Archive for the ‘Story’ Category
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.
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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.
Tags: rorschach, watchmen
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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?
Tags: lovecraft
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One of the hardest parts about talking about this comic is describing it as “Jeff Smith’s Bone“. It inevitably leads to giggles.
I first encountered Bone when I was in middle school. I’d just moved up from a cozy little elementary school to what I found to be the school equivalent of Mos Eisley. I hated it there, but it’s safe to assume I hated every school I went to between elementary school and college. In this new world I was expected to hustle from class to class, to jump up at the ringing of a bell like a rat in a maze. The whole thing seemed demeaning to me, and it certainly didn’t help me learn anything. It was in middle school I first had trouble grasping certain subjects, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that trouble arrived at the same time as swapping periods every forty minutes.
But there was a ray of light in this place too. That was Art class! Here I was a king, and I’m not ashamed to admit I lorded over the others in my class with glee. I hadn’t yet been trained to feel shame for being good at something, nor had I developed the social grace to know I was being rude when I showed off my abilities, hungry for praise and acceptance.
As I neared the age I was expected to get a job and learn to earn money back home, my mother quizzed me on what made me excited, and I answered “Drawing.” I wish now I had been looking at her face when I said it, but I was glued to the pages of some book at the time. Was she proud, or did she dread the day I’d learn that drawing for the sake of drawing itself is not what one calls a “profession” in the strict sense of the word? To this day I’m not sure if I make either of my parents proud. I rather doubt it. You see, I still haven’t learned that drawing for the love of drawing is not a profession.
But it was thanks to that fateful conversation that an ad for a cartoonist was pointed out to me in the Pennysaver, and from then on it was decided. That is what I would be. Sadly for me this decision happened during the early nineties, and most of what was on comic shelves was gritty, dark, bathed in blood and had Todd McFarlane’s name on it. I came to believe that was the progression of comic evolution. Like many during that time, I expected they would only get grittier and darker (and indeed, some have). Until I read Bone.
Without going into spoilers, Bone never came right out and told you what it was until it was almost over. Only when you starting seeing armies massing and dragonfire did you understand it was a fucking EPIC. When I started reading it, it was (and remained even to the last pages) the tale of Fone Bone and his two cousins Phoney and Smiley Bone. Exiled from their home for Phoney’s backfiring schemes, they find themselves in a valley and embroiled in a story far older than any of their adventures. Their actions help to determine the fate of the entire world. Like Frodo and his buddies leaving Hobbiton and saving all of Middle Earth, the Bones are short and unimpressive as warriors. They have no magical powers. It’s just them and the world. I could relate.
And the art was brilliant.
I was in love. In high school we took a trip to Quebec, and the highlight of that trip in my memory remains finding a quaint comic shop. More than half the titles were in french! But there, on the rack, was a trade paperback collection of Bone!
I should briefly state I do not collect individual issues. I don’t have anything against those who do, but the idea of “collecting” them seems to rob comics of their artistic merit and turn them into investments.
I spent all my money for the trip in that store and I didn’t regret a dime of it. I spent the trip back home with my nose smack in the middle of the book, the first real comic I ever bought with my own money. I drank it in, feasted my eyes. I hungered for more. My fate was sealed.
What Bone taught me was that it’s okay to reinvent yourself halfway during your story. It’s okay to defy expectations. It’s more than okay. It’s your goddamn responsibility. Especially when the expectations set for you are so terribly low and insulting. Nobody who actually READS Bone could say comics aren’t an art form. Nobody could argue they don’t have storytelling powers equal to, or perhaps greater than, the modern novel. And NOBODY who reads it seriously could ever dismiss it as mere “kid stuff”.
Tags: bone, jeff smith
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Some background on my influences is called for I believe. Let us start with how The Lord of the Rings effected me.
Like many, I had read The Lord of the Rings as a child. One of my earliest memories of reading is snuggling into a cubby in third grade and reading The Two Towers all by myself. Reading was an escape for me, an escape from my classmates and the uncomfortable reality of the public school system. Which isn’t to say I didn’t have any friends… in fact, it’s difficult to look back on my childhood with an objective eye. My feelings clearly altered my memories of that time, injecting feelings of persecution and otherness that I’m sure now were unwarranted.
Reading took all that away. I wasn’t ME anymore. I was Frodo, or Peter in the Chronicles of Narnia, or a Martian walking the rusty landscape of Bradbury’s mind. Fantasy and SciFi helped me learn what Truth was, at a time when everyone else seemed to lie to me. A lot of things I imagined were true were crumbling around me. I was dealing with being my own person, with becoming a teen and eventually a man, and my relationship to God. But nobody around me seemed willing or able to give me any help in that regard. Instead my life was a shuffle from one standardized test to another, the focus on becoming a functioning member of society overwhelming any drive to become an individual human being. With the real world crushing who I was becoming, is it any wonder I turned to fiction?
But the fiction I sought was hardly an escape. I looked for the dark places, I learned of suffering. I NEEDED to find a way to explain why people feel pain, why love goes unrequited, why a just and loving God would allow evil to exist. Of course my obsessive search for those answers in Worlds-Not-Our-Own labeled me as something Other once I got older… “Don’t worry,” I was told, “You’ll really get to enjoy yourself and become your own person in college.” The insinuation being you aren’t ALLOWED to become your own person before then because nobody is ready to deal with a teen who demands answers.
It would be inaccurate to say I put aside those childish things in high school – more like traded them in for more socially acceptable fixations like video games and popular music. These things were fun, but they weren’t a search for any kind of truth (not that my teen brain could wrap itself around this concept). That I might have abandoned something honest in order to become a mindless processor of what my demographic consumed never occurred to me, although looking back it really explains the bizarre feelings I was losing myself despite my attempts to prove I was unique by listening to the same gritty rock song as everyone else.
So it was with great excitement I embarked on my college career. Surely, HERE things would be different! Now I could join the ranks of adults who MAKE the world, not just inhabit it. Now I could exert some control over my own destiny.
It was not to be. My first semester of freshmen year was in the Fall of 2001. I learned just how little control anyone has over anything in the world, and my beliefs about Good, Evil, God and Humanity weren’t just shaken to their core, they were shattered.
But Tolkien picked up the pieces. You see, I’d forgotten about those books completely by now. It had been so long since I’d read them, and I’d “learned” so much since then that they were fuzzy and gray in my mind, no longer relevant. They described Things That Didn’t Matter, right? And yet, as I rediscovered those books, I remembered why I loved them as a boy. I remembered feeling strange and alone for loving a world that wasn’t my own. And in my freshman year, as I once more walked the paths from Hobbiton to Imladris, to Moria, Cirith Ungol and Mount Doom itself… I discovered I wasn’t alone. They, like me, demanded answers through their fiction, sought to understand the real by immersing themselves in the unreal just as I did. That there were others who see the World That Is through the lens of the World That Might Be.
And that we were Legion.
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