My India Trip: The Accident

I got off the plane in New Delhi just before one o’ clock, local time. Between the two flights and the layover I’d already been traveling for twenty-three hours. I still had a seven hour bus ride to go, after an unspecified wait for the bus to even show up (the wait turned out to be another five hours). However, none of that mattered, because I was in Delhi. Everything was like I remembered: the impenetrable and incomprehensible mess of traffic on the streets, the air pollution so thick you can taste it, and the overwhelming sense of being somewhere very different from home.

And then I looked over and saw a Venom sticker on the back of this guy’s van:


Not so far away from home as it used to be, I guess.

I’ve been home for a week now, trying to shrug off the jet lag, trying to figure out what to write about. That last bit isn’t exactly true. While I was in India, I kept knocking around ideas for blog entries, like the persistence of the caste system as demonstrated by the servant culture, or cheap cars and the democratization of travel, or the damned air pollution so thick you can taste it. I had all these ideas swirling around in my head, and then we got into a big car accident.

This is the truck we ran into.

I don’t know if you’ve driven in a developing country before (and really I’ve only been to India, so I don’t know if driving is better in the rest of the developing world) but it’s kind of scary. As near as I can figure it, in India the rules of the road consist of:
1) No slowing down, drive as if your brake lines are severed
2) Pass other cars constantly
3) Honk all the time.
I wish I’d taken video so you could see how this works, but, needless to say, there’s a crap-your-pants moment about every seven seconds.

Now, I’ve done my share of reckless driving before and I’ve had some close calls, but driving in India is like someone took all those moments and put them on a mixtape, sped it up, looped it, added a bhangra beat, leaked it onto the internet, where it got downloaded by a BILLION people, who put it on repeat in their cars.

My uncle, who lives there, asked once if I wanted to try driving. I said that I didn’t think I had the proper judgement yet; that, as a passenger, sometimes I’d think there was plenty of time to pass, and my driver would pass, but just as often I’d think, “If we try to pass now, we’ll die,” and my driver would go for it then too. I was content in accepting that I didn’t get Indian driving, so I wasn’t going to worry about it.

All of this is to set the scene. On my sixth or seventh day there, we were driving back from the wedding and reception that I’d gone to India to attend. We were in one of those cheap cars that I mentioned above, a tiny white hatchback called the Maruti 800, which is marketed as the “people’s car.” Wikipedia tells me that more than half the cars in India are Marutis.

The wedding receptions in that part of India are held early in the day, so we were driving home at around six in the evening. The sun had just set, but we still had dusky light to see by. You know how they tell you that time is the worst for visibility? Well, turns out they’re not kidding. We were doing about 70/kph on a straight stretch of relatively empty highway. We were all chatting away, all looking forward, and none of us saw the truck parked on the road until it was about fifteen feet ahead of us.

I’m writing about this to share the experience, because it still feels so strange to me that I was in one of those big car accidents that you seen in the movies. My mom says that she and my aunt screamed before we hit, but I don’t remember any screams until after; we were all too surprised. They drive on the left over there, so my uncle swerved right. Doing so saved us, but we were still too close, and the left side of our car smashed into the truck.

Right before we hit I remember thinking, “That’s it, then.” And then the glass from the windshield and left side windows shattered and flew in at us. That’s when the screaming started. With what momentum we had left, my uncle coasted the car around to the front of the truck and parked.

You can the scrapes where we hit, and that's a piece of our fender lying to the side.

We had five people in the car: from left to right, in the front were my aunt and uncle, and in the back, my cousin, my mom, and me. I was completely untouched, and I turned my attention to my mom, to get her calmed down. I focused on her, not wanting to look in the front. None of us had been wearing seatbelts; the back had none, and with the lack of enforcement, front passengers never wear theirs. I was sure that my aunt must be lying on the hood - but she wasn’t. We’d been in an accident like the one in Adaptation when Chris Cooper pulls out of the driveway and gets smoked, but aside from sprains and minor cuts, we were all fine. The passengers on the left side, the side of the impact, got the worst of it, but even they weren’t that badly off. I remember thinking that if you had to get into a major accident, this was the way to do it.

We got out of the car and found that the truck driver had pulled over to take a leak by the side of the road. Other drivers pulled over to see how we were and to yell at the truck driver. We were in the countryside, so someone drove us up the road to some small shops, while someone else fetched a doctor for my aunt. Throughout everything, I felt detached, as if I was watching all these things happening to someone else. I don’t know if I was in shock, but I found myself getting irritated that all everyone around us could talk about was the accident. I wanted to say, “Yeah, it could’ve been terrible, but it wasn’t, so why don’t we talk about something else?” I might’ve actually said something like that.

However, over the next few days, I was reluctant to get into any cars, and when I did have to be driven somewhere I found myself pushing myself back into my seat every time we passed someone. I met someone from Chicago a few years ago who talked about the riots and shootings that happened after when the Bulls would win a championship, and he said, “Chicago’s the only place where you hope your team loses in the playoffs.” I felt like that, as I went from marvelling at how much nicer the roads were now than when I visited ten years ago, to hoping that our routes took us over broken down roads so we’d have to drive slower.

I got back to Canada okay, but the shine’s worn off of India for me. I’m reluctant to go back. The accident wasn’t the only thing, but I always trusted that even though some things seemed strange or wildly unsafe to me, I’d be okay, because the people around me knew what they were doing. Now I’m thinking that a ton of steel and glass doing seventy is a ton of steel and glass doing seventy, no matter where you are. Am I getting conservative in my old age? I wonder.

