SUPER-SANITY--! #3

I'm a big comic book fan.

If you know me at all well, you'll know this. In case you didn't know, my room would tell you as much. My walls currently hold a number of posters, including: some Bryan Hitch's Ultimates 2 action, a John Cassaday Captain America piece of propaganda brilliance, some classy Mike Wieringo (RIP) Fantastic Four, two Mike Mignola Hellboy pieces, and an ad for the classic James Robinson/Tony Harris Starman series. Not to mention some Countdown to Infinite Crisis ads, some Green Lantern Corps and a Ghost in the Shell 2 movie poster from my old local cinema.

I read comics. and I love reading them. It's a hobby/habit, whatever. I'm also a comic book writer. The Lucifer Cage, my series with Craig Cermak (see his DeviantArt page here), has seen it's first six page installment published in the proto-indie horror anthology Psychotronik Comics Presents #1 (purchase here), and we're working on producing more pretty much, I think, constantly.

I digress.

A few months, when I started work on my "novel" again, I started scouring the internet for inspiration, things to get me thinking and writing. I need a constant source of inspiration, else my ability to write dries up, and I'm up a creek, so this is kind of imperative for me. I scoured DeviantArt for art-- because I love looking at that kind of stuff, and I saw amateur, non-professional interpretations of established characters. I saw original art. I saw sunrises and sunsets, I saw women and I saw men, and I started thinking about people, and the human body.

I started thinking about how people aren't really... people. They're a collections of lines and shapes, and that if you put those lines and shapes together you make a person. Without those lines and shapes, you're just a blob of nothing, a mass of flesh, and that's not a human being, is it? The most beautiful people are the most elegantly, put together collection of lines, whilst the unattractive are a blurred interpretation of humanity, and therefore flawed.

(Namor, sharp undersea mother-fucker, art by John Buscema: Legend. Sharp lines convey strength, attraction, and bad-ass-under-sea-mother-fuckery)

&
(Namor, skeevy, slimey, dirty fish-dude, with soft lines and round shapes, based around, I do believe, Robert DeNiro. Drawn by Alex Maleev. Which is interesting because Maleev drew Namor before much more elegantly. More on that down the line, I think...)

When you consider comic book characters, Superman, for instance, he's conveyed in thick, strong lines. he's chiselled, well defined. He's pure and he's strong and you can see him as clear as day. Batman, on the other hand, is seeping into the shadows in which he strikes from, blurred and ill-defined, just as his intentions are to the ignorant viewer? Archetypes, maybe? lines defining the character, the person? I don't know. sometimes we hide behind our features, our hair, our clothes, and we become someone different. But underneath, our "lines" remain the same.

I'm not entirely sure.