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Waiting for the End of the World June, 2000

One of the things I like about comix is that it's a very subversive medium; no one outside of it seems to pay much attention to it. But I think comix can be like some forlorn weather vane twisting about on some distant roof. If you watch it closely, maybe you can tell which way the storm's coming...

Fanboy Rampage By Jeff Lester

Lately I've been thinking about the end of the world. Some of you may call me morbid, but I prefer to think of myself as nostalgic. I grew up in the '70s and the '80s, which meant I was certain I would be dead before I hit 30. The end of the world was in every pizza parlor, every movie theater, every living room: Missile Command, The Road Warrior, Stephen King's The Stand. If not with the mushroom shaped bang, then with the biochemical whimper. I remember rolling twenty-sided dice with my friends, creating characters with realistic mutations and birth defects for some damned RPG, and I recall sitting up in the middle of the night, convinced that the jet I heard flying overhead sounded different than all the others; closer, heavier, swollen with thermonuclear child. And I think that I, like the rest of my generation, have knowledge of a secret those before us forgot and those after us may have never learned.

The end of the world is pretty cool.

Oh, sure, it sucks for the people who die, and, yeah, crippling deformities are nothing to break out the party hats over, and, okay, so four-eyes like me will need a new pair of glasses because the Alpha Primates keep stealing them to make fire. But no lines! No traffic! Being able to drive around like Charlton Heston or Mel Gibson or John Saxon and kissing the occasional undeformed girl who is impressed with your ability to use a lighter! I wonder--do the kids today have a chance to nurture a good comforting post-apocalyptic fantasy, or is the idea of being separated from their Sega Dreamcasts too troubling?

Anyway, the other day I was sort of waiting for a bus (oh, yeah, and no more waiting for the bus!) and I realized one way that the end of the world could come about a way in which comic books were involved.

Before I get to that, let's talk about our friend, memetic theory. Memetic theory is that wacky branch of sociology that posits that ideas are like viruses; as a way to understand the ways in which an idea can sweep through and hold sway over large quantities of people, like the pop song that gets stuck in your head and just won't go away. One of the best examples of memetic theory is, amusingly enough, memetic theory, which continues to be embraced by various communities despite very little hard data or proof.

Now serial fiction, by which I mean mainly stories that continue on a regular basis about the same set of characters, in this country was (up until recently) the province of two domains, conveniently split for the purposes of stereotype into the masculine and feminine; the superhero comic book and the TV soap opera, respectively. These forms have managed to exist for an long amount of time with reasonable stability. Interestingly, the comic book marketplace hit rough times approximately the same time the soap opera did. Apparently, it's getting harder to introduce new soap operas and the viewership of those soaps still around is dwindling bit by bit, year by year. Sound familiar?

Assuming that there's some link here, why would this be? I used to think, with regards to recent comics, that the problem lay at the feet of writers who just didn't have the chops. After all, back when I was a kid, a writer would take a storyline about Daredevil fighting an owl not The Owl, just a regular old owl trying to nest in the attic of Matt Murdock's brownstone and carry it out for six issues. And it worked. Whereas I could barely read one issue in every six during the death of Superman. But these days I'm starting to think that there's more to blame than lousy writing.

I would say the meme that superhero comics (and soap operas) were able to pass along to the culture at large was the alluring meme of serial fiction. In fact, just to show you what an off-the-cuff and insane hypothesis this is, I'll talk out my butt and say that comics experienced a downturn in the '70s during the rise of the movie sequel, and then took a definite turn for the worse as more shows on prime-time TV, previously static from one episode to the next, stole more and more moves from serial fiction and began arcs that spread over the course of a year, subplots that spanned several seasons. As something reasonably rare on prime-time TV became the norm (no Cheers pun intended), those who needed their serial fiction fix no longer needed to turn to comic books.

But now see, wouldn't that mean that if there were more people infected with the serial fiction meme, more people could then get hooked on superhero comics? The thing is, as far as I can tell, the serial meme is very popular in the short term and very unattractive in the long one. Now TV producers are having a harder and harder time getting their serial format shows to succeed in syndication. People don't want to watch episodes of a storyline out of order, any more than they want to read chapters of a book at random. And the appeal of serial fiction now may not be what it was; maybe people no longer develop an attachment to a fictional character and grow along with/in contrast to it. No, these days I think people just want to be part of an event, to feel like something's happening. And a TV series that's really cooking can make millions tune in to see what happens next. It can automatically empower the viewer as part of the Zeitgeist, merely by watching. But the serial meme is at war with the national attention span deficit and, over time, the deficit wins; the goal of a TV show is to be on long enough to get syndicated, but in order to do that, today's TV shows have to construct serial fiction storylines that, once they reach syndication, nobody no longer wants to watch. As the nation's attention shortens from Quake II to Quake III, network TV, the unstoppable beast of my childhood, is slowly dying from the inside, from a kind of memetic syphilis it probably picked up from comic books.

How did I get from here to the end of the world? Frankly, I don't remember anymore. Something about the thermodynamic heatdeath of serial fiction, blah, blah, blah, spreading back, meme-like, to our actual lives. The Apocalypse as the simple eradication of cause and effect, merely by the shot-in-the-arm, here-kid-here's-your-sucker vaccination of constant event, an overwhelming desire to be experiencing something, even though for some of us, some of the best moments of our lives were when we were reading comics, rolling twenty-sided dice, waiting for the bus; doing, in short, less than nothing and being all the better off for it.

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