At Length

To disappear or to vanish: we know what this means. Present, then absent. Here then gone. 

But to disappear into: strange. To disappear into work or disappear into play both suggest that the vanishing subject vanishes from our sight by virtue of their attention to something that isn’t us, a task, a toy. But it is not the subject who vanishes. It is the observer of the subject. We disappear from their sight, because they are attending so carefully to whatever holds their focus that they cannot see anything else. And we say they disappear. Nothing is so small that it cannot become a portal for vanishment.

MICRONAUTS

I can’t see very well. Miniatures and intricacies have always attracted me because the poverty of my vision is such that, when I was a child, I felt like I could literally inhabit their world at scale. Most built objects and environments assume a consistent optical capacity on the part of those who use them; this makes virtually every aspect inaccessible to those outside that range. If your vision doesn’t fall within the assumed standard, for example, you cannot just “move closer” to the blackboard; the entire space of the classroom prohibits that. The consequence was a sort of unsought but inviolable removal from whatever built environment I was in. From wherever I was allowed to sit, a blackboard was an environmental effect, not a discrete object, likewise a wall or the window in it. They lacked perceptible reality; it was difficult to even determine how far away they were. In this way they adopted a quality of abstraction, of space that I couldn’t enter and that would remain at the periphery of my experience no matter how I moved or where. It resembled being inside a bubble whose perimeter was not only indistinct but made of indistinctness. 

However, this compromised sense of distance inevitably came with a compensation: my uncorrected vision is the equivalent of a permanent macro lens. Imagine the vinyl floor of an above ground pool. I could see things with a degree of detail not available to the typical eye without mechanical assistance. In some sense these are the only things I can see. Vision uncorrected, I can perceive both the crudeness of that mode for the mid-range and the complexity and beauty of that beneath the threshold of notice. If you have ever used a magnifying glass or a jeweler’s loupe, you know how intoxicating this can be, how it gives you entrance to a world that both is and is not part of the default world of perception. In my case, the only problem was that I could not leave that world. Look up? Blur, abstraction. Look down? A microverse. Between those two, where the actual world proceeded, was nowhere I could inhabit.

It’s difficult to summarize how alienating this felt but also how deeply comforting. And it’s not merely the comfort of literally not knowing what’s going on around you because you literally cannot see what is going on around you; it’s not the bliss of ignorance. Rather it’s a sense of inhabiting a dimension removed from others, or, more accurately, from which others are ineluctably removed. It certainly isn’t that I believed I was invisible or imperceptible; it’s that I knew the way I was occupying the space was not a way that could be seen or shared, and that made it a way of being both in a common space and out of it all at once, simultaneously public and private. This space was not only a bounded physical environment but a sort of emotional pocket dimension, somewhere for my mind to go. 

Because I was a kid a lot of what I turned my macro lens to was encompassed by nature and comic books and toys. To nature I will return, but the toys are especially pertinent. Of action figures two types exist: the representation of the human and the nonhuman. Or, more precisely, the organic and the mechanical whereby the former includes humans, animals, aliens, and monsters, and the latter includes, well, robots and variations on robots.

If you can only play by looking very closely at what you are playing with, then simulacra of the organic are somewhere between dissatisfying and repellent. Macro evaluation of a human action figure’s features brings the flaws and deficiencies of the approximation to light in ways that cannot be dimmed. The painted eyes look like paint, not eyes; hands look like winter gloves made of flesh. It’s difficult to sustain a suspension of disbelief manipulating an action figure with so many evident and specific deviations from what it’s meant to approximate. The form falls outside the welcoming region of likeness and becomes something that interrupts rather than facilitates imagination.

Robots, though? Robots are artificial. The more flaws their surfaces exhibit, the more they look like machines, objects, built not born. A long scratch on the surface of a human action figure distracts from its notional humanity; a long scratch on the surface of a robot just suggests a badass robot who’s seen some shit. 

In 1976 the robots, or near-robots, with which I was obsessed were called Micronauts. In 1979 Marvel added to its roster of superheroes The Micronauts, an ornate, dystopian space opera that sought to capitalize on two commercial properties at once: Star Wars and the accompanying mania for all things that mixed science fiction signifiers in fantasy superstructures, and the toy company Mego’s Micronauts, that toy line of literal action figures that already commanded my imagination. By building out a narrative that necessarily completed gaps inherent to the marketing of the toys themselves, the comic books stripped them of some of their mystery while preserving the conceit that when the Micronauts emerged from their dimension, known as the Microverse, the process somehow shrunk them so that they appeared to humans no larger than the actual action figures from which they were licensed. Mego itself licensed the toys in 1976, so we can say that is their date of origin. Unless the true date of origin is that of Micromen or Mikuroman, released by the Takara corporation in Japan in 1974. Though perhaps their date of origin is 1972, with the release of the Henshin Cyborg, from whose design they were derived. Though those figures too have mysterious and unexpected origins. Henshin: to change or transform. Micro: small. At least Mego added one element: -naut, mariner. Small figures, inhuman figures, sailors of strange seas. 

The relationship between the comic book and the toy line was not reciprocal. The former incorporated elements of the latter. The latter resolutely ignored the former. The comic book had characters; the toy line had objects. Maybe not a figure, then, but a figurine; a Micronaut was no person, but rather some thing.

I was not the kind of child other children often approached, but if another kid with a Micronaut happened to encounter me and wanted to share enthusiasm or play together, I would rebuff them. I didn’t trust the frameworks of their play; I just wanted to know how I could get ahold of their Micronauts. I think this defines what even then we called an inability to play well with others.

So, for various circumstantial and perhaps pathological reasons, I was a robot boy. Micronauts came in various kinds: die-cast metal figurines, cheaper plastic ones (marketed as Time Travelers in the United States), larger metal-and-plastic hybrids whose limbs were attached to the torso via magnets. Every Micronaut, regardless of its type, could be at least partially disarticulated, and these discrete parts could be rearranged, as could the accessories and vehicles. Your villain could have a horse but could also become a centaur version of that villain and that horse; the centaur’s legs could be replaced with wheels, the horse’s tail appended to the back of a Time Traveler, like that of a scorpion. The permutations were endless and the superficial flaws and irregularities proof that the narrative drama preceded the occasion of play. Did it matter that the reflective silver heads of the Micronauts included mullet hairstyles? It did not, because it wasn’t supposed to be hair. Was it odd that a robot had an approximation of hair at all? It was not, because it was more axiomatically true of robots that they would — at least some of them — be reproductions of human shapes and human features.

