Author Archives: nealcall

Neal Draws Comics: Literature or Love . . . Literature or Love

Posted by —

40

Hard Decisions

Of course, it’s not like I really have to choose between the people I love and my books, not completely. But you know those times when you’re right in the middle of the good part — when someone’s about to die, or they’re about to find out who’s behind the curtain, or maybe there’s just a really freaking great description of a cocktail party and all the lost souls who attend such things? In moments like these, when someone says, “Did you hear me? Take. Out. The. Trash,” and gives me a look that says, “Right now, or I will cut you,” I sometimes teeter ambivalently on the precipice of getting stabbed, if only to read a few more words.

When I was a kid, I’d carry a book around with me everywhere I went. You know, just in case I scored three minutes in which nothing else was happening: at the bus stop; during the commercials in between Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Denver, The Last Dinosaur; while walking from my fourth-grade classroom to recess (anyone else ever smash their head on the bar between two doors that open outwards? Those things were killer).

Having a toddler around means that I have lots of three-minute opportunities to crack open a book. Unfortunately, I just can’t seem to reach total immersion at the drop of a hat the way I used to; most of the time three minutes just doesn’t feel worth the effort. But every once in a while, I’ll come across a book that just begs to be read, that stays in my head all day long, such that I can almost remember the sentence I left off with. And then I get mocked for wandering around the house with it under my arm, for bringing it to the bathroom with me, for holding it open with one hand while stirring pasta, for throwing it into the diaper bag as I run with Addison to the store. You know, just in case the traffic lights are really long.

And, I gotta be honest, books like these don’t always make me a better husband or father. When I’m in the middle of one, it can be damned hard to even get up to relieve myself, much less perform a task necessary for the smooth operation of our household. Washing diapers, at a time like this, are not on the top of my priority list. And, of course, the best way to get un-interrupted reading time is to call up Dora for a little babysitting. Is it possible, I wonder to myself as I find my page, that my daughter might learn to love books because they indirectly reward her with TV? Probably, I decide. Yeah, more than likely.

“Daddy, do you want to go read? You can put Dora on for me if you want.”

So, in terms of the comic, I suppose you might say that I’m trying to have my cake and eat it, too. At least every once in a while. Since I’m still married and my two-year-old can spell her name (A-D-D-I-S-O-N!), I suppose there might be room for multiple loves in my life. Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m now such a snob with books; if I liked everything I read, I’d probably be divorced and living in a box under a bridge, reading to my heart’s content.

Hopefully nobody is currently living under a bridge with their library of books, but when you’re in the middle of a good book, what ends up going out the window to make room for it? Has your ability to immerse changed over the years? By inclination or by necessity?

Neal Draws Comics: Reading in the dark

Posted by —

28

I'll be rich!

The theater lights go out, and I smile to myself as latecomers scramble to find seats and run into each other, spilling their popcorn and bruising their shins. Suckers. Of course, this could have been me on any number of other occasions. But not today. Today is different. Today is the fourth screening of Brave with my toddler at the dollar theater, and we’ve finally gotten it right. Fourth time’s the charm.

Addison sits on my lap, her head leaning back against my chest. She holds one of my fingers in her hand and a baby carrot in the other. I’m pretty sure she’s going to forget which hand holds the edibles, but I’m feeling benevolent. Maybe this time I won’t get bit. Her hair smells faintly of soap and spaghetti sauce. It’s nice. This is a good moment.

The movie’s about to start, and I hold my daughter’s little body close as I bend and dig into the diaper bag, pulling out a book. So far, so good. I reach into my pocket, and pull out a little flashlight. Deep breath. Moment of truth, here we come.

I remove my finger from the kid’s grasp and open the book in my left hand. I flick on the flashlight with my right.

Too bright! Addison shields her eyes, and I can see the glow reflecting off of the walls nearby. I flick it off. I think for a minute, as I watch Merida and her “Mum” playing hide and seek. Maybe if I sort of cup the end of the flashlight in my fist, allowing just a tiny sliver of light to escape . . .

Alright! It . . . kind of works. As long as I’m gripping the light just the right way . . . damn. I just blinded someone. I put the book down, repositioning my fingers over the end of the light. Addison looks up at me and tries to swat my hand away.

“Shhh. It’s okay. Just watch the movie, kiddo.”

I try the light again. Okay, this could work. It takes me a minute to find my page in the book again. But Addison’s in the way. I struggle to find a way to get the light close to the page and also be able to see the thing. The light slips again. It’s like a little light show over in this corner of the theater. I wonder if I should whisper really loudly, “Sorry!” but decide against it.

