Die By the Pen: How to Kill a Day
Every Wednesday, Jared Gniewek discusses what feeds his fires as an author of comics, screenplays and radio dramas.
Man oh man, you managed to take care of all of your stuff. Your table is cleared and your significant other is out of town. You just put on your rebellious sunglasses and are about to do a dance to “Raise a Little Hell” in your underpants. But what’s that needle scratching on the record? You’re not sure what to do to kill the day? You’re fresh out of ideas and everything seems boring and stupid! Everything seems boring and stupid? Well, buck up, compadre, ‘cause Uncle Jared’s got some ideas to get you through your day off.
#1: Read FROM HELL, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
Yeah, it’s just so good. You got three copies for Christmas in 2000. All of your forward thinking aunts and stepmothers who read the New York Times Book Review and knew you liked the funny books got it for you. The same ladies (God bless ‘em) who bought you Maus when you were seven and Persepolis last year. It sat on your shelf after you struggled with the first chapter and you can’t bring yourself to get rid of it. You just know it’s gonna be a great read but you just keep puttin’ it off. Do yourself a favor and read it. Or read it again if you were able to get through it the first time.
You will walk away from this book a smarter reader of comics, a more complete person, and it will give you a massage. A massage of your brain! The whole time-as-architecture motif will keep your noodle working and the gritty, loose art of Eddie Campbell will keep you poring over it with a magnifying glass, trying to get each and every detail. Not only is the book terrifying and surreal, but also artful and stylish. Anyone
that can make gore poetic is a Saint in my world view. An honest to God Saint!
You will want to make tea for this. Earl Grey suits. Wear your bathrobe and sit by a fire. And remove the sunglasses…you are not Neil Gaiman.
#2: Star Wars Depends Party
Invite over some friends who also have a free day. Everybody puts on their favorite adult diaper. Put in Star Wars: Episode IV: A NEW HOPE. Start watching all three [Ed: ORIGINAL TRILOGY, GRRR] Star Wars movies (go for the non-special editions—this is supposed to be pleasurable, after all). Order Mexican food and drink a liter of Mountain Dew. No one gets up till the Ewoks are banging on Stormtrooper helmets! Oh the smells! The wonderful smells! The best part is when the first one loses it and then everyone just goes. Nostalgia never seemed like such a relief! You get to feel like an old codger while enjoying your own reminiscence. Plus it helps you forget the crappy Special Editions and newer movies. You can go home again, kids.
#3: Comfortable Awakening
Sit on Facebook taking quizzes in your underpants. Let’s help celebrate the arrival of spring via stripping down and helping the marketers know our buying habits! There is nothing so freeing as underpants and a computer. All those suckers at the office are stuck in their stupid trousers while you’re sitting in the veritable lap of luxury. Oh wait… you already do this every night. Never mind.
#4: Open your long boxes and read random individual issues. That West Coast Avengers book was pretty good when you were 14. Guess what? It’s pretty good NOW, too. Thrill at the exploits of Wonder Man’s sunglasses and rebellious sleeveless ensemble. Shudder with the impact of every arrow from Hawkeye’s bow. It’s a good thing you’re alone at home, too because you might spend a little too long lookin’ at Tigra’s (ahem) panels.
Actually, all kidding aside, it’s worth it to revisit the superhero books of our youth. Sometimes, when we’re bitching and moaning about how superhero comics have “lost it” it is because we are comparing the newer books to the books we have attachments to as a kid. No comic can do to you now what a decent super hero book could do to you at fourteen. The most we can hope for is an evocation of that sense of wonder. I recently picked up the collection of Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur and Moonboy and that very same sense of wonder I had a as a pubescent was ripped from its grave and kicked around for a few hours. I finished it in a whirl and felt recharged afterwards.
The batshit insanity of superhero books can often be hard to swallow once you’ve learned a little more about life, I suppose. I find myself having a harder and harder time being drawn in by the more modern “spy thriller” type books that Marvel in particular puts out. Not that there aren’t compelling books being done there. Guardians of the Galaxy is about as good as it gets for me for superheroes. While not as over the top as a Steve Englehart issue of Doctor Strange or Silver Surfer (or West Coast Avengers for that matter) it comes DAMN close.
Some folks read superhero books to escape the modern world but I prefer the idea that we use the superhero books to filter the modern world into a more simple and palatable place where difficult problems can be solved with violence. It is comforting and alluring to dip into this worldview when most of the solutions to the real problems facing our world are far more complex than kicking someone’s ass. I think that that is much of the adult allure of these types of stories. This moral simplicity, of course, can be subverted to great effect by the better writers (Steve Englehart included, of course), but for the most part the plot is advanced and the conflict reconciled through the appropriate use of the fist. When revisiting the comics of our youth we have to think carefully about the excitement we would feel when punishment was handed out to the appropriate parties and how it came to be that we felt this violence was justified. It can be a little scary to examine those revenge instincts.
Well anyway, do one, do all four, heck, do none of these things. It’s YOUR day. Take it and beat it into submission. All the best.