My favorite Micronaut was a translucent clear Time Traveler. I loved transparent things, but it didn’t bother me that the figure’s head was not likewise transparent. It was reflective silver, like those of his entire cohort, and thus resembled chrome. His very existence seemed to defeat standard perception. His body was present, but you could see through it. His color was that of water, of whatever surrounded him. When you investigated his face, you could see his features but across those features would be a mirror-reflective version of your own. He was there but not. When you regarded him, he confounded the mechanism of your regard. I wanted to be him.

Him?

NON-AUTONOMA

A toy that’s meant to approximate an automaton is a strange thing: undeniably a device that imaginatively possesses free will, but which exists only to enact the will of the person playing with it. It does nothing other than what you manipulate it to do, but to meet that function, you must pretend it has the independence and autonomy it lacks. Your first command is to grant it the illusion of self-command.

A child following this script is not likely to be disturbed by it. But it can be an unnerving protocol to watch a child perform. You can see children scold their dolls and their action figures for doing things the child has made them do — very often things the doll or figure would assuredly not do were it to own the agency the child grants and ignores having granted. Children judge their toys, sympathize with them, maintain both roles in a dialogue with them; very rarely if ever does that dialogue indicate conflict initiated by the toy. It’s the rare child who fixes their gaze upon a toy and sings “Well, I disagree” or “Why won’t you do as I ask?” The latter is especially unimaginable — the role of the child in directing the toy cannot be made explicit in the behavior directed.

Another person is the autonomous being the toy is pretended to be but is not. And so we do not treat other persons as if they were toys, as if they were robots whose existence depended entirely on the labor they performed for us.

That is, however, exactly how we treat the idea of other persons. You can see why someone might want to be no one if being no one removed them from the possibility of misperception, of ill-use.

ACTION FIGURES

Why else would one choose to be no one in one’s own imagination? Perhaps because others do not allow you to be the someone you are, because they force you to be someone you are not; perhaps because the burdens of being someone are too complicated, too impossible to inhabit without endless recurrent moral injury. There are many ways to attempt to become no one: one can kill oneself; one can remove oneself, can obscure oneself beyond hope of legibility, can attempt to divest oneself of all associated with, all that seems inextricable from, a self. Or one can play, such that one’s self disappears into what cannot be seen.

Of all the fictive ways of being no one, each comes with its own paradoxes. The Micronauts represented a two-fold approach to being no one: the first, simply by lacking the personhood we refuse to attribute to objects, and second, by performing a materiality defined by the degree to which one thing is always capable via modularity of being something else. But their paradox resides in that very protean quality. What exempts them from personhood becomes their personhood. My radical near-sightedness made Micronauts optically familiar in a way the proximate world was not, and I felt I knew them because they could be persons without being human.

MADE IN JAPAN

An inhuman artifact nevertheless has specific human origins. Nothing on the packaging, in the directions, or graven into the Micronauts figurines boldly declared they were Japanese. And yet I knew instantly they were Japanese toys, or toys of Japanese origin, because they were too good to be American. In the United States of the 1970s if you wanted an object that required precision, compression, intricacy, and that worked, you wanted something made in Japan. This kind of belief is only possible with an idea of Japan, one only vaguely and imprecisely associated with Japan itself.

That these features both implied and demonstrated a whole host of stereotypes does not erase the material facts that objects and devices of Japanese manufacture were superior in their sophistication and in their success at doing what they needed to do. It’s not as if there were no other action figures on the market; it’s just that, compared to Micronauts, they were hopelessly amateurish. Action figures of the same size were radically less articulated; comparable levels of articulation could only be found in toys substantially larger and far more unwieldy for purposes of play.

Additionally, Micronauts did things. Baron Karza could shoot tiny missiles from a spring-loaded cavity in his chest; similar mechanisms in his wrists enabled him — or you — to blow off his own fists as blunt object projectiles. The tooling was so precise that any of these weapons could easily be shot across the length of the room.

In any case, part of what made Micronauts was what they weren’t. These were not crude plastic soldiers, they were not literally inarticulate army men, they were not (as might befit a standard boy) G.I. Joes.

Except in a circuitous but undeniable way, that’s exactly what they were.

COMBAT JOE 

Two imperial powers go to war; one imperial power visits unprecedented destruction on the other and then commits to “rebuilding” that which it destroyed. How do the people of the imperial power thus “rebuilt” experience this? 

Combat Joe is the name given to G.I. Joe when the action figure first appeared in the Japanese toy market in 1970. What was it doing there? Who was this toy for? It’s one thing to have had the actual presence of living American soldiers in Japan, and another to have some cultural and artifactual imports appear correspondingly, and yet another, stranger thing entirely to have one of those artifacts be a toy replica of the American soldier, a distillation of that which had already occupied the country. Who wanted this? How was it taken up by the children of Japan? What did their parents think?

The Combat Joe, independent of its chaotic cultural valence, was an idea that nevertheless depended on an object; each toy was manufactured from a template, and the template is more basic than the soldier built upon it. The “Joe” aspect is literally the surface of the template’s shape — paint, fibers for hair. The actual template is just the approximation of the form: a body, or more accurately a mannikin of a body.

Once they had the license, the Japanese manufacturers could do any­thing with the template itself, and they discovered that, divested of its skin, the template was a compelling object: the shape of a man, transparent, containing an armature mechanism that resembled less the skeleton of a human than the innards of a robot. Stripped of its skin — its humanity, its racial signifiers, and its national associations — the Combat Joe made a wonderful if entirely accidental robot.

