Hey there comic fans! Welcome back. Last time, I started waxing poetic on inspiration, where ideas come from, and how my brain cramped up from reading Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”. Of course, my curiosity on the subject didn’t end there. It went dormant for a bit, but even in that dormancy stuff would grab my attention. There was that thing where all these people were claiming the world was going to end because the people at CERN (I think it was CERN) were colliding particles that protestors feared were going to create black holes, a brief bit on some TV show I was watching, probably on the Discovery Channel, about multiple dimensions. That one really got my imagination going. One of the scientists was talking about how a dimension might be curled up on the tip of your finger. I love that idea. It’s very “Horton Hears a Who”. By this point I had started “Misadventures of a Comic Fan”, but hadn’t yet decided where I was going with it beyond the idea that I wanted the main character to have some very strange comic related experiences. Then I stumbled across a video on YouTube called Imagining the 10th Dimension. That started solidifying my ideas. The comic shop would become the center of all these multiple dimensions. Why pick the comic shop? Well, it is a story about a comic fan after all. For many comic fans, Wednesday is a big part of the week. That’s the day new comics arrive, and whether they actually go to their store on that day or not, they know the comics came. As I took that metaphor further the owner of the store began to enter into it. The storeowner is the guy in the know. He knows what’s coming in on any given week, what’s going to be delayed, and has an informed opinion on what’s going to be hot. As the idea of the comic shop becoming the center of multiple dimensions with the owner operating as some sort of gatekeeper began to really take form, I recalled writing a very short story I called “Inconsequential Trivialities” that I felt would make a wonderful origin story for the owner. It’s appearance in the comic can be found here.
Once that was all in place I started playing with the reality I had set up for the characters. I have read in several places that when novelists write, the stories frequently take them in unexpected places, characters will almost start to write themselves. I love that statement, especially when taken literally. It’s almost as thought the writer has a window into another dimension and he or she is merely recording what they see. So I had Pat, the storeowner, aware of all the novelists, and storytellers out there, including myself. Not only is he aware, but he’s trying to make the main characters aware. I figured that in order to function on a day-to-day basis, you’d have to ignore or deny something like that. So Mike, the titular comic fan, is in complete denial. He’s seen evidence of this and ignored or forgotten it. Cracks in his disbelief are starting to show, but he hasn’t really accepted the nature of his reality. I’ve tried to walk a balance beam with Mike. He’s wrapped up in the comic experience and appears to believe that it’s real, that it not only exists but that he wants to be one of the superheroes he reads about. His subconscious has known all along that he’s seeing other realities, but his conscious mind denies this. The opposite end of the spectrum is Lucas. He just accepts things as they occur. He’s still at a stage in his life where he hasn’t tried to deny his imagination. He still sees monsters in the closet and under the bed. Everything he sees in books and on TV is real to him. Tom is somewhere in between.
I think I’ve taken enough of your time for one week. Next time I’ll cover the remaining characters and get into the plot.
Have a great week comic fans!
Dave
