To Dream The Impossible
It strikes me that, a year ago, I was in the UK at the start of a three week excursion that feels oddly impossible now in ways that I can’t fully explain. To be honest, I think that it felt impossible at the time, but also inevitable, and I was simply too tired to do anything other than head into it and hope for the best.
I do remember, very clearly, being all too aware of how isolating the whole thing felt ahead of time — knowing that, despite the trip being bookended by two conventions and featuring a stay with family in the middle, I would be spending so much of that time alone to a degree that hadn’t been the case for years by that point. It was a scary thought, in many ways, and one that I feel like I didn’t really fully understand until a few days into the trip. (Maybe the first full day after the first convention was when it sank in, when I was staying in an AirBnB in a city I’d never been to before, realizing I had no food and no company and nothing to do for the next 24 hours while I waited for something to happen.)
And yet, there were times when that freedom from expectation or commitment was thrilling; usually when I felt less at sea, such as the hours I spent walking without purpose in the towns I grew up in, just listening to music and rediscovering the streets I’d wandered around hundreds if not thousands of times before. Or the flights and trains and drives into pastures new, and feeling a buzz of excitement instead of loneliness.
(I remember spending an afternoon in Leeds, almost by accident, and it just feeling astonishingly new and right, in ways that I couldn’t even properly put into words.)
There’s a lesson to be found here, as I find myself getting more cautious and older. Something about finding comfort in discomfort, and not letting that anxiety put me off doing things that could be good for me down the line. I know that it’s true from experience more than once, and yet: I still think about the trip from last year, and it feels daunting and impossible, even now.
My Mind Is On The Blink
One of the things that kept this past New York trip interesting was the fact that, try as I might, as exhausted as I may have been, I only managed to sleep past 5am once that entire week. (Surely, I reasoned, I should be sleeping in, in that 5am EST is just 2am PST, and yet.) In theory, I know that I should have spent that time reading something fun, watching shitty television, or some similarly mindless endeavor to keep myself from waking up too fully or testing my brain, and yet what I actually did every single time it happened was immediately get up to start working for the next hour before I went out and got myself some breakfast from the Starbucks around the corner from the hotel as soon as it opened.
Across the course of the week, I discovered the following things about this accidental routine:
- 6am is an ideal time to go for a walk around New York, especially in October. The sun’s not up, the people are just starting to walk around for the day, and you get to see a lot of businesses set their shit up each morning. There’s a lot of hosing down the sidewalk and people singing loudly as they do so.
- There are good “walking around New York at 6am” songs and there are bad “walking around New York at 6am” songs. I listened to a bunch of French hip-hop during those walks. (My hotel was just off 42nd Street, which is perpetually lit up by neon signs and an oddly wonderful thing to experience at that time of the morning when accompanied by French hip-hop; I recommend it to you all.)
- Inexplicably, there were always people from my company up and around at that time of the morning. Every single morning. Even the morning when the show wasn’t happening and there was no last-minute prep to be done, I ran into someone outside who was waiting for a car to head off into the morning. Perhaps the most surreal example of this was running into the same person just before I got to my hotel room the night before, and then immediately as soon as I left the hotel the next morning; in both cases, she was on a journey between the hotel and the convention center.
As I’m writing this, I’m on the plane back from New York, unsurprisingly utterly exhausted, and also hoping against hope to get a full night’s sleep for the first time in eight days. Surely it has to happen eventually.
I Want To Wake Up
To say the New York trip was not what I expected would not be entirely correct, as I’m pretty sure that there was no point before I got on that plane where I thought it would be anything less than “a lot of work” and “very stressful.” That said, it was so much more work, and so much more stressful than I think I’d been imagining, to the point where I worked… maybe 16 hours every single damn day of the trip? Okay, wait, that’s not true; five of the days. I was traveling for the other two. For those days, I worked something closer to 4 through 6, depending.
(It really was a lot of work, for reasons that I’m not going to share publicly.)
