Comic Book Rant Because I'm Old And Think I Know Shit

I happened into a place. It had comics. Lots and lots of 80's and 90's comics with lots and lots of 80's and 90's independent comics. Not even a comic shop, just a store that sells used books and movies. For whatever reason, it also had long boxes teeming with comics. Holy crap that's f'ing cool, am I right? What a find. The money and joy flowed like the swollen rivers of Spring.

 

One title had an introduction by cover artist Matt Wagner. Yes, that Matt Wagner. Fantastic. He described Bill Widener’s Go-Man as:”...if Jack Kirby’s meth-headed grandson read a whole lot of Marshall McLuhan while an episode of Miami Vice blared away at him from a thirty foot screen.” 

 

 

Marshall McLuhan evoked in a comic book introduction? What? How is this possible?! 

 

Oh yeah, it was 1989. 

 

Comics were a beast of a different fur back then. The Big Two fought over talent and market share, while the independent ecosystem flourished. No, most independent titles didn’t stay afloat long, but the whirling melange of new titles flashing into existence to fill the voids struggled well to the betterment of the medium. Tim Burton, Mr. Mom, and Wilbur Force assembled to make a little fan flick called "Batman". Verily, foundations were being well set into the Earth. We were two short years from 1991's "X-Men" #1 selling eight million copies. Four years from Vertigo birthing itself in a gas station bathroom stall to the piped music of Tom Waits. And social messages? To think of today’s market as the watermark for diversity is to ignore the life and times of Karen Berger. Ann Nocenti’s "Daredevil" run alone was a college course in cultural affairs. The market was teeming with the rehashed and the startling new. And today? Well, I don’t see it that way. Maybe I am wrong. Am I? 

 

I desperately hope I am. 

1992 book making fun of speculators who, unironically, almost killed the industry in the 90's. Love. It.

Are YOU learning anything new from comics? Name more than two comics today that do, or could, invoke McLuhan. Where’s Yukio Mishima? Where’s Robert Anton Wilson? Where's Ayn Rand? Where's Anansi? Where’s Joseph Campbell? Where's Charlotte Perkins Gilman? Where's Robert Bly? Where’s Heraclitus? Where are the Grimm Brothers? Where’s Hypatia? Where's Thomas Aquinas? Where's Burroughs? Where's Plath? Where's Ellison? Where’s the Golden Ratio? Where’s Vonnegut? Where’s Waldo? I want the sequential art medium to feed me, challenge me, anger me, and confound me as vibrantly now as it did 30 years ago. Yeah, I am older and far more experienced. I wear the medals of Pain and Miles. I carry the wisdom of scars. Are those any reasons to assume comics can’t be a balm? That the pages of fantasy and the fantastic must fall silent before the slogging parade of years? Hell no!

 

At least I hope not. 

 

No. Strike that. Reverse it. I want, not hope, the New Release shelves to shine like a baby star. I want the glistening, bristling creativity of the unexpected. Too much to ask? Okay. Fine. We'll compromise. How about we settle on entertaining. Is that too much to ask of a publishing industry seeking our money and praise and money? To pull us, albeit briefly, away from the pallid gaze of the morning alarm, the monthly bill stack, and the daily rut vampire?

 

Well, gentle reader, I fear it might be.

 

Stan Lee exclaimed, "Excelsior!" from any rooftop, bus station, or international media outlet he could climb on before getting caught. I keep my ear to the ground today. The peaks and valleys carry jumbled static. There is no voice rising above the din crying, "Great stories come first!" or "Our goal is to be the best!" In the Maker's name, please correct me if I am wrong. I know examples of quality storytelling exist because when found I throw my time and money at them with thirsty gusto. Unfortunately, they are far and few. I will say none thus far carry the mantle "reboot", "relaunch", "re-imagining", or "revamp". It's been my experience that those words mean 'creativity by committee', which is no creativity at all. 

(Side note: I would give real money to see a Raymond Chandler, crime noir-esque Batman movie. Hello? Hollywood? World's Greatest Detective? Hello?)

