This Is Monsterland
I am here to chew bubblegum, and to sing the praises of Marvel Monsters Group.
And I'm all out of bubblegum!
...You know, for a few years now I've been fond of telling people I know (the non-comic-reading kind, that is) that the genius of Marvel was to blend superhero comics with romance comics. Just think of the early X-Men's Cyclops and Marvel Girl, or Peter Parker's hard luck life, or the Reed-Sue-Namor triangle, or...
Well, obviously one could go on and on this way. It makes a convincing story, too: after all, who co-invented romance comics? Jack Kirby. And who co-invented Marvel comics? Jack Kirby. Sure, so the blending of the two would be the most natural thing in the world for Jack, as well as yet more proof (as if any more were needed) of his natural tendency to work way out ahead of the curve: today, as bestselling science fiction novelists try their hand at crossing over into the romance-novel world, and already-famous bodice-rippers see even their giant sales take a step up when they cash in on science-fictional subject matter, it's humbling to think that they too are living in The House That Jack Built, with his own two hands, way back in the early Sixties...humbling, yes. But with one proviso.
It isn't true.
Or, it isn't entirely true.
It's embarrassing to admit, but until the publication of the Marvel Monsters Group titles, it had never occurred to me that Marvel's lineage was still, essentially, the monster lineage of the old Timely books. Of course once you realize that, it all seems so obvious: re-read FF#1, and you'll see it. It's a team of monsters. Just like all the rest: Spider-Man is a monster, the X-Men are certainly monsters (mutants walk among us, and they're organized! Look at their creepy identical uniforms! Look, that one doesn't even have eyes!)...and hell, even Thor is a bit of a monster. Or else what else does it mean that Jane Foster is always there getting supremely wigged out by all the Asgardian stuff? If you take it from Jane's perspective, she must be awfully glad not to wind up alone in a room with Sif for more than a minute or two...Sif is seven feet tall and immortal, and jealous. Sif, for Jane Foster, is someone to worry about; Jane is about as secure with Sif around as a gerbil is with a cat...
Okay, I ran with that one a little bit, I'll admit. But no wonder the poor girl's constantly fainting! And I ask you, has Marvel ever, ever had a bigger fainter in its cast list than Jane Foster?
I say thee nay...
But back to the main point, which is that it took Marvel Monsters Group to open my eyes to all this. And how brilliant is MMM, that it disguises comics commentary itself as throwaway "Assistant Editor's Month"-style comics stories! Suddenly, as Jim points out* in his superlative essay on Marvel Origins, the sinking of Monster Isle in the climax of FF#1 becomes the clear representation of monster comics throwing off their threatening past, in order to drape themselves in new and more superheroic clothing - my God, it's gnosto-Cabalistic parturition, again! - until the only "real" monster left wandering around unsupervised afterward is the uniquely-grotesque Thing, himself virtually the poster boy for monster rehabilitation. And when I say anyone can see that's what he is, I'm not kidding: the first copy of FF I ever bought was a hard sell to my father, because he saw Ben Grimm on the cover, and thought it was a scary monster book.
"But he's a good guy!" I protested, flipping the pages open to prove it.
"Well," he said, looking, "okay then."
And there you pretty much have it in a nutshell, don't you? Yes, the Thing: different from the monsters that went before him in more than one way. For one thing, he was a near-human-sized, scientific, and firmly Earth-based monster, not a gigantic, magical, or interdimensional one; and for another thing, he could lick any of the other, more unrepentant monsters if it ever needed to be done. To quote FF#1:
"The second gigantic guardian of Monster Isle is powerful beyond belief...but he is fighting an enemy whose every atom has been charged with cosmic rays...an enemy who can't be stopped!"
Darn right he can't be. Because that is, in fact, Ben Grimm's whole shtick: he's absolutely unstoppable, and absolutely a good guy. Even concerned fathers can see that.
By the way, the comic book in question? FF#139, and still a favourite. Gerry Conway, scripter!
