How I learned to love reconstruction

I have two favorite books, out of many favorite books, that hold the top two spots in no particular order. I quote them constantly, especially at bars, when my sobriety is in question. My sobriety so hotly debated, in fact, that I have even threatened on more than one occasion to get various passages tattooed upon my person, up to and including my ass. These books are Watchmen by Alan Moore and Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I know, I know — what an original and forward-thinker I must be to align my world view with two of the most popular works of fiction of the last thirty years. What a genius that I, between the ages of 18 and 24, held these works in such high regard as the greatest in deconstructionist literature. All of that said, this has nothing to do with the books, although they have greatly influenced everything I’ve ever written — in any genre, with any theme, and for any reason — for the last decade. Really, the books themselves are fine. It’s the deconstruction part that kind of bugs me these days.

I want to talk about reconstruction instead.

Okay, yeah, we all go through our deconstructionist phase. I’ve spent enough time in the classroom, pouring over film and literature, art and performance, looking at the best, most precise ways to tear things apart. That’s what art is, right? It’s the act of rendering something down — a concept, a memory, a feeling — to its basest, most human parts and putting it on a page, canvas or film strip for others to ingest, analyze, and file away. We’re all taught a great deal on the act of destroying a thought or a principle. We’re all taught to look at things and to rip them to shreds, finding the faults and the holes in comfortable stories and settings until we’re blue in the face. You and me, we know what’s up, right? It’s safe to say that we can critique our way out of numerous paper bags. As a society, I think, we’re pretty on-point in destroying things. I’d say we’re even pretty good at it.

Any savvy consumer of media can tell you what’s wrong with something when it’s put in front of their face, and that’s a great thing. It is absolutely critical to being an objective patron in the flashy, fast-moving world of big budgets, corporate interest and SEO terms. You have to know what you’re being sold, what’s wrong with it, and how to dismantle it if necessary. But the older I get, and the more I learn about fiction and narrative, concept and realism, the less I find myself preoccupied with deconstruction. And somehow, yes, this circles back around to superheroes, and I’ll explain why in a minute.

Let’s take Watchmen for example, since I brought up superheroes. This book is a huge and completely blatant rip on everything wrong in the superhero genre. It takes a huge dump on all of our favorite archetypes, showing the flaws and the fallacies in the pie-eyed escapism the genre perpetuates, where readers allow self-appointed heroes make the moral decisions for all of us and quietly sweep the consequences under the rug. Because the kinds of people who would put on masks and run around in the dark must be off their tits, right? They have personality disorders and violent tendencies and delusions of grandeur. They would have to — what else would possess a man to put on tights and fight crime?

My 18-to-24 year old self, very disillusioned with the kinds of stories being told in mainstream comics, and the childish fantasies of grown men being paraded around to excuse their (frankly gross and upsetting) behavior, ate it up with a spoon. It took the piss out of everything I was mad about and twenty-five years later, still stood up as the final nail in the coffin of my love affair with superhero comics. It was what I needed at the time. I think anybody who reads the genre understands that.

Then, you know, things changed.

By 25, when I got back in the genre as a reviewer rather than just a reader, I had a calmer head. Leaning on my education and experience as a writer, I could be a much more savvy consumer. I was able to look at this genre objectively, to spot the major flaws as well as the tiny triumphs, and to address them appropriately. I could look back on Watchmen and celebrate that it was the story that needed to be told at the time, but not the only story that matters moving forward.

While industry standards still dictated a certain level of gross behavior, writers and artists were winning small battles in the effort to elevate the genre with deeply personal stories and character arcs. Kelly Sue DeConnick on Captain Marvel is a good example of that, as well as Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye; Kieron Gillen’s Tony Stark in Iron Man and Kathryn Immomen’s take on Sif in Journey into Mystery show that character-driven stories still work in larger, action-heavy contexts. No, it’s not perfect, but it’s getting better than where it was when I left. I’d learned to stop being so reactionary, and, instead of just pointing out problems and setting fires, to offer solutions and compromises. It doesn’t have to be love or hate, admiration or destruction. You can love something with all your heart (like, you know, Captain America, for example) while still knowing all its flaws, and find ways to portray it better in the future.

This is why it comes back to comics and superheroes. Wanting to write comics was how I got into writing in the first place, an embarrassingly long time before those rocky 18-to-24 years, when I was writing so many flaming critiques to Marvel Comics that they started sending them back unopened. (It’s still a highlight for me. Just saying. I like to bring it up at parties.) These days I can only hang out on the periphery, writing reviews for mainstream books and putting together weird indie comics whenever I can, trying to solve problems in very small ways.

I’m tired of taking things apart; you can only do it for so long before it wears you down. That’s why I’m taking on the projects that I am, and tackling superhero fiction. I don’t just want to talk about the problems that I have with it, because I do have quite a few. (Unbalanced representation of women, minorities, the disabled, the LGBT-aligned, etc.; endless runs that change creative teams with no resolution, end goal or continuity; sloppy, trend-based writing and artwork; I could go on for a while). I want to talk about solutions, too, and ways to do better by the genre. Hell, I just want to put it all on the table, and make my inner thirteen-year-old’s dreams come true. I want to do it all.

So, when people ask me why my next book is about superheroes, I want to tell them that it’s because I’ve taken a lot of things apart. I want to try putting them back together for a change.