In 1952, the UN issued an urgent report warning that American comic books and their sadistic superhero characters had become a threat to world peace: "By undermining or warping the traditional values of each country, the Superman myth is becoming ...

In 1952, the UN issued an urgent report warning that American comic books and their sadistic superhero characters had become a threat to world peace: "By undermining or warping the traditional values of each country, the Superman myth is becoming a kind of international monster.

The Phantom Zone overspilleth!

catastrofe:

dream job

No wires

The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1991) [1]

This is no fantasy... no careless product of wild imagination. No, my good friends.

The opening lines of Richard Donner's Superman (1978) [2] In a 1950 film serial entitled Atom Man vs Superman [3] television executive and evil genius Lex Luthor sends Superman into a ghostly limbo he calls "The Empty Doom." Trapped in this phantom void, Superman's infinite powers are rendered useless, for although he can still see and hear the "real" world his ability to interact with it has all but disappeared. Over the following decades this paraspace [4]—to use Samuel Delany's term for a fictional space, accessed via technology, that is neither within nor entirely separate from the 'real' world—would reappear in the Superman mythos in various forms, beginning in 1961. Eventually dubbed "The Phantom Zone," its back story was reworked substantially, until by the mid 60s it had become a parallel dimension discovered by Superman's father, Jor El. Once used to incarcerate Krypton's most unsavory characters, The Phantom Zone had outlasted its doomed home world and eventually burst at the seams, sending legions of super-evil denizens raining down onto Earth. Beginning its life as an empty doom, The Phantom Zone was soon filled with terrors prolific enough to make even The Man of Steel fear its existence.

Overseen by story editor Mortimer Weisinger, and the unfortunately named artist Wayne Boring, the late 50s and early 60s were a strange time in the Superman universe. The comics suddenly became filled with mutated variants of kryptonite that gave Superman the head of an ant or the ability to read thoughts; with miniature Supermen arriving seconds before their namesake to save the day and steal his thunder; with vast universes of time caught fast in single comic book panels. It was an era of narrative excess wrapped by a tighter, more meticulous and, many would say, repressed aesthetic:

Centuries of epic time could pass in a single caption. Synasties fell between balloons, and the sun could grow old and die on the turn of a page. It was a toy world, too, observed through the wrong end of a telescope. Boring made eternity tiny, capable of being held in two small hands. He reduced the infinite to fit in a cameo... [5]

The Phantom Zone is one of the least bizarre narrative concepts from what is now known as the Silver Age of D.C. Comics (following on from the more widely celebrated Golden Age). It could be readily understood on a narrative level, and it had a metaphorical dimension as well, one that made conceivable the depths contained in Superman's vast, but ultimately manipulable universe. The Phantom Zone was usually portrayed on a television screen kept safe in one of the many rooms of the League of Justice headquarters. It could also be used as a weapon and fired from a portable projection device—the cold, harsh infinity of the Empty Doom blazing into Superman's world long enough to ensnare any character foolish enough to stand in its rays. Whether glimpsed on screen or via projection, then, The Phantom Zone could be interpreted as a metaphor for the moving image. 

In comic books, as in the moving image, the frame is the constituent element of narrative. Each page of a comic book is a frame which itself frames a series of frames, so that by altering each panel's size, bleed or aesthetic variety, time and space can be made elastic. Weisinger and Boring's Phantom Zone took this mechanism further, behaving like a weaponized frame free to roam within the comic book world. Rather than manipulating three-dimensional space or the fourth dimension of time, as the comic book frame does, The Phantom Zone opened out onto the existence of other dimensions. It was a comic book device that bled beyond the edge of the page, out into a world in which comic book narratives were experienced not in isolation, but in parallel with the onscreen narratives of the cinema and the television. As such, the device heralded televisual modes of attention.