(All right, enough of that...)
So Ben Grimm has been made into something more than just a run-of-the-mill monster type, though he looks the part, because he has been affected by a cosmic agency that only science could ever explain: and since this makes Ben a monster with a rational origin, he is superior to the other monsters he encounters because he has reasons for being what he is that go beyond just "being" a monster. Ben's power is of the powers that dwell naturally in outer space, powers of science and reality rather than supernaturalism, and thus they are symbolically powers of the future, not the past. And that's very nearly a kind of roughly-sketched teleological justification, except it has valuable loopholes in it: Ben is chosen for something, yes, but only by natural forces, nameless forces of accident and necessity, that will never reveal themselves except in his choosing. Whereas all the other monsters are just plain stuck with who or what they are. I mentioned in an earlier post that the FF's powers have either become their personalities, or their personalities their powers, or both; and in fact I could go even further with this, because it just so happens that there's a Lee/Kirby FF comic in which Doctor Doom hypnotizes them into thinking they've all lost their powers (I assume you've all read it), but then as the hypnosis wears off the powers start to return, and Reed says something a lot like:
"I suspected Doom would use something of the kind on us, but our powers are too strong to be suppressed for long!"
Forgive me not actually going and looking it up. That's what he says, though. Interesting, isn't it? Because this follows little-kid comics logic as well as anything, and says that the FF are their powers, and their powers are them, and so powers and personalities both become identical as they also become purposes...purposes, ultimately, of their own. And indeed it seems to me that the centrality of the Fantastic Four in the Marvel Universe is precisely because of this kind of thing, this union of purpose, power, and personality in the departure of motifs from their original genre. Not that all the other Marvel characters (well, a lot of 'em, anyway) don't share this with the FF. They do. But it wasn't them that made the first change from monsters to heroes, and it wasn't them that saw Monsterland to the door. It's often said within the comics narratives themselves that the FF set the example for all the other Marvel heroes, but no one ever explains what this example they're setting is, exactly. But Marvel Monsters Group (along with Jim Roeg) does explain this. And what they explain is that the FF are the ones who show how to make the damn thing go, in the first place; and its larger meaning is therefore the same as their larger meaning. The two meanings are identical. And have you ever noticed that in the Marvel Universe, everybody is really glad to see the Fantastic Four? The Avengers might be seen as tools of the U.S. government, and the X-Men may be hated and feared, and Spider-Man may be misunderstood, but to the FF the whole world is wide open. They can go everywhere, and talk to anyone, and they get everywhere first, and open it up, like (now this really is going too far) particles that create their own spaces in the quantum vacuum.
Um...sorry about that. Let's just leave that to one side, okay?
Okay. Although there is that cool thing in the Bloodstone MMM special that has everybody talking to Reed, and him talking to everybody...
Okay, okay, enough. We're done here.
...Which means that now, finally, it's time to go back to Marvel Monsters Group again...unless...hey, did we ever really leave? Well, let's get on with it, anyway. Because Fin Fang Four #1 needs some talking about just as much as Fantastic Four #1 does. In that first (and sadly, I guess last) issue, it's hard not to see a little meta-texting in the way FFF realizes he must put himself on Reed Richards' good side, and act the hero - and want to act the hero, or at least find acceptable reasons to (reasons acceptable to himself, that is) - or else never be seen again. Reed is not blind to this either, exactly, but never having been asked to change from monster to hero (since of course he himself was the very instance of monsters being recontextualized as heroes by exterior and world-creating forces in the first place), he does need FFF to clarify it all for him a bit. Which the dragon does, in a fascinating little conversation over a chessboard about how some monsters decided to change themselves to suit the new thing their world was becoming.
