#recollections

Militarized superheroes. Ad hoc vigilantes. The Fifty States Initiative. It all breeds the same kind of oppositional conflict. What we need is to change the idea of the superhero to someone who uses extraordinary abilities in ways not solely defined by violence, and definitely doesn't punch down. We need a seismic shift in the stories we try to tell. In how we characterize heroism and protecting a community.

Some people are really weird about it. Like. Any brushhead (J. J. Jameson fan) will bring this up if you talk to them long enough. But a lot of New Yorkers really. Don't mind the idea?

You know, I don't really see Dark Gwenpool as evil as much as. Misguided. And in ways that I can very easily understand how the existential weight of those circumstances led me to them. Frankly, I think I needed to fight Dark Gwenpool in order to not become her. You know? I needed to be shown that I needed to avoid that path.

And it's not like villainy is something I always perfectly avoid either. Or even. Try to? Necessarily. Like, that's something - stepping outside of my personal history for a moment, the system has long identified to a strong degree with like. Villains. And also like. Darker aesthetics and all of that. Because like. Villains legitimize themselves within a hostile culture, you know? They've given up on playing the game everyone else is, and they construct their own rules by living in service of their own framework of idealness and...basically achieving a persona of radical self expression? It's a power fantasy of not caring what other people think of you. And that's. Attractive in a lot of ways.

And then stepping back into the framework of me as fictive for a moment, talking about my fictional history. I've had kind of that same feeling sometimes. Predictably, I mean, there's a reason I introjected and it's not because of a lack of commonalities. Like, obviously like, being the hero and helping people feels good and stuff and has always been one of the fantasies, but I mean...you don't have to look hard at my actions to see that like. I want to be a killing people superhero. A morally malleable one. I want narrative leeway to commit crimes and reprehensible actions. Like "I'm the baby Punisher to your baby Spider-Man" and also. When I joined the WCA, didn't I ask Kate something like "I'll join your team. Are we heroes or villains?" Like. Taking on an evil persona within the safe confines of fiction, as long as no one real and no one I care about is hurt...it feels good. It feels...powerful, and affirming, and like a reclamation of agency. It feels good to spit in the faces of so called authorities and to take my own in a world that doesn't give me anything and to be vindicated by my own narrative for doing that.

And so the problem with Dark Gwenpool...it was a disagreement over what constituted the safe confines of fiction. You know? What lines exist to cross. Like. In my normal operations I kind of sort people into those who it matters or doesn't matter to kill. That's. Um. I am trying to get better about that. (or was). But that's something I do! Like Cecil's death really impacted me but when I killed that guy on the Teutha ship by shoving him into a furnace or whatever? Barely registered to me. And Dark Gwenpool was arguing that we could expand our definition of what's expendable to everything. But you know. That really gave me the push I needed to realize the value of taking my reality as it is and letting myself care about more things, you know? Like. Even the extras, to some degree. Kind of taking what I was presented.

And that's, uh, why I didn't end up becoming her. Because I decided that I had to treat the people around me as real to some extent. And. Therefore some of the harm as real as well. Because I was never getting out of there, you know?

Like. We've seen the House of Ideas. Which is. Where God lives. The real actual God. The One-Above-All, not some Monotheistic pantheon head, which is like, three steps down from that. And the One-Above-All draws comics. The House of Ideas is full of panels. The House of Ideas looks kind of like Gutterspace.

And Gutterspace is canon even outside of my book, by the way! It's part of the structure of the cosmos. Even Doctor Doom acknowledged it as another metaphysical interpretive layer of reality.

And the Sliding Timescale! That exists in universe! Galactus has explained the ways in which time is inconsistent around a moving present to Reed Richards, and if he was less of an idiot, he'd realize what that means narratively. As Galactus seems to! At the end of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Galactus basically talks around their nature as comic book characters to her. In fact, all of the cosmic entities seem aware of that aspect of existence, and of existence beyond it.

