The Joy Narrative - Day 2

Tomorrow is comic book day.  Today I'll be on the Internet looking up previews of comics that come out tomorrow.  The comic book companies release four- to five-page previews of the new titles a couple of days in advance.  I could simply wait until tomorrow to read the first pages of the books I collect, but I can't help myself.  I want those stories.  I want to keep up with Green Lantern, Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Rogue and X-23.  I love these characters.  I have followed them now for almost two decades.  I've grown up with them.  I've developed a deeper sense of story by reading theirs.

I'm a writer.  I'm bound to love stories, but there is something unique about comic books, about the blending of image and text that...morphs the form into something new and exciting.  Some will say it is all violence and cartoon women with big breasts, but it is more than that.  For example, the core titles I collect are the X-men line.  While the X-men are about high adventure and pulp fiction, the comics are also about family, alienation, courage and heroism, growing up, and finding your purpose in the world.

In much the same way that generations have grown up with the Bible as a source of morality, so have I grown up on the lessons of the comic book world.  More often than not, you will find the characters in comics driven by an inner sense of purpose, forced to question the limits of their own morality and how that morality translates into action.  I think they serve as the modern day fable, the parable.  They can be used as a barometer of culture.

When Captain America was killed a couple of years ago, it felt right.  There was something present in the culture at that specific juncture that made it seem appropriate that a symbol of American patriotism should be assassinated.  In fact, he was assassinated by one of his own (the plot thickens).  Well, since then he's been resurrected in typical comic book fashion, but that too reflects on what is happening in American culture.

Many people scoff at my fetishistic pleasure in comic books, but there is something real and tangible underneath the sci-fi/fantasy.  The metaphor of power translates in very real terms into a life lived on this plane.  I love them and I hope to keep that little kid inside of me alive for as long as a I possibly can.