RIP Stan Lee

Stan Lee died on Monday. That is to say, Stan Lee died today. I'm writing this shortly after hearing what had happened, and I hope it's somewhat coherent. (I was going to post this pitch I wrote for a 100 story Spider-Man run later this month, but after reading it over, I noticed that it was extremely crap and I wanted nothing to do with it, especially after today. If you want to see it with some commentary, DM me.) There are many things that could be said about Stan Lee, most of them probably not to his benefit. There are also things to be said by better writers than I (Andrew Rillstone, for example. His Spider-Man work has always been better than mine). The truth of the matter is for all that I am a "Spider-Man Guy," my knowledge of the character has massive gaps. I haven't read the Clone Saga or most of the things by Gerry Conway or even that one story where Peter throws his costume into the trash because he can't take it anymore. Most of my knowledge of the character comes from writers like David Brothers, David Mann, and the aforementioned Andrew Rillstone, all of whom have shaped how I view the character. Hell, of the Spidey comics I have read, Lee's are relatively middling. That's not to say there aren't some greats in there (the one where Peter lifts the rubble is perhaps one of the best Spidey comics ever), but compared to the one where Peter gets shot by Kraven the Hunter and doesn't realize he's just become a magician or the one where Peter reveals his identity to J Jonah Jameson, a lot of the Lee era stories seem to be less... personal. Not as focused in the characters interiority. There are some moments of genuine wonder (the conversation between Betty and Peter under the desk, Aunt May's Speech about Parkers not giving up, Peter coming to terms with never being in a relationship with Betty), but they're fleeting moments for arch characters living a farce. But there is one issue by Lee that I always hold dear to me. Back when either the first or second movie was coming out, the New York Times decided that it would be fun to reprint some of the old Spider-Man comics by Lee and Ditko. Being a kid who loved reading the funny pages of the newspaper, I was curious to see what these comics were like. The one that was, in retrospect, the most important one to how I view Spider-Man was The Amazing Spider-Man #2. The issue had two stories in it, one being a Vulture story that I didn't remember much about. But the other one focused on a relatively minor villain called The Tinkerer. It's an odd story for people who are familiar with Spider-Man's cultural myth. It's not about some their on the run or a billionaire trying to ruin a working class guy's life because he keeps spoiling his plans to become richer and richer. It's an alien invasion story like you'd see in an EC Comic (a company I was not familiar with at the time). Reading it now, it's very much a relic of cold war fiction with the aliens being a metaphor for the Reds (despite being Green) and Spider-Man being a  good old fashion American (despite being dressed in Red and Black). At the time I read it, I didn't think much of it. I didn't think much of anything I read when I was that little. And yet, the story stuck with me all these years. It was revelatory in its implications for the character of Peter Parker. Peter didn't have to be bound to stories of soap operas and "realism." The character could go into the fantastic or the weirdly science fiction. He could be the mentor to an immortal witch or the hero with a thousand faces. He could just be some regular ordinary guy or he could be the most interesting person in the world. He could be black or asian or even female. A Spider-Man story could be about... well, just about anything. It was that single, kind of bad, kind of wonderful Spider-Man comic by Lee and Ditko that started the fire. (Looking at it now, it feels more like a Lee story than a Ditko one. Lee's EC esque work tended to be more action oriented than Ditko's more quiet and philosophical ones.) And great ideas, to riff on someone else's words, are forged. So I'll always be grateful for that, Stan Lee.

"Thank You, True Believers."

Will Happen/Happening/Happened (Come Along With Me)

Commisioned by Aleph Null

Something I don't get to talk about much in the article,
but I really love the dream sequence and
how it's about trying to find a peaceful
means of concluding this war, rejecting the
us/them dichotomy in favor of a more
empathetic view of the situation.

Adventure Time and I are never going to be on completely good terms. I should stress that I think the show is great, perhaps even one of the most important animated series of the 21^stcentury, if not of all time. The art style fits within my aesthetics, as do the themes and ideas it explores (arguably more so than Steven Universe, which is admittedly a better show). And, as I’ve said on Tumblr, it’s the greatest Solarpunk story ever (though I will concede to Always Coming Home being better [though I probably should read the book first]. I will, however, argue against the other critique given to that take, wherein the person claims that I’m only saying Adventure Time is a Solarpunk story because it’s a fantasy series and not because Adventure Time is an ultimately utopian piece about how civilization survives after the apocalypse in all its strangeness and wonder).

It’s just that… Ok. For those of you who have followed me since before my days writing this blog, I did a guest post on Jen Blue’s blog on the web comic Discorded Whooves (an revised version of which will be included in Vol. 4 of My Little Po-Mo should it’s Kickstarter succeed. HINT. HINT). In that post, I briefly bring up that I am not a brony. The way I would describe my relationship with the series was to contrast it with my relationship with Adventure Time. Where My Little Pony was a show I didn’t care to watch, but was fascinated with its fandom to a somewhat anthropological perspective (more on this should the Kickstarter succeed), Adventure Time had a show that I was fascinated by but a fanbase that was just… fine. Nothing revolutionary or anything, nor even anything bad; they just didn’t hold my interest.

