Okay, I admit it — in ‘04 I voted for Kerry (that’s not the admission, but take it as you will), and when his lackluster campaign dribbled down to defeat and I got some public-affairs spam titled “No More Ohios!” I was like, “What, you mean places where we LOSE?”. I didn’t think that opponents of an authoritarian executive branch, unconstitutional warfare, extrajudicial detention and punishment, and clandestine espionage on the unindicted citizenry were served well by an inability to accept defeat and a tendency to claim vote-fraud, since it wouldn’t prepare us to insist on future candidates who aren’t so compromised and disengaged that they can barely exceed the margin of error over the other guy.

But it turns out not so much that the voting machines are rigged or at least unreliable (though there’s that too) as that the *system* is rigged — since the 2002 passage of a law ostensibly aimed at facilitating registration and voting, millions of new registrations and votes have been contested and thrown out. This comes through a combination of partisan officials (the state attorneys general decide which registrations are legit, and they tend to skew to one party or another — often Republican, though Hillary seems to have won the New Mexico primary through some chad tricks too), and good old impersonal bureaucratic logic overriding common sense (if some clerk messed up your name on one form, you’re not who you say you are at the polling place and you can’t vote; if you’re unreachable at an address then you don’t really have an established residence — even if you’re away ‘cuz you’re a student or soldier; etc.). These conditions tend to shut out poorer voters without driver’s licenses to check against; young people in school or the military; seniors who can’t make it to the electronic machines and have to fill out contestable hand-marked ballots; etc.

This is discouraging the would-be voters who have the least access to politicians otherwise — poor, young, elderly, and many Americans of color — and disaffecting the very voters whom no less than Bush’s former speechwriter David Frum was heard last night on The Daily Show saying John McCain will lose without.

But why lose when you can just stop those you’ve turned off from voting to begin with? I’m heartened by the unprecedented turnouts recorded all through this year’s primary season, but whoever wants to win the general election will have to make sure he gets enough people interested to exceed the margin of loss (and, yes, effectively, theft). As it happens, there’s a kind-of comic book about the subject, collecting some acclaimed cartoonists who alternate with good information and advice from Crusading Reporter for No American Newspaper Greg Palast and Bawby Kennedy Jr., available for free or small-donation downloading here: http://www.stealbackyourvote.org/

There’s some redundancy and more than a few typos, but as with candidates, consider content, not packaging; the booklet — especially Palast and Kennedy’s text, funny enough — lays out the issues and possible solutions in the grand tradition of the comic form, to-the-point and persuasive. And they manage to make you feel alert but not discouraged, an essential formula for us all teaming up and coming to the rescue.

Neat: Variety is reporting that Josh Brolin is in talks to play Jonah Hex:

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117993724.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&query=josh+brolin

Never read Jonah Hex, but I trust the opinion of mi amigos who have spoken quite highly of it. Hope the movie’s good. Hope the movie’s great. Actually, I hope the movie is so good that it generates brotherly love among people of all colors, nationalities, political affiliations, that it returns the economy to working order, and that it makes french fries lower in cholesterol. But I hope that for each movie made. (imdb.com notes the film isn’t due to arrive in theaters until 2010.)

I’ve been watching a lot of PBS lately and last night by chance I caught an episode of Frontline called “Bush’s War.” It was a detailed account, mostly via interviews with key Bush administration personnel, of how the current Iraq war came to be. Most fascinating was the very real infighting that took place between the CIA and the Cheney/Rumsfeld military machine. Fascinating because this was not about partisan politics per se — these were all members of the “W” administration. Yet like any episode of 24 the political play that took place within the walls of the White House was both astonishing and riveting. It was absolutely a game of Survivor, and the biggest player voted off the island was Colin Powell, who before the final vote was used as a marketing tool to sell the Iraq war to the UN and the world. Perhaps most interesting is that this documentary shows Mr. Bush looking as presidential as he ever has in his eight years, a sight I’m not used to seeing, and one that is a distant memory in these troubled times.

Best of all, this episode and many others of Frontline are available in full for free online viewing at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/bushswar/.

