by Jarett Kobek
Billionaires were always giving advice to people who weren’t billionaires about how to become billionaires.
It was almost always intolerable bullshit.
SANDBERG BECAME A BILLIONAIRE by working for a company named Facebook.
Facebook made its money through an Internet web and mobile platform which advertised cellphones, feminine hygiene products and breakfast cereals.
This web and mobile platform was also a place where hundreds of millions of people offered up too much information about their personal lives.
Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.
What is your gender? asked Facebook.
What is your relationship status? asked Facebook.
What is your current city? asked Facebook.
What is your name? asked Facebook.
What are your favorite movies? asked Facebook.
What is your favorite music? asked Facebook.
What are your favorite books? asked Facebook.
ADELINE’S FRIEND, the writer J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, had read an essay called “Generation Why?” by Zadie Smith, a British writer with a lot of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. Zadie Smith’s essay pointed out that the questions Facebook asked of its users appeared to have been written by a twelve year old.
But these questions weren’t written by a twelve year old. They were written by Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg was such a billionaire that he was the boss of other billionaires. He was Sheryl Sandberg’s boss.
J. Karacehennem thought that he knew something about Facebook that Zadie Smith, in her decency, hadn’t imagined.
“The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, “that we’ve spent like, what, two or three hundred years wrestling with existentialism, which really is just a way of asking, Why are we on this planet? Why are people here? Why do we lead our pointless lives? All the best philosophical and novelistic minds have tried to answer these questions and all the best philosophical and novelistic minds have failed to produce a working answer. Facebook is amazing because finally we understand why we have hometowns and why we get into relationships and why we eat our stupid dinners and why we have names and why we own idiotic cars and why we try to impress our friends. Why are we here, why do we do all of these things? At last we can offer a solution. We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving. I guess what I’m saying, really, is that there’s always hope.”
chapter four
Having worked in the belly of the beast, Jeremy Winterbloss understood the comic industry’s traditions of racism and sexism.
Any product not delivered by White men would receive less orders than products offered by White men. Which meant less sales, which meant a smaller audience, which meant less money.
Many people in the comics industry remembered Jeremy. He stood out. Many people in the comic industry remembered the eumelanin in his basal cell layer.
Back in the early 1990s, Jeremy worried that if he and Adeline published Trill under their own names, then it would be seen as a Black book drawn by a White woman.
Which meant less sales, which meant a smaller audience, which meant less money.
Jeremy wanted to be recognized for his contribution but Jeremy also wanted to make money. He wanted to do meaningful work and be paid for it.
In this, he was different than Sheryl Sandberg. He had no interest in advertising baby powder and asking people about their favorite music.
JEREMY DEVISED AN IMPERFECT SOLUTION to the issues of racism and sexism in the comic book industry. He suggested that both he and Adeline adopt pseudonyms.
The adoption of pseudonyms was another of the comic industry’s time honored traditions. Jack Kirby, who had no eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis and pretty much created the comic book industry, was born Jacob Kurtzberg. He chose his pseudonym to sound less Jewish.
Adeline, who was then suffering from many strange habits including an affected Transatlantic accent and a terminal disinterest in making a statement, agreed with Jeremy’s suggestion.
“Darling,” she asked, “won’t it be simply frightful to pretend that we’re other people?”
Jeremy went with J.W. Bloss. Adeline picked the somewhat more baroque M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch.
MONTHLY PUBLICATION of Trill ceased in 1999. A series of unforeseen events, including the collapse of several distributors, made it very difficult for comics creators to self-publish their own work. The money just wasn’t there.
TRILL CEASED PUBLICATION at the exact moment when the greater English speaking world became interested in trade paperback collections of comic books.
Sometimes these collections were called graphic novels.
This was a misnomer. The trade paperbacks were not novels and very rarely contained any graphic material.
An example of an actual graphic novel was Les 120 journées de Sodome¸ an Eighteenth Century book written in prison by an obese French nobleman without any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.
Like most actual graphic novels, it succeeded wonderfully at being graphic but failed miserably as a novel. It was a book about people in a castle who fuck each other to death while throwing their own shit around like a bunch of caged monkeys.
By contrast, the graphic novels of the comic book industry were mostly Marvel or DC getting new money for old rope by binding together reprints of ancient material.
Typically these graphic novels contained nothing more than images of volleyball sized breasts and Spider-Man smashing Doctor Octopus through a brick wall while saying, “Ol’ sourpus sure made a mistake messing with his friendly neighborhood webhead!”
