ok, so this is stupid long. what the hell, right? if you're here, you must be slightly interested in what I have to say. and if not, I will post a youtube link shortly. Just be patient. Onward:

for some time, there's been a project I've wanted to work on.

I've always been into comics. Comic books, that is, just for clarity's sake. I haven't kept up with them for almost ten years now. I pick up a few here, a few there. I just haven't been able to justify the 30 bucks a week it would take to really keep up. But I've read enough to know there has been a shift. In short, comics aren't for kids anymore. Enough intelligent people grew up on the comics that were written and drawn for kids back in the sixties and seventies that those people, grown now, have incorporated those stories into their adult lives. One example of the maturation of the medium: Michael Chabon's meditation on the Superman mythos and what is arguable the central tenet of all fantasy works, escapism, won a Pulitzer Prize a few years ago.

Chabon went on to get story credit on the film "Spider-Man 2." The preponderance of superhero films in the last ten years is further evidence that comics have crept out of the shadows into the light of mainstream society. ComicCons still attract the outcasts they always have, people who need the escape they offer, but the big ones now also attract some of the most famous, accepted people in the world, and also some of the most talented, namely movie stars. Last year, for the first time in its thirty-year history, The San Diego Comic Con, the crown jewel of the Con universe, was sold out. Kids don't make that happen. Because kids aren't wage-earners. They don't have the money to make that happen. Their parents, however….

While there are certainly still juvenile comic books out there, the general trend has been towards more complexity and intelligence in the writing, more refined craftsmanship in the art, and a general maturing of the entire world of comics.

From this, one can infer that at one time, comics as a whole were significantly more "immature." I can tell you unequivocally that this is true. The attic of the house I grew up in is chock full of old Marvel Comics, dating back to 1963. None are in very good condition. I own a copy of X-Men 2, but the paper is dry, yellow and brittle, and I have never seen the cover. These comics have been read, repeatedly. My dad would trade them with his friends as a young adolescent. His dad brought home cardboard boxes of full of comics and Mad Magazines, all jumbled together. My point being: I've read the old stuff. A couple summer ago, I decided to read Daredevil up to the point that Frank Miller took over the book. During the process, I began to understand what a watershed moment it was when Miller came on the scene. Of course, it would still be a few years before he cranked out "The Dark Knight Returns," one of three or four books in the 1980s that were something along the line of comicdom's very first wet dream, i.e., a sign that they were growing up.

Comics have matured intellectually, but also literally - in terms of the audience they are intended for. Generally speaking, I would say most comics today are aimed at the 12-25 demographic. In those years before Frank Miller, before John Byrne, long, long before Brian Michael Bendis and Mikey Chabon, comics were for kids. Kids like my dad. 14 & 15 were the upper ages of the demographic, not the low end. The modern state of comics is all to the good. But you have to wonder: just because comics grew up, does that means kids have to, as well? I shudder to think that younger kids have been shut out of modern comics just because the last set of kids to grow up on them are just now hitting their full wage-earning potential. In other words, just because I'm the one shelling out my hard-earned cash for the books now (or I would be if I had some to spare), the companies and creators have a vested interest in catering to my age group. And that means that there are simply not enough books left that cater to comics' original fan base, the group that ultimately put them where they are today. There are still a few, and the major companies certainly get credit for putting out books with the word "Adventures" tacked on to the title, which seems to be the universal inisgnia for "OK for the Kiddies." But by and large, the bulk of comics are not intended for the audience that could probably get the most out of them.

This being the case (feel free to argue with me if you have the time or inclination), I have a little bit of a fascination with the way things used to be. That fascination has lead me to read Daredevil 6-120, or whatever the numbers are, but it has also led me to the project that I started this whole post out to talk about. Those old Marvels in my mom's attic are the history of comics. But the sense of wonder and amazement, their sheer escapism, didn't start with them. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, even Siegel and Shuster were feeding on older narrative traditions, the stuff they had read (I would suppose) as boys.

It goes back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to a collection of writers that I like to think of as writing "Boys' Adventure stories." I hope you can pardon the sexist nomenclature. If you can't though, just keep in mind that at the time these writers were published, the audiences for these books were predominantly male. We are talking Victorian Era here. I'm talking about Jules Verne, Jack London, H.G. Wells, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs. I've read some Jack London. I read Doc Savage: Man of Bronze, which is a comic book in novel form. But I haven't read much of the rest. So that's my project. To read these writers, whose works I hypothesize amount to the prehistory of modern comics.

To start, I just finished Wells's "The Time Machine." I've seen at least two different filmed versions of this story, only one of which I remember. The Guy Pearce version from a couple of years ago was incredibly safe (produced by Disney, I believe) but was kind of wonderful for it's lack of cynicism and PoMo-ity. They didn't try to open up the story for an adolescent or adult audience. They didn't load it down with blood or gore or sex. It wouldn't have been hard to do, and wouldn't necessarily have made it a worse film. But it was nice to see someone take a different path. The one sort of appeasement that the filmmakers offered to modern audiences was hanging the main character's time-travelling obsession around the neck of a tragic love story which is nowhere in the book. That angle does help to humanize the character somewhat, but it seems that was the last thing on Wells's mind. In the book, the main character remains nameless. He is identified only by the title, "The Time Traveller." Likewise, the inner circle of educated friends he recounts his story to are known to the reader solely by occupation: "The Editor," etc.

