Me vs comics, cartoons, death and ultimately what superheroes mean to me.
Right, sorry for the pretentious title, best way for me to sum up what I’ve feeling right now. And I apologize in advance if this post gets rambley or weird but that’s all I feel like typing about right now. Sorry, no cool pictures or reblogs tonight.
It’s just, it’s almost been a year since my mom died(August 14th is the date) and I’ve been kinda kicked with an emotional sucker punch by it. Lots of feelings I thought I had resolved are coming back(missing her, feeling sad, feeling helpless) and new ones are coming up(am I really living a life that would make her proud?, am I giving her the respect she deserves?). All in all it’s a bit of a mess.
So in the end here I’m sitting trying to deal with it, and right now I’ve decided to try and think out and explain the things that matter to me and inspire me. And in the end right now that comes back to comics. Shitty, amazing comics.
Of course it didn’t start with comics. It started with cartoons back in the halcyon days of the 90s. The big superhero cartoons of the day. Batman the Animated Series, the old X-men and Spider-man cartoons, Batman Beyond. How could I not like those cartoons? It had people dressed up in bright colorful costumes fighting badguys and doing the impossible everyday like it was no big deal. It was freaking fantastic. Hell, there was even Freakazoid! and The Tick to poke fun at the whole concept and still have a glorious impossible romp all along the way with it.
Eventually this came to an end though. I was growing up, and it wasn’t cool to like cartoons anymore once you entered middle school. So I did my best to stop. I never really did completely, keeping up with shows like Justice League and X-men: Evolution. I just made a point of not talking about them with anybody, because remember, cartoons were lame and kiddie now. So in an effort to appear mature I turned to books. So many fantasy and sci fi books really. So many. I mean I swear to god I think I managed to read all the Star Wars EU books from set up until the end of the New Jedi Order series.
Yes, yes I know what I was reading then wasn’t really more mature than cartoons. But it didn’t have bright colors and it didn’t air on Saturday morning so I figured I was safe.
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At this point you are probably asking what changed. What was the catalyst that turned me into the comic nerd you all know and love? Well the answer was surprisingly simple. A Shadowrun game that was running late because one of the players was having trouble getting there. Or rather what we did to occupy our time until she got there.
See my friend’s sister decided to play some episodes of Naruto and Full Metal Alchemist she had just downloaded. And I watched these and I was blown away. Cartoons with blood! Hyperkinetic fighting! Death! It was almost too much for me to take in(keep in mind I was a stupid middle schooler at this point). And then to top this off she let me read the first volume of Sandman, Preludes and Nocturnes. Right there I was knocked off my feet again. Comics weren’t just superheroes and lame strips in the newspaper. They could be epic, scary, weird and so many other things. At that point a fire was lit. I had to find more of these weird comics and violent Japanese cartoons!
And thus began my hunt for more of those things. Anime lead to manga and all the weirdness there. Suddenly people had suffixes attached to all their names! Strange bits of Japanese culture! Reading right to left! It was all so foreign and interesting. On the comics front I ended up being one of those assholes through most of high school who would go to a bookstore and read a comic and finish it but not buy it. Sandman was the first but after that I just kinda went anywhere I wanted. I tried dipping into superheroes a few times, but the continuity not matching up with the cartoons threw me off so many time I gave up. But so many comics man, admittedly a lot of it was Vertigo and Darkhorse stuff. So weird and the comfort of Star Wars.
As for manga and anime, well I ended up getting really hooked on shonenshit back in the day. Naruto and Bleach and all that stuff with online scans. Which lead to stuff like Berserk and Claymore! and all sorts of other manga. Which somehow lead to online comics (Sluggy Freelance was my first one) and I realized, comics can be about anything.
Like seriously, any fucking thing. It was great realization. I mean it is true for any medium really, but I think comics have a lot of unfair stigmas built up against them that it was still pretty powerful to realize this.
And while this whole fictional exploration was going on, high school, the most important years of my life was going on in the real world. And while I can’t say I hated high school like some of my peers, I did always feel a certain antipathy for it. It didn’t hold my interest much because well, all I did was feel like I was following a path somebody set out for me. Wake up, go to school, socialize enough not to get branded anti-social, do your homework and enough extracurriculars to look good for a college application so you can get into college and get a good degree and get a good job.
The whole ordeal felt like bullshit and tedium, but I went along with it because that’s what everybody expected of me. It wasn’t particularly hard since I never really tried really hard. If anything I managed to get a B+ average mostly by doing well on tests. No real passion for it, but the expectations, and underneath all those a small terror. If I didn’t do well in school I couldn’t get into college and I couldn’t get a good job and I would be stuck working a shitty service industry job forever and be miserable.
I ended up applying to college as an after thought really. I just picked a respectable enough university close by, half assed an essay and sent in an application. And a few months later I was accepted and enrolled in the business program, because that was what my mom did for a living and office jobs could provide good money.
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And thus started my first year of college. The gen ed classes were pretty fun and the sudden freedom from my parents was great. But after the first semester, a certain ennui set in. The business classes bored me to tears. And from what I could piece together, the whole business culture is… Sociopathic Casual Saturday. Always guarding your ass, always selling yourself over everybody else, always doing things the routine way. It bored me to tears and made me want to avoid school in general.
Right, I should probably start talking about how comics factor into this whole story again huh? Well a friend suggested I read Runaways. So I got it and read through the whole series up to that point. And a strange thing happened, the oblique references to other bits of Marvel continuity intrigued me instead of driving me off. Why were there only 300 or so mutants left? What was this Civil War thing? Captain America is dead? Oh hey Spider-man does stuff too right? Who is this lady with the sash who punches things? Is Iron Man really that much of a fascist douchebag? They shot the Hulk into space?