The worst day was definitely Thursday, the first “full” day of New York Comic Con, purely for the fact that it was the day where every single techical difficulty hit us full in the face and we had to get ways around them by hook or by crook. How do you do a liveblog when you have no internet connection? Let me tell you, that was definitely a question I had to ask myself, which might give you an idea of how the day went.
Actually, no; here’s the ideal illustration of how the day really went: at one point, I realized that I didn’t know where my phone was. I could remember the last time I had it, and that was maybe half an hour earlier, and thinking about it, I realized two things: (1) my phone had fallen out of my pocket in a convention room holding a few hundred people, and (2) there was a very good chance I would never see my phone again. Which, you know, would not be great for any number of reasons.
Still, I went back to the panel room, thinking, the panel’s not been done for that long, it’s probably on the ground where I was, and I climbed around on my hands and knees only to find absolutely no phone. It was at this point where I realized how stressful that day really was, because upon realizing that I had really, actually, lost my phone, my first thought was, well, this is still only the third or fourth worst thing that’s happening right now.
For what it’s worth, it turned out someone in the room had already found the phone, so when I went to ask if the A/V team could keep an eye out in case anyone hands anything in, they simply handed me my phone and said, “this is probably yours.”
If only all the other problems of the weekend had such simple solutions.
Slight Return
One of the unexpected by-products of my recent obsessive return to old Flash comics was the discovery that one of the first American comics I’d ever read was amongst their number, and the wave of nostalgia that hit me as soon as I saw the cover.
It’s the cover in particular that had the biggest impact, because while the kid me — apparently the issue came out in 1981, so I would have been six years old, probably? — kept the comic in question, apparently I lost the cover of it along the way. I can remember the interior of it with surprising clarity, especially some pages/images (although, admittedly, the version in my memory has additional scrawls in pen that I added at some point, which was something I did to a number of comics when I was a kid), but the long-lost cover has long been something that became a lot more vague, slipping further and further into a clouded, amorphous state with every passing day… until I accidentally bought it as part of a lot of back issues, and found it in my hands again.
Looking at it now, I can see why kid-me was so excited by the cover: it’s not just that it’s dynamic and has the hero in peril (Look at that posing from Carmine Infantino!), but there are two different bad guys, and each are visually distinct in a way that’s immediately recognizable and understandable. For my sins, I became a massive Rainbow Raider fan as a result of this comic, despite his being clearly impossibly lame; his secret identity is, I shit you not, Roy G. Bivolo; I still can’t tell what side of the thin line that separates genius from disaster that lies on.
Accidentally having this comic in my hands again for the first time in decades felt like a curiously charged moment with significance I couldn’t fully comprehend, not least because it happened so close to my 50th birthday. If there is some artifact of who I turned out to be from childhood, something like this really might be it. Maybe the universe was trying to tell me something, although I can’t understand what.
Perhaps it was just telling me that I haven’t really changed that much in all these years. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not, all told.
Hap, Happiest Season
As you read this, I’m in New York for New York Comic Con 2024. I’m actually writing this weeks earlier, knowing (a) at the time you read this, I will be so busy with the show itself that I couldn’t even consider writing a post here, and (b) that I’ve already been working on things for the show for so long that I don’t call it New York Comic Con (or even NYCC) anymore, but New York Comic Con 2024, because that’s the terminology I use at work.
New York Comic Con is a show that takes up a large percentage of my work year, because it’s the biggest show in North America, but also because it’s the biggest show Popverse does every year; it’s the one that takes the most planning and organization, and the one that comes with the most pressure to get it right. It’s also the one with the most moving parts, which also means it’s the one with the most potential for things to go wrong; to absolutely no-one’s surprise, I started having stress dreams about this show about a month before it started, simply because that’s the way my brain works.
Despite all of this, it’s something I look forward to each and every year because I get to go to New York. Even now, there’s something genuinely magical about the city to me — if anything, the magic has grown from the first time I visited (26 years ago now, shockingly; I really am old), filled with awe and entirely unsure how it happened. Now, I have decades of memories in the city that decorate the landscape, each as odd and oddly meaningful as another, even if they’re simply of walking back to a hotel with a particular song in my ear after a day’s work. It’s become a city full of memories and ghosts, which feels entirely right for New York.