THE TRADE PAPERBACK EDITIONS of Trill continued to sell after the final monthly pamphlet was printed. Each year, the trade paperbacks sold a little more than the year before.
Then two things happened in the mid-2000s: (1) On the basis of their success with Bone, a book by a guy named Jeff Smith who didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale strata of his epidermis, Scholastic offered to print color trade paperbacks of Trill, granting access to the voracious children’s and education markets. (2) Don Murphy, a quarrelsome producer of Hollywood films without any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis, optioned the cinematic rights to Trill.
UNLIKE MANY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES that are optioned by Hollywood producers, Trill was actually financed and turned into a film.
Half of the money came from a Hollywood studio. The rest was raised from private investors, including a very sizeable chunk of change via the Saudi media group Fear and Respect Holdings Ltd.
Fear and Respect was run by His Royal Highness Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud, who had a small amount of eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. The principle purpose of Fear and Respect was to invest in new media companies and old media opportunities.
HRH Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud liked film, and he could see the future. He could see that intellectual properties derived from the comic book industry were on the verge of providing very lucrative revenue streams.
Trill was his first foray into the world of cinema.
He had high hopes.
ADELINE AND JEREMY were not involved in the filmmaking process, but gave their tacit support by saying nothing against the project. They did not attend the film’s premiere.
The film was computer animated, which meant scores of underpaid technicians in Asian countries spent countless hours working on devices assembled by even lower paid workers in other Asian countries to produce crude replicas of artwork that had cost Adeline about $54 a month in materials.
When the film was released in 2007, it did what Adeline considered a ridiculous amount of business: about $25,000,000.
&n
bsp; This was $25,000,000 less than its production budget, which did not include the tens of millions more dollars spent on marketing.
Trill was a flop.
HRH Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud was sad.
But the publicity was great for sales of the trade paperbacks.
NEITHER ADELINE NOR JEREMY had wanted their identities revealed, but another producer of Trill, a man named Joel Silver, let the truth slip during a press conference.
Joel Silver, who didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis, later said it was a mistake.
Adeline assumed it was intentional.
She’d spent most of her early life in Los Angeles. She always assumed the worst about Hollywood people. Anything to increase tracking.
THE REVEAL OF M. ABRAHAMOVIC PETROVITCH as a woman belonging to the social construct of the White race was treated as the more interesting story than that of Jeremy Winterbloss as a man belonging to the social construct of the Black race.
Nearly ten years after finishing the last issue of Trill, Adeline was in demand. For her self, as her self. The details of her life became fodder for public discourse.
People were fascinated that she had lived through the grimy old East Village. People were interested that her best friend, Baby, was a gay writer of Science Fiction and the author of Annie Zero. People wanted to know how Adeline had kept the secret for so many years. People were fascinated by a woman working in genre comics and doing it so well. People were interested that she lived in San Francisco and wanted her opinions about the tech industry and the dotcom boom of the late 1990s.
Basically, she got kind of famous.
chapter five
Despite never appearing as a character within its pages, Jack Kirby is the central personage of this novel. He died in 1994. He was born in 1917.
Jack Kirby is the central personage of this novel because he was the individual most screwed by the American comic book industry, and the American comic book industry is the perfect distillation of all the corrupt and venal behavior inherent in unregulated capitalism.
The business practices of the American comic book industry have colonized Twenty-First Century life. They are the tune to which we all dance.
The Internet, and the multinational conglomerates which rule it, have reduced everyone to the worst possible fate. We have become nothing more than comic book artists, churning out content for enormous monoliths that refuse to pay us the value of our work.
So we might as well revere the man who was screwed first and screwed hardest.
JACK KIRBY WAS BORN Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917 at 147 Essex Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was a New York Jew at a time when being a Jew in America was a ticket to suspicion and abuse.
He was a creative genius working in a medium that disrespected the intelligence of its readers. He was a creative genius working in a medium that hid objectionable words behind strings of symbols like $#!+ and @$$.
He smoked cigars and he spoke in a Noo Yawk accent. He never graduated high school. He fought in World War Two. He was a Jew who wrote and drew comics about kicking the shit out of Nazis and then went to Germany and kicked the shit out of Nazis.
WHENEVER THERE WAS AN IMPORTANT MOMENT in American comic books, Jack Kirby was present. Always creating, always making new things, always with the new ideas.
He was one of the lamed vavniks, one of the thirty-six righteous who kept the world running.
