Sep 18, 2018
Baked and Awake Episode 053 - LIVE From RenCon 2018 at the Interurban Hotel
Conspiracy and Occult Disclosure in Comic Books and Graphic Novels
Welcome everyone and thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Please try to work with me today as I will be reading much of this presentation. It’s part of podcasting that we often script greater or lesser degrees of our shows, necessitating at times this sort of… set up in a live setting. It’ll be fine. I’ll look up now and then and we’ll get through this together, refreshed and having had a break off the busy Convention floors. I’d like to take a moment to also comment on how beautiful the Hotel interurban is, and how stoked I am to be here with you today podcasting from this beautiful space right in the middle of the Renton City Comic Con. Also please join me in thanking my lovely Niece Payton and her amazing Boyfriend Rob, for hanging out with my two boys today while we all enjoy this amazing show. Thanks so much to both of you, I owe you each a big solid.
As for myself- I’m Steve Cominski, and some of you with us today may already know that I am the host of the Baked and Awake podcast, produced right up the hill from here, from our home in the beautiful Skyway neighborhood. Make some noise if you’ve ever been to the Skyway Park Bowl and Casino! Alright, so I have been doing the show for a little over a year now. We talk cannabis lifestyle and education stuff from my perspective as a member of the legal weed industry and before you ask- NO I am NOT the Plug! Alright actually I am The Plug but just not for you guys okay?? I sell to licensed retail cannabis stores and that’s where you all should be getting your cannabis, too! By the way, sorry but NO smoking today at the venue. Please do not get my butt kicked out of here because you don’t know how to act, thank you. Seriously though I sincerely hope you did figure out how to get safe before the event, or are happy enough waiting until you are home or somewhere else 420 friendly, because it’s just about 420 right now and I know I’m feelin’ great. If you’re feelin it too, you don’t have to say or do anything- you’re dialed. Now, a little more about the podcast- in addition to talking about all things green and stinky and how to smoke it, we like to get weird. And by “we” I do mean me most of the time, although as you’ll hopefully come to find out I am fortunate to have already had the occasional, amazing guest sit down, to share a session and usually a story! These conversations cover topics mysterious and paranormal. At times I find myself exploring subjects philosophical or spiritual. Quite often, I dig in, with a gleam in my eye that’s not only the weed- and chop it up with you about some fantastic thing or another that our more shall we say “would be upstanding” friends and neighbors, certainly family members, might very well like to label “Crazy Conspiracy Talk”. I’ve done episodes about The Maury Island Incident, You may know it as Vashon Island- and the UFO sighted there in in 1947, that was said to have dropped hot molten slag on to an innocent Logging Salvage Boat Crew below, killing a dog. We have talked about the Martha Washington School for Insane Girls in South Lake Washington. NOT a myth! How about the tragic and downright strange circumstances of the deaths of Bruce and Brandon Lee, both interred in Seattle just North of Capitol Hill.. Heck, we even took a two episode look into the bottomless and baffling Mel’s Hole, way out in Pullman WA- and if you haven’t heard of Mel’s Hole, lemme tell ya- it’s a HECK of a story.. So for those of you coming to it for the first time today, again- thanks for being here! ...And you’ve got a lot of catching up to do so I suggest you pull your phones out and find Baked and Awake right now in your itunes or your Spotify or whatever you’re using, and subscribe to the show before you get distracted by another full sized, 3D Printed, transforming Optimus Prime cosplay (I’m not mad!)- because you’ve got like 52 episodes to listen to, not counting this one! Finally, when this podcast is over, I’ll be hanging out in the hall for a few minutes to say hello, and hand out stickers, if you’re into that.