From the unerringly American Combat Joe came the Henshin Cyborg, in Japan a far more popular and inventive toy. In realizing the template’s potential as a robot, the manufacturers initiated a complex narrative structure and increasingly intricate mythology, and reinvested resources such that the Henshin line did not remain merely Combat Joe minus its distinguishing features but effloresced into additively complex designs of its own, speciating into more and more diverse and complicated versions of that bare template. They destroyed to build, but also built upon what they destroyed, like removing a facade from a house but adding rooms to the structure and keeping the foundation. However, as the popularity grew and the variety of characters distributed among the figures grew accordingly, one aspect of that foundation became more and more of a hindrance: its size. One Combat Joe was fairly large, but since there was little need for great multiples of Combat Joes, this was not a problem. Henshin Cyborgs? You needed many to inhabit the narrative. Their design differences were aesthetically substantial, but more importantly, their characterological diversity meant one could never be enough, and several were very nearly a requirement.

This posed a space problem. While a parent might be relieved to no longer have to house a simulation of an American G.I. in their own home, an army of alien robots, while less politically and historically grotesque, created a storage burden, especially in a post-war Japanese housing market where residential space was at a premium. Nor was plastic an inexpensive commodity.

The solution was obvious: shrink the Henshin Cyborg line. Smaller figurines were cheaper to produce in bulk and that money could then go to greater degrees of design customization and innovation. More characters, more figures, more to sell, more to collect. G.I. Joe begat Combat Joe; Combat Joe begat Henshin Cyborg; Henshin Cyborg begat Mikuroman.

MIKUROMAN

The fact that in 1978 I “knew” Micronauts were Japanese did not mean I had any idea that the market for the figure in Japan was as deep and complex as it was. Micronauts both are and are not ミクロマン. I do not think I would have appreciated or considered the difference between Japanese and made in Japan. If I had thought about it at all, l likely would have assumed that Micronauts were the same in America as they were in their place of manufacture.

I would have been mistaken. What to an American consumer appeared as an unprecedented wealth of characters and designs represented a bare, impoverished fraction of what was available in Japan: Micronauts were like a minimal colonial outpost of an expansive action figure empire. And this raises the question of why the company would bring such multitudinous resplendence to the Japanese market and yet such slim offerings to the American one.

The solution to this mystery is that they wouldn’t; two companies each made their own choices. Just as Combat Joe was licensed to Takara, the Microman templates — or at least some of them — were licensed to the American company Mego. I don’t know if Takara refused to sell the whole archive of designs or if Mego decided to pick and choose, but the consequence is that Micronauts were not simply Microman toys that happened to be sold in the United States. Far from it. And just as Takara took the original license and made it their own, Mego took the Microman license and attempted to do the same. But what they chose to do was both evolutionary and atavistic.

ACROYEARS

I don’t recall how explicitly the packaging and product descriptions identified which of the Micronauts toys were essentially “good” or “bad” but it would have been difficult to conclude that the Acroyears were meant to be anything but antagonistic to the Micronauts. Though still approximating a human frame, the Acroyears displayed less fidelity to the subtler features of a human template: their feet were wheeled, their limbs more like wrenches, their hands digitless clamps. And they did not have faces — or if they did, they were concealed by angular, armored helmets which I always understood to be their actual heads. But regardless they revealed no eyes, no mouths. Relative to a Time Traveler, an Acroyear seemed like a rebuke to the very idea of imitation; they had the robot’s contempt for the android. 

That I could adduce this kind of relation between the two indicates either the pervasiveness of the archetypes or, more disturbingly, a nearly physically encoded set of criteria for the procedures of antagonistic other-ing. There’s no absolute reason why I should have placed the action figures in narrative contention, much less according to this script. Yes, I was primed, potentially, by the fact that the manufacturers accessorized them with weapons. But I could have turned those weapons to imaginary foes just as easily as I conjured entirely imaginary stories and worlds; I could have pretended pine cones were quasi-sentient megaliths pre-programmed to defend the terrarium, that ice cubes were alien intelligences unable to maintain cohesion under the burning force of imaginary laser beams emanating from the instruments of my Time Travelers, who regretted the conflict but saw no other way to secure their ongoing commitment to knowledge and discovery.

But if I was going to lie (or, more generously, fictionalize), why were these the lies I would tell? Note the speed with which even my alternative scenarios take on perfect sub-narratives of imperialist, colonialist self-justification. Even in relative isolation and naïveté, I am reproducing the imperatives I can neither name nor directly perceive. Admitting that, it becomes obvious not only why I was going to place the Time Travelers and the Acroyears in conflict, but also why I was never going to grant the latter the same degree of loyalty or empathy with which I graced the former: they didn’t look like me.

Perhaps not so robot a boy as previously described then. 

FROM THE PLANET OF VISCEROS!! 

Like Moreau, Mego made monsters. Membros, Lobstros, Repto, Ampzilla. The Hornetroid. 

Each of these action figures made the implicit hybridity of the Micronauts line both more explicit and more extreme. Whereas a Time Traveler suggested something both human-like and machine-like, the relationship between the two conditions was subtle if not entirely seamless. With its new line, however, Mego erased that ambiguity while also introducing new, more confusing implications. 

Each figure in the monster line was undeniably, often grossly organic. Antron was a humanoid figure (“the six-limbed Invader from the faraway galaxy of Thoraxid”) with insectile properties; Lobos (“the scaly creature from the deepest oceans of Zenon”) was based on an in­explicable concept of a lobster that walks upright and whose brain sits at the back of a gaping mouth behind a forked tongue; Repto (“half-man half-reptile from the distant planet of Sauria”) was exactly what you would expect from that description except unaccountably possessed of enormous red wings. And then there was Membros, who presented a patchwork quilt of incompatible physiognomies, topped literally with a glow-in-the-dark brain that sat on his head like a Marcelle-waved pudding of grey matter that under proper conditions did indeed luminesce. I would leave mine next to an exposed light bulb to maximize his dramatic effect. 

These monstrosities were crude by almost every means of reckoning. That they were meant to be villainous was not a claim to be left to the imagination; luridly designed, even their packaging and descriptive materials were queasily alarmist. While cleaving to roughly humanoid shapes, each partook of something as far from the biologically human as possible; only one even allowed a mammalian hybrid (alas, poor Centaurus). If one of the pleasures of the standard Micronauts line was how nimbly it invited and avoided the question of what they were, the monster line answered that question with brutal efficiency. This? This is a dinosaur-man with a circular saw appended to its forearm. These things don’t need hands; they’ve got an axe protruding from one elbow and a laser blaster from another. They are not here to “discover” or “explore.” They are here to fuck shit up.

