Lost En Route to San Diego
(While I spend this weekend writing the new Onomatoepeia, here’s last month’s.)
As I type this, I am ignoring the warning being delivered – in an entirely bored and unconvincing manner – by an air stewardess, telling us that the fasten seatbelt signs are no longer illuminated despite the fact that her announcement was interrupted by the tell-tale bing-bong of said signs being turned back on. You can tell, from the flat tone and dead eyes of the stewardess as she talks that the plane isn’t the only thing with an autopilot, but this particular one has quite clearly already been engaged.
(When I was a kid, the concept of an autopilot was ridiculously exciting; I imagined it like the parts of Knight Rider where KITT took over, as if the pilot would talk to the plane’s controls and say that he needed to take a break, and the plane would talk back and then engage turbo boost or something. Even today, I find something oddly and wrongly thrilling about the word “autopilot.” Isn’t technology great?, part of me says to the rest of me, and the rest of me just smiles weakly and nods and hopes I’ll shut up soon.)
I’m in the air, anyway. That’s what I really meant to say when I started this, that I’m flying, G. Willow Wilson-style, to San Diego for this year’s Comic-Con (And now you get an idea about when this was written, and can frown accordingly). This wasn’t the plane I was supposed to be on; arriving later than original estimate, as Kurt Heasley once sang, put paid to that plan and thankfully a seat on the next plane out was available. But there’s something about this particular plane that’s freaking me out, a little. You see, I’m not the only person on it.
Well, obviously, I’m not; since I abandoned by Donald Trump-esque life of financial debauchery back in the late 1990s, I’ve flown with the rest of you riff-raff even on flights across the world, when everyone involved would’ve rather I’d've been on a different plane altogether – I can’t help it, I cry when watching in-flight edits of popular Hollywood blockbusters, especially when they’re of the quality of Bring It On! and X-Men: The Last Stand – but that’s not really what I meant. What I mean is, I know other people on this plane.
There’s a weird feeling when you’re on a plane, thinking that it’ll be you and hundreds of strangers so that you can easily fall asleep and drool, if that’s what you need to do, because you’ll never see any of them again, and suddenly you see friends and familiar faces walking past you in the aisle, falling over themselves and their luggage. Maybe it’s because I’ve watched too many disaster movies, but by the time you’re on your fourth “coincidental” meeting of someone you know, you start to get nervous, as if someone or something has gathered you all together for nefarious purposes that surely can’t end well. You go from thinking, “Oh! It’s fellow Savage Critic Douglas Wolk!” to “Wait, Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover? What’re the odds?” and then, all of a sudden, it’s “Seriously, is that really Dark Horse’s entire publicity team? What’s going on?”
(Please note: I have no idea if it’s Dark Horse’s PR team or not. I don’t know what they look like. I just have a feeling, not unlike in Star Wars, when Darth Vader knew that Luke Skywalker was nearby. There’s a disturbance in the Force.)
I shouldn’t be quite so nervous, of course; it’s a flight to the San Diego Comic-Con from Portland, which none other than Comix Experience alumnus Jeff Lester can’t help but refer to as “Comicville” every time he mentions how jealous he is that I moved here – Although, in his case, it’s not the amount of comic folk that live there as much as the fact that it’s the home of the Waffle Window, which is literally the back window of a restaurant where you can purchase candied waffles with all manner of savory and sweet accompaniments, that causes his personal little green demon to pop out like Jeph Loeb’s Rulk can only dream of. We’ve covered the sheer weight of comic folk in the general population of Stumptown before, but suffice to say that it’s a city that greeted the news that Invincible Iron Man and Uncanny X-Men writer Matt Fraction would be moving there with what amounted to a collective shrug of the shoulders and disinterested “huh,” as if someone had just excitedly announced that the Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen was, in fact, disappointing when judged purely on a level of character development as viewed through the prism of the short-lived Dogma movement, which sought movies filled with a half-improvised “realism” performed by amateur actors so as to create an authentic and authentically disappointing viewing experience; there’s just an inevitability that Fraction would come to call Portland home. It’s like a comics black hole.
That said, I was nonetheless panicked when Fraction started twittering the joys of Jeff Lester’s beloved Waffle Window the other day, if only because it’s about two blocks from my house. In my defense, my reaction was less “OMG, famous comic writer Matt Fraction is so close to my house that, were my house to explode in some freak unlikely accident at this very moment, he would likely be hit by a fragment of flaming debris, possibly that Watchmen action figure that someone mysteriously sent me without any explanation whatsoever that I neither want nor need and yet find myself unable to get rid of because I have a compulsive need to keep all presents, even ones from complete strangers who thought to leave no means of identification with said gift, just on the off-chance that they would one day visit and ask where said gift was and I didn’t want to hurt their feelings,” and more “Stop talking about the Waffle Window, dammit! Then everyone will want to go and I will never be able to snag free samples of the delicious chocolate-covered pearl waffle!”
