I follow up on my word.
It’s a dawn of a new age. A new, possibly financially destructive age for me, and hopefully the opposite for DC Comics.
The first of the new 52 are here. Down with the old, in with the new.
Haven’t read them it yet. I will soon. Don’t wait up.
This time, we’re surpassing dimensions.
I’ve always been a fan of alternative art—the creative phenomenon where many fans and artists alike visually reimagine some our most beloved characters. The result? Hours of browsing interpretations, and how cool and weird and incredibly well done they are, more often than not.
Well, this time Futurama steps up to the plate once more, and it’s a common subject for visual reinterpretation. Deviantart (or deviantsculpt?) user artanis-one takes it to…
A whole.
Notha.
LEVEL.
My guest post on preposterousthoughts:
No, I’m not a fat-ass, the Simpsons didn’t draw me, and my comic book shirts look fucking awesome—no three week old stains and unwashed smelliness. My voice isn’t obnoxious. I’m not an elitist.
My basement is, in fact, unfurnished, but my bedroom is a nice place to sleep.
But yeah, I enjoy comic books. I enjoy picture books for overgrown children. The almost literature. The stuff for little cousins and creepy guys in your English lecture. And I tell as many people as I possibly can, because more people need to like them.
More of you, and your friends, and your parents, and your children. You need to benefit from reading a comic book, because there’s more good in one than you can possibly know right now, and because it will help you. It will help you be a more creative person, a more imaginative mind. It will aid you in understanding your perception of the world and help you think critically and creatively about absolutely everything you experience.
You know why? Cause it’s helped me in the two and a half years since I picked up my first one, and it sure as hell can help you and everyone you know.
Look, I realize you have better things to do with your time and money. You have work, you have school, you have more productive, active hobbies. You may read books, and since comic books are not those, there’s no need.
It’s a common misconception. A majority one. A one comics can’t yet seem to break.
That’s because they rely on us—on me, the reader, to spread word. To recruit audiences. To get people interested. Because unlike books, there’s never an end to them when the author sells a bunch of them to a company, and calls it a day.
No, comics are a rare form of narrative. They’re deviations from the structure. They’re special. In a self-contained narrative, you have characters, plot and setting to create a story. It’s alone. It ends, and with it, so does everything else contained within. Comics are not self-contained. They’re self-sufficient. They evolve with each generation. And because of it, there’s people you and I both know, that have been alive far longer than we have, and will most likely continue to do so.
Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker. They don’t end with the story. They live on. That’s what they do, because they’re more than characters; they’re icons. They exist to give us examples, to provide us with something, to enrich our understanding of life and its values. They are templates.
To be important, they must represent importance.
Lets do some role-play. You’re the scrawny kid in school. You grades are pretty good for your age, a few friends, you keep a low profile because that’s how you roll. Then you find out there’s some others who don’t like something about you. Your scrawniness. Your good grades. Who you are. They beat on you, they hurt you, they make you feel less than them.
You want to get back at them, show them who’s boss, make them understand what they’re doing is wrong. You want to be powerful.
Who do you turn to, without making a scene, without risking yourself? When there’s that much fear involved, of consequences, of punishment, what’s the way out?
I hope, for that kid, it’s a comic book. The reason why someone like Spider-Man is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, comic book characters of all-time, is that he was born into a generation of nerdy, bullied, and weak kids like he was. He had the grades, he liked a girl, he was picked on. Then he got bitten by a spider, and had these amazing abilities. Abilities that real life would never allow under any circumstances, and right in front of your eyes, after each page flip, Peter Parker’s doing it all in front of you.
When you’re a kid, ‘real’ can be as fluid as your next daydream in class. That kid takes that comic book with him wherever he goes, because after each bully pushes him around, he turns to Peter Parker. ‘With great power comes great responsibility’. Those catchphrases become mantras. They live by them. It moulds them. It guides them through turmoil and helps them overcome hardships thrown at them.
When they grow up, the grow up with Peter Parker too. That’s how comic books get fans. They connect with you. You see something in those iconic characters that have survived sometimes longer than your parents. They have amazing abilities, crazy powers, but there’s one thing that they will always be:
Just like us.
They’re human. Maybe not in the literal sense, but they are like us, because they’re written by us. They’ve had lovers lost. Their parents are gone too. They’re orphans in a place they’re not used to. Problems to them are problems to us, just with supervillians thrown into the mix.
The fantastic versus the realistic. The unimaginable versus the understandable. There is no competition in comic books. They co-exist by necessity. When I read comic books, for that moment, in that panel, reading that word bubble—I’m hearing, seeing, witnessing the character come to life. My imagination connects with the page. I bring it to life myself, I fill in the blanks. I have the power to make it as real as I want it to be.
When you’re a kid, that seems like the easiest thing to do in the world. Everything else is a mountain to climb. When your head’s in that comic book, it’s a way out. It’s a resource, and a bible. You live in it, and it lives in you as long as you carry on everything your favourite characters and stories represent.
Truth, honesty, responsibility, justice, kindness, heroism, understanding, tolerance—the list goes on. Comics teach more than they tell. We want the heroes to win, that’s a universal truth of storytelling. In comic books, rarely, if ever, is that fantasy not fulfilled. For that kid, it’s a wish come true. It’s reaffirming. It’s validation.