Compared to Membros and his ilk, the previously established antagonists, the Acroyears, look elegant and possessed of a relatively chill disposition. Their more mechanical roboticism and martial affect seem more those of stoic warrior monks than outright nemeses. An Acroyear did not look like it would drool or hiss or emit guts if you pierced it; it did not shamble, it did not slither, it did not suggest in any way that it might defecate on the field of battle, a claim one might hesitate to make of Ampzilla or the Terraphant.

If the toys derived from Microman did not make too fine a point of telling you how to play with them, those of the monster line left you no choice. These were not going to be your protagonists. These were there to fight, oppose, suppress. That they were the out-group was built-in.

I never had the same emotional attachment to these toys as I did to the more traditional Micronauts. There was no desire to be one of them; they were inelegant and even in playing with them I sometimes felt a measure of embarrassment — they were crude, as mentioned, but there was also something patronizing about them in that they looked like manufactured preemptions of the kind of thing the most frightening boy you knew would solder together from the remains of toys he had previously tortured into discrete parts, Frankenstein’s monsters assembled in prediction of the worst possible impulses.

They were stupid, but they were useful. Many were more solidly built than either Micronauts or Time Travelers, as if someone had decided that drawing on hardier organic forms alone warranted a hardier, thicker toy build. But even that seemed appropriate. They were built to be abused, and if you scarred or broke one, that just made them more of what they were: monsters, made to destroy, to be destroyed.

These additions come late to Mego’s production of Micronauts. If they bolstered the success of the line, they didn’t do so effectively enough; Mego collapsed under the internal pressure of production difficulties, the relative fragility and hazard-rich potential of the products themselves, and the unforeseen external pressure of competition from the Kenner-licensed Star Wars action figures. Less articulate, more durable, also derived from a franchise that was American and Japanese without any understanding of that fact by its consumers. Against this wave no other action figures stood a chance.

That failure, however, doesn’t mean Mego had the wrong idea. The introduction of an extreme outgroup creates solidarity. Absent Membros and his grotesque brethren, Micronauts and Acroyears seem conspicuously divergent; in their slimy, scaly, leathery, and chitinous presence, Micronauts and Acroyears suddenly seem more of a type. The membership is malleable, but only in the context of a greater, more legible other. Your short sword, set against a circular saw, no longer signals quite what it once did.

TRANSFORMERS

Design flexibility, the capacity to see the potential in a template and adapt it to new ends, is what allowed Microman to move from its origins as a barely rebranded G.I. Joe to a series of elegantly alien maybe-robots. But design flexibility also allowed Microman to test the limits of its own template, and that proved its undoing. 

In the early 1980s, Takara began introducing vehicular accessories for its standard Microman figures that could be manipulated to adopt the shapes of more familiar objects. In principle this was just an extension of the modularity inherent in the line, a logical consequence of using one’s imagination to form one toy into several and several into dozens. However, arising as if from a generational wellspring of frustration with the limits of the toys one inherits from one’s culture, the focus shifted to the following question: if the Microman’s vehicle could be a robot that turned from X into Y, what did you need the Microman for? The so-called Micro Change line merged with Diaclone to produce a series not of smaller toys but larger ones: robots that could become vehicles who were themselves the protagonists of supposed narratives, no Microman necessary. These were robots who drove the vehicles they themselves were. 

In 1984 the American toy company Hasbro licensed these toys as Transformers. If Micronauts had not already suffered a fatal blow from the advent of Star Wars merchandise (to say nothing of the tomfoolery and incompetence at the parent company Mego), Transformers surely would have killed them. Micronauts on their best day earned the merest scintilla of the attention Transformers did. 

For my part, I viewed all of this with contemptuous indifference. By the time Transformers appeared on the market, I was a brand-new teenager, and while I was glad something was out there to compete with the Star Wars action figures – which I always resented for not just displacing Micronauts but doing so while being objectively inferior – I had no interest in Transformers themselves. It was to their credit that they required some cleverness in design to function as both robots and vehicles, but because we knew what the vehicles were supposed to look like, the figures had to maintain that standard above all else; this inevitably came at the expense of the design of the robot configuration. A fighter jet had to look like a fighter jet; its robot form could look like a blocky tiny-headed metal endomorph. If it looked clunky, who were we to judge? We had nothing to compare it to.

But if I am being rigorously honest, my distaste for Transformers wasn’t limited entirely to their failure to be Micronauts. There was something weirdly jingoistic about Transformers; I didn’t like the fact that Optimus Prime was a red, white, and blue semi-truck. I didn’t like that the relationship between the Autobots and the Decepticons was so unambiguous, so banal in its repetitive irresolvable battle between good versus evil. I did not like that when I imagined Transformers l imagined something loud and clanging and colossal; l liked things small and detailed, not gargantuan and brutalist. I didn’t like how American the whole enterprise seemed to be, what a weirdly militarized analogy for the Cold War, the endless conflict between sides utterly lacking in ambivalence or mystery. There was something about Transformers that was utterly, irrevocably boy in ways that struck me as elementally counter to Micronauts. None of this was helped by the fact that Transformers and G.I. Joe, both owned by Hasbro, had cartoons airing at the same time. 

G. I. Joe, in fact, had a concurrently resurgent toy line, which featured figurines at the reduced scale of Micronauts and shared their hyper-articulation and even improved on it in some ways. But for all that, they were still army men. And while consumer interest in G.I. Joe and Transformers progressed in tandem for a while, interest in the former faded while interest in the latter never did. Transformers did not need the United States military, but they also seemed incapable of escaping them. In the live action film franchise (I do use the term “live action” advisedly) as much attention is lavished on the U.S. military as on the Transformers themselves; the soldiers are G.I. Joes without the fictively embellished scrim the cartoons and toys cloaked them in.

I was never going to see any Transformers movie in a theater, but I did watch one on television. Even given the compression of the spectacle to the limits of a television screen, it was deafening, visually chaotic, inventively stupid, and committed to destruction. But what baffled and enraged me was that glorification of big-ass trucks and the U.S. military, the cultural revenge of trash, the resurrection of Combat Joe.

