r/Crazy_retro_stories

OSAMA BIN LADEN: THE PALADIN OF JIHAD

May 5, 1996

Osama bin Laden is a hard man to find. An exile from Saudi Arabia, he has lived in Sudan for five years, but he is a recluse, and his whereabouts are known only to his aides and a handful of Sudanese officials. To arrange to see him, I first had to track down one of bin Laden’s associates in London. Then, at a tearoom near Charing Cross Station, I made a request for a meeting. Several weeks later, bin Laden sent encouragement. I traveled to Khartoum, and waited for a few days at a hotel when a message came through the front desk, “The businessman will see you.”

A Toyota with black-tinted windows picked me up and drove me through Khartoum. Finally, after arriving at a building on the outskirts of the city, I was shown into a cramped office where several bodyguards stood watchfully. Tall, barefoot, smiling broadly, bin Laden greeted me in a gold-trimmed robe and red-checkered headdress. With an exaggerated gesture of his arms, he offered a cushion as a seat. Depending on who is to be believed, this gracious hospitality came from either a devout Muslim businessman, as bin Laden would claim, or “one of the most significant financial sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world today,” as the U.S. State Department describes him.

The U.S. has a special interest in bin Laden because of the bombing that occurred last November at an American-run National Guard training center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Seven people were killed, including five Americans. Last week, Saudi television broadcast the confessions of four men arrested in the bombing, and they said they had been influenced by faxes sent from bin Laden’s Advice and Reformation Committee. U.S. officials investigating the bombing believe bin Laden’s involvement may have gone further, and one says he is “high on our suspect list.”

Although virtually unknown in the West, bin Laden is a towering figure among Islamic fundamentalists. His late father rose from peasant origins in Yemen to become Saudi Arabia’s richest construction magnate. The family’s wealth is estimated at $5 billion, and at 38, Osama bin Laden personally controls a fortune of perhaps $300 million. In the 1980s he became famous in Islamic circles for his heroic role fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan as one of the main leaders of the Arab volunteers. A few years after the war, he went into exile in Sudan, where he runs several businesses–a construction firm, a farm that produces sunflower seeds, a tannery that exports goat hides to Italy.

But his resume doesn’t end there. Bin Laden has become prominent in the embryonic Islamic movement aimed at toppling the pro-Western monarchy in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, security officials in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. suspect that he has become a central participant in a loose network that provides funds for Islamic terrorists. Rather than depending solely on states like Sudan, Iran or Libya, this group’s jihad is being coordinated and underwritten by individuals as well. In addition to making his own financial contributions, bin Laden plays another role, several sources believe: he raises money from Islamic businessmen, mainly in the Gulf, runs it through companies in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East and eventually funnels it to holy warriors in various countries. “There was a time when people thought that any support for international terrorism must be state-centered,” says a scholar in London. “The bin Laden phenomenon is an illustration of the privatization of the support of terrorism.”

At his office near Khartoum, bin Laden acknowledges his political opposition to the House of Saud, but belittles the terrorism charges. During the long conversation–interrupted twice for prayers–he explained the accusations against him by saying, “The Egyptians would catch somebody who would say, ‘I was trained in bin Laden’s camp.’ These camps were set up to help the Afghans, but suddenly the Egyptian media is blaming me for anything that happens. It’s like blaming a university for students who graduate and go perform bad deeds.”

So far no one has produced conclusive evidence of bin Laden’s involvement with terrorism. Nevertheless, investigators are tracking him closely. Sources in the West and Middle East have told TIME the following:

–Last December, British police raided the London residence of an Algerian named Rachid Ramda and found communications from the Armed Islamic Group, an Algerian organization suspected in seven bombings in France that killed seven and wounded 180 last year. The police also discovered records of wire-fund transfers and traced them to bin Laden’s headquarters in Khartoum.

–Also in December, Egyptian security officials uncovered a conspiracy by the extremist group Islamic Jihad to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak. Based on interrogations, which may have included torture, Egyptian authorities are now investigating an informant’s tip that bin Laden helped fund the plot.

–Relying on confessions by suspected terrorists, Egyptian security officials also allege that bin Laden is the major financier of a camp in Afghanistan called Kunar that provides training for recruits of Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group, both Egyptian terrorist organizations.

–Citing its own intelligence sources, the U.S. State Department claims that bin Laden helps fund three terrorist training camps in northern Sudan. Extremists from Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia receive instruction at the camps.

