On comics.

I'm a nerd. I play Dungeons and Dragons, read comics, manga, and in general anything sci-fi/fantasy that I can get my hands on. I also play online games like World of Warcraft (or I did) and Aion (still do, when I have time). Sometimes, I'd much rather spend time online than outside socializing. And then the times I do feel like socializing, I generally want to play D&D or do something else expressive instead of dealing with the rest of the idiots around me. I understand that this rant seems completely out of the ball park... but you all fuck off. This is my blog and I shall rant about what I want.

Okay, okay, okay. Comics have this ridiculous stigma to them, for some reason the average person thinks that a comic cannot have a great story with characters that really speak to you. This doesn't make sense to me. We can look at a painting and find something that touches us deeply about it. The same is definitely true for a novel. Why, then, do we not view comics as a medium that can really help us define what it is to be alive?

My main example is Identity Crisis, a DC comic that has to deal with a bunch of super heroes like Batman and Superman and the death of all the people they love. The opening scene is of Sue Dibny, the wife of a superhero, getting murdered. Later on in the story you find out that she was once raped, and that her rape changed the way every character in the story has interacted with one another since. It becomes a story of lies and mistrust and what you do when the person you love most is hurt or dead. The twist at the end - when you find out who really was responsible for the murders of Sue, and two other minor characters who come to mean a lot to you throughout the comic - is just a sad, terrible moment. When Tim Drake's father is murdered, I really wanted to call my dad and tell him how much I love him. Because when you see Tim racing home to save his father, and the panels parallel the brutal life that all the characters who are about to lose something have lived, you realize that at some point these people stopped being characters on paper and actually managed to dig a place in your heart with issues that matter most. Tim is racing up the stairs, hoping to find his father alive, and as a reader you feel the same panic he must be feeling - is his dad dead? Will he get there in time? If his dad is really dead - if my dad was really dead? - how could the world possibly go on?

How could this act of violence not be the one that changes everything, and how could this boys pain and suffering just be made commonplace by the fact that it has happened to someone else before?

I bawled my eyes out when I read the scene where Tim's dad died. At the end, when Ralph talks to Sue even though she is dead, I was teary eyed again. The conversations he held with his wife were similar to the ones I imagined sharing with my mother. Mundane, every day things, stuff of no importance that you wish you were able to share but will never be able to. It just hurts.

And this is a comic book, a story form that's generally assumed to be full of POW!'s and BANG!'s, making someone cry and reevaluate what really matters in their life because characters who do not actually exist are experiencing such intense pain.

I was going to rant more, but really... I'm not in the mood to rant to no one about something that I feel really passionate about. Even if it is comics. So there. Stop being judgemental pricks about comics and let me show you comics that will actually tell a great story, one that tugs at your heart and makes you feel just as much (hell, more) as your shitty reality television.

Boo.

eyeliner is making my eyes bleed.

A few quick things:

I need to get back to school. I feel like my brain is rotting and oozing out of my head.

I need to start reading again. I'm not in school! I actually have time! I should be reading now, to make up for all the time I won't have to read once I get back in to the educational flow of things and have millions of pages of homework.

My eyes really hurt.

Life is hopelessly mundane right now, and while a mundane life is generally nothing to complain about, I am complaining. I would really appreciate it if a few things stopped being so mundane and started livening the fuck up.

So... for now... I'm going to pull a random book off of my book shelf and start reading. Maybe I'll even write something. I haven't done that in awhile. A poorly written story is still a story...

IT IS TOO EARLY.

I really should be asleep.