Heraclitus observed, "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man." 

McLuhan observed, "Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers." 

Shannon Entropy, as part of Information Theory, observed: The amount of information in a message is the amount of surprise. In other words, if you know what someone is going to say before they say it, then their message contains no information. Consider what this means in our social media age, and how it impacts comics. Oh? You see how that includes many other things? Well, I leave that for YOU to ponder... 

Bill Bryson observed, "My first rule of consumerism is never to buy anything you can't make your children carry." Children can carry LOTS of comics. Just saying.

I want to spend lots of money on comics. I want the comic industry to want to earn my money. It has generations of readers eager to shove greenbacks down their corporate G-strings if they'd give us reason to. We nerds like to spend money! 

There's a reason this meme exists.

Be as topical as you want, but do it with an ear to quality. Try new things while respecting the good that came before. Encourage and foster new talent while giving credit to the talent and concepts that carried you this far. Give us tales to pass down to our children. Hero's Journey? Anyone? That one seems to do well over the, oh, centuries. 

I want new and amazing. I want familiar and true. I want to spend lots of money. 

Well, comics industry? Here's the dangling carrot. 

What say you! 

ROM the Spaceknight is an Archetype?

Been thinking a lot lately. It’s kind of a curse, but I knew what I was getting myself into when the salesman showed me my pre-birth possibilities. I simply could not pass on HUMAN. Sure, it was WAY out of my budget, but how can you pass up on an optical system designed to detect ripe fruit, the movement of snakes, and the position of stars. How can you say no to a multi-layered nervous system engineered to sustain a bleeding edge blend of reptilian, mammalian, primate, and post-primate processing? Damn thing nearly drives itself! Sure, sometimes it drives into an early grave, or a series of spectacularly, fantastically bad choices when left on autopilot too long, but that’s the thrill of the ride. Repair and maintenance costs aside, the full package really got my engine revving. Then Bob showed me the mysteries, complexities, and (ahem) hypnotizing curves of the model I would be compatible with. Good golly Miss Molly, I couldn’t sign the papers fast enough! Practically threw my check book at the old boy. Great salesman, that Bob. Swell guy. Top notch. What am I saying, of course you know! You picked human, too. How’s your model working out? 

Back to thinking. 

Below is an image.  

Before you ask, it is ROM the Spaceknight. A toy hero turned comic hero created by Richard C. Levy, Bryan L. McCo, and Scott Dankman, per Wikipedia, and sold to Parker Brothers. ROM is interesting. Here’s a commercial.

Built to fight an enemy that can trick the senses, replace trusted friends, and rain destruction without warning. It’s as if the message is, we must be on guard for threats around us that don’t resemble threats. And to do so requires a means, let’s call it a combination of experience and wisdom, to see past the surface. How else do you build an Analyzer without the knowledge of knowing what to look for?

But I digress. Back to the picture. What do you see? Literally. Now, what do you see figuratively? Metaphorically? Archetypically? Psychologically? I’m not suggesting the artist tried to craft a multilayered image. Maybe they were, but nothing online confirms that. Odds are they were simply meeting a deadline, had an idea about the next slice of the plot, and needed to get this done before moving onto the next project. All the while, hoping the check shows up soon. However, we get our ideas from somewhere, don’t we? Yes, we do. Humans are built, and you may want to sit down for this, for the wilds. We’re built for surviving in an environment without power or grocery stores. We’re built to be part of a group, a family, a clan, a tribe, a city, a state, a nation. We are built to exist with and around people more than things. Things are a means to a human end. I know what some are thinking: “Sam. I like to be alone.” Maybe you do. Maybe you have your valid reasons and it suits you. Or maybe you’re just hiding. I don’t know. I bet you do. But you aren’t really alone, are you? Do you make the power flowing into your outlets? The food on the grocery store shelves? The clothes on your back? The movies and shows playing on your favorite streaming service? Nope. You rely on FAITH that the other humans of the larger group you belong to are predictable enough, similar to you enough, to keep the lights on, the plants tended to, the looms moving, and the cameras recording. That’s a lot of trust invested. No wonder our minds are tuned to recognize emotion so quickly. We need to know what the other humans are doing to predict what will happen next. 

