Recorded Conversations

Recorded Conversations: Comic Books in Class

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. After the annual pop culture festival that is San Diego Comic Con, and shortly before fall semester starts at universities, J. Michael Bestul has posed this quandary:

Question: You’re teaching a class in popular culture, literature, or the like. As part of your curriculum, you need to incorporate one graphic novel or comic book series, and only one. Which one do you use, and why?

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I came up with the “one and only one” limit to make this challenging for myself, and to the other sequential art geeks that may inhabit the Recorder’s editorial board. As someone who’s taken a university course that focused on nothing but comic books in culture, and presented a conference paper on them – and whose wife works at a comic book shop – the challenge is in the limitation.

So let’s start with what kind of hypothetical class I’d be teaching. Since I get the unrealistic ability to choose my class in this scenario, it would likely involve American fiction, speculative or supernatural fiction, or mythology in modern — and Modern (and Postmodern) — storytelling. The comic book in question would need to:

  1. tie back to other class readings, and
  2. illuminate other facets of popular culture in its own unique manner.

With that in mind, my series of choice would be Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. I’d prefer to utilize the entire Mignola-verse (Hellboy, BPRD, etc.), but if I could only use one book, it would likely be Hellboy: the Conqueror Worm.

Since there would be a heavy focus (in this hypothetical class I’m teaching) on genre fiction (Bierce, Lovecraft, Howard, Borges, García Márquez, Asimov, Pratchett, Gaiman, Hill), and the theoretical underpinnings of mythmaking & intertextuality (Campbell, Jung, Eco), I would want a superhero comic book that could easily connect with these foci.

Tying the Mignola-verse together with these other readings is the easy part. Hellboy is a variation on our old friend, the heroic monomyth, but it also is a study in intertextuality. Mignola is very open about where he derives his stories from – whether he is retelling a piece of Asian or Celtic folklore, or utilizing the cosmic monsters (and their amphibian/human hybrid minions) that are a direct reference to Lovecraft’s Mythos.

But more than intertextuality, there are other pop culture connections that can be taught via Hellboy. One is the difference in storytelling between media (say, the Hellboy / BPRD books, graphic novels, and films – as well as Geek & Sundry’s “Motion Comics”), and another is the conventions of the comic book medium itself. As fellow Addisonian Alex pointed out in our last Conversation, sitcoms always tend to wrap up by the end of the episode. That is, they are episodic – after the conflict is resolved (or pushed back), the fictional world returns to its neutral state in time for the next episode.

Superhero comics are very, very similar. Even if a series-changing event occurs (e.g., death of a main character), at some point the series will only bend so far before that event must be undone or unwound (e.g., character comes back to life, or was not dead) — thus snapping the series back to its neutral state.

The Mignola-verse series defy that convention. The author has acknowledged this defiance in a recent story arc, indicating that in these series, when something is broken, it stays broken. The first dramatic example of this was with Hellboy: the Conqueror Worm, wherein Hellboy is pushed into a situation that goes against his character. When the tale ends, this causes him to reject the neutral state, thereby moving the narrative beyond episodic conventions.

And in the years since, Hellboy has only further broken from the episodic “return to neutral.” In the latest tales, for example, Ragnarok actually happens. Populations are wiped out. The world doesn’t go back to the old normal:

That’s what Professor Bestul is offering up this semester. How about the rest of you gents?

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Read the responses from the other editors, Andrew, Bean, and Travis, as they are published throughout today.

Recorded Conversations: the (cultural) object of our affections

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. The question for this first Conversation was posed by Alex Bean:

Question: What cultural object (movie, music, show, book, play, whatever) do you find yourself coming back to again and again over the years?

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Indeed, Alex, that is a wide-open question. Thus, I feel it deserves a broad-ranging answer. Not broad-ranging like Mr. Cook’s answer, but an answer so utterly gargantuan & sanity-sapping that it has mutated beyond its origins as a cultural object and into an unnamable sub-culture.

I speak, of course, of H.P. Lovecraft and this delightful Mythos.

