I’ve always lived in the periphery of comic book fandom, drawn to its strange and fertile corners but never quite tethered to its mainstream heart. As a kid in the ’90s, I was spellbound by Batman, the shadowed hero of Tim Burton’s imagination, where Gothic melodrama and camp swirled together in a perfect storm. The early ’90s brought me the Swamp Thing TV series, a humid, moss-covered fever dream of pulp storytelling that felt like it was recorded on the edges of a Louisiana swamp, where the mythic and mundane collided in glorious VHS haze.
And, oh, Fantastic Four—those comics were my window to boundless wonder and chaos. Something about their unpolished sincerity spoke to me, Reed Richards bending the very laws of physics while the Thing grappled with his rocky humanity. Later came Spawn, a jagged, angst-ridden fever spike of 1990s counterculture, Todd McFarlane's grimy symphony of the damned. But even at my height of comic enthusiasm, I never got swept into the floodplain of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The endless chain of blockbuster behemoths has largely passed me by; my indifference borders on blissful unawareness.
If my fandom feels tangential, it’s because I identify more as a kindred spirit to the early '70s comic-book heads who lived on the fringes—less collectors, more dreamers and chaos seekers. Like ghostwriters penning suicide notes for disillusioned superheroes, or Zappa in his Studio Z days, when freaks and freak-outs reigned supreme, my tastes have always been less about the polished product and more about the unhinged energy of creation. It’s the raw, proto-state of an art form—wild, shapeless, and crackling with possibility—that gets me. I live for those moments before something becomes capital-A Art, before it calcifies into a genre, a movement, or a commodity.
This might explain my enduring love for proto-metal of the 1970s, too. Bands like Blue Cheer, Sir Lord Baltimore, or Captain Beyond embodied that same raw spirit, staggering into uncharted territory with distorted guitars and cosmic ambition, decades before metal became a codified culture. There’s something intoxicating about art in its primal state, when it’s half-formed and feral, alive with potential but not yet caged by definition.
I wonder sometimes if there’s a novel lurking in this fascination—a story about falling in love with art not as a finished artifact but as an uncontainable force. About a character who chases the thrill of the first, wild iteration of every creative movement, always moving on when the thrill gives way to structure, coherence, and commercialization. The novel would be equal parts lamentation and celebration, a tribute to the fleeting glory of raw creation and the rare individuals who recognize it in its purest state.
Because in the end, that’s what drives me: not the final polish but the feverish moment when an idea is still raw, strange, and alive. That’s where the real magic lies.
No comments:
Post a Comment