Frozen Ramblings

Right-o. Still frozen today, so if we Sawmill it'll be later on. So, I've got some time to ramble it appears.

Everyone wants everything to be one thing, y'know? He's a good guy. He's a bad guy. He's rich. He's poor. There is a God. There is no God. We came from Monkeys. There is Global Warming. There is no Global Warming. The Democrats have the Answer. The Republicans have the Answer. All Politicians are Corrupt. Blahblahblah.

What a load of Crap.

Nothing is One Thing. I mean, I'm never gonna believe in Evolution as the be-all-end-all answer to How Everything Works, because there's too many big, fat holes in the theory. For something based on Chaos it's so...Organized. Like, maybe, there was a Hand involved in it, y'know? At the same time, I never understood, even when I was a Baptist, why we had to sit around and discount or try erase Evolution. For starters, it's the prevailing Scientific Theory, which means it should be taught in schools in Science class (how is that NOT a Duh?), and frankly, a lot of it makes sense.

Oh, but that's too wishy-washy. We gotta Stand for something, don't we? Cripes.

Like I said, it's a Load of Crap. Hell, nothing displays that better than our stupid ass Two Party System. I know the Democrats suck. I know this. Hell, even at the absolute height of Obamamania I knew, deep down, that the Democrats were gonna drop the damn ball the very second they got in office. But what's the alternative? The Republicans? Hahahahaahaahahaha!!!! Democrats are screw ups, but Republicans are the Anti-Christ, soullessly devoted to the collapse of humanity and the rise of the Apocalypse.

(And even then, I'm falling into the Age Old Trap of Oversimplification. After all, I'm sure there are competent Democrats, and Republicans that are decent people. Surely)

We always want everything boiled down to the simplest terms. Have you watched those stupid 24 Hour News Shows? It's all Headlines and the most basic information. When a Sports Team Loses, it's always the fault of one guy. That LeBron Guy didn't work hard enough. The Quarterback had a rough day. The Pitcher sucks. Blahblahblah. Never mind that there's an entire team of people playing the stupid game too.

Even the most simplistic crap is more complex than it appears. Take those horrible "Transformers" movies for example. Stupid action films? Sure. But they're also an ad for a bunch of cars and toys and that one Actress that I used to think was hot until I heard her talk and then I was like, she's not hot anymore (I like how movies can be ads for People now. That's funny. Interestingly, Matthew McConehey pioneered the trend.).

Jack Kirby didn't do simple. People always try to streamline the King down to this or that, but there was no this or that with the King. He did Superhero, Sci-Fi, Horror, Western, Romance (invented that genre, actually), Humor, and just about every other genre in comics. His style evolved over time. There was the stringy, wild, rough and tumble look Kirby's strips had in the 40s. There was the beautifully drawn 50s comics and the dynamic strips of the 60s. The 70s are the most often imitated of Kirby's styles, with their thick, blocky figures and explosive action. Hell, even in the 80s, the end of Kirby's career, there was an experimental approach to Kirby's storytelling. "Thor" wasn't just a superhero action comic. It was a Mythological, Grand Cosmic Epic with elements of Action, Humor (Volstagg cracks me up), and even Romance (man, that whole Jane Foster thing went on forever, didn't it?). The Fantastic Four was barely a superhero comic. It was a Sci-fi comic about Family and Exploration. Fighting bad guys was just kinda incidental. The Fourth World was a Cosmic comic, a War comic, a comic about different forms of familial connections, a Romance comic (from time to time), and one of the most bad ass action comics ever made. It was also one of the first true Megatexts (which is a Rant for another day).

Hell, I read in an Article once, that one of the reasons why the High-and-Mighty Comics Literatti have perpetually turned their collective noses up at Jack Kirby is because he didn't settle into one genre and his work was so hard to pin down. Man, that's one of the things I like about Kirby.

Maybe it's my problem. I think too much. I break things down. I like mashing up genres. I like combining different things. I like when something doesn't have an easy definition. I don't want the easy answers. I like when I don't entirely "get" something. I like being left with questions. But I'm a weirdo.

That's why I'm drawn to the movies I'm drawn to. David Lynch, Takashi Miike, David Cronenberg, all guys who don't create simple, easy to explain, easy to understand films. You can't really explain a David Lynch film in a single sentence (except for maybe "The Straight Story", and even that one is more complex than it appears on the surface).

That's why "SDF" was hard to promote. What was it? There were Action strips, but they were strange affairs with blood and horror and cartoon animals. And then there was a Walt n' Sped strip. Then there was something really odd, like aliceislost or Broken Tea Cup. And none of that is easy to sum up in a thirty second soundbite that you're blathering to a perfect stranger in a crowded convention full of people.

I will say that "The Hot Fudge Sundae Adventure Club" is a Lot easier to promote. You start with "It's an Adventure Comic" and right there you've got a bit of a hook. Something simple for the casual passerby to latch onto. Then you can dig under the surface a little bit. Tell them about the odd characters, and the surreal environments. Tell them about the Space Whales and the Giant Monsters and the pointless dance numbers. And if you haven't lost them by then, you might pick up a sale.

Where am I going with this? I dunno. Just rambling I suppose.

I guess that's been my problem for the last few years. What I'm looking for isn't simplistic or easy. I liked the debate that "Inception" provoked. I liked how everyone had different theories. I liked how some people despised the movie because it didn't fit their simple definition of this or that. I liked how I ran the movie through my mind backwards and forwards for days. About the only thing that bothered me was when people would dumb it down by calling it "A Special Effects Extravaganza". Groan. Special Effects were about as far from the point as you could get with that film. At best they were just part of the puzzle. Same old same old.

That's part of what drives me to work the way I work. There's so little out there that interests me (I gotta wait, what, 5 years between Lynch films? There's only two comics by Grant Morrison every month. I do watch a lotta TV, though). I make up for it by making the kinds of comics I wanna make, the way I wanna make em. That way at least there's something I like out there.