I came to the Mythos from a few different angles, much like a Hound of Tindalos. By my teens, I was already a devotee of Poe and Bierce, as well as a tabletop gamer. In addition, my local library had a section dedicated to Wisconsin writings, including the stories of August Derleth. When my mind pieced together these seemingly dissociated bits of knowledge, it lead me inexorably to HPL.

That selfsame library also contained many blasphemous tomes published by Arkham House, the Wisconsin publishing house founded by Derleth and Donald Wandrei. These included the original anthologies of Lovecraft’s work, which I confess to borrowing often and for the full allowance of time.

It was the summer after my first year of high school when I cracked open an HPL story for the first time. Under the searing light of a relentless midday sun, I read the short story “Dagon.” It was… okay. I mean, I liked it, but it didn’t grab me.

Dagon did, however, grab the front of this ship.

After a bit of research, I learned that the chronological approach was not the best way to read HPL. So I jumped next to “The Nameless City.” The mood and ambience of that story struck me. Maybe there was something to this Lovecraft fellow, I thought. On it went, my enjoyment of HPL’s work slowly overtaking me, much like madness does to his protagonists.

And then I read “The Colour Out of Space.” I was hooked. This was the story that sealed my fate as a Lovecraft geek: the slow terror of a creeping blight, the sheer horror of powerlessness in front of an unworldly presence, and yet… a seemingly random event.

After that, all I could do was tumble down into this Styigan abyss. I was devouring weird and supernatural fiction that were tangential (or influential to) HPL’s Mythos. It introduced me to Robert W. Chambers and his Yellow Sign, which prepared me for the plays of Luigi Pirandello. It—

Have you seen the Yellow Sign?

I’ve got to pull back, here. There isn’t enough room in this response to list all the creative vistas that HPL opened to me: games like Delta Green, Arkham Horror, and Call of Cthulhu; other authors of the weird such as Arthur Machen, Ramsey Campbell, and Neil Gaiman; songs by the likes of Metallica, the Mountain Goats, and the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets; podcasts, films, people, my Master’s thesis…. And on, and on, ad infinitum.

I keep returning to Lovecraft and his Mythos for more than the original stories. The man himself was terribly flawed, and his stories could’ve used better editors. But the ideas that flowed from Lovecraft’s pen, and the community of writers he encouraged and collaborated with, those are what keep me coming back to his eldritch Mythos.

Read the responses from the other editors: Bean, Andrew, and Travis.

Recorded Conversations: the (cultural) object of our affections

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. The question for this first Conversation was posed by Alex Bean:

Question: What cultural object (movie, music, show, book, play, whatever) do you find yourself coming back to again and again over the years?

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I don’t really have a solid answer for this with a lot of detail, mostly because I’m drawn to about twenty different books or movies or albums or games at a time. My mood tends to be flighty, like the wind, and different pieces speak to me at different times because of that. It’s hard to nail anything completely down because the things that I identified with years ago mean different things to me now.

Jurassic Park was the first movie where I realized that I could be something with my life, whether it be a dinosaur or a paleontologist or a filmmaker or a writer. Sometimes I wish I could harness the passion that I felt about dinosaurs when I was five. To quote Paul Rudd in Knocked Up: “I wish I could feel as strongly about anything as kids feel about bubbles.” Insert (in place of bubbles) ‘dinosaurs’ and (in place of kids) ‘me as a five year old’ and you’ve got the general statement/problem of my entire life.

Five-year-old Travis is all OVER the latest study on whether dinosaurs were cold- or warm-blooded

The Lord of the Rings trilogy has been a central feature of my life since middle school — not because it was an escape from the hell that is growing up in a small Midwestern town, but because it was something that I could so strongly share with my mother. There is a trivia game that I was gifted by a friend concerning Lord of the Rings knowledge. While playing the game, we quickly discovered that my mom and I created an entirely unfair advantage when we were on the same team. The game would literally end on the first round because no one else would get one right and we would sweep on through everything. The stories of good and evil are something that I continually return to, and it reminds me deeply of the relationship with my mother that I have now lost.

