I DON'T APPROVE OF YOU OR YOUR LIFESTYLE
The Horror and Wizard World
BY JASON GANTENBERG I JUNE 13, 2008
There is no sense anymore in taking inventory of the pertinent news. The 2008 presidential campaign is shaping up to be like any other despite the cries coming from both major parties that this is a year for change. Anyone who managed a "C" or better in Social Studies ought to be able to smell the bullshit once it hits them in the face and should know that change—in its real and unadulterated form—will not come until the words "Democrat" and "Republican" are stripped of their hegemony over the political lexicon.
Until that happens, there isn't anything useful one can say about the current state of affairs in American politics lest we are to believe the hogwash coming from CNN and FoxNews, the two networks who bear the most guilt for trying to inject a sense of meaning into an election year that can only aptly be described as a sadistic sideshow. The only people with a legitimate reason to follow the news ticker are gambling addicts and masochists.
So we'll steer clear of impotence for the time being and for as long as we can. There is plenty of time yet to piss in the water before November.
Wizard World is coming to Chicago once again, and my current plans place me there on Friday to try and catch an appearance by Warren Ellis—the Guest of Honor at this year's meeting—and then again on Saturday to tell Tricia Helfer just how much Battlestar Galactica means to me as a human being. I can't think of anything offhand that is likely to stop me if our application for press passes is accepted. An opportunity to walk through a convention center teeming with perpetually aroused geeks wearing a fedora and shoving my tape recorder into any face that so much as casts a sideways glance at me is one that shouldn't be passed up under any circumstances. If my previous experiments with quasi-journalism in the yuppie suburbs of Chicago are any indication, I should be able to get at least four hours of usable audio from the throngs of Marvel fanboys playing pocket pool while watching clips from old episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess. Hell yes. This is a carnival worth seeing, even for someone with a concentrated loathing for the nihilistic and over-represented Marvel Universe.
I've never been a particularly big fan of comic books, though I do boast a profound love for classic geek fare like Tron and The Lord of the Rings as well as a general obsession with other staples of science fiction and fantasy literature. For some reason, comic books didn't seem to do the trick for me until I read Transmetropolitan, which accounts for—in large part—my specific desire to attend the convention this year. Perhaps it was an easy sell seeing as how I inhale the works of Hunter S. Thompson, an obvious muse for Transmetropolitan's drugged-up and savagely insightful protagonist Spider Jerusalem. In fact, I'll go as far as to say that Transmetro along
with Watchmen are two of my favorite literary works in any form, and both of them helped me to see that there are truly wonderful things that may be done with the comic book form. The problem is, of course, that very few people manage to take advantage of the possibilities. If I were a more intelligent person, I might be able to illuminate these vague concepts and pound out a rough guide to writing comic books that don't suck.
I won't claim to be an authority on the matter, but I do have an itch to gobble up a few titles, most notably The Invisibles, Preacher, and Y the Last Man as well as a few Ellis titles whose names escape me at the moment.[1] Other than that, I don't want anything to do with the X-Men or Superman or even Batman any longer. So many characters have died and risen again that there is nary a mutant or superhero in mainstream Marvel and DC titles that doesn't have some viable reason to believe they might be the second coming of Jesus Christ, which is what I meant when I called Marvel (not exclusively) nihilistic.
It's difficult for me to engross myself in a world where there are no rules. Where dead is not necessarily dead, and where one character has been portrayed in such a litany of different ways that they no longer have much of an identity, which is precisely why I prefer the contained and closed-ended story to a shallow albeit vast pool of trademarks serving as little more than templates for new regurgitations of old ideas. Even intensely creative writers like Warren Ellis and Grant Morrison have played their parts in this merry-go-round, and for the record, I have no interest in reading Morrison's take on Superman or Ellis's Astonishing X-Men when it comes out. If it means beating my comic book-devouring friends back with an electric cattle prod, then so be it. I have my principles.
There was supposed to be a moral to this thing when I started out, but I feel satisfied at leaving it off here and letting you fill in the gaps, for whatever it's worth. I have no desire to go back and revise my work, and there are too many phobias that require my attention at the moment, anyhow. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting severe weather in my area tomorrow including a chance for extreme severe weather, which is indicated by a hatched area on their convective outlooks. This means that hail of 2 inches or greater diameter, winds of 65 knots or greater, or an EF2 or stronger tornado are not out of the question. Indeed. For those comprised of abject pessimism like myself, these things are a probability rather than a possibility.
Come to think of it, a mean bitch supercell might be the only thing standing between me and my posing as a journalist at Wizard World in a couple of weeks. I've never been a religious man, but it couldn't hurt to fire off a "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" for good measure before the nightmares take me.
[1] You might ask why—in this age of instant information and gratuitous efficiency—I do not simply perform a Google search or glean such information from Wikipedia. Well, I'm on a deadline here, and quite frankly, I'd rather waste my time writing this footnote than dragging my finger across the touch pad. Deal with it.
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