For his 1978 big-budget movie version of Superman, [6] director Richard Donner cunningly translated The Phantom Zone into something resembling the cinema screen itself. In the film's opening sequence, a crystal surface swoops down from the immense backdrop of space, rendering the despicable General Zod and his cronies two-dimensional as it imprisons them. In the documentary The Magic Behind the Cape, [7] bundled with the DVD release of Superman in 2001, we are given an insight into the technical prowess behind Donner's The Phantom Zone. The actors are made to simulate existential terror against the black void of the studio, pressed up against translucent, flesh-like membranes and physically rotated out of sync with the gaze of the camera. Rendering the faux two-dimensional surface of Donner's Phantom Zone believable required all manner of human dimensions to be framed out of the final production. The actors react to causes generated beyond the studio space, the director's commands, or the camera's gaze. They twist and recoil from transformations still to occur in post-production. In a sense, the actors behave as bodies that are already images. With its reliance on post-produced visual effects, the Phantom Zone sequence represents an intermediary stage in the gradual removal of sets, locations, and any 'actual' spatial depths from the film production process. Today, actors must address their humanity to green voids post-produced with CGI, and the indexical relationship between the film image and the events unfolding in front of the lens have been almost entirely shattered. In this Phantom cinema produced after the event, ever-deeper layers of special effects seal actors into a cinematic paraspace. Just as The Phantom Zone of the comic book heralded televisual modes of attention, The Phantom Zone of the 1970s marked a perceptual regime in which the cinematic image was increasingly sealed off from reality by synthetic visual effects.

   For Walter Benjamin, writing during cinema's first “Golden Era,", the ability of the cinema screen to frame discontinuous times and spaces represented its most profound "truth." Delivered by cinema, Benjamin argued, mechanically disseminated images were actually fracturing the limits of our perceptions, training "human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily." [8]  The cinema screen offered audiences who were confined to finite bodies that had never before experienced such juxtapositions an apparently shared experience of illuminated consciousness. Far from inventing this new mode of perception through the "shock-character" of montage, Benjamin believed that cinema spoke of the 'truths' which awaited us beneath the mirage of proletarian experience. Truths which would guide us—with utopian fervor—towards an awareness, and eventual control, of what Benjamin called the "new nature":

Not just industrial technology, but the entire world of matter (including human beings) as it has been transformed by that technology. [9]

In short, cinema was less a technology than a new and evolving mode of machinic thought, both generated by and generating the post-industrial subject. Observing the relation between representation and visibility, Jens Andermann notes:

Truth, the truth of representation, crucially depends on the clear-cut separation between the visible and the invisible, the non-objectness of the latter. Truth is the effect of what we could call the catachretic nature of visuality, the way in which the world of visual objects can point to the invisible domain of pure being only by obsessively pointing to itself. [10]

As from the Greek root aisthanesthai – "to perceive"—the aesthetic conditions through which The Phantom Zone have been translated frame far more than a supposed fictional void. Called upon to indicate an absolute outside — the unfathomable infinity of another, ghostly, parallel universe — The Phantom Zone instead reiterates the medium of its delivery, whether comic book, television, or cinema, with mirror-like insistency. Such is the power of new technical modes of thought, that very often, they cause us to rethink the outmoded media that we are so used to as to be unaware. The Phantom Zone hides the cinematographic image in plain view. Its reappearance and reimagining over the last 60 odd years, in ever newer forms and aesthetic modes, can be read paradigmatically, that is, as a figure that stands in place of, and points towards, shifts, mutations and absolute overturnings in our perceptual apparatus. Its most recent iteration is in the 2013 Superman reboot, Man of Steel, [11] and in particular in a 'viral' trailer distributed on YouTube a few weeks before the film was released. [12] Coming towards us soars a new mode of machinic thought; a Phantom Zone of unparalleled depth and aesthetic complexity that opens onto a new new - digital - nature.

