It Has Begun!

I have but one thing to say to all those self-loathing Democrats so demoralized by the events of last week's election that they refused to trust the strength of their own convictions, who sounded the call for unity, compromise and contrition in the wake of our defeat, and who warned against paying any attention to the rumors of election fraud in key battleground states:

(Click on the picture for my secret message)

That's right, all those internet rumors are finally starting to bubble up to the surface of the mediasphere. The blogosphere hasn't been discredited yet, people.

Never surrender.

Never concede.

They wouldn't, and neither should we.

Lets use these blogs for something important.

You don't need to have the Coluan intellect of Braniac 5 to know that something is mighty fishy here.

God Damn It

I'm sitting here in the relative safety of my Blue State cocoon, dumbfounded and frankly scared by the events of yesterday. I know there are supposedly a lot of different issues that went into the decisions yesterday, I know there are a lot of reasons to be angry and to be confused... but frankly, it just hurts to feel so alienated.

It would be one thing if it had been close - but it wasn't even near close. There was a difference of almost four million votes between us and them. It makes me feel sad to think that all the effort we've spent the last two years, all the anger and motivation and outrage, it just wasn't enough. At the end of the day, they had more voters than we did, simple as that.

Democrats can't really speak to the issue of "values" as cultural conservatives understand it. Most liberals hew pretty close to libertarian on civil rights and personal privacy issues. For them (that is, many non-GLBT liberals who agree with me and Gavin Newsome on this), they can't directly approach the issue of marriage defense, because its patently offensive on the face of it to even consider that you shouldn't extend equal rights to all members of society. Most of these liberals just can't even conceive of the type of mindset that would make those decisions: how do you discuss doctrines of hate in a rational matter? You don't, because - or so the thinking goes - it demeans everyone to bring these issues into the political discourse. The assumption on the part of liberals has always been that a silent majority of Americans agree with them and share the values of tolerance and acceptance and a strong desire to fight bigotry. No-one wants to think that they're fellow citizens are filled with hate, but this is the reality brought home to us blue-state liberals as a result of yesterday's voting: there are intractable moral divides which we can never cross on these issues. They are fueled by hatred, we are not. There can be no reasoning.

And apperantly the major swing issue was morality. Voters in eleven states voted to change their state constitutions to make the possibility of gay marriage moot. There's no way to reason with that kind of unreason: most of those people probably disapproved with the President on at least one, possibly more major issues in his platform and his record, but the fact is that morality was the issue that made them pull the lever and vote for the bigot. That's scary, because this is a divide that cannot be bridged by compromise. I know there are all sorts of fine people in the "Defense of Marriage" movement who go out of their way to make sure everyone knows they're not bigots or hateful, prejudiced rednecks or whatever... but I can't see their excuses, all I see is hate and fear. They can argue all day until they're blue in the face that it's not about hate, but how else am I supposed to feel? I didn't choose to be a trans-gendered six-foot green half-Superman/half-Batman freak. I didn't ask to be born this way, I just was. If they have a problem with it, they should take it up with their wonderful God, not me.

So, I'll continue on with my life, trying to make it one day at a time, breath by breath. I'm glad I live where I do, I'm glad I have the friends that I do and I'm glad for the support from my fans all over the internet. But it'll be a little bit harder to get through the days now knowing just how
much hatred there is in the middle part of our once-great nation. If I lived in a small town in Oklahoma or Mississippi, if I was a lonely closeted GLBT kid in a conservative small town, I'd probably want to kill myself. That, my friends, is the legacy of hatred.

Some oddly appropriate words came to me recently when I was thinking about this - off the Flaming Lips' brilliants Clouds Taste Metallic album:

Evil Will Prevail

With loving hands, and their arms are stretched so wide they can’t,
Seem to take a breath.
Knowing evil will prevail,
And a million people seems like a lot,
And a million people can’t be wrong...
With loving smiles, and their mouths are stretched so wide they can’t,
Even take a breath,
Knowing evil will prevail,
And the magic bullet is the glowing mother ship,
And the mother zaps you dead...
With loving hands, knowing evil will prevail,
Knowing evil will prevail,
Knowing that evil will prevail,
Knowing evil will prevail,
Knowing that evil will always win...

God bless you, everyone. We've all a hard road to hoe, but love will win. It has to.

Hey Yo

Sorry I haven't had so many updates lately. I've been super busy at work! I went out for margaritas last night after work (yeah, we've even been working Sundays!) and I could swear that Jim from accounting was actually making eyes at me. I know, I know, I'm probably reading too much into it. But still - I have never been very good at figuring out whether or not people are or are not ... that way. I guess my gaydar is on the fritz.

I got an interesting letter the other day from DC Comics. It seems that they might some day be interested in publishing a reprint volume specifically devoted to my adventures. Of course, I can't really talk about it yet, because I don't want to jinx it - but wouldn't that be cool? They put out that Bizarro volume a few years back, why not a Composite Superman book? Of course, they didn't actually say that they wanted to publish the book, merely that I should stop calling myself Composite Superman because that's a trademarked name - but I read between the lines here! They want me, this is just part of the process.

But what would I call myself if I can't call myself Composite Superman? It's on my birth certificate! Ralph? Howard? Norman?

Support Group

Had a meeting of the group tonight. A bunch of us unemployable cartoon characters got together a few years back and decided to form a support group. I get a lot out of the camraderie and socializing, but honestly, some of these guys hang on the group for dear life.

Joe Camel pulled it all together. He had a hard time when they finally decided to let him go, and especially after they told him he could never work in animation again, by order of Congress. He was pretty stunned for a few months but then he pulled himself up by his proverbial bootstraps and got his act together. He's a cruise director for Carnival now, and spends a great deal of the year at sea.

