It’s time. We’re changing the name of the Shoot the WISB podcasts to better fit our little media collective, and everyone who participates in or listens to this show gets a vote. We took suggestions from our crew and our listeners and ended up with about 20 names (thanks for the suggestions!). From that massive list, we narrowed things down to two manageable polls: one for movies and one for television.
I love my friends deeply. I’m closer to my friends than I am to certain members of my family. As I see it, friends are the family you get to select for yourself. One of my favorite things to do with friends is to discover stuff. A friend of mine dropped in from Canada recently, and we went to a restaurant I’d never gone to before. Then we went to a nightclub I didn’t know about and watched a band play that I’d never heard before. I even learned how to swing dance for the first time. We capped it off with a visit to a vintage candy store filled with the sorts of candy you remember from childhood. That was a wonderful, memorable evening. I love music. It’s a big part of my creative side and is important to my writing process. I’m always looking for new music. As it happens, one of my best friends used to be a professional DJ, and one of our favorite things to do is to invite a close-knit group of friends over to drink, chat, and listen to music.
I was at the end of fifth grade when the Spider-Man film starring Tobey Maguire premiered in the US. That wasn’t the start of my love for heroism in storytelling: as a preschooler, I pretended to be a fire fighter like my grandfather had been; in third grade, I fell in love with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; later, I obsessed over shows like Cardcaptors and Sailor Moon. But it was in fifth grade that I was brought into American superhero comic stories, and Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker did it. After watching the movie with friends, I checked out the novelization from my library. I devoured it and watched superhero cartoons – Teen Titans came first, then Static Shock. I ended up secretly writing Teen Titans fan fiction in junior high.
This, right now? This is the real Golden Age of comics, and that makes me very happy. If you’d asked me about the ideal future for comics, 25 years ago, as I was learning about the medium and the industry, preparing for my own foray into it? (Part of my secret origin is that before I fell in with a bunch of people who were making comics, and got excited about doing them myself, I really didn’t know much about them!) Or if you were a fly on the wall for the conversations between me and my friends about what comics could and should be? Or if you’d distilled all the Usenet and message board debates over what was wrong with comics, and what would make comics better, not just for us frustrated independent comics readers and creators, but for everyone?
It is astonishingly difficult for me to discuss how much I love THE LAST JEDI. I stumbled from the cinema, face utterly aching from all the ridiculous expressions I had pulled and mind a haze of images, but I was a different person. I say THE LAST JEDI is transformative because it transformed me. And that is very, very hard to quantify. My years and years of critical and analytical training fall by the wayside, not because I am incapable of seeing its flaws (this isn’t “turn off your brain” entertainment), but that whatever else one says about its negative qualtities, I could but numbly point to myself as testimony to its power: For the first time, I felt seen, truly seen by another in the medium of fiction. I felt reborn. The voices of doubt that have haunted me for so long are muted. I felt braver than I have in years and more able. I felt more at peace. I felt balanced.
27 years ago, I remember seeing commercials for the Canon Rebel film camera, with tennis player Andre Agassi saying “Image is everything”. And since the Internet remembers and stores everything, that thirty-second commercial from 1990 is on Youtube. Go ahead, watch it. At the time, I thought “Well, that’s dumb. Photography is dumb. Image is not everything, substance is. How shallow, how banal.” Heck, I didn’t even know what an SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera was. Cameras could…change lenses? Who knew?