The General Zod trailer for Man of Steel begins with a static rift that breaks into a visual and audial disarrangement of the phrase, “You are not alone". General Zod's masked face materializes, blended with the digital miasma: a painterly 3D effect that highlights the inherent ‘otherness' of where his message originates. The aesthetic is unsettling in as much as it is recognizable. We have no doubt as viewers of this 'viral' dispatch as to the narrative meaning of what we are witnessing, namely, a datastream compressed and distributed from a paraspace by an entity very much unlike us. The uncanny significance of the trailer stems more from how very normal the digital miasma feels; from how apprehensible this barrage of noise is to us. Indeed, it is ‘other', but its otherness is also somehow routine, foreseeable. The pathogen here is not Zod's message, it is digital technology itself. The glitched aesthetic of the trailer has become so habitual as to herald the passing of digital materiality into the background of awareness. Its mode of dissemination, via the Trojan Horse of YouTube, just as unvisible to us during the regular shifts we make between online/offline modes of communication. The surface of this Phantom Zone very much interfaces with our material world, even if the message it impresses upon us aches to be composed of an alien substance.   Digital video does the work of representation via a series of very clever algorithms called codecs that compress the amount of information needed to produce a moving image. Rather than the individual frames of film, each as visually rich and total as the last, in a codec only the difference between frames need be encoded, making each frame “more like a set of movement instructions than an image." [13] The painterly technique used in the General Zod trailer is normally derived from a collapse between key (image) and reference (difference) frames at the status of encoding. The process is called ‘datamoshing', and has its origins in glitch art, a form of media manipulation predicated on those minute moments when the surface of an image or sound cracks open to reveal some aspect of the process that produced it. By a method of cutting, repeating or glitching of key and reference frames visual representations are made to blend into one another, space becomes difference and time becomes image. The General Zod trailer homages/copies/steals the datamoshing technique, marking digital video's final move from convenient means of dissemination, to palpable aesthetic and cultural influence.  In the actual movie, Man of Steel (2013), Zod's video message is transposed in its entirety to the fictional Planet Earth. The viral component of its movement around the web is entirely absent: its apparent digitality, therefore, remains somewhat intact, but only as a mere surface appearance. This time around the message shattering through The Phantom Zone is completely devoid of affective power: it frames nothing but its existence as a narrative device. The filmmakers rely on a series of “taking over the world" tropes to set the stage for General Zod's Earth-shaking proclamation. TV sets in stereotypical, exotic, locales flicker into life, all broadcasting the same thing. Electronic billboards light up, loudspeakers blare, mobile phones rumble in pockets, indeed, all imaging technologies suddenly take on the role of prostheses for a single, datamoshed, stream. In one—particularly sincere—moment of the montage a faceless character clutches a Nokia brand smartphone in the centre of shot and exclaims, “It's coming through the RSS feeds!" This surface, this Phantom Zone, frames an apparatus far vaster than a datamoshed image codec: an apparatus apparently impossible to represent through the medium of cinema. The surface appearance of the original viral trailer is only a small component of what constitutes the image it conveys, and thus, of the image it frames of our time. Digital materiality shows itself via poorly compressed video clips arriving through streams of overburdened bandwidth. Our understanding of what constitutes a digital image must then, according to Mark Hansen, “be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable." [14]

In its cinematic and comic book guises, The Phantom Zone was depicted as “a kind of membrane dividing yet connecting two worlds that are alien to and also dependent upon each other".[15] The success of the datamoshed trailer comes from the way it broke through that interface, its visual surface bubbling with a new kind of viral, digital, potential that encompasses and exposes the material engaged in its delivery. As cinematographic subjects we have an integral understanding of the materiality of film. Although we know that the frames of cinema are separate we crave the illusion of movement, and the image of time, they create. The ‘viral' datamoshed message corrupts this separation between image and movement, the viewer and the viewed. Not only does General Zod seem to push out, from inside the numerical image, it is as if we, the viewing subject enraptured by the digital event, have been consumed by its flow. The datamoshed Phantom Zone trailer takes the one last, brave, step beyond the apparatus of image production. Not only is the studio, the actor, and even the slick appeal of CGI framed out of its mode of delivery, arriving through a network that holds us complicit, this Phantom Zone frames the 'real' world in its entirety, making even the fictional world it appeals to devoid of affective impact. To take liberty with the words of Jean Baudrillard:

[Jorge Luis] Borges wrote: they are slaves to resemblance and representation; a day will come when they will try to stop resembling. They will go to the other side of the mirror and destroy the empire. But here, you cannot come back from the other side. The empire is on both sides. [16]

Once again, The Phantom Zone highlights the material mode of its delivery with uncanny exactness. We are now surrounded by images that supersede mere visual appearance: they generate and are generated by everything the digital touches, including we, the most important component of General Zod's 'viral' diffusion. The digital Phantom Zone extends to both sides of the flickering screen.   References

[1] Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. (London: Free Association Books Ltd, 1991), 149–181.