And now, my introduction to the notion that there is a strong, persistent custom that exists among the writers and artists responsible for the creation of most of the Comic, Graphic Novel, Video, and Big Screen content we consume, to perpetuate the impression on to us, everywhere a series of archetypal mythological personages, histories, and hidden teachings in the form of thinly and sometimes not so thinly veiled imagery, symbolism, language, etc. This Programming spans languages and cultures, religions and examples can be found all over the world- we’ll keep it western for our purposes. It is my contention- and I am in no way claiming to be the first or even the fifty thousandth person to draw some of these parallels- that this umbrella theme has been here since the instantiation of well, who knows probably the Gutenberg printing press, but lets stay a bit more topical and say around the dawn of Comic Books, and soon after that, as color and first makeup effects and then Special on screen effects really began to take off- Hollywood and Feature film production in particular. Prior to the era of the talkies, movies were shorter and had limited or no recorded audio, therefore they were severely limited in the scope of stories they could portray in a worthwhile treatment. One medium that WAS up to the challenge though, back then was Comic Books! Comics, and their forebears’ Pulp Magazines, were the original playground for the fertile imaginations of many of the writers who would go on to populate the Movies’ later worlds of Creature Features, Alien Invasion Horrors, and Wizards and Warlocks. Stories of High Espionage and Intrigue were also popular tales for the early Comics and Pulps, and let us not forget the Paranormal, Bigfoot, and Ghost Stories, with all of the aforementioned story types finding themselves intermingling and overlapping deeply with each other along the way.. The roles played today by Comic Books, big budget, special effects fueled Hollywood Movies, and to an increasing extent, our ever more immersive video games, is one of social psychology and social engineering, in my opinion. Whether this psychology is benevolent or malevolent in nature is highly subjective. Digression. “Alright, But Steve”, you say- “what do you think we are being engineered for, Bro? I mean, it’s not like there’s really a secret cabal of international One Percent of the One Percenters, Banksters and Satan worshipping, apolitical Kabillionaires running the entire world from shadowy private island fortresses and off grid underground bunkers, right?!” “I mean, you don’t mean to sit here and tell me you think the United States took and expatriated thousands of Nazi Officers of the modern day STEM career path persuasion, folding them into american intelligence and science agencies all over the country in the wake of WWII, giving many of them new names and biographies in the process, and setting up more than a few of them in palatial, secluded estates the likes of which would make Bill Gates jealous, some of them maybe right in his own back yard? I am of course going straight for the deep end, though nowhere near the bottom of the pool, with references to Operation Paperclip. The disclosure of awareness of alternate histories, alien contact, the belief in and practice of occult rituals into the modern era by some of the seeming most elite layers of society, corporate, and the worlds of Church and State- has BEEN going on right in front of our eyes since the dawn of both comics and the film industry- yes even in the silent movies that I just said didn’t matter. Back around then, as we said in those early 40’s and 50’s, Golden and Silver age titles like Amazing Stories, Science Fiction Stories, Weird Tales, more parochial seeming straight up wholesome comic book titles like Superman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, and so many others paraded all the old Gods and Titans before us, either by their historic names or by some clever semantics, names that nevertheless mean the same thing. That’s right, we need not dig into independently published, gritty, black and white comics by edgy writers nobody’s heard of outside of this room. No indeed, we need simply cast our eyes about us and look at just about any example of the arts you care to take the most casual of looks into, and we will see that they are rife with imagery, iconography, and symbolism that, once they begin to be revealed, can hardly be missed anywhere you see it.. “Modern” Movies have been hogging a lot of the spotlight from comics, going all the way back to dusty old features like The Day The Earth Stood Still or War of the Worlds, itself adapted from a live radio broadcast in 1938 by Orson Wells, which was in turn adapted from a 19th century story by the same name written by H.G. Wells. Fueled by these and many stories like them in comics, radio, and TV as well as feature films, The Alien Scare was on. And yet to this day, 80 years hence, no Little Green Men have landed on the White House Lawn, that we know of.. To date myself a bit while bringing the sci fi analogy a little nearer to my heart- I am of the generation that grew up on the OG STAR WARS.. I know- movie. Doesn’t matter. Because can I really look out on this crowd and expect to be telling absolutely any of you for the first time ever, that much of the Star Wars Mythology is rumored to be tied to the real, ancient history of our own Solar System and indeed, Galaxy? Of course not. Iapetus So, back to that why.
