EPISODE 326: COMIC COMIC COMIC COMIC COMICONATONIA

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

So, Deadwood is coming back in 2019, and Frasier may be, too, and pretty much you should stop reading this right now and go delete your social media history because who hasn’t at some point in the middle of the night for some reason believed what will actually and finally fill the gaping hole inside is to start rage-tweeting threats at foreign countries.

(The real hard part about being the President: no one cuts you any slack on your social media game.)

Also, Hollywood apparently think we’re each going to find a vault full of money to pay for all their subscription only services, your lawyer is now allowed to tape calls with you and then publicly release them and still be lawyers, and Comic-Con has been over for almost a week and I’m still tired.

Hi. It’s 2018. Or as I like to think of it, 2017, Part II: What if We Never Got Return of the Jedi and Han was Trapped Forever. Welcome back.

I had a piece published this week on newsletters as a thing helping me to find community and solace amidst the crazy, and I see that some readers have hopped on here. Thanks for coming. Great to have you with us!

So I spent last week at Comic-Con. It was pretty great. Came back Sunday, with So Much Work staring at me/slapping me in the face/humiliating me in public, and yet have spent most of the days since staring into space/my Kindle trying to reanimate, because ComicConatonia is a real thing.

Or it may be that I am getting old.

(Do not answer that.)

As always when I come back from Comic-Con, I have a lot of feels and emos and other words you can shorten. But also as always, I can go on a little. So I’ve broken things up this week into two parts.

Part the First: An Adult Who Reads Comic Books Tries to Convince You This is Fine, No Really, It is, Even Spiritual, You Should Try It

Part the Second: Comic-Con 2018, Sketches of Beauty

For readers who feel like Argh, Everything in the World is Super Heroes, I wish I could be Thanos and dusted everybody, you might skip to Part II, it’s just three little moments I witnessed in San Diego.

There’s also links at the end, which I promise are about things other than how cool that Aquaman trailer was and the important question of how is it that Wolverine can even move with bones made out of metal, which is a thing I spent way too much time last week wondering.

PART I: CYCLOPS WAS RIGHT
I grew up, like much of my generation, trained to be ashamed of the things that I loved that were at all out of the ordinary (aka anything that was not athletics or hair bands).

(I love every '80s series out there, but the thing most of them miss is the constant interweaving of total freedom and Lord of the Flies brutality growing up back then. Our lives were way more Stand by Me than Stranger Things. Wandering around at night without parental concern, discovering dead bodies? Sure. Of course.

But older kids threatening with all seriousness to straight up murder you, strange adults striking up conversations in parks while your teachers/scout leaders just roll their eyes at your concerns John Hughes-style, equally true and always present. Our life was a landscape of endless exploration and adventure, but also of secret, unspoken danger and a general tendency to shame you out of anything that made you unique, so that we could grow up to harass Kelly Marie Tran and think Hey, it's not me, it was her performance, which was a thing someone kept telling me at the Con.)

When I entered the Jesuits back in the day I stopped reading comics. I'd grown up reading them, had the long boxes filled with plastic sheeted-books in my parents' attic. But I was an adult now, I was entering a religious order. It didn’t seem appropriate. When I was a child, I spake like a child, etc... (never change, King James translation of the Bible).

Then seven years later while I was teaching at a Catholic high school in South Dakota I stumbled upon this radical imagining of the future of the Marvel Universe called Earth X in a Walden’s ('member Walden's?), and was gorgeous and strange and featured a Captain America who was this haunted figure with a shaved head wandering through a America that had fallen apart, while Reed Richards had become Doctor Doom and Peter Parker had gotten pretty paunchy.

Ain't No Toga Like a Captain America Toga

I walked by the new issues of the book month after month, in a coy Oh say, look, what a coincidence, I’m back at Walden’s again way. And eventually I broke down and bought an issue. And I was hooked.

It’s such a unique form of story, the comic book. On the one hand, it’s serialized and visual like a television show. But many of the characters have existed fifty, sixty, seventy years, with different artists and writers tasked through the decades with the unique combo-challenge of continuing the character’s story while making it new and fresh. In a way a comic book like Amazing Spider-Man is like its own anthology series, with each new creative team offering a fresh new character jam. And at the same time it's like improv, with the new team having to take what's come before and Yes, And it.

I think what I most like about comics, though, is the way that eternal ongoing story yields an unexpected kind of realism. Yes, these characters wear spandex and fly and hypnotize people with their dancing, and I cannot pull off any of those things (yet) (we live in hope) (I long to be in the remake of the remake of Footloose), but their lives keep unfolding, just like ours.

