You may be wondering why I haven’t written anything about our Proctident’s all-time low poll numbers or the administration’s purchase of ordinary Americans’ privacy from the phone companies.

Two reasons:

1. I don’t believe in gloating.

2. I’m not sure that anything’s really changed among the electorate.

Time and time again, we’ve seen that it doesn’t matter what the Republicans do or to whom they do it. The voters always seem to forgive. Rove and company are geniuses when it comes to winning elections. And even if they weren’t — well, as Mark Evanier likes to say, if this gang of thugs and incompetents ran unopposed, they’d lose. Luckily for them, they get to run against Democrats.

Take nothing for granted.

Jason Sacks, a participant in the Yahoo Howard the Duck Group, posted a message on that group with some questions about the story in Hard Time: Season 2 #6. I thought the readers of this blog might find our exchange interesting:

Q: This issue seems to set up the final issue, “49 years later” (nice joke on the current DC “one year later” btw). Was this always intended to be the story in this issue, or did you slot in this “meta” issue when you found out the series was cancelled?

A: This story was planned for #6. If we’d known earlier that cancellation was coming, we probably would have resolved the Cutter arc in this issue, instead.

Q: Does everyone have a khe-chara? On the recap page you call it “his spirit-force”, implying that others also have the same force. Is it unique to Ethan or do we all have a khe-chara?

A: As I conceive it, everyone has a spirit or animating force, but not everyone has the innate ability to project that force as a khe-chara.

Q: If we all have it, was Ethan’s manifested through the school shooting, and why has his khe-chara continued to manifest?

A: The shooting was the incident that brought the ability to the surface for the first time. It’s continued to manifest over time for a number of reasons: (1) The extreme ongoing stress of prison life may have kept the ability bubbling just beneath the surface. (2) Once Ethan became
aware of the khe-chara’s existence, he gained the ability to manifest it at will. (3) Ethan may really be descended from Kaga na Yu’usha and therefore have special powers as regards the khe-chara.

Q: To what extent should we take the whole bizarre scene in this issue literally? It seems to me that Ethan is having an out of body experience as he lies in a coma, but it also seems that Fruitcake is somehow sharing that experience with him. That implies that Fruitcake has some sort of odd mystic ability. True?

A: As you’ll see, we blow off any ambiguity about that in #7. Fruitcake may or may not be completely sane, but he does have certain psychic abilities.

Q: Leading to the feeling that the scene can be seen as literal is the fact that Ethan sees moments that he can’t possibly be aware of, for instance the press conference. Whence comes this ability?

A: Simply from his other-dimensional vantage point.

Q: What is it about Ethan’s prison that attracts so many weird and powerful people?

A: Coincidence.

(That’s the kind of question that no comic book writer should ever answer any other way, because any response will inevitably be interpreted by future continuity fetishists in the dullest, most literal, most constricting way possible for decades to come. Not a huge problem in this case, since the ownership of Hard Time will eventually revert to me, but I don’t even want to tempt fate. Imagine the havoc I could unleash if I said that the prison had been built on drained New Jersey swamp land where Unami tribal mystics once believed there existed a Nexus of Realities…!)

Q: I assume that the segment with Turo and Mercedes and the baby isn’t meant to be taken literally. If so, what do the snakes swarming on the baby’s body represent?

A: We explain that much more fully in #7. The snakes weren’t meant to be taken literally, of course. They’re a visual representation of Turo’s tortuous emotions.

Speaking of that final issue, I proofread the book Tuesday night, and it went to the printer on Wednesday.

Nice to see that *someone’s* not totally cowed.

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This was a very wise jury.

If Zacarias Moussaoui was complicit by his silence in the 9/11 attacks, you don’t punish him by dispatching him to meet Allah.

You deny him his martyrdom.

You deny him his 72 virgins.

You deny him every narcissistic desire that would, in his own mind, have made his existence meaningful in the eyes of Heaven and gotten him laid on Earth.

