Exquisite Dead Guy

OPENING MONOLOGUE

Hello there from Poland.

I’m getting my ducks in a row here as 2024 winds down, so I’ll keep this week’s intro short. I mean, have you ever put ducks in a row? It’s, like, hard. They just keep moving!

This week I talk about Anthony Bourdain, Drunk Hulk, Stephen King’s book Holly, and my favorite Bob Kane (creator of Batman?) story. Let’s go!

Today's reading

• On Anthony Bourdain

• Holly

• Makes you want to go hiking, doesn’t it?

• Every Gallery in the World

• Are you ready?

On Anthony Bourdain

In the process of putting together the new edition of SMASHED: THE LIFE AND TWEETS OF DRUNK HULK, I was thinking about Anthony Bourdain.

I’ll never forget waking up to a ton of emails and notifications after Bourdain’s Rolling Stone interview where he mentioned my work.

This was in 2012 when Twitter’s DRUNK HULK was at its peak. I had already been outed as the writer and was working on the original book.

Whenever it felt like the gig was up, someone like John Hodgman or Bourdain would mention me, and I’d suddenly get ten thousand more followers who were just discovering the account. I remember how Poland discovered me when Linkin Park, of all bands, namedropped me in an interview with Teraz Rock.

But Bourdain was generous. He’d write me messages about specific jokes he liked, and he even gave me a quote for the back cover of the book when it was published.

When he did a panel at SXSW, he asked me to tweet the event live as Drunk Hulk. I can remember sitting in my office here in Poland as we set up the live feed with his team in Austin, and Bourdain’s head appeared on the screen to give me a quick hello.

I’m not going to pretend that we were friends, but I’m happy to acknowledge how gracious and nice he was, especially when he had no reason to. I’ll always be thankful for that.

Holly

I only managed to finish one book last week. Luckily for me, this book was a doozy — Stephen King’s Holly. 

It’s worth noting that this is the third book King has written with the name of the female protagonist along with Carrie and Dolores Claiborne. And it’s the sixth book with a name for the title: Billy Summers, Christine, and Rose Madder (I might be pushing it with the last one there).

As I mentioned last week, this is the sixth book with Holly Gibney (her next book comes out in May). I read an article this week that talked about how divisive a character Gibney was for readers. I didn’t know this was an issue at all.

I can understand some complaints about her when she first appears in the back-half of Mr Mercedes. The story goes that she was meant to be a background character and King fell in love and expanded her role in the story. Initially, she’s painfully shy, dealing with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and trapped under the thumb of an overbearing mother. She ends up befriending Bill Hodges — the detective protagonist in the eponymous trilogy — who treats her with the kind of patience and kindness she’s rarely seen and comes into her own by the end of the book. When she appears in the second book, Finders Keepers, she’s a full-fledged partner in Hodges’ detective agency.

Throughout the other books, Gibney not only becomes more self-assured but confronts cases that alter her sense of reality (supernatural elements). So by the time we catch up with her in Holly, she’s positively transformed. Sure, she still has unresolved issues with her mother and her usual tics, but she’s front and center in a way that even Hodges didn’t get despite having his own trilogy.

I think people who have issues with Gibney aren’t fully appreciating the evolution that King has accomplished with the character. It’s something we’ve rarely seen with his work. The only characters to come close are those from the Dark Tower, but even then the overwhelming mythos of that series didn’t really let King get as granular with his characters as he does Gibney. Hell, Jack Sawyer had two books (almost 2000 pages) and didn’t get half the treatment Gibney gets. There’s a good chance that she could end up becoming THE defining character in King’s legacy.

King pulls off some neat tricks with Holly that make the book fun. And the book is fun. You know who the bad guys are right away and the book is all about following Gibney as she slowly puts it all together. It all leads to Gibney’s darkest moment in the series, but it also highlights the distance from the shy girl we met in 2014 — that person would not have survived this particular and bloody ordeal.

Makes you want to go hiking, doesn’t it?

Every Gallery in the World

Bob Kane is known as the creator of Batman, but in reality, he had a writer (Bill Finger) and a ghost artist (Shelly Moldoff) doing all the heavy lifting for him. Kane just loved the credit and attention (and money), and he rarely ever drew, save for the occasional Batman sketch for a beautiful woman who’d ask.

One day, a writer was visiting Kane and said it was a shame he no longer drew. Kane took him into his studio, where there were many terrible paintings of clowns, all signed by Kane.

He said, “These are the paintings that are going to make me. These paintings will soon be in every gallery in the world.”

Months later, the writer finds out that Kane is being sued by his ghost artist. The writer is shocked that Moldoff would sue Kane — it was unheard of in comics.

And then someone corrected him.

He wasn’t being sued by Moldoff — no, it was the guy painting all the clowns.

Are you ready?

This can be a fun time of the year, but it can also be heavy for a lot of people. Pay closer attention to your friends and family because it’s easy to overlook those who need more than a wrapped present. And if that person happens to be you, don’t be afraid to ask for help. It’s hard, I know, but people really do want to help.