And with that, they keep growing, failing and changing, which frankly I'm not always confident I'm doing or capable of. Seeing a writer find a new angle on your favorite character, it gives you hope there might be more to me than I think, more growth possible than I think I can muster right now.

My gold standard of this is Cyclops (aka Scott Summers), leader of the X-Men.

Can we just be real for a second:

The whole Touching my Glasses Thing? Such an affectation.

Until recently I never liked Cyclops much. For most of his existence as a character he has been a humorless pill. Super responsible – sure, okay, fine, good for you – but with that extra “Everyone needs to get a lot more serious about this” Daddy Gonna Lecture quality that requires immediate resistance in the form of pranks, fart noises and party hats.

The other thing was, he was always paired with Jean Grey as the Couple of Destiny, even though while he was so boring she was pretty much the coolest of the cool, the female Marvel character who always seemed to have it together, even if she did eventually become a cosmic being and destroy a whole solar system. (Who hasn’t done that.)

Everything about Scott just seemed so stiff and lifeless and trapped in amber. He was the oldest son imprisoned in a very tiny cell made out of all the oldest son tropes, insisting it was fine, he didn’t need any room to breathe anyway, just as long as he was fulfilling Daddy X’s dream.

Then along came writers Grant Morrison and Joss Whedon, both of whom saw these problems in his character and decided instead of ignoring them to build the whole story around them, to make Scott face the Living Death of Expectations he was living, the loveless marriage he was in and just how much he had let his life be paralyzed by fear.

(One of the cool insights Joss had was that even though Scott was All-Time X-Men Team Leader and Daddy’s Favorite and All the Cool Things, he’s also one of the few mutants whose powers never eventually became self-controllable. No matter how strong his will or firm his desire, Cyclops never stopped needing a visor or glasses. That's why he was so up-tight; he's really really dangerous. It's hard to chill when you might accidentally blow a hole in the roof. Or your roommate.)

Forced to deal with His Stuff, Scott became a different person, one who could became more vulnerable with others, more accepting of his own ambiguities, more able to laugh and be his own kind of leader. He could even tolerate becoming "the bad guy". Yes, that meant eventually killing Professor X and sort of starting a terrorist group (again, who has not done this??). But when you come from being the Eternal Boy Scout, to get to a point where you can step outside the lines and find your own way is kind of a huge thing.

(And this is comics, Professor X is back, sort of, I guess.)

I read the big Scott stories pretty soon after I came back to comics, and I don't know, I could relate to the uptightness and the fears of vulnerability. And watching him have all that shattered, seeing the kind of liberation it brought him, I think I saw a chance for me, too.

That’s the thing about comic books for me – I’m all in for science and adventure and capes and discovery, but what keeps me coming is the glimpses of hope and possibility I get.

Did I just drain comics of all their colors and make them into a self-help book? When I read Superman I just feel hugged. Plus, there's pictures! Cue screaming.

I don’t know. I’m a broken record on this, but I think the stories that we love, we love because there’s some kind of gold in there for us. Sometimes it’s just a matter of stepping back and asking ourselves, why do I love/hate this character/event/show so much?

++

The one exception: Riverdale. I can find nothing of value anyone could ever get out of Riverdale.

(Nephews and Nieces who Keep Telling Me Riverdale is Twin Peaks: Shots Fired.)
++

How about you? Can you think of any comic characters you loved as a kid (or yesterday when you went to the comic shop as you do every week)? (You're my favorite.)

I'll give you one other for me: Peter Parker. (And I do mean Peter Parker, not Spider-Man.)

I don’t think I ever read Spider-Man comics as a kid. (I was way more into the dark and twisty – Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, X-Men, Batman punching Guy Gardner in the face.)

But as I look back I realize he was always a pretty big deal to me, for one very simple reason: he got picked on.

Flash Thompson, you dumb clown.

I couldn’t have put this into words as a kid, but the thing about getting picked on was it was always sort of a double whammy of bad – you had the actual activity, the being chased or mocked or whatever. But then also there was the broader fact that your life was a reality that included this happening while others either looked away or didn't care. The fact that it was happening was actually worse than the punishment itself; you just felt so confused and ashamed.

I can’t remember spending one moment as a tween thinking Cool, A kid who can climb walls or looks good in red or saves people. None of that meant much of anything to me. But the fact that there was someone in a story who also got belittled for no reason was a huge comfort. It was like a public acknowledgement that it wasn't just me.

Once upon a time I volunteered as a reading tutor at the then-existing Cabrini Green Housing Project in Chicago. At the end of a year working with grade schoolers I videotaped them performing scenes from this little book we had read, The Greedy Python. I thought it might help them appreciate what they had accomplished, what they could now read.