I make Addison get off my lap, but strike out with the chair next to me, which keeps wanting to fold up and eat her. So I force her to stand next to me in the aisle. She’s okay with this for the moment, her attention on the screen. So I position my flashlight hand again, and make another attempt.

I manage to shield the light pretty well, which means that it comes out rather dim and unpredictably. I have to hunch forward and peer close to the page to read, but I’m going to make this work. I get through about a page and a half before my flashlight hand starts to cramp up. The exasperated pressure building up inside of me leaks out of my mouth in a strange, unpleasant sound.

“What’s wrong, daddy?”

“Nothing, just watch the movie.”

I massage my hand and have another go at it. In the movie, a bear makes an appearance, and Addison rushes back for me and I fumble the flashlight. It rolls a couple of rows, stopping with the light shining down towards the front of the theater. Damn. Nation.

I manage to get the book and flashlight packed away. I watch the rest of the movie with my daughter on my lap and thirty-thousand people staring angrily at the back of my head. I can feel them. It burns.

Since I’ve got the movie memorized, we’re at the door before the scene fades to black. As we flee, I’m making revisions in my head for our next visit. Fifth time’s the charm, maybe.

I imagine being back in the theater, holding a book in one hand, my daughter in the other, and still being able to read. Somehow. It’s close, I can feel it.

Neal Draws Comics: That was then, this is now

Posted by —

26

I remember as a kid the way I would line up all of my stuffed animals in my bed with me. Of course I had a favorite, but I wasn’t going to let any of the others know that. That would just be cruel. I’m sure my parents felt much the same about all of their kids. Or maybe they disliked us all equally, it’s hard to say. (I joke, mom, I joke.)

As I look around my room now, books have replaced raggedy teddy bears and bunnies with spittle-soaked ears. Lots and lots of books. As with the stuffed animals, my favorites are ripped and dog-eared from years of use. The accumulation of caresses — mostly gentle, but sometimes furious at the suspenseful parts — have left smudged pages and polished spots on covers. And there are a few with broken bindings where they impacted walls, only to be contritely scooped up and finished.

And there’s the food. I know, it’s gross. But there are some books on my shelf that I can open and recall very distinctly what I was eating at the time, because there are still little crumbs in the binding. You try to shake them out, but sometimes there’s nothing you can do, at least until you get home and start excavating with an ice pick. And by then you’ve forgotten. Hello, Wheat Thins on page 127. Nice to see you again, balsamic vinegar drops on page 273. We can see similar signs, usually crusty applesauce or prune juice stains, on the disease-ridden bunny that my toddler drags around with her everywhere. Seriously, that bunny looks like it has Ebola.

Books are my comfort objects now. I rarely go anywhere without a book tucked under one arm or stashed in my backpack. With a good book on hand, suddenly every traumatic event evens out a little. Car broke down on the freeway? No biggie. I’ll just read All the Pretty Horses until the tow truck gets here. Another snow delay at the airport? That’s another hundred pages of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Just saw someone flattened by a falling airplane engine? Hey, life happens. Back to Harry Potter.

And when I go to sleep at night, there’s nothing more comforting than my huge extended family of books watching over me, encircling me, imbuing my sleep with the wild ruminations and explorations of the greatest and craziest. Sometimes there are nightmares (Kafka, I’m looking at you), but the dreams make everything else worth it.

Stephen King Week: Is Carrie prophetic? Neal weighs in on his first Stephen King novel.

Posted by —

38

I’ve heard a lot of good and bad things about Stephen King. I’m talking about the man whose books have sold more than 350 million copies, not the moustachioed Australian explorer beloved for crossing Australia from South to North. I’m talking about the man whose first independently published story was “I Was a Teenage Grave Robber,” not the U.S. Representative from Iowa who claimed that a Barack Obama presidency would have al-Qaida dancing in the streets. ‘Cause his name sounds Muslim, you know? I’m talking about the man whose alias, Richard Bachman, died of “cancer of the pseudonym,” not one of a whole bunch of football players (football as in soccer) by the same name. Seriously, there are a lot of Stephen Kings out there. And King would probably like it that way — that he’s just one manifestation of “Stephen King” who occurs in a million different ways in the world.

