#max bemis

me sitting in science class hiding behind a lab table on my phone looking at pictures of Max Bemis thinking I’m being sneaky but my table has been too silent for too long and i realize our science teacher is standing behind me watching my screen and trying to figure out who tf the random guy that I keep putting on my “Maxx Attackk!” Pinterest board is

Graham Norton - Gay - Actor, presenter

i'm not gonna waste these words… ♡

Recently finished Polarity by Max Bemis and Jorge Coelho, which is about a disaffected bipolar NYC artist who discovers he really does have superhuman abilities in his unmedicated manic state and embarks on a campaign of half-cocked vigilantism against all of his longstanding bugbears- high school bullies, inauthentic artists, guys who overcharge for drugs. Cashes out in the vicinity of "Hipster Luthor Strode," or possibly Holden Caufield if he started moonlighting as a superhero in order to do something about all those phonies. I don't personally feel equipped to engage with the potential thorniness inherent to the premise- that various mental illnesses actually can give you city leveling superpowers- but It's pretty clearly written from the author's familiarity with living with Bipolar disorder; and the attendant discussion of whether being authentically yourself is even a meaningful idea in the context of mood swings and mood stabilizers, dovetails in obvious ways with the old super heroic dichotomy-of-identity tropes. And the art is kickass, which buoys the whole thing a lot. Equally compelling, at least to me, is where the story falls in the implicit progression of the setting as a superhero setting; the ultimate antagonists of the book are aware of the superheroic idiom, and although no such people exist in the public eye yet, their long term evil plan is to create that institution- which, within the logic of the comic, would amount to teams of mentally unwell young adults paraded around in costumes while kept selectively drugged up or severely undermedicated to whatever extent that the powers that be find useful. Preventing them from engineering this new status quo is treated as the big win of the comic, although it's left ambiguous whether the protagonist is going to go back to moonlighting as a vigilante on his own time. The overall thesis of the book seems to be that as unmoored as that power fantasy is from practicality, it's also undeniably very, very cool.

discard all feelings the stars scar my ceiling i won't spare you. i, i won't spare you won't spare you, won't spare you won't spare you, i won't spare you i shall grow and grow i shall grow and grow i'll grow i shall grow and grow i shall grow and grow i'll grow

That was a really fun anthology series. Very glad I went through it all.