Reed Richards - Mr. Fantastic Jerk!

Okay, at first glance you'd assume that this is one of those panels taken out of context to warp what's really happening in the scene. Surely, there's some perfectly logical reason why Mr. Fantastic, patriarch of comics' premiere superhero family, the Fantastic Four, is slapping his wife. Mr. Fantastic must be under some kind of mind control, or that's his evil twin, or he's trying to brush that red anemone off her cheek and she's got to shut up so it doesn't go in her mouth.

The interesting thing about this panel is that if you put it in its original context, it's just as bad:

In an even broader context, Susan Storm, the Invisible Girl, is being mind controlled, which explains the 80s hooker outfit but not the mullet. Mr. Fantastic has to snap her out of it, and his plan, as seen here, involves being a gigantic jerk. This being comics, his plan works, they defeat the villains, Mr. Fantastic bottles his nerd rage away again, and the Invisible Girl (now "Woman") doesn't file a restraining order. You'd think the smartest man in the world would be able to come up with a better solution for mind control than "I'll slap some sense into her," but I guess not. Oh casual misogyny in comics, where would the industry be without you?
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I'm off to India for a few days, kids. Photos when I get back.

I've had bad bosses before, but geez...

I ganked these from over at Scans Daily:

I was going to post just that second page, because I think it tells you everything you need to know to get what's going on, but the expression on Robin's face in the very first panel is too good not to share. That's a look that says, "Seriously-- What. The. Fuck." He doesn't say anything the entire time because he can't believe the level of bullshit that's going down.

And I'm guessing it's explained in the story, but why is Batman wearing a trench coat and a hat over his costume? It's a pretty awesome fashion decision, and I guess it speaks to the idea that a superhero's costume is their face, but it strikes me as impractical. Aside from the fact that wearing clothes over your clothes (and your cape) must be restrictive, why would you need a disguise on top of a disguise? Isn't that like wearing a ski mask and a wig? Or maybe a Santa outfit over your Halloween costume? The whole point of the Batman outfit is that it conceals your identity, if it's working you don't need any more than that.

Then again, maybe the fact that the hat and trench coat make no sense is intentional, a kind of shorthand to emphasize that he's gone >ahem< batshit crazy and that's why he's chained his partner to a cinderblock. If that's the case I guess we should count ourselves lucky that he doesn't also have lipstick smeared all over his face and a granny wig over that hat.

EDIT: Jason points out the obvious innuendo of Batman's "Down you go!" line. How did I miss that?

Will I keep buying: Casanova?

I think I’m going to stop buying new comics. I know that sounds like crazy talk, given that I’m in the store every Wednesday and I look forward to buying comics all week, but for someone, let’s say, as “thrifty” as I am, being charged the higher Canadian price when our dollar is stronger right now is driving me crazy. What really gets on my nerves is that comic stores pay the American price for their stock, regardless of what the Canadian cover price is. In Toronto, following the lead of the Silver Snail, comic stores are selling comics at the U.S. cover price, but I don’t know of any stores out here that are doing the same.

Most comics publishers have been slow to alter Canadian cover prices, I figure, so as not to alienate comics retailers, preferring instead to alienate comics buyers. There’s a lot of talk about the effort needed to alter cover pricing, but if our currency had gone in the other direction, I’m sure the response from the big companies would have been much faster.

I’m not giving up comics, but I’m becoming even more selective in what I pick up, and I’m seeing what I can wait to pick up off of eBay or Amazon at a discount. Whenever I’m in the comic store now, the question I ask is, “Do I need this issue right today, or can I wait a few months until it’s collected?” Or, “Do I need to be buying this book at all?” I think a lot of comic buying is driven by the continuous run. You stick with a series long after you’ve stopped enjoying it, sheerly out of force of habit. (The same happens in relationships or with bad TV shows -cough - Smallville - cough -). All you need to drop a series is an excuse to break your uninterrupted streak, like, say, price gouging.

All these thoughts were running through my head last week, when I was in my comic store and I saw the latest issue of Casanova. When this series started up, I gave it a chance precisely because it was cheap. I’d never read anything by the writer, Matt Fraction, or the artist, Gabriel Ba, before, but the series was being published in the format pioneered by Warren Ellis’s Fell: 16 pages of story, 4 pages of text in the back, no ads, all for two bucks, and I wanted to support the experiment. I wound up liking the writing and loving the art, so I stuck with the book.

Recently, however, in addition to my money concerns, Gabriel Ba left the book and his twin brother, Fabio Moon, replaced him, with an art style I don’t like as much. For me, the biggest selling point of this book was always the art, and with all this comic price resentment brewing in me, I decided that this new issue was a make-or-break, and would determine whether I’d keep buying the series.

The issue, unfortunately, was awesome. The book is chock full of good bits, but this three panel sequence convinced me to keep buying:

Casanova is the coolest spy movie you've ever seen, but smarter. Except it's more than that. It's Steranko's Nick Fury by way of Grant Morrison – a comparison I’m not going to be able to make for long, because the more I read of Fraction's work the more I'm hearing a voice distinct from Morrison's- obsessed with the same sort of hypercool weirdness, but tinged more with scifi than, I don’t know, is it magic that Morrison’s into? Casanova is funny, it's clever, it's mean, and while it's all about surfaces there’s something going on underneath. The whole first issue is online here. You should read it.