(Portland’s siren call to comic people spreads far and wide, I discovered recently. My eleven year-old niece visited this last week, and used any given opportunity to talk about her desire to become a cartoonist; we’d be hanging out, doing nothing much and suddenly she’d be filled with the spirit of comix to declare that she was going to become famous by making comic books – Weirdly enough, only comic books, and not comics, she announced at one point. Without the “books” suffix, she wasn’t interested, and found herself unable to even say the word “comics” without a sneer and shudder, if “books” wasn’t involved. After maybe the third time when she told me that just maybe I wasn’t aware that words and pictures when used in combination could create a potent storytelling medium with which a wide variety of tales could be told, I realized that she hadn’t come to visit my wife and I at all; she’d simply followed Portland’s Cosmic Comic Homing Signal.)
Bearing all of this in mind, perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised that the plane is full of people involved in some way with the comic industry. In fact, wouldn’t it be more surprising that a plane leaving from Portland and going to the city that’s holding the largest comic convention in the country opening on this very day didn’t have comic blood flowing through its passengers? And yet… and yet…
And yet, I can’t shake the weird feeling that I got when seeing everyone get on and recognizing them. It was like I had slipped into my very own comic-centric episode of Lost, and that the plane was destined to crash on some mysterious island in the middle of nowhere – Oh, alright, let’s just call it Alcatraz. SF is totally on the way, after all; we’re probably flying over it right now as I type – and we’ll be forced to live out some long-winded and improbable existence filled with smoke monsters, three-toed statues and assholes called Ben and Jacob.
The worrying thing is that Paul Tobin could kind of pull off the John Locke thing, if he shaved off the moustache. He’s got the hair, the charm and – more worryingly – the surprising ability to regain the ability to walk when in the presence of supernatural islands in the immediate neighborhood. I know, it’s not something you’d immediately guess while reading the latest issue of Marvel Adventures Spider-Man, but trust me. I’ve met the man, and he can totally step with the best of them just powered by the sheer belief that there’s probably a supernatural island out there somewhere. Probably the one that tried to eat all the original X-Men back in Giant Size X-Men #1.
But I digress.
(Actually, while I’m digressing, I’m now trying to figure out just who the comic equivalent of Jack would be. It’s a no-brainer that Mark Millar would be Charlie – the accent! The slight crapness! Come on! – and Gail Simone, clearly, would have to be Kate just because of the hilarious online fan mentality that only seems to be able to think of Gail when trying to think of women writers in the industry – Somewhere, Kathryn Immonen is crying, you insensitive jerks. But Jack? Who has that curiously unbecoming mix of zeal, self-importance and “occasional” 100% pure jerkiness? Are we going to have to give Joe Quesada a work out and a buzz cut to make this happen? That just seems cruel. Help me out, people.)
The consequences of such a crash could be catastrophic to the comic industry, however. Few people remember now that The Great Comics Crash Of The 1990s that most now think of as a simple metaphor for industry-wide near-collapse brought on by companies over-extending through a combination of greed and misplaced belief in the longevity and loyalty of an audience as much fired by short-term gain and fadism as a genuine love of the medium or its characters actually started with an actual plane crash, when a small plane carrying John Denver, the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Todd McFarlane’s desire to be a comic creator plunged into the watery depths of the Bermuda Triangle, as predicted in Barry Manilow’s chillingly melodic oracular dirge. If the plane I was on as I write to you now was to suffer a similar fate, I can only imagine what the consequences would be.
But since you asked: Even if you’re not a fan of Tobin, Coover, Wolk or arguably the Dark Horse publicity team if my entirely-unlikely psychic urge happens to be correct even though I have only met said publicity team a couple of times and can’t really remember what any of them look like – and if you’re not, then why not? They all do good work – consider that the comics community of Portland, Oregon, would be devastated by the disaster. Outside of their inevitable immediate response – a series of political comic books about the dangers of lax air safety laws that double as fundraisers for the new “WTF, Alaska Airlines, I Mean, Seriously” scholarship fund that would help wannabe cartoonists learn how to become creators and/or critics, with each issue themed around a particular victim of the crash – no-one from Portland would ever feel safe to board a plane ever again, meaning that San Diego would become a creator wasteland and Stumptown would take its place as The Most Comic Of All Conventions. The city of San Diego, as a result, would fall into disrepair and ultimately take all of California down with it, leading to the rest of America having to launch a full-scale attack against the apathetic yet well-tanned hordes threatening to infect the other 49 states, 28 Days Later-like. The country would become engulfed in a brand new, yet updated for today’s more horror-movie-centric zeitgeist, civil war that would shock and amaze the world… and that’s all before six people from our flight would reappear and hold very unconvincing press conferences about their experiences following the crash.
I think you can see why I’m worried.
And yet, there’s always the possibility that the remaining twenty minutes of the flight will be pain- and disaster-less. Just as Grant Morrison holds the magical ability to make his writing come true (Especially embarrassing for him following the release of those Spawn issues in the mid-90s, when he became an undead soldier of indeterminate race trapped in a war between religious forces with fancy speech balloons and computer coloring), maybe I have a similar ability to prevent what I write from coming true. If you’re reading these words, it means that I landed safely, and all is right with the world, after all. Either that or
Note: This document, found on a laptop recovered at the crash site of Alaska Flight 576 from Portland, Oregon, was unfinished, but contained a request that it be forwarded to Brian Hibbs in case of emergency. It is presented here as a tribute to the missing, presumed stuck on an island with lots of strangers who like to have flashbacks to their unusually interesting and intrigue-filled lives, Graeme McMillan. Namaste, as our Dharma Initiative colleagues like to say.
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