By the time you read this, it will be at least two weeks since the events of September 11, 2001. For me, sitting here now, it’s been just over a week. A week can be a long time, particularly for the public consciousness, and it seems a truism that the more intensely a subject is covered, the faster no one really wants to read or hear about it again.

This is only the first of several problems when writing about the events of that day (which is hard to write since I’ve heard so many people say it as if the initials were capitalized—not "that day" but "That Day"). It’s an event so large and so devastating that it demands to be written about without irony, without humor, without cynicism, without false sentiment—in other words, without 95% of the tools most modern writers use today. Throw in superheroes, Stan Lee, and Hostess products and the Fanboy Rampage palette is diminished by about 98%.

So why should I write about something you will probably already sick of reading about, and using only 2% of my resources?

I guess part of the answer is that, even now, eight days after, it’s still hard for me to write or talk about something else. It’s what strangers and acquaintances initially talk about instead of the weather; in that sense, it is no exaggeration to say that it’s become part of our climate.

But also, for me, Fanboy Rampage is this special area where I can share thoughts no one else but you would understand. There’s no other place where I can talk about the secret meaning of Hostess ads, or where Skull The Slayer might be now, or the Aquaman two-pack, or Frank Miller’s Jesus, or do an extended imitation of Stan Lee or riff on old comics ads. Anywhere else, I’d be rewarded with a whopping shot of thorazine in the ass and a free ticket to a padded room.

And so there’s a few thoughts that I have, disorganized though they are, about September 11, 2001 and the days following that I wanted to share here…because I’m not sure anyone else would understand them. If nothing else, it’ll be a break from what is becoming FBR’s patented mix of comic books and sexual deviancy.

Recently, in an article about late night talk shows returning to their air, there was this quote that caught my eye: "As someone at [The Daily Show] said succinctly, irony is dead for the moment." It’s an evocative statement, particularly if you’ve read the laments of authors like David Foster Wallace grousing about the difficulty of writing honestly and directly in an age of irony. Even though I’m a big fan or irony and sarcasm, I think maybe a vacation from them might not be a bad thing. Oddly enough, for comics, I see widescreen as somehow conjoined with irony in the hiatus department. I suppose we need look no further than DC’s indefinite postponement of The Authority Widescreen, although there had already been a brief hullabaloo in the news about The Adventures of Superman #596, with its eerie pictures of the twin Lexcorp Towers damaged and smoking from the upper portions. If you ask me, DC got off lucky: imagine if it was still in the middle of its Our Worlds At War crossover, and had to decide whether dozens of its books were now inappropriate for display or sale.

Even if my reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated, some time away from widescreen may not be the worst thing for mainstream comics. Only two or three weeks ago, Hibbs was talking about how widescreen was reducing a lot of comics to nothing but larger and larger panoramas of cosmic gibberish and nonsensical plot turns devoid of characterization. My hope is that mainstream comics creators might see, in the dark mirror of real smoke and real debris, how nihilistic and empty the thrills were getting.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that, for so long, we in America have been blessed, so much so that the only frames of reference many of us initially had for the events of that Tuesday were fictional events. Die Hard was the one that I bandied about with people I consider close friends—and I know that I consider them close friends because I was willing to talk about an awful event and risk coming across as a heartless bastard by using the context of Die Hard. I don’t think it was just me, but I do know that I personally felt some degree of guilt in having nothing but pop culture with which to measure and comprehend something so appalling. I felt it somehow bespoke to the tininess of my interests, of my experiences, and cast inferences on how bloodthirsty my appetite might be, how easily I disregard human life and human suffering: that I ever enjoyed any movie about an exploding skyscraper is something that, at odd moments over the last week, has caused me genuine shame.

But, you know, I really wonder. After all, it was not, at least directly, my disregard for human suffering that caused the events of 9/11/01. (In fact, I’ll go one step further and say that those who did cause the events of 9/11/01 didn’t suffer from such a disregard, either. Maybe it’s not a disregard for human suffering, but rather regarding the suffering of some humans far more highly than the suffering of others that can cause such events.) And whether temporary or not, my diminished appetite for things in which human life is easily and brutally discarded in a single conflagratic shrug is, I think, a good sign that my inner moral compass wasn’t permanently damaged by Die Hards I-III, Lethal Weapons I-IV or the ending of Fight Club. Perhaps it’s just a yin and yang thing: a peaceful society dreams of violence, a society besieged by violence dreams of peace. And maybe a society on the edge of both will dream equally of both.

Floating somewhere around such considerations is Dan Clowes’ David Boring. As David Boring struggles in his quests for romantic fulfillment, familial heritage and self-identity, the world is filled with reports and rumors of terrorist attacks, of spooked people acting with apocalyptic justification, of small talk rife with fearful theories and non-sequiturs: "So tell me," a character abruptly says on the very last page of Chapter One, "do you think we’re headed for World War Three?" Which is something I’ve actually had two co-workers say to me in the last week. Years from now, it’s going to be impossible for people to believe that David Boring wasn’t started the day after 9/11 but, in actuality, several years before.

And although Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen was written fifteen years ago, I have to admit that I thought of it at least once or twice that Tuesday, and it seems to keep resurfacing in odd contexts. Watchmen is one of those books that I have to buy every few years because I keep loaning it out and never getting it back. But I still remember a lot of it and, from time to time, the phrase "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" comes into my head as I watch some particularly awful piece of footage on TV. The splash pages of New York in desolation and destruction at the beginning of Chapter XII also haunt me at odd moments. And I think the "villain" of Watchmen, who does what he does to accomplish what he considers a righteous end, has been the closest I can get to understanding those who planned and those who acted upon that plan. Watchmen’s study of the thin line separating villains and heroes (a line no thinner than that of perception) makes it a particularly trenchant read right now.

Finally, at the risk of sounding like a total cheesebag, I wanted to talk about the origins of superheroes. Just about every major superhero is created by an element outside their control, frequently (but not always) the element of catastrophe. Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered before his eyes; Superman is the only survivor of planet Krypton. Alternatively, this is also true for most of the great villains: The Joker, Dr. Doom, the Green Goblin, Two-Face. They too were created by a transformative catastrophe. It would seem then that the difference between the heroes and villains has to do, in part, with how one handles catastrophe, with what you do after that element outside your control has changed you (how you handle what Alan Moore, in The Killing Joke, referred to as that "one bad day.") I can’t tell whether it’s too naïve or too cynical to say this, but I hope that America, transformed now by its one bad day, can find it within itself to act wisely now at a time when we need wisdom; the wisdom, if nothing else, to try and separate justice from vengeance.