[Apologies to Steve K. Baum for stealing his joke for my title]
One of my big projects of the last couple of years (ever since picking Big Al's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series back up in 2008) has been exploring the roots of modern speculative fiction, and one of the best resources for this has been looking at the list of books in Lin Carter's Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.
The short version of the BAF story (as short a version as I know how to tell, anyway): in the 1960s, Ballantine Books founders Ian and Betty Ballantine noted the rise in popularity of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth series of books (it would be hard not to, with every third baby boomer picking up a complete set) and, deciding that classic fantasy was the current "thing", hired the aforementioned Mr. Carter to edit a new imprint for them featuring the genre.
Now, Carter may not have been much of a fictionist (that's a little unfair of me, as the only fiction of his that I've read have been his Conan pastiches - perhaps there are some Carter fans out there that can inform me of some masterpiece of his I've missed out on), but the guy sure knew his fantasy. Given pretty much carte blanche to publish whatever he saw fit, Carter brought out classic after classic by Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, the amazing Clark Ashton Smith, and many other forgotten fantasy masters, presumably blowing many a hippie's and/or erstwhile Shire-dweller's mind.
The concluding irony? A series that was probably at least in part created to "cash in" on the then-current craze for fantasy fiction ended up barely in the black. No matter. A number of great authors' works were rescued from oblivion; all parties involved came as close as any published series ever has to establishing a fantasy canon (although the later Fantasy Masterworks series also does a fine job), and the Ballantines and Carter now, no doubt, have the great Dharmacakra tilting in their favor.
There are several good sources for info on the BAF series on the web. The best by far that I've found is this gorgeous gallery of scans at skwimshmi.com. The Wikipedia article on the series is quite informative (you knew I'd get that one in there, didn't you?), and you can preview the likes of the Carter-edited anthology Discoveries In Fantasy at that other amazing Internet time-devourer, Google Books.
Something I've done a lot since starting this blog (in addition to looking up information about life on the British Isles during the Stone Age, reading about a million Alan Moore interviews on the net, et cetera) is flip through my collection of Alan Moore trade paperbacks, looking for ways in which his comics work connects (thematically, stylistically, or otherwise) with his writing in Voice of the Fire. I was doing this with my battered and re-re-re-read copy of Watchmen and started looking through the "Fearful Symmetry" chapter, which, IMO, still stands as the most amazing display of formal virtuosity in the history of the comics medium (no, I haven't read Promethea yet). My eyes wander to the 6th and 7th panels of page 22 (I'm afraid you'll have to follow along in your own copies at home, folks - our scanner is presently covered under a small mountain of paper), in which the one cop is looking into the Comedian's file. I notice the number on the file: 801108, which, as Doug Atkinson points out in his excellent annotations, is a "palindromic number, and all the numbers in it have vertical and horizontal mirror symmetry," in keeping with the chapter's theme of symmetry and mirroring.
Then, following a weird hunch that I had, I picked up my copy of DC Universe: The Stories Of Alan Moore (still my favorite collection of Moore comics, aside from the Watchmen TPB) and turned to the page in The Killing Joke where Batman is walking in Arkham Asylum in the cell block where Two-Face and the Joker are held. I look at the number on Two-Face's cell - 0751. Hm - no help there. I look at the number on the Joker's cell - 0801. A-ha! Aside from the amusing link with the Comedian (a comedian is a joker - geddit?), I figure there's some significance to the number 801 besides that and the mirror symmetry thing. (Are you with me so far?). So I Google 801 and I'm reminded that 801 is a band that the musician Brian Eno was in back in the 70s. Why is this significant? Well, Alan Moore is a huge fan of Eno's, to the extent of naming a Swamp Thing story that he wrote, "Another Green World" after an Eno song of the same name. Wait! It gets better! The name 801 comes from a lyric in a song called "The True Wheel" from the album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). The name of the chapter in which we see the Comedian's file, "Fearful Symmetry", is taken from a poem called "The Tyger" by William Blake. And what's the Comedian's real name?
Why, Edward Blake, of course.