Buttressed by this abbreviated example of how you and I are interconnected, regardless of our desired level of proximity, let’s glide over to the next point and the picture. We’re connected because we’re human. We have minds molded by forces far, far older than the modern world. Forces we shared up to the not so distant past, given the youth of our species. The need for safety, food, sex, and shelter from deadly predators hunting in the dark. The need of holding value in the eyes of others and companionship, which in turn meant a greater likelihood of securing the first four I mentioned. Enter ROM. A group locked into a loop of ‘need satisfaction’ can last a very long time in a static system, but it will quickly crumble and die when faced with a threat or change to that system. Imagine a machine that gathers materials from a set point to use to make more machines. Those new machines, in turn, also gather materials from the same set point to continue the cycle. Now move the set point. Without growing or adapting, without knowing HOW to grow and adapt, the machines stop working and collapse. That’s the inevitable doom of no one leaving the loop. To be clear, most large changes to the loop (like moving a set point) is as much of a threat as a smart, hungry dragon settling into a cave outside your village. Nature isn’t good or evil, but it’s a cold killer nevertheless. So, what is the name humans give these individuals who travel far from home, learn, suffer, fail, try again, and ultimately return transformed into something new to enlighten their people and defeat the threat? Say it with me: HERO. Ideally, that HERO will then mentor others, perhaps even other new heroes, to refresh the upward, post-animal cycle.

Behold an infant teetering on unsteady legs after yet another bumpy fall, lifting itself from the ground and into a new world of exploration and greater independence. Later, an adolescent grapples with the mental and physical wonders of a raging biological fire burning away its childhood form to open, for the second time in perhaps as little as a decade, another new realm to navigate. This ought to sound familiar. It is your past, in case you forgot. Rom’s life followed the same path on his utopian (perpetual childhood?) home world until an outside force threatened to destroy it. He then volunteers to leave behind his life of comfort for a new, unfamiliar one of struggle and responsibility. It costs him all the physical comforts he ever knew. His mind and nervous system, the only means of knowing existence, are placed into an armed exoskeleton hardened for combat. He must learn this new way of living or perish. The trade-off? Clad in Bio-Armor, he can now sore through the scorching heat of atmospheric friction to lift himself form the gravity well of his planet to sail amongst the stars. He can see through the deceptions of the Dire Wraiths and rally powerful tools to one day restore peace. 

Brevity compels me to bring this to a conclusion, gentle reader. The length of a work is no guarantee of impact or importance. I’ve said nothing you don’t already know. That’s not self-deprecating humor or taking the easy way out. I’m talking concretely about matters (See what I did there? The linguists do.) and symbols created by YOUR human mind because Claw and Tooth and Hunger and Disease walked with us for millennia. They still do, lest we forget. Science wouldn’t exist if so many things weren’t hell bent on killing us hairless, pink things for so long. Consider that for a moment. Really consider that. Then consider this. Why is Female considered a creative and/or destructive aspect around the globe? Why is Male considered an orderly and/or tyrannical aspect? Why did Rom need to leave utopia in order to become strong and wise? Shiva wants to know. Odin the All Father wants to know. Glooscap wants to know. Akna wants to know. Lots of old deities and heroes have been poking around lately asking very uncomfortable questions. A few even asked for your cell number. I didn’t give it out, not to worry. It seemed like they were only trying to figure themselves out, but I didn’t take any chances. Maybe they just want to know what to do next. Maybe they only want to know what is best for them. And you.  Damned if I know, but you might, though. YOU might have the answers for gods and humans.

Blaze it across the sky, if you do. We’d appreciate it. Then brace yourself for pushback. Some humans don’t like being told what to do. Some don’t stay in the loop.