There’s a compelling remark by writer Bryan Hill in one of the panels I’m watching for Comic-Con@Home today, and I’m just going to drop it here. It’s long, and I’m never any good at editing out the all the rights and you knows and stuff from people’s speech, even though I know some people do that with transcriptions.
I do think that if you are charged with telling stories about ethical characters, about superheroes, I think you have the responsibility to manifest those ethics in other ways, you know? I don’t understand how a person can write superhero stories and act like a supervillain. You know? Like, I think you just have a responsibility to uphold the ethics that you’re writing, otherwise I’m not going to take your work seriously, right? So, I do feel like because of the nature of my work, I can’t give people a terrible experience, if I’m, you know, feeling down or in bad mood. Like, I have to get over that, a little bit, you know? Because the last thing I’d ever want is for someone to read a Batman story I wrote, find me on social media or something, and then have a horrible experience with me as a creator, because I’ve ruined their experience and I’ve tainted their relationship to that character. I won’t do that, and so, you know when we think about pop culture and its importance during these times, you know I think it’s incumbent on creators to understand that in a lot of ways the work that we’re creating is the last vestige of, like, popular philosophy, you know? That’s where people are getting their ethics and their ideas from. Most people aren’t going to read Aristotle, they’re not going to read Marcus Aurelius, right? You know, they’re not going to read Plath, you know? They’re not going to read Naomi Wolf. But what we can do is, not bury the stories with our personal theses, but just kind of fully embrace where they are ethically, and allow these things to be vehicles for, yes, entertainment but also like a little bit of brain food and soul food at the same time.