You can’t get through anyone’s comic these days without them noting what their soundtrack was for writing it, and unlike the frustrated rock critics most comic-writers are, I’m a *failed* rock critic, so herewith, the setlist I used to make the eight-hour relay to SPX and back seem like only seven…

Alan Moore & Tim Perkins, “Angel Passage” (2001)

Like a parallel-universe “Aqualung” that was somehow recorded *by* Aqualung. You can feel the spittle and scowling stares come through your speakers as the Greatest Comicbook Author of All Time declaims deranged post-Cthulhu poetry over elegant and eclectic postmodern-classical scores. State-of-the-art streetcorner lunacy with just enough finesse to make you wonder if Moore’s protagonist really is the god he thinks he is.

Juan-Carlos Formell, “Son Radical” (2006)

Suave, affirmative, chopsy and constitutionally incapable of egotism or excess, Formell is one of Cuba’s most important (involuntary) exports. Sounds to me like nueva trova reclaimed for rock ‘n’ roll, which makes a pointed and poignant anti-Castro statement even if you don’t speak five words of Spanish, which I don’t.

Suzanne Vega, “Beauty & Crime” (2007)

Her catchiest tunes, strongest vocals and richest production fig-leaf her most superficial and sophomoric lyrics — I’d say it’s a sign of the apocalypse if this hadn’t come out a year ago and I knew we made it somehow. I idly wished she’d get another divorce or something to bring back the arch and aching insights, then learned her stepdad just died and felt like even more of a bastard; check out this great profile of him by a guy who seems to have known him better than he let his family: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/chronicler-of-new-york-leaves-the-scene/

k.d lang, “Watershed” (2008)

Another crashing disappointment from a towering artist. It’s like a career remix, the kind of thing Pink Floyd patches together with flawless surface and empty insides when Roger Waters ain’t around. Beautiful vocals, of course (confirmed even more, as usual, by the few well-chosen live bonus tracks), lush arrangements, thudding lyrics, template compositions and a strange imperative to ruin even the most promising songs with a style-mash of her lounge-chanteuse and twang-bar-queen phases. Many modern disks don’t seem to get going ’til the third or fourth song; this one only gets halfway good three songs from the end, but the words still suck and the damage is long-since done. The kind of disk you could steal online and still want a refund for.

Rasputina, “Oh Perilous World” (2007)
Melora Creager, “Perplexions” (2006)

Okay, *this* is what I’m talkin’ about — Alice Cooper and Laura Nyro kidnap and torture Peter Schickele in 1971 and record it. That’s my meta-narrative, anyway; the operative one is Rasputina’s purported score to a nonexistent musical which is itself about events that didn’t really happen: an alternate reality where the Mutineers on the Bounty form a planet-of-the-apes-ish society that serves as a hellish microcosm of the modern Western world and seems to subtly burlesque narratives of island-nation backwardness closer to America’s shores. A lengthy bonus disk collects more jaunty guignol hits in extinct forms of American musical expression (banjos and vaudeville, anyone?) and heaps of spoken-word-in-tongues; ringleader Melora Creager’s rustic sci-fi solo disk is an encore you’d actually ask for.

Bad Brains, “Build a Nation” (2007)

The Brains lose no spacetime on their first full new album in twelve years, like recurring deities sailing sideways across history. Beyond the meager three-dimensional conceptions of “heavy” and “soft,” endurance and mellowness, their blistering punk and sublime reggae tap the cosmic alternating current of vitality and serenity, with no dilutions or contradictions. A steel and electric divining rod of diaphanous invulnerability and beautiful fury.

And then I went home.

The new Love and Rockets — reborn as a 100-page annual — is something of a tipping point. Superheroes have been pervading political metaphor, advertising design, multiplex balance sheets and Pulitzer reading lists for most of this decade, and now, one of the flagship books from The Company Where Superheroes Are Worse Than Porn is given over largely to a superhero serial. Geeks will be intrigued by the 50-some pages that Jaime Hernandez devotes to an endearing super-soap-opera set in his mythic B-movie SoCal (dressed more shadowy and angular than ever for the Maggie saga’s sudden slippage into the costumed heroics the character has long pursued an interest in at the margins of L&R’s usual modern romance-comic dramedy).

This is not so much a deconstruction of the superhero genre — an acknowledged auteur can get away with that once or twice, as Dan Clowes did in the also-Fantagraphics-published Death Ray, a brilliant rebuke to the misanthropy of standard superhero narratives steeped in a basic suspicion of the genre’s aims and its fans’ enthusiasms (and a superior version of Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass several years before the fact). Jaime’s story is more a *re*construction of the genre, immersed in an undisclaimed love of its wacky possibilities and convinced of its fans’ goofy charm. This is a program that’s been underway at the fringes and core of superhero comics for some time now, perhaps unbeknownst to Fantagraphics but surely well-knownst to Jaime.