You make him live in the hated West, in the belly of the Great Satan, with the taste of the adversary’s food — and/or semen; after all, we *are* talking prison here — in his mouth every day for the rest of his life.

And you pray he lives a very long life.

Can anybody *really* not tell what it is?

Let me know.

For that matter, do I?

I don’t know.

But I do seem to have some sort of affinity for it, one that I’ve pretty much ignored since my *Man-Thing*/*Son of Satan*/*Tales of the Zombie* days at Marvel in the early ’70s.

No more.

Research for my new DC project is leading me back into the realm of spells, incantations, talismans, cults, angels, demons, arcane symbology, elder gods, arrogant young punk gods, enchantment, disenchantment, and the metaphysics thereof.

I’d forgotten how much fun this stuff can be.

You people are *really* going to like the new book.

(No, I still can’t tell you exactly what it is, but — soon, very soon, I hope.)

Boxes of books, that’s all. Stuff that should’ve been put on the shelves and organized months ago. In those boxes, however, were a couple of my handwritten journals, circa 1977-79, starting just before I moved permanently to Los Angeles.

I could’ve lived without rereading those, without revisiting that time, without seeing how badly my handwriting has deteriorated over the past few decades.

Time concerns me a lot these days. How little of it there may be ahead, how badly I manage and use what’s at hand, how much of what’s gone before has been wasted.

Speaking of waste, it occurred to me the other day that 2006 marks the 20th anniversary of…this:

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Time flies, doesn’t it?

Today is one of those days when, miraculously, I don’t have anything scheduled. Taxes are done. I’m Jewish, so no Easter services to attend. I may drop in at the Christkillers’ Ball that’s held at the Las Vegas Gate to Hell under the Convention Center every year…

Yes, that’s a joke, but speaking of Jesus…

I saw “The Passion of the Christ” for the first time last night. It’s…interesting. It presents very little context for the events it depicts. Consequently, if you come to the film, as I do, without the requisite religious predisposition, it basically plays as a rather dispassionate treatise on how to reduce an unusually sturdy carpenter to bloody shreds for no reason. “Marat/Sade” in Latin and Aramaic.

In case anyone’s wondering: no, I didn’t find the film to be anti-Semitic. It does go inexplicably easy on Pilate, however.

Anyway…

Now it’s time to clear the living room floor of tax-related papers, think a little about the new DC project, consider what I want to say on this blog about the topic of superheroes and about my health situation, and maybe watch the DVD of “Capote” that Mary loaned me.

When I moved in January, I discovered a few hundred Betamax tapes in a box, films recorded from cable back in the mid-’80s, some of them from L.A.’s legendary “Z” Channel.

There are some terrific and rarely-seen movies on those cassettes, but, of course, you need a working Beta player to look at them. I haven’t owned one in at least a decade.

So…I’m wondering what, if anything, I should do with these tapes, other than just toss them.

Suggestions, anybody?

To defend the Bush administration today, it seems to me you’d have to be the kind of lobotomized, eyes-gouged-out partisan who could’ve defended Bill Clinton’s blow job — not his policies, not his efficacy as president in spite of the blow job, but the act of the blow job itself.

I think Bill Clinton is great, and I’ve certainly got nothing against blow jobs, but even I couldn’t go that far. However thrilling it may have been for him and Monica, that particular blow job was reckless, thoughtless, and it put the entire country at risk while the impeachment extravaganza played itself out.

The same is true of Bush’s systematic dismantling of governmental checks and balances and the Republican Congress’ astonishing complicity with him, even to the derogation of its own Constitutional powers.

The so-called “liberal” media are already bending over backwards to make excuses for Bush based largely on rationales coming from Karl Rove’s office and Ken Mehlman’s motor mouth. We should be used to that by now, but it helps to keep this in mind: To defend Bush’s lies, his incompetence, and his imperial grab for power, you have to be the kind of person who could defend the blow job.