Beginner's Mind

Thanks to a generous loan from a former student/current fraternity advisee, I'm reading The Watchmen. I'd long heard of the book, but back in the apex of my high-school comic nerdism, my tastes tended more toward the X-Men, a healthy dose of Spidey and the Punisher, and a handful of mainstream DarkHorse titles (if there was such a thing back then). I wasn't terribly picky in what I read, but my one fast rule back then was that if DC published it, I wasn't interested. (Alas--I had learned from bad childhood experiences to equate DC with cheap Superman and Batman runs in which the heros pontificated in long strings of spoken exposition, which even then felt horribly false to me.) Consequently, I missed out on the genius of Alan Moore (and Frank Miller, for that matter), and I am reading The Watchmen now for the first time.

Initially, I'd planned to pick it up only because the movie is due in theaters this coming spring, and I like to read the books ahead of the movies when I can (which is the main reason I subjected myself to the Twilight series this summer). But since deciding I needed to read The Watchmen, I've begun studying graphic narrative and reading more graphic novels (I finished the initial ten volumes of Neil Gaiman's Sandman this summer as well) in an effort to learn more about the medium and the genre--because I suspect it is both, and more--as I set out to write my own graphic novel. In my studies, I've seen Alan Moore's name come up repeatedly, and though I was already familiar with his stature thanks to works like V for Vendetta, From Hell, and his important additions to the Batman mythos, the book most people talk about is The Watchmen. Except they never actually talk about it--they mention Moore himself off-handedly, almost as a given, the way we might mention Shakespeare or Austen, yet they always write The Watchmen in a whisper, as though they're all afraid to inadvertantly disrespect scripture. And that seems to be the way most serious comics writers and scholars and critics approach The Watchmen, as the Bible of graphic novels. (Or, perhaps, the "New Testament" to the power of the comics medium, the "Old Testament" being Will Eisner's The Spirit, a film version of which is also due in theaters soon, this time directed by comics legend Frank Miller.)

I am barely a fourth of the way into the novel, but already I see why it is so revered. I cannot yet comment on the intricacies of the story--of the plotting and the structure as a whole--though I am already picking up on subtlties of visual structure that astound me. But even only this short distance into the story, I am amazed--awed is not too strong a word, I think--at the sheer scope of Moore's storytelling prowess, particularly as regards his understanding of character and of symbolism--which, in the comics medium, is somehow textual and visual simultaneously. Moore is famous for his angry disavowal of any film versions of his work: he insists that the comics medium is unique to the degree that no other medium, even film, can possibly accomplish what he can do in a graphic novel. I have long been prepared to disagree with him, and I am still looking forward to the film adaptation of The Watchmen, but reading this novel now, I'm beginning to see his point. And I am beginning to understand for the first time the full possibilities of the comics form, which excites me for my own writing so much that I'm hoping to assign comics to my own creative writing students, not because I can teach the form but because I am so thrilled at the potential for it and want desperately to see what students would do with it.

This semester, as we study pop culture and critical interaction with a "text" (really, any medium), I'm making my students write a series of short, informal response essays. And I figured, what's good for the goose.... So, this is the "sample response" I've written for them, in all its shabby inglory:

Last fall, I read an article in The Journal of Popular Culture titled "'With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility': Cold War Culture and the Birth of Marvel Comics." The latter half of the title is misleading; the article is less about the Cold War and more about the ways in which Stan Lee single-handedly revolutionized the comic book industry and forever changed our idea of the superhero. Not to get too into the article itself, my own favorite section of it dealt with Peter Parker and the invention of the teenage hero.

I wasn't as obsessive as the stereotypical "comic-book geek" (I was certainly no Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons), but I read my share of comics in high school and college (I hung out with Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons), and I still have my collection. Spidey was always a favorite of mine, for most of the same reasons this article points to: He was my age--a teenager/young adult--but he was a hero in an adult world and could handle adult villains easily; he was a geek in the world but secretly cool, shy and unsure around his love-interests but hip and sarcastically eloquent as his alter-ego; and, though he was super-strong and super-agile, he often relied on his wits and intelligence to defeat his enemies. Better still, he was troubled: He burdened himself with worries and responsibilities beyond the capacity of normal people and even beyond his own capacity sometimes. (We've long acknowledged a mental condition of involved self-sacrifice, wherein a person believes he or she is personally responsible for the salvation of the entire world; Buddhists call it bodhicitta, the compassionate desire to help all sentient beings; psychologists have long called it a "messiah complex"; but I wonder if we ought to start discussing, for my generation on down, the "Spider-Man Syndrome.")

Anyway, I started thinking about this article a week or so ago when I heard, much to my shock, that Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson-Parker are splitting up. I caught the announcement on a brief news item on WPR, and for me, it was as earth-shaking as the death and resurrection of Superman, as surprising and intriguing as the assassination of Captain America. And I can't help wondering, now that Spidey (who is technically in his 40s but who ages slowly) and I are both older, leaving our youth and eying a not-so-distant middle-age, what the ramifications are going to be of Spidey's new "mid-life crisis."

I remember following the love affair of Peter and Mary Jane with the same zeal and personal investment with which my grandmother watched her soap operas. Mary Jane was my generation's ideal woman, for the comic book set anyway. She is smart, self-assured, outrageously sexy, just flirtatious enough.... We all wanted to marry Mary Jane. When I watch the second Spider-Man film (in my mind, the last, because film 3 was a rotten mess), I actually erupt in grinning tears—even now, after multiple viewings—every time Kirsten Dunst looks proud and glassy-eyed at Tobey McGuire and says her character's iconic love-phrase: "Go get `em, Tiger."

Strictly speaking, Peter and Mary Jane aren't breaking up or getting divorced. In a classic bout of comic-book silliness, they've lost their memories. Apparently, Peter's Aunt May was dying, and to save her life, Peter and Mary Jane jointly made a deal with the devil (okay, the comic-book character Mephisto, but it's the same thing), agreeing to erase their entire relationship. They haven't fallen out of love; they've just forgotten the last twenty-one years. So, Spider-Man is now a swinger in a multitude of ways, free now to engage in more dangerous, more exhilarating adventures, to take on greater responsibilities (though, really, what responsibility is greater than marriage?). And we readers, straight men and gay women alike, ought to be rejoicing: Mary Jane is available once more. But to be honest, I don't want her available. I prefer them both in love. As my heroic surrogate in super-literature, Peter Parker needs to stay with my ink-colored red-headed icon of sex and romance. Otherwise, I'm left with just another celebrity marriage gone awry, just another undoing of my carefully deluded adolescence.