The why is this. Comics along with their counterparts, middle and long form graphic novels, and in an adjacent dimension things like Anime/CG Features and Many types of video games, movies and TV in all its modern streaming forms (Gravity Falls, Anyone?)- ancient meta myths are again and again encoded back into our minds, hearts, and souls. This, that we may not lose a crucially important, impossible to contain, largley made up but nevertheless true history of Human Kind. Encompassed within this True, living history of Humanity, are all the warnings our ancestors have left behind for us, and every virtue they likewise recognized. Distilling these virtues into Heroes and Anti-Heroes. Titans, Gods, Saints and Demigods- they are our first exemplars of a conflicted soul, beings who often embody two equally compelling, to themselves virtuous (Because what Bad Actor really thinks they are the Villian?) halves, intent on the destruction of the other half with a righteous conviction. The themes, personalities, and depth of the timelines of Earth’s deep historical mysteries lends itself beautifully to being told out in bits and pieces, over a course of years, right inside the richly expressive visual medium of Comics. You’re seeing images I’m sharing on the screen with you now, some from film sure, but these days these realms intermingle as much as the story genres listed earlier did in the pages of magazines with names like “Tales of Amazement”. (Pause) I also brought books from my own collection today, sitting on this table before me that I barely had to go digging into to come up with examples that corroborate this entire argument. We’re don’t have time for them today but trust me when I say they are in your collections as well. Speaking of which, Some of you are, no doubt, thinking of examples in your own life of the different “Glitch in the Matrix” moments you may have been fortunate enough to experience, when some book, movie, game or another cracked a whole new fissure open up in your mind, sending you to another layer, a new level of your own journey into the explorations of questions like “Why are these myths repeated everywhere to this day?” “How can a materialistic, -not in that way! Secular, scientific leaning, western educated person rationally deal with the fact that the harder and harder we push the boundaries of conventional physics, they always get wonky and break down spectacularly in the end. Or at least our calculations do- This is especially true when we try to conceptualize any means of moving about the universe at any appreciable percentage of the speed of light. Despite being an apparent vacuum, we’re unable to figure out how to accelerate a ship of any size, even that of a BB, through space up to even a few tenths of a percentage point of the speed of light. Again, you can research that yourselves, we’ve all got supercomputers in our pockets. The point is that this limitation has always been held up to us by Scientists, the Media, etc as the reason nobody has ever journeyed here even if there were Intelligent Alien life out there. Oh, and of course, everybody knows there’s nobody out there, amirite? OK. Pretty sure we only have 30 minutes today and that’s fine! We’re just having a peek, right? A primer, if it can even be called that. We’re pondering this thing together that we’ve already identified, and we should keep doing so, in my opinion. Now, let’s list off a few more strictly comic book based examples of heavy amounts of disclosure or symbolism right off the top of my head as I write the following listicle, I’m kidding it’s just a list- I just like saying listicle- and sort of categorize them under their general theme or themes.
- Superman- Ultimate Male Physical and Moral Archetype, Western Edition. Is nevertheless an alien, and hails from a mysterious world with its own eerie mythology. Space Hercules, if you will. Savior type figure.
- Wonder Woman- Sculpted from clay by her mother Hippolyta, Wonder Woman is the Super Powered Princess of a race of themselves fearsome warrior women, the Amazons. The Amazon race has Atlantean roots according to the Wonder Woman mythology. Her name, Diana- tells us she is God like, harkening back to the Roman Goddess Diana, known to the Greeks before that as Artemis, Goddess of Hunting and childbirth.
- Thor- Greatest of Warriors, The Norse God of Thunder, Son of Odin and Brother to Loki, the trickster, archetypical joker and dark sorcerer of one of the world’s oldest pantheons.
- Finally, The Watchmen- Costumed Not Actually Super Heroes exist in a world that has Incarcerated, “retired”, or subjugated them into service for “The Man”. A few holdouts, diminished Has Beens to a one, must fight for their own liberty while saving The World from one of their own. Key archetypes include Dr. Manhattan, a Quantum Being, a shapeshifting and teleporting Man-God. Moloch, an arch villain with the name of a Dark God and a Demonic physical aspect. Ozymandias- the groups Erstwhile former “Captain”, and ultimate Foe, whose very name is the Greek label for the Pharaoh Ramses II
Huh- looking back up at that now, it is kind of a listicle! We could go on. I don’t think we have the time however, and I like to think the point has almost been made. Call me what you must, but if you’ve sat here with me this long, and as I type these words I don’t know if I’ll be sitting here alone by now or perhaps this entire time- but I hope you’ll call me a friend- I’m asking you to keep looking at the symbols. Keep finding the hidden subtext that’s layered into every book you love so much, somewhere. Because it’s there for a reason, it’s performing its job, and it is in service to us all. Wait- what? Isn’t this the part where you’re supposed to warn us away from all this pagan and paranormal -that we haven’t even scratched the surface of- bullshit and go to church, Steve?! Nah Fam, I’m saying there’s mountains of material out there, a lot of it bad, much of it wildly inaccurate even when well intentioned. That’s ok though, you can handle all that! Just keep reading. And maybe, keep listening. But don’t forget to also sit a while in reflection, too.. And always remember to smoke indica, and do shit anyway.
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Episode ambient Music generously provided by Antti Luode, as posted to reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/6y699a/i_have_released_my_1363_songs_free_under_creative/
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