You Should Know Better

Reading Comics Into Adulthood

There’s a certain amount of cover covering one must do when reading a comic book in public. The front of ACTION PHILOSOPHERS! has all the explosive lameness that the less-informed would come to expect from a pulpy magazine: rippling muscles, tights, motion lines, bright red background with blinding yellow block text. Little do people know of the deep draught I’m partaking. The philosophy of the ancients with the attention-grabbing simplistic panels of the super-hero.

I learn that Plato -meaning flat or broad- was a pro-wrestler named for his impressively broad shoulders.

My hand slips from the page and I no longer care.  Let the world see.

Plato with college-creating action! Conversations with the dead! Individual eradication! Rebirth of the Superman! The absolutes of numbers!

While customers order Venti lattes I contemplate Koans, riddles that “demonstrate the absurdity of truth.”

The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics is broken down in simple panels, like windows into an obscured world; suddenly I feel like I could enlighten a classroom of five year-old’s on philosophies aged 3,000 years.

To the customers of the cafe, I’m a full grown man reading a comic.  I don’t care.  We move East.

Bodhidarma says “If you see Buddha on the road . . . kill him!”

I say, “Of course!”

The comic teaches me that Kung-fu means hard work, a physical analogy for deflecting distractions of the world to achieve a more Zen being.

I start into Nietzsche and run a stitch through floating phrases in my head: “the opium of the masses,” Ubermensch, Beyond Good and Evil, Communism, Nihilism, Principalities . . . I pull the loose end and they come together so beautifully, woven by the sequential art.

And that’s when she walks in.  A new barista. And she’s cute. Slyly, I put the comic book away and smooth the creases from my forehead.

My Kung-fu has failed me.

Recommended to: Philosophiles, Supermen, and that guy in the cafe that just doesn’t give a damn

-CMH

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 2nd, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under All Comics, Rez Sick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.