(Well, and of course it's a chessboard they talk over: chessboards are always interesting things in stories, symbolizing as they do both the mathematical inevitability of fate - the black-and-white checkerboard motif is, according to no less an authority than Emma Jung, an invocation of the high science of Muslim astronomy during the Dark Ages- as well as divination, and perhaps most significantly the inflection of the personality on the pattern of the universe. As well, chess is like the sublimation of war, too, and therefore stands for the symbolic working-out of differences, so it's a point that's being made here, and it's one that isn't lost on Reed Richards...)
And now to perhaps stretch things just a little too far, let me pose this question: is this conversation between Reed and FFF analogizable to an in-continuity historicization of the very shift from monsters to superheroes, itself? Is it in actuality saying that the Marvel superheroes are still monsters, and their world still Timely's Monsterland, only wearing brighter and more distracting clothes and making slightly more necessary sense? Perhaps, then, NPP's warning to Marvel to keep the superhero elements in their Sixties comics light was a felix culpa, a happy fault that kept the Marvel superheroes' monstrous nature from becoming too well-hidden too quickly, and let the early days play with that tension for long enough that it became a permanent part of their appeal.
Until, suddenly, something happened that changed it, and made everybody forget. Made me forget, at least.
Care to guess what it was?
On message boards all across the web, you can find discussions of how Captain America is the only founding member of the Avengers who is not actually a founding member of the Avengers. Weird, huh? Now why would that (very strange) argument be so ubiquitous, and how could it go on for so long? Captain America is of course not a founding member of the Avengers at all, but people seem to sense or intuit that he is, and very strongly too; so something about the symbolic language of Marvel comics tells them that he is anyway, even though he isn't.
And I would argue that this is because Captain America joining the Avengers is what legitimized the transformation of Marvel characters from semi-monstrous creatures (or at the very least, freaks) to dyed-in-the-wool superheroes. Because as you see, Cap was very different from any of the other Marvel characters that were made up post-Fantastic Four. Cap was a thoroughbred. Cap was pure. Cap was straight out of that classic Forties gold-plated true-blue superhero mould, and that's what he was always intended to be, and most importantly he slept through all of that other stuff that wasn't like that. So he didn't bring "class" to the Avengers when he replaced the Hulk (the Hulk!); in that replacement (and it's hard to see how it wouldn't've worked worse if it wasn't that exact replacement) he was nothing less than a resuscitated ideal, that the whole Marvel Universe could begin to partake of on his resurrection. Not just a man out of time, Cap was a man out of company, man out of ethos, man out of pattern, man out of universe...but he brought his universe with him, too, so that was okay. Because every other character in the Marvel Universe is weird and a bit of a freak, and was like that from the beginning! But Cap was - and is - a diamond.
It was a deliberate move on Lee and Kirby's part, obviously. Doubtless, it was all about the cachet. But how well it worked!
Unbelievable.
Anyway...
I'm tempted to go on, here, and get into the whole massively-recurring cultural motif of the empty seat at the table, especially as it regards Cap. But I won't, because everything in this post is already set up (as well as I can set it up, anyway) to resonate with the previous Infinite Roys posts, and if I load on any more stuff, it all might come crumbling down into incoherence. That is, if it hasn't already.
I leave it to you to find your own connections, if indeed there are any to find. Happy hunting, everybody! I really must find some way of not babbling on at such length...
* Well before MMM's actual publication, naturally! Jim, too, works well ahead of the curve!
And I'm all out of bubblegum!
...You know, for a few years now I've been fond of telling people I know (the non-comic-reading kind, that is) that the genius of Marvel was to blend superhero comics with romance comics. Just think of the early X-Men's Cyclops and Marvel Girl, or Peter Parker's hard luck life, or the Reed-Sue-Namor triangle, or...
Well, obviously one could go on and on this way. It makes a convincing story, too: after all, who co-invented romance comics? Jack Kirby. And who co-invented Marvel comics? Jack Kirby. Sure, so the blending of the two would be the most natural thing in the world for Jack, as well as yet more proof (as if any more were needed) of his natural tendency to work way out ahead of the curve: today, as bestselling science fiction novelists try their hand at crossing over into the romance-novel world, and already-famous bodice-rippers see even their giant sales take a step up when they cash in on science-fictional subject matter, it's humbling to think that they too are living in The House That Jack Built, with his own two hands, way back in the early Sixties...humbling, yes. But with one proviso.