That is with one exception. One person whose work influenced how I read (and, at times, still read) the show. A person who is latched onto my view of the show as much as Rebecca Sugar or Pendleton Ward or John DiMaggio. Their name… was illeity. I found their art through one of the Adventure Time deviant art groups (though sadly, it went away with the passing of time). It was for an epilogue, a series of fan comics following up on the events of the episodes, be it through highlighting some part of the subtext or recontextualizing the events in a new light. The comics would also include a quote that would further these goals, be the quote by Francis Thompson, Voltaire, or Grant Morrison (an author who, while I am aware of his more problematic aspects, has had such a profound personal impact on me that not even what happened later could spoil it [I'll go in more depth on this in...April? Maybe March depending on whether I end up doing 13 or 14 for- Well, Spoilers. The main thing is illeity was also a massive fan and wrote some {what I recall being} eloquent words on his Batman]).

But what really drew me in was the art style. Rather than adhere to the style of the show, as many of the artists who do fan art are want to do, the epilogues opted for a more expressionistic style. The art kept the spirit of the characters while going into a direction that allowed the characters to sing. Imagine if David Bowie did covers of Beatles songs from their experimental period, and you’d get a good idea of what it was like seeing this art as a teenager. (Though, in retrospect, Station to Station era Bowie.)

Near the end 2013, I discovered that I had unknowingly created a Tumblr account. Naturally, illeity was one of the first people I followed (along with El Sandifer, Hamish Steele, and Lewis Lovhaug). Through there, I had… well, not as conversational interactions as the Eruditorum Press crowd, more of the relationship I expect is typical between a creator and a fan: I asked them questions and they replied. (Indeed, if you search my username on Tumblr, you’ll find several of those questions just lying around.) And yet, I think up ideas for comics that we’d work on together. This sort of alchemical themed Adventure Time comic about Betty going through various influences of the show and series it influenced before ultimately saving the Ice King. I never actually wrote these down, but I thought if I just worked up the courage to ask them, they’d just say yes without asking for payment because creating art is more important than being able to feed yourself. (The alchemy would probably be more on their end as they wrote an amazing piece on the subject, Xenosaga, Jung, and Adventure Time, which Jenny praised after seeing it reblogged on my Tumblr. She instantly followed the artist, thus being yet another in a long line of examples of me introducing interesting people to one another. She unfollowed them after what happened next.)

And then the summer of ’14 happened.

I didn’t unfollow them at first. I thought it was just a fluke, that despite being clever, they were one of the movement’s useful idiots, that they’d realize how terrible the movement was after all the awful harassment and cruelty and coded racism and denounce them, that they’d not be terrible, that they wouldn’t be like that fucking asshole from my anthropology class who had me sit down and look at various articles and videos about the subject for an entire hour, only to scream “SO MUCH FOR KEEPING AN OPEN MIND” when I decided that I could be doing literally anything else other than watch two hour long videos by Sargon of A-fucking-kkad about ethics in games journalism and how feminism isn’t even necessary anymore. I thought that the time they didn’t use Tumblr would be a time to cleanse from the toxic influence(s) making them think #GamerGate wasn’t an awful group of people.

I was wrong.

It was after this hiatus that I decided to unfollow illeity on Tumblr. I was still fascinated by their take on Adventure Time, and wanted to be able to ignore biting the apple of knowledge. But then I looked back at those old comics. One in particular, an epilogue to the episode Root Beer Guy, and in particular the quote used. It was by Margaret Thatcher. At the time, I thought that it was an ironic quote, to highlight the villainous nature of Princess Bubblegum, with her schemes and surveillance and whatnot. But it gnawed at me. And then I thought about the artist’s defense a few months back of people drawing White Garnet. And the gnaw grew. And then they posted some comic commemorating #GamerGate, and I immediately unfollowed. I was done.

Except, I wasn’t. Three things kept me coming back. The first was Deviantart’s decision to make a maximum amount of pages for favorites. So I would have to move the old files into a folder. Realizing this, I dreaded the day I would reach illeity’s posts. When I did, I looked on their account to see what they had done in the meantime. Apparently, they had written a Comicsgate screed (a movement they’ve been with since the Joker/Batgirl cover thing) done in the style of Tom King and Mitch Gerads’ (brilliant) Mister Miracle that, among other things, slightly whitewashed Kamala Kahn (in that you can tell she’s a person of color, but she looks more capable of passing), condemns Jane Foster Thor for not adding any value, and claims that making Iceman gay is “…like a repurposed thought-bomb. One that replaces whatever it destroys… A screaming guillotine to legacy.” Also, they created a loli-OC called UKIP-chan. Yeah.

