THOUGHT BALLOONISTS

The Spinner Rack That Forgot Time

I’m fresh back from the 25th Annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, in Cleveland (in fact I drafted most of this on a plane with an incredible view of snow-frosted mountains far, far below). There Craig and I presented a paper from our recently launched project about the work of Eddie Campbell. Balloonists assemble!

The presentation went well and the conference was excellent and encouraging; the general level of interest in comics was high. I came away with plenty to think about. In the meantime, all this traveling has reminded me of something else, something I’d file under the “Unlooked-for”:

Greetings Culture Lovers!

Seizing the opportunity for mischief, Stanley...inscribed four fateful words
on the ceiling—“Stan Lee is God.” That was the first known use of his famous pseudonym.

-- Raphael & Spurgeon,
    Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book (2003)

Hard not to admire it
When it comes at you so nakedly,
This craft of trumpeting oneself, of
Horn-tooting, branding, memyselfandaye --

Dig his antic, capering Self, smiling larger than life,
Giving up a bit of his boundless whatever to
Jolt us into faith:

Taskmaster, impresario, front-facer,
Imprimatur for thousands of pencil-and-paper dreams,
He who reined in comets, shaping,
Captioning, grounding so many zero-gee fantasies

(so much skywriting! born of so many
down-to-earth drawing boards,
this in itself a marvel,
month to month and
paycheck to paycheck,
far in fact from his fraternal mythic Bullpen),

and packaging, barnumizing, glossing all,

Over years the public face
Of imagination unleashed, original energy, and all that --

Lo, he doth bestride the four-color earth like a living colossus,
Higher, higher still, perennially young,
Long retired, never-retiring
   (playing extra in his own world),
Years on from doing anything, really, but

Still, as ever, giving us, ourselves,
         back to ourselves, in small packages.

Ringmaster, totem, smiling one,
Rallying the happy few,

we band of readers, initiates, ingrates and fans,

some miffed, maybe, to have been so long entranced,

But all of us, just the same,

All of us pilgrims.

...

Master of Elements

 

Master of Elements
(Kirby’s Metron)

I see you — the hungry mind —

outrider, probe —
liminal god of discovery, design and cunning,
nudging the Source

(wellspring from whence everything, yet unknown to all
despite your vaulting) —

there you go, skirting the promethean,
as if to solve it

I know you: The apogee of an idea,
epitome of a line of geniuses,
bodies hobbled, atrophied, often chair-ridden,
heads most often bare, smooth, shiny like eggs —

masterminds, with an accent on the minds —

     (your very name's a measurement)

Professor X’s cousins, sedentary oddballs,
standing out amid bright crowds of bolting,
springing, soaring demigods,
and people.

Your gymnastics are all up here, aloof and etherous —
strangely riveting to your biographer, whose pencil
was a fist, raw with physics —
a burning hand conjuring chaos

(but equally chair-ridden, tracing violence on a blank white page).

I see you, knowledge-seeker,
and take you for a warning —

your knowing presupposing an ignorance,
a willed carelessness, bracketing consequences —

(at least Oppenheimer, when he helped uncork
the sky and blot the world, felt decently
shamed, so the stories say) —

I see you: a dream
of the mind gone everywhere, all-inquiring,
of bottomless comprehension and cosmic flight,

but always in a chair.

CH contemplates six-plus weeks without a Balloonist post

(and much longer than that without CH stepping up to the plate). Sigh.

But, not to fear, folks. More to come soon, promise!