It isn't true.
Or, it isn't entirely true.
It's embarrassing to admit, but until the publication of the Marvel Monsters Group titles, it had never occurred to me that Marvel's lineage was still, essentially, the monster lineage of the old Timely books. Of course once you realize that, it all seems so obvious: re-read FF#1, and you'll see it. It's a team of monsters. Just like all the rest: Spider-Man is a monster, the X-Men are certainly monsters (mutants walk among us, and they're organized! Look at their creepy identical uniforms! Look, that one doesn't even have eyes!)...and hell, even Thor is a bit of a monster. Or else what else does it mean that Jane Foster is always there getting supremely wigged out by all the Asgardian stuff? If you take it from Jane's perspective, she must be awfully glad not to wind up alone in a room with Sif for more than a minute or two...Sif is seven feet tall and immortal, and jealous. Sif, for Jane Foster, is someone to worry about; Jane is about as secure with Sif around as a gerbil is with a cat...
Okay, I ran with that one a little bit, I'll admit. But no wonder the poor girl's constantly fainting! And I ask you, has Marvel ever, ever had a bigger fainter in its cast list than Jane Foster?
I say thee nay...
But back to the main point, which is that it took Marvel Monsters Group to open my eyes to all this. And how brilliant is MMM, that it disguises comics commentary itself as throwaway "Assistant Editor's Month"-style comics stories! Suddenly, as Jim points out* in his superlative essay on Marvel Origins, the sinking of Monster Isle in the climax of FF#1 becomes the clear representation of monster comics throwing off their threatening past, in order to drape themselves in new and more superheroic clothing - my God, it's gnosto-Cabalistic parturition, again! - until the only "real" monster left wandering around unsupervised afterward is the uniquely-grotesque Thing, himself virtually the poster boy for monster rehabilitation. And when I say anyone can see that's what he is, I'm not kidding: the first copy of FF I ever bought was a hard sell to my father, because he saw Ben Grimm on the cover, and thought it was a scary monster book.
"But he's a good guy!" I protested, flipping the pages open to prove it.
"Well," he said, looking, "okay then."
And there you pretty much have it in a nutshell, don't you? Yes, the Thing: different from the monsters that went before him in more than one way. For one thing, he was a near-human-sized, scientific, and firmly Earth-based monster, not a gigantic, magical, or interdimensional one; and for another thing, he could lick any of the other, more unrepentant monsters if it ever needed to be done. To quote FF#1:
"The second gigantic guardian of Monster Isle is powerful beyond belief...but he is fighting an enemy whose every atom has been charged with cosmic rays...an enemy who can't be stopped!"
Darn right he can't be. Because that is, in fact, Ben Grimm's whole shtick: he's absolutely unstoppable, and absolutely a good guy. Even concerned fathers can see that.
By the way, the comic book in question? FF#139, and still a favourite. Gerry Conway, scripter!
(All right, enough of that...)
So Ben Grimm has been made into something more than just a run-of-the-mill monster type, though he looks the part, because he has been affected by a cosmic agency that only science could ever explain: and since this makes Ben a monster with a rational origin, he is superior to the other monsters he encounters because he has reasons for being what he is that go beyond just "being" a monster. Ben's power is of the powers that dwell naturally in outer space, powers of science and reality rather than supernaturalism, and thus they are symbolically powers of the future, not the past. And that's very nearly a kind of roughly-sketched teleological justification, except it has valuable loopholes in it: Ben is chosen for something, yes, but only by natural forces, nameless forces of accident and necessity, that will never reveal themselves except in his choosing. Whereas all the other monsters are just plain stuck with who or what they are. I mentioned in an earlier post that the FF's powers have either become their personalities, or their personalities their powers, or both; and in fact I could go even further with this, because it just so happens that there's a Lee/Kirby FF comic in which Doctor Doom hypnotizes them into thinking they've all lost their powers (I assume you've all read it), but then as the hypnosis wears off the powers start to return, and Reed says something a lot like:
"I suspected Doom would use something of the kind on us, but our powers are too strong to be suppressed for long!"
