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Comics as archetypes
I've had a number of people ask me over the years why on Earth I read comics. Most of my family doesn't read squat to begin with, fiction is considered a waste of time, and fiction with *pictures*? Why, that's a tiny little step above Dick & Jane.
I've always been fascinated by comics - when I was a kid, I had a ratty old copy of JLA, where they crossed over to Earth-2 and met with the JSA. (If I'd known how much that would end up being worth today... oy...) I read and re-read that one comic *so* many times. It was on my bookshelf next to a copy of D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths that I had on *cough* perpetual checkout from the city library for about two years. I considered them equally fascinating, and equally indicative of humanity, in their own ways.
Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, and others, have said that comics are our modern mythology, and in many ways they're right. They're certainly one of the more persistent set of myths through the 20th century. Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and Johnny Appleseed were aspects of the uniquely American expansion of the 19th century, but they were replaced by Babe Ruth, Ty Cobbs and Hank Aaron as popular media took hold at the same time as an upswing in organized professional sports.
Today, we have too much 24/7 coverage to have living heroes, much less myths. Steroids, dog fighting, cigars in the Oval Office... we're constructing clay heroes from the ground up these days.
And maybe that's a good thing - perhaps it's good to recognize the hard truths: that these are people too, that they're no better or worse than most of us, that there's not that big of a disparity between any two members of this human race that can't be bridged. When we tear down false idols and pedestals with awareness, we raise ourselves to some degree. When done from a basis of fear, not so much. These are hard pills for us to swallow. We *want* our heroes, we *want* shining examples to show us the way, we *want* to think that we can be *so much more* than what we see around us.
Unfortunately, today we see too much to make that readily available.
But we still want those examples. We still want heroes.
So, fiction is the last bastion of the hero, and, I believe, comics are a unique medium for supplying expression to that need. McCloud has written on the creative and technical sides of the field better than I could, so I'll just point you to Understanding Comics. He has extensive references you can dive into for further reading. In a nutshell, though, it boils down to an intersection of right brain and left brain input - words become glyphs with symbolic meaning, and symbols take on semantic import. You can't nail it down as text or visuals - either without the other is meaningless and trite in this realm. It requires working with both hemispheres simultaneously to create, or derive, a message. The best comics feel otherworldly and epic because they work on both halves of our mind simultaneously, an experience most of us aren't used to, and they pull us into the process through the panel gutter.
And what describes myth better than 'otherwordly' and 'epic'? Babe the Blue Ox wasn't normal sized... she was massive. Pecos Bill carved the Grand Canyon with the horns of a steer he was bringing under control as he pulled its head to ground. Babe Ruth self-assuredly pointed to the exact spot he was going to swat his home run, and then knocked it 400yds... no, 500... no, 550... the ball smashed the lights out... the ball was never found...
Myths grow as we need them to - they take on aspects of those doing the telling, as they express their own interpretations, fears, desires, and thought. So given this constant reworking over time, why does Herakles thrive in the land of myth, but the Scarlet Pimpernel is left to the forgotten ghettos? Archetypes. The purest forms of characters and figures, distilled and refined, become a shorthand for the facets of our own psyches. They become universally recognizable as 'of us', and they speak to some part of our inner life. They speak *for* us, when we cannot. We learn lessons from them, we consider what these archetypes say, because in doing so we listen to ourselves.
We need heroes, but more so, we need archetypes to make sense of our inner world. We may or may not be born with innate understanding of our own psyches - but we are certainly not born with the capacity to discuss them. We develop language to weakly express our own rich internal life. We feebly reach out with words to try and connect with others. We eventually adopt this as the norm, and, more often than not, we impress this so firmly onto our own minds that we forget how to *be* without these words. We stop, we analyze every thought, feeling, and whim, and we do so with words that are a pale shadow of what and who we are. We limit ourselves by our need to connect, and our limited mechanisms to do so.
We forget how to be without words.
Archetypes transcend words. They are a common language that is expressed not in simple language, but in emotion, in mental images, in icons, in feeling, in *being*. Not every one will have the same reaction to an archetype, but the common ground for interpretation is there, and discussion about differing interpretations brings a new level of discourse to that connection we crave. Archetypes are iconic - Thor has his hammer. Batman, his cowl. Captain America, his shield. Every archetype has some *visual* element that becomes symbolic of their entire nature, that explores and explains their distillation better than words could. The advent of color printing made these even more palpable. We can react emotionally to simple color swatches that we associate with specific characters.
We've always had archetypes - Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung explored this topic from two different angles, while much of shamanistic totem work can be seen as an archetype-based psychology. Every culture has had archetypes, and many aspects of 'the human condition' are universal to them. Power. Loss. Grief. Joy. Decisions. Regrets. Consequences. They are lessons we pass on from generation to generation because they still apply, even after centuries. They are the basics of our existence.