When the kids saw that tape, they stared at it in silence, like it was a live transmission from another planet. As soon as it was done they insisted on watching it again. Then again. They even began imitating themselves as it re-played.

I couldn't figure out what was going on. I asked my boss, who was grandmother to many of them. She explained, most of them had never seen themselves on television before. It was simple as that.

We all want to be represented, I guess. The power of that is impossible to overestimate. ++

Another way of saying all this, but way shorter and with Time Lords: At the Comic-Con Doctor Who panel Jodie Whittaker, the first woman ever to play the role of the BBC's great time traveling human loving alien, was asked to describe her take on the role.

Her Doctor, she said, is “a pillar of hope, striving for brightness and inclusion.”

As I walked out I found myself thinking, Am I like that? Because I want to be.

++

One More Take (We Gonna Celebrate): Last Friday at the Eisner awards (aka comic book Oscars), Chicago writer/artist Emil Ferris won a ton of awards for her 800 page (!) hand-drawn graphic novel My Favorite Thing is Monsters.

Every page is as incredible looking as this one.

And as Ferris got up each time to receive her awards, she slowly revealed the incredible journey behind it. More than ten years before she started on Monsters, a mosquito bite at her 40th birthday party resulted in her getting the West Nile virus, which led to encephalitis, meningitis and paralysis. And this was all a time when she was a single mom with a six year old daughter to raise, and art was her source of income.

She had to teach herself to walk and draw again.

Then, if that’s not enough disaster for you, when she finally finished her novel, after four years of basically surviving on ramen, the publisher's entire first run of it was LOST AT SEA. Like, Bermuda Triangle-level crazy.

Ferris had so many amazing things to say at the Eisners about what she gained from her experiences. But here's how she summed it up: “Things can be healed. Things can be redeemed. Every line is gratitude.”

PART II: THE LORD, THE PRINCESS AND THE BOY WITH THE GREEN DINOSAUR
A big part of Comic-Con is waiting lines and flowing mobs. No matter what it is you love – Lego Figurines! Marvel Super Heroes! Peanuts! -- at Comic-Con you will always find others with the same passion, and most of them got here before you, so be prepared to wait.

The epicenter of all this is the massive exhibition hall, where every big pop culture phenomenon (and a thousand tiny ones) set up their tents and offers a million cool things for you to buy. It’s the nerd equivalent of a Middle Eastern bazaar, every next turn another attempt to convince you they have brought magic to life and it is just for you, if you could please just open your wallet, feel free, right now.

Even though the hall is open from 9:30am to 7:00pm each day, people will often line up for hours ahead of time to be the first inside – usually so as to race to get into other lines within for different “Con exclusives”.

So I was standing in the convention center early Friday morning in my volunteer assignment, holding a little green sign and directing people coming from the outside towards the hall and other areas. It's a job I've had before, and one that I really love. You just see so much, standing there in the middle of everyone. Some people are hurrying to get somewhere, mostly unnecessarily (FOMO is so real, y’all). Others stroll arm in arm, just taking it all in like long-loved couples walking along the ocean at sunset.

Kids stagger around eyes wide, knowing that by some crazy miracle having snuck into Willy Wonka’s candy shop and devouring all of it with their eyes, while their parents shepherd them Disneyland-like through this world of wonders.

Some come by themselves, cosplaying crazy outsized characters they hide within, shy and fragile, enjoying the combination chance to vanish and be seen. Others (men) come in big meat-headed groups (of men), completely lost to the fact there are others around them as they argue about the ethics of what Thanos did or how bad Shazam is going to be. (Did I mention they were men?)

And at one break between mobs, I saw a young woman headed my way. She was tall, and also large. Pockets of flesh pressed out from her forearms and thighs. She walked slow and sort of back and forth. Each step seemed to require a lot of effort.

She walked by herself, while people zipped on her left and right. But as she got close I saw she had this incredible look of happiness on her face. I couldn't tell you why; maybe this was her first time to Comic-Con, or maybe for some reason it was a big accomplishment for her to be here. But her face just radiated joy. So much so, I honestly had to keep glancing away. Her happiness was so beautiful I couldn't quite take it all in.

What was that? I've spent a week now wondering that. What did I see?

Somehow I think it was someone willing to be open to the world and just taking it all in.

It was a little like when I taught high school and the students finally started to listen. You'd look in their faces and see they'd decided to lower their guard. And you'd have this glimpse of who they really were, and it was frightening and humbling and if you thought about it too long you might need a hanky.

As that girl walked by me, her eyes never left what lay beyond us, the exposition hall or wherever she was headed. And for that one moment, totally out of the blue, I felt like I had been given a glimpse of something beautiful and holy.