–In 1992 two hotel bombs in Aden killed two Austrian tourists and narrowly missed 100 U.S. servicemen en route to Somalia for Operation Restore Hope. The U.S. State Department says bin Laden was implicated by suspects as the bankroller behind both bombings.

Growing up in Saudi Arabia near the Red Sea, bin Laden struck those around him as an ordinary young man. But he was more pious than his brothers, and was deeply affected by the involvement of his family’s company in rebuilding the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina. Then in 1979, just after he graduated from King Abdul Aziz University, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and mujahedin resistance fighters put out an international plea for help. Bin Laden responded by packing himself and several of his family’s bulldozers off to central Asia. He was inspired, he said, by the plight of Muslims in a medieval society besieged by a 20th century superpower. “In our religion, there is a special place in the hereafter for those who participate in jihad,” he told TIME. “One day in Afghanistan was like 1,000 days of praying in an ordinary mosque.”

At first his work was political. He recruited thousands of Arab fighters in the Gulf, paid for their passage to Afghanistan and set up the main guerrilla camp to train them. Later he designed and constructed defensive tunnels and ditches along the Pakistani border, driving a bulldozer and exposing himself to strafing from Soviet helicopter gunships. Before long, he had taken up a Kalashnikov and was going into battle. In 1986 he and a few dozen Arab defenders fought off a Soviet onslaught in a town called Jaji, not far from the Pakistani border. To Arabs, it was one of the first demonstrations that the Russians could actually be beaten. A year later, bin Laden led an offensive against Soviet troops in the battle of Shaban. Vicious hand-to-hand fighting claimed heavy mujahedin casualties, but his men succeeded in pushing the Soviets out of the area.

“He was a hero to us because he was always on the front line, always moving ahead of everybody else,” recalls Hamza Mohammed, a Palestinian volunteer in Afghanistan who now manages one of bin Laden’s construction projects in Sudan. “He not only gave his money, but he also gave himself. He came down from his palace to live with the Afghan peasants and the Arab fighters. He cooked with them, ate with them, dug trenches with them. That was bin Laden’s way.”

Bin Laden returned home to discover that he had become a celebrity. But his star appeal swiftly faded when he began denouncing the Saudi regime. The government had already come under criticism from Muslim activists for its corruption and its failure to adhere strictly to Islamic law. All these failings offended bin Laden. But the real apostasy was King Fahd’s decision to allow Western troops into the kingdom during the Gulf War. In bin Laden’s view, armed infidels in the holy land were a desecration of Islam. After publicly criticizing the regime and becoming the target of a harassment campaign, he fled to Sudan in 1991. A sizable contingent of “Afghan Arabs”–Arabs from various countries who fought in Afghanistan–followed him and found work with his companies.

Now bin Laden runs his farms and his businesses in Sudan, criticizes the Saudi government from afar, and, he says, gives money for charities. He suggested a second meeting, this time at his small, walled farm on the bank of the Blue Nile south of Khartoum. At the farm, he made a point of claiming that the Egyptians had cited it as a terrorist camp. All that could be seen were a few horses, cows and goats. “Take pictures of whatever you like,” bin Laden said with a smile.

Sitting cross-legged on the ground next to the stables, he refused to speak about a number of issues, including his exact links with the governments of Sudan and Iran or with convicted terrorists like Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, now in a U.S. prison. However, he disavowed any involvement in the Riyadh bombing and the recent suicide attacks in Israel. “It is no surprise to me that corrupt regimes would make such charges,” he says.

Despite his denials, bin Laden remains a grave concern to those “corrupt regimes.” He is, as a U.S. official said, a “big fish,” since his heroic reputation gives him influence. According to this official, “Bin Laden is the kind of guy who can go to someone and say, ‘I need you to write out a six-figure check,’ and he gets it on the spot. He hits up Islamic businessmen who in some cases may not know where their money is going. A lot of it isn’t going to rebuild mosques in Bosnia or feed starving Muslims in Somalia. A lot of it is going to set up camps and support networks and procure material for terrorist operations.”

The Saudi government has stripped bin Laden of his citizenship, Britain has forbidden him to enter the country, the U.S. has made serious allegations against him, but so far no one has charged him with any crime. In his conversations with TIME, he gave a warning to those who would continue to pursue him. “People are supposed to be innocent until proved guilty,” he said. “Well, not the Afghan fighters. They are the ‘terrorists of the world.’ But pushing them against the wall will do nothing, except increase the terrorism.”