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

By the time Transformers was released, I had learned the history of Takara Tomy, of Mego and Hasbro. I knew that an object indicative of one highly consistent cultural referent initiated a sequence of objects that wandered so far from their origin that it seemed impossible to detect that origin only to somehow return to it without devolving or retracing its steps. What I still do not know is how to think of what this thing is. 

Transformers have imperial reach; they have held the attention of generations across the world, the alchemical product of two powers engaged in commercial exchange, competition, and profiteering, composed of features that bespeak both long traditions and contingent local conditions, an elaborate and elaborative mythology that endlessly conceals its actual ancestry. Who owns Transformers? Forget companies and contracts. To what culture do Transformers belong? Are they Japanese? Are they American? Both? Neither? I know what they are to me; I also know that in no way captures the whole array of things they are to others.

What they are metaphorically is what they are literally. They are things that you manipulate. They are robots that are alive. They are something that becomes something else. But what isn’t? 

Of all versions of either Microman or Micronauts, the Inter-Changeables are the most disdained: only on the market briefly, cast in inferior plastics, poorly named. No one loves the so-called Inter-Changeables for these things, but none of this has prevented them from being collector’s items. I like to attribute their unpopularity to their name, which deplorably suggests that any number of a collective can fully and meaningful be substituted for any other, an idea people may find both admirable and repellent depending on the context. But I have a fondness for them as existing between my narrow perception of Micronauts and my subsequently expanded understanding of the complexity and depth of the Takara mythology.

That mythology, of course, clarified things I had previously assumed were unknowable, enmeshed beings who were welcome ciphers in ever-more-sophisticated narratives that in answering questions about their telos should have precluded my own interpretations. But they do not. Every configuration and era of Microman has centered and invited change. Why should I object to their being other than what I imagined them to be? They are figures of change, henshin 変身; they always were.

ONE THING AT A TIME

Which Micronaut was the best? It is a foolish question. Which story is the best? What work am I calling on the story to do?

I do not believe a hierarchical categorization of works of art can ever be successfully established. I also do not regard or evaluate all works of art equally. It is as easy to cite informed justifications as it is to plead sentimental attachments. It seems impossible that I would ever set one work against another and conclude that they were equal if the measure were my evaluation of them. I place one Time Traveler on a fallen sheaf of bamboo and another in a cracked glass filled with water tinted lightly with blue food dye. Their narratives are entirely distinct. Do not make me choose or make choosing the means by which they are joined, so that I am not choosing at all.

But in one way all works are equal: they are equally partial, equally incomplete. Multiply the objects of comparison infinitely and you would still never get closer to finding one that is more than any other, because they each only ever represent the singularity of their production. This remains true of even the most collaborative arts. Thousands of people may work on a film, dozens on a comic book, one on a poem, one simply at literal play: none are more or less capacious than the others. It isn’t a matter of authorship, either: collective authorship still results in a single work, and that singularity cannot ever be more than a bare fraction of the world. The work cannot represent more than itself; it can only present. Claims that any given work “captures” some element of the world, claims that it “encompasses” or “wrestles with” or “shows us what it is like to live now” — any of these equivalent blandishments — all works do these things, and to the same degree. All present an alternative to the world, an alternative marked most conspicuously by what it leaves out, which is always almost everything. Every version is a microverse. The work does not mirror complexity and variability; it replaces those features. The replacement itself may have a greater or lesser degree of complexity relative to any other work, but compared to the world, it will be hopelessly, absurdly flat.

That very flatness, however, is the source of the appeal, because the simplicity affords a coherence that the world will not. All that is included becomes subordinate to the singular perspective; it is easy to fall into that perspective and mistake it for a faithful mimetic apprehension of the world. We criticize escapism when it seems to exceed the boundaries of play, but the greater danger is that we allow ourselves to believe the art has brought us into the world rather than replace that world with one we prefer. There are many ways to be tempted; the replacement need not be pleasant or simple on its own terms. All it must do is remove elements from the world and whisper “Isn’t this better? Isn’t this more true? More meaningful?” and all we must do is forget: the challenge of other people, their number, the fact that they each embrace their own temptations, and replace us as readily as we replace them. The world is full of this, but this is not the world. The world! The world: I keep citing it. What is the world, anyway? The world is that which begs replacement. The world is more than we like. More than we want.

NAME YOUR MACHINE

When I named what I wanted to be, I said Him. It isn’t, and I didn’t.

Some might protest that gendering a toy or a machine does not demonstrate the pernicious influence of gender on every facet of our society at every level but simply indicates our desire to personify the objects to which we’ve grown attached: mech-animism. But if we cannot imagine personhood without involving gender then my point stands doubly reinforced.

I did name my Micronauts, but I did not draw from the store of available, familiar names. I liked that Micronauts were beings but also things; I liked that they possessed materiality and abstraction in ways that mimicked but were not beholden to human body-soul marriages. The only thing I didn’t like about them was their projected milieu. The futuristic, science-fictional world of the Micronauts was for some reason less inviting to me than placing them in contexts for which they clearly weren’t designed: the utter jungle of my Floridian backyard, its mud and ferns and blocks and bricks. I even sewed clothes for them (a nonstandard boy) but oddly only clothes even less appropriate than the baseline weirdness of their needing clothes at all. I made them fur leggings and loose tunics for wandering across desert sands and serapes for evenings around the fire. For some reason I wanted to make them attempt to blend in even though there were no communities for them to blend into and even if there had been their efforts would have only cast their differences into sharp relief. 

Maybe I just wanted them to be like me — inevitably, inexorably costumed in something ill-matched even if it apparently fit. In naming them, too, I wanted them to have something familiar but not: each name a real word, a known word, but a word uncommon. They even had consistency of scansion: two syllables. Telos (I had no idea what it meant; I read it in a comic book somewhere). 

Alpha, Mica, Only. 

Nemo.

