Complex Numbers

Excelsior!

If you do what you really want to do, you feel like you're playing. - Stan Lee (1922-2018)

Stanley Martin Lieber wanted to save his real name for literature, so when he got started writing the supposedly lowbrow stories for which he'd later become famous, he used the pseudonym we've all come to know well.

As I've said before, I've always hated the term "genre fiction," and I never use it. It's intended, I think, to distinguish fantasy, science fiction, horror, supernatural and other stories from "literature." But all stories have a genre - some, more than one. I noticed that yesterday's science fiction, fantasy, etc. become today's literature - Mary Shelley, Poe, Twain, Stoker, Verne, Wells, Burroughs, etc., and I saw no need to wait for time to pass so that others could appreciate fiction with otherworldly elements the way that I did.

When I was a kid, I tried reading comics, and I tried reading The New Yorker. The former stuck. The latter... well, I figured when I got older, I might understand and appreciate that magazine's post-modernist, rambling, allusion-laden, snobbish style.

I never did.

I did like the cartoons, though.

Comics are a strange blend of genres - so much so that they have become a genre of their own. From the outset, which for the sake of argument I'll place at the first publication of DC's Action Comics 80 years ago, they have always blended science fiction and fantasy. I've mentioned in this space and in newsletter editorials that I have problems with stories that get the science wrong. Boy, do comics get the science wrong - but the best of them are internally consistent; hence the fantasy aspect.

They are, you might say, modern fantasy; or, as I prefer, modern mythology, the stories of those with powers far beyond those of ordinary men and women. Gods, in a sense - gods who walk among us. Or fly. Or teleport. Or run really, really fast.

Even those comic book heroes without identifiable powers have honed their skills in ways that make them greater, but whether human, alien, mutant, or irradiated, most of them share one trait: the desire to do good, even if the heroes themselves are just as flawed as we - or their creators, writers, and artists - are.

They urge us to become the best that we can be.

Apparently, for me, the best that I can be includes an abiding love of comics: in their original words-and-pictures format, in their TV and movie adaptations, in books, in behind-the-scenes interviews. I guess you can call me a fanboy, even if I've never dressed up as Spider-Man or gone to a comics convention (I have been to general F&SF conventions, but none of the big Comic-Cons).

These past 10 years or so - the time since Marvel's Iron Man first exploded onto the big screen - have seen a renaissance of comics adaptations. Some people are tired of that. I get it - it's not everyone's vial of super-serum. Comics movies were made before 2008, though, and will continue to be made until they're no longer making money for the studios, which probably won't be anytime soon. Personally, I'm tired of rom-coms, but my solution to that is to simply not go see them. Problem solved.

I can say with some certainty that if it weren't for comics, I wouldn't have had the urge to write, or to appreciate science (even if the latter was out of the curiosity to see just how bad they did science). I wouldn't be the person that I am.

I never did get a taste for The New Yorker's snobbery, but look at this:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/black-panther-and-the-invention-of-...

That's an article in the most snobbily literary of art-snob magazines post-modernistically deconstructing a movie based on a comic book character co-created by Stan Lee - and unabashedly praising the film.

And the man - The Man, as he was known - lived long enough to see his "lowbrow" life's work join the ranks of literary fiction in being analyzed, scrutinized and reviewed by that magazine, and in a positive manner at that.

So if you're wondering why so many people are reminiscing on this one guy's life today, well, it's because he's one of the people who actually changed the world for the better, inspiring millions of people and adding to the world's body of great literature.

Not bad for a pulp fiction writer.


(Note: I'm probably going to crib heavily from this entry for next week's Fantasy newsletter, so if that editorial seems familiar, that's why.)