iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 1h

Choosing to interpret this as “The Black Casebook would not exist without these books”

The Waste Land, Hamlet, Anatomy of Criticism, The Political Unconscious, Hawksmoor, A Savage War of Peace, The Big Sleep, Nixonland, and 78 Degrees of Wisdom

1131

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Emerging from the vale of doomerism to think dialectically once more

Merlin stands on a misty hilltop in EXCALIBUR.

2181

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Way harder to narrow down than I thought it'd be, but here we go. First row is childhood, second row is high school, third row is college.

The nine albums that made me:

Childhood: The White Album, Pretzel Logic, Cowboy Bebop OST
High School: Foxtrot, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Return to Cookie Mountain
College: Remain in Light, Midnight Marauders, All Hail West Texas

2170

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I leaned more into fun than scares, but there are still spills, thrills, and chills to be found here

Approximately 24-hour horror sleepover film block: The Masque of the Red Death, Opera, Return of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th Part VI, You’re Next, House, Rec, The Thing, Ghostwatch, Buffet Infinity, Gonjiam Haunted Asylum, Phantom of the Paradise

1244

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I would invite anyone who thinks colorists are fungible to take a look at Greg Capullo's art with and without FCO Plascencia on colors.

From "Superheavy": Kaiju-sized supervillain Mr. Bloom attempts to kill Jim Gordon, only to be stopped by a punch to the face.

From Deadpool-Batman: Batman punches Deadpool on a Gotham rooftop.

From "Zero Year": Batman steers his burning Bat-Blimp toward a weather balloon.

From Wolverine Revenge: Old Wolvie shares a drink with Forge on a rooftop.

65712

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Debord and Baudrillard by way of Tony Scott and Michael Bay

1257

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

With apologies to Tetris, Halo, and the KOTOR and Arkham games

My nine favorite games: Morrowind, Baldur’s 2, Planescape: Torment, Half-Life 2, Mass Effect 2, Crusader Kings 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Disco Elysium, and Hades

1531

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Two ASOIAF moments that have always haunted me: Ned Stark spending his final moments before passing on revealing the truth about Jon’s identity to his greenseer son, who promptly forgets about it; the “Please.” woman, who might be Martin’s bleakest testament to the reality of war.

2339

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

…his adventures are recorded in the Black Casebook. Happy Batman Day, everybody.

1150

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

He is the Batman, and whether this dark knight rises…

From TDKR: the Dark Knight leaps through the Gotham skies for the first time in 10 years.

From BATMAN AND THE MONSTER MEN: The Caped Crusader stares down one of Hugo Strange’s pet ogres.

From BATMAN RIP: The Dark Knight rises from the grave.

From BATMAN AND ROBIN: The Batman declares that the Dynamic Duo will never die.

170

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

…to punish the wicked, until dawn finally breaks.

From THE SAGA OF RA’S AL GHUL: Batman ambushes a goon on a snowy mountainside.

From BATMAN AND THE MONSTER MEN: The Dark Knight pays an eerie visit to a sleeping Sal Maroni.

From DEJA VU: The Dark Knight mocks (and terrifies) some crooks.

From ABSOLUTE BATMAN: Bruce absolutely wrecks the Party Animals’ shit.

170

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Above this city that cannot change stands a man who cannot quit.

From DARK KNIGHT, DARK CITY: Batman meets Gordon atop GCPD headquarters.

From NIGHT CRIES: Batman sits gargoyle-like on a rooftop.

From THE BLACK GLOVE: Batman looks down on a neon-drenched Gotham.

From THE IMPOSTER: Batman weeps as he stands sentinel over Gotham’s first night without a violent crime in half a century.

170

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

…and shrieks of laughter after midnight.

From KNIGHTFALL: Arkham escapees run into the night.

From THE LAST ARKHAM: Mr. Szasz unveils himself.

From ENDGAME: The Joker swims toward the Batcave.

180

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Everywhere in-between, lives are punctuated by violence born of desperate circumstance or cruel whim, and worse things still:

From THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: Bruce remembers the night the Batman was born.

From VENOM: A little girl drowns in a sewer.

From TERMINUS: A jealous husband kills his wife’s lover.

From DEJA VU: Batman hears another boy get orphaned on the streets of Gotham.

190

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Corruption blooms in its corridors of power. Conspiracies gnaw at its rotten foundations.

From STRANGE APPARITIONS: Rupert Thorne holds court in a smoke-filled room.

From YEAR ONE: The GCPD drops an incendiary device on a tenement.

From THE LONG HALLOWEEN: Carmine Falcone sizes up Bruce Wayne.

From ENDGAME: Batman requests an audience with the Court of Owls.

190

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

This is what it’s all about (Colin Burrow in the LRB):

Many recent responses to ‘What’s the point of literary criticism?’ have implicitly accepted that a subject can justify people studying it only if it will make them money or get them a job. Studying English literature gives you ‘transferable skills’. It encourages empathy and understanding of other people and a willingness to make balanced analytical judgments, which the few remaining employers out there who are not horrible will or might or should value. Then there are neurological (or sometimes pop-neuro) justifications: reading poems lights up bits of your brain that other reading can’t reach, and the more bits of your brain that aren’t lost in an AI-induced fog the better. Read English! Light up your grey matter!