–Scott Macleod; With reporting by Dean Fischer/Washington and Helen Gibson/London

 

It looks like the forces of darkness are in the ascendant again. When The Exorcist was being filmed, its cast and crew were plagued with apparently devilish accidents, incuding a hallucinating child, a mysterious fire on the set, and the strange case of William Blatty's portrait, inexplicably burst from its frame. Now, it seems, the devil is objecting to the filming of Omen, Twentieth Century-Fox's soon-to-be-released super hair-raiser about a demonic changeling. Bizarre occurrences to date: Star Gregory Peck's plane was struck by lightning when he flew to London to make the film. Two other planes, containing David Seltzer (the film's author) and director Dick Donner, were similarly roughed up. Then, two days after he landed, Donner was hit by a car. When the young boy who plays the changeling visited the London Zoo, a tiger escaped and killed its trainer. Then when Harvey Bernhard, the film's producer, arrived in Rome to shoot Italian sequences, the top of Hadrian's Arch, next door to his hotel, was struck by lightning—something natives swear has never happened before. As for the film itself, an insider who's seen a 22-minute snippet says Omen is going to be "very scary."

----New York Magazine, April 26, 1976

Britain Stringing Along

Apr 27, 1986

Princess Margaret tipsily suggests that the new royal baby be christened Johnny Walker, then collapses in a drunken heap. The Pope comes on as just another hipster in wraparound shades, with a banjo and a Texas drawl. And Ronald Reagan spends most of his time in pajamas searching for his missing brain.

Such are the stars of Spitting Image, the British television program in which some 400 latex and foam-rubber puppets reduce the antics of the powerful to a mess of funny faces, pratfalls and spasmodic jerks. Breaking satirical ground and television rules with equal relish, the weekly show regularly strings along almost one in every four British men, women and children.

The great appeal of the free-for-all farce lies mostly in its outrageousness. Its sights are trained equally upon every sacred cow. During last year’s Christmas special, for example, Prince Philip was shown clutching a bottle of liquor, with Princess Anne collapsed on his shoulder and a housewifely Queen sporting a button that read BAN THE BOMB. In another sketch, a wooden Prince Charles knocks forlornly on his wife’s bedroom door, calling, “Does one want to do a jigsaw with one?” Prince Andrew’s fiancee Sarah (“Fergie”) Ferguson has already become one of the show’s targets. And even the little princes William and Henry are depicted as ten-decibel hellions.

The fantastically unlovely gargoyles are the handiwork of Peter Fluck and Roger Law, who trace their roots back to the caricatures of the 18th century. For most of their careers the pair drew spiffing images of political figures for publications ranging from Britain’s scurrilous Private Eye to the New York Times. These days, working in a converted banana warehouse along the London docks, the international lampooners produce what might best be described as the Muppets seen through Hogarth’s eyes.

While the program’s unmerciful skits have certainly turned plenty of heads in Britain, not everyone regards the product as a jolly good show. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who has been portrayed chatting with Adolf Hitler on immigration policies, saw the satire once and decided that she had seen enough. Many critics have complained that the show’s cynicism is too easy and its script sophomoric. Almost everyone, however, concedes that the japery is nonpartisan. The House of Commons actually has a videotape of the show delivered each week.

Untiring in their efforts to get a rise out of their viewers, the pantomime’s merry pranksters once flashed, for less than a second, a subliminal message that said, “Spitting Image scriptwriters are incredibly good in bed. Go out and sleep with one now.” Even off the air-waves, the Image-makers have frequently made waves. The BBC, for example, refused to play the group’s only recording, in which a make-believe Prince Andrew crooned I’m Just a Prince Who Can’t Say No.

By now, the Spitting Image puppets have become so popular that thieves are taking out after them. First a $2,250 crumple-faced model of Thatcher disappeared, and then a jug-eared Prince Charles dummy. Both robberies, however, seemed only to vindicate the program’s anarchic assumption: for citizens who think themselves puppets in the hands of their rulers, nothing is more satisfying than having rulers as puppets in their hands.

Modern Living: THE BODACIOUS NEW WORLD OF C.B.