To a similar extent, I am drawn not to culture/media, but to nature. A walk in the woods is as close as I have ever come to spiritual absolution, and I find myself craving wide open spaces free from the polluted, noisy cities that I have grown up near and around. Call it the spoiled life of a country boy, but I feel that there is something wrong with a  world where you look up into the sky but cannot see the stars due to light pollution. That’s why someday I figure to retire to a cabin in the middle of Wyoming or South Dakota or Arizona or the Upper Peninsula to just write and forget about society. (Chris McCandless is my homeboy)

Music has always been an important feature to me in my life. I grew up listening to a steady diet of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, learning to play instruments. I taught myself to play guitar by listening to Led Zeppelin’s albums over and over again, playing alongside and learning what it meant to be a musician. Even now, I strum away at my guitar when I’m feeling particularly irked or stressed or just in need of belting out Neil Young or Counting Crows after a long day of menial pay and no tangible results to witness. Any/all music seems to do the trick, but if I had to boil it down, my top five artists of all time are The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Counting Crows, Beck, and Nirvana.

With that in mind, how does one choose one object to return to over and over again?

Read the responses from the other editors: Bean, Andrew, and -J.

Recorded Conversations: the (cultural) object of our affections

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Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. The question for this first Conversation was posed by Alex Bean:

Question: What cultural object (movie, music, show, book, play, whatever) do you find yourself coming back to again and again over the years?

—

It began with, of all things, cassette tapes: a disorganized collection of cassette tapes, current whereabouts unknown. The tapes were my dad’s, and the first one was, in fact, a mix tape, an assemblage of he and my mom’s favorite Billy Joel songs, made about the time they saw him in concert eight months before I was born.

One day at the age of four, for reasons unknown (maybe I grew tired of nursery rhymes), I popped the tape into Dad’s Ford Escort, and from the propulsive first bars of “Movin’ Out,” I was hooked, lined, sinkered, and fried like a Lake Erie perch on the music. For five years, I listened to that Billy Joel tape until it finally wore out, and by that time I knew the words to every song on it, for Dad and I had sung them together through so many cruises through the freeways of Mahoning County. Not only did I learn vocabulary and a bit about how to craft poetry, but as I let the songs’ meanings sink in more and more, “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant,” “Goodnight Saigon,” and others clued me in to a range of emotions and ideas more complex than those found in my picture books. It was an early, formative step into growing up.

But this was not the only tape in Dad’s collection. Hungry to hear what else he had stored in his seat pockets and glove compartment, my fortuitous next step was a cassette with Rubber Soul on one side and Revolver on the other. Those songs were committed to memory within two months, and the Beatles became and remain one of my great obsessions… in wanting to learn all about them, I discovered how much care went into every note and every lyric that had seemed so fun and effortless upon first listen. Twenty years later, among many things which come to mind when I think of the Beatles, I always think of the work which must be expended to create art, or excel at a job, or raise a child, or make a relationship last…my family did all of those things, and the Beatles are inextricably linked to my family.

Gotta love a band with a name like Supertramp

There were more tapes beyond those. More Beatles with the White Album. Tommy, which Dad owned on vinyl too, and the lyric book’s illustrations scared me as much as the crazy sounds of “Revolution #9.” Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues. Mix tapes of Supertramp and the Association. The Best of the Doors. A tape with two Rock and Roll Hall of Famers making sounds I’d never dreamed of on each side, Pink Floyd’s monumental Dark Side of the Moon giving way to Traffic’s folk-jazz hybrid John Barleycorn Must Die. And there were the songs Dad sang to me in the bathtub, songs from all those cassettes, plus  Donovan and Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Cat Stevens and Carole King and Bob Dylan and Harry Chapin.

Dad and I didn’t care much for “Cat’s in the Cradle;” our songs were “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” and “Mail Order Annie.”

Today, I listen to anything and everything, having grown to love classical, country, jazz, and even rap by now, but the starting point was that original set of songs my Dad had on cassettes. From there, I built the foundation for a lifetime of exploration, and not just in music.

