ever made.

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When you've been made up, how do you even know you're alive?

MACHINE MAN by Jack Kirby





A machine that thinks it’s a man! The drama aspect trumps discussions of complex technology; as with most comics, it’s not very hard science.











Flirtations with the life of artificial intelligence reach back to Asimov’s I, Robot. In the mass media, the thinking machine-as-character populates science fiction in many forms since, with Bladerunner following in 1982 and Star Trek: Next Generation’s Data in 1988. In 1939, one of the first two superheroes in Marvel’s history (in their Timely days) was the Human Torch---an android who runs amuck when he spontaneously catches flame (stop, drop, and roll wasn’t the answer this time). DC Comics started Robot Man’s adventures with the Doom Patrol three months before the X-Men debuted in 1963; in that case, you start with the human brain of Cliff Steele, so while the troubles resemble, at least he knew his intelligence started life organically. Even the android Vision, a “synthezoid,” had made his appearance during Jack Kirby’s Marvel hay day, in a title Kirby helped begin, The Avengers (too bad---no Emma Peel). His particular brain patterns, however, were copied from a one-shot character named Simon Williams, from 1964’s issue nine, before his return from the dead in 1975---so again, the artificial intelligence proceeded from human life. From whence springs the life of the Machine Man? That is a mystery of intense interest to our electrode-eyed protagonist.


This time out, in 1978, the King of Comics tries the thinking-machine-as-superhero. As super heroes go, however, this one’s conditioned to be a civilian; the robot wants to be what some might call a “secret identity,” a regular guy. In every way, he’s so far from it.


Machine Man’s an ultimate computer, a super-powerful robotic infantryman, but the quest to program him with intelligence leaves him with a yearning to exist as an individual---even dreams! His debut as Mister Machine came in a comic inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey , a property licensed from Stanley Kubrik at the time, which featured the Monolith and a handful of “out-there” Kirby ideas. In the story, his creator, Abel Stack, gives him a face and conditions him like a son. He removes a destruct device at the cost of his own life, leaving Machine Man “orphaned” with the greatest gift of all: his love for his son. On his way to a normal life, he must overcome the fears and anxieties he sparks in humanity, expressed in the Army manhunt by Col. Stagg, ordered to destroy all x model androids after losing men and an eye in battle with the ones that went mad. The existential crisis of being a thinking entity inside a robotic war machine, it seems, is one to handle with care, and is nearly impossible to face alone.

So what happens now?


You can play with the analogies and get many interesting thoughts. Why do I like him so much? It could be Jack Kirby’s intention shining through; while he makes a cool super hero, which was a standard requirement for being in a 1970’s comic, his story’s really centered on a thoughtful search for identity. As Jack draws, he says in one of his wonderful text pages to the reader, he thinks of him as “a nice young man of twenty-six, with good scholastic credentials and a person of positive and constructive qualities. The thoughts of cold, hard steel and finger weapons system and electronic units are far from my mind until the action starts.”





Why I like him---even though he would hardly seem unique in the years to follow---is tied to Kirby’s unusual characterization. His unsmiling face (not entirely devoid of expression) accompanies a defensive demeanor; his gadgetry----and as gadget heroes go, he’s classic---generates wonder in people, yet “Aaron Stack” or X-51 is not charming or charismatic. He takes some of the befuddlement in stride, but the attempts to invalidate his existence or destroy him or even analyze him set off a personal resentment you might term “human.” Without a human body, his pleasures are of a more intellectual stripe, as he’s hardly equipped to be a hedonist (as he’s not a “Hedonism ‘Bot” oh no!). His values---his truthfulness, even bluntness, courage, reflectiveness, and the willingness to help those in need---are strong ones, but a defining part of being an individual is choice making, so while he doesn’t set out to be unpleasant, he can be impatient, cynical, moody, disagreeable. While he tends to grasp what is right, even if he wrestles with it, Aaron Stack is no Mr. Spock!


I suppose, as Jack Kirby had so many opposing his return run at Marvel, he may have related some of these feelings as the mechanical marvel with hardly a friend took his impending date with the scrap heap with resentment and self-defense. Kirby kept delivering like a pro but he was not always appreciated for his unique displays of talent. His style of scripting, his story pacing, even the drawings were criticized by fan and pro alike---and realize, the decade before, every artist at Marvel was being taught how to emulate Kirby’s bag of tricks.

He retained his fans and much of his autonomy, but Kirby often felt out of place in the very creative field he’d done so much to establish. I mean, he helped bring us Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, the Hulk, the original X-Men, the Fantastic Four and Silver Surfer and Doctor Doom and Magneto---he had some hand in nearly everything the fledgling company did! But this time out, after getting his new heroes started, Jack decided to go into animation and keep his career alive while enjoying the rest of his life in California, which I’d recommend to anyone.


Personally, I appreciate the way he kept finding something different to do, rather than wearing out one-note characters. Maybe it’s just the time in my life when I found this obscure character, but since I didn’t get to read about him for some time, I went home with that cover image in my mind and promptly began inventing his adventures and powers. He inspired me to plant a memory deep in my brain: after so many lessons learned, my real joy lay in the power of creativity to intensify one’s spirit.
So, here I am, in the future world of 2010, revisiting a happy evasion of boredom from my own “wonder years”: our childhood concept of the Uglies and the summer spent at Brenda’s Place, waiting to mop up after closing time, writing and drawing a humorous homage to Kirby’s quandary with my own invented pseudo men. Before I get ever so busy with the numerous other ideas at work “off-stage”, here at the gate of eternal summer, let me tell you all about it.