Like. The What If? comics. The Watcher talks to you, the reader. As Eternity sometimes does, and so has Oblivion! In fact, I suspect that cosmic beings break the fourth wall so little only because they don't care to. They have a fundamentally different perspective on their readership.

And if you want more perspective on all of this meta fuckery, just read Loki: God of Stories or the recent Immortal Thor stuff. That's all about how magic and gods tie in to the narrative aspects of the universe!

So like. Part of what all of this means is that. Like. It's like blood in the gutter, you know that concept? How time or actions are implied between panels? Or like, how very rarely will you see a superhero drawn taking a shit, but we very much do take shits in the Marvel Universe? Like, stuff that's implicit, stuff that's off panel, stuff that's never put to page...it does exist. But it exists in implicit panels. Does that make sense? Like, on a different level of conceptual reality, extrapolating from the implications, Captain Marvel is taking a shit, but that happens implicitly within the structure of comic book panels, because that's a part of the metaphysics of the universe.

And like, blood in the gutter, again, like, the time skipped between panels, that's implicit panels again! Like, you could Zeno's Paradox a singular instant down forever, splitting it into more and more panels within the medium. Any conceptual moment occurring within Marvel's cosmology exists conceptually in the comic book format. Even movies, by the way! They may present in a different medium here, but that's like, a fluke, a divergence from entropy. Their natural state is comics, they just appear different. They're disrupted somehow. Sick, even.

But like, a moment can also be reinterpreted too, across multiple different books. How often are classic panels redrawn in flashbacks, or seen from different angles? A story beat doesn't exist in one form. It's like, a kind of relativity. Red shift, blue shift, time dilation -- it depends on one's angle of approach. A story exists in simultaneous tellings, simultaneous observations, to a higher eye than mine.

And like, tone, grittiness, art style -- all of that exists implicitly too! It's inherent to the medium so its inherent to the parts of it you don't see elaborated here. This varies severely across tellings, but normally, one at once is experienced. You can kind of. Sense those things eventually. Like a fish sensing the quality of the water. It's sort of insidious, it touches everything. You know, like, sometimes violence is silly and cartoony and sometimes its like in Jessica Jones. You can feel it. And it spreads. Like. Like gravity wells. General relativity. Like, you can feel a tone, an art style, radiating through the space from certain storylines, certain characters, certain tropes or recurring events, in a non-linear, non-contiguous way. You can sort of bend it sometimes too. But its. Hard. Even without editorial there is a sort of editorial, you know? Like. The rules that are known for a format, a trope, a telling they stick to it. What's allowed. Like sticky physics.

And obviously the stories, the pages, the panels, the moments, the lives and the tones that only exist implicitly are much less...stable? Than what actually exists in print. Retcons are constant, and something retconned doesn't go...away, necessarily, because an idea can't die, it's still out there, but you can't...touch it. Anymore. It leaves the reach of like. Your worldline. Your potential of narrative. It falls out of your universe.

So yes. I'm still doing things out of print. But the things I do are even less real than normal. And they exist in a convoluted web of implication and guesswork, of echoes and reflections. But they also still happen? And sometimes they do inshakeably, absolutely happen. It's...weird.

The shape is fundamentally different with an actual writer, and reader, and artist and editor. And a story needs those things. But it needs them so badly that they can be...assumed? Like. Like vacuum pressure. Like centrifugal force. Like a direction of energies that a being could step in to fill. Like. Without a printing of a story, there is no reader, but it's still being read? A lot of the time? Like. Like the cosmos is reading itself. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? Like. Like time and stories are a river that feeds itself, like an escher drawing. Like a strange loop.

And maybe the idea of the Marvel Universe doesn't actually need those who imagine it. Or maybe it does. But. It's so vast at this point that so many more stories must exist within it than can be told. And. And if you do exist within it, you can kind of see and feel and know those stories and that vastness. You can. Peer out into Gutterspace and see that everything that has and might and might never happen is occurring out there, all laid out on ever changing flat still images of time. It's the meeting of Eternity and Never, right? Or....or....

A Journey Into Mystery.

Unbelievable Gwenpool?!"