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
DC Comics first exposed me to the concept of a Multiverse (especially the Earth-S specifically for all the Zany Shazam and Whiz comics characters), perhaps that helped me to appreciate Moorcock's ETERNAL CHAMPION mythos all the more.
We (i.e. comic and FSF readers) know there is an almost concrete connection between comics and enjoying and being open to reading genre material. I wonder if there has even been and substantial proof of this other than folks like us slagging off on the internet.
I learned the word "estuary" from an old Curt Swan issue of Action Comics.
That word has always seemed vaguely indecent to me. Estuary. Don't let the dog out, she's in estuary. I'm sorry, you have an estuarine infection.
This is probably a consequence of growing up near the Chesapeake Bay estuary - the saucy wench!
I learned the word sanctimonious by reading Booster Gold. Dan Jurgens loved that word.
I think every single one of us learned the word "invulnerability" from Superman....
I think I may have learned "invulnerability" from the story of Achilles, but I read a LOT of Greek mythology in kindergarden.
But Red Skull taught me my first words of German....
My first knowledge of what the Cuban Missile Crisis was came out of the JLA/JSA/All-Star-Squadron crossover. [Which is more of a comment on how late the schools deemed fit to teach any 20th century history at all than anything else, but...]
But Red Skull taught me my first words of German....
Given the pathetic state of most foreign language dialogue in comics, I'm sorry.
I was just thinking as I finished We3 (in addition to "Holy crap, this is good") that this is the perfect comics story. You couldn't do this as straight prose, because it would be boring (probably) and you couldn't do it as a movie, because the CGI animals would look unbelievably stupid. Comics can do some wondrous things with literature and art, and it's nice when you can read something and recognize that. That's why Alan Moore's attitude toward Hollywood making his works into movies (throw money at me, then leave me alone) is refreshing, because he knows they can't touch the source material.
That's not even his attitude anymore. Now he just turns down the money and says to give it to the artists involved.
Even better.
From an interview with Moore at http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=4737 :
"I've decided I don't want anything more to do with films at all. After all the stuff with "The League," there'd been some minor law suit with somebody claiming that I had gotten the idea from an American Hollywood screen writer and you can imagine how I felt about that. So, I felt, if I'm going to react I might as well over react. (audience laughs) So, I said, right, that's it, no more Hollywood films. And if they do make films of my work, then I want my name taken off them and I want all the money given to the artists. I thought, God, that sounds principled (audience laughs) and almost heroic! (audience laughs) Then I got a phone call from Karen Berger the next Monday, she's an editor at DC Comics, and she said, "Yeah, we're going to be sending you a huge amount of money before the end of the year because they're making this film if your Constantie character with Keanu Reeves." I said, "Right, OK. (audience laughs) Well, take my name off of it and distribute my money amongst the other artists. I felt, well, that was difficult, but I did it and I feel pretty good about meself. Then I saw David Gibbons who I had done "Watchmen" with and he was saying, "Oh Alan, guess what, they're making the 'Watchmen' film." And I said, with tears streaming down my face, "Take my name off of it David. (sniffles)" (audience laughs) "You have all the money." Then I got a check for the "V for Vendetta" film. It was just, this was within three days!"
I once got into an argument with my first-grade teacher over her description of the Apollo 11 spacecraft differed from what I had read in Tintin.
Hard to believe that Tintin was wrong.
JeffR: Likewise on the Cuban Missile Crisis (the final part of Crisis on Earth-Prime was also my first exposure to the Multiverse).
Ralf: Well, it was just stuff like "Mach schnell!" and "Schweinhund!" No attempt to actually put together real sentences or anything. :)