So, think of me as I do the job and don’t sleep enough, and enjoy some great food and some terrible food, and some great terrible food. I might be busy, I might be stressed, but if nothing else, I am still in one of my favorite places in the world.
Throw One Down
O, Lucky Man!
A number of conversations I’ve been having recently have me reflecting on the role of good luck and good timing in what I only occasionally feel self-conscious referring to as my career — namely, the fact that the circumstances that allowed me to get where I am today no longer exist, despite all that happening in the past two decades.
It’s a sign of the ways in which “digital media” has evolved — and the rate at which it’s happened, for that matter — but every time I look behind me to try and recommend that others follow in my example to try to further their writing careers, I realize that I’m talking about worlds that simply aren’t there anymore… something that feels especially surreal, given that, as I was coming up, I was moving in unchartered territory that hadn’t existed just a handful of years prior, either. Forget about the internet boom; the more I think about it, the more I realize that I came up in an internet burp.
The democratization of media that the internet appeared to offer — the very thing that allowed someone like me, with no training or, let’s be honest, special skill, to find an actual, real career as a writer — was, in retrospect, a temporary aberation that happened almost by accident as companies struggled to adapt to whatever the internet economy was going to become. I managed to sneak in while the lava was cooling, and before the continents shifted into place. Doors didn’t just close behind me, they burst into flame and ceased to exist entirely. (It was probably the lava’s fault, in this tortured metaphor.)
I’ve always credited my job to luck: to knowing the right people by accident, to being in the right place at the right time. But the more the internet becomes what it is, the more that I see how it devalues the “content” it relies upon to exist, the more I realize that the luckiest part of all was being there in the era in which no-one had really figured anything out, and was still willing to try stuff to see what stuck.
The Fastest Obsession Alive
I wish I could explain to myself, as much as you, what possessed me to start collecting old The Flash comics last month with the speed and ferocity that I went after them. I’d been re-reading a collection of the final issues of the series — the so-called “Trial of the Flash” storyline, which is strange and a little camp and gloriously awkward in such interesting and delicious ways as it tries to marry a 1950s approach to story with the 1980s when it was published — when I realized that it was a comic that really didn’t feel like anything else, even surrounded by countless other comics it had inspired. I’m not sure what this is, I thought, I want more.
That I had this thought a week before a local comic show seemed like fate, and so I found the few cheap back issue sellers there (didn’t there used to be more? There should be more, again), and picked up a handful of copies. And then, inspired by that experience, I picked up a few more on eBay. And then a few more. And then more, and so on. The end result? Within three weeks, I had somewhere in the region of 30-40 issues. Thanks, my lowkey version of hyperfocus.
Here’s the thing, though: I don’t regret it at all, and not just because I picked up most of them at bargain prices. Instead, I’m if anything more obsessed by the very particular tone and obsessive nature that the comic displays in almost all of these issues. By hanging on to tropes established decades earlier when they were in fashion, The Flash‘s 1970s and 1980s comics are these fascinating examples of what happens when ideas and cliches metastasize and become something else in the process: there’s true danger in these stories — people die, even the Flash’s wife — but it’s all treated with a lightness and melodrama that defangs everything and suggests that nothing really bad can ever happen, with whatever energies should (and traditionally would) be put into emotionally responding to trauma being instead diverted into answering any one of the outlanding questions each story is built around: How can a man die in the morning and get married in the evening?!? What does it mean that my enemy is now my best friend — and knows my true identity?!? Why am I surrounded by dinosaurs and how can they help wake up this child from their coma?!?
(Yes, that last one is real.)
Each of these comics asks a very particular suspension of disbelief, and then goes on to reward that with stories filled with imagination, good humor, and no small level of whimsy. They’re clearly comics for kids, but done in such a way that I almost feel as if I had to age into in order to fully appreciate. Pow! Zoom! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore, as the tagline used to claim, for real.