++

The danger of the exhibition hall is you can get so swept up in the business-side of things, the buying and the oh god what’s everyone in line for maybe I should stand with them for three hours that you never really give yourself the chance to just take it in, to savor this insane and brilliant world you were somehow given the opportunity to be a part of for a few days.

My strategy is to get my own to-dos out of the way early. It sounds smart, right? But actually it’s absolutely bogus. There’s always another booth, another thing I now-suddenly “need”, and before you know it you’ve spent three hours chasing that eternally receding satisfaction of consumption.

This Con I came with my shortest-ever to-do list, and yet somehow it was harder for me than ever to escape the chase. Saturday afternoon I realized I had just a few hours more before I’d be leaving the Con for good and yet I’d still never really “seen” anything.

So I popped on my headphones, said a little prayer to let me just be present, and took a wander.

And I came across this little girl, maybe eleven years old, dressed as early Princess Leia – the white gown, donut braids in her hair. She was pressed against a short glass wall, looking in on attendees playing a strange game where they were asked trivia questions about South Park, and every time they answered incorrectly a life-sized South Park character would turn and spew purple liquid on them.

(I have never felt either so old or so grateful to be the same.)

What struck me about the girl is how un-Leia-like she looked. She was a little doughy in that way that kids often get as they enter into adolescence, and wore a bored sort of frown on her face. She was not pretty or distinctive in any way in this moment, in fact. She was utterly ordinary.

And I just loved the fact about her so much. Can you think of a single Disney princess who is ordinary? Or a single character from any franchise who really is at root start to finish a normal person? It happens almost never, especially for women. Hero stories are about special people. They’re not for the bland or the ordinary.

And yet here was this ordinary little girl dressed as one of the greatest princesses of all time and clearly not even thinking twice about it. Of course she gets to be the princess. What world are you living in?

It gave me so much hope. Everything on the surface might seem like it's falling apart and collapsing back into some horrible whenever, but in fact the barn doors have been open too long. There's no stopping now the growth that's been going on underneath. ++ As I was walking out of the exhibition hall for the last time, I passed two little boys playing on the floor near what I suspect was their grandfather’s booth.

Usually the idea that you could ever just lay around and play on the floor at Comic-Con is barking mad. It’s just insanely crowded there, especially on the weekend. But this year Saturday was remarkably mellow.

The smaller boy had a tiny green toy dinosaur, and as I passed I heard him give a little roar. I turned back to see him raising the dinosaur up, pretending it was fighting with some other imagined creature. He was totally in the moment, unaware of anything but the story he was half-telling himself, half-watching unfold.

I left the hall to the happy sounds of him playing on, monster roars bright as the sun.

++
AND FINALLY:

How Can Wolverine Even Walk: Theories

1. Adamantium is super light.

2. Wolverine is actually ridiculously strong.

3. Wolverine is actually super fast, and the metal slows him down.

The first is the easiest fix. It’s comics, anything can be anything. But it sure seems strange to imagine that a substance dense enough to cut through pretty much anything is also so luckily super lightweight!

The second is a fun idea, but Wolverine has had the metal stripped from his bones at times, and he didn’t get any stronger.

That might rule out the third option, too, but we've never really seen it tested. And it’s my favorite. Wolverine’s whole MO isn’t just that he can heal, but that he has the abilities of a wolverine-like predator: he’s got heightened senses, he’s got the claws.

While wolverines don’t generally chase their prey (who said that a newsletter about pop culture and spirituality can't give you the chance to learn about small mammals?), when necessary they can go up to thirty miles per hour. That’s freaking fast, y’all. Definitely faster than Wolverine is presented in the comics.

(Okay, it's also true that wolverines are exceptionally strong for their size. But seriously, do we need another roidy super hero? Please God no.)

So that’s my pitch. The Wolverine we know is actually a super slowed down version of what he would be if he didn’t have to deal with all that metal. Pull that metal out of him, and watch him go.

You heard it here first.

++ LINKS ++

Audubon's 2018 Photography Awards, with my personal favorite is the tiny bird feeding on an icicle, taken by a non-professional photographer, which does not make me feel bad about my own photo skills at all.

People respond to the question, "What is something that seems obvious within your profession, but the general public seems to misunderstand?" Some great stuff.

This is pretty much the greatest thing that has ever happened at Comic-Con (Subtitle: I Stumble For Ya.)

Amy Poehler returns to TV to advise Big Dumb Scarecrows.

And We Go Forward.

Next Tuesday is the feast of St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits. People attribute lots of different skills to him; for me his greatest asset was that he was a daydreamer. He let his imagination wander, he paid attention to where it led to him, and that's how he came to know God and find his purpose.

If it worked for him, why not for us? Dream on.