Back from my first San Diego Comic Con. Back to oppressive heat and boredom.It’s odd how when I was there, in the convention center and surrounded by 120,000 people, all I wanted was a break from it. Now that I’m back, the world seems a lot less interesting now.
I met a lot of interesting artists and writers at SDCC. Kelli Davis and I will be getting Border Crossings out there in one form or another in the next few months. Thanks to everyone who was kind and genuine to us.
This week I’m working on a short article trying to explain the disconnect between comic book creators and their fans. There’s a weird tension there that I think has a lot to do with the assumption that comics fans should have a sort of peer relationship with the creators they admire. Once again, we have Stan Lee to thank for that. I witnessed many an angry or dysfunctional interaction between fans and creators in San Diego. This article will report on just a few of them.
2007 was both a productive and a sad year for me. I haven’t posted here in a long time, since the below post regarding Kezzy’s October passing. But every year I like to catalog what I’ve done with myself so I have a written inventory of my accomplishments.
Wrote a 22 page first issue for BORDER CROSSINGS, along with a pitch sheet for a five issue series and illustrated a map of the fictional island “Iamipea.”
My first comic, DUE NORTH #0 was published by UpDown Studio in Atlanta, GA. I wrote a back matter section discussing the origin of the story and laid out the cover, panels and lettering in InDesign.
Had a table at Heroes Convention in Charlotte, NC with Lauren Pettapiece. We sold DUE NORTH and pitched BORDER CROSSINGS around. We also stayed in a lovely hotel and ate big breakfasts.
Submitted “A Disease of Its Own Kind” and “The Veiled Continent Revealed” to many horror, literary and science fiction magazines/journals. Received lots of rejection letters, including one telling me that “cannibalism is not appreciated.”
Finished 3 semesters and 7 classes for my M.A. in Communication. Wrote some papers about Winsor McCay’s rhetorical comics, Jimmy Carter and steampunk’s origins in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. I also taught Introduction to human Communication 4 times.
Read loads of books for classes, but particularly liked Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture, Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow and Hardt & Negri’s Multitude. For fun I read The Scar and Iron Council by China Mieville. I also got into the habit of reading trashy Forgotten Realms novels on the train to and from school everyday. I think I read like 9 of them this year.
Wrote my essay “From Black Flags to No Flags” about punk identity and its relationship with presidential rhetoric. This paper has received top division award for the Southern States Communication Association’s Popular Communication division. I will be presenting it in Savannah, GA in April of 2008.
Wrote 2 essays toward my thesis regarding Captain America villains and the genealogical mapping of national ideology. This thesis will be my major project for the first four months of 2008.
Made my April “Mix of the Month” club CD entitled “War on Earth.” This mix features Al Burian, Radiohead, Thrones, Challenger, Hrvatski, French Toast, Dillinger Four, Matmos, Mr. Lif, His Hero Is Gone, Clint Mansell, Kate Bush, Ben Davis, Aphex Twin, Ignition and Sinaloa.
Flew to Texas for my brother’s graduation. Flew to New England for Ben and Laurie DuBois’ wedding; also got to hang out with my friends for a few days. Flew to New England for Christmas and skiing on Mt. Sunapee.
Went to Cirque De Soleil, the Georgia Guidestones, the Atlanta Comic Con, the Atlanta Comics Expo, Momo-Con @ Georgia Tech (yikes), Dragon Con 2007, the Rembrandt etchings @ Oglethorpe University, the Atlanta Puppet Museum, played Frisbee golf in Smyrna, played paintball with classmates, saw Francis Ford Coppola speak @ GSU, saw Hot Fuzz preview, saw The Ten twice, Serenity screening in Atlanta.
Saw Converge in Athens, Red Sparrowes @ Drunken Unicorn, The Haunted & Dark Tranquility @ Masquerade, Rollergirls in Stone Mountain, August Burns Red, Evergreen Terrace and Casey Jones @ Masquerade, Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black @ Roxy, Lifetime & The Draft @ Masquerade, Watain, Nachtmystium and Angelcorpse @ Drunken Unicorn, Captured By Robots @ The Earl, Turbonegro @ Center Stage, Jesu and Wolves In the Throne Room @ the Earl, Quadiliacha @ Drunken Unicorn, World/Inferno Friendship Society and Sage Francis @ Center Stage, Amon Amarth @ Masquerade, White Magic @ Drunken Unicorn, Chuck Ragan @ Masquerade.