When Dad exposed me to so many great and varied sounds before I’d even started kindergarten, he and Mom (she was responsible for the Carole King) were telling me without words that there was so much out there, and not just in art, to experience, and I should not hold myself back for any reason; they certainly weren’t holding me back. With that simple expression of love and trust in me, I did more than go out to find new music, eventually music my parents had never even heard of; I read every book which interested me, saw every movie that caught my eye, tried as many foods and occupations and college courses as I could, and all those experiences and memories have bled into my writing. In a way, that music led to my becoming a writer. It was the first step in a journey which guaranteed I would always have inspiration, always have things to draw on in my own life to write about.

Nobody listens to cassettes anymore. But I still listen to those artists and albums all the time, and always smile with love and gratitude…and the occasional chuckle when I picture my five year-old self hear Lou Reed sing about “giving head” and having no idea what that meant.

Read the responses from the other editors: Bean, Travis, and -J.

Recorded Conversations: the (cultural) object of our affections

Leave a Comment

Welcome to “Recorded Conversations,” an occasional feature where all the Addison Recorder editors contribute their thoughts about a question, idea, or prompt. Everyone will chime in, and then we see where the conversation wanders. The question for this first Conversation was posed by Alex Bean:

Question: What cultural object (movie, music, show, book, play, whatever) do you find yourself coming back to again and again over the years?

—

This is a pretty wide-open question, but I like that for our inaugural run of this feature. It means that there’s lots of room for all of us to play around and explore what makes us tick. Personally, I thought I knew what direction I was going to go with this question, but as I sit here my mind is changing. Initially, I had thought to make my answer something like John Ford’s seminal The Searchers. If I had to pick a favorite movie that would be it for a whole variety of reasons.

But, the question posed is not about favorites per se, but about what we can’t seem to get enough of. The object that I return to time and again is not The Searchers, or Deadwood, or any of my myriad other favorites. No, I always find myself inexorably drawn to sit down and enjoy that grand staple of American television: the sitcom.

I’m not sure exactly when my love for the sitcom started. I can remember watching a lot of NBC’s mid-90’s greats like Seinfeld and Newsradio when I was younger. Tim Allen’s old series Home Improvement was definitely appointment viewing in our household. That’s unsurprising considering that my dad loved doing his grunty-hoot thing like it was going out of style (which it was). In high school I had the TV schedule memorized so that I could jump between comedy reruns, eliding around the heavy-handed nighttime soaps or dry procedurals. By college, my obsession was in full bloom. I can recall skipping student organization meetings in order to stay in my dorm and watch The Office.  When you’re a freshman who knows no one else on campus the funny people on TV can be a more welcome sight than the myriad strangers all around.

These days, much of my down time is filled by one sitcom or another. Be it a new episode of Happy Endings on Wednesdays, or queuing up an episode of Better Off Ted for the umpteenth time on Netflix while I play a video game, TV comedies are a constant presence in my life.

When you combine those two activities, you get Skyrim’s top-rated sitcom, “Shouting at Draugr”

There is an eternal tension in sitcoms that makes them endlessly consumable for me. Their most obvious function is to deliver jokes, which must rely on an element of surprise in content or delivery. But underlying even the most anarchic joke machine shows (such as Seth McFarlane’s many, many cartoons) is a finely-tuned narrative structure. The series has an established setting and cast of characters, which each episode disrupts in some fashion. These disruptions, such as Liz’s perpetual romantic troubles on 30 Rock,  are the motor behind the jokes. However, each episode must resolve its disruption within that same episode or else risk alienating the audience.

So, no matter how many times I watch The Venture Brothers, there is always that tension between the comic disruption caused by the Guild of Calamitous Intent’s half-brained attacks on the Ventures and the knowledge that the problem will be resolved within twenty minutes. It’s engaging without taking up my whole brain; hilarious without being challenging at the end of a long day.

Go Team Venture!

So, that’s me, what about all of you?

Read the responses from the other editors: Andrew, Travis, and -J.