ROBOYS AND GIRLBOTS 

When we attach gender to objects that in no way reproduce human forms or shapes, we conclude quickly that the gender refers not to an inherent physical property but to some other essence or perhaps the gender most proximate to its use. This is how we associate some toys with only those genders socially authorized or encouraged to play with them. How we do this is undeniable; that we do it inspires entirely earned frustration and exasperation, especially insofar as the expected practice only reinforces the primary socialization that is itself indefensible. Your truck is not a boy, nor is your truck “for” boys. Unless your truck is Optimus Prime.

However, when the object in question does approximate human form, the assignation of gender becomes even more strange. A robot made in the shape of a man is more and more obviously not one because the act of making a resemblance just further confirms the fact that no gender exists to obviate the need to signal gender. My robot was not a boy and was not “for” boys. In the absence of an inherent property, the closer we get to an approximation of that property — a materialization? its abstraction — the more abstract the property itself becomes. How was I supposed to know what a boy is? If a thing that cannot be a boy, or anything lateral to boy in equal partaking of gender, but can be perceived and understood as a “boy” then what does that tell us about so-called actual human boys? If it wasn’t automatically a boy, didn’t that mean it could be?

I AM NOT NOW NOR HAVE I EVER BEEN

I was always drowning my Micronauts, because I lived by the ocean and because, unlike me, they could not drown. They always returned from their immersions. Once I buried one in the sand; it was lost forever. When I am dead, if I leave remains I want them interred in the sea. I do not want a grave, I do not want a gravestone. But if I had one, I would want its engraving to read “I am not now nor have I ever been.”

Old advertisements for Micronauts partake to a greater or lesser extent in attributes stereotypically, even hyperbolically, representative of what we’ve characterized as male. When I was a child, encountering all these figures for the first time, I did not conform well to what was then understood as male. Some of this was dispositional and behavioral; some of it seemed more a matter of innate physical habituation — the way I moved, gestured, sat — and some a result of sheer deviation from the physiological mean. My body alone approaches many statistical margins. For all these reasons, by and large other boys did not respond to me positively; to the degree they read me as another boy at all, they perceived deficiency or deviance, pushing them often into diffuse suspicion and sometimes assumptions regarding sexuality, long before sexuality was a matter of physical concern for any of us.

I received these signals and judgments as fair without drawing the associated conclusions. They were fair insofar as I agreed I was not like the other boys, but I drew no specific conclusion from that insofar as it did not create a sense of affinity with the boys who marked me as unlike, nor with the other boys who were not like the other boys. Nor did it create a sense of affinity with girls. It’s true that I was obsessed with Wonder Woman and with playacting as Wonder Woman but that was because I wanted to be Wonder Woman, not because I felt like I was in any way already like Wonder Woman.

Every figure of comparison felt equidistant. I could detect how those figures of comparison might be proximate to each other, but none  were more or less like me. They were all equally unlike me; even the aspirational ones, various as they were, were equivalent in that I could never achieve them.

As one might expect, I never identified with being a boy. But I never protested being identified as one in impersonal social settings, or at least not often. If in gym class the coaches divided us into girls and boys I would sometimes stand there, somewhat detached and insensate, until the coach forced the issue. But I never trudged over to the boy’s side with any sense whatsoever that I belonged there. I just knew that’s where I would be placed, as a nonstandard or deficient boy, for lack of any other place to put me. But I never felt an affinity with the group to which I was assigned. This disaffinity is so unwavering that I don’t think I could recognize or even fully imagine its alternative.

It’s important to acknowledge that while this subjective experience has some meaning and legitimacy, it does not exempt me from the consequences of being perceived as a boy and/or man and of having been raised accordingly. Advantages accrue to me, I have unearned powers and social capacities, I inherited and reproduced flaws and errors concomitant with boyhood. I suspect that historically I have been at my most dangerous when I have too stubbornly clung to my self-understanding without consideration of or deferral to either what other people saw or how I had been shaped by those perceptions, misaligned though they were with what I knew of myself. It did not occur to me that a space could be made socially to assert my identity in ways that were not destructive.

When I was marked as a nonstandard, deficient, or deviant boy, I did not feel any affinity for “boy” either with or without those modifiers. When I was accepted and understood as a boy, I did not feel any affinity for “boy” then, either. Even now, when identified as a man or male, I nod, but what I feel is a combination of uncertainty and delayed recognition: What, you mean me? 

I do not want to be male or a man, just as I did not want to be a boy.

What I wanted to be was a Micronaut.

PLAY WITH, READ ALONG

There are multiple ways to think about the degree to which an activity is solitary. One can construct the activity as solitary by virtue of it occurring fundamentally within the constraints of one’s own perception — according to this perspective, one would be engaged in solitary play even if one was playing with, interacting with, others, though as a kid I had little experience of the latter. Reading activates imaginative processes related if not identical to play, though it’s easier to see in that case how we establish reading as solitary: unless you are being read to or reading aloud to someone, you are alone. But there are ways it can be solitary beyond that understanding: it is isolating when one reads in an environment where no one else reads, and it is isolating to read work which no one else has read, or in a context lacking discourse with those other readers. 

I was free to play, but I played largely by myself; other children were almost never involved. And while my immediate family was committed to reading, no one was reading what I was reading. So not only did I have no one to gauge my reading against, I read in the most solitary fashion for a long, long time, never even having met another child who had heard of The Micronauts, never having any comfort with or use for another kid’s narrative superimpositions on actual Micronauts. They would use them to perform outsize human emotions, and those are what I wanted to use them to escape.

SPY MAGICIAN

I don’t know how else to communicate accurately the function Micronauts served in my mental landscape, but perhaps the most important element to transmit is how rare they were even before they became collectibles. They were rare because they were never very popular; you couldn’t be sure a store would carry them at all. They were rare because, as mentioned, they had an at least partially deserved reputation for being dangerous for children to play with. They were rare because my family was poor, and something like an action figure was maybe, if we were having a good year, a birthday and Christmas possibility at most. They were rare because their complexity made them fragile; I took the broken ones apart and used the pieces to complete or repair the other broken ones. And they were rare because I literally could not see them: my vision was so deficient, even with glasses, that it was impossible for me to see behind counters or higher up on shelves. So I looked for Micronauts everywhere, rarely finding them, terrified that they were present and that I had missed them because I wasn’t looking in the right place.

