…always reciprocates in kind.

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…and my first reaction upon seeing “Mr. Weiss” was to kick it over to my dad, whose response to anything involving “comic books” is to roll his eyes and wonder where he went wrong as a male role model for his sons.

Kidding aside (sorta), I’m not sure how to answer the question because I don’t really follow the current funnybook scene these days. I hit the end of that road with DC’s Final Crisis, in which I came away from that event feeling that I’d experienced all I needed to from the superhero genre.

“You’ll grow out of it” tends to be dismissed as a condescending platitude uttered by sour adults who’ve lost touch with their sense of childhood wonder, but it’s not without basis in reality. My fandom was a luxury of youth that gradually faded into a mildly diverting habit. The expense, storage requirements, and sense of diminishing returns associated with keeping up with current releases couldn’t compete against the responsibilities of being a responsible adult with bills and obligations and precious little free time.

It was an individual decision, based largely on the Weiss Advice on Vice: If something causes more headaches than it brings enjoyment, then it’s time to call it quits. My priorities and concerns may not (and in all likelihood are not) applicable to anyone else.

I have quite a few friends and associates who remain invested in the comics fandom scene, and keep me informed of worthwhile things that I’d otherwise miss — stuff like Agents of ATLAS, Incredible Herc, and Captain Britain and MI-13, which I’ve picked up in trade paperback format. For the most part, however, I’m content enough tilling the back forty of childhood nostalgia and historical oddities where comics are concerned.

That said, I think American comics are in a fairly good (if not great) place as far as the crap-to-quality ratio goes. There’s a wealth of excellent work getting released these days in print and digital formats, even if most of it doesn’t hold much appeal for me. That applies to “Big Two” superhero slugfests — providing you’re willing to look past the ever-churning editorial-mandated clusterfucks — and indie titles.

The real problem resides with the business side of the industry, especially in the realms of marketing and distribution. The rise of digital formats and retail models aside, the comics industry has been painted into a corner by shifts in demographics, technology and the economic landscape where repeated reliance of short-term fixes has resulted in dire long-term consequences.

The “kids and comics” argument offers a fine example of this tendency to misconstrue — and thus misdiagnose — a greater underlying problem. Laments about the abandonment of and need to recapture the young reader demographic tend to focus on either physical or creative accessibility — “get them into their hands” and/or “get them something they’ll understand.”

The reality is that there will always be a segment of the kid population that enjoy comics and they that enjoyment has nothing to do with adults’ perceptions of accessibility. Kids didn’t abandon comics because comics abandoned newsstands, newsstands abandoned comics because kids abandoned comics to an extend that made the hassle profitable enough to justify continuing that retail model.

Comics became associated with an idealized interpretation of American childhood because they filled a specific niche. They provided lurid, disposable, and, most importantly, cheap entertainment when options for such a thing were limited at best.

Comics survived the advent of television because most households from 1950 to 1980 only owned a single TV set. Comics were a fast and easy pacifier on family outing and errands, be they a car trip to the White Mountains or clothes shopping at Gorins with grandma. Ten-or-twenty-five-or-sixty cents could buy grownups a small pocket of peace as the restless tykes were temporarily placated.

That may still hold true today, but now comics have to contend with a host of flashier competitors. Much as kid staples such as paddle-balls and yo-yos have given way to action figures and other trendy gee-gaws, comics have lost their childhood boredom niche to handheld electronics and the delivery of 24/7 kids’ programming via cable or home video.

I’m not saying that couldn’t change. I’m saying that’s the reality that has to be accepted and no amount of nostalgic assumptions about childhood behavior will alter that reality.

I honestly have no idea what it would take to turn that or any other of the industry’s worrisome trends around. Digital distribution has shown promise, but possesses its own set of limitations and hasn’t yet emerged from its shakedown phase. The success of cross-media projects like The Walking Dead or The Avengers shows that there is popular and sustainable interest in the material, yet not in a way that feeds back to the comics industry as a whole…as opposed to ephemeral spikes in specific trade sales or as a test lab to keep licensed properties refreshed.

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…but were you aware that Marvel — publisher of such theologically important works as this and this — also entered a cross-promotional Christian comics covenant of its own?

Unlike the Spire’s Archie offerings, which were essentially youth-demo tracts with familiar licensed characters, the products of Marvel’s three-issue collaboration with Christian publisher Thomas M. Nelson were part of a related but different phenomenon. The rise of America’s current evangelical movements also saw the rise of a parallel (and quite profitable) realm populated by Jesu-fied iterations of popcultural trapping and trends. Name a medium or genre — no matter how obscure or associatively heathen — and there exists a “Christian” prefixed counterpart. While the quality of the material may leave a lot to be desired, ideological underpinnings and the din of the self-created echo chamber trump matters of marginal competency.