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Whatever a superman is NOT (and creating silly hidden races at home)

Once upon a time, around 1970, the man called the King of Comics, Jack Kirby briefly worked on covers for the hero called the grand daddy of super heroes, Superman.
DC Comics did not put Mr. Kirby directly on Superman's titles, perhaps concerned with his strong style taking over the character's look, for whatever reason. In fact, he worked on Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen.


Well, the man who co-created so many of your favorite Marvel characters eventually went back to the company where he had that break through. Generally speaking, his creations of this second time have never quite become as mainstream as their predecssors from the 1960s like Hulk, Mighty Thor, and the Fantastic Four.


I'm reading about a couple of variations on Superman, created around the same time, before the Man of Steel came out in his first big motion picture, which is to say 1976-1978. Then I'm going to mention how they inspire my present work.

Lately over in my Integr8dfix.blogspot.com I've been chronicling an effort to merge the space born powers of Superman with the high school troubles of Spider-Man. That hero was The Man Called Nova---created by Blade the Vampire Hunter's maker, Marv Wolfman. His series burst on the scene to vanish over two years---all too literally, the comic went Nova. The recession of the late 1970s hit Americans of all ages. It was a very optimistic, very straight super hero story, and if it had become a film of its day, I believe the Industrial Lights and Magic could've made a classic.




All of this effects my out look on Sun Strike, a character whose fictional history is largely inspired by the Human Rocket, Iron Fist, and solar technology's break through at the time.

In some ways that hero's fictional history fits beautifully into the UFO phenomenon, coming out the same year, 1974, as a UFO incident investigated by the French government. It so happens a new book, UFOs by reporter Leslie Kean, was featured on The Colbert Report tonight as well! Sounds like a fairly definitive work in the field...but back to the mid-1970s and Kirby's eye for the mysterious and pop culture.

Asked not to take too great a hand on classic Superman, Jack Kirby decided to invent his own. This week I'm going to dive into his stories of a race of super-men, the Eternals,related to the massive UFO phenomenon of the times, and an Earth-made, solitary super man, the robot that thinks as a man. He was created X-51, to be an obedient super soldier, merging the military industrial complex with a break through. As another writer would put it, "the super-man exists, and he is American."

But he is godlike, not God, and one thing over which he has no control is whether others believe a Machine Man could also have a sacred soul, or even a place in the feeling, reacting, living breathing world of Men. Outside of a world crammed with super heroes, one can appreciate the stunning existence of a being made to think like us, believe he is us, ultra-capable, the last of his kind marked for destruction. And while he is not God, perhaps not even one of us, he is asked to save the world.

Over in integr8dfix.blogspot.com, I'll introduce you to these lost comic book gems, and over here, we'll have a great laugh composing our mock epic of the People who Always Smile. It really says something about people, because you can't have people without Crazy.



I'll speak of the Eternals more later in the week; though I have only recently found these issues to read for myself, I'm struck by how much his hidden race inspires the parody hidden race once called the Uglies, as created by my sister Debra and i around 1982, as I re-introduce them as the Stuckwayze.


They don't die, but their lives of mimicry and silly confusion make them a counter point reflection. I'll be revisiting one of the last comic books I made before I dumped them for a while to try to get more into getting a girl friend, as comic book characters weren't as popular with teenagers in those macho days of the 1980s.

At the time, I was even more inspired by Machine Man, as I had a few of the only issues Kirby ever made for the character, writing and drawing him. What made him so human was the way his body had amazing abilities, but he's an outsider emotionally involved with the fond desire to live on the fringes, yet still have an acceptable place among people. Our Uglies were also artificially made by someone to be mindless slaves, but the joke was on THEM. I'll share my inspirations for the look of the characters and the secret Crib of what passes for their civilization, as drawn from the world around me and interpretations of ancient UFO culture, ala Jack Kirby.

So off we go into fun of making our...uh...whatever a superman is NOT, really.

Dine and dash: the Stuckwayze

They're stuck---but they have their ways! Here's a penciled preview of the kind of silliness that is to come. I'm not sure how widely I'll be distributing STUCKWAYZE #1 since I'm just making it for fun, but the story just keeps getting funnier the more we talk it over. I hope I'll be done next week.






What will Ogie do with his new found fortune? It's a journey into mystery and befuddlement!

Stuckwayze! Ughnn!!

Well, from the mists of childhood sprang a race of silly beings...I made UGLIES #1 one summer when I was old enough to know better, and after wrapping up all but post-production work on D'n'A #1 I needed a challenge to my speed. Also, they say every artist has like 10,000 bad drawings in them and I thought, might as well get a leg up.

Anyway, I am not 100% sure, consciously, I am striving to publish STUCKWAYZE and I've gotten busy with thousands of words of writing, but I keep pecking away panel by panel. Perhaps I will get to explore the "speed" aspect once I'm done re-working the cover to D'n'A one more time!




I am pretty sure there should be some live action footage to really illustrate what they are all about, mixed in with cartooning where things get impossible. We'll see if I don't mind looking silly beyond all measure of surface cool in such a high profile way! I'm afraid I know the answer, uhgh.