Here is a list of some characters that he either created or co-created: Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the original X-Men, the Avengers, Thor, Loki, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Doctor Doom, Galactus, Ant-Man, the Black Panther, Nick Fury, The Demon, Kamandi, Klarion the Witch Boy, OMAC, the New Gods, M.O.D.O.K, the Eternals, the Inhumans, the Forever People, the Newsboy Legion.
Here is a list of the above characters that he owned:
BY THE TIME that Adeline made her unforgivable mistake, Marvel Comics had transformed itself into Marvel Entertainment, which was a film production company. The films that Marvel produced were based on the comic books which it had published in earlier decades.
Marvel had released the following films: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor, The Avengers, Iron Man 3. All of these films were based on intellectual property created by Jack Kirby.
Marvel had done $5,289,863,327 worth of box office business with films based on intellectual properties created by Jack Kirby. This does not include merchandizing or DVD/Blu-Ray sales.
This was more money than the respective annual GDPs of fifty countries.
BEFORE MARVEL TRANSFORMED itself into a producer of films, the company was run by individuals of dubious business acumen.
These individuals had licensed away the media exploitation rights to many of Marvel’s best known intellectual properties, including the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, both of which were co-created by Jack Kirby.
The creation of the X-Men was complicated, but Kirby was there with the original concept. He did everything on the Fantastic Four.
By the time that Adeline committed the only unforgivable sin of the Twenty-First Century, the Fantastic Four and X-Men had been exploited in the production of eight films, seven of which were based on the work of Jack Kirby. These seven films had taken in $2,136,662,237 at the box office.
Combined with Marvel’s take of $5,289,863,327, this totaled out to $7,426,525,564 of business derived from media properties that Jack Kirby had either created or co-created.
JACK KIRBY had worked-for-hire, when the prospect of billion dollar films of any kind, let alone those starring superheroes, was inconceivable.
Work-for-hire was one of the many bad deals that businesses offered to creative people. The terms of work-for-hire were: we pay you enough to eat and we keep everything you create.
So Jack Kirby had worked-for-hire and created a plethora of intellectual property which developed immense value while he himself held no legal ownership over that property.
He spent the last years of his life fighting with Marvel over his intellectual property and the return of his physical artwork. He went to his grave with no stake in his life’s work.
He got screwed.
JACK KIRBY is also the central personage of this novel because this is not a good novel. This is a seriously mixed-up book with a central personage who never appears. The plot, like life, resolves into nothing and features emotional suffering without meaning.
The writer of this novel gave up trying to write good novels when he realized that the good novel, as an idea, was created by the Central Intelligence Agency.
This is not a joke. This is true. This is church.
The CIA funded the Paris Review. The CIA funded the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. The CIA engineered the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.
A person would be hard pressed to find three other institutions with more influence over the development of the good novel and literary fiction.
Literary fiction was a term used by the upper classes to suggest books which paired pointless sex with ruminations on the nature of mortgages were of greater merit than books which paired pointless sex with guns and violence.
The CIA funded literary fiction because people at the CIA believed that American literature was excellent propaganda and would help fight the Russians. People at the CIA believed that literary fiction would celebrate the delights of a middle class existence produced by American dynamism.
The people who took the CIA’s money were happy to help out.
The result was sixty years of good novels about the upper middle class and their sexual affairs.
Generally speaking, these good novels didn’t involve characters with much eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.
A SIDE EFFECT of the CIA’s funding of the good novel was to ensure that American literature was hopeless at addressing the pace of technological innovation. This is because the defining quality of any good novel
was the limit of its author’s imagination.
And the authors of good novels were terminal bores. The writers of literary fiction were the people who’d come to your party and pass out in your bathtub and then spend years dining out on the tale.
For more than half of a century, American writers of good novels had missed the only important story in American life. They had missed the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the developing communications landscape, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television.
And so too had they missed the full import of the last fifteen years. The symbolism sustaining the aesthetic and intellectual pursuits of the Twentieth Century was now meaningless. It was empty air. It was gone, vacant, missing, collapsed beneath the weight of two towers.
So much of the dialogue around literature and writing had become about the embrace of human rights, but a massive shift had happened and no one ever mentioned it.
For thousands of years, people had written with a wide variety of materials. Some used pens. Some used pencils. Some used typewriters. Some used papyrus. Some used foolscap.
Now writers used computers, which were the byproducts of global capitalism’s uncanny ability to turn the surplus population into perpetual servants. All of the world’s computers were built by slaves in China.
The business of American literature had become the business of exploiting slave labor. An example of this is the book that you are reading.
This bad novel, which is a morality lesson about the Internet, was written on a computer. You are suffering the moral outrage of a hypocritical writer who has profited from the spoils of slavery.