Comic Books, Monsters At Doors, Frankenstein, Comic Books Again: A Journal, by Jacob Malewitz

Comic Books, Monsters At Doors, Frankenstein, Comic Books Again: A Journal

By Jacob Malewitz

At Banana Republic, Covington

Parents cannot see through solid objects like Superman. When you hide behind the car with a cigarette in your hand they do not know. When you are under the covers reading a comic book when you should be sleeping they seem absent of the abilities Superman honed, patented, and sold to millions. As a writer, I think on comic books a lot. As part of my “Artist Way” group I take myself out for a good run at the comic shop. I have only done it a few times but, creatively, it helps me plenty. I hope you will find a reason not only to write here, but in experimenting with things you would not do on an artist date. I developed the idea that morning pages weren’t a waste, nor were artist dates, and writing eventually took me over. I no longer believed I was wasting my time writing.

The comic book run was just an experiment—much like this essay title. I try neither to be odd nor mad in writing; the words just come to me. Perhaps that is one reason I am different than writers like Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg. Besides the fact I am male, 23 as I write this, not in debt because of buying so many notebooks, and read comic books … I tend to write all over the place. Allow me to elaborate.

I wrote a story called “The Mars Jacket” maybe six months ago. I did not know what I had. I thought it was a decent portrait of a madman, but even this narrator was crazy, and wrote much like the random thoughts of a man headed to an insane asylum. I think it had a spark of sanity to it. He wanted to be happy. That was the theme to the whole process. I experimented with a narrator who wanted to be happy … big deal. But, the fact he was mad, an insane man in an insane quest, met with much acclaim where I posted it. This is not to say the next “Gatsby,” written by a writer who understood madness, was found, because many people hated it. I found a niche somewhere there.

A story before it had been similar and, if allowed to jump, worked in my love of comic books. This narrator was insane in a sense, but much less so than the narrator in “The Mars Jacket.” He was reliable. He too wanted happiness. He also read comic books; he had no intention of writing them, like I, but he did want to be a writer and did write reviews of the comics he read.

The monsters at the door, lets call them my reviewers, seem to like it too. Being this was what I considered my first quality literary short story I set about to create it again. It took time, many failures, but I found not another literary short story, but a fantasy one residing within me. This came to be “The Mars Jacket,” which became my best story. The character in this story was compared to movie heroes (I believe Riddick, a science fiction character in the films “Pitch Black” and “Chronicles of Riddick”) and was also compared to comic book super heroes. I had no intention of those comparisons being made; I did make my character an outcast of sorts who gained special powers. There it was: comic books had tainted me. The monsters at the door loved it; well, most of them. A few people thought that, even though my character was mad, the grammar and punctuation needed to be in sync. The key here was I had written a quality short story—a fantasy one no less, that was compared to movies.

Neither of these stories has been published yet. The literary short story was submitted but rejected. As I write this, “The Mars Jacket” has stayed the same story wise and thematically but the grammar has been corrected. It will be submitted.

Sitting under my covers, reading stories of Spider Man, Batman, Iron Man, I never would have thought my stories, which I never thought of anyways as a child, would evolve into something on the page. Sometimes it works out that way.

When the Frankenstein’s monster found a cache of literary classics, where he learned language and rational thought, he became someone different. The monsters at my door changed what I thought of my writing. To this day I fight with theme, but what pervades my stories seems to be a the human desire for happiness. The Frankenstein’s creation wanted exactly that. Spider-Man wanted justice in New York City. Batman wanted it in Gotham. Superman, if he had kids, would have been able to see them sneaking in comic reading during the late hours of the night.

The evolution of a writer cannot be forced. We can toy with the idea of being writers, and read all the best books on the craft of writing, only to find ourselves absent of the drive to do the dirty work. What matters is we are patient. “The Mars Jacket” had to come from me during a point of madness. The stories we tell work into the background of our lives. They are more true to ourselves than we can ever be. Consider exploring what you actually do, what you actually seek, when next you think stealing time away to read or write is a bad thing.