The year of comics

I was in my second year in high school when someone from I forgot where delivered a lecture about Wasted by Gerry Alanguilan for something I forgot.  Apparently, the only thing that stuck with me was this comic, which I purchased shortly after this person talked about it.  I'm sorry I don't remember her, I would have thanked her for the recommendation.

I was very impressed with the thing.  The entire thing - the drawings, the lines, the characters, the story - all these impressed me.  I'd like to think that being an impressionable and inevitably miserable teenager didn't have anything to do with it, although that was arguable.  At any rate,  it was vastly different from the Archie and the Funny Komiks I grew up reading (though I was reading mostly prose in those days, and I was still wondering whether any book can match To Kill a Mockingbird).  Now and then I could borrow Pugad Baboy from one of my schoolmates or their male friends, though I didn't actively look for anything, or at least anything else, of the graphic genre.  I wasn't even certain that it was a genre back in the 1990's, at least where I was.  It might just be that I was studying in a Catholic all-girls school, and that the world outside looked nothing like what was going on inside the campus.  Hence, the awesomeness of Wasted.  

My third and fourth years rolled by, and I only had fleeting romances with the final four comics of The Astonishing X-Men: Age of Apocalypse and perhaps the first eight of Spawn following Angela.  My two other friends and I, all of us loners (go figure), would swap with one another flimsy comics which we managed to scrounge up from used book stores.  We weren't able to get any complete storyline compilations, so we had to be content with the stories as far as the thin comics went.  Pretty soon there were other stuff that got in the way, so the comic book reading didn't blossom into full-fledged loves.  College came and went - and since it was college, time was spent learning habits that will inevitably assure me a very uncomfortable old age. The only graphic material I held then were Heavy Metal, and sadly no story stuck with me, perhaps due to all those habits I was busy picking up. I read Gaiman's The Sandman during my last year in college, and then I graduated, so I was already busy picking myself up for what adult life had to throw at me.  I feel I didn't give The Sandman the pause it deserved, but that's how it goes, sometimes.  We know that we are holding something outstanding in our hands even when we know that our minds do injustice to it by letting it go so easily.  I did that same injustice to Watchmen, too, since I read it while I was busy with masters studies, and busy with those habits that I still lovingly nurture.  So, eight comics stories in eight years. 

Now I have read roughly fifteen comic compilations in the span of three weeks.  (Living with someone with almost as much comics as he has action figures, one would wonder why I didn't do it sooner.)   It started  when I was teaching Endless Nights to Philosophy of the Human Person students in June, just to tie up all the themes we focused on throughout the semester - then one student recommended Lucifer, a spin-off from Gaiman's work, which I then read, and that was it.  I would have liked to say that I was as impressed as I was with Wasted, since it was the first time I actively sought out to read any graphic novel again, but time would not allow awe as easy as it does the first time it did.  Lucifer was an interesting foray into theology and metaphysics, chop sueying characters from several mythologies, and I devoured it in two days.  

What followed was a melee, as only melees could follow a love long denied.  I am almost ashamed to say that it was only this year that I read V for Vendetta, which was for me ruined by the movie anachronistically.  I reread Watchmen again, though for the first time ever I appreciated a line in a movie counterpart which the comics didn't have: "Never compromise.  Even in the face of Armageddon."  His story as told in Before Watchmen: Rorschach convinces you that it's him that's really made for that line and absolutely no one else.  Within a day, I moved onward to other Moore stuff, like The Courtyards and then Neonomicon, which surprised me because they were meant to be read in that order.  The Courtyards was eyebrow-raising, again an interesting take on the metaphysics one is capable of when doing drugs that aren't really drugs because it turned out to be a language (go figure), and Neonomicon erased my eyebrows altogether.  A panel of anthropomorphic fish with a realistic penis does that, sometimes.  When I got to Lost Girls I was really lost, so I didn't resume reading it after the first two pages.  (Not for nothing does Alan Moore look like the way he looks.)  Momentarily stumped as to what to read next, I turned to Pasco, who made me read Identity Crisis and think about how massively slippery identity is, knowing that I have to incorporate this brilliant work into lectures about personal identity, no matter how awkwardly I do it.  And because I thought the Crisis at the end had something to do with Identity Crisis, I read Final Crisis, which left me wondering what the glorious heck some of those writers from DC are snorting.  

After rereading Flashpoint Paradox, I moved on, quite unaccountably, to Court of Owls, Night of Owls and City of Owls, and then Death of the Family and Joker: Death of the Family.  That really did it.  I loved the Joker all over again, having first loved Heath Ledger's rendition.  As I was reading the entire thing I kept on thinking how apt the everlasting dance between the Batman and the Joker was for illustrating what love is, and then promptly forgot it in all of my lectures.  

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I was reminded of it when another student recommended I read Year One of Injustice: Gods Among Us.  Batman's face when Superman killed the Joker was utterly priceless, reflecting a love singing maniacally loud in the final panels of The Killing Joke.   While waiting for Zero Year, which was next in line to Death of the Family, I read Joker's Asylum, featuring stories of all the major incurably insane characters in Arkham as told by the Joker, and, not surprisingly, the Joker's and Killer Croc's stories were masterfully done - sharp pieces for showing society to itself.  Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, recommended by my boss, featured dizzying weavings among Camus, Icarus and his father, and Proust.  It reminded me of both David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp and Adrian Tomine's Shortcomings and Optic Nerve stories, the way the socio-existential could be explored so effectively through stories.     

Having taken a break from comic books and going back to prose makes me truly know what I now consciously appreciate in the graphic medium of telling tales:  the illustrations are a multi-layered text for other parts of your mind, which are somehow different from the pictures you conjure when you read a written medium.  It was too early for me to know this through Wasted, although I appreciated the work no less.  And perhaps the greatest source of happiness to be derived from the comic book genre is that it is a very effective way for getting philosophical points across, with or without fish with penises.