[2] Richard Donner, Superman, Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, 1978.

[3] Spencer Gordon Bennet, Atom Man Vs. Superman, Sci-Fi, 1950.

[4] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 164.

[5] Grant Morrison, Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero (London: Vintage Books, 2012), 62.

[6] Donner, Superman.

[7] Michael Thau, The Magic Behind the Cape, Documentary, Short, 2001. See : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYXbzVJ6NzA&feature=youtu.be&t=4m12s

[8] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge  Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 26.

[9] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1991), 70.

[10] Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Pre, 2007), 5.

[11] Zack Snyder, Man of Steel, Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, 2013.

[12] Man of Steel Viral - General Zod's Warning (2013) Superman Movie HD, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QkfmqsDTgY.

[13] BackStarCreativeMedia, “Datamoshing—the Beauty of Glitch," April 9, 2009, http://backstar.com/blog/2009/04/09/datamoshing-the-beauty-of-glitch/.

[14] Mark B. Hansen, “Cinema Beyond Cybernetics, or How to Frame the Digital Image," Configurations 10, no. 1 (2002): 54, doi:10.1353/con.2003.0005.

[15] Mark Poster, The Second Media Age (Wiley, 1995), 20.

[16] Jean Baudrillard, “The Murder of the Sign," in Consumption in an Age of Information, ed. Sande Cohen and R. L. Rutsky (Berg, 2005), 11.  

In the original Superman films General Zod and his accomplices are trapped in The Phantom Zone, which in the films is represented as a 2D 'crystal' prison sent spinning through space. I am looking for any writings/insights into how the visual effects for this were created, and exactly by whom. Any other insights, from comic book lore, about how the Phantom Zone was represented - especially visually - would also be appreciated. I know about the Richard Donner controversy (Superman was directed by Richard Donner in 1978, and after he was 'fired' from the project Superman II was taken over by Richard Lester, 1980). That's for another discussion.

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A child sent to Earth from a dying planet is adopted by a couple in rural Kansas. Posing as a journalist, he uses his extraordinary powers to protect his new home from an insidious evil.

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The Phantom Zone

Mr. Daniel

digg.com/odd_stuff/Superman_s_challenged_half_brother_pic

This text was read out loud on the 21st November, as part of the Volatile Dispersal: Festival of Art-Writing, held at The Whitechapel Gallery Thanks must go to Maria Fusco and Francesco Pedraglio for asking me to take part…

In one of the most uncanny revelations in science fiction, the protagonist of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine awakes from his anthropic slumber: the museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his future. Like the Time Traveller it is easy to forget, that however hard we try to walk beyond a given path, we will always tend to inscribe another in our wake. ——– I discovered the ants trailing like gunpowder across my kitchen floor. Before I had time to think I had vacuumed up a thousand. Yet they kept coming, tending to resurge where last I had punished them; coursing like a rainless cloud on the exact same trajectory each time. ——–

The French tourist attraction Lascaux II is like the 1980 family movie Superman II because: 1. It’s a translation of archetypes, a kind of ode to idealism. 2. Some people claim that it is better than the original. 3. The special effects are dated, but they still pack a punch. 4. It cost millions to produce. 5. All it is is editing. In 1963 Lascaux cave, a network of subterranean tunnels scrawled with some of the earliest known Upper Palaeolithic human art, was closed to public scrutiny. Since its discovery in 1940 around a thousand visitors had trampled through the site per day, bringing with them a toxic mix of exhaled CO2 and greasy, groping fingers. In 1983 the Lascaux II replica was opened to the public. The tourist attraction contains a faithful recreation of the textured surface of the original cave upon which 75% of the precious art has been meticulously copied. In the late 1970s Richard Donner, a talented director best known for his earlier film The Omen, was fired by the producers of the Superman franchise. Donner’s attempt to craft and create two Superman movies back to back had become hampered by production disagreements. A new director, Richard Lester, was drafted in to piece together the unfinished second film from remnants that Richard Donner had left scattered on the cutting-room floor. Lester’s Superman II was released in 1980. Richard Donner’s name was absent from the credits. The original Lascaux cave rests in darkness again now, killing the time its simulation has reclaimed from toxic breath and greasy, groping fingers. The addition of a ‘state-of-the-art’ air conditioning system to the Lascaux complex is thought to be responsible for a virulent, black fungus now invading the site. Experts are looking for a solution to the new problem they helped introduce. Richard Donner finally released a ‘faithful’ version of Superman II in late 2006, a version for which Richard Lester received no credit. The two films contain around 75% of the same material, in vaguely different orders. ——– Somewhere unseen to me a billowing sack of protoplasm with the head of a Queen was giving birth to its hundredth clone of the day. But unlike its brethren this clone would never grow towards the daylight. A dark shroud of worker ants would drag poison into its womb: a deadly meal upon which the nest would feast. ——–