Some members come and go. Magnus and Solar were here for a while, but both of them recently got "The Call" again so they're out working. We were really glad for them, even if we were all a bit jealous, too.

Bosco is the old man of the group. He always has stories of the old days at Warners, before "that damn Bugs Bunny and the rest of his Jewish clique" took over the studio. He says he gets together with B'rer Rabbit every year for a barbeque, but B'rer never attends meetings anymore. He's got a compound up in Montana that he almost never leaves these days.

There are a few other members who drift in and out. Krazy Kat used to come all the time but he's really busy with all these reprints. Hobbes used to to come as well, but he stopped coming after a while... unlike most of us, he retired pretty rich. It was sort of a pity thing with him, and a few other members resented that.

October 1993

It was a long summer. My last earthly possessions were loaded into the back of my 1985 Subaru Brat. It was blue and I called it Mighty Mouse.

I hadn't been employed since I lost that job at the Memphis waffle house. I was a good short-order cook but, again, in another example of the prejudice our society still indulges towards the trans-personed. Believe me, there were many times in my life that I desparately wished to be something other than a green-skinned hybrid of Superman and Batman with green skin. I do have the powers of the Legion's Chameleon Boy, so I can look like whomever I want. But this is my default mode, this is who I am, and it took me a long time to learn that I shouldn't have to change who I am to conform with suburbia's ideal of normalcy.

Sure enough, I can change my form to look like Brad Pitt - or even Angelina Jolie. I can go out and have a good time, bring a one-night-stand back to my apartment. But invariably, when they wake up in the morning, its the green-skinned composite "freak" they wake up next to. I had had enough of pretending, I had had enough of trying hard to fit into a society that wanted very badly to pidgeonhole me into a narrow spectrum of gender identity. I was learning to accept who I was, and that it was OK to be different. It sounds silly, it sounds like Seseme Street on the face of it . . . but I needed to learn that it was OK to be me, that I didn't have to be someone I wasn't.

So I was driving through the high desert of Arizona with a cassette tape copy of Nirvana's In Utero on constant repeat in the stereo. I bought the tape at a K-Mart in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and although it was harsh and abrasive and painful, it was everything I needed in a record at that point in mmy life. When Kurt died six months later I felt the less more keenly because he had traveled with me on my journey, even if we never met.

I had bought a small sandwich baggie filled with peyote on a street corner in an Indian reservation in New Mexico. I don't know why I did it, I certainly couldn't afford it. I aimed my Brat into the horizon and drove like knife through the heart of the jagged Coconino landscape. When I ran out of gas I pulled the car over to the side of the road and walked inwards into the desert, marking a perpendicular path to the road and walking further from civilization with every step. There was a part of me that wanted very much to die, at that point in my life . . . wanted nothing more than to disappear into the space between the lines that Kurt screamed on "Rape Me". I could relate.

When the sun disappeared behind the far mesas I upended the bag of peyote into my mouth and sat down in the dust. There were storm clouds on the horizon, round puffy balls of chain lightning rolling in from California. I coudl feel the elctricity in the air - the part of me that was Lightning Lad could taste the free electrons in the air, buzzing like hornets.

I know you've all probably read Baba Ram Dass. I'm not going to bore you with my psychedelic experience, except to say that this was the first time I had ever had anything stronger than a joint and the experience changed my life. I don't know if I would ever reccomend that anyone do psychedelic drugs. They open some powerful doors in your mind, and if you're not ready for what's hiding behind them, it can probably be extremely traumatic. All I know is that I was ready for what happened to me that night, and I am thankful that God in his infinite wisdom saw fit to grace me with the light of His perception, if only for a moment. There was a place in Creation even for a messed-up Composite Superman, I knew.

I eventually melted into the desert in a pure liquid form whiel the lightning storm raged above me. When the sun rose in the east the drugs were fading but I realized that I could feel and understand things I'd never seen before. I could feel my watery tendrils snaking all throughout the living desert. Finally, I rose up out of the dust, my body blooming out of the ground in the form of a thousand tulips, every one of them having my face. I saw the new dawn through a thousand pairs of eyes, and I have never seen anything more beautiful than that desert morning.

Hello!

Well, I'll be tickled pink. I have to admit that I've been a slow learner as far as this whole "internet" thing is concerned. I just recently got a Dell after a few years of having an e-mail account down at the public library. I love this computer, and the best part is that I was able to get it as a part of my workman's comp settlement, so I didn't pay a dime!

You've probably been wondering just what the heck I've been doing the last few decades. Well, the sad fact is that there hasn't been much call for a Composite Superman since the Crisis. I remember very well showing up for those last gigs at the DC offices. (I was in a few of those multi-character panels throughout the series. ) There was something of a melancholy mood throughout the shoot, because many of us knew very well that this would probably be our last gig with DC outside of reprints. Sure enough, there was no room for a Composite Superman in a post-Crisis world. I stopped waiting for "the call" a long time ago.

And before you ask, yes, I saw that Superman/Batman story, and no, I didn't get any money for the likeness. But it was very cool to see that I wasn't totally forgotten.

Anyway, I'll be blogging in the coming days about how the recent CS action figure came to be, how glad I am to have rediscovered my fanbase, and about the long years in between. I'll also be writing about my long struggle with my gender identity, and how I finally found the courage to come "out of the closet", and how I was embraced by the GLBT community. Being a monstrously powerful composite being with anamolous physical characteristics made my sexual awakening especially painful, and hopefully my story will be of some inspiration.

Thanks for coming!