In the last few years I have felt, inside my mind/spirit a kind of 'pressure' which appears to me to be a great need to speak, to tell of stories and visions. In a way, it is a summing up of decades of thought and experience that now seem to me to be 'of one piece'...that there is a possibility of organizing around a 'message', though not a simple one. Of course, this is to some degree an illusion, because summing up even my own life's events is clearly beyond my meager skills of expression - and if I hope to say something about Nature and my larger Society, well -- that is perhaps ludicrous!
And yet the pressure is still there, and I have at least learned over the years that such a thing is difficult and unwise to ignore. Also, I have met a great many highly intelligent younger people, who seem to be completely disaffected with the 'standard motifs' of Futurism, as presented to us by experts, authors, film-makers, etc. When I consider their complaints I see that I have some possibly useful nuggets hidden away in my consciousness, some ways out of the current malaise maze. And, if it is to them I wish to speak, than I must do so in a medium and context where that would make sense. To put it simply, young people do not read books anymore - they play video games, go to movies, watch tv and...they read manga/comic books. (Some people like to call books of narrated pictures 'graphic novels' to make them seem more 'respectable'...which is deeply weird when we review how long the Novel itself was denigrated in its early history!).
Most people who know me also know that I am a cinemaniac...I LOVE films - watching them and talking about them. But I do have some frustrations with that medium. It simply isn't as 'contemplative' as literature. It is a blazing flow of timespace dumped into your head. Some critics watch movies with their fingers on the pause button, and stop and start to see if they can achieve a deeper view, but movies were meant to happen, like music, in a fluid motion. So, if one has a big philosophical 'agenda', some form of 'literature' may be the only context for the user/reader to have the time and space to stretch out inside a world of your creation, simultaneously truly making it their own.
Now let me say this...most Graphic Novels blow...they are terribly written and they are terribly drawn. It is a new-ish medium with major growing pains! But when it works, it really works: Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Alan Moore's Promethea, Grant Morrison's Invisibles...these seem to me to be among the most important narrative achievements of the human race in the last hundred years. So, we DO have reason to believe that a truly New Literature can be born out of comics...and it is getting more easy to envision every day. The quality of self-awareness and mutual critique in the field grows by leaps and bounds. Early theoretical programs by meta-practitioners like Eisner and McCloud seem to be wearing well, and we are figuring out how to talk about the visual-textual medium in terms that sometimes borrow from other disciplines but that also create new words and ideas when required.
This is fun, and it may one day make things possible that we have not even thought of yet. Some people think that the coming rise in ubiquitous internet bandwidth will cause all literature to be drowned in an ocean of video (or, later, VR-scapes) but I don't think so. The trend toward co-development of related comic and movie 'properties' shows a couple of things: a) these two media perform different tasks; b) we are undergoing an early 'imitative' phase where comic books are trying to be more 'cinematic' which will hopefully die out. The cross-fertilization is productive, but the uniqueness of both is far more interesting in the long term. In fact, in my own approach to comics, I hope to elevate the 'page design' to a much more 'simultaneous' fusion of different time-streams than in the mainstream page and frame sequencing technique. Think of what we sometimes see in 'graphs' or in good paintings -- a kind of frozen gestalt which is stillness and yet, paradoxically, also conveys movement and relationship.
Maybe there is a reason that so many young people are switching their interests and their habits of self-education. I am in no way saying that books are obsolete...that would be a very incoherent stand on my part because I am still reading 1000 pages plus of them a week! But, to paraphrase (and extend) the thesis of the fascinating author Leonard Shlain - a medium which is verbally abstract AND visually concrete may take us farther into our left and right minds than we have ever gone before. AND that, may suit a future which literally 'goes beyond words' better than anything else we could do.
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