After their general discontinuation in the United States, I only encountered Micronauts three times. The first was in maybe 1982 in a K-Mart with my sister and my mother. They weren’t even on the toy aisle; they were in a wire mesh bin in the sales section, Time Travelers but opaque instead of translucent: red, blue, yellow, apple green. They were marked down considerably, so I bought four; neither K-Mart nor I knew these would become highly sought-after collector’s items. The second encounter was in 1986, visiting Tallahassee with my sister, when I found them in a toy store (I was still visiting toy stores not because I ever bought toys but because I felt anxious if I didn’t enter one; the residual impulse to search for Micronauts and the fear I had missed them was that strong). Time Travelers again, but this time marketed under a different name – those aforementioned Inter-Changeables – and a return to translucents, though of richer neon hues. And the third time was in New York in 2002, when I was completing my ritual of browsing the St. Marks Comic Shop and then either holing up at the Pommes Frites on 2nd Avenue or heading in the opposite direction to find a space at Veselka. On that browse I found more Micronauts than I had ever seen in one place. The magnetic ones, the Time Travelers, the specialty figures, the monsters. A company named Palisades had purchased the entire Mego catalog and license and reissued everything at once. I bought as much as I could carry and sat in the back of Pomme Frites with my funnel of double-fried potatoes and drew my hoodie close so no one could see my face. I couldn’t trust my expression. I found a way to vanish.

You must understand what I know I cannot make you understand: I was aware, am aware, of how literally childlike all this is, and that the childlike persisting into adulthood becomes childish. But I am also aware that I used these toys the same way I used reading itself: to be the other that was actually the self, to be elsewhere, not because it was safe necessarily but because no one could see me there, and since I could not be seen rightly where I was, the ability to go to a place where I could not be seen at all was essential. Each of these unexpected encounters felt like a re­minder that the world that wasn’t still was. There was a home. It continued. In the waking world there was still somewhere to go.

MICROMAN (2003)

In the spring of 2004, I was visiting my sister in Athens, Georgia; she graciously allowed me to make a stop at Bizarro-Wuxtry. Despite that visit in New York to the St. Mark’s Comic Shop, I am always a bit reluctant to shop anywhere other than my beloved Vault of Midnight in Ann Arbor, but at the time I was searching everywhere for back issues of the Legion of Super-Heroes, about which I was writing a book of poetry, and there was a chance Bizarro would have a random selection of treasures. Even if they didn’t, however, my sister and I had ritualized visiting comic book shops since she was old enough to drive and I was old enough to plead. 

Bizarro did come through that day, and in ways I could not have anticipated. After finding a few LSH issues I had been looking for, I was browsing the adjacent room of toys and collectibles. I wasn’t looking for anything; I was just looking. I am not a toy collector: the last toys in which I had any interest had been discontinued twenty years earlier, and the Palisades experiment had come and gone. 

Which is why it took me several minutes to understand what I was looking at. Housed in a plastic tube with surprisingly formal and sophisticated packaging was an approximately 10cm tall figurine that both was and was not a Micronaut. It had to be one; it couldn’t be one. It had the same chrome head and the same partially translucent body, but both were leagues more carefully made than any Micronaut I had ever seen. When I was a child, I had spent hours and hours redesigning Micronauts in my mind, figuring out ways to make them better: more articulable, more sculpted to mimic human musculature, more sturdy, more stable. The figure I was looking at redeemed all this re-envisioning with a greater flair and design sophistication than my childhood mind could ever have hoped to approximate. It was perfect. 

Or at least it looked perfect. I bought one. There were a few other kinds, but I purchased the one that had first caught my attention. I was so disoriented and so excited that I battered the employees with questions – what is this, do you know where this comes from, are you even old enough to remember Micronauts – they could not answer. When I got back to my sister’s house, I immediately tucked myself away in a bedroom and opened the tube to remove the toy and determine if it could be as extraordinary as it looked.

It was better. Solidly built, with at least twice the points of articulation of a traditional Micronaut, it even had something I had always wished they possessed: interchangeable hands, each set comprising a different gesture: flat palms, closed fists, splayed fingers, loose grips. In combination – one hand inviting, for example, the other a raised flat palm – they were remarkably expressive. Even the accessories were intricately tooled and refined. The simplest but also perhaps most foolish way I must describe it is simply to note that I felt like the figure was the adult version of a Micronaut. It’s better characterized as a Micronaut for an adult version of the child who once collected them, and that is in fact what it was: not a Micronaut but a reinvention of Mikuroman to pique the interest of adult collectors of the Takara originals from the 1970s and 1980s.

I didn’t know any of that at the time. All I knew was that I had found, randomly and without seeking, a thing I had resigned to a numinous mixture of dream and memory. I took out my contacts so I could see it finely, as I had seen its cousins when I was a child, and as I did then I saw my features distorted in the curvature of its reflective face.

CHILDISH THINGS

Maybe, he thought, maybe I’m reading too much into this.

But that is why “this” includes these things particularly. Toys are not the most sophisticated texts from which to extract these themes, and perhaps toymakers would concede their work as wholly and happily designed for children, though they likely take great pride in the sophistication and complexity of what they make. These machine persons that seem immune to human, overwrought agonies: It’s all too much and not enough. What matters is not whether the works are juvenile; they were what I had at hand when I first started to use what was at hand to solve the problem I felt I was. What matters is that children do engage with what they have at hand, and they engage by reading too much into them, by going too far. Escape cannot be partial. If you do not go too far away from the world you reject, how can you ever reach, much less inhabit, the world you seek? 

NEGATIVE PORTRAITURE

I am not a people-person, or even a person-person, or perhaps a person at all.

How would one know how to make such a claim? To doubt one’s personhood? Proximity to persons is, paradoxically, a precondition of alienation. Consider water: water surrounds what it isn’t; the relationship is both intimate and alien. When you remove a solid object from water, the water returns to what it was with no evidence of the object ever having been. The Time Traveler I loved best was as close to water as a solid could be.