My first ferret Kezzy passed away on October 19th. The post below explains the circumstances. He had a profound effect on my life and I still miss him terribly everyday. At the end of December we adopted a silver ferret named Nim and brought him into our family. Nim was abandoned and left to starve, but was taken in by a local shelter. He is adjusting to his new life here with us.
I just wanted to let you all know that my ferret Kezzy passed away today. He’s been struggling with living with a tumor for 2 months now and yesterday he took a major turn for the worse. He couldn’t walk, eat, drink or get to his pan. He had seizures last night and I stayed up with him until they passed and he could sleep again. Kelly and I had today to spend with him and then we brought him to the vet in the afternoon. He passed away very peacefully, slurping on his ferretone until he drifted away.
He was a very unique ferret and brought a lot of joy into my life; not an easy task, but the little man got the job done.
I just showed the whole LOLCats meme to my human communication class the other day, using it as an example of syntax (and why animals don’t have it). But now we have LOLthulhu, and an even better example. Like animals, elder gods and shoggoths can form word sounds, but are unable to combine them syntactically. This is why they want to conquer the world and render humanity as cosmically insignificant. The horror.
We caught a showing of Grindhouse at the GSU Cinefest theatre on Wednesday. This being my second time seeing it, I still can’t decide if Death Proof is misogynistic or a celebration of grrrl heroism. Occasional Superheroine started an interesting conversation about the topic here (way back in April, when the movie first came out). Five months later and it’s coming out on DVD with additional footage. Death Proof is begging to have a proper analytical essay written about it, but do we still care? Regardless, I found Zoe Bell and Vanessa Ferlito to be two new, engaging actresses I’d previously never seen before.
Note: Do not attempt to purchase popcorn from Cinefest after 5pm.
I’ve finally recovered and have an opportunity to post about Dragon Con. This year was the first time I’ve asked for sketches from comic book professionals and I started with two of my favorite artists. Francesco Francavilla (The Black Coat, Sorrow, 24/7) did a great piece inspired by Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” for me. David Lloyd (V For Vendetta, Hellblazer, Kickback) also did a sketch of a concept for a new character. Both were true gentlemen and I thank them for being friendly and approachable.
The numbers were definitely up this year, some reports say 60,000 people were in attendance. Kelly’s pictures from the weekend can be viewed here.
Interestingly, Carl Jung developed most of his theories of archetypes and collective unconscious because he was seeking to understand the inner mind of the mentally ill. In applying his work on myth then and how it relates to society, I think it’s fair to say that society appears to be schizophrenic. And not getting any better. He referred to this state as an inversion of dreaming, where we dream while we are awake. So much of our time is now spent in fantasy worlds of television, comics, movies and especially video games, that in a way our entrenchment there contributes to an unhealthy culture. A lot of later theorists seem to be spring boarding off of this, most noticeably Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence.
While I was reading Jung, I couldn’t help be dragged back to my own schizophrenic attachment to modern myths – specifically in comics. His collective unconscious provides an interesting theory for phenomena like telepathy. I think writing characters like Martian Manhunter or Professor X would have a great twist if they were to inhabit the roles of psychologists like Jung, Freud and even Wilhelm Reich.
Jung was interested in all kinds of esoteric cultures and rumors like alchemy and UFOs. Another interest I had was that his theories of consciousness are remarkably similar to fictional ideas expressed by H.P. Lovecraft (The Dreamlands) and Alan Moore (see Ideaspace).
To Jung, we develop and mature by activating our archetypes in a particular way. His theory seems semi-biological but he’s less interested in the origins of consciousness than its present condition. I wonder if perhaps it is encoded, not in our biology, but in our methods of communication and identity formation? The ways that signs are inscribed in culture may in fact give them this power.
“The Shadow” for Jung is an archetype of an enemy complex, one that is inherently xenoist. The Shadow comes from both our cultural indoctrination, but also our family repressions. We project onto the shadow any threats we perceive to our personal state and peace. For my work on “evil” in popular culture and its correspondence to our Othering of peoples historically, this concept is especially significant. We displace our fears as an imaginary community, onto another group of people. We can destroy them or come to terms with our Shadow and re-integrate it. This fears play out in national politics, but their traces are more obvious in our myths. For instance, Harry Truman was less likely to refer to himself as a “commie smasher” than Captain America was.