Most fire ant bait is an insecticide and an attractive ant food combination made up of processed corn grits coated with soybean oil. Baits are taken into the colony by ants searching for food. The bait is distributed to other members of the colony through the exchange of food known as trophallaxis. Although several fire ant baits are available, there are two main types: insect growth regulators and actual toxins. Hydramethylnon bait is a toxin that disrupts the ant’s ability to convert food to energy. Spinosad bait is a biorational toxin derived through the fermentation of a soil dwelling bacteria. Abamectin, the toxin in Raid® Fire Ant Bait is also the result of the fermentation of soil dwelling bacteria. Fipronil bait disrupts the insect’s nervous system through contact and stomach action. Fenoxycarb, or methoprene, and pyriproxyfen are all insect growth regulators that prevent queens from producing new workers. One key to the efficiency of baits is that the insecticide gets to the queen. 1 ——– In my local supermarket was an aisle devoted to domestic murder. Sticky traps infused with cockroach friendly aromas; circular baiting baths filled with a saccharine mosquito-drowning dew. Tablets for prevention, sprays for elimination and piles of bug-nets, bug-bats, bug-bombs and bug-poisons. ——–

In a central scene from the 1991 film, Terminator II, Sarah Conner attempts escape from the high-security asylum in which she has been incarcerated. For a patient, deemed to be dangerously unstable, an asylum is a rigid tangle of limits, barriers, locked-doors and screeching alarms. Sarah Conner’s escape is notable because of its affirmation of the paths of the asylum. Far from moving beyond it, Conner uses the rigidity of the system to aid her movement through the building. From the very beginning of the scene Conner’s dancing feet, her balletic violence, inscribe into the constraints of the asylum a pattern of the purest desire. A paper-clip, a broom and a container of bleach – all systematic of order and closure – become in turn a lock-pick, a weapon and a kidnapping ploy. A key, usually a symbol of access and movement between limits, is snapped in its lock and instantly becomes a barrier. Only upon the arrival of The Terminator and her son, John, does Sarah’s freedom over the asylum finally ebb back towards the traditional limits of fear and isolation.

——– I bought a box of Raid ant bait. The compound eyes and hideous mandibles of a cartoon ant stared back at me from the package. This caricature, designed to demonise the ants, instead expressed their human-like determination. A determination that I would use against them. A determination bound up and offered to them like a spoonful of Trojan horses. ——–

Though the radiation from kryptonite is detrimental to all life, it is especially harmful to Kryptonians such as Superman. Kryptonite is the ore of kryptonium, and usually has a green hue. Although, in its red form, kryptonite is perhaps at its most unpredictable. Red kryptonite turned Superman into a powerless giant and a dwarf. Turned him into a terrifying Kryptonian dragon. Red kryptonite drove Superman insane for a period of forty-eight hours. Made Superman unable to see anything green; grow incredibly long hair, nails, and beard. Grow fat; gain the ability to read thoughts; grow a third eye in the back of his head. Lose his invulnerability along the left side of his body. Split into an evil Superman and a good Clark Kent. Become apathetic. Be rendered unable to speak or write anything but Kryptonese. Grow an extra set of arms. Become clumsy. Swap bodies with the person nearest him. Transfer his powers. Rapidly age. Go through multiple personality changes. And have his skin rendered transparent overloading him with solar power. Red kryptonite made flames shoot out of Superman’s mouth and endowed him with the power to make his wishes come true. Red kryptonite transformed Superman into an infant with the mind of an adult. Robbed Superman of his super powers and afflicted him with total amnesia. Red kryptonite once endowed Superman with the head and antennae of a giant ant.2

