A Blog About Nothing...and Comics

I don’t really have anything particularly interesting to blog about this week, but I have been thinking about my personal academic essay, and how I’m going to write it. I was thinking about playing with the structure of the essay, having things move forward while some move backwards, intermixing dialogue and song lyrics with research. I know it sounds like it’ll be all over the place, but I’m actually excited about writing an essay for once because of this.

Maybe it’ll be stream of consciousness. From reading Pagnucci this week, I see that our narratives, if they are truly to be about us living the narrative life, have to have everything in there. Song lyrics? That’s part of me. Random thoughts? That’ll go in there too. Research about topics I’m interested in? That’ll be in there too. If anything, I was struck by one of the quotes I read in Pagnucci’s “Storied Wisdom” section by Douglas Coupland. “He said our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time-our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events-a story-and that when we can’t figure out what our particular story is we feel lost somehow” (105).

Isn’t this the truth. We oftentimes take our cues from music, books, and movies, and when our life isn’t reflecting any of those easy plots or storylines, we suddenly wonder what’s wrong with us. I think this will fit nicely with my “refusal to grow up” theme from last week’s blog. Nobody really writes the specific story, or handbook, or song, about how you’re supposed to grow up, or how your experience of growing up was. But, as Pagnucci would say, that’s for us to do, where “in a world without heirlooms, we make our own” (95). It’s up to us to preserve that piece of experience, and if I’m going to be honest with myself, and my topic, the paper will have all of these seemingly disparate elements that make me who I am at this point in my life. The problem is making the contents of my feverish brain interesting for the audience.

Of course, being a comic book nerd, I also like Pagnucci’s section on his love for comic books and how that always seemed to relegate him to the fringes of academia. But as I’ve said, and always wanted to write more about, comic books can be powerful sources for literary analysis. You just have to know where to look. One of the things so strong with comic books, at least the non-crappy ones, is that they have an overarching mythology to them. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man…these are our modern Greek gods, believe it or not. If Edith Hamilton were still alive (is she?) she would be writing not about Zeus, but about these characters and the effect they have on our culture, and how they often mirror that culture.

A few years ago, Marvel comics had an all-out, year-long event called “Civil War,” which featured nearly all the characters from the Marvel universe taking sides for and against a new type of legislation that forcefully mandated superheroes to now register with the government and relinquish their vigilante status. Nerdy stuff, I know, but it had many echoes of the War on terrorism, the recent paranoia on issues of privacy vs. security, and racial divisions. It was massively popular, perhaps validating, if just an inkling, that comic books were more than just pop fluff and could speak on weightier topics. Also, Captain America, perhaps the definitive “give ‘em hell” American in all of comics, was assassinated. The issue garnered all types of media coverage, including the front page of the New York Times. He’s not real, but the implications of his death were still resounding.