Some of those arguments are not simply venal. And some are OK, so far as they go. They help explain why people who have read English can end up as CEOs of big companies or as headteachers. There’s now even a British prime minister who read English and got the job largely because he seems better at talking to people than his lawyer predecessor. English graduates can also do some of the things that make life worth living: write TV dramas, act, do stand-up, sing, make films or help Brian Eno make music, to list just a few of my former students’ activities. But often the terms on which the subject is defended (which broadly speaking boil down to ‘don’t worry, it will get you a job’) concede so much to the dingy gods of the marketplace that they don’t capture the point, the real reason someone might want to study the subject, let alone evoke the kinds of pleasure that might come from doing it well.

So what are those pleasures? What is the point? The core act of literary criticism sounds simple. It is sitting down with a bit of writing and thinking about it. Then there should be a head-exploding moment of making connections between its different bits and perhaps bits of one’s own experience or stuff that’s happening in the world now or which was happening in the world around the person who wrote it. Sometimes the thing you’re reading will seem alien or baffling to start with. But the key thing to remember is that it once mattered to someone enough to make them shape it and write it down, so there has to be something there, even if finally you decide it shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did to the person who wrote it, or that it doesn’t really work.

You might think about the way it manages to create a particular effect and you might learn how to write from thinking about the way it’s done (are there tricks, bits of compositional magic you can learn from?), or you might just feel a shiver at understanding something you never thought could be understood. Sometimes you get a sense of seeing someone else’s world, or a world that you didn’t think was there. And once you have worked out a way of understanding the poem or the novel or the play then you have to convey it to someone else. A good critic is a kind of lightning conductor who picks out the energy in what they read and passes it on to others.

0115

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Say what you will about Morrison’s woo-woo shenanigans, but New X-Men #115—published in July 2001—is eerily prescient. It wasn’t the first time a plane flew into a skyscraper in fiction, but Morrison and Quitely used that iconography to convey the traumatic birth of a new era several months early.

Emma Frost teaches a telepathy class on the island of Genosha. One of her pupils, a goth called Negasonic Teenage Warhead, tells her: "Miss Frost...you think everything's just a joke, but I had the same nightmare fifty times last night and I'm having it again right now. Everybody's going to DIE."

Giant Sentinels begin wreaking havoc across Genosha. A wheelchair-bound Magneto can only watch as something approaches his tower.

A jet-shaped hunk of metal crashes into Magneto's tower. On the streets below, civilians scatter in a futile attempt to evade genocide.

From his chamber in Cerebra, Charles Xavier watches as 16 million mutants are exterminated in a matter of minutes. "No one saw it coming," he says. "They were drinking tea...making love...all those lights...gone out...no one saw..."

0252

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

As a Godzooky partisan, I did NOT care for this little freak as a child.

0210

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I need the average socialist to reach this level of discursive sophistication.

010

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Quite fond of his Earth X redesigns for the X-Men too, particularly Cyclops

060

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Alex Ross doesn't always do it for me, but he nailed the Green Lantern redesign in Kingdom Come.

The Green Lantern sits on his throne in an emerald "city"/satellite orbiting Earth, watching for alien threats.

Green Lantern, armored, holding a sick energy construct sword.

67613

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes

The Incredible Hulk screaming "HULK STRAIGHT!!" in Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's Ultimates comic.

0215

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I'm not mad about this line, but I have a hard time distinguishing it from panels of Batman saying "I don't like police brutality. That's bad, to me."

From the new Ghost in the Shell show: the Major says "A lifestyle that prioritizes consumerism..."

"...is the real act of violence against impoverished countries."

1222

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

RIP Tim Curry, a guy you were always happy to see show up. Watching him unload his tommy gun and cackle maniacally in The Shadow is a formative memory

3414

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

The South Remembers (in a non-evil way this time)

A shrine to Dolly Parton in my neighborhood

022254

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

A bird-themed plate was allegedly discovered on the Batman Part II set. It's probably just a coincidence, but Reeves and co. might be referencing The Owl Service, a novel about a Welsh myth quarantined in the owl pattern on a set of plates. Discovering the plates causes the myth to recur yet again.

The plate seen on the Glasgow set of The Batman Part II, photographed by @kieranmovies on Twitter

0170

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Don't say that you love me. Just tell me that you want me.

From Frank Miller's THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS: Batman pursues the Joker into a hall of mirrors, to mixed results.

1231

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

“Still, as a storyteller, I'm fascinated how a person's sense of consciousness can be so transformed by nothing more magical than listening to words...mere words.”

Agent Dana Scully reads Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space”

0243

The Enigma of Amigara Walt @blackcasebook.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

The magical alphabet from Alan and Steve Moore’s Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic

2160