I was recently discussing my love of odd quantum physics theorizing and how I like to use it in my work with someone today (while looking at essays for the new book, coming this summer from Prime Books, and yes, that was pretty shameless of me, but it does relate) when I realized that in a large part, I owe a certain cast of mind to comic books. Specifically, the difference between myself and my friend when discussing hyperspatial relationships, to use but one example from our conversation.
I was discussing how a box could be larger on the inside than the outside, and the very idea seemed to burn his brain a little, which I found amusing. Sure, there are plenty of ways I could have been exposed to this idea.. Dr. Who comes to mind... but the fact is, the first time I came across it was in an old Gardner Fox comic. Same thing with parallel universes, time travel and causal violations... all of these good tropes of weird mind-bending SF, the kind of stuff I would come to love from writers like Tim Powers or Borges, I was first introduced to in comic books. Tesseracts, cloning, all manner of weirdness, really. Would I have been capable of grasping the intricacies of the great smoky dragon if not for Bill Mantlo? Probably. But I still remember his work fondly years later, stories where (as an example) a giant gamma irradiated behemoth could encounter a society of sapient animals who based their whole society either on an abandoned bible or an old Beatles song, or where a captain of industry could fight, sequentially, an evil Chinese mandarin, the Frankenstein's monster and a Balkan scientist with a mask grafted to his face by another, even more evil Balkan scientist, and a fat guy with a fetish for gold. Oh, and I shouldn't forget that Iron Man battled the fat gold-lover with the help of a half-alien guy dressed up in a costume off of a playing card and his psychic ex-girlfriend.
You hear a lot of talk about how superhero comics today are mostly crap, and I can't really refute it: a lot of the stuff I pick up in stores doesn't really do it for me. But there are a few writers who I will consistently check out, and other writers who I don't like myself but who others seem to be getting that same conceptual charge out of. One of the reasons I love comic books of all kinds is the total lack of a limitation to storytelling because of finances (no special effects budget to worry about) while still possessing that immediate, visceral potential for visual storytelling. Jon Silpayamanant and I have briefly had a back and forth on the ability to separate the visual from the narrative in comics, and I agree it's a thorny issue, but in one sense that very inability to tell the dancer from the dance in comic books is one of the medium's greatest strengths, when it works right: one of the things I absolutely love in Shanower's Age of Bronze is exactly how he creates the world of the Bronze Age Hellenes: it's infinitely more satisfying to me than, say, Wolfgang Peterson's attempt, in that there's no need to cast a big name actor whether or not he's right for the part and the 'acting' is all in the elegance of the illustrations. The limitless potential for imaginative freedom in the medium while relying on a joint visual/verbal vocabulary of expression is just something that keeps me coming back to the damn things, whether it's for a scene where an anti-sun is attacking the planet Earth and being opposed by the entire population of the planet, granted superpowers, or watching a battle in a seething holocaust of fire between a stellar god of fascism and his son, or looking at a quirky arrangement of panels telling the story of how a nosy photomat clerk sneaks out of her meal at a chinese restaurant to tail a guy whose pictures she developed that day. And to a great degree, my early exposure to the old EC reprints gave me a taste for the visual in storytelling that serves me in my work in fiction, when I turn my mind to it (the story coming out this year in the Adventure anthology from Monkeybrain... look, I resisted a link!.. has a very visual style to it) and which has given me an appreciation for the works of artists I would probably have never given a chance otherwise, such as Heironymous Bosch.
So yeah, I owe a good deal to my early obsession with these strange little pamphlets. Which is probably why, years later and after having discovered plenty of other art forms I enjoy, I still come back to them from time to time, looking to trap that old lightning in a bottle again. Sometimes it even happens. That's part of the reason for posts like the one yesterday, because quite frankly, one of the reasons I love comics blogging is that I learn more about comic books from it than I can from the 'comics press', which is seemingly full of sycophants and yes-men who only grow a spine or form an honest opinion either under duress or because they're afraid of being supplanted somehow. This doesn't mean that I think the blogs are a perfect utopia of discourse... I'm hardly that naive... I just generally prefer being exposed to the biases of people who are more up front about having them, and even the bloggers who I don't at all like I can at least count on to be themselves more regularly than anything I've seen in a lot of the 'press' I've read. (Although lately I'm liking The Comics Journal more than I used to. That's a digression, I guess.) Honestly, I learn about more books here than I did ever before, which is in itself a reward.
This has been a scattered rant about my debts to old comic books that has, as is often the case, veered wildly into a whole new direction at the end, and is finally coming back to close on the idea that I will never forget how cool I though the JLA/JSA crossovers were, and how much easier I found Philip K. Dick and Samuel Delany to understand because of them.
Posted by Matt Rossi at January 27, 2005 3:11 AM