Pen-Elayne on the Web

Look, Up In The Sky!

I talked earlier about gravitating towards creative people and things. I find comic books to be one of the most potentially creative entertainment forms in existence. I love how the best ones combine words and still pictures into a seamless synthesis, engaging the reader's imagination to fill in the time and space gaps "between the panels." (By the way, if any wonk who doesn't read comics is interested in this sort of process anyway, you can't do better than visiting Scott McCloud's page and picking up his books Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, even though the latter is more speculation and opinion than fun academic treatise.) And I like that it's such a relatively young artform in its current incarnation (even though pictograms predate the written language historically) that its potential is still in the process of being realized. I don't know that anything yet put out in the comic book format qualifies as High, Lasting Art; but as mythic, epic storytelling some of the stuff out there is tremendous. I'm also blessed to be married to someone able to wonderfully articulate the thinking behind his storytelling, and to have friends who can do the same. And lastly, it's just plain fun pop culture to reference, even in the mainstream. Steve Premo, for instance, writes this observation: "When I drop your page down to the task bar at the bottom of my screen, the name gets shortened to Pen-El. That would make you Superman's ancestor or something." Definitely or something, Steve.