In his book you find not the much-discussed, much-repeated Watchmen paradigm of “what if superheroes actually existed” (overstimulated and morally questionable, just like warriors and authority figures in real life), but the question of “what if your neighbors were superheroes” (eccentric, conflicted, essentially likable but largely un-figure-out-able). The latter model is on view in any issue of Madman or (going back a ways) Atomic City, and even in much of the most mainstream franchises, particularly the suburban super-family theme of Mark Waid’s latest watershed, all-too-brief run on DC’s The Flash. Jaime joins their company more explicitly than ever, and unapologetically, being perhaps the Nixon-goes-to-China guy to kick down the floodgates of superheroes’ acceptance as one strain of socio-commercial folklore for good.

Elsewhere in the family, brother Gilberto sticks to everything *else* that comics can be, with deranged funny-animal-in-Vegas epics, enigmatic first-person fairytale hallucination vignettes, a sci-fi fever-dream of Martin & Lewis on Mars, and two great dramas of melancholy wanderers separated by many decades who unexpectedly cross a similar path of timeless nothingness and eternal exile. These are told mostly in jumpcut rewind and fast-forward montage — no one is better at assembling the fragments of experience by which we actually order our emotional memory, out-of-sequence and outta-nowhere but putting together all we need to know about what our life means (or how meaningless it can be); especially in the second of these two stories Beto himself has never been better at using this experimental technique for intense narrative clarity.

Beto teams with other-brother Mario to avenge several generations of elite-carpetbagger-vs.-wily-bumpkin narratives in a farcical tale of unscrupulous land barons trying to trick some local Indians out of their property. As if in a long-distance rebuke to the odd old description of Beto’s fictional Palomar as “a Central American Dogpatch,” Mario’s script and Beto’s Bullwinkle-esque visuals indeed suggest some post-colonial L’il Abner, with the stereotypes set on broil and the callous humor shining a heatlamp on over a century of North American comedy at rural and ethnic expense.

The colorful tales and outsize achievement of Love and Rockets: New Stories #1 make it explicit, but we always knew Los Bros. Hernandez were superheroes in real life.

A brief thought while I recover from the Small Press Expo and as we head into the second Obama-McCain debate: this business from the Biden-Palin matchup about how, when it comes to energy, we should “have everything on the table” — conservation, wind, solar, hybrids, “clean coal” (sure…), “safe nuclear” (come again?), and of course lots and lots of domestic oil from struggling offshore fisheries, popular beach economies and unspoiled wildlife refuges.

Everything should be on the table, Sarah Palin says, and Joe Biden too readily concedes it. But we got in the financial peril we’re in now because of Republicans who can’t conceive of limits, and again, with energy, they’re not acknowledging that that “table” has an edge — if you keep loading it with candy and cookies and ice cream, eventually there isn’t gonna be any room for the turkey. (Did ya like that metaphor? I may be a vegan but I’m a uniter, not a divider.) There are finite financial resources (now more than ever) to go along with our dwindling energy resources, and funding & focus on more of the same unrenewable, polluting and climate-warming fuels means less for the renewable, green and job-creating forms we should be concentrating on, and which have been feasible but undernourished since several energy-crises ago. This is something both parties have to admit and commit to, though the Dems are pursuing the drill-baby-drill vote with a much fainter zeal that suggests to me they’ll have an, ahem, change of heart once and if they’re safely elected. Unlike the feel-good, specifics-free environmental ads of the oil companies, that’s a lie I can live with, for now.

Postscript: There’s no telling what talking points the candidates will hammer home in Tuesday night’s debate, but a bit of a B.S. scanner needs to be shined on one that John McCain has been working on the road: the way that his return to Washington somehow single-handedly brought about the compromise vote on the financial bailout while Obama sat it out. First of all, it remains to be seen if this bill’s passage was anything like a good idea; skeptical voters with shaky jobs and savings will need to be shown the money, so to speak (or at least some proof we’ll ever see any again). But the more important short-term point for McCain, as far as the whole principled-refusal-to-politicize-things goes, is: It’s pretty much the biggest part of bipartisanship that you don’t take credit for it.