So where are the archetypes of today? Greek myths are passé, although the film 300 was an *excellent* attempt at bringing one to the mainstream. (Based on a comic, I might add.) Who are the modern heroes that define these archetypes for us? Some would argue they are to be found in the movies from Hollywood, but those are so... limited. They are limited by budget, by scope, and by being wholly external to our thought processes. What is on the screen is what we get. We don't add any of ourselves to the creative process, as we do in the panel gutter of comics. We don't become part of the art, and it therefore is limited in how much it becomes a part of us. It can give us a thrill, but it is the rare film that creates a link to the core pieces of our mind and heart.
Obviously, I think that comics are one rich source of archetypes. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that today, they are the *main* source of archetypes for our society. Heck, look at the iconic movies coming out of Hollywood - Spiderman, Superman Returns, Batman Begins, The Hulk, and so on. All comics derived.
Why? Because they speak to us. Spiderman: guilt leads to responsibility, if we're brave enough to face it... and can destroy us if we let it. Superman: compassion tempers power, and power is so terrifyingly lonely. Batman: Rage and bottomless loss expressed as cold, emotionless determination governed above all by a disciplined mind and reason. Hulk: Rage expressed as raw animalistic power - stripping away all reason and leaving a raw id without fetters.
Who hasn't felt these at one time or another? By distilling these emotions down to their cores, by expressing them in characters who act out and give form to these emotions, we allow them to have a voice. We can express what is in our hearts and minds, and do so safely. We can learn from them as well - when faced with great anger, what would Batman do? The Hulk? Superman? Flash? Green Lantern? They become our proxies, to experiment with various reactions to a situation without engaging in those reactions. They let us consider paths and options, and their stories give us morality plays on which to judge our own potential actions.
And those lands on which they operate are mythic. Worlds die, and are reborn. Gods walk the Earth, are among us, *are* us. It is ironic, that in distilling our archetypes, we invariably elevate them to scales of interaction of which we can *only* dream... and yet, perhaps that is exactly the point. We remove them from our daily lives, and place them, not on a pedestal where they are confined, but on a grand and sweeping stage where they can take us along for the ride. We become them, for we have always *been* them. It is only in the rare instances that we allow ourselves to feel it, to remember what we once were, and remove our own blinders of words that limit us.
Archetypes take us back to what we are, and have always been.
We are good, we are evil. We feel joy, sadness, regret, guilt, loss, rage, love, compassion, loneliness, isolation. We question, we dream, we doubt, we hope. We are all the things we have lost words for. So we use pictures to bring us back to our best parts, and to come to terms with those that are less appealing.
We need our heroes... but most of all, we need us.
I've always been fascinated by comics - when I was a kid, I had a ratty old copy of JLA, where they crossed over to Earth-2 and met with the JSA. (If I'd known how much that would end up being worth today... oy...) I read and re-read that one comic *so* many times. It was on my bookshelf next to a copy of D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths that I had on *cough* perpetual checkout from the city library for about two years. I considered them equally fascinating, and equally indicative of humanity, in their own ways.
Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, and others, have said that comics are our modern mythology, and in many ways they're right. They're certainly one of the more persistent set of myths through the 20th century. Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and Johnny Appleseed were aspects of the uniquely American expansion of the 19th century, but they were replaced by Babe Ruth, Ty Cobbs and Hank Aaron as popular media took hold at the same time as an upswing in organized professional sports.
Today, we have too much 24/7 coverage to have living heroes, much less myths. Steroids, dog fighting, cigars in the Oval Office... we're constructing clay heroes from the ground up these days.
And maybe that's a good thing - perhaps it's good to recognize the hard truths: that these are people too, that they're no better or worse than most of us, that there's not that big of a disparity between any two members of this human race that can't be bridged. When we tear down false idols and pedestals with awareness, we raise ourselves to some degree. When done from a basis of fear, not so much. These are hard pills for us to swallow. We *want* our heroes, we *want* shining examples to show us the way, we *want* to think that we can be *so much more* than what we see around us.
Unfortunately, today we see too much to make that readily available.
But we still want those examples. We still want heroes.
So, fiction is the last bastion of the hero, and, I believe, comics are a unique medium for supplying expression to that need. McCloud has written on the creative and technical sides of the field better than I could, so I'll just point you to Understanding Comics. He has extensive references you can dive into for further reading. In a nutshell, though, it boils down to an intersection of right brain and left brain input - words become glyphs with symbolic meaning, and symbols take on semantic import. You can't nail it down as text or visuals - either without the other is meaningless and trite in this realm. It requires working with both hemispheres simultaneously to create, or derive, a message. The best comics feel otherworldly and epic because they work on both halves of our mind simultaneously, an experience most of us aren't used to, and they pull us into the process through the panel gutter.