TIME

May 9, 1976 9:00

This cotton-picker name of Red Vine from the Dirty Side was rolling a pregnant skate through Watergate town other day when he passed the home twenty of lady breaker First Mama. There was no city kitty so, mercysakes, Red hammered off, keyed his rig and called “Breaker one-niner for KUY-9532. “Negative copy. That foxy lady wasn ‘t hanging out, didn ‘t have her ears on. Good buddy told her anyway, “You truck ’em easy now, Apple Betty. Eighty-eights and ten, roger and out.”

To the owners of 15 million Citizens Band radio sets, and some of the millions more who have become familiar with CB language from records and TV shows, the message was loud and clear: a nontrucker from New York City, whose CB nickname is Red Vine, was driving his Volkswagen through Washington when he passed the White House, home of fellow CB-Owner Betty Ford, whose radionym is First Mama (TIME, May 3). There were no cops around, so he slowed down and tried to reach her on his set, using her FCC-issued call number, but got no response. The attractive First Lady was not monitoring her set,* so Red Vine reminded her to drive safely, wished her love and kisses and signed off.

The cryptic, demotic jargon—and the Arkahoma accent in which it is invariably delivered no matter where in the U.S.—may seem outlandish to many. If so, they had better hang easy and adjust to it. From 8 to 10 million more CB sets will be sold in 1976, which with extra equipment could amount to some $2.5 billion worth—nearly as much as total sales of TV sets. One of the biggest manufacturers, Hy-Gain Electronics Corp. (maker of Betty Ford’s rig), reported that 1976 first-quarter sales quintupled those for the same period in 1975. A $2.95 paperback CB dictionary has sold more than a quarter of a million copies. “CB Land,” as enthusiasts call it, is served by a babel of newspapers, magazines, thousands of clubs and a lobby in Washington. The cult’s most celebrated recent convert after Betty Ford is Snoopy, who has found solace with CB in the Peanuts strip.

Three of the biggest U.S. electronics manufacturers decided this year to enter the lucrative market for what the song The White Knight described as “that Japanese toy, that trucker’s joy.” Most 1976 American cars can be bought with the sets installed; nearly half of all trucks in the U.S. are CB-equipped. The cost is relatively low—from about $90 to $350 for a serviceable set and antenna—and CB is simple to install in a truck, car or boat, drawing its power from the vehicle’s battery. The same units can be plugged in at home with inexpensive DC inverters to cut house voltage down to the 12 volts needed to go on the air. Portable units cost even less. The FCC estimates that in time there will be 60 million licensed CB sets in operation. As one industry executive says, “The more people are on the air, the more people want to join them on the air.”

Without doubt, simple, low cost, ubiquitous radio conversation represents the biggest explosion of communications since the invention of the telephone. Its cultural impact may not be as pervasive as television’s, but in an odd way, it is a creative one. TV is, after all, a nonparticipant pastime. CB radio, by contrast, is a two-way medium that enables everyman to write his own script. It has not only nourished a proliferating vocabulary that threatens to outdate any dictionary of American slang within months; as well, it catalyzes an egalitarian, anti-authoritarian philosophy that has never been expressed in this fashion before. In the TV series Movin’ On, hit records like C.W. McCall’s Convoy (which sold 5 million copies and is to be made into a film) and the movie White Line Fever —all of them CB oriented—the good guys v. the cops is a basic theme.

Such considerations were far from the collective mind of the FCC in 1945, when it set aside a sliver of the broadcast spectrum for the noncommercial use of ordinary citizens such as hunters, boaters, construction teams and farmers ranging far from homes and telephones. The first CB license was not granted until 1947. In the next quar ter-century, only 850,000 CB licenses were issued. Then came the 1973 oil embargo, speed limits were dropped to 55 m.p.h. (“double nickel” in CB argot) and truck drivers installed the units to warn each other of lurking cops (“smokey bears”) and radar cars (“Kojak with a Kodak”). Television news picked up the story, and the rest is hysteria.

Chaotic Delay. In January 1973, there were 26,682 CB license applications; in January 1975, 79,375; in January 1976, 544,742. At Gettysburg, Pa., where the FCC processes the applications, conditions have been hardly less chaotic than they were in July 1863. Unopened envelopes overflowed into the ladies’ lounge; the FCC fell two months behind. Last month the agency moved to cut the delay by allowing anyone who buys a set to obtain an immediate temporary permit on mailing in $4 and an application form.

