Allow me to apologize in advance for the warm and fuzzy onslaught heading your way, gentle reader, but I wanted to share some stuff with you this time around and it will be almost impossible to do so without inflicting the Spielbergian glow of sentimental sappiness on you all.  Actually, this may not be such a bad thing, since Hibbs tells me the resultant suicide count from my darkly cynical Christmas column last month has crept into the double digits and a counterbalance might well be in order.  Nonetheless, if listening to other people babble happily about impending events of great importance, or hearing them speak urgently about the difficulty in planning the most important day of their lives, makes you suffer from intense migraines that cause the periphery of your vision to crenulate--an ice cream headache of the soul, if you will—you may wish to avert your eyes, and turn to the ordering info for the newly available Rising Stars hardcover.

Because this fanboy is getting married.

Yes, it’s almost impossible to believe (in fact, Hibbs says he’ll only believe for a monthly fee of $20, but I think that’s the going rate for him in all belief-related matters this year) but not only could I get a date after starting to write this fanboyishly rampaging column six years ago, I’m now getting married!  Thanks to Edi’s infinitely warm and loving nature (and the help of my good buddy, The Psycho-Pirate, who I met a few months back in a Learning Annex workshop on “Post-Crisis Recovery”), she has agreed to get hitched to yours truly.  And therein lies a very sad tale, and a couple of digressions and an ending I’m kinda unclear on, and hopefully none of the sort of cynicism that will push yet another reader to end it all by throwing their lives under an unstoppable crushing weight, like a bunch of falling longboxes or two months of Brian Bendis titles.  Because we’ve started to scouting locations for suitable places to get married, and one of the first things Edi asked was: “If you could get married anywhere, where would you most like to get married.”

I thought about it for a few minutes.  “Uh, The Batcave?”

“No, really.”

“No,” I said.  “Really.  That giant penny?  All those steps and nooks?  Oh, and that giant Joker playing card?  How cool is it that Batman not only used to beat the pudding out of bad guys, but he used to take souvenirs of the pudding-beating?  I think half the reason Batman took on Robin in the first place, is he needed help getting the stuff back to the cave.  Can’t you just see the two of them trying to bungee cord a giant playing card to the top of the Batmobile?  I bet that made the Gotham police a little edgy. ‘Say, Batman, you’re not driving off with valuable crime scene evidence, are you?’ ‘What? Oh, uh, no, of course not.  I’m just transporting it down to the crime lab for you guys.  It’s an understanding me and Commissioner Gordon have, uh, worked out.’  ‘Oh, really?’ ‘Yeah, totally.  Oh, hey, you should look under that crook there.  I think he fell on a stack of unmarked twenty dollar bills and a pair of season tickets to our local sports team. Heh, heh.’”

“You know,” I said to Edi, as she crossed her arms and waited patiently for me to run out of breath, “Now that I think about it, the DC icons all have cool forts—Batman’s got the Batcave, Superman has The Fortress of Solitude, and Wonder Woman has Paradise Island—but the Marvel heroes have real estate.  Avenger’s Mansion in Manhattan. Xavier’s Mansion in upstate New York.  Dr. Strange’s house in Greenwich Village.  The Baxter Building is about as fort-like as you can get, and it’s still buried in the center of downtown New York.  It’s almost as if Stan Lee was such an extrovert he couldn’t understand the idea of having a private place to escape from other people, or maybe he was so financially savvy a more powerful fantasy to him than giant pennies and phantom zone generators was prime location New York real estate..  I never really noticed that before.”

Edi said, “So you’re saying you want to get married in New York at Avenger’s Mansion.”

“Uh, no.  I ‘d still rather get married in the Batcave.  Or the Fortress of Solitude.  Or Paradise Island, if you’re willing to let me get bathed by Amazons.”

Edi sighed.  “And to think you make fun of people who have Klingon weddings…”

“Ugh!  I can’t imagine anything sillier than a Klingon wedding.  Except maybe a Star Trek wedding.”

“Last night, you said you wanted to get married on the Planet of the Apes.  How is that any different from a Klingon wedding?”

“Are you kidding?  A Planet of the Apes wedding would rock! It’s got an undercurrent of grim apocalyptic destiny to it, depending on which era from which film we chose.  And it’d be original! But a Klingon wedding is lame: the Klingons now are just a race where bad social manners are rewarded—no wonder why hardcore geeks love it. The difference between your average surly Klingon and your average tech support guy is essentially zero. The Klingon may smell better, but that’s about it.”