——– I set down the bait, causing the trail of ants to divert and invert. After a few moments of disorder the nest plotted a new trajectory: the black cloud bleeding into yellow poison. Ants never anticipate. They only creep onwards, solving each problem as it comes to them. Surviving because survival is what ants do. ——–

It is written that when the Maya people of The New World were first set upon by the Spanish cavalry it was spiritual confusion that hastened their demise. To their eyes the seething onslaught of man and horse was made of but one, new and terrifying, species of creature. In the West we might call these creatures Centaurs: liminal entities fused of two distinct species. To the Maya the border between God and beast was breached by the Spanish invaders, truly alien beings who in all but one generation would subsume the Maya under a wave of technology, disease and colonial ascent. At the time these stories first made their way across the Atlantic ocean the Mayan Centaurs would have been seen as examples of a primitive world view. Today we tend to believe we have a clearer conception of history, one not marred by colonial aspirations or archaic stereotypes. And yet, like Edwin Hubble, staring out at an ever expanding universe, the more we examine these events the more they seem to accelerate away from us. Like the Maya we are constrained by our perceiving eye, by the cultural reservoir within which our imaginations swim. It is as though the very fidelity of reality is determined at its point of viewing, that in some sense we will always see Centaurs where really there sit men on their horses. ——– By morning the upturned plastic mushroom was empty of its poison, as piece by piece the ant bait had been dragged, carried and manoeuvred into the nest. In places a fine yellow dust now stained the kitchen’s cracked linoleum. A dust composed of corn grits soaked with delicious, deadly poison.

1 Extracted from University of Arkansas web archive: http://tinyurl.com/6xzob2

2 Dialogue text compiled from online sources: wiki.superman.nu/wiki/index.php/Red_Kryptonite, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptonite & supermanhomepage.com/comics/comics.php?topic=comics-sfaq#Q34