While CB “radiddio” is widely used by truckers and ordinary drivers to warn of speed traps ahead, the network is highly esteemed by highway patrols and police for its ever-increasing role in reporting accidents, crimes, stolen cars, fires, traffic tie-ups, even reckless drivers (“Harvey Wallbangers”). Several volunteer organizations of CBers have sprung up to monitor the air waves and provide round-the-clock emergency services. The biggest, called REACT (for Radio Emergency Associated Citizens Teams), claims more than 70,000 members in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, seven Canadian provinces and West Germany. Since its formation in 1962, REACT claims to have handled 35 million emergency calls, including 12 million highway accidents.

The social and economic background of CBers is changing rapidly. Once populated mostly by truckers and blue-collar hobbyists, CB land is attracting growing numbers of businessmen and middle-class families who use the sets for safety and information. CB is also a “bodacious” (in CB lingo, super, fantastic) way of relieving freeway tedium—so much so that truckers’ use of amphetamines has declined drastically in recent years. Ordinary drivers tend to be as evangelistic about the medium as oldtime gear jammers. “When I’m on the road these days,” says New York Businessman Lawrence LeKashman, “I’d sooner leave the spare tire behind than my CB.” Enthusiasts predict that CBs will some day be required equipment on all cars.

The macho world of CB is part soap and part horse opera. Says Amitai Etzioni, the eminent Columbia University sociologist: “A CB allows you to present a false self: to be beautiful, masculine, tall, rich, without being any of those things. Like the traveling salesman who drops into a singles bar and says he’s the president of his company, a person can project on the air waves anything he wants to be.” The person who installs a CB set and adopts a “handle” (nickname) and starts “modulating” on the air, is creating a character and reaching out to others while still maintaining anonymity. Adds Etzioni: “People in our kind of society, torn from our roots, want to relate without fully investing ourselves in a relationship, as we would if we joined a church group or worked on a campaign. With a CB, you can have personal contact with the turn of a dial. It is very controllable and protects you from getting too involved.”

CB is a godsend for many shut-ins and others who are isolated from the community. For some enthusiasts, like Mrs. Patricia Schey (“Kissy Face”) who monitors her “home base” 16 hours a day in Madison, Wis., it is more of a passion. Almost everyone, however, responds to what Manhattan Psychoanalyst Joel Kovel calls “CB’s element of voyeurism.” That aspect of the CB phenomenon has not been lost on Mitchell Brothers, the porno-film producers. They recently released an opus with the self-explanatory title C.B. Mamas.

Potty Mouths. The real CB land has more sinister denizens. Police departments across the country report that mobile radios are being used increasingly in holdups and burglaries. CB sets themselves have become the favorite target of street thieves; 500 CB thefts were reported in Los Angeles during a three-month period. Game poachers use CB to outwit conservation officers. Though the California department of fish and game frequently changes its code, admits one officer, “poachers seem to know what we’re doing before we do.” Prostitutes (“pavement princesses”) who plug their charms on CB have become so common that there is even a song about them, Rosie on the Ridge.

Potentially even more annoying is the widespread abuse of the channels —especially by so-called potty mouths using obscenities. The language on the Los Angeles air waves, says a sheriffs department engineer, Henry Richter, “is filthy. It’s a disgrace; it’s like a gutter.” “Uncle Charley” or “Candy Man,” as CBers call the FCC, also has a major problem with broadcasters who illegally use “hamburger helpers,” or linear amplifiers, to boost the output of standard 4-watt transmitters beyond their normal range of five to ten miles. Their beefed-up blat can splatter normal television and radio reception. Yet another migraine for the feds is CBers’ use of what they call “SBC,” for “sick bird channel” —”ill eagle” (illegal) use of channels reserved for vital services.

CB’s existing 23 channels are already badly overcrowded in metropolitan areas. Even Channel 9, which is supposed to be reserved for emergencies, is often invaded by mindless chitchatters (“ratchet-jaws”). Says James McKinney, FCC’s deputy chief of field operations: “I have a feeling that by 1979, all I’m going to hear is one loud buzz.” The FCC is working on a short-term solution: to expand the band to as many as 115 channels. But even that would be little more than, so to speak, a Band-Aid. Eventually, authorities agree, they will have to find a place on the radio spectrum for a second-generation band with 200 or more channels.

These problems are to be expected in so radical a coupling of social change and technological innovation. Questions about CB’s influence have not even been formulated. With a “good buddy” system of 100 million or more Americans speaking compulsively in inelegant private tongues, what will happen to the language of Jefferson and Henry James? Will future presidential candidates have to campaign by mike from the expressways—and learn to call them “double slabs”? Or will the whole CB cult simply go the way of goldfish swallowing and Hula-Hoops?

