R) Regnum

Regnum Masq'dmun

Or, O! The greatness of d'man.
The Masked Man that is. A man of his times. A man of many guises.
Let us trace the history of this beloved asshole in the mask:

His origins unknown, the character first appeared in a high school comic strip by J.R. Baron called “The Adventures of the Three Science Guys” which despite the pretentious foreshadowing inherent in its magnanimous titularity, seemed to chronicle the mundanities of existence for three young men constitutionally averse to Science, but stuck taking Chemistry class together.

Mispronunciations aside, the comic was frequently very funny and proved a moderate success that allowed its three stars to launch solo careers after their comic counterparts had graduated. Brian pursued his music career and got married, Smurf liberated Iraq and became a male erotic dancer who goes by 'Blue Balls', and DMM starred in a spin-off comic strip called “The Masked Man Goes to College.” Continuing in the line of titular misnomery the strip, which ran weekly in a campus paper, recounted the quotidian miseries of a lackaday first-semester collegiate drop-out somehow still living in the dorms with a (possibly imaginary) twenty-five-hundred pound sea lion named Carloff.

What followed was a two year absence afterwhich the strip reappeared revamped and under new authorship. “The Masked Man Goes to College 2.0” was a web meta-comic drawn by The Masked Man himself, having apparently moved to a house in California with The Dude, a gun-toting roommate and his uncle, a pilot. Drawing the webcomic himself allowed DMM the character to frequently vent his frustration with DMM the author in 3-panel tirades bemoaning everything from his looks to his disatisfactory traits. Sometimes the strips would show DMM attempted to “draw himself better” but these usually ended with The Dude barging in wearing full militia gear and demanding “payment”.

Once D'Mask'd Man went online there was no turning back. Before the comic strip folded (more accurately it seems, faded away) DMM had integrated commentary on the content of the strip through use of his newly created Myspace page, and it was there that he diverged from the comic-strip medium altogether. The M'dM d'writer emerged on the blogosphere, fully formed, fully dysfunctional, and raucously colorful within the year. “The Masqued Mind Revealed” with its attendent tagline “now updated 5 times a month year!”

The zaniness that followed was hard to classify. It was cutting edge, right at the height of the blog literary scene-- not fan-fics or web-New Journalism, but the blog as both ends and means: both the art and the artist. He would write pieces that couldn't be done in any other way, juxtaposing html and text and colour and content in new and unique ways.

No one read it.

Then:

The emo period deserves no further comment.

But the man eventually reformed his ways and masked his inner contentiousness in, of all things, conformity. He had kids. He started writing pieces for Harpers and Atlantic Monthly with titles like “The Anchor, the Quicksand, and Post-Collegiate Expectation” or “Invisible Standing in an Invisible Crowd.” He went back to school and got a rushed Masters from Concordia in Strategic Communications before taking a senior editorial position as for the e-news quarterly The Other.

Coming back into the fray of his youthful unabash after nearly twenty years of playing it straight, his return was a book entitled Agony & Wrath. A meta locomotive of a novel about the Great American Man writing the Great American Novel. Whilst challenging and expanding accepted definitions of both, the novel constantly questions its own truths building to a memorably killer twist ending in the Ramapo Mountain wilderness outside Ringwood New Jersey.

Met with critical acclaim and lackluster sales, the man in the errant mask has presently disappeared. Whereto next the masked man ventures, and where he reappears is as yet unknown. What we know is he remains a man; finding ever new ways to mask identity in anonymity, discomfort in humor, loss in transcendence, and new beginnings in endings.

Stay tuned.