The Comic Book That Made All the Difference

Duane Pesice is a writer, musician, and self-taught expert on Cephalopods. He blogs regularly at PlanetModeran.net.

I got to thinking about the subject of "the book that has most influenced me" and kind of surprised myself. Had to go back a really long way, back to 1966, to find the one book that set me on the path to tomorrow. It wasn't even a book. It was a comic book.

More specifially, it was an issue of Marvel's The Avengers-#33, to be precise. It had most of the recognizable Avengers crew (Thor, Cap, Iron Man), a lot of movement and color, and it had some vaguely scientific stuff that filled my five-year-old brain with wonder (The Serpent Squad, I seem to recall, were the villain). I remember just being "opened up" by that comic in a way that has only happened a couple of times since. I read it in the little drugstore at the corner of 55th and Kildare, southside Chicago. I had allowance left and blew that on the same month's issue of the Fantastic Four (don't remember which).

That led to a seventy-issue run of the Avengers for me (I missed #104 because I was sick for a couple of days. It took me twenty years to find out what happened to Hawkeye.), and a 200-issue run of the FF. The writing, the art, everything just clicked. The stories led me to real stories. I was naturally attracted to Bradbury and was able to collect that first round of Tolkien Ballantine paperbacks. I, Robot was in my bookcase by the time I was eight, the same year I discovered Lovecraft through reading Dr. Strange (who I found out about by reading the current issues list in the middle of each mag, under the fan mail).

My first piece of writing, in 1967, was a comic book. I remember distinctly reacting badly to Gene Colan's art and the villain Stilt-Man in an issue of Daredevil and deciding that I could do better. I had only drawn boats and things before, very childish renderings. I remember drawing the people from TV Guide over and over to get the relative sizes of facial features right, and the development of my villain (an antihero named Chevron after the gas station two blocks away). My first short story starred Cthulhu and Randolph Carter.

Stan Lee name-dropping Harlan Ellison in the letters column provided the last kick into today. I recognized the name and spent my allowance for two weeks on the two-volume paperback copy of Dangerous Visions. On the way home from buying that set, I found a copy of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction lying on the sidewalk. It had Cordwainer Smith in it.

By the time I was twelve, I had somewhere around 200 books, having discovered used-book shops, piles and piles of comics (nearly all Marvel with some Gardner Fox stuff), and had written my first novel (fanfic starring Black Bolt and the Inhumans).

It's possible that I haven't grown up much since then, or maybe the circle remains unbroken. Comics and HPL and SF are still my comforts both for reading and writing, and I've just begun work on a webcomic/graphic novel containing all of the above and Hunter Thompson and Elvis to boot. And Groff Conklin and James Baen and Bernie Wrightson and especially Jack "King" Kirby, and Roy Thomas and Stan "The Man" Lee-I can't thank you enough.

A Truth So Vast, Only Magic Could Convey

Edward Blaylock has worked as a parking valet, a stadium vendor, a telemarketer, and a teacher. He writes under a (very thin) pseudonym on his blog, Walking the Earth.

Kevin has asked me to write about a book that has been a powerful influence on me. I could write about the way Have Spacesuit, Will Travel turned me onto science fiction. I could try to explain how Give War a Chance turned me on to political humor. I could wax rhapsodic about The Prophet, or talk about how The Games People Play gave me the tools to escape a difficult marriage. There have been so many books; it should be difficult.

I’ve known almost from the second he asked me what book it is, though. None of my friends or family will be surprised by my choice, because I’ve been a raving fan of it since I was seven years old. The book is The Fellowship of the Ring.

I love the Fellowship, and by extension the whole Ring Trilogy, with unabashed fervor. The first appearance of the Nazgul still fills me with dread. Gandalf’s stand against the Balrog and Boromir’s death bring tears to my eyes to this day. I get as choked up reading Theoden’s speech at Pellenor as I do hearing Henry V speaking of Saint Crispin’s Day. The pictures Tolkien paints are heartachingly beautiful, but that’s not how the books influenced me.

I can say without hesitation that the Ring Trilogy gave me my first instruction in the meaning of moral courage. People who haven’t read the series see it as a trifle, a story about fey Hobbits and twee Elves. What they don’t realize is how much it’s a tale of facing up to real darkness. I started reading the Fellowship for the first time at 7 years old, and while an awful lot of it went over my head, I clearly understood the terrifying evil of the Nazgul and the courage that it took Frodo and the other Hobbits to travel through the Shire and beyond. I understood even then the feeling Frodo had of terrible, heavy necessity when he volunteered to be the Ringbearer.