by Daniel Rourke I discovered the ants trailing like gunpowder across my kitchen floor. Before I had time to think I had vacuumed up a thousand. Yet they kept coming, tending to resurge where last I had punished them; coursing like a rainless cloud on the exact same trajectory each time. Somewhere unseen to me a billowing sack of protoplasm with the head of a Queen was giving birth to its hundredth clone of the day. But unlike its brethren this clone would never grow towards the daylight. A dark shroud of worker ants would drag poison into its womb: a deadly meal upon which the nest would feast. In my local supermarket was an aisle devoted to domestic murder. Sticky traps infused with cockroach friendly aromas; circular baiting baths filled with a saccharine mosquito-drowning dew. Tablets for prevention, sprays for elimination and piles upon piles of bug-nets, bug-bats, bug-bombs and bug-poisons. I bought a box of Raid ant bait. The compound eyes and hideous mandibles of a cartoon ant stared back at me from the package. This caricature, designed to demonise the ants, instead expressed their human-like determination. A determination that I would use against them. A determination bound up and offered to them like a spoonful of Trojan horses. The French tourist attraction Lascaux II is like the 1980 family movie Superman II because: It’s a translation of archetypes, a kind of ode to idealism. Some people claim that it is better than the original. The special effects are dated, but they still pack a punch. It cost millions to re-produce. All it is is editing. In 1963 Lascaux cave, a network of subterranean tunnels scrawled with some of the earliest known Upper Palaeolithic human art, was closed to public scrutiny. Since its discovery in 1940 around a thousand visitors had trampled through the site per day, bringing with them a toxic mix of exhaled CO2 and greasy, groping fingers. In 1983 the Lascaux II replica was opened to the public. The tourist attraction contains a faithful recreation of the textured surface of the original cave upon which 75% of the precious art has been meticulously copied. In the late 1970s Richard Donner, a talented director best known for his earlier film The Omen, was fired by the producers of the Superman franchise. Donner’s attempt to craft and create two Superman movies back to back had become hampered by production disagreements. A new director, Richard Lester, was drafted in to piece together the unfinished second film from remnants that Richard Donner had left scattered on the cutting-room floor. Lester’s Superman II was released in 1980. Richard Donner’s name was absent from the credits. The original Lascaux cave rests in darkness again now, killing the time its simulation has reclaimed from toxic breath and greasy, groping fingers. The addition of a ‘state-of-the-art’ air conditioning system to the Lascaux complex is thought to be responsible for a virulent, black fungus now invading the site. Experts are looking for a solution to the new problem they helped introduce. Richard Donner finally released a ‘faithful’ version of Superman II in late 2006, a version for which Richard Lester received no credit. The two films contain around 75% of the same material, in vaguely different orders. Most fire ant bait is an insecticide and an attractive ant food (generally processed corn grits coated with soybean oil) combination. Baits are taken into the colony by ants searching for food. The bait is distributed to other members of the colony through the exchange of food known as trophallaxis. Although several fire ant baits are available, there are two main types: insect growth regulators and actual toxins. Hydramethylnon bait (Amdro®, Siege® and Maxforce®) is a toxin (slow acting stomach poison) that disrupts the ant’s ability to convert food to energy. Spinosad bait (Eliminator® Justice™) is a slow acting biorational toxin derived through the fermentation of a soil dwelling bacteria. Abamectin, the toxin in Raid® Fire Ant Bait is also the result of the fermentation of soil dwelling bacteria. Fipronil bait (Chipco® Firestar™) is a slow acting toxin that disrupts the insect’s nervous system through contact and stomach action. Fenoxycarb (Award™ and Logic®), or methoprene, (Extinguish™) and pyriproxyfen (Distance® and Spectracide®) are all insect growth regulators that prevent queens from producing new workers. Abamectin (Clinch™, Varsity™, Ascend™ and Raid®) bait acts both as an insect growth regulator and a toxin. One key to the efficiency of baits is that the insecticide gets to the queen. [i] (The stage is very dark. The sound of breathing can be heard, and then the scrape of a foot against something solid. The darkness holds in this state for a few more moments. The breathing dwindles to a spoken whisper, low and indistinct. These noises echo from within a narrow space. They grow closer as they repeat. The audience waits. A flicker of light erupts from below stage right. It swells and diminishes like a heart-beat. The stage is modelled on the inside of a cavern. Its edges fill all angles of the stage except the obligatory missing section. It is through this absence that the audience watches. Two men clamber up from a tiny recess in the simulated stone. An older man carries a flame set upon a gnarled tree root. The dank odour of tar drifts out from the flame as the men catch their breath. There is only an iota of light. The audience waits.) Older man: Though the radiation from kryptonite is detrimental to all life, it is especially harmful to Kryptonians such as Superman. Man: Kryptonite is the ore of kryptonium, and usually has a green hue. Older man: Although in its red form, kryptonite is perhaps at its most unpredictable. Man: Red kryptonite is especially volatile. (pauses, looking at his companion) No two chunks of red kryptonite have the same effect on Superman. (The two men drift. The older man's lantern casts the only light in the theatre. A series of hand outlines, shaped in ochre powder, are met by the men's gaze. In turn they each press an outstretched hand to one of these, muttering under their breath. After this ceremony they find seating spaces and buckle into crossed legs. As well as his flame the older man carries a small, leather pouch over one shoulder which he now sets down. The men are dishevelled and