chibi-Rei
26
Aug
2010
Archive for August, 2010
influences: Evangelion
25
Aug
2010
What was I saying? Influences. Neon Genesis Evangelion.
I won’t go into Evangelion’s impact on anime as an art form or any of the historic impact of its original run and subsequent remakes. I don’t care… Evangelion is very personal to me. It set me on a path years ago that truly changed my life. This may sound ridiculous, but if it wasn’t for Eva, I never would have met my fiance.
Follow this. I first saw Evangelion in high school. I was sleeping over at a friend’s house and I noticed his impressive anime collection. I was AWARE of anime, but it all seemed kind of… bizarre to me. The only things I’d had any exposure to were Pokemon, DragonballZ, or Sailor Moon. I was curious though… obviously this was a world not dissimilar to my own world of comics, full of niches and hidden gems and truly remarkable stuff. Something about Evangelion leapt out at me. To this day, I couldn’t tell you what it was about the cover of the first VHS that made me ask, “Hey, could we watch this?”
To say it rocked my world would be putting it lightly. I developed an insatiable thirst for more… but like Watchmen, Evangelion spoiled me. I’d only accept well-translated, excellently voice-acted, groundbreaking stuff… so naturally I didn’t get into too many. I was quick to find flaws in new series I was exposed to.
Nevertheless, I’d developed a taste for the stuff. I knew it could speak to me across the chasm of culture and language that separated the US and Japan. I knew it had innumerable genres, that it was growing bigger every day.
It was thanks to Evangelion that I came to seek the stuff. And it was thanks to Evangelion that when I was getting a tour of the college I would eventually attend and the guide showed my group a sample room, I peered in and saw posters of anime characters leaping, posing, smiling and snarling. The girl in the room was working on her computer, but she’d paused momentarily to answer questions of the group.
I walked up to her and held out my hand, which she took with a quizzical expression and shook.
“Hi. I’m Sal. We’re going to be friends,” I said.
That was my esteemed creative partner and hetero-lifemate Lyndsey. She GETS me. Science has not yet come up with a unit of measurement to gauge how meaningful a relationship can be to a person’s life, but ours would be off the scale. Together we’ve written novels (they remain in the editing phase but you can learn more about them at www.immortaltrilogy.com) and explored the pitted landscape of geekdom like astronauts tethered to each other. Lyndsey was and is one of my dearest friends, and I can’t say if I would have returned to my college after the semester hiatus I took to gather funds two years in if she hadn’t still been there.
And once I’d returned, I met the girl I’d one day ask to be my wife. So, see? I have Neon Genesis Evangelion to thank for meeting Danielle. It makes total sense. Stop raising your eyebrows!
There’s other reasons Evangelion was an influence on my life and continues to be to this day. The main character’s self-loathing and relationship to his parents struck incredibly close to home for me. The character design itself: gorgeous, and I don’t mean the female bodies but the clothes, armor, weapons and mecha. The world became a real place of blood-red seas and giant angels. The fate of the entire human race came to hinge on one boy learning not to hate himself, to find value in his own life when the parents who should have sheltered and nourished him either died or used him for their own selfish purposes.
Eva’s story continues today. The series is being resurrected as a collection of films, entirely reanimated and with a far greater budget. Characters are being added, stories are being changed, everything is in upheaval… between the changes from the original anime to the manga and now to the films Evangelion has demonstrated it isn’t afraid to reinvent itself. It doesn’t take it’s success or popularity for granted, certainly (though at times I wonder how much of the story’s gravitas is actually parody – after all, this is a series which in it’s original run used the last two episodes to basically give their entire fanbase the middle finger).
Since watching it that first time, a bleary-eyed teen awash in hormones, I’ve seen many other anime series and enjoyed them immensely. But none will ever hold the place Eva does in my heart.
influences: Watchmen
21
Aug
2010
What can I saw about Watchmen that hasn’t already been said?
Wait, I know. It ruined comics for me.
That’s not entirely true. It’d be more accurate to say it ruined superhero comics for me. Not that I was actually all that into superheroes to begin with. My favorite comics were fantasy or horror, or even comedy (and depending on you point of view, Mike Mignola’s Hellboy fit all these classifications!). I’d also been turned on to manga by a friend and was seeking specific volumes like Charles Dexter Ward (bonus points if you know the reference). Like many comic fans during the nineties, I was exposed to the boom of Image comics, and its struggle to compete with the Big Two (for the uninitiated: Marvel and DC). And Image did win me over with a few titles like Gen13 (the HORMONES did it, I swear!) and Spawn (no excuse), but DC had the edge when it came to superhero fare. I suppose if I had to pick a team I’d have gone with DC based solely on their Vertigo line and the fact that they ran Sandman (see fantasy comics above), but my true love at the time was Alien vs. Predator. Silly, I know, but I’d forgive any crap that comic franchise threw my way (the films, on the other hand…). I tell you all of this so you understand the place I was in when I first came across Watchmen. I knew enough to know what I wanted, but not enough to know what was good for me. I was developing tastes, but also unable to discern.