Forgive me not actually going and looking it up. That's what he says, though. Interesting, isn't it? Because this follows little-kid comics logic as well as anything, and says that the FF are their powers, and their powers are them, and so powers and personalities both become identical as they also become purposes...purposes, ultimately, of their own. And indeed it seems to me that the centrality of the Fantastic Four in the Marvel Universe is precisely because of this kind of thing, this union of purpose, power, and personality in the departure of motifs from their original genre. Not that all the other Marvel characters (well, a lot of 'em, anyway) don't share this with the FF. They do. But it wasn't them that made the first change from monsters to heroes, and it wasn't them that saw Monsterland to the door. It's often said within the comics narratives themselves that the FF set the example for all the other Marvel heroes, but no one ever explains what this example they're setting is, exactly. But Marvel Monsters Group (along with Jim Roeg) does explain this. And what they explain is that the FF are the ones who show how to make the damn thing go, in the first place; and its larger meaning is therefore the same as their larger meaning. The two meanings are identical. And have you ever noticed that in the Marvel Universe, everybody is really glad to see the Fantastic Four? The Avengers might be seen as tools of the U.S. government, and the X-Men may be hated and feared, and Spider-Man may be misunderstood, but to the FF the whole world is wide open. They can go everywhere, and talk to anyone, and they get everywhere first, and open it up, like (now this really is going too far) particles that create their own spaces in the quantum vacuum.
Um...sorry about that. Let's just leave that to one side, okay?
Okay. Although there is that cool thing in the Bloodstone MMM special that has everybody talking to Reed, and him talking to everybody...
Okay, okay, enough. We're done here.
...Which means that now, finally, it's time to go back to Marvel Monsters Group again...unless...hey, did we ever really leave? Well, let's get on with it, anyway. Because Fin Fang Four #1 needs some talking about just as much as Fantastic Four #1 does. In that first (and sadly, I guess last) issue, it's hard not to see a little meta-texting in the way FFF realizes he must put himself on Reed Richards' good side, and act the hero - and want to act the hero, or at least find acceptable reasons to (reasons acceptable to himself, that is) - or else never be seen again. Reed is not blind to this either, exactly, but never having been asked to change from monster to hero (since of course he himself was the very instance of monsters being recontextualized as heroes by exterior and world-creating forces in the first place), he does need FFF to clarify it all for him a bit. Which the dragon does, in a fascinating little conversation over a chessboard about how some monsters decided to change themselves to suit the new thing their world was becoming.
(Well, and of course it's a chessboard they talk over: chessboards are always interesting things in stories, symbolizing as they do both the mathematical inevitability of fate - the black-and-white checkerboard motif is, according to no less an authority than Emma Jung, an invocation of the high science of Muslim astronomy during the Dark Ages- as well as divination, and perhaps most significantly the inflection of the personality on the pattern of the universe. As well, chess is like the sublimation of war, too, and therefore stands for the symbolic working-out of differences, so it's a point that's being made here, and it's one that isn't lost on Reed Richards...)
And now to perhaps stretch things just a little too far, let me pose this question: is this conversation between Reed and FFF analogizable to an in-continuity historicization of the very shift from monsters to superheroes, itself? Is it in actuality saying that the Marvel superheroes are still monsters, and their world still Timely's Monsterland, only wearing brighter and more distracting clothes and making slightly more necessary sense? Perhaps, then, NPP's warning to Marvel to keep the superhero elements in their Sixties comics light was a felix culpa, a happy fault that kept the Marvel superheroes' monstrous nature from becoming too well-hidden too quickly, and let the early days play with that tension for long enough that it became a permanent part of their appeal.