(Seriously, if you have a D-list band and want to play for AAA-sized crowds, use find-and-replace to swap out all sex and drug references in your lyrics in favor of “God,” “Jesus,” “worship,” and “pray.” You can keep the stuff about getting down on your knees, however.)

In a realm with Christian rap, metal, punk, romance novels, dating sites, kiddie cartoons, and detourned Joy Division t-shirts, it only stands to reason faith that someone would have hit upon the concept of a bona fide Christian superhero…

…which is how the Illuminator came to be.

Andy Prentiss was a unhip, be-mulleted teen attending summer camp in some Tennessee backwater when he was consumed by a shining light from the heavens. The whys and wherefores behind the mysterious radiance and its choice of victim beneficiary were not addressed — “mysterious ways,” and all that — but the experience changed Andy into a superhuman avatar with the ability to transform himself into a being of coherent light.

When the cigarette-smoking, fedora-sporting, collar-popping, drug-peddling, rat-tail wearing bad boy of Andy’s placid Nashville suburb became possessed by a demon, the virtuous teen attempted to use his powers to bring the agglomeration of parental nightmares down but was instead laid low by his own pride and cowardice. (Mostly cowardice.) He was rescued from infernal immolation by Gus, a church janitor who exchanged hawg-riding hellraising for extreme evangelism after losing a hand in a bad bike accident.

After giving Andy a tough love pep talk about what it means to be a true holy warrior, he offered the teen his old set of riding gear — a very 1993 ensemble which evoked both Star Brand’s and Cobra Commander’s (helmeted variant) fighting togs — and set him loose to slam spiritual evil…

Said spiritual evils took the form of dope peddlers, an evil secularist biology professor…

…whose plan to cure birth defects (“blessings in disguise” according to the devout Gus) by setting loose gator-human hybrids during the big football game, more dope peddlers, the fearsomely goateed Channel Master…

…who used his demonic new age crystals to transform Andy’s teenage crush into the supervillainous “Chakra,” and still more dope peddlers. (It was the 1990s, after all.)

No matter how grave the threat or how big the stakes were, Gus was there to provide the kind of spiritual advice which can only come from a middle aged, hook-handed former speed freak who lives in a boiler room and spontaneously raves about battling demons and God’s ultimate plan for the world.

Trapped between the realms of moral edification and disposable entertainment, Illuminator doesn’t really work as either a spiritual document or a superhero tale. It fails as most works (Christian or otherwise) do when agendas drive the work rather than subtly informing it. Its mix of tropes lifted from Marv Wolfman’s 1970s Nova stories, religious platitudes lifted from 1980s televangelists, and the “eh, close enough” visual aesthetics of the post-Image talent exodus of the 1990s result in a work that reads less like a superhero comic and more like an art therapy piece put together by a person struggling to reconcile the tenets of his faith with his love for the capes-and-spandex genre.

Neither staff nor snake, lamb nor lion, the radiantly religious Knight of Light exemplfies the qualities that make all but the most devout souls flinch when they hear “Christian” appended to a familiar format (especially when said format is “third wave ska”). May he find lasting peace in the Elysian Brownfields of Nobody’s Favorites.

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(from Action Comics #266, July 1960; by Jerry Siegel and Jim Mooney)

FLINTRIDGE, CA – Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory made a puzzling and grisly discovery today, when a video feed from the Cassini probe revealed a boy-shaped object drifing in the vicinity of Enceladus.

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Gosh golly, I can sure see why the Fifties have been held up as an idyllic era by certain segments of polito-pundit class! Talk about your “Greatest Generations!”

While LIFE held a number of misguided (or simply dead stupid) editorial positions over the thirty-odd years of its run as America’s #1 periodical, it did tend to be on the right side of history where racial equality and civil rights were involved. The specifics may have been wrapped up in paternalist platitudes, gradualist timidity, and the white middle concerns about “angry Negro militants,” but the editor’s hearts were in the right place even if their heads were up their asses. (As illustrated by their partisan celebration of the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy,” which struck a blow at traditionally Democratic blocs while ensuring that the socially progressive right-centrism endorsed by LIFE would evaporate thanks to the GOP’s new dependence on batshit social conservatives and racist lunatics.)

Most of the readers’ responses (the ones LIFE chose to publish, at least) to the article expressed shock and dismay over the racist behavior of the rioters…if for no other reason than such behavior “gave the commies more propaganda material.” Still, there were some unreconstucted dumbasses willing to toss their vague semblance of wisdom into the ring. These included an Alabama state rep eager to gloat over Northerners’ hypocrisy and this poster child for poor reading comprehension…

Ah, yes. “I’m not a racist, but WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE PROPERTY VALUES?” It’s a reliable old chestnut capable of putting the fear of lost equity into even the staunchest of armchair liberals, except the properties in this case were units in a publicly owned housing project, you frigging moron.

