Journey’s End

In 1984 I began a journey, one that ended this week. It didn’t begin as my journey. I was merely a companion, myself and thousands of others, to a stranger who would become someone I felt I knew. Over the last thirty-five years his journey became symbolic of my own, shedding light on my own life in the way all great stories do. Though his personal, real life journey continues, the story he was telling is now over. I want to talk about endings.

Mage: The Hero Denied #15

This is not the first time I’ve written about Mage: The Hero Discovered and its creator Matt Wagner. I’ve talked about it in more detail in a previous blog and written about it academically for Salem Press (though the links in that blog are now dead so you can’t see it anymore). This comic book series began in 1984 and I was there with the first issue. At that time Wagner said that he envisioned Mage to be three distinct story arcs. This week, after thirty-five years and large gaps in production the final issue of the final series shipped. It was the conclusion of a story that I have been anticipating for a long, long time. No spoilers, but I was satisfied with the ending. It wrapped up the various plot lines, encapsulated the feel of the entire series, and stayed thematically consistent with everything that went before. In its ending it conveyed that even when a specific story ends, life goes on.

But I’m not here to do an analysis of the narrative. This is more personal than that. There are specific plot and character elements I’ll go into here but, if you want to know ‟what happens” I’m sure you can find many articles online, or you could, preferably, read it yourself.

I’ve read a lot of comics. I’ve been doing so my entire life and for the last twenty-two years I’ve worked at a comics shop which give me access to everything that comes out. As much as I love the medium most books I read are an ‟in the moment” thing and then forgotten. That is more true now than when I was younger, of course. Like a lot of media consumption the majority of it can be enjoyed while engaged with it, then easily discarded. There are those that deserve further study, of course, and those that reward multiple readings. It is an art form that comes with all of the problems and expectations and joy that can be associated with any other art form. But for everyone who loves this stuff, I assume, there are those few titles that become a part of your life. Heart books I have called them in the past. Those books that speak to something more personal.

Mage is one of those series for me, perhaps the biggest one. At the time I couldn’t have told you why it spoke to me as strongly as it did. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it since. Mage appeared in the early days of the Direct Market, an innovation in comics distribution that allowed for more diverse content from a wider range of creators. I liked a lot of the books I saw then simply because they were not the traditional Marvel and DC superhero fare. Mage was a unique mixture of superheroes, fantasy, myth, and Arthurian legend, all things that I was into. What made it different at the time was that it was all took place in a contemporary setting. The popularity of the genre we now call Urban Fantasy has made this approach much more common, but back then it felt unique. The protagonist, Kevin Matchstick, was a young man wearing jeans and a t-shirt, someone I could know, or more importantly, someone I could be.

This is a core part of the connection. The story opened very differently from most. We didn’t get an explosive fight scene. It was very understated, but it’s was definitely the hook that reeled me in. Kevin meets what appears to be a homeless street urchin and proceeds to have a very personal three page conversation with this stranger, revealing his doubts and anxieties, the kind of questions about life and identity that most people have in their early twenties. It turns out that the homeless man is Mirth, the avatar of the World Mage... Merlin, if you will. This Meeting With the Mentor serves a

dual purpose, one that works on a meta-level. For Kevin, his meeting with the Mage launches him on his personal journey of self-discovery. For me, and probably for others, my meeting with the series Mage brought me into the journey as well. Mirth spoke to Kevin and Matt spoke to me through Mirth. In this way the series became a mentor for those engaged with the narrative. It did for me at least.

What I didn’t know at that time was that Matchstick was an avatar of creator Matt Wagner. He looked just like him. Since that time Wagner has called the series and ‟allegorical autobiography.” He took elements of his own life and fictionalized them. Over time, the more you knew about Matt, the more you could recognize in the narrative, and the more personal the story became. Over the years, because of his other work in the comics industry, through interviews and letters pages, we saw elements of his life outside of his work seep through. Because of these, and because of the personal nature of Mage, an illusion of intimacy was created. This happens a lot with artists, though I think it is probably more obvious with musicians or actors. Through their public persona and the work they create we feel like we know them better than we actually do. This feeling is heightened when we can see ourselves reflected in their work.

2009 San Diego Con.

I don’t know Matt, not really. I have met him in real life exactly twice, once at a convention in Ohio in the early 90s and once at San Diego Con in 2009. During the 80s and early 90s when I was trying to get into the comics industry through self-publishing I sent copies of everything to several receptive creators, Matt among them. He always wrote back, even if it was just a postcard. He was supportive and friendly and those things felt really important at the time. A few years ago when I was researching my article for Salem Press he was gracious enough to answer a bunch of questions for me. He would probably recognize me if I walked up to him at a convention. We’re friends on Facebook. I feel like I know Matt, certainly more than he probably feels like he knows me. But all I really know is what he has revealed to me through the allegory of Mage.