Until, suddenly, something happened that changed it, and made everybody forget. Made me forget, at least.
Care to guess what it was?
On message boards all across the web, you can find discussions of how Captain America is the only founding member of the Avengers who is not actually a founding member of the Avengers. Weird, huh? Now why would that (very strange) argument be so ubiquitous, and how could it go on for so long? Captain America is of course not a founding member of the Avengers at all, but people seem to sense or intuit that he is, and very strongly too; so something about the symbolic language of Marvel comics tells them that he is anyway, even though he isn't.
And I would argue that this is because Captain America joining the Avengers is what legitimized the transformation of Marvel characters from semi-monstrous creatures (or at the very least, freaks) to dyed-in-the-wool superheroes. Because as you see, Cap was very different from any of the other Marvel characters that were made up post-Fantastic Four. Cap was a thoroughbred. Cap was pure. Cap was straight out of that classic Forties gold-plated true-blue superhero mould, and that's what he was always intended to be, and most importantly he slept through all of that other stuff that wasn't like that. So he didn't bring "class" to the Avengers when he replaced the Hulk (the Hulk!); in that replacement (and it's hard to see how it wouldn't've worked worse if it wasn't that exact replacement) he was nothing less than a resuscitated ideal, that the whole Marvel Universe could begin to partake of on his resurrection. Not just a man out of time, Cap was a man out of company, man out of ethos, man out of pattern, man out of universe...but he brought his universe with him, too, so that was okay. Because every other character in the Marvel Universe is weird and a bit of a freak, and was like that from the beginning! But Cap was - and is - a diamond.
It was a deliberate move on Lee and Kirby's part, obviously. Doubtless, it was all about the cachet. But how well it worked!
Unbelievable.
Anyway...
I'm tempted to go on, here, and get into the whole massively-recurring cultural motif of the empty seat at the table, especially as it regards Cap. But I won't, because everything in this post is already set up (as well as I can set it up, anyway) to resonate with the previous Infinite Roys posts, and if I load on any more stuff, it all might come crumbling down into incoherence. That is, if it hasn't already.
I leave it to you to find your own connections, if indeed there are any to find. Happy hunting, everybody! I really must find some way of not babbling on at such length...
* Well before MMM's actual publication, naturally! Jim, too, works well ahead of the curve!
posted by plok at 4:55 PM
2 Comments:
This, and all your other Fantastic Four criticism, is most certainly the Lee/Kirby level of Fantastic Four criticism: No other has presented the birth and development of the Fantastic Four in such historical detail and philosophical ordering of the Marvel Universe.
But can't criticism, by its very nature, only be on the Roy Thomas level, on the very good? Because it only represents the emotions that the book has inspired in others, how it can only refer to one particularly excited member of the audience? Isn’t it just a translation of a work from one person to another?
This would be true if people did not believe in stories, in fictions, but they do: the audience looks into the eyes of the man on the stage and feels what he feels, they experience empathy, or at least a degree of commonality, with the person writing the criticism. They can explain his pain (or joy, or any emotion) by interpreting his actions, and the author’s words. Criticism can act as intelligent and cultured art about art (the human shares a shade with the monster, but after discussion we find that, yes, criticism can be as riveting as a story, if only because everyone knows the story.
So, in this sense, I’d say that, yes, this criticism can be considered REAL FF criticism. But where does it exist in the narrative of larger criticism!?!
And this is all besides the conundrum of whether something is scholarship or criticism (Perhaps something is scholarly if it reveres the past instead of criticism, which is all too aware of evil and righteousness).
Instead of playing Chess, this comment should probably be written during a conversation of which chess opening is better than the other. I really mean this comment as a fanboyish compliment, instead of a question that needs to be answered. And a really belated compliment, at that. Hm.
I'll take it anyway, Xypha! And funny you should ask about the place of this criticism in the larger narrative of criticism...