Edi looked at the ground.  “Well, I almost wish we would have a Klingon wedding.  Because at least it wouldn’t be restricted to being held in imaginary places.” Which more or less broke my heart in twelve or thirteen different pieces.  So now we’re looking at City Hall, which is neither the Bat Cave nor the Planet of the Apes, but resembles Castle Dracula, I think, what with all its gilding, and its darkly colored dome, and those pillars with sculpted people being crushed under the weight of each at the bottom.  More details as they become available, but if you know anyone who’s willing to hang upside down for hours over a ceremony that’s religious in so far as it allows to leave the place alive, please drop me a line.

***

You know, I’ve coveted Peter’s ability to slice Lost in Pictopia into a few topics for several months, and now seems an ideal time to do so.  Because although you probably already know Will Eisner passed on January 4, 2005, I really couldn’t let it pass here without mention.  Eisner was 87 when he died, and was still working: you can order his meeting of The Spirit and The Escapist this month, and there’s another completed graphic novel to be published later this year.

Like the work of a lot of the great comic masters (Kirby and Crumb come immediately to mind), I didn’t like Eisner’s work stuff when I first came across it.  Kirby was too scary, Crumb was too creepy and Eisner’s work too goofy and too oblique.  I’m embarrassed to admit now I didn’t understand the first Spirit story I came across (in Jules Feiffers’ revelatory The Great Comic Book Heroes, when I was about nine) particularly since I just now sat down and read it and it’s as clear as crystal: The Spirit comes to an Arabic town to find a doctor who has a needed antidote; the doctor has no wish to return having just married his beautiful wife and goes on to laugh about how all eight of her previous husbands have lived no longer than a day. The Spirit fights to prevent the doctor from being killed (after encounters with the evil wife and a greedy jewel smuggler); the doctor dies just before the stroke of midnight; the evil wife dies, killed by the greedy jewel smuggler, and the smuggler makes off with the jewel of death, ostensibly the source of the wife’s evil husband-killery, and then he too dies, swallowed whole in an earthquake, and all of this foretold by a beggar writing in sand at the beginning and the end of the story.  Running time: eight pages, and like I said, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it when I first read it.  The Spirit, after all, only slugs two people which, at the time, struck me as barely superhero-worthy.  Worse, The Spirit doesn’t do anything so much as causes things to happen with his arrival.  Destiny and the other characters’ (corrupt) natures cause things to happen.  In my very childish understanding of how superheroes (and by extension, the world) worked, only the superhero and the villain were allowed to do things.  Every other character was allowed to talk up a storm, of course, but they were there either to be trapped, saved, or exposit.  Only the villain did stuff (that was bad) and the hero did stuff (that was good), and those were the only active agents I, in my egocentric nine year old worldview (only I did stuff, and everyone else was just there to point out whether what I did was good or bad), would allow or understand. In Eisner’s world of The Spirit, however, people had their own agendas, met their fates through their own actions. What also bothered me in that story wasn’t so much that good triumphed as evil eventually collapsed in on itself—an idea far more sophisticated and true than any of the other reprints in Feiffer’s book.  Behind all the work’s baroque staginess, the theatricality of the body language—and, in The Spirit, the frequent switches, straight out of vaudeville, from humor to violence and back again until they ultimately comingle—Eisner is ultimately a realist in fabulist’s clothing, and I hope that aspect of his work, more than any of many, many other noteworthy aspects, will never be forgotten by those who make comics and the entertainments we read.

There’s about eleven million anecdotes on the web about Eisner, by people who actually knew him and interacted with him and stuff, but my own anecdote is probably best suited for here only, since I (like The Spirit) barely figure into it at all.  One Friday at the store more than a year ago, during the mid-afternoon lag, Hibbs was out smoking a cigarette and talking to me about signings.  He was talking about whether or not the store should actually have signings again, after the dervish of activity that went on up until the late ‘90s.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” Hibbs said, and blew a plume of smoke into the night air. “Really, the only people I want—actually want, and will probably never get—are Alan Moore and Will Eisner.  Those are really the only two left worth getting.”

Me being me, we went on to talk all about Alan Moore and all the complex ways we might trick him into coming to San Francisco (something about concocting a flier for the world’s largest sleeveless shirt store, I think), but the comment stuck in my brain because of Eisner.  There were a ton of people that Hibbs had brought to CE to sign books, but there were a lot he hadn’t, and there were all the people who had emerged in the industry since he had ramped down on the signings.  And there at the top, still, were Alan Moore and Will Eisner. Their shelves, I realized then, were even next to each other, and between the placement next to Moore and Hibbs’ high esteem, I realized that Eisner was more than just some great to be taken for granted, a phase in one’s reading history where the work is eagerly devoured and then put aside, but someone vital and current, still such a big fish that a canny fisherman like Bri would still dream about netting him.  Eisner may have slipped the nets for good, and swims now in waters far beyond us, but his works still dart and race here in our shallows, and they will still shine as long as we behold them, in the darkness and the light alike.