The other thing that the film's love story does that has no place in the book is to rationalize the Time Traveller's quest. Ironically, it does so by making his reason for the pursuit of his goal more irrational, i.e., he is driven by sorrow and heartbreak – emotions a film audience can connect with viscerally.

Wells's approach to the character and the material is far more cerebral. The impetus behind the novel's version of the Time Traveller is simple, unbridled curiousity. At several points in the book, TT muses on the idea that humanity, at the dawn of the 20th century, is just entering an awkward social and technological adolescence that will eventually give way to a future in which the majority of our everyday maladies and inconveniences are solved wholly and completely. We will be free to embark on an intellectual and spiritual Golden Age once our outward needs are tended to by advanced machines and medicines.

Indeed, this is the other reason I wanted to investigate these writers. They didn't just inspire and inform three generations of storytellers. Their works also spurred the imaginations of three generations of thinkers in the more general sense. Jules Verne foresaw the submarine with Nemo's Nautilus, for instance. There is a They Might Be Giants song that laments the current lack of easy access to personal jetpacks and flying cars. But, in the last few months, I've read articles (one in Wired, one on CNN), about teams of people trying to create these very items. And they're not far off. There is a team of researchers at UC Riverside in California at this very moment attempting to stabilize a mixture of matter and antimatter that could eventually become the basis for what would essentially be a laser death ray. Time travel still remains a persistent fantasy, but reseacrhers and scientists are hard at work on making manifest many things that no one ever thought could be actualized. My point is: Would we have sliding doors without Star Trek? Probably. But this entire group of writers envisioned a fictional world that we in the real world have been chasing ever since.

In a hundred years, will society still be chasing the fantasies of the writers of today? I doubt it. I submit that Verne, Wells, et. al, were writing in a time when the lines between reality and fiction were clearer, but beginning to blur. In the general era of the Industrial Revolution, nearly anything must have seemed possible. Science was just entering the modern era. Who was to say we wouldn't travel to the outer reaches of space, or the center of the Earth, or the ends of Time? These thoughts surely stimulated the mind, but they were easily identified as fantasies, impossibilities. One could imagine the end, but not the means. There was no bridge from fiction to reality – at least not for rockets and lasers. But cars, mass access to electricity, and radio all crossed that span within just a few decades. So bridges could be built. It was just a matter of proper engineering.

Today, people are working diligently on practical solutions for achieving fantastic goals. An increasing amount of what once would have been considered fiction is within our reach. We are dragging fiction into reality, and we're getting better at it. Witness space travel. Witness the race to create flying cars, jet packs and superlasers. Witness artifical hearts, eyes, ears, legs, arms. Witness cloning. It's no longer a matter of can the human race achieve these goals, but a nuts and bolts matter of how.

In the 21st century, mankind has scaled to incredible heights of scientific and technological achievement, but we seem no closer to a Golden Age than Wells was when he was writing. We've made reality more amazing, but as a result, fiction must by contrast lose some of its luster. No one going into a modern movie has any illusion about how the special effects are achieved. They may not grasp the details, but generally speaking, any random moviegoer can probably tell you it was done with computers. There was a time when special effects were a mystery. But we have access to so much information, about movies as well as so many other facets of life, that we're able to dispel mystery with a 30 second Google-search, or by buying the DVD with the behind the scenes documentary. And why live in mystery when you don't have to?

My personal fiction, one that I've cobbled together after chewing on all this is that there is a finite amount of fiction in the universe, and the more that we pluck ideas from that mass of concepts for use in the real world, the more endangered fiction as a whole becomes. If we use fiction up, what are the kids of today going to grow up reading? Tech documents? Tutorials? The current wave of maturity in comics is predicated on three generations of preadolescent daydreaming. That daydreaming has produced phenomenal amounts of entertainment, wonder, curiousity, insight, advancement, and maybe even some wisdom. Now that Harry Potter's concluded his run on the global psyche, what nourishment is left for the young mind, still unabashed in its hunger for, and willingness to indulge, the fantastic? The fields of fiction need to be replenished for a new generation and a new century. We've got to push fiction further, even if whatever we churn out sounds corny at the time. After all, that never stopped Stan the Man. And Spider-Man 3 was the second highest-grossing film of 2007.

Essentially, we need new goals. We've been so wrapped up in figuring out the routes to clearly defined destinations that no one is thinking up new, outlandish destinations. Everything seems within reach (even if it's a stretch), so even imagining something out of reach becomes ever more diffifcult.

So I'm gonna go read my Martian Tales before the movie comes out (it's in the works) and see if the Old Masters, the guys who laid the foundation for all the crap I've been rambling about, can inspire me to answer my own challenge to come up with something out of reach.