Read more than comics!
By Steve Gerber – It sometimes seems every comic book reader harbors the ambition to write or draw comics, which is fine. A creative, critical, and vocal fandom helps keep the current gaggle of professionals on their toes.
Unfortunately, however, too many aspiring writers and artists have been led to believe that they can learn their craft by immersing themselves in comics to the exclusion of all other influences. It’s not true.
Axiom: If your literary and artistic influences are rooted entirely in comics, it’s a virtual certainty you’ll never write or draw anything more interesting or original than what you’ve already read.
So if your big ambition is to write Marvel’s fifth Thor title, you can stop here. Just avoid bookstores and libraries at all costs, and never venture beyond the new releases rack in your local video store. You’ll be fine.
If, on the other hand, you aspire to something more, you’re going to have to explore the world as it exists outside comics. Here are some books that took me there, and considerably further.
The single novel that most thoroughly rearranged my mental processes was The Stranger, by Albert Camus. Camus (pronounced kah-MOO) was an existentialist writer who fought with the French resistance during World War II. He died in 1947—the year I was born—in an automobile accident. The novel is set in Algeria and concerns a man so cut off from his own being and from the world around him that even the news of his mother’s death can’t rouse him to an emotional response. It’s impossible to look at the world the same way after reading this novel, so if you’re deeply fond of your internal status quo and satisfied with all your working assumptions about life, death, and humanity, stay away. If you don’t mind having your perceptions rattled, I recommend it highly.
The same applies, in a very different way, to the writings of Marshall McLuhan, particularly Understanding Media and The Medium is the Massage. Wired magazine considers McLuhan its patron saint, because he explained the digital age 30 years before it arrived. If you’ve heretofore subscribed to the common monkey-see, monkey-do theory of how media affect us, you’ll come away from McLuhan thinking very differently, and far more subtly, about television, film, radio, and even more recent innovations like the World Wide Web.
What about non-mediated reality? How real is that? For one view, consult the works of Carlos Castaneda, beginning with The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, Tales of Power, and my personal favorite, Journey to Ixtlan, which is as scary and suspenseful as any horror novel.
Marvel has been making a big deal lately about “putting character back into comics,” but character can’t be summed up in a few advertising taglines. To put character into characters, it’s necessary, I think, to understand the cultural context in which they operate and which shaped them. For a completely terrifying look at the current version of America, try Philip Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism. For a completely hysterical look at the same culture, try Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot (And Other Observations), by Al Franken.
Another axiom: Entertainment doesn’t have to anesthetize your brain.
When your circuits overload from trying to absorb all of the above, relax with almost any science fiction by Arthur C. Clarke or William Gibson, the vampire or witch novels of Anne Rice, or one of Scott Turow or John Grisham’s legal thrillers.
You have nothing to lose—except your desire to write Marvel’s fifth Thor title.
Steve Gerber is making a long-awaited return this fall to his best-known creation, Howard the Duck.