Who but Alan Moore could take us from an comics anti-hero to a super-villain to a groundbreaking ambient musician to a visionary poet and then back to the anti-hero?
The Comedian in Watchmen. Art by Dave Gibbons
Ad for Batman: The Killing Joke. Art by Brian Bolland
William Blake by Thomas Phillips (Wow! He's huge!)
He stands to look over here, but he doesn't look at me. He's the oldest man I've ever seen - his long hair and beard are white and oh! His face! His face is marked with charcoal - nothing except his eyes are white. A band is around his head, up from which come antlers. He has flowers in one hand and sticks in the other. Now he looks around some more, and farts, and sits down in front of his white skin hut.
Paragraph 3:
I can't see what he's doing, except that he keeps moving his hands quickly. Smoke. I smell smoke. He's making a fire, and now he's putting more sticks on it to make it bigger. He picks up little stones that sit nearby and puts them around the fire to make a barrier.
Paragraph 4:
He sits with his back against the hut and picks up something made of stone, not any longer than my hand, that's all flat and sharp. This hand-axe he puts to another nearby stone and scratches it back and forth, as if to sharpen it. Now I lie back and hear the noise of this; the sun is getting lower in the sky.
Paragraph 5:
In with the smell of smoke I can now smell flowers, and I lift my head to look toward the river. The girl is coming back here over the reedy rise; the skins she's wrapped in move all around her knees. Between her hands there's still a little grey shape, and as she walks I see where a little bit of liquid comes out and falls on her arm. I think she's holding a making* like a little valley** that she filled up with water in the river. Slowly, she walks up the dirt rise, where the antler-headed man takes her water to set it above the fire.
* The noun form of making meaning "something made" is actually in the dictionary (well, my dictionary, anyway), although I don't recall hearing it used that way before.
Now it's dark, and I'm standing up by the logs and I don't understand how it is that I'm standing there with my eyes open. I'm a little frightened as I look around, and now I hear a noise behind me, like someone walking on dry leaves. I turn to see, and now I'm more than just a little frightened.
Paragraph 5:
There is a shagfoal* standing in the grass less than a dozen feet** away from me. She looks at me - her eyes are brighter than fire and she's a big as a tree stump. I piss down my leg - it's warm, then cold.
Paragraph 6:
Around the shagfoal's feet in the dark there are little shapes moving - they are as ugly as her. They are black and eyeless - I figure out that they're shagfoal pups, crawling and scratching beneath their mother. Their tongues are long, white and worm-like, and they wave them around in front of themselves to taste and smell the air. They're silent, and I'm more afraid of them than I am of their mother.
Paragraph 7:
The shagfoal looks at me, and I have no strength to move - it's like I'm made of stone. I think hard about shagfoals, so I can think of something that'll help me. My people say that the shagfoal are big and frightening dogs, the kind that used to be around during the Ice Age, like the Urks, and now, like the Urk-kine, they've passed away. Only their ghosts walk the earth now, up this world and down the other, and where the barriers between worlds have become thin, as they are at a crossroads or a river-bridge, the shagfoal come.
*A "huge black dog", as Neil Gaiman describes it in the book's introduction - see this Wikipedia entry for more information
He scratches at his ass and gives me my mother's stone axe head; there's no strength in my hands to hold it. It falls down, and the wise man hits my face so hard that blood comes out of my nose. "Now take it up," he says, "and dig her hole. So that the odd-smelling spirits do not come to her and make us sick when we breathe them in. So that the carrion-bird and carrion-dog come not. So that earth takes earth's due and thinks well of us, and that it is not hard below our feet." So the wise man says now, and, licking the blood from my nose, I dig hard in the dirt.
Paragraph 6:
Below the grass the dirt is cold and grey, and soft enough that I can push a bunch of it up at once [?]. I dig to where there's roots and stones, and it slows me down. The bright dots of sunlight come back on my mother's face, then come off her cheek and slowly move off to between the grass and flowers. I lift up a stone, and there are many worms beneath it. Now I dig the blade of my mother's axe head between them, and they make even more of themselves. My digging makes my fingers bleed. There's blood on my mother's axe head, now; blood in my mother's hole.
