An exploration of my favorite comic book character and why he sets my imagination on fire.

WARNING:  In good conscience, readers, I cannot let you continue on without confessing what I’m sure you’ve surmised.  I am a comic book nerd.  Raised in the American comic book tradition.  Much to the chagrin of independent creators everywhere, I love superheroes.  Now, I don’t really read the big two very much anymore, but when I point to the stories, characters, artists, and writers who inspired me as a kid, I find I unerringly refer to those that worked on and came from superhero comics. 

So, with that out of the way, those of you who are not interested in superheroes of any kind or what I have to say about them have moved on to another corner of the Internet, I’m sure (the whole thing is corners, I suspect), and those of you that remain suffer from at least some affection or direct ire for the genre. 

Some quick superhero philosophy.  The genre does a couple things well that has hooked children for generations.  Chiefly, the key to anybody being a superhero is that they are empowered.  Where others are weak, they are strong.  Where others are afraid, they are fearless.  When any human in their right mind would want to stick their head in the sand and try to ignore the oncoming wave of oblivion, they stand, and (usually) win.  What’s not to love?  They are a projection of what we wish we could be.  Faced with the most difficult situations we can imagine, they have the courage and strength make the right decisions.

I think, on the flip-side of being individually empowered, our poor superheroes are also prone to being propagandized as models of behavior or villainized as fascist expressions of masculine dominance.  And I can’t really disagree.  The thing about being empowered enough to make your own rules is that you would have to believe you know better than everyone else when making decisions that directly affect them.  So naturally, readers and writers cast one of two lights on that idea.  Either the characters DO know better, and so represent a way that we, the consumers, are supposed to behave, or the characters DON’T know better, and represent a fallacy of thought that we, the consumers, should avoid.  I’m not trying to pass a value judgment on either school of thought. I think entertaining stories arise from each idea.

My deep and abiding love for my favorite comic book character, though, springs from the idea that he breaks this rule, due to his nature.  In case you hadn’t guessed by the title, my favorite character is the Hulk.  Now, I will not attempt to argue that the Hulk has been flawlessly written and utilized in his 60 some-odd years of comic book existence.  But in concept, I believe he acknowledges both of the ideas above that make superheroes something to aspire to and something to fear. 

Hulk is the strongest there is.  Physically.  And the more you try to prove that he’s not the strongest there is, guess what? The stronger he gets. Hulk is the ultimate expression of being able to change the world around you to suit yourself.  Who can forcibly stop the Hulk from getting what he wants?  Nobody.  You just have to calm him down.  I would like to believe that my anger and outrage at the state of the world had such a power to change it.  That murder and kidnappings, earthquakes and starvation, climate change and environmental corruption could be halted simply by the power of my anger.  It’s not the case, but therein lies one reason I love the Big Green Guy. 

But I also know that I don’t know everything, and if I did have the power to change the world, even if I was trying to make it better for everybody, I wouldn’t necessarily succeed. Hulk, in concept, acknowledges this.  His desires are simple, generally non-combative feelings centering around wanting to be left alone or to help some individual he cares for.  But his efforts are equally likely to lay waste to beneficial things as they are to be beneficial.  In the face of such power, who’s mind wouldn’t seem like an infant’s?  Even the smartest person would have trouble predicting the consequences of his or her own actions when they could be so catastrophically huge.  Here the Hulk serves as a humbling reminder, to me, that the greatest power in the world does not absolve us of responsibility to each other, and disregarding the welfare of others even briefly can turn you into a monster.

And then there’s the human aspect of the Hulk.  Not physically strong, but highly intelligent and highly socially responsible.  Bruce Banner pits every ounce of his control against that urge to change things out of anger, to act rashly.  Because he does not want to see anyone get hurt.  I think, or rather I hope, that it is a statistically rare person among us who can really think about physical harm coming to somebody else and sincerely wish it upon them.  Who can think that they would like (and I mean LIKE) to be the cause of someone else’s pain, broken bones, maiming, disease or death.  I know that the thought of really being responsible for things like that turns my stomach.  And Bruce Banner can unleash the ultimate human force for change at any time, but the thought of those consequences is enough to encourage him to fight to restrain it until the most necessary of moments. 

