{"id":104,"date":"2015-05-08T02:08:35","date_gmt":"2015-05-08T02:08:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/?p=104"},"modified":"2015-06-05T09:38:20","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T16:38:20","slug":"the-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/?p=104","title":{"rendered":"The Why"},"content":{"rendered":"

When thinking about comics,\u00a0there\u2019s a passage from Michael Chabon’s\u00a0The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay<\/em> to which I come back often, which I will share with you now. \u00a0In this chapter, Joe Kavalier, Sammy Clay,\u00a0and their\u00a0fellow young comic creators are working on just\u00a0cranking\u00a0out new masked crimefighter comic characters to fill out the page count of comic enough so that they qualify as magazines.<\/p>\n

“My guy flies,” said Davy O’Dowd. \u00a0“That I know.”<\/em>
\nJoe shot a look at Sammy, who clapped a hand to his forehead.<\/em>
\n“Oy,” he said.<\/em>
\n“What?”<\/em>
\n“He flies, huh?”<\/em>
\n“Something wrong with that? \u00a0Frank says this is all about wishful figments.”<\/em>
\n“Huh?”<\/em>
\n“Wishful figments. \u00a0You know, like it’s all what some little kid wishes he could do. \u00a0Like for you, hey, you don’t want to have a gimpy leg no more. \u00a0So, boom, you give your guy a magic key and he can walk.”<\/em>
\n“Huh.” \u00a0Sammy had not chosen to look at the process of character creation in quite so stark a manner. \u00a0He wondered what other wishes he might have subsumed unknowingly into the character of lame Tom Mayflower.<\/em>
\n“I always wished I could fly,” Davy said. \u00a0“I guess a lot of guys must have wished that.”<\/em>
\n“It’s a common fantasy, yeah.”<\/em>
\n“It seems to me that makes it something you can’t have too many of,” Jerry Glovsky put in.<\/em>
\n“All right, then, so he can fly.” \u00a0Sammy looked at Joe. \u00a0“Joe?”<\/em>
\nJoe glanced up briefly from his work. \u00a0“<\/em>Why.”<\/em>
\n“Why?”<\/em>
\nSammy nodded. \u00a0“Why can he fly? \u00a0Why does he want to? \u00a0And how come he uses his power of flight to fight crime? \u00a0Why doesn’t he just become the world’s best second-story man?”<\/em>
\nDavy rolled his eyes. \u00a0“What is this, comic book catechism? \u00a0I don’t know.”<\/em>
\n“Take one thing at a time. \u00a0How does he do it?”<\/em>
\n“I don’t know.”<\/em>
\n“Stop saying you don’t know.”<\/em>
\n“He has big wings.”<\/em>
\n“Think of something else. \u00a0A rocket pack? \u00a0Antigravity boots? \u00a0An auto-gyro hat? \u00a0Mythological powers of the winds? \u00a0Interstellar dust? \u00a0Blood transfusion from a bee? \u00a0Hydrogen in his veins?”<\/em>
\n“Slow down, slow down,” Davy said. \u00a0“Jesus, Sam.”<\/em>
\n“I’m good at this shit. \u00a0Are you scared?”<\/em>
\n“Just embarrassed for you.”<\/em>
\n“Take a number. \u00a0Okay, it’s a fluid. \u00a0An antigravity fluid in his veins, he has this little machine he wears on his chest that pumps the stuff into him.”<\/em>
\n“He does.”<\/em>
\n“Yeah, he needs the stuff to stay alive, see? \u00a0The flying part is just a, like an unexpected side benefit. \u00a0He’s a scientist. \u00a0A doctor. \u00a0He was working on some kind of, say, artificial blood. \u00a0For the battlefield, you know, Synth-O-Blood, it’s called. \u00a0Maybe it’s, shit, I don’t know, maybe it’s made out of ground-up iron meteorites from outer space. \u00a0Because blood is iron-based. \u00a0Whatever. \u00a0But then some criminal types, no, some enemy spies, they break into his laboratory and try to steal it. \u00a0When he won’t let them, they shoot him and his girl and leave them for dead. \u00a0It’s too late for the girl, okay, how sad, but our guy manages to get himself hooked up to this pump thing just before he dies. \u00a0I mean, he <\/em>does die, medically speaking, but this stuff, this liquid meteorite, it brings him back from the very brink. \u00a0And when he comes to–“<\/em>
\n“He can fly!” \u00a0Davy looked happily around the room.<\/em>
\n“He can fly, and he goes after the spies that killed his girl, and now he can really do what he always wanted to, which was help the forces of democracy and peace. \u00a0But he can never forget that he has a weakness, that without his Synth-O-Blood pump, he’s a dead man. \u00a0He can never stop being… being…” \u00a0Sammy snapped his fingers, searching for a name.<\/em>
\n“Almost Dead Flying Guy,” suggested Jerry.<\/em>
\n“Blood Man,” said Julie.<\/em>
\n“The Swift,” Marty Gold said. \u00a0“Fastest bird in the world.”<\/em>
\n“I draw really nice wings,” said Davy O’Dowd. \u00a0“Nice and feathery.”<\/em>
\n“Oh, all right, damn it,” Sammy said. \u00a0“They can just be there for show. \u00a0We’ll call him the Swift.”<\/em>
\n“I like it.”<\/em>
\n“He can never stop being the Swift,” Sammy said. \u00a0“Not for one god-damned minute of the day.” \u00a0He stopped and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. \u00a0His throat was sore and his lips were dry and he felt as if he had been talking for a week. \u00a0Jerry, Marty, and Davy all looked at one another, and then Jerry got down from his stool and went into his bedroom. \u00a0When he came out, he was carrying an old Remington typewriter.<\/em>
\n“When you’re done with Davy’s, do mine,” he said.<\/em><\/p>\n

Wasn’t that magical? \u00a0Wasn’t that just a joy to read? \u00a0But as much as Michael Chabon’s writing just catches you in its arms and carries you away, my favorite part of this section, the part that sticks out so clearly in my imagination even more than Sammy’s spontaneous generation of a superhero, is Joe Kavalier hardly looking up from his work to ask about the why<\/em>. \u00a0This, I think, is the most important, obvious, fundamental thing one needs to consider when writing comics – particularly superhero comics with characters who have been around for decades. \u00a0It’s not just a matter of story, it’s a matter of why<\/em> this character is here and why<\/em> they’re doing what they’re doing. \u00a0Sometimes I worry that there are a lot of Davy O’Dowds out there working on comics today.<\/p>\n

I’ll probably be referencing this passage from time to time. \u00a0Just a heads-up! \u00a0In the meanwhile, for the few of you who\u00a0have yet to read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay<\/em>, what are you even waiting for?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When thinking about comics,\u00a0there\u2019s a passage from Michael Chabon’s\u00a0The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay to which I come back often, which I will share with you now. \u00a0In this chapter, Joe Kavalier, Sammy Clay,\u00a0and their\u00a0fellow young comic creators are working on just\u00a0cranking\u00a0out new masked crimefighter comic characters to fill out the page count of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":109,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104\/revisions\/109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.codyscomiccorner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}