I also wonder if Jung provides an explanation for the rage expressed by fans of popular culture myths like Star Wars. When George Lucas changes the history of these myths through digital editing, in a sense he’s re-arranging the way their collective unconscious is remembered. This could cause significant psychological distress for a fan that was so attached to the Star Wars mythos that it’s narrative symbolized their own struggle with individuation.
Finally, Jung theorized that as human society progresses and becomes more complex, so too do their myths. This is because we are further away from our unconscious now that we were as “primitive” society. Myths are a kind of fantasy thinking that can alter our world view. But modern people are more direct/logical thinkers, further away from that process.
This summer I’m taking a class on Myth and Popular Culture. The professor of this course wants to connect the theories of Roland Barthes, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell with some of the more popular fantasy/sci-fi epics in film and comics today. I have decided to blog here from my notes and thoughts on the class.
Joseph Campbell is a theorist of myth, most famous for his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, where he theorizes that most myths are a re-telling of the Heroes Journey. Campbell illustrates a formula for this kind of tale and applies it to many myths from varied cultures around the world. Many of the stages in Campbell’s monomyth have names like Black Metal song titles: “Crossing the Threshold,” “Meeting with the Goddess,” and “Ultimate Boon.” Myth (for Campbell) is how human beings try to understand the universe. This class applies Campbell’s formula to movies like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and it fits surprisingly well. In fact, when reviewing my script for issue #1 of BORDER CROSSINGS, I found that my story follows the formula as well, despite my never having read Campbell when I wrote it. I’m curious if stories using this Heroes Journey structure are somehow more likely to gather a following because off the familiarity of devices used?
Campbell also believes that the Heroes Journey ultimately serves the purpose of “awakening” us to the real difficulty of our time, where we reflect the fantasy on our actual historical moment. Since my thesis concerns representations of evil in comics and film, I can see that Campbell is going to be a useful theorist to return to. If these stories point out to us what our society considers to be “evil”, I wonder what this says about MMORPGs? These kind of games allow us to play the role of the Hero, but do they teach us anything about ourselves and society? I also wonder if the prevalence of Campbell’s monomyth in today’s mass entertainment actually affects us psychologically. Since we are surrounded by this same story and now we can actually assume the role of the Hero, do we in some way assume that we are traveling the Hero’s Journey in real life? Do Americans feel entitled to adventure? And then, when that tale doesn’t play out according to the cosmogenic cycle that we subconsciously know, do we experience a depression or anomie with real life?
Our readings moved away from Campbell to explore Christopher Vogler’s application of the Hero’s Journey to modern films. Our class used Star Wars: A New Hope as a case study to apply the formula to. While it fits this film and many others, I realized that comic books with big name protagonists can never fully follow the Hero’s Journey. Because of their serialized nature, comic heroes are eventually returned back to their status quo, no matter what ordeals they go through or boons they return to society. Captain America may have died this year, but every comic fan knows he will return eventually. The narratives of particular story arcs may follow Campbell’s formula, but in the end they have to be re-set so the characters can move through them again. Like MMORPG’s I wonder what this says about the mythic nature of comics. What societal lessons can we learn from their cycles if they are always being re-booted and retconned?
From our class discussion, I think my largest epiphany came from analyzing Star Wars and its mythic status in society. Many SW fans are bitter about Lucas’ alterations to the original trilogy, such as Greedo shooting Han first, or even the music being different during the Ewok party scene at the end of Return of the Jedi. If Star Wars does hold the same place for us as Greek or Norse myths did for their audience, then this bitterness toward Lucas is a reaction against ownership over myth, whether by an individual (such as Lucas) or a corporation (like a movie studio or book publisher). Audiences want their myths to remain intact and resent that modern culture (through myth) isn’t theirs, but resides under the jurisdiction of the few and the powerful.
Lauren Pettapiece and I will have a table in the artist’s alley at Heroes Con in North Carolina from June 15-17. We’ll have DUE NORTH there and will also be handing out previews of BORDER CROSSINGS, our pitch for a fantasy globalization comic. These should include four pages of story, plus sketches, maps and a crossword puzzle. Lauren will probably draw Abe Sapien, the TARDIS or an armored polar bear if you ask nicely.
Greg Carter (who does Abandon) has been a big help getting us ready for our first big convention. Thanks Greg!
My new flickr page has lots of visual research material taken at the Atlanta Center for Puppetry Arts. They currently have an amazing exhibit on Southeast Asian mask dancers. This was brilliant kismet for my current project, as I’ll be incorporating designs of topeng, kachina and other global mask dancers.
