More ASS, Some LoSH
May 30
More ASS, Some LoSH
There’s something bittersweet at the heart of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s All-Star Superman, a pang of regret mixed with that ugly beast known as “reality”–as if the characters somehow know that their world, their adventures, all that they hold dear is too wondrous and sparkling to last forever.
In a sense, it’s almost a parable for today’s geek–the twenty- or thirty- or forty- or whatever-something, struggling to stay in touch with the stuff they love while juggling assorted “real-life” responsibilities like babies, house payments, laundry, and so on. Or maybe it’s just me–I wonder sometimes. Can I remain in this slightly arrested state forever, where I spend most of my days living as a perfectly “normal” adult in the perfectly “normal” world and sit down before bed each night to paw through moldy superhero comics that are more than two decades old?
Those comics, the Legion of Super-Heroes (Levitz/Giffen era), seem to have a comment to make too–they’re the ultimate Mary Sue concoction, at least they seem that way. It’s a relatively insular superhero and sci-fi mash-up universe, set in the distant future of a definitely insular superhero universe (the DCU, natch). It’s consistently fueled by its own arcane, obscure history and culture, redefining what it means to be an anal-retentive obsessive nerd.
And yet, for a nerd, what a place to go. Everyone’s friends, you know them better than they know themselves, and loyalty rules above all. Even better, there’s some SERIOUS action happening–sex and love aplenty. A pre-teen kid growing up in the sixties through the eighties could do far worse than to aspire to becoming a member of the Legion, and as that kid became a young adult and then adult geek, there must have been tremendous comfort in being able to escape into this elaborate fantasy world every month.
One comic mourning the loss of childhood playthings; another that enshrines them in never-changing amber.
