I have watched my son living the same story - transforming himself into a bloodthirsty dinosaur to embolden himself for the plunge into preschool, a Power Ranger to muscle through a social competition in kindergarten. People integrating the scariest, most fervently denied fragments of their psyches into fuller senses of selfhood through fantasies of superhuman combat and destruction. Across generations, genders, and ethnicities I kept seeing the same story: people pulling themselves out of emotional traps by immersing themselves in violent stories. I talked to the kids who read my stories. I saw my own creations turned into action figures, cartoons, and computer games. I wrote some Hulk stories, and met the geek-geniuses who created him. In my 30s, I found myself writing action movies and comic books. Eventually, I left him behind, followed more sophisticated heroes, and finally my own lead along a twisting path to a career and an identity. I followed him to new friends - other sensitive geeks chasing their own inner brutes - and I followed him to the arrogant, self-exposing, self-assertive, superheroic decision to become a writer. “Puny boy follow Hulk!” roared my fantasy self, and I followed. I had a fantasy self who was a self: unafraid of his desires and the world’s disapproval, unhesitating and effective in action. Suddenly I had a fantasy self to carry my stifled rage and buried desire for power. The character who caught me, and freed me, was the Hulk: overgendered and undersocialized, half-naked and half-witted, raging against a frightened world that misunderstood and persecuted him. They were good for me because they were juvenile. But not because they preached lofty messages of benevolence. My mother borrowed some, thinking they’d be good for me. One of my mother’s students convinced her that Marvel Comics, despite their apparent juvenility and violence, were in fact devoted to lofty messages of pacifism and tolerance. Then the Incredible Hulk smashed through it. My parents, not trusting the violent world of the late 1960s, built a wall between me and the crudest elements of American pop culture. Placed in a small, experimental school that was wrong for me, afraid to join my peers in their bumptious rush into adolescent boyhood, I withdrew into passivity and loneliness. Taught by my well-meaning, progressive, English-teacher parents that violence was wrong, that rage was something to be overcome and cooperation was always better than conflict, I suffocated my deepest fears and desires under a nice-boy persona.
Teacher rage comics free#
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