The second time came when I went to the Reddit page the remnants of #GamerGate made to discuss Elizabeth Sandifer’s The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate for no other reason than I was bored. (Maybe someone posted a link to it on twitter, I don’t remember.) While there, I happened to be on the site at the exact right time to see a pro-#GamerGate image drawn by illeity. The art itself was sloppier than I remembered, but the use of colors was still pretty damn good. In many ways, illeity is the case my brain makes against the probability that the right can’t make good art. They’re my Robert Holmes or Nick Land, though not as talented as either. They were my problematic fave. But I’ve moved past them.

And yet… The third time I encountered them was when I finished watching the episode Come Along With Me, the final episode of Adventure Time. The first thought I had was an applause of its quality. The second was to think, “What is illeity going to do to follow this up?” What they did, a few weeks later, was a riff on The Last Question, starting the whole series all over again with a boy and his dog. But that didn’t seem right. That wasn’t what Adventure Time was about. Maybe at the beginning it was about that, but the show changed since then. Even at the beginning, it was leaning towards being about more than a boy and his dog.

There were hints of a world of a world larger than that. Even right down to the opening credits, which flies through this brave new world with such people in it as Marceline the Vampire Queen or Ice King or the people of the Candy Kingdom or the remains of the world before the Mushroom Wars. It’s always been about the world (as opposed to, say, Steven Universe, which, contrary to popular criticism, is about the titular character’s relationship to the world and how he grows up within it). It’s about how that world is fleeting, but there is beauty in even the most horrifying of places.

In many ways the actual ending of Adventure Time is a better capstone to the series than this fan made epilogue. There, it depicts a montage of the various peoples of the world living their lives, happily or otherwise. It catches up on long lost characters like Banana Man or the (original) King of Ooo as well as implies new stories like the return of the Humans or Simon’s quest for Betty. It then ends with a future generation of heroes pull a sword out of the tree like it was the Sword in the Stone, implying new adventures to follow. And more than that, there’s a sense of optimism for the future. Sure, things might end someday, and they’ll probably end in death. But that’s ok. Time is an illusion that helps things make sense. So we are always living in the present tense. It seems unforgiving when a good thing ends… but you and I will always be back then.

And in many ways, that’s illeity’s breaking point for me. For all that their use of color is wonderful, for all their taste in good comics, for all that they like the optimism of Grant Morrison… when I revisited the comics for this article, there didn’t seem to be much of an inkling of that optimism in it actually appearing in their work or their livelihood. Sure, there’s that one comic where Peppermint Butler’s nemesis accepts his kids (and his own) weirdness and a general alignment with the queerness of Princess Bubblegum, but that’s it. There’s a whiff of pessimism to their work, a view that Princess Bubblegum is incapable of change; that Finn doesn’t really care about other people besides himself and his desire for adventures; that Jake… doesn’t even have much of a character in these beyond joke fodder. That people who want to see themselves in comics they love are just far left SJWs who weren’t reading comics in the first place. That harassing people who just wanted to talk about the silly hobby they love is worth it in the name of changing absolutely nothing about video games.

And at the end of the day, that’s not what Adventure Time is about. For all its flaws, for all its willingness to cycle back into old storylines, Adventure Time is a show about moving on. It’s about growing and shifting towards a better life. And sure, that life may be fleeting. Utopia may crumble into fascism and good people might be taken from us far too soon and the next generation might still have to deal with the bullshit we had to deal with. But there will be new bullshit they’ll have to deal with. And things that are better and things that are just different. Adventure Time isn’t about history repeating again and again, about some boy and his dog, about the necessity of cruelty, or even the specter of the past haunting the future. In the end of the day, Adventure Time can be summed up in one simple sentence: Everything stays, but it still changes.

So no, Adventure Time and I are never going to be on completely good terms. But I can forgive it for my own hang-ups. It’s an amazing show with a finale befitting of the series and all its themes of growth, rebirth, friendship, war, healing, love, madness, magic, hope, and the desire for things to be better than they were, though that doesn’t always go the way you think. Endings rarely do. The series started out as a story of a boy and his dog fighting a creepy old man who stole princesses away. It ended with a finale of peaceful resolutions, utopianism, fighting the devil with the power of wishes and music, and a rejection of the concept of endings. What more could a Grant Morrison fan ask for?

Well, Princess Bubblegum and Marceline kissing, but I got that too!

“Thanks to the internet, minorities and outsiders, non-conformists, trans people, everyone's getting a chance to talk and agitate, and the world is learning to listen. I think new viewpoints and useful new ideas will naturally come from the queer margins into the center of culture. But I think, as I said, the Utopian counterculture project might also be a longer process than any of us wanted to believe…”
-Grant Morrison