It’s telling him, ‘If you’re a good person, and you do the right thing, and you stay true to who you are and what you stand for, you’ll always be the good guy—you’ll always be the hero.’
Basic. Simple. Direct. A comic book is all these things on page. Yes, they’re complicated, and yes there’s a lot of history and backstory and pretext, but you distill those things into what’s important: the character—what, and who, they fight for.
I’m not going to lie, it takes work. When you grow up, you lose a lot. Most of why being a kid is awesome slowly dissolves. I think one of the first to go is that enthusiastic acceptance of the incredible. Everything is exciting. You’ll accept anything as reality—is it naiveté? No, just wild abandon. Not caring for the world, because you don’t fully understand it yet. And that’s okay, you’re a kid.
When you’re older, you have to care. You have to be a realist, accept that this is the world you live in. There’s no more tea parties with stuffed animals, or car races on your bedroom ceiling. Just you and the world you live in.
Then you pick up that issue of Spider-Man, remember how much it did to save you from yourself, and others, back when you were that scrawny kid, and it all comes back. You live it all over again. Your imagination sparks, you start thinking inside the book. Things come to life. People come to life.
Just think, how could you ever drop something like that again?
You have to take yourself outside your world. Your bubble needs to be burst from the inside out. Open a comic book to a random page—I’ll bet you anything something amazing is happening. If not, within the next two or three pages. It’s not like films, where it generally has to be rooted in reality, or like books, where your imagination is exercised to the point of exhaustion. Reading comic books is a team effort. It gives you glimpses into another world, with you to decide the rest.
You provide the images motion. You give the comic book a life of its own. All it takes is for you step back from your world, and your perceptions, and your understandings as vast as they may be, and pick one up and read it. Leave ‘real’ at the door. Enter another one—it will takes you places.
There’s a commitment. Comic books make money, yes. But it’s in the most creatively satisfying way possible, for both parties. Readers, they get a perpetual storyline and an awesome protagonist (a few have run to 900 issues), and creators—writers and artists—they get to create those worlds, guide your hand while you traverse something you’ve never seen before.
To me, that’s enticing. That’s something I can commit to. It gives me inspiration that things so fantastic can engage me that closely. Evoke a plethora of emotions and thoughts with each page. I want a lot of what I can’t have. But I can take pieces of it, and use them elsewhere. Create my own stories, my own realities. Engage with my imagination and let it, instead of trying to make it, go places.
I hope you have an alternative. For me, comic books represent the ability to dream, the opportunity for escapism, and the inspiration to use my imagination as freely as I possibly can. Maybe you have other ways, and I’d love to hear them.
Just know that, that creepy guy in the English lecture, he could have been that kid who grew up without Peter Parker, or Clark Kent, or Bruce Wayne. I want you to help him. Get a comic book. Give it to him.
His mind, and his heart, and his dreams will do the rest.
Support comic books. Visit your local comic book store and ask about DC Comics’ ‘New 52’. There’s 52 new issue one comic books releasing tomorrow, featuring 52 of DC’s top characters and teams.
No history needed. Just pick one up and start reading.
If you get confused, just ask me. I know my shit.
[via my tumblr & preposterousthoughts]
This site makes you want to fucking do better.
Just keep clicking, the advice keeps coming.
I want to live off this site come second year.
And I will. I’m ready. Bring on the design.
Tons more to get you pumped.
‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. You live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. And even the inside of your own mind is endless. It goes on forever inwardly. Do you understand? Being the fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to be bored. – Louis CK.
Word.
There’s something called Tumblr and it’s been like a really annoying rash that you don’t know it’s there half the time but when it does show up you can’t really avoid feeling it right there, begging to be dealt with.
Well, I scratched it.
This is me. Toned down, brass tacks, simple stuff. If you want to know what I’m up to in terms of my head and its craziness, follow that Tumblr.
I promise myself I won’t re-blog every single cool thing I see, but now that I’m in enemy territory it’s hard not to develop some Stockholm Syndrome. It’s just so easy. There’s even a Tumblr directory devoted to comics. I don’t know what to do.
If I turn, know that I loved you all.
Bee tee dubz, I’ll be concurrently using both. This is for the general crazy shit. The other one, I hope, will turn out to be mainly for the creative crazy shit.
Fubar from Hasraf HaZ Dulull on Vimeo.
Motion comics are always a pleasant sight. It’s like two different mediums having a baby together. A baby that kicks ass.
The voice acting, the expressive animal faces, the sense of realism and the military jargon are all contributing factors to making FUBAR, FABAR (Fucking Awesome Beyond All Recognition).
God damn, I’m so clever.
30+ pages kind of big.
Several characters kind of big.
Arms aching kind of big.
I want to be in this world kind of big.
Might turn into something.
Check back in a little while.
Mitch Reed’s the kind of guy who will get shit done when he has his mind set on it, finish it, and then fist-pump in the air. And then flip a table and laugh at the person sitting there.
And then high five someone.
Also, he’s famous and he makes video shorts like a boss.
Also, he reps my blog cause he’s a cool motherfucker.
Get at him at his tumblr, folks.