As horrible and hateful as the “falling home values” fallacy was, at least it was rooted in empirically observable reality — a stupid self-fulfilling prophecy where racism and financial anxiety brings about waves of panic selling that depresses equity more than the rumored arrival of a hypothetical “Other.”

Today’s hate du jour doesn’t even bother justifying things with a direct economic angle — just some bowdlerized scripture or soft “statistics” or loaded phrases designed to trigger some primordial shithead reflex. “I’m not a homophobe, but WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE SANCTITY OF MY LOVELESS THIRD MARRIAGE?”

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My childhood obsession was for all things aquatic. It makes sense in hindsight, given than this was an era when Jaws and Jacques Cousteau and Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle loomed large in the collective consciousness. Shipwrecks, sea monsters, sharks, whales, and warships — I was fascinated with them all, and spent those years sporting a sailor’s cap on my messy blond mop of hair and with a little stuffed seal as my constant companion.

My parents supported and encouraged my interest in maritime topics. Besides keeping my supplied with thematically appropriate playthings and games, they also provided a constant stream of books on the topic. Most of these were grown-up titles — massive coffee table tomes covering the fishes of the world or the evolution of warship design, as well as image-heavy (and thus “kid-accessible”) offerings from the National Geographic, American Heritage, or Time-Life libraries.

A favorite from that last publisher was a hardback volume titled either The Sea or The Fishes from the “World We Live In” series of pop reference books. It wasn’t until I started my intensive study of LIFE‘s original publication run that I realized that the book’s contents (and those of similar offerings) was essentially pulled from “special feature” issues that had run in various issues of the parent magazine. (It makes perfect sense, but six-year-old Andrew was slightly less savvy about the inner workings of publishing empires.)

It was one of those dumpster-diving expeditions that I uncovered something that nearly fried my brain with a nostalgia flashback of singular lucidity — a painted fold-out mural depicting cross-section of ocean life from surface to briny depths. It originally appeared in the November 30, 1953 issue and can be seen here, though the scanner fumbled the job by chopping the spread into to non-contiguous segments.

Even in its butchered state, there was no mistaking this intimately familiar vector for childhood nightmares…

…upon which hours upon hours of my childhood were spent in rapt contemplation and semi-successful efforts to copy freehand onto manila drawing paper.

This particular detail…

…occupied a significant space of my childhood’s imaginative landscape. The crazy and terrifying morphology of deep sea fishes dug its hooks deep into my developing brain and engendered all sorts of bizarre kid-sociations. Even today, I can’t look at these denizens of the depths without thinking that Jimi Hendrix music follows in their briny wake and that their fanged maws would speak with the menacing growl of the teen burnouts who used to hang out on the corner by the lead burning plant.

The above will be discussed in more detail in my forthcoming oceanology monograph, Viperfish: Conversion Van-Loving Stoners of the Abyss.

Recommended listening: This one goes out to all my hatchetfish homies!

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When my senior year of high school rolled around and it became time to choose colleges to apply to, my first choice was the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin. I can’t remember what my reasons were for choosing the school, apart from the “great adventure” giddiness that was sweeping my circle of peers.

“Get out of Woburn and see the world,” was the fashionable mantra for the artsy-fartsy set I hung around with (yet quietly disliked), though most would end-up crashing and burning by the end of their first semesters, forcing a retreat back to the safety of the City of Roses.

My dad thought going to Wisconsin was a stupid idea. He didn’t actively lobby against it or try to dissuade me from applying, but I think he knew, better than I did, how tightly my sense of self was rooted in this sullen patch of real estate known as eastern Massachusetts.

“We’re creatures of the coast, Andy” he told me while we were sitting on a bench at Long Wharf. “You’ll miss the ocean, trust me.”

Then the financial aid package which would have made UW-Madison possible fell through and rendered such speculations moot. I threw together a last-minute (as in “two weeks after I graduated”) application for UMass Boston, was accepted on the spot by an admissions officer who saw my transcripts and thought I was spoofing her, and went from getting away from the Atlantic Ocean to spending a large share of my life within spitting distance of her churning gray waters.

While my guidance counselor was appalled by my decision to forgo an education at a nationally reknowed institution in favor of a locally mocked “safety school” (which was and is an utter bullshit rep), I have no regrets about the road not taken. Every good thing that has come my way since 1990 has tied back to my years at Umass Boston — with a certain big-eyed, dark-haired, punky and no-nonsense classmate-turned-soulmate being the grandest prize of the lot.