*Spoilers from here on. If you haven’t read Watchmen, go do so. I won’t demand you slap yourself across the face first, because reading it will accomplish the same thing.*
So one day I see a bloody clock staring me in the face. It’s hands are frozen at midnight. “Oh, horror,” I think. I was probably seventeen. I scan the back of it and words like “legendary” and “groundbreaking” do nothing to impress me. I turn to the first page to check out the art, which was for me the deciding vote on whether or not to purchase it, and read this:
“Rorschach’s Journal. October 12th, 1985:
Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended cutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘Save us!’… … and I’ll look down and whisper ‘No.’”
My fate was sealed. Eyes wide, I staggered toward the checkout, woozy as though I’d been hit with a hammer between the eyes like a beast in a slaughterhouse. I returned home, sat down on my bed with nary a word to my parents or three brothers, and I didn’t… stop… reading… until I was finished.
Eyes still wide (but rest assured, I’d blinked while reading. Oh yes, blinked back tears…) I took a deep breath… and opened it again to read from the first page.
I have yet to write about how Neon Genesis Evangelion influenced me, but the feeling I get from reading Watchmen is similar. These are works of such importance to their medium and specific genre that they don’t even need to respect their audience. In fact, the character of Dan (Nightowl II) is a portrait of the pathetic fanboy: he can only get it up when he’s in costume, acting out his boyhood fantasies. As a man he lives alone, or in the basement, with no friends, reliving the glory days of someone who isn’t even HIM. He can’t relate to women who don’t share his obsession (although Laurie has a bucketful of her own issues too). And in the end he’s a coward who crumbles to Adrian’s will and lets the only man who could be considered his friend die in the cold… alone.
THAT’S NOT A HERO! my mind screamed. That’s a BOY in a COSTUME. And this is supposed to be US, people. The fans. WE’RE the cowards.
I ate it up. I could read it over and over. I adored the abuse. Moore took the idea of what a superhero or a costumed vigilante is and turned it into a whole person complete with dreams and fears and flaws, and we all know that there’s stuff not to like in other REAL people… that’s why I used to READ comics, to avoid discovering those things! Dan was ME, as if Moore had been watching me… but not even I was that self-centered, and I realized I was soaking in a culture that practically controlled my thoughts and programmed my reactions!
I’ve already told you I sought harsh truth in my fictions. I wanted to learn something real. No longer was I the kid who read comics just so I could see Aliens and Predators duke it out… now I demanded more. Now I understood what comics as a medium were capable of. Perhaps I take these things too seriously, and like Rorschach I’ll someday be destroyed by my inability to change (and by the unfeeling blue hand of an apathetic god).
Indeed, Watchmen wasn’t a completely positive experience (if you can call having your worldview and self-worth shattered positive). It also made me a harsh critic. Suddenly NOTHING was good enough. I came to expect to have my world rocked every time I picked up a comic book. This attitude bled into the rest of my life as well. I’d been raised and transformed by my experiences into, at age eighteen, an extremely judgmental person.
More on this tomorrow when I write about Evangelion. Before we part, let me end with an anecdote: on the last day of my senior year in high school, I made a sign out of a beam of wood, a thick piece of posterboard, and a magic marker. I marched through my school on the last day with a sign that read: THE END IS NIGH.
Yeah. I was that kid.
influences: Lovecraft
20
Aug
2010
It was Christmas break in 2002, I think, when I entered the world of the Old Ones, the Elder Gods, and H.P. Lovecraft for the first time. At first, I was confused. These are short stories, right? They’re written like any other. The language might be antiquated, the places unfamiliar, and the dialogue stiff and forced, but I can navigate this place as well as any other literary world.
Except you can’t traverse a Lovecraftian landscape the same way you stride through a Goosebumps book, absorbing cliffhanger endings intended to leave you with a final shock of horror. It’s not as easy to read, for one thing. And for another, the environment is so radically different. Even when you ARE in real life locations (and sometimes they’re places I’ve actually been in Rhode Island or Maine) they’ll be warped versions of those places.
Lovecraft wasn’t the first, nor the last, to transform New England into a menagerie of horrors. What is it about this place that begs for cosmic evil to take root here?
It was over discussions of Lovecraft’s mythos with my friends that I really explored my thoughts about other worlds, ancient gods, and their relationships to mortals… and, indirectly, I explored my thoughts about what I really believed about the real world, ancient gods, and their relationships to us. The whole central concept of Lovecraft’s writing is that the universe doesn’t care what we do, that our development as a species was accidental at best and inconsequential at worst, and reading it forced me to realize the fears I’d begun to harbor in the darker parts of my mind since the fall of 2001: what if there is no God? What if there’s no meaning to anything?
I don’t mean to suggest I actually formed the beliefs I hold today by reading the writing of H.P. Lovecraft. I’m only saying that reading him got me thinking about it, and thinking about it enriched me as a person and got me to confront and defeat the doubts and fears in my heart. And isn’t that what true horror is supposed to accomplish?