See, evil in the Fellowship is palpable. Evil is terrifying, not only when it’s swathed in yards of black fabric and riding a night-black horse, but when it’s whispering to you that you could make everything right again, if you’d just take this one easy step. Evil corrupts, whether through despair, through fear, through temptation to power. Evil is insidious and unfathomably powerful.

But here’s the other half of the equation: evil is limited. Sauron, the principal force of darkness in Middle Earth, cannot create anything, but only twist other people’s works. More important still, as much as Sauron and all his vast armies inspire terror in others, they themselves are cursed with constant, gnawing fear, the fear that comes of telling too many falsehoods and of having only that strength that one has taken from others.

In the face of evil, the heroes of the story stand up. They face their fear. They stare back into the baleful gaze of Sauron’s burning eye and they defy him. They face terrible trials, and not all of them succeed, but in the end evil is defeated by the concerted actions of good people.

Tolkien stressed over and over again that the Ring Trilogy was not meant as an allegory. He was right to the extent that he didn’t consciously write it as one. Nevertheless, his own Catholic worldview is plain to see. We’re all on a quest to make the world a better place. We have to do so keeping in mind that the end doesn’t justify the means. The road isn’t easy. We will stumble along the way. We’ll need help to get where we need to go. We may have to pay a high price. But in the end, if we listen to the better angels (or wizards) of our nature, we will win. I can’t think of a better way to summarize my own outlook on how to live a good life. That understanding of the struggle, of how hard it can be to face up to temptation and evil, is part of what has drawn me into the Catholic Church as an adult convert. I had always seen those ideas as self-evident because I heard the Ringbearer’s story as a child.

C.S. Lewis wrote the Narnia books as an allegory for children. As I mentioned, Tolkien vehemently denied any allegorical meaning in the Ring Trilogy. All his protestations aside, as a guide to living a moral life I have to say that The Fellowship of the Ring beats Narnia hollow.

All for One, and the Book for Me

Lauren Bonk is a wife, mother, sometime actress, and freelance writer. She blogs and conducts business at LaurenBonk.com.

When Kevin asked me to write about the book that has most heavily influenced me, my thoughts immediately shot to The Great Gatsby or Wuthering Heights. These two novels are simply my favorites. Of all time.

The keyword here, however, is influence. While swooning over protagonists and drowning with pleasure into pages of gorgeous words is all well and good, I'm guessing he was looking for a little more meat.

Plus, I don't think anyone really wants to read 500 words of me swooning over Jay Gatsby or Heathcliffe...I think we'd all come out of that one thinking I've got serious mental issues.

Anyway, the book. The book for me has got to be The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. I read it when I was in third grade. I know that sounds ridiculous, but let me set the scene:

It's 1993. Amanda and Lindsey have gotten over a fight and are best friends again...I've got a crush on Tim (he's got an earring and a rat tail), and Disney has just released The Three Musketeers starring Chris O'Donnell about a bazillion other celebrities. BAM! my crush on Tim is shelved, and I am head-over-heels for this movie. I love the adventure, I love the clothes, I love the language, but more specifically, I loved Kiefer Sutherland.

This was when I learned that a lot of movies actually came from books. For Christmas, I got a big box of those short little paperbacks...Little Classics, maybe? I don't know, but all the classics were there, and 3M was one of them. I read it and thought, “Hey, that was pretty much the same as the movie, but there was more stuff in it...hmm...” I realized then that the pictures going on in my head were a lot better than the ones I was seeing on the screen.

My parents then informed me that the small book was actually a very shortened version of the original. Since I was completely hooked by this story, I had to get my hands on it. After school, I marched over to the library and asked for help in finding the long version. Seeing as how I was in 3^rd grade, the librarian was a little skeptical. Her skepticism, however, was easily shaken off by the fact that I wasn't another kid asking her for an R.L. Stine, and she was jumping at the chance to put some real literature into a kid's hands.

I'll admit that I was pretty intimidated when I saw the book. That thing was a monster...and it only had a smattering of really old pictures in it. The little version had a picture on every other page...but darn it, I read that thing. And though I had no idea what most of the words meant, I loved it. A few chapters in, I decided to read it with a dictionary, and, obviously, that helped me out quite a bit.