The dude is interesting. Even for me, someone who prior to six days ago had never read one of King’s books. He published Carrie when he was twenty-six. He’d already written four (unpublished) novels, and by the time this one, his fifth, was published, he was still three years younger than I am now! And Carrie simply exploded him into the American psyche. How’d he deal with that? Well, for one, he quit all jobs besides writing, FOREVER. My jealousy knows no bounds. For two, he started a long affair with drugs and alcohol that culminated in an intervention staged by his friends and family where they dumped out the contents of all of his icky garbage cans on his carpet. He beat the addictions and has been sober for the last twenty years. He even survived a collision with a mini-van, after which doctors wanted to amputate his leg. But he was like, “Screw that, touch my leg and I’ll make you bleed out your eyes. With my mind.” So I imagine.

The man has battled demons. If there’s a lot of gruesome, disturbing stuff in his writing, it’s really no big surprise. What IS quite a surprise is that for a guy whose bread and butter is supposedly hack horror writing, he’s inspired some of the greatest actors (Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Ian McKellan, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Hanks, Jack Nicholson, Sissie Spacek, Kathy Bates, etc., etc., etc.) to play his characters in some of the most beloved and critically acclaimed films of the last thirty years. My film major heart leaps a little at that, and it’s King’s special ability to triumph so prolifically over more than one medium that ultimately convinced me to give him a shot.

I chose Carrie as my introduction to the writing of Stephen King. Mostly because it was available, and another (!) film adaptation of it is coming out within a year. Carrie was King’s first published novel, and King himself admits it showed his amateur beginnings:

“I’m not saying that Carrie is shit, and I’m not repudiating it. She made me a star, but it was a young book by a young writer. In retrospect, it reminds me of a cookie baked by a first grader — tasty enough, but kind of lumpy and burned on the bottom.”

Even though it’s not touted as King’s greatest work, I don’t regret starting with Carrie. Now, it wasn’t a perfectly pleasurable experience; Carrie is a little girl who has been abused since the day she was born. As a parent, there are moments here that just hurt my heart. I hate reading about abused children. But King mostly avoids exploitation of Carrie’s horrific home life (need we call the mother religious? I’d rather just call her hella cray-cray) by creating a thought-provoking scenario that evokes the sadness of kids who live with off-their-rockers substance-abusing parents, and also can’t avoid the depressing codependency that you find even between family members who hate each other’s guts.

This is stuff that’s meaningful, and that gets at the root of King’s motives. Sure, it’s a novel about a telekinetic girl. But more fundamentally, it’s a novel about being an outcast, and about dysfunctional relationships, and about kids awkwardly negotiating that “coming of age” experience. Glad I’m past that. So glad.

Perhaps most striking to me was the way that King’s novel gets at the pent-up energy and anger and hurt in the outcast youth of our society. Sure, there was The Outsiders and The Catcher in the Rye before King got on the scene. But to my knowledge, King did something very new, and eerily prescient, in treating the breaking point of an abused teen on a destructive scale that went beyond personal tragedy and ended in nation-wide mourning. Carrie’s specific abilities are pure fantasy. But replace “telekinesis” with “semi-automatic weapons,” and you’ve got Columbine. Or Virginia Tech. Or Aurora, Colorado. This is not just gore-fest silliness, you Stephen King hating morons (why am I suddenly angry?). This is a powerful metaphor of youthful anxiety that smells a lot like teen spirit. And you know how Kurt Cobain ended up, may he rest in peace. Being a teenager kinda sucks. Stephen King really gets that.

While Carrie is a horrific (duh!) story, Carrie is not a demon, nor is she merely insane. Had King merely written a story about a psychotic killer, I don’t think it would have resonated and sold 16 million copies, or been adapted to film so many times. Carrie is the darker side of the coin to all of those later angsty 80s teen films. It’s an amped-up, blood-dripping Blackboard Jungle, a prophetic indictment of bullying and a justifiably melodramatic warning about youth under pressure.

Now, of course the book is not without faults. In comparison to an author like Kazuo Ishiguro, who offers a delicate, subtle path of discovery in the coming-of-age story Never Let Me Go, King can seem pretty on-the-nose. And despite its thoughtful, intelligent underpinnings, Carrie does sometimes seem a bit crudely thrown together, a mish-mash of perspectives and weakly presented scientific theory and sometimes contrived supernatural “gotcha” moments. But even with its technical limitations, there’s a soul to Carrie that surprised me, and I’d recommend it in a heartbeat, if not as a literary masterpiece, at least as a fascinating and surprising metaphor on social ills that seems particularly relevant in the present day. Yes, there’s sex and violence (though no more than I’ve read in a lot of Pulitzer winners), but this is Stephen King. You already knew this about him. The bottom line is that if this is what King is capable of in his first published novel, I’m pretty jazzed about exploring his more mature works.