Grayson #14

While peaking on LSD, Otto Netz came up with the idea of Spyral when he placed a pirated copy of Freud in his Apple IIe's floppy drive in the hopes it would clear out what he believed was a spider infestation within the casing and then sat back to watch the action through a kaleidoscope.

After that caption, the plan was to find a picture from the Freud program on the internet but sometimes the internet fails miserably (unless I failed miserably?) The Freud program was generally found stuck on a disk handed to you from the greasy kid in junior high who spent his entire lunch hour hogging up the lone Apple IIe computer in the library. His disks were full of cracked games like Conan and Karateka and a version of Zork which never actually worked. Freud was really just the therapist program "Eliza" with a lo-res image of a bald man whose eyebrows would move up and down as he thought about each of your responses to his questions which would eventually point out that your mother was the problem. Maybe that was just me because I would answer every question with "My mother is the fucking problem!" But I just spent forty minutes scouring the internet for a picture of Freud. I'm sure one exists out there but I couldn't figure out the exact chant to repeat into Lord Google's ear to get him to manifest my desire. I even downloaded a disk image for "Personal Therapist" to try out on my Apple IIe emulator so I could get the image myself. Alas, the disk image was based on Eliza but didn't include the bald guy waggling his eyebrows. When the program began, no image popped up but I thought maybe after entering my first response, it would enter the lo-res screen with the bald guy. So I dutifully typed "My mother is the fucking problem!" but no dice. Eliza just mumbled something about how I wasn't being clear. How could I be any clearer, you stupid machine!

This issue begins with Otto Netz giving a brief overview of why Spyral came into being. I could choose to scan the page so the explanation is made clear or I can fuck Eliza right in her stupid confused face and make things unclear by providing an even briefer overview! I realize that I'm not really punishing a fifty year old computer program but I feel that I have to act petulantly anyway because how much clearer could I have been! I don't think mankind ever has to worry about Artificial Intelligence taking over because it may be able to beat huge nerds at Jeopardy but it'll never know how to act childishly and misdirect its anger.

So my brief, brief overview of the beginning of Spyral is this: So there were these Nazis, you see? That's probably enough.

Grievous that you were reading Shelley!

I probably shouldn't have such a strong opinion against Shelley since I really can't judge him by anything but Prometheus Unbound (which I read in high school so I can't even place any credence on what I thought of it then, being that my experiences of life were negligible) and that his name is Percy Bysshe. But being human, I will allow myself to hate Shelley simply because I was bored by one of his plays when I was sixteen. If anybody would like to try to assuage my feelings toward his poetry by giving me some great example of his work, I'll pretend to give him another chance before sticking to my guns.

Midnighter sits nearby as Luka Netz wanders away unnoticed. Some computer brain he is! He really should try not to be so gay sometimes. Maybe if he'd just looked at this woman as she walked past, his computer brain would have figured she was listening to Grayson and Tiger being eaten by robot spiders in her lair.

With the help of God Garden enemy agent Ladytron, Tiger and Dick defeat all of the Luka Netz's robot spider guard dogs. But then when Tiger asks Ladytron to EMP Luka's computers to stop the next wave of robot spiders so he can go back to defeating Ladytron (because he thinks that's the mission, after all!), Dick knocks him out again in literally one punch. Although after he punches him, he also has to kick him to knock him unconscious so I may have jumped the gun on the use of "literally" there. Although in this climate where most people can't go half a sentence without shoving that word into it, it's not like anybody will notice.

An "oily," hunh? I can't say I've ever been robo-curious before but now I'm totally into it. Also that was a fairly blatant lie about the "can't saying" part of that last sentence.

Otto Netz reappears to tell more of his origin story. He was bored killing the heroes whom he had helped to create so he created a villain that would challenge Spyral because it would be him but he would call himself Doctor Dedalus. That's why Spyral is so nutty and so into webs and spirals and Ouroboroses. Also this might be the first villain that I've ever truly identified with! He created Spyral and Spyral's nemesis, Leviathan, simply to entertain himself! The only other villain I identified with was one that my friend created but I eventually gave him his motivation. It was Global Thermonuclear War Dude and his goal was simply to destroy everything. I supplied the reason for his goal: so he wouldn't miss out on anything after he died.

Otto is telling this story to his two daughters (or granddaughters (or clones)): Katarina and Elisabeth. Luka must be short for Katarina. And Doctor is short for Elisabeth.

Otto finishes up by telling the two girls that he will encode his being into a computer. He is the Spyder Oracle which Mister Minos and now Helena can access for information. And then one day, one of the girls will download Otto into their being while the other becomes Leviathan. And the spirals can continue like this practically forever.

It turns out Otto's story is the information Dick is gathering from Luka Netz's computer system. So now he knows Spyral's shameful secret: it's based on Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry! Dick is aghast and asks Ladytron to maybe do that EMP thing like Tiger wanted earlier. For, you know, kicks?

Back in Spyral headquarters, Spyder commands Helena to activate Dick Grayson's nanobots' auto-cannibalization sequence. Luckily Tim Drake deactivated all of that shit for Dick. I think. I hope!

Or Ladytron's EMP shuts them down just in time. That's probably the thing that actually happened because do any of us really want to believe that Tim Drake is that smart and capable?

And then Tiger wakes up full of shame and embarrassment and thoughts of manly revenge.

But first a sexy Robin war!

Grayson #14 Rating: No change. In the future when people are obsessively snatching up anything Tom King writes, they'll look back at Grayson #14 as the point when people began saying, "Grant who?" Sure, lots of people, right now, love to say things like, "Who does Grant Morrison think he is? He expects me to pay $4.99 so he can jerk himself off directly in my mouth?! Well, I'm not going to allow him to get away with that anymore without first saying how much his jizz tastes like self-indulg...GAG CHOKE SPIT COUGH!" Maybe there's been a bit too much time since I read the entirety of Batman Incorporated and I'm taking the credit away from Grant Morrison because maybe this was all in that and I was just too dizzy to realize it but if it wasn't, Tom King just made Otto Netz make sense. It's also possible that I'm a stupid American who...no wait. That's a fact! Let me try that again. It's also possible that the fact that I'm a stupid American means that I needed the entirety of Batman Incorporated boiled down to these key points straight from Otto Netz's mouth. One thing I'm certain of though...no wait! I'm totally not even certain of that. But let's pretend I am, okay? One thing I'm probably certain of is that Otto Netz doing all of this because he was bored is Tom King's idea. If not, then I probably should have loved that idea when it was written by Grant Morrison as well! But then, I never wrote anything about the Pre-52 Batman Incorporated, so I have no Grandmaster Record of what I thought at the time! The world mourns the loss of my thoughts. Right, world? Mourn, you fuckers! MOURN!