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! 

Speak Loudly, Do The Ghosts We Carry.

I startled awake afraid, hands raised seeking a threat to strike. The sensation of weight and confinement crowded me as I grasped at anchors to pull me away from the dream. I remembered dirt. I remembered a small space. I remembered malice filled eyes looking down at me. They wanted me in the small place, to stay there, to keep me there. I don’t know what they were or what animal or nightmare form they were part of. I do know they saw me as sure as I saw them. Intelligent as they were uncaring. I don’t know if they were part or cause of whatever placed me in the filling, pressing dirt but that they wanted me there was without doubt.

I asked Diogenes to stop barking for a moment and tell me what this dream could mean. He brought forth a lit lantern holding it close to my face before asking me how honest I wanted us both to be. I tried to answer but the lantern’s illumination was so bright I had to turn away. 

A hand then fell upon my shoulder. Friendly Seneca smiled at me and asked where it was the dirt came from. I said I did not understand as all dirt comes from the Earth, is the Earth. He nodded and asked how is it in the Lantern’s light my hands were so clean after digging so hard. 

To them both I leveled a finger. I need answers, not lessons! I need truth, not riddles. Be clear or begone for I am troubled and need peace. 

A sudden roar of laughter struck my ears. I turned as the lantern changed in tone but not brightness. A bald cliché of the devil draped in cheap black satin poked his long fingernail at my forehead. You need to get out more, kid. he said. You need to relax and just take in all the angles, dig? It’s all a sideshow. Go west find both your ticket booth and your stage.

He probably dropped them in my river, Anton. came a voice to the side. We turned to face a bearded man in robes. His feet and legs were dripping wet. The dollar store Satan laughed. Your river, my midway, Uncle Bob’s triangle, and Jim’s Dublin, you old fool. 

He shops at the Scottish Rite Aid whispered the first man from the shadows. A women’s voice, hard a railroad spike and hot as steel, shot back. Leave the comedy to those who truly understand destruction. 

Stop! All of you! The ones in the shadows and the ones who are the shadows. Stop it! The ones on thrones and the ones licking the best of gutters. STOP! All your voices. All your thoughts. All your ideas! I AM A WALKING COFFIN. My back hurts and my ears are sore from broadcasting all I have heard. I need to set you all down and just…rest. 

I sob with fatigue and sadness. I have no map and the waves grow higher and higher.  

Excuse me, pips a quiet voice. Do you know what time it is?

Yes, I reply. But longitude is not the problem.

Then knowledge is not the answer.

That’s not a new idea.

To continue is not new. To end is not new. To question is not new. To be mad or angry or contented is not new. That’s the point. 

Where is the Lantern’s light? Why can I only see platitudes now? Is this all I have left after falling? 

Material falls from a sifter. The sifter is not falling. You have what you hold whether you see it or not. 

I tire of this Hidden Master facade. Identify yourself and explain how you are one voice when before I was a multitude. 

You have what you hold.

I need answers!

You have what you hold.

I need…You have.

Atlas gave them One Shrug, Atlas Shrugged movie review

NO, this is not a bash session. This is not an exercise in trolling. This is not a vent, rant, or a demand for the professional banning of all actors and producers involved in the making of these silver screen gems. And yet. The Atlas Shrugged movies are (so far) less than great. Okay, less than good. These are not good movies.

They can’t be.

Full disclosure. I actually own these films. I own Atlas Shrugged in both paper and audio formats. I own other Ayn Rand works. Heck, I even bought a hat.
                                                                      (I love this hat.)

And I still think the movies are pretty bad, just for not the reasons most critics have savaged them. Atlas Shrugged is an immense work. It is a manifesto. It is the pouring out of Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy into a fictional world much like our own. It is many things, but what it is not is a novel. And therein lies the inherent downfall with adapting it into a movie. Atlas Shrugged is a novelized philosophy text. I warn friends and acquaintances to whom I recommend Atlas Shrugged that if they walk into the book with a Harry Potter, Twilight, or Hunger Games mindset they are better off not even looking at the cover.

Atlas is not for escapism, it is for educating. Ayn Rand, through Atlas and her other works, wanted to change how people thought by introducing them to her moral code: Objectivism. A moral code, briefly, is a blueprint for living. Change a person’s moral code and you change how they think and live. Millions of words have been spilled debating, arguing, dissecting, and plain eviscerating Objectivism. My point here is not a dissertation on what it is or is not (I’m not thrilled by the movies is my point lest you forget), but I do think a summary for those unfamiliar with it is in order. A word of warning, however. Atlas is over one thousand pages long. I’m going to encapsulate some aspects that speak to me in five sentences or less. This is in NO WAY a CliffsNotes version of the book or Objectivism. Here goes: (1) As your life is yours, no group, society, or belief system may lay claim to you in any way without your permission. (2) Humans, having no instinctive method of survival, must use reason (the Mind) to survive. (3) Therefore, no one has the right to claim the products of your Mind without permission just as you have no claim to the products of others without theirs. (4) Capitalism, when operated correctly, creates an environment of voluntary trading between individuals where value (your best efforts)is traded for value (the best efforts of others). (5) Money, as a symbol of fair value for value trading, is a moral creation based on honesty and hard work that allows a person to achieve levels of security and freedom never before seen in human history. Okay. Not too bad. Over-simplifications with volumes of ideas left out, yes, but given I tried to squeeze a lake into an eyedropper I’m alright with these five.

The book has moments of excellent drama, comedy, wit, and some sex scenes Fifty Shades of Grey would be proud of, but they are ALL to illustrate a philosophical point, including (dare I say especially) the sex. It’s not impossible to do that in a movie, but it is very very hard and usually a horrible way to build a film. Every scene, every line, every set, every piece of wardrobe, etc. must be coordinated to almost subliminal levels to send messages to the audience. And that’s exactly what the producers of the film would have had to do for starters just to attempt an adaptation of a book that hammers readers with enough dialogue to make Tuesdays With Morrie seem like an Action-Adventure film. I’m not pessimistic enough to say the producers were doomed to failure from the start, but on bad days I’m very close to it.

Still, I applaud the attempt. Truly. I know I couldn’t make a film to do it justice. The material is so thick it’s intertwined. I will probably buy the third installment to show my support. I just won’t expect to feel the same gut reaction I do from reading a text populated by personifications of a moral code compared to watching actors reciting memorized lines. But in a way. I’m okay with that.