I don’t need adventures, and some of my worst moments have made when I strayed from that realization. I want to be content, to be centered and to accept my limitations.

It hasn’t been completely smooth sailing, but I think I’ve achieved such a state.

Recommended listening: Preach on, my classic rock brothers.

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Sometime in the spring of 1991, I signed on as player in a Dungeons & Dragons game run by one of the college Sci-Fi Club’s mildly high poobahs. Even though I’d all but given up D&D (and role playing games in general) by that stage of my developmental evolution, it seemed like a nice way to waste a Friday afternoon and get to know some club members I knew of but rarely socialized with.

The run was a fiasco from the beginning, as the DM was an anal-retentive fellow who felt obligated to micromanage every aspect of game in accordance with whatever “advice for gamemasters” column ran in Dragon Magazine that month. From his insistence on inspecting everyone’s sets of dice before each play session to his demand that he personally select the miniatures we used to plot out complex combats, the kid reveled in the pettiest of petty tyrannies.

When he wasn’t enforcing his narrow yet arbitrary sense of authority around, he treated the player to a continuous stream of in-jokes and obscure references from his hometown campaign that were utterly opaque to a bunch of outsiders. “Realism” dictated that players had to deduce creature names themselves based on the halting, nasally descriptions provided by the DM, thus leading to a memorable series of battles against “hunched humanoid sorta thingees with glowing eyes and axes and stuff.”

And then there was the time when he based an entire adventure around that irritating staple of irritating geeks otherwise known by Dr. Demento fans as “The Existential Blues.”

As discontent spread in the ranks, each of the players began to rebel in their own way. I opted for sociopathic griefing, where my chosen-for-me chaotic good fighter began feasting on his kills and festooning his armor with their severed heads. Those actions — along with my new battle cry, “BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD” — were references to Warhammer Fantasy Role Play, which had replaced D&D as my RPG of choice during my sophomore year of high school.

The grubbiness of the Warhammer mythos (as depicted in the various magazine ads for the oversized and ludicrously spiky lines of Citadel miniatures) dovetailed nicely into my transition into the thrash metal and hardcore punk scenes. The system’s extensive and opened roster of player careers and extreme lethality contasted sharply with the syncretically baroque yet fairly limited mechanics that characterized AD&D (first going into second edition) at the time. While I’d never managed to get a substantial run going with my local circle of gaming pals, the system dug its hooks into the part of my adolescent male psyche that celebrated violence, futility, and the importance of skulls as fashion accessories.

My passive-hyperaggressive goofing caught the attention of the other players. This led to a DM-excluded discussion where I was pressured into taking control of the group and starting a WFRP campaign, which I quickly cobbled together after an uncomfortable and false round of “no hard feelings” with the deposed DM. (I suspect he went home that night and wept into his collection of threadbare Rush concert shirts.)

I didn’t run my campaign along the system’s suggested lines of interaction and intrigue, or in accordance with the traditional rules of good gamesmastering, period. I held to the higher principle of “as long as the players are having a good time” and it served me well through eight months of old school dungeon crawls and shameless loot grinding. The game’s notorious lethality and accent on gory death were typically limited to the party’s adversaries or hidebound traditionalists who harshed the buzz.

“Oh, an ambush at a roadside tavern is hopelessly trite? Well, lookie there, it seems the mutant criticaled a crossbow bolt through your Adam’s apple. Don’t worry about your corpse, Southie Dave’s thief is already looting it for valuables.”

By the time the run concluded, the players could (and would) recite the nastiest results from the critical hit tables — which for the most part ended with “a shower of hot blood covers you and your opponent. Death is instantaneous” — alongside me.

It was great fun predicated on anticipating the expectations of the players, and that’s how these things ought to be. There were some folks who groused at the cliquish nature of the group. That characterization may have been true to an extend, but it was never an elitist affair. Anyone (apart from a few guys I really loathed) could participate as long as they were willing to accept the fast-and-loose spirit of things. I think half the active membership of the club (plus my little brother and a friend from high school) cycled through the campaign at some point or another…which was how I ended up getting elected as club president.

There’ve been times in the past two decades where I’ve thought about putting together another Warhammer RPG campaign, acutely so after the 2nd edition ruleset fixed and fleshed out many of the original deficiencies. My efforts never made it past the daydream stage, however. The lack of free time and a handy central meeting place have complicated things past the point of feasibility, but the biggest hurdle is the knowledge that I’ll never find a group of core players capable of matching the old Sci-Fi Club gang.

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– what beautiful policy statements they make!

(With thanks to Pal CJ)

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