Talk Shows. That fate seems unlikely. CB provides too many valuable uses and affordable comforts to fade out. From Nastyville to Tricky Dick’s —Nashville to San Clemente in pre-CB parlance—the new radiddio offers a kind of openline talk show that entertains and instructs while conveying at best a genuine feeling of neighborliness never before associated with highway driving. “When you’re riding around and listening to these people,” says a Manhattan disc jockey, “what you hear is America at its best.” Well, not always. But there is a bodacious new world out there, and its people are talking to one another again and even exchanging eighty-eights.

* Or perhaps was listening in on one of the other 22 frequencies that CBers can tune to simply by switching a TV-like channel selector.

Crazy Letterman #5

Moonlighting, which was the critical darling at the time, was about to air its famous season 2 finale a week after this.

From the Movie “Poetry In Motion II”

A G&E Productions flick

Tana Forte- thrashing…

Gregory Cioffi- Director

From the Movie “Poetry In Motion II”

G&E Productions

TIME May 6, 1996

Haunting recollection -Alan Walowitz
From the Movie “Poetry In Motion II”
A G&E Production
Gregory Gioffi- Director

Here Comes the Knight

“This is the scene in which the Joker feeds poisoned cotton candy to a troop of Boy Scouts,” chuckles Frank Miller, displaying a sheet of rough layouts from his latest big project — a four-part, 200-page work called The Dark Knight Returns. It’s a revisionist pop epic about Batman's middle-aged return from a brooding retirement. The series takes place sometime early in the next century, but it revives the violent film noir tone of the '40s. Miller explains:  “I’m emphasizing his more malign qualities.” He indicates some horizontal squiggles in the next panel: "Those are the dead boy scouts.”

 Miller began shaking up the insular, inbred world of comics in 1979 when, at the tender age of 22, he moved to Manhattan from Vermont to take over the drawing chores on Marvel's long-running Daredevil series. Though he looked back to such idols as Will Eisner (creator of The Spirit), his style was immediately distinctive. He sliced the page space into thin slivers, shattered it, threw thick shadows across it at extreme, expressionistic angles. "This is not illustration, ' Miller asserts of his boldly stylized approach to the medium. "This is cartooning.

When Miller took over the writing of Daredevil a year later, he brought the storytelling into even tighter congruence with his drawing, spinning intense underbelly-of-the-city yarns full of mixed motives, petty thugs, seductive female assassins, and bands of marauding Ninja. He left Marvel in 1983, jumping over to the company's chief rival, DC Comics. to create the six-part Ronin. a futuristic exploration of his favorite Japanese martial-arts motifs.

Though Miller is again working on-four Daredevil-related projects, it's the freewheeling Batman miniseries, which debuted last month, that will probably make the biggest splash. Miller’s violent, no-batshit approach reanimates the Caped Crusader as a killer, a vigilante, a figure of controversy hunted by the authorities, a stalking beast of the urban jungle.

Now in middle age, Bruce Wayne's aiter ego won't leave him in peace: "In my gut,” says Bruce, “the creature writhes and snarls and tells me what l, need.”

'My Batman series has a really grim portrait of how the world works,” explains Miller. “One of the reasons comics aren't doing as well as they used to is that the characters are completely out of date, particularly in social and political terms. We live in frightening times, yet these superhero comics give a benevolent picture of the world.”

Miller calls Batman a “demon,” as if he's not even human anymore: “I went so far as to make the non-Batman personality of Bruce Wayne essentially the character of a man who's a werewolf. Bruce refers to himself as a 'host body’ at one point.

I have his Batman Side speak to him as if it were a separate entity, saying things like. 'l am your soul. You try to drown me out, but your voice is weak.”

If Bruce Wayne is 50 years old, Dark Knight must be a futuristic story. 'Actually it isn't. though technically it has to be set in the future because the story ignores the current Batman continuity. But for me its specifically contemporary. The president in it is a not-very-carefully-disguised parody of Reagan.

“One of the main themes is that we live in an aheroic age. Batman's being out of place is an important part of the story. Everything he does is illegal, he's up against authority. It culminates with Batman having to fight Superman, who is also in his '50s. But Batman isn't a reactionary, he's a radical. The only conservative character in the series is Superman, who takes his orders directly from the-president and helps track down welfare violators.”

— Brian Cronenworth