Now, I had read “chapter books,” as we called them back then, but none like this. This book treated me like an adult. Now, quite obviously, I wasn't an adult (and by no means did I deserve to be treated like one)...but what I'm saying is that this book was like an honest friend. A friend who didn't talk to me about babysitters in a club or foxes dressed like Robin Hood. This friend told me an epic story that not only entertained me, but also taught me a few important life lessons.

People don't always say what they mean. Times get rough. Emotions can make us hurt and do stupid things.

These are all very important lessons... and adults don't always want to tell you about them in when you're in third grade...but they couldn't have been more relevant. Dealing with friendship in elementary is pretty much a bloody battlefield, and I needed all the help I could get.

Now, I know this post has a fairly juvenile flair to it. This isn't a book I can be intellectual about; I've just started rereading it for the first time since '93. It is, however, the piece of writing that lit the candle. I had no idea that a stack of paper, bound together, could be so powerful, until I read The Three Musketeers, and if I ever get the chance, I'm buying Mr. Dumas a fancy drink...something with an umbrella.

No, no, no, not an umbrella. Some fruit stabbed with a plastic sword...yeah. That's more like it.

Don't "Kitty" Me

Heather Stauffer is a writer, historian, Alzheimer's Advocate, and blogger for OldJokesGetLaughs.
blogspot.com.

My bookshelves are full of Great Plains histories, nineteenth-century novels, and mystery paperbacks, so I was surprised when, a few months ago, I checked out up a copy of Dirty Job and couldn’t put it down. Christopher Moore’s 2007 novel takes readers to San Francisco and then exposes them to the “dirty job” of being a death merchant in charge of collecting soul vessels.

Yes, a death merchant. In our culture’s current obsession with vampires and the un-dead, this story stands out by its wit and unconventional characters. The protagonist, Charlie Asher, is a Beta Male; when Alpha Males were out hunting food and defending the community, Beta Males stayed behind and made themselves available for the grieving widows.

The owner of a second-hand shop, Charlie just wants to be a good father to his daughter, Sophie. Charlie becomes a father and a widower in the same day, and soon after he discovers that he can see people’s souls attached to items in his store. Now, in addition to the other major changes in his life, he is responsible for collecting these souls and seeing that they are redistributed to new owners.

This is not a book for everyone (liberal use of death and swear words tend to be unappealing to younger readers and the faint of heart), but it is an interesting commentary on identity and purpose. Charlie is simultaneously thrown into two very important roles (death merchant and single father), and at first he tries to avoid both on the grounds of his timidity and neurosis. Once he comes to terms with his responsibilities, he is more accepting of himself and his abilities. Well, to a point.

As the narrator explains, Charlie’s existence as a Beta makes him perfect for this new role in the soul business. He is dependable, overly-committed, and disappears into the background easily. His overactive imagination helps him problem-solve unorthodox situations associated with death merchantry and fatherhood, but it also inflates his ego to the point that he believes he is Death (with a capital D), and not a servant to it. This, of course, does not quite pan out like Charlie expects.

As people start dying around him, Charlie becomes convinced that he is the reason. Fueling this belief is his daughter’s ability to kill people by calling them “kitty,” and the two massive hell hounds that appear from the shadows to protect the apartment. Instead of continuing to improve on his roles as father and merchant, he seeks ways to become a super-hero Alpha Male (in the form of his “true” identity: The Big D.).

I’m not sure why this story has stayed in my mind so long after returning my copy to the library. Perhaps its humor caught my attention. In true Christopher Moore fashion, several scenes had me literally laughing out loud; who can stay somber with a character named “Minty Fresh” or an immigrant tenant who sells Sophie’s dead pets at the Chinese market?

Perhaps more telling, in the midst of the overly outrageous scenes, are the realistic emotions of Charlie. His wife was the love of his life, and her absence prevents “death” from becoming too lighthearted in the novel. As much as Charlie changes in the story, he genuinely grieves her passing the entire time. Also grounding the reader is his attachment to Sophie. He shows his best characteristics when working at fatherhood.

Though Charlie is not cut out to be a super-hero Alpha Male, he does have the ability to excel in the things that he is good at, and that might be what resonates so strongly about this story. We can all use our talents, skills, and personalities to be part of something great, even if we aren’t “The One.”