Re:Generator Magazine

Endings are always bittersweet, even more so when you’ve learned to love your Ukranian slave dwarf like a second cousin or a friend’s cool older brother. Ryan and I knew Re:Generator had to end, that our secret underground bunker had to be emptied of all evidence we were ever there and filled in with concrete. These measures will come soon enough, but for now, we’re pondering just what is to be done with Федір.

To be honest, we have no idea.

When we found him near the docks of Дніпропетровськ in early 2006, the timing couldn’t have been better. He spoke just enough English to be hilarious. “You vant be blown?” he solicited to Ryan. Ryan did, and while Федір went to town on him, we offered to sneak him into our fabled land of plenty in exchange for further services. We were trying to get a new publication off the ground, we explained, and if we could convince him to be our assistant, working for very little – for free, really, other than the promise of food and a cage in a closet for shelter – the United States was his for the taking. He agreed, towelled off Ryan’s potent seed, and joined us on an unforgettable journey.

Those early years, we were inseparable. Some may argue it’s because we chained him to the workstation in his claustrophobic closet during business hours and locked his cage at night, but I like to think we formed a strong emotional bond. While we took all the credit for our evolving project, it was Федір who kept Re:Generator running smoothly, found our stories, and wrote first drafts in his pathetic pidgin English. Truly, he was a gift from the gods.

And then, the divisive Democratic presidential primaries of 2008 happened. We should have noticed the red flags sooner. Федір had always been a workaholic, but as the Clinton campaign amped up its desperate tactics, he went days without any sleep. We would have enforced his rest but the output from our little man was some of the best material he’d ever produced, and readership was skyrocketing. As they say in his homeland, why look a gift dwarf in the goggles?

Bill Clinton’s “race card” comments before the Pennsylvania primary were what put poor Федір over the edge, pushing him into a comatose state. Instead of being revived by the Ukrainian Honey potion, he plunged deeper into a coma. The doctor we brought in – at least, we think he was a doctor; he wore a white coat and made grim faces – informed us our Slavic slave was all but done for. We were on our own, and without his invaluable assistance, Re:Generator began to flounder. So when he revived this past May, it seemed like things were finally on the upswing.

They weren’t.

Something is terribly wrong with Федір. He rarely speaks now, and when he does, the subject matter has a touch of the apocalyptic. He speaks distantly of the lakes of fire, of creatures never seen by mortal beings so terrible he often cries uncontrollably as he describes their blood-caked carapaces. He doesn’t help, he doesn’t write, he seems uninteresting in fellating Ryan, he rarely eats, he never sleeps and his involuntary howling can even be heard on street level.

Ryan says the only humane thing to do now is end his life. “He’s seen things in the spaces between this life and the next that no one was meant to behold. That, or we broke him with that concoction full of mercury. Either way, I can’t stand to see him like this.”

I’m grasping at straws, looking for any other way to deal with the problem. “What if we free him?” I implore, my voice breaking. “What if we unleash him on the glorious cacophony of the outside world like we always promised we would? It’s not too late.”

“Robert, look at him,” Ryan says gently. “I was right in May and I’m right now. There’s no hope for him.” Федір has his left index finger in his mouth, gnashing his teeth animatedly. Blood is running down his face like a sanguinary goatee. He stops, shudders, and spits something onto the ground. It’s his finger. He chuckles with unearthly amusement.

In that moment, Ryan knows I’m on his side. Wordlessly, he motions for me to herd Федір into his cage. I heed the battlemaster’s command, and for his part, Федір offers little resistance. It’s heartbreaking, but letting him continue like this is even more so. Ryan returns with his antique English Brown Bess musket. He loads the longrifle, aims, and… nothing. Tears cloud his eyes.

“Do it, damn you!” I scream. “I can’t take it any more!” Eyes closed, Ryan squeezes the trigger. An ear-shattering thunderclap fills the room for a moment, then passes, as if it had never been. Федір lies motionless on the floor, the space where his head was now akin to an over-ripe cantaloupe. “It’s over,” Ryan says hoarsely, “and so is Re:Generator.”

Truly, there is nothing left to say. We leave the bunker for the last time in uncomfortable silence, the knowledge of our deed obscuring any relief we might feel at the unshouldering of a great burden. Федір has been freed, in a way, and it is up to the living to contend with what, if anything, that means.

“Re:Generator was a cultural sleeper cell, a slap in the face of propriety, and an unashamed advocate of the 3rd, 16th and 18th Amendments. They broadcast from deep underground Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles, California, with tentacles reaching as far as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Illinois, and Vancouver, British Colombia. Re:Generator strove to be a bustling marketplace of ideas – its bloggers were under no directive but to write what they felt, what amused them and what piqued their interest. They were just as confused and opinionated as everyone else (sometimes more so); they were just lucky enough to have a soapbox to stand on. At least that’s what they told anyone who got on their case.

But who were these wreckers of civilization, these threats to the very meaning of what it is to be American, nay! human? They were the damned, and the damned are named thusly:” —About Re:Generator

Re:Generator is dead. There is nothing left to say.

That isn’t quite true, is it? There’s always something to say, but when I resurface, I’ll be saying it differently. Look for Constellation Fang on the horizon. Study it, and write your observations in a moleskin notebook. When you squint at it long enough it will flicker briefly, then explode with content.