Matt and I are contemporaries. I’m about three months older than he is. We grew up with a lot of the same cultural touchstones, and it’s obvious to me we read a lot of the same books and comics and shared many of the same interests. It’s part of why I could so easily project myself into the series. As time went on some of these interests became more well-developed. Matt has said many times that he was unaware of the mythologist Joseph Campbell and the idea of the Hero’s Journey when he began working on Mage, even though in retrospect it is amazing how closely Kevin’s path follows this pattern. Campbell came to prominence in 1986 through a series of interviews with journalist Bill Moyers (available in print form as The Power of Myth). This series was eye-opening for me and still qualifies as one of the most influential books of my life. It pulled together so many of my interests and the ideas I had been having about them and gave me a language and worldview that still resonates with me today.

One of these ideas is that of a personal mythology. Psychologist Carl Jung asked the question, ‟What myth are you living?” The idea is that each of us reenact recurring motifs in our own personal story. We are the products of our culture and for good or ill we can all become caught up in unconscious behaviors due to the social structures we live in and the stories we have been told about our place in it. The benefit of knowing the myth you are living is so that you can break out of harmful patterns of behavior and self-delusion and adapt a story for your life that is healthier and more fulfilling.

Matt put his personal myth on paper and shared it with all of us. By doing so he set a precedent for his readers to do the same. As we saw throughout his series, it is possible to be living several different myths at the same time. It’s also important to acknowledge that everyone around us is doing the same thing. We may be the protagonist of our own story, but we are also the supporting cast in the lives of others.

It’s important to note here that while the story of Mage, and that of Kevin Matchstick, is over, Matt’s life isn’t. Without spoilers, while there is a definitive end to the series it is implied that life goes on for our protagonists. Endings are important. It’s part of what is missing from mainstream comics. Great myths have their ending, but as licensed corporate characters none of our modern superheroes get to have that. Every character at Marvel and DC have died at some point, only to be resurrected (an overstatement, but you get my point). Big events happen and then are quickly forgotten. We all say we want continuity, but with an eighty year history and characters that never really age we can never really get that. Not as long as people are making money from the products. We continue on with what Stan Lee referred to as the ‟Illusion of Change.” We can never get true closure.

Endings are difficult in real life. Even when the result is a good thing, such as leaving a bad job for a good one, or moving to a better house, it is still stressful. Change is hard. When it is the end of a relationship or a life it can be emotionally catastrophic. Experiencing these in our fictions provides a catharsis from a safe emotional distance. That is but one of the lessons of empathy we can learn from them.

I watched as Matt, metaphorically through his avatar of Kevin, grew in strength and power and came into his gifts as an artist and storyteller. I saw him when he fully embodied that power, when he served as an inspiration for a generation of other creators and shared his path with them, creating opportunities for others to share their own journeys and find their own power. I saw him age and discover new challenges in life, just as I was doing in my own. I have joked with him that I have always identified with Mirth more than Kevin, and maybe that is because part of my path has become that of the Magician. As a writer and artist and educator I embody more of that myth than I do that of the Warrior or the King. Through Kevin, Matt has shared his family with us and his experiences as a father. That part of the recent series became more profound because it was colored by his now adult son Brennan, who wasn’t born when Mage first appeared.

So it goes.

I recently taught an Intro to the Graphic Novel class at the University of Pittsburgh. I taught some of the canonical works that everyone teaches, like Maus and Persepolis and Fun Home. I did a section on the superhero, of course, with Batman Year One and Watchmen being the primary texts for what I wanted to do. I finished the section with Mage. Hey, it’s my class, I can teach what I want! I may be the only person to have done this, and to be honest, I questioned if this was just my favoritism coming into play and if there was anything of value to discuss in a college level comics class. Looking at the work through this lens I was able to use it as a way to talk about myth and Arthurian legend, Jungian psychology, Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and the genre of Urban Fantasy. We also were able to touch on a different way to do autobiographical comics, comparing it to some of the other books I mentioned. Where Watchmen and many other books of the time are famously a deconstruction of the tropes of the superhero I argue that Mage (and a few others, like Scott McCloud’s Zot!), are a reconstruction of the trope clothed in a modern setting. However you look at it, the title was a great success in class and gave us a lot of material to discuss. At the end of the semester several students referenced it as their favorite thing we read all semester, and I know I made a couple of avowed fans. The journey Matt documented still speaks to certain people.