Jared Gniewek works in the music industry as a back line technician, performer, and promoter. He is also a freelance writer whose work can be seen in the recent re-launch of Tales from the Crypt and heard on The Dark Sense, an audio anthology of the macabre for which he is also the story editor — http://www.earstage.com/darksense.htm.
Man, if I had access to this list when I was laid-up with my back problems, I could have filled my coherent hours a little more constructively than I did in watching mini-marathons of Disney Channel sitcoms. But I can tell ya that those Sprouse twins have come a long way since their awe inspiring turn as John Stewart’s son in Big Daddy. Wow, Tigra… if I had the opportunity to make a superhero movie, back in say 1990, you know who I would have cast as Tigra? Robey. Jared, you know what I’m talkin’ ’bout…
I have to disagree with the assessment about superhero comics and adulthood. I’ve only recently come back to the superhero fold after years of Vertigo, Dark Horse, and various higher profile independent reading. Sure, I’m only reading certain writers, but what I am reading has moved me in ways that superheroes never did before. I loved the X-books when I was a kid, almost to the exclusion of every thing else around me. But I would take Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men run over anything Claremont and Byrne ever did. That’s not to say that the stuff they did was without merit, but I believe Joss’s interpretations are the best interpretations of those characters to ever hit the page. And that’s just one example. The work of Geoff Johns on Green Lantern and Superman, Grant Morrison’s JLA, All-Star Superman, his run on Batman? What about Ed Brubaker? Catwoman is one of the best comic books I have ever read, period. There are some phenomenal writers working in the medium of superheroes now and I believe that they’ve done wonders for moving those books forward and ultimately letting them be what it is that they need to be; our modern mythology.
I wouldn’t disagree with the quality of these writers Brett. They all bring it. I love Whedon’s Astonishing but only because Claremont defined the characters for him twenty odd years ago and now he doesn’t need to use the thought balloons…I feel he evokes the Claremiont characters and I have atremendous and wonderfuls ense of nostalgia on reading Astonishing.
I’m pretty sure, though that at the end of the day it is righteous violence that propels the plots of these books. I’m only stating that I’m not getting the same type of thrill off modern super hero books as I did off my childhood ones. I have a harder time escaping into them because the idea of violence as a problem solver is harder and harder for me to accept the older I get.
I have to disagree with the mythological aspects of superheroes as well and I know that puts me pretty far outside most folks who study ’em and have definitely had my share of drunken arguments over this point but I simply have never seen the paradigm between belief structure stories shared in an oral tradition and money making pulp for the masses. Umberto Ecco addressed this forty years ago when he wrote about the Superman books at that point.
And self reflexive post Joseph Campbell toying with the tropes of the heroes journey is just that…toying for believed dramatic import not a natural progression of story elements. No one guy wrote the labors of Hercules and it is hubris to believe that a handful of writers and editors can duplicate what takes hundreds of years of shared storytelling dynamic. If Paul Bunyan didn’t follow the heroes journey, why should Superman?
Believe me, I love new super hero books, just not for the same reasons I loved the books of my youth. And I wish i could reclaim that feeling with newer books but the style of writing and art is too far gone from what I would say is the ideal of that genre for my tastes. So I look for Batshit crazy and love it to tears. Actually, at the end of the day, what I mean to say is “Cosmic” rather than batshit crazy but batshit sounds so NICE!
While it’s lost on me as to whether or not we had this discussion over many a cocktail glass of whiskey, I’ve decided to put down on paper that I agree with you Jared… Superheroes are not mythology, but something more akin to American folk tales. Not the Johnny Appleseed/Pecos Bill models which share the explanation quality of Greek and Roman myth, but rather the John Henry model of a hero for the times.
I think that this is especially true of Silver Age heroes, many of which have their roots in the science and fear of the Cold War, and like the myths and lore of old there have been revamps, re-organizations and retellings of many of their stories to appeal to each new generation.
Spider-Man the character, really has no one author. While Lee and Ditko are credited as his creators, it took successive strings of writers and artists to build on him either through continuing his continuity or creating new universes for the character to live in that are more applicable to a specific time’s popular thought. Then there are cases like Ultimate Spider-Man (or indeed the entire Ultimate line) that use accumulated continuity and refashion it into something new, as say Homer did with the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Then there are the movies, TV shows, cartoons, etc. which also build on those stories, etc.
So, in the end who is the actual “author” of Spider-Man? Stan Lee? Ralph Bakshi? Jim Salicrup? The Electric Company? David Micheline? Sam Raimi? Or is it all or none of them?
Are we, the buyers, readers and watchers of Spider-Man his creators as we respond to it and then through funding his exploits with our purchases, deciding where he goes next? Much in the way audiences responded to Greek drama which fed the “myths” back in the day?
I think that this is an interesting topic to tie in with the discussion that Michael and I have been having on his most recent post.
Is Spider-Man more of an ideal at this point? Is there an ideal Spider-Man? Interesting stuff to chew on…
I conceived a huge response to all of this and finally scrapped it to just say this:
All-Star Superman
I wouldn’t agree that the storytelling of All-Star Superman is driven by violence at all, and in my opinion those twelve issues are the definitive example of what Superman is and what he means to us.