A Sense of Doubt blog post #1365 - An Original short story - "COMIC BOOKS"

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1365 - An Original short story - "COMIC BOOKS"

After learning of Stan Lee's, I added part of this story to my post about him and his life.

My Stan Lee Post

In sharing that post, I decided to start sharing some of my fiction writing, which I had not yet shared on any of my blogs, and furthermore, I decided to start with this work of fiction called "Comic Books."

I modeled this piece of prose -- it's not right to call it a story and even "fiction" is probably not really accurate -- on a similar work by my favorite writer, Margaret Atwood.

I do not intend much more introduction than this here, but I have added a few images.

COMIC BOOKS

_________________________________________________________________                                    by christopher tower

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1. Comic book heroes always need a motivation to do their good deeds. They call it: "upholding the good." I didn't know it existed in palpable form. Isn't it just a myth--"the good"--to make sure people behave?

     All male heroes have motives. Often the male hero suffers  a horrible tragedy. He watches his parents gunned down; he fails to stop the thief who kills his uncle, his surrogate father; he watches his wife and children slaughtered by mobsters and bears the guilt of surviving the ordeal. Other heroes just wish to use their powers for the common good because of their true-blue, all-American upbringing in rural Kansas. "With great power comes great responsibility." But some heroes have the right motivation. They perform their good acts for fame or for money. Some of the other heroes think this is odd.

2. I used to examine myself everyday to see if I had super powers yet. Everyday I checked to see if I could cling to the walls. I would splay my hands out, press them hard against the plaster and paint, and then try to pull myself off the floor. I always fell. Or I would launch myself off roofs hoping to soar off in flight. Or I would practice moving fast, hoping my metabolism had sped up, and I could suddenly break Mach One.

     Any undetectable powers were good. If I could move objects with my mind, turn myself invisible, or slip between the minutes, slide out through the seconds, in between time, then I could perform all my good deeds undetected. I wouldn't have to make a costume, which was my biggest fear, since I couldn't sew.

     Powers that could take me into outer space were the best. A power ring with a built in force field with which I could fly faster than light itself would be ideal for galaxy hopping.

I figured I would feel more at home in outer space, on other planets, circling other stars where I would be super strong, super fast. Again I could avoid creating a costume because I could move too fast for people to see.

     I guess this is why I stopped going to church. I always prayed really, really hard for super powers. But God never gave me any. So far.

3. There is always violence in comic books, but it never infected me. The violence never seemed real. And anyway the heroes always managed to have great sex after a good day of defeating bad guys and wanton destruction of property. My favorite was rolling villains up in the road as if it were a sheet of paper, or lifting a whole building off its foundations and dropping it on some evil-doer. Since I couldn't roll up roads or lift buildings, I figured I'd leave the violence and the crime fighting to those who could.

4. There are always women with large breasts, long legs, and skin-tight costumes in comic books. Often the women have long hair and strut about provocatively as they kick in some villian's teeth. I used to set the comic against my ear. Listen for the rustling of their discreet breasts under their costumes. Listen for the costume rustling discreetly over their breasts. Always the discretion though, over everything like a shroud, a curtain which sways as people move, revealing only random fragments of what hides behind it. But there are the sounds: the labored breathing of the women as they lift Mack trucks overhead or bind criminals in their magic lassoes, the satiny sheen of their costumes brushing together with the same soughing sound of bed sheets and linen, and the words in between their words, siren calls which glide over my skin like a hand, long with fingernails, the light scraping that makes dull, white lines in the skin.

5. My friends and I would play super heroes in our backyards or on playgrounds. The hardest thing was picking people to be the heroes. Everyone always wanted to be the villains. The villains were more interesting. And in most games, the heroes began to act like villains. The heroes would betray one another, steal and kill in a vain effort to do the right thing, or decide that they had enough power to run everything, to be more than just a leader, to decide who lived and who died.

    I always tried to bind together all the different things that were happening. I always tried to make the story come to a satisfying ending. But you know what? All the games ended the same. The heroes were all dead, and the villains ruled the world. And one hero was being flogged, punished for being such a do-gooder. We could never understand why the comic books never came out that way.

6. Most people think comics are a boy-thing. Macho fantasies, male agressive, gender programming. These are the same people that had the murder scene taken out of the Classics Illustrated version of Crime and Punishment. But they are not just macho fantasies.

    Comic books are about how to get power. Killing and so on and winning and so on. In regular comic books, men get the women. This goes along with getting power. It's a perk. If you get power, you get women.

     But I always saw the empowered women first. As a young boy, in my own comic stories, Batman was always enslaved by the Catwoman. She always used some love potion or powerful hypnosis to make the caped crusader do her bidding. She seduced him when it suited her. Then she tossed him aside like luggage on an airport conveyor belt. 

NEXT!

     And I was always attracted to the un-heroes, anti-heroes. The heroes who were very reluctant to be heroes. Those that accidentally became swept up in events, forced to make tough choices. Or the real bad heroes, those that were almost as mean as villains. Those that were not nice people. Those that made mistakes or cheated in high school.

7. I have seen galaxies crumble...and new suns a'borning! But never

have I glimpsed the answer...to the riddle of the universe!

This is the kind of sentence I go mad for. I would like to able to write such sentences without embarrassment. I would like to be able to read them without embarrassment. If I could do these two things, I could pass my time on earth, like a smug butterfly wrapped in a cocoon.

8. Strength gone...super powers...gone...only seconds left before

Lois dies! I could understand this scene even without the pictures. I have lived this scene countless times. The weakness that infects every cell of your body. The young ingenue arching her back, suffocating in Lex Luthor's Kill-Lois-Gizmo. Her full, round lips, the curve of her spine, her eyes on me, begging me, begging me.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1811.16 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1231 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.