Each question lead to more comics which lead to more questions and the cycle kept repeating itself. Over time I branched off into Ultimate Marvel and DC for a change of pace, but I guess there was a certain magic to superhero comics. Magic, aliens, bullshit super science, space, time travel, other dimensions and monsters all layered on top of a silly version of the real world. It was Amazing, Astounding, Fantastic, Incredible, Uncanny, Spectacular, Mighty and altogether invincible.
But through it all, these heroes felt like people. They had jobs, families, school and personal lives. Things I rarely saw in the fantasy and sci fi books I had been reading for so long because by necessity of being books, they had to focus all on the plot to keep the story moving. Serialization allowed comics to take little digressions and flesh out their characters and humanize them more.
And of course while I was taking this wild romp through superhero comics, college kept continuing. And it was wearing me down. I couldn’t bear the business classes and all the double talk and casual sociopathy and extroverted kiss assery and tedium. I started to withdraw more and more from school, doing the bare minimum, retreating further into my own little world. Eventually it got to the point where I would only leave the house to go to work, German class or to get food.
Yeah, I’m sure you can all guess how my academic career went from this point. I ended up flunking my classes and it’s only because I had gone to see the school shrink after some nasty suicidal thoughts that I got a medical withdrawal. So here I was 2 and a half years into college and flunking out with a nasty case of depression.
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Right, low point in my life story right? Well thankfully after a few months there was a development to galvanize me into action again. My step father’s cancer and my mom’s diabetes and complications from it had progressed to the point where they needed help functioning. So I decided to pack up what little stuff I had and move out to Arizona(I went to high school and college in Wisconsin) to help them. It was a rough transition. Quitting my job, and saying good bye to my friends(and loosing contact with half of them afterwards) and going to an unfamiliar place to help out family.
Things were okay for a few months. I mean sure there was a lot of running around, getting a driver’s license, going back and forth to hospitals and a nursing home and taking care of a giant house and look for a new job. But at least I was doing stuff. And then a few months into it all my stepfather died.
My mom and my step family was pretty torn up about that. But aside from dealing with his estate, I didn’t get much help from my relatives concerning my mom. So I basically had to be her caretaker, driving her to dialysis three days a week, driving her to doctors appointments, picking up her meds, cleaning the house and just generally helping her. Oh and looking for a job in my spare time so I could pay off my student loans. And then eventually having a job and having to keep up with driver duty and caretaking duties for my mom.
To say I was exhausted would be an understatement. Being on demand on all the time and constantly running everywhere for my mom drained all my energy. I eventually stopped leaving the house in my spare time because one time she called having a panic attack needing me home as quickly as possible. If it wasn’t for #yackfest and phone calls with my old roommates from back in Wisconsin, I would have gone crazy.
Well that and comics. Shitty amazing comics. Bizarre fantastic stories with people who felt human even when they were an alien horseman with a magic hammer or a man who dressed like a bat to beat up criminals. It was just comforting to read them, and occasionally get inspired by them. Not always the speechifying or big gestures. Just the simple core idea of superheroes; people with the capacity to do good going out and doing good because it is the right thing to do.
That was one of the many reasons that inspired my decision to take CNA classes. I mean sure I dressed it up in pragmatic reasons. I already basically was a CNA and I was good at it, so I might as well get paid to do it. But there was also that desire to help people, even in some small capacity. Because while taking care of my mom I saw a lot of doctors and nurses and EMTs and CNAs. And while they might not have had a big fix for stuff, they managed to ease suffering somewhat, or at least explain things and that made the world of difference.
About a week into my CNA class my mom died. I woke up one morning to hear her having a seizure. The paramedics came and took her to the emergency room and she died a few hours later. I don’t really remember much of the rest of that day to be honest. Talked to the chaplain with the hospital to help me stay stable, signed off organ donation forms, called people I loved for support and kind of ran around screaming. Literally, I ran down the hospital parking lot screaming an hour or so after her death. Apparently somehow I got myself home and went to sleep.
The next day though I managed to get myself through by doing two things. I finished reading Mary Roach’s fascinating book Stiff(yes, the timing of when I decided to pick up that book was not lost on me) and read I Kill Giants again. An irreverent book about what we do with corpses and a comic about a little girl dealing with loss and fighting giants helped me get through the day.
I ended up finishing my CNA class and getting certified. I started working on my mom’s estate and I moved back to Wisconsin to be with people who approximated family for me. After that mostly a lot of putzing around, depressive fits and an horrible attempt at working a pizza shop call line with estate work sprinkled here and there
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So what was the point of my life story just there? Or at least specific parts of it? Well like I said at the start, it was to help sort out my feelings. And in the end I guess I can say comics are something I’m damn passionate about and I think that is for the best. Comics taught me that the world is a fantastic place. Sure there aren’t robots, or chi strikes or aliens, but if you give the world a shot, it is pretty damn amazing. Comics helped remind me that people can be total shitheads but also end up being great heroes or just good friends. That things are worth fighting for and that if you have the capacity to do some good in this world, you owe it to other people to do what you can to make the world a better place.
So right now I think I need to get my ass in gear and get serious about getting into tech school so I can start working on getting a nursing degree and go out and be a nurse. And that I miss my mom, and I love her very much, but it’s time for me to be serious about doing what I want instead of just doing what everybody else asks me to do, because that is pointless.
