blog.rickeyainsworth

Now, see, I haven’t read any superhero comics since I finished with Watchmen. I hate superheroes. I think they’re abominations. They don’t mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine- to 13-year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to 13, it’s nothing to do with them. It’s an audience largely of 30-, 40-, 50-, 60-year old men, usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spider-Man without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal. This is a significant rump of the superhero-addicted, mainstream-addicted audience. I don’t think the superhero stands for anything good. I think it’s a rather alarming sign if we’ve got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the 12-year-old boys of the 1950s.

The Creative Process: 1. This is awesome 2. This is tricky 3. This is shit 4. I am shit 5. This might be ok 6. This is awesome

Stalker comes to the end of an echoey tunnel where he meets the others. They’re making good progress, apparently, are ready to go on. Professor is not happy. He didn’t realize they were actually continuing their expedition; he thought Stalker wanted to show them one of the local sights—a side trip as they would say in the tourism world—and has not brought his knapsack. He has to go back and get it. You can’t go back, he says, going back to a point made earlier. Professor is insistent. He wants his knapsack. (It so happens that, right now, I identify with Professor’s desire to be united with his rucksack. Six years ago my wife came from a trip to Berlin with one of those Freìtag bags made out of recycled truck tarps and seat belts. Unlike some Freìtag bags it was rather plain—plain grey in fact—and initially I was a little disappointed. Over time, though, I came to see that she made the wisest possible choice and I came to love that bag absolutely. And then, ten days ago in Adelaide, in the course of a long, multifacted, multi-drinks evening, I lost it, either in a restaurant, at a party, in a taxi or at the gardens of the Arts Festival. No one handed in my bag. It was gone—and is not identically replaceable. Freìtag bags now come with a hip fastener, though I could get a reasonably exact match. But it’s my one I want, that I want back. At this moment, in fact, if I found myself in the Room, my deepest wish is that I could be reunited with my Freìtag bag. There is a parable—or maybe it’s just part of a stand-up routine—that at the end of your life you are reunited with all the things you have lost in your life. This lovely idea turns out to be a terrible disappointment as you are faced with thousands of pens and umbrellas, each one a metaphor, I suppose, for the worthlessness of the things by which you set so much value. But it would be nice if, at the end of your life, the locations of where you lost your most beloved ten or twenty possessions could be revealed to you, if you could see a film that showed your younger self walking away from the table at the festival in the Adelaide, slightly drunk, while the Freìtag bag, disceetly stylish in grey, sat there neglected, unnoticed and mute, incapable of calling out ‘Vergissmeinnict.’ ‘So that’s what happened’ you would say to yourself, shaking your head in astonishment, at the simple but profound mystery of loss, on the brink of the most profound and mysterious loss of all, that of your life. And who knows—maybe the revelation of how we lost those treasured things would reconcile us to that other loss in ways that religion no longer can.)