Testing for my Flying Belt

I see superpowered people.

Really. When I look at a skyline, I see the angles Spider-Man would need to swing in through an upper window, if this were a week the artists wanted to do it justice. I know Spidey’s not up there, but to this day I think if I could just get the physics right…

I guess my mother knew she couldn’t change me. Sure, a lot of moms talk about throwing out their kids’ comics; mine certainly did. But she never really followed through with it, just laid down the law that I couldn’t start talking about Spider-Man at the dinner table. And then it was “no D&D,” but by the time I discovered the X-Men, I realized if she hadn’t held the line back then I might never have stopped talking. This is what we call maturity.

(Of course, Jane Hughes had read a few Superman issues herself back in the day.)

These days we talk about how comics, dragons, and all the rest are powering most of Hollywood’s biggest investments–but we still call them “escapism.” There’s no hiding just how obvious the wish-fulfillment is, and how moronic it would be to either leap off a tall building or think real problems could be punched away. Not something you waste a real thought on, right?

So that makes what I do my own kind of secret identity.

It was the X-Men’s smart planning that did it for me, along with Barbara Hambly’s flawless novels of other worlds. More than anything, I look around and I start seeing which way something would have to be.

• When Cap gave each of the Avengers a different role in containing the Chitauri in New York, I saw the military sense each move made. (Hey, I’d played out scenes like that in my head–of course if one teammate is big enough and raw enough you let him charge after the biggest threat and just “Smash!”)
• I can tell you that every fictional throwing knife is obviously a misspelling of “axe,” the thing you actually can throw. But Jim Butcher did it better, with one line about how clumsy and weak knives are, plus another for how it changes things when you put a vampire’s experience and muscle behind the throw.
• I know the real reason Clark spent all the seasons of Smallville not flying was that he wasn’t ready for people to “Look, up in the sky!” Being seen is the usual reason people pass on getting flying when compared to invisibility, but I did work out the best ways to use even that power in secret.

And I keep thinking where different forces might come from, and how each kind of past would change people’s lives. Which psychic powers win which games at Vegas, but then what a person like that might want to do with the money. How many clues Saya went through to learn why her “Blood-Plus” really poisons the monsters. How Frodo and Sam found the courage to just keep plodding on and on through a whole hellish landscape for a home they were sure they’d never see again.

–That’s when I usually crash to earth, and for the same reason as the younger Clark:

No matter how many plot points I can work out, I know they all lead to the same thing, whether the heroism’s fantasy or real. Consequences. Serious change in your life. Sacrifice. And then I’m just another of the readers and writers who didn’t join the army or the Peace Corps, instead I’m driving past each stalled-out car beside the freeway rather than take a moment to pitch in. Every time I hear a man shouting at a woman I know I could walk over, just to remind her there are people who could help… but is it worth it, if the man’s a neighbor who knows where I live? There’s a reason some of my own characters live in hiding.

Buffy Summers, as always, said it best about what it would take to live like that: “It’s hard, it’s painful, and it’s every day.”

It’s the dance most of us do. Half the fun in reading about heroes is trying to work out what could happen next, but another half can be putting the book down and knowing there’s no telepath out there scrubbing blanks in our own memories. Except… except… sometimes, following how to outwit a problem or what to stand for or how it feels to change someone else’s life can come back to you, when you need it most. That’s no secret.

–Oh, those ways to fly without being seen? First, do it at night, and second, curl up in a ball so if anyone sees your silhouette they’ll take it for a bunch of balloons.

Anyway, I’ve got a writers’ meeting tomorrow. And this time if I see a car stalled out by the freeway, I’m going to make sure that while the guy waits for the tow truck I can offer him a snack.

But he’s not getting my comics.

 

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