So now what? What do I do now that I have seen the end of something I have anticipated for thirty-five years? Is my life that different? Not really. The only thing I no longer have is the anticipation. I trust that Matt will continue to create new material, not for Mage but for other projects. As a fan of his work I still have things to look forward to.

I also now have the entire story of Mage. I have a new anticipation, that of rereading it. I have gone back to the original many times over the years and as I have grown and changed and aged I have discovered new things in the narrative. It speaks to me in different ways at different points in my life. Now that there is more of it I believe this experience will only increase.

Thank you, Matt, for sharing your journey, for inspiring me and many others. Thank you for being a friend in a very meta sort of fashion. Good luck in all of your future endeavors. You have let Mage go, but your well-earned power as a storyteller remains.

Posted today by Matt.

Favorite Comics Part Five: Mage: The Hero Discovered

As I said in some detail recently, I discovered the work of comics creator Matt Wagner through the black and white issues of Grendel. Because I was so enamored of it I picked up the first issue of his next series, Mage: The Hero Discovered without hesitation, even though it looked like a very different kind of project. In the course of my life in comics there have been very few that rank as highly in terms of ongoing influence, or simple enjoyment. Last year, when I had the opportunity to choose the graphic novels I wanted to write about for Salem Press's CriticalSurvey of Graphic Novels, Mage was my first choice. I was thrilled to get that specific assignment. The article is a more academic approach to the topic than I plan on going into here, but if you want to read it go to http://salempress.com/Store/pdfs/Mage.pdf. All of the details of the story and character are covered there.

So, what is it about this series, among all the multitude of comics that I have read, that struck such a chord with me, and continues to do so? Good question, with a lot of answers (or quasi-answers, anyway).

Matt Wagner and I are contemporaries, in terms of age (he's like three or four months younger than I am, if memory serves), if not career. We grew up, obviously reading a lot of the same comics and books and loving a lot of the same influences. I say obviously simply because of the ideas that show up repeatedly in his work.

Let me try to be more specific about something that is probably too big to be specific about. As I've said repeatedly, I learned to read from comic books. There was Archie, and Dennis the Menace, and other “kid-friendly” funny books, but there was a tremendous amount of superheroes as well. This interest in heroic fiction has been a through-line in my reading interests and in what I create ever since. I “graduated” from comics to books pretty quickly. The Howard Pyle version of Robin Hood was one of the first real novels I ever read (third grade, if I'm not mistaken). I can't tell you how much I was into this when I was eight years old. The sense of adventure, the fun, the action, all of it added up to enthrall my imagination. I think it's safe to say that this experience was instrumental in Hawkeye, the archer from the Avengers, being my favorite superhero (and why Hawkeye instead of Green Arrow, the more obvious Robin Hood archetype, is another blog).

I also remember reading tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I also read stories from mythology. I read a lot of historical fiction aimed at kids. And I read Comics. All of these ingredients went into the gumbo of my imagination, so it's evident to me why I have always seen them as connected. Superheroes have always been, to me at least, the 20^th century iteration of myth and legend, of heroic fiction.

So let's jump to the early 80's. I saw John Boorman's Excalibur in the theater in 1981. The imagery completely blew me away and reignited my interest in Arthurian fiction. At this time I was pretty immersed in fantasy fiction anyway, thanks primarily to Lord of the Rings. Even then I knew that some changes had been made to the Arthurian mythos, at least the one I was familiar with. In the film it is Percival who is with Arthur at his death, and who throws Excalibur back into the lake from which it came. While I loved the movie, this confused me, simply because in all of the stories I had read it had been Sir Bedivere in this role (read my ebook Bedivere for my take on the legend). I wasn't as aware then as I am now of how different movie adaptations are from their source material (and at times have to be). I also wasn't as aware of the wealth of Arthurian fiction available. In my mind there was only one story. I had no idea of how the King Arthur tales grew over centuries and had been written by many, many hands, each of which reflected the times they were written in. There is no one core King Arthur story, only a collection of different writings, all of which deal with the same characters, tropes and archetypes. The enduring longevity of these stories, I believe, is because the core issues they deal with remain core issues for people no matter where or when they are from. The eternal issues of duty versus personal interest, what it means to love, the quest for deeper meaning still ring true for people.

Of course, as the world moves on the stories need to grow in ways that still speak to the current world. All enduring myths go through this process (see the book Transformations of Myth Through Time for more on this).