When I was a child, this was the approach I chose to manage objects, i.e., persons and behaviors, that I otherwise could not handle. In self-construction, the protocol was simple: do not be that which you oppose. At first glance this likely doesn’t seem all that destructive or even ill-advised, but its tenability depends on what exactly you oppose, and even if you choose rightly, identity formation via acts of rejection has both limits and unintended consequences.

For example: I dislike anger. Before I was old enough to remember, I am told, I was possessed of an extraordinary temper; I would bang my head against walls and floors, pull out my hair in great double-handfuls. I wasn’t constantly angry, it seems, nor even especially quick to anger, but when I did lose my temper, I would apparently commit to a course of literal self-annihilation. But when I was old enough to finally remember myself, I wasn’t like that at all. My dislike of anger manifested in the obvious form of not liking having anyone be angry with me, and I disliked the sensation of my own anger as well.

But what I disliked most profoundly was the dynamic of anger, the way its expression created even more anger. I hated how the anger of one family member would provoke the anger of the others, escalation without apparent end. My solution to this was not to attempt to dissuade anyone from anger, but rather to just never express anger at all. I won’t feel this. Upon seeing a thing I disliked, I would renounce ever doing or being that thing. I would, sometimes literally, walk away. A childish stratagem.

I should clarify what this dislike of anger feels like. In some ways I suppose it feels like anger. But there has always been something about the effect of anger on the ego that I find repellent. It seems surpassingly difficult to enact anger without validating oneself in grotesque and unjustifiable ways. Angry people seem to believe unreservedly in their own rightness; they warrant their impatience, their cruelty, their contempt. They somehow manage to center their own violated sensibilities while also placing the onus for their response entirely elsewhere while also axiomatically authorizing every other thought, feeling, or judgment they seem to have. Anger has thus always read to me as a short-cut to otherwise indefensible self-regard, and I cannot see it without finding whoever is expressing it grotesque. And yet fictional figures of anger — Captain Nemo, Namor, Magneto — have sustained decades of fascination.

This fascination is assisted by the fact that I agree with them. I have no problem agreeing with the moral judgment that often precipitates and occasions anger; if anger is defined as that initial judgment, I can easily identify it and find the judgment sound or if not sound at least comprehensible. Again, the problem has never been with the reason for anger, or at least not often. I rarely have any interest in talking someone out of their anger and even more rarely any right to attempt to do so and this remains true even when they are angry with me, as uncom­fortable and upsetting as that can be.

No, the problem isn’t that I disagree with someone’s anger. The problem is that when people are angry, they are terrible, and I would rather not be like them.

And the problem with that is “I would rather not be like you” is not a viable tool for assembling personhood, especially if one is far more attuned to what one doesn’t want to be than to what one does. “No thank you” is, in the end, an insufficient expression of preference.

This has extended not just to the domains of feelings I don’t want to have. It isn’t even a matter of not having the feelings, but of commitment to them. My advice to myself has always been that denial or repression of one’s feelings isn’t necessary if one just doesn’t care about them. Thus, in the case of anger I care very much about the specifics of whatever has provoked the judgment itself, but about being angry I do not care at all. Or, more accurately, I do not believe in my anger. Oh, I have feelings, I just don’t care about them. 

Good enough as far as it goes, but it encompasses disidentification of all kinds. I don’t like thinking of myself as a writer or a poet. If I am dissatisfied with a poem, I am happy to concede that it’s so bad at being a poem that it can’t really be poetry at all. There’s no aspect of my life in which this dynamic doesn’t recur. Sometimes the results are absurd, sometimes self-defeating, sometimes both. But in no instance do I ever resist being disidentified with or as something.

It isn’t even as if the goal is to construct via dis-identification some alternate identity that is unique or singular, much less superior. I am happy to be generic; I just don’t want to be sub-generic. There may be sub-categories of robots, endless versions of Micronauts, but all subcategories are equally not human, and none of them had tempers to lose, or expectations they could fail to meet.

ON LAND OR IN WATER

Of all the supplementary vehicles available to the Micronauts, the Hydrocopter was my favorite. Befitting its name, it was modularized such that it could fly through the air, float and speed along the surface of the water, and submerge itself entirely within. While it obviously couldn’t do the first, it was surprisingly capable at the second and third. The cabin of the helicopter doubled as the transparent bell of the submersible, so the Time Traveler stationed within could explore any sustained depths with high visibility.

Despite my affection for it, the Hydrocopter posed both practical and conceptual challenges. The first was simply that the design of the bubble had to be airtight, an effect managed by having one half of the sphere locked into the other half with the resulting seam sealed by a rubber strip that covered the whole circumference. After all, were the sphere to leak, it would defeat the very purpose of the sub­mersible. But this meant that when it was working, the bubble couldn’t be independently submerged; it would just pop up to the surface, bobbing haplessly and idiotically, neither ship nor submarine but unsought flotation device. If you wanted it to explore the true depths, you would have to hold it down yourself, and naturally the deeper you wanted it to go the harder it became to keep it there. Annoying as this was, it pales in comparison to the implication of the Hydrocopter’s necessity for the Time Traveler. Did it have to breathe? I did not want to think it needed to breathe. That seemed wrong. But if it did not breathe, why did the bubble need to be airtight? I solved two problems at once: I opened the bubble, filled it with water, placed the Time Traveler in the captain’s chair, and sealed it again. It sank to the floor of the tub/pool immediately, where I could happily roll it about: exploration without risk, immersion without consequence. The very realization of elsewhere. As close an approximation as possible of a dream, which is just an ocean you can breathe.

Micro Verse

Likewise the artfully designed geometries of the micronautical bodies, their approximations and reductions of human shapes, their cloudy jewel tones and faces painted in semiprecious gilt, their stop-motion postures and immunity to time, the folding and unfolding of the angles of their limbs.

And the endless, everpresent water. The shallow dish of gold, its skin adorned with seeds. The ocean’s grit and grip, striven against, driving one forward but also deeper into the sand. The salt on the lips. The shocking cold of the outdoor shower opened to the bamboo and sea oak, its water drawn from the well, and the splay of toes against wet stone. Fingers gummy with the white threads of tangerine lobes pulled apart. How was I to know that world was not one that had the likewise joyful in it? I was no one, visible, or I was no one visible, and so there were none to tell me.