I mean maybe it's just the sliding scale of Internet Time (!), but it seems to me its place is (of course) ORIGIN...the origin of my engagement with online commentary like Jim's, the origin of my thoughts about how the writing of FF and the cultural context of FF created by that writing must collide, to create something to say about it besides "what a great comic". And Real FF itself is the product of a previous collision, I guess -- a new universe born from the old -- but post-Stan/Jack FF isn't a product of the old universe, but the process of the new one.
What happens when the universe becomes "transparent" after the Big Bang, you might say...and the four forces separate. Oh, that's just too damn cute. Or, oh no, it isn't.
Well, maybe.
I never aimed at more than Roy-ness in this, by the way, which is why I'll so take the "Real FF Criticism" compliment, take it and run for the hills where no one else can get at it...although for myself I think it wouldn't be possible to analyze the FF this way without looking backward to a story everyone already knows, a cultural weight already long-formed, I do take your point that immediacy, emotion, a communicative "miracle" if you will, these are things that can liberate criticism as well as they liberate art. Ultimately it's the reader who's got to make that determination, I guess, but though I didn't think of these little essays as particularly original when I wrote them (because I borrowed their inspiration from Jim), I did want to talk about originality in them, and if you think I brushed up enough that magical potency just enough that it rubbed off on me just a little, well then who am I to argue with you?
Still, re-reading this, I am astonished that I ever thought of these connections as "new" in any way -- in my little sector of the blogoverse, the places I visit and read, I think the relationships described in these posts are simply the substratum of every conversation, the very basics, the stuff everybody's well-acquainted with -- I take them for granted now, take it for granted that everybody sees them almost as though they have "always" seen them, and not because of me but because they were there to see the whole time anyway, obvious really. Some time after writing these posts, I realized I was online for the same reason everybody else I habitually read was, to identify where the peculiar symbolic jazz of the superheroes comes from, and what it's all for...and what makes it Real, Very Good, Caretaker, or Shitty in various cases. And for me, that question's been answered pretty well in the last couple of years...
Which means that I now believe a Real FF level of excitement and originality in this weird little genre is possible again, not just as homage or rehabilitation or pomo-ish reconstruction but as the thing itself, the thing that seemed to lose strength and die, exhaust fresh ideas, and peter out. A little while ago I read something somewhere, "why aren't there more new superhero characters being created?", as though that was all that was needed to restore the ancient thrill of this game...and someone actually answered "well, most of the good powers have been used up, over the last sixty-odd years."
I found this remark stunning: how could somebody who's supposedly a fan of this stuff get it all so tragically wrong? And it made me think of Atomic City Tales as a counterargument...which I guess I really ought to post something about...
Anyway, what's the crux of the thing: it's that everybody gives up on a past sometime or other, relationships that don't work, beliefs that won't hold as they are but don't know how to change...everybody falls into a rut, sooner or later. And then the challenge is, how do you bring all this revenant-type shit back to real vivid life again, so you can enjoy it as you once did? How do you rediscover some kind of simple purity of appreciation for things that seem to have lost their ability to enchant? Ah...growing up, it's a bitch...
So, you have to figure out how to bring that stuff to them, is the answer.
So, not that FF comics ever lost the power to enchant me, but I had a hard time defending that enchantment from my own inquiries. Why should they enchant me? Why was I so magnetically drawn to them?
And thus began my artistic education. I think.
I think this thing of mine here was me working backwards through the moves in a game of chess, yeah: to return to the land of opening gambits, first causes, first affinities...and know them for the first time? Oh, no...it's just too cute...
And by the way, a conundrum is technically a puzzle whose answer is a pun. Neat, eh?
Thanks very much for commenting, Xypha! Blogging is a wonderful thing, I've found.
My verification code here is "precow", by the way...no wait, it fits! You see, in Norse mythology the original creature was Audumla (if memory serves), the cosmic cow whose milk fed Ymir...
Origins! We're always looking for 'em...
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