dirty with tar smoke.) Older man: Red kryptonite turned Superman into a powerless giant and a dwarf. Man: (thinking at first) Turned him into a terrifying Kryptonian dragon. Older man: Red kryptonite drove Superman insane for a period of forty-eight hours. Man: Made Superman unable to see anything green; grow incredibly long hair, nails, and beard. Older man: Grow fat; gain the ability to read thoughts; grow a third eye in the back of his head. Man: Lose his invulnerability along the left side of his body. Older man: Split into an evil Superman and a good Clark Kent. Man: Become apathetic. Older man: Be rendered unable to speak or write anything but Kryptonese. (The older man opens his pouch, passing his companion the lantern. He pulls out handfuls of twigs, moss and dried fungal remnants and begins to build a fire.) Man: Grow an extra set of arms. Older man: Become clumsy. Man: Swap bodies with the person nearest him. Older man: Transfer his powers. Man: Rapidly age. Older man: Go through multiple personality changes. Man: And have his skin rendered transparent... Older man: ...overloading him with solar power. (By now the fire has been built. The younger man lights the fire. As it begins to burn the light of the stage naturally increases. The cave walls are covered with ancient depictions of horses, reindeer, mammoth and bears, as well as the outlined hand-prints.) Man: (thinking again) Red kryptonite made flames shoot out of Superman’s mouth and endowed him with the power to make his wishes come true. Older man: (weary) Transformed Superman into an infant with the mind of an adult. Man: Robbed Superman of his super powers and afflicted him with total amnesia. (From the fire the older man now draws a length of charred wood. He stubs the stick into the ground, and pinches at its end, blowing away the cinders until only a charcoal tip remains. The older man attempts to stand, eventually requiring his companion’s assistance. He walks the length of the cave, touching his fingers against the animal depictions. Coming upon the naive likeness of a human amongst the animals he taps it in recognition, and begins to mark the figure with his charcoal tool. His marks are simple strokes, but they highlight the human form until it is transformed into something quite different. His companion speaks as he continues to draw.) Man: Is that everything? (The older man continues transforming the painting. From its head he draws a set of antennae. Its torso he elongates into a tear-shaped thorax, adding new limbs onto the extended body. He finishes, stepping back. The human now resembles a giant ant, defined in charcoal against the surface of rock.) Older man: Red kryptonite once endowed Superman with the head and antennae of a giant ant.[ii] Ants! Giant fucking ants! Millions of them, with spiny knees and quivering mandibles trickling with deathly secretions. They advanced upon Earth, taking Tokyo at first, seeming to rise up as one black monolith and wash across the terrified metropolis below. They came from the moon - or perhaps from outer space - although tales of cracks in the Earth opening to an ant-shaped hell beneath could not be founded on rumour alone. From Asia they advanced West, pulling behind them the glistening entrails of human civilisation in one terrific globule. To cross the Himalayas they congregated along its flank in layers, cemented one upon the other with human gunk, until a sheer wall of arthropod crept like a heavenly bridge, up and over the mountain peaks. By the time they reached Iraq they had crushed five hundred armies beneath their scurrying limbs. The viscous mass of human dead they trailed behind them now teemed with the remains of fighter jets, gun turrets and ten thousand war tanks - all minced together in the goo. On a dusty plain, not far from the city of Baghdad, the horde began to gather. Within hours a vast swathe of earth and human cement had been erected into a cone-shaped tower of Babel. The human armies kept their distance defending what little remained of the terrified populous; cursing their inevitable slip from the top of the food-chain; peering back into the evolutionary quagmire from whence they had risen. From the entrance of their Biblical tower the insects extended, like a waiting procession, along the walls of Babylon. With their antennae pushed up high and their thoraxes lowered onto the hot desert ground it was then that their Queen appeared in the sky. In her tree-trunk sized jaws she carried a great, green meteorite, which she set down at the gates of her new ant city. The rock emanated from within a pulse of fire which seemed to re-energise the ant millions; causing their many limbs to chatter against one another; causing the whole of Earth to tremble in anticipation. There are many contradictory tales of what happened next. Some say that the green rock cracked, tearing apart the Earth with its power. Others claim that the Queen ant shed an outer skin, revealing beneath a pair of golden wings. The most accepted story though, and the one to which I subscribe, is that slowly the Queen rolled the green rock in through the gates of the tower, her army following behind her, until the entire swarm had disappeared into the awesome nest. Today the new Babel tower glints in the sun, its upper-most pinnacle piercing through the thin desert clouds. It is said that one day, when the ants have waited out their restful sleep, our waking nightmare will drive them from the tower once again. But I don't believe that, knowing that in time all monuments must crumble to the earth which bore them. Instead I listen carefully for the pulse of the Queen's cargo. Turning my ear to the trembling sky. Waiting for it to speak of the journeys on which it has travelled. Hoping that somewhere, out in the depths of outer space, the ant Queen is revered as the saviour of her alien race. By morning the upturned plastic mushroom was empty of its poison, as piece by piece the ant bait had been dragged, carried and manoeuvred into the nest. In places a fine yellow dust now stained the kitchen's cracked linoleum. A dust composed of corn grits soaked with delicious, deadly poison.END [i] Extracted from University of Arkansas web archive.[ii] Dialogue text compiled from online sources: Superman wiki, Wikipedia& SupermanHomePage. by Daniel Rourke