I cannot express my gratitude to the readers who have followed Re:Generator nigh on five years. So I won’t. Anyone who wishes to see a limited exhibition of historical artifacts, some previously unreleased, can join me after the jump.

As for the rest of you, this is the end. God bless you, and God bless America.

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This is it. This is the end. In just a few days, on August 1st, 2011, there will be no more Re:Generator. Not in an existential way – our archives will still be up, eventually reminding you of a more innocent time before the cataclysmic event. As you protect your young, curious son from gangs of roving cannibals who put babies on spikes, the overwhelming dread you must always stave off if the boy is to have a chance will give way, if you let your mind wander, to memories of fighting with your wife, who’s given up the will to live, and also visiting our website. Such is the curious power of our great, five year work, that even in your darkest hour, you can chortle to yourself at the thought of something we wrote when there was life and happiness. Really, we’re compiling our final seven months not for the people of today, but those who can truly appreciate it.

San Diego Comic Con: Understanding the inexplicable, Let the unbridled orgy of nerdiness begin, I am now insanely jealous of the Re:Gen writers attending Comic Con, Oh. My. God., O Snap: Uncanny Dexter, Pendragon, Parade Time with Finn and Jake, Your friendly neighborhood…, I am the hammer…, We have contact, We came, we saw, we took pictures of people in costumes; Do fail whales dream of electric tweets?, Facebook is a dark, dank dungeon, People in web comics smell like booze and cabbage, Get your Comic Con on and The Behemoth
by Staff
It’s unclear why San Diego Comic-Con’s press relations wing opened the gates to Re:Generator year after year, but we’re glad they did it. Whatever they saw in us, we tried to make the most of their implicit trust this year by getting hammered, harassing the My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, chatting up Wonder Women and Slave Leias, and playing video games, in roughly that order. Is there any difference between us and professional journalists, other than that they get paid? We don’t think so.

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Of all the traditions followed by the Washington, D.C. press corps during the start of a new president’s time in office, none is more insidious than “The First 100 Days.” There’s an expectation that what the leader of the free world does during that time will define his presidency for good or ill; with this prefab narrative in place, the fourth estate is all too happy to report events within that framework. And while it feels nice to think something as enormous and impactful as the American presidency can be so easily defined, it simply isn’t true. A vastly more accurate portrait can be drawn a few years in, when the hype has died down, victories have emboldened and losses left their sting, and the everyday business of keeping a country of over 300 million running and safe is a weight upon his shoulders.

Since I decided to end Re:Generator, the question of Barack Obama has been foremost on my mind. While we never limited ourselves to politics alone, a great swath of our content has been political in nature. In the 2008 election cycle, Re:Generator tended to have a pro-Obama bias, although cast through the lens of deep political cynicism (Perhaps a better way of putting it is we were even more cynical about Hillary Clinton than we were about Obama, and our cynicism extended further still when it came to the Republican field of candidates.). Before we recede into shadows, I feel it would behoove us to revisit our expectations around him, as well as charting the highs and lows of his actions so far. When I told a friend about my plans, he posed a question he thought deserved answering: Is Obama as bad – or worse – than George W. Bush, considering many of his actions echo his predecessor’s? It’s a controversial question to ask, but we’ve never shied away from controversy. I intend to give my friend his answer. And so it is we take a steely look at the first two-and-a-half years of the 44th president of the United States…

In part one, I revisited my cautious hopes and dreams for the Obama administration, which they exceeded beyond my wildest imaginings – if the phrase “exceeded beyond my wildest imaginings” now means “failed to deliver on many of their campaign promises, and went about things the wrong way much of the time.” In The first two-and-a-half years‘ riveting conclusion, I turn my eye to the specifics of Obama’s record. What has he done? What hasn’t he done? And what does it all mean?

Every president has their apologists and hero worshippers, those for whom their Commander-in-Chief was lovingly sent to earth by God Almighty, His every word and deed a thing of divine grace. If Dear Leader, in His infinite wisdom, did do wrong, it wasn’t His fault. They accentuate the positive and downplay the negative, write glowing biographies and publish websites with ironic titles like What The Fuck Has Obama Done So Far? No apologist is completely off the mark – unless a president spends every moment of his working day pillaging, murdering, consorting with demons and eating human flesh, a good deed here or there is bound to come out of the White House.

In that vein, Barack Obama reversed the global gag rule on foreign family planning services that made US aid contingent on their avoidance of offering or even talking about abortion. In a further show of respect for science and medicine, he repealed the ban on federal funding of stem cell research put in place during the Bush era. The Obama’s have advocated for healthy eating while avoiding the self-righteousness that can turn some Americans off to the message. Under Obama, the FDA has finally been allowed to regulate tobacco; not take it out of smokers hands, as the hysterics would bleat, but to prevent minors from ever getting hooked in the first place.

B-Rock is obsessed with keeping most of us alive, it seems. With his eye to the long term, he negotiated the New START treaty with Russia’s Dmitri Medvedev to reduce the nuclear arsenals of both countries, cutting the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers by half, and establishing a new inspection and verification regime. There’s still a long way to go before the two countries’ stockpiles have been abolished, but some action on this front is better than none, and extends the spirit of “trust but verify” cooperation initiated by president Reagan in the 1980s. Obama has improved veteran services, expanded the children’s health insurance program significantly, and gave the country a small taste of health care reform (but more on that later).

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