I took this photo in a hurry as the driver looked pretty hard ass, I was in the Walgreen's parking lot near my bus stop about a month after 9/11. Burbank is just east of Bridgeview, which has the highest population of Muslims in the US, and home to the first mosque built in this country, at 103rd and Harlem. Times were tense that autumn of 2001. But being hard ass also means you can't WRITE the damn language you expect others to SPEAK. And the guy can't weasel out of it by saying there wasn't enough room to spray paint a coherent sentence. Happy end of the 4th of July...Wayne
One of the comics I look forward to each month is THE BOYS, a completely over the top book by Scottish writer Garth Ennis and artist Darrick Robertson. You can't get past two panels without seeing more graphic dialogue or art than in most scenes of PULP FICTION. One Supes--or Superhero--fights crime with a hamster stuffed up his ass in a roll of toilet paper. Another, based loosely on Batman, fucks anything in sight to avoid screwing his sidekick, a Starbucks coffee cup on his shrink's desk, the shrink's cat, and his own equivalent of the Batmobile's exhaust pipe. In the recent issue, an old comic artist--certainly a thinly-disguised Jack Kirby-- called The Legend explains the history of the superhero from the 40s until post-9/11 in typical Ennis fashion. I always write about the strange world of Earth-14 I visit in my dreams, but in one (maybe more) of the ossery of Earths in the multiverse, I can only hope there's a Fourth of July without George W. Bush as president because he cut his own head off with a chainsaw. If there is a multiverse, there must be an Earth with an extra five thousand US soldiers and a million peaceful Iraqis still alive, and worries of another Great Depression only happen in dystopian short fiction in the pages of Fantasy & Science Fiction...Wayne