And what describes myth better than 'otherwordly' and 'epic'? Babe the Blue Ox wasn't normal sized... she was massive. Pecos Bill carved the Grand Canyon with the horns of a steer he was bringing under control as he pulled its head to ground. Babe Ruth self-assuredly pointed to the exact spot he was going to swat his home run, and then knocked it 400yds... no, 500... no, 550... the ball smashed the lights out... the ball was never found...
Myths grow as we need them to - they take on aspects of those doing the telling, as they express their own interpretations, fears, desires, and thought. So given this constant reworking over time, why does Herakles thrive in the land of myth, but the Scarlet Pimpernel is left to the forgotten ghettos? Archetypes. The purest forms of characters and figures, distilled and refined, become a shorthand for the facets of our own psyches. They become universally recognizable as 'of us', and they speak to some part of our inner life. They speak *for* us, when we cannot. We learn lessons from them, we consider what these archetypes say, because in doing so we listen to ourselves.
We need heroes, but more so, we need archetypes to make sense of our inner world. We may or may not be born with innate understanding of our own psyches - but we are certainly not born with the capacity to discuss them. We develop language to weakly express our own rich internal life. We feebly reach out with words to try and connect with others. We eventually adopt this as the norm, and, more often than not, we impress this so firmly onto our own minds that we forget how to *be* without these words. We stop, we analyze every thought, feeling, and whim, and we do so with words that are a pale shadow of what and who we are. We limit ourselves by our need to connect, and our limited mechanisms to do so.
We forget how to be without words.
Archetypes transcend words. They are a common language that is expressed not in simple language, but in emotion, in mental images, in icons, in feeling, in *being*. Not every one will have the same reaction to an archetype, but the common ground for interpretation is there, and discussion about differing interpretations brings a new level of discourse to that connection we crave. Archetypes are iconic - Thor has his hammer. Batman, his cowl. Captain America, his shield. Every archetype has some *visual* element that becomes symbolic of their entire nature, that explores and explains their distillation better than words could. The advent of color printing made these even more palpable. We can react emotionally to simple color swatches that we associate with specific characters.
We've always had archetypes - Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung explored this topic from two different angles, while much of shamanistic totem work can be seen as an archetype-based psychology. Every culture has had archetypes, and many aspects of 'the human condition' are universal to them. Power. Loss. Grief. Joy. Decisions. Regrets. Consequences. They are lessons we pass on from generation to generation because they still apply, even after centuries. They are the basics of our existence.
So where are the archetypes of today? Greek myths are passé, although the film 300 was an *excellent* attempt at bringing one to the mainstream. (Based on a comic, I might add.) Who are the modern heroes that define these archetypes for us? Some would argue they are to be found in the movies from Hollywood, but those are so... limited. They are limited by budget, by scope, and by being wholly external to our thought processes. What is on the screen is what we get. We don't add any of ourselves to the creative process, as we do in the panel gutter of comics. We don't become part of the art, and it therefore is limited in how much it becomes a part of us. It can give us a thrill, but it is the rare film that creates a link to the core pieces of our mind and heart.
Obviously, I think that comics are one rich source of archetypes. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that today, they are the *main* source of archetypes for our society. Heck, look at the iconic movies coming out of Hollywood - Spiderman, Superman Returns, Batman Begins, The Hulk, and so on. All comics derived.
Why? Because they speak to us. Spiderman: guilt leads to responsibility, if we're brave enough to face it... and can destroy us if we let it. Superman: compassion tempers power, and power is so terrifyingly lonely. Batman: Rage and bottomless loss expressed as cold, emotionless determination governed above all by a disciplined mind and reason. Hulk: Rage expressed as raw animalistic power - stripping away all reason and leaving a raw id without fetters.
Who hasn't felt these at one time or another? By distilling these emotions down to their cores, by expressing them in characters who act out and give form to these emotions, we allow them to have a voice. We can express what is in our hearts and minds, and do so safely. We can learn from them as well - when faced with great anger, what would Batman do? The Hulk? Superman? Flash? Green Lantern? They become our proxies, to experiment with various reactions to a situation without engaging in those reactions. They let us consider paths and options, and their stories give us morality plays on which to judge our own potential actions.
And those lands on which they operate are mythic. Worlds die, and are reborn. Gods walk the Earth, are among us, *are* us. It is ironic, that in distilling our archetypes, we invariably elevate them to scales of interaction of which we can *only* dream... and yet, perhaps that is exactly the point. We remove them from our daily lives, and place them, not on a pedestal where they are confined, but on a grand and sweeping stage where they can take us along for the ride. We become them, for we have always *been* them. It is only in the rare instances that we allow ourselves to feel it, to remember what we once were, and remove our own blinders of words that limit us.
Archetypes take us back to what we are, and have always been.
We are good, we are evil. We feel joy, sadness, regret, guilt, loss, rage, love, compassion, loneliness, isolation. We question, we dream, we doubt, we hope. We are all the things we have lost words for. So we use pictures to bring us back to our best parts, and to come to terms with those that are less appealing.
We need our heroes... but most of all, we need us.
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