Post Modern Myths #3 by Eric M Esquivel – A Moral Compass

We’re twenty three seconds into the gig when somebody drops the “g” word.

A fine glaze of pretentious sweat forms over my Casanova and Invisibles tattoos. My hands start doing that shaky thing they do when somebody refers to The Essential Defenders vol. 3 as a “graphic novel”.

I glance over at my partner (not in the “homosexual lover” sense, but in the even gayer “artistically collaborative” meaning of the word), and he’s ostensibly unfazed.

Because I know the dude (again: not Biblically. We’re just uncannily close collaborators) I’m one hundred percent sure he’s just as annoyed as I am, but Dave has more experience with this sort of thing. Every day of his college career has been spent listening to his educators condescendingly praise his “passion for children’s literature” and nodding and smiling as his peers yell “Biff! Bam! Pow!” and mime karate chopping him in the face as he walks from the drawing studio to the parking garage. He’s a veteran.

He’s dead inside.

I never went. This teaching guest spot is the first time I’ve set foot on a campus of any sort in half a decade.

So, when I look out into that sea of Christian Audigier, ironic cat sweaters, and polite smiles, something snaps–the fractious ninth grader I usually keep in chains at the back of my psyche who hasn’t been set loose since my high school “Career Fair” pouts and stomps his way to the foreground.

“Comic books aren’t a ‘genre’. They’re a medium” I say, interrupting my own introduction.

Suddenly I’m having flashbacks to every discussion I ever had with my guidance counselor, every ex-girlfriend’s dumbfounded father (“people actually make a living at that?”). It suddenly becomes imperative that I convince everyone in the room what a serious business comics are.

I lead with the tried and true “words and pictures” quote by Harvey Pekar. I parlay that into a couple of choice samples from Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” I’ve had memorized since 1994, which into some Joseph Campbellian rambling about “The Hero’s Journey” and “Jungian Archetypes”.

Basically: I use all of the fancy schmancy words I know that make funnybooks sound more historically relevant and culturally resonant than they probably are.

It’s a nightmare.

Dave is fumbling around with the lesson plan, trying to find his place.

The only person paying attention is this one tall, veiny Aryan in a Tap Out shirt who keeps silently mouthing the word “nerd” over, and over, over again and staring at me dead-in-the-eye.

By the time I get around to contrasting the donning of the cape scene from Mark Waid’s “Birthright” with the accounts of Australian Aboriginal foreskin ceremonies from “The Hero of a Thousand Faces”, even I’m watching the clock.

After what seems like a lifetime, the professor interjects (Thank almighty Rao):

“Before we get too ahead of ourselves…” she quips (which is actually really, really funny) “Why don’t you both speak a little bit about what drew you to the comic book ‘medium’ in the first place?”

Dave and I look at each other. We freeze. One can actually see the gears turning in our heads.

We both spend so much of our adult lives defensively justifying the cultural merit of comic books, both of us seem to have forgotten whey we got into the game in the first place.

Dave mutters something about Tin Tin and stomps on my foot, simultaneously signaling that it’s my turn to speak, and that he hates all of my guts for embarrassing us both so much, thus far.

“Uhh…”

I stammer at first, speaking unrehearsed about comics for the first time since I wore Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas to bed.

“I guess I first started reading comics… because I grew up without a father”.

Dave groans. A sweet little blonde girl in the second row with a seahorse tattoo on her shoulder gasps, then quickly clasps her hands over her mouth, to conceal the evidence. Everyone else turns to stone.

Crickets.

The giant Aryan whispers “Oh, snap. I think he’s gonna cry…” before his girlfriend pokes him in the ribs.

“I sort of, uh… grew up without a lot of male role models around, so… (it’ s funny I haven’t thought of this in so long) one of my first memories, actually is of buying an issue of “Superman”, because it had “man” in the title…”

Suddenly, people start giving a shit. They look up. They lean in.

Whether it’s that innate, perverse desire to witness a train wreck in progress or a genuine interest in what I’m saying, it’s impossible to tell—but they’re listening.

“Most…(probably all, actually) of my morals come from superhero comics”

A couple of chuckles. A few smirks.

I’m getting bolder, loosening up a little. I start counting on my fingers:

“I’m vegan because Aquaman doesn’t eat fish. I don’t drink, because…”

“I never drink when I fly, Lois” Some kid with a wicked Chris Reeves impersonation chimes in.

“Yes! Exactly!”

I list off a couple more. Dave chimes in with his own (“I can’t download comics illegally because of The Phantom’s oath to end piracy, I can’t suffer a vampire to live, because I grew up reading Blade”).

There’s rolling laughter. But It’s not the sort of “oh my God, really?” laughter I’m used to from growing up fat and cripplingly passionate, it’s the “oh my God, I’ve totally been there” laughter that bonds people of a common experience together. What kid didn’t read a couple of comics, growing up?

From moral we go to theme, from theme to character, from character to setting, so on and so forth. It’s easy as pie, once all of the ostentatious semantics are discarded and people actually comprehend what we’re saying to them.

And that’s the beauty of comics, really: we don’t need any of the intellectual posturing our (vastly more boring) sister art forms do to survive. It’s compulsory. It’s in our blood. Whether we call them “albums” or “graphic novels”. Whether or not they’re compatible with the newest overpriced tech’ toys, whether or not the hipsters and the intelligentsia deem them of value: comics are tailor made to speak to human beings on the purest, most visceral level of consciousness. They aim straight for the heart.

They’ve been with us since the beginning (when we were cave people, drawing hunting sequences with a cocktail of our own blood and feces) and they’ll be with us in the end (via holographic scratch-and-sniff contact lenses, or something) and the only force in the entire universe capable of rendering them less exciting and emotionally engaging are the legion of self-conscious uber dorks who arrogantly assume that their artificial labels (“how about we call them ‘serialized, sequential pictorial novellas’, guys?”) elevate the form by sheer virtue of a couple of extra syllables.

Comic books don’t need our help. To survive. They need us to let our hair down a little bit and get out of their way.

Eric M Esquivel