The first comic book series that really opened my eyes to this idea was Camelot 3000 by Mike Barr and Brian Bolland, published by DC as a 12-issue maxi-series. In retrospect this series has a number of problems in terms of storytelling and themes, but at the time I really loved it, and it still ranks pretty highly in my echelon of comics, more for nostalgia of what it meant to me then, in full acknowledgement of its faults. In the big picture, Camelot 3000 was more important to me in firming up my interest in the Arthurian myths than in influencing me in comics. This story showed me how you could take the characters and themes and transplant them to a new setting and make them work. It also introduced me to the story of Tristan and Isolde. While I had heard the name Sir Tristan in conjunction with King Arthur, he was not one of the knights who stood out to me as having his own story. The subplot of Tristan/Amber March was my favorite part of Camelot 3000, and led me to researching the core story, and reading many more variations on it over the years. The romance of Tristan and Isolde has become my favorite of all the Arthurian tales. It resonates with some real-life aspects of my life and speaks to my sense of love and tragedy and sacrifice in ways that are probably too psychologically telling.

But, as much as I liked it, Camelot 3000 was primarily a retelling/rehash of the original stories that brought very little new, other than green-skinned aliens and transgender characters, to the tales.

Then I read Mage. The Arthurian connection was not made manifest in this series immediately, and though hints were sprinkled throughout the narrative, it was only revealed near the very end of the story. When the series began it was more of a tribute to classic superhero origins. Kevin Matchstick, who wears a t-shirt with a Captain Marvel lightning bolt symbol on it, gains superpowers thanks to an encounter with a magician, just like Captain Marvel. It was only later that the magician, Mirth, was revealed to be an incarnation of Merlin. He certainly didn't look like any standard version of Merlin (like the one in Camelot 3000 did).

Merlin by John Buscema,
from a B&W Marvel Magazine

Merlin, from John Boorman's Excalibur,
as portrayed by Nicol Williamson

The wizard SHAZAM looked
more like Merlin than Mirth.

Over the course of the series we saw the tropes of the superhero genre skillfully interwoven with classic Arthurian memes, creating, as a result, something new. This series accomplished what I had always believed... comics as modern myth.

There were certainly no shortage of precedents for mythic characters in comics. But for the most part, prior to this, the mythic characters succumbed to the tropes of superheroes more than the other way around. Thor, for all of the Asgardian trappings, was a Marvel superhero far more than he was ever really a god. Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of the old Thor comics. But at Marvel, the character was stripped of much of his truly mythic resonance in favor of tights and fights. He was an old god in a new milieu, but, for me at least, he never spoke to my personal experience. The same was true for most of the “gods” that appeared as comic book characters (that includes Kirby's New Gods, an overt attempt to create a modern pantheon).

Mage spoke to something more personal. It wasn't a retelling of the Arthurian stories. It was a recognition of mythic patterns in modern life. The fact that the way Kevin Matchstick looked was based on Wagner said that the things that happened in the story were, in some way, fictionalized autobiography. It said that Myth wasn't just a collection of musty old tales from the past that had no relevance to modern life, but that it was something that was still alive, and that with open eyes, we could see these patterns in our own lives.

That idea alone brings a little bit of magic to the mundane (and isn't that what I was looking for in my interest in comics and speculative fiction anyway?).

Not long after that I was introduced to the ideas of psychologist Carl Jung ( I was a Psychology major, after all). The first book of his I read was Man and His Symbols (which is probably the best place for the newcomer to his work to start), and doggone if a lot of these ideas about the nature of myth weren't present in his work as well, long pre-dating either me or Matt Wagner. From Jung I went to the work of mythologist Joseph Campbell. I first heard of him from his famous series of interviews with Bill Moyers that appeared on PBS around that time. These were collected in print form as the book The Power of Myth. There have been very few books in my life that have been more influential. There are lots of books (many by Campbell), that cover the topics in far more exhaustive and academic detail. But, for me, this served to give me a specific framework of thought for a worldview I had always intuited but didn't have the words for. It's still pretty much my default framework for a lot of what I do.

The key idea I took from all of this is what I said in my article about Mage:

“Myth is not just a story, but a roadmap; the goal of one’s life journey is to discover the myth one is living. By being aware of these themes, readers can recognize and discover the hero within any life, including their own. Matchstick does not simply accept a destiny—he agrees to take an active role in creating it.”

And that's what Myth is to me. Since then I have read a bunch of psychology books that deal with this theme. But Matt Wagner was doing it in fiction, in a comic book, before I ever saw any of this. He was taking themes of mythology and folktale and weaving them into his personal life in a way that created art.

There are a lot of other aspects of Mage I could talk about. While writing the Salem Press article I thought of a number of things that deserve looking into in greater detail. But, this has gone on long enough, and those are probably bigger articles (or maybe papers).