And which one of them is right?  Which one of them is necessary?  They both are, to me.  I think the story telling bears this out.  It’s a favorite of writers to make the Hulk a necessary solution to a problem, even though Banner is sort of the model human (intelligent, generous, societally conscious, self-sacrifing).  They are both necessary, both right, depending upon the circumstance

I find this concept so compelling. This idea of Man vs. Monster, Intelligence vs. Strength, Society vs. Independence.  But what I especially love about the Hulk is that there isn’t really a right answer.  Just an interesting question.

All morning I’ve been kicking the idea around in my head of renaming my blog “The Blunderdome.” 

The dialogue in my mind:

Some Vaguely Interested But Ultimately Confused Party (or SVIBUCP, from here on out): “The Blunderdome?  Why the Blunderdome?”

ME:  (Snarkily) “You know, just to manage expectations.”

SVIBUCP:  “Oh. I don’t get it.”

ME: (As always, totally off my game once sarcasm has been misreceived.)  “Uh… well, y’know.  To acknowledge the mistakes that I’ll inevitably make.”

SVIBUCP:  “Oh.  So that people will expect you make mistakes?”

ME: “Yeah.  No. I dunno.  It was funnier in my mind.”

SVIBUCP:  “It was supposed to be funny?”

ME:  “Oy.  See, if you got the joke in the first place, you’d see why this is funny!”

SVIBUCP: “I remain unconvinced.”

This led me to begin pondering the idea of managing expectations.  The pros and cons, if you will.  Now, before you read any further, a brief disclaimer.  Semantics, connotations, and context are extremely important to me.  If  you are annoyed by the parsing of language, so that a thing that means one thing suddenly appears to mean several, you should probably no longer read this blog.  The value of these explorations of the vagaries of implied meanings is something that I see, but I by no means expect anyone to share it.  My past is littered with the corpses of lively parties that I have brutally killed with such discussions as the ones I will frequently have with myself here.  Rest assured, if you walk away muttering, “This fella thinks too hard” you will here no disagreement or begrudging insults from my corner. 

Anyway, back to managing expectations.  This is a weird phrase.  On its surface, I’m inclined to think it’s a good thing.  We don’t want other people to expect more than we can give, because we don’t want them to be disappointed.  So, saying that we should manage expectation is another way of saying that we should avoid disappointing others.  Professionally, that’s probably sound advice. 

Many people turn this particular dial even further, and use it to imply that we should make other people expect LESS than we can give, so when we deliver what we’re capable of, not only are they not disappointed, they’re actually surprised and thrilled. Again, professionally, probably a good thing. 

Where I suspect this particular construction of the idea falls apart (at least for me) is personally.  I have noted that I have a propensity to only barely deliver what I  have promised myself, if at all.  I have read a number of blogs and articles, heard a number of interviews and soap box diatribes (not pointing fingers, guarantee if you’re reading this I’m not talking about you) that all say, “Goals are great.  But set your goals realistically.  Then maybe you can actually get them.” 

Which sounds very magnanimous.  “They” don’t want to see us depressed by not having what we want, and since “they” can’t give us what we want, “they” counsel us to instead not want so much.  Being someone who has struggled to muster motivation and ambition for much of his life, I can safely say this is not good advice for everyone.  If I do not challenge myself to do something harder than float and be contented with my lot, guess what? I’ll float and be contented with my lot, at least in terms of my behavior.  I (like many) will still whine, whine, whine about where I’d like to be versus where I am, and then console myself with the idea that it’d be really hard to get there, and I’ve set my goals much more realistically, which explains why I’m so happy! Right?  RIGHT?!

If you, friend and reader, like me, have trouble mustering motivation or activating ambition, if you respect humility above other virtues and find this gives you some bizarre aversion to feeling successful, let me share with you what makes me feel the happiest.  Do not compromise your desires.  Want, with utter abandon, whatever it is that you want.  Set goals that involve ACTUALLY GETTING PART OF WHAT YOU WANT.  Manage your expectations right up to the freakin’ stars.  If you are forced by others to stop and think about how difficult to achieve the thing you want is, recognize that they are right, and you already know that.  Forgive yourself for not getting there.  Love yourself for trying. 

To rip an idea from the heads of many wiser, smarter, happier, more successful people than I, the only guarantee you have is the journey.  Accept that many people will want to make a house along the side of the road.  Know that you don’t have to.  There’s nothing wrong with wanting, walking further. 

I’m not saying trample others.  Charging ahead blindly, without regards for those around you, is as foolish and hurtful as it’s been for the last hundred million years.  But for me, having a realistic goal doesn’t mean settling, it means not feeling guilty about wanting it.

I am 25 years old.  This July I will be 26.  I was an actor for most of my young life.  I did at least two plays a year, community, school, professional or otherwise, from the fifth grade until two years ago.  Or three now, I guess. Through high school, college, and my professional career, it actually averages out to four plays a year.  It was a huge part of my life for most of the time that I was turning from a child into an adult.  There were, understandably, a lot of parts of my identity that were inimically tangled up with what I did and how well I did it.  Which made me utterly unable to do it professionally.  I did not have a level of objectivity that allowed me to deal with failures in that arena.  And like any field, a theatrical career is full of failures, and, more significantly, perhaps, compromising successes. 

In the midst of deep introspection, totally unhappy with my artistic pursuit, feeling like I was letting down my friends and family who had expectations for my acting career in addition to totally failing myself, I began drawing again.  Dredging the canals of my imagination, turning it all into what had, as a youth, occupied an even greater portion of my imagination than acting.  Illustration, comics, and mythology.  It has been a long, cathartic road, realizing that I had spent my life and entire school career (unless I go to grad school, which feels unlikely) studying something that I didn’t want to have to study to finding a something I had always been passionate about in addition to truly afraid of.

I am smart. I always got good grades.  Acting was, for me, pretty easy.  This made failures especially riling, because it was always the fact that I wasn’t trying hard enough that was at the root.  But most of the time, I didn’t have to try hard.  Conversely, though I may have had some advantage over other five year olds in the realm of art, I lost that edge long ago.  I am, generously speaking, an average artist.  I see objectively in my more successful work an unexpected aptitude for color selection, but if I have any natural advantages in this field, that’s where it ends.  Everything else that I do right, or close to right, has been absorbed the hard way, through tens of thousand of truly crap drawings, to the level of only sort of crap drawings.  And I have loved every minute of it.

It feels like failing.  But it feels like failing up.  It’s hard to really feel like I’m failing when, even though I’m not great, I’m better than I was.  Because I look at drawings from three years ago, and I SUCKED.  Fantastically.  And I can see what I’ve learned in the drawings now.  And I forgive myself what I don’t know, because I’m getting a late start on all of this.  I only know as much as I have taught myself, which is extremely liberating.  Like a freelance illustrator, I am my boss.  Or more specifically, my instructor.  I have to determine the methods by which I learn the best, I have to apply myself, produce the dedication to create the assignments and then complete them.  I fail all the time.  And every once in a while, I succeed.  I have a feeling I’m doing everything the hard way, the wrong way, but I also have a feeling that it’s valuable to me because it’s my way. 

Right now, I make my money working a non-creative day job that rankles me  at the best of times.  But it pays bills.  I have the liberty to study my interests in the off hours.  I’ve even started to make a little money off of illustration projects here and there.  I just got engaged to my beautiful fiance, who’s been with me for these last very challenging six years.  We are shopping for a condo.  We will turn part of it into a studio where we can each pursue our creative careers. We put in an offer this last weekend, but it got rejected. Another upward failure, because now we know what putting in an offer is like. 

My day job is an upward failure, because even though I’m not doing what I want, I’m using the money to push me closer to where I can do what I want. 

I think, honestly, from the outside, a true creative professional (or anyone, really) might look at my life and think it a mediocre, unfulfilled existence.  That I’m floating along, halfway in between a lot of things, with no guarantee of them lining up in the future.  But one thing I learned from failing at what I thought I would do only to find joy in failing at what I didn’t think I would do is that the rewards in my life are simply where I choose to see them. 

Here is a very simple way that I apply this idea to my artwork.  Everytime I look at something and see that I’ve done it wrong, have I failed at doing that thing? Yes. Sure. Undoubtedly.  What I created was not what I set out to do. 

But is noticing, knowing that I did it wrong a failure?  Absolutely not.  It is a success.  A success of mental evolution. It is the very mechanic of auto-didactic success.  If I have learned that lesson, will I do it wrong again?  No! At least, not in the same way. 

Everybody says appreciate your failures. I say remember that SOMEBODY has to teach you what you don’t know.  Might as well be you.