Monday, November 30, 2009

Hideous Energy

We are all objects in motion for a reason, but what's the reason? I thought about it one day, and I decided the answer based on Frankenstein.

Frankenstein was the doctor, and most everyone knows that; if you haven't read the novel then you've seen "Monster Squad," and their monster test would have informed you pretty quickly. The doc had the same problem his creation ended up dealing with, until the poor piecemeal bastard disappeared into the cold.

Doc Frankenstein couldn't stop himself. Just like Dr. Jekyll, Dorian Gray, the Invisible Man...um, Lord Voldemort, all of these characters needed to act, to seek out whatever they were after, and they absolutely could not stop themselves.

The year I last read Mary Shelley's novel is steadily fading away into the past, so I'm not sure why, right out of my head, Victor Frankenstein wanted to reanimate a dead body. I can take a guess, but it would be goofy conjecture, me aiming for cheap laughs. The monster, though, I'm fairly sure, wanted to live the life of a normal man. Not only that, he wanted a life of the mind.

Something had to drive these guys, something that could maybe be called "ambition," which is too limiting of a descriptor.

Why would Vic Frankenstein go ahead and gather up body parts, sew them together, then make sure lightning struck the whole mess? He couldn't NOT do those things. He was compelled. What, exactly, was compelling him though? The same thing that compelled his monster to get up and walk around: energy.

More than that though. There's potential energy in a spring, and it can maybe become Kinetic, but those two things sound boring, right? They're so scholarly. The energy inside someone that never allows them to stop, urging them on and on and on until they're accidentally reanimating dead guys or turning themselves invisible, is something way worse. Terribly miraculous.

A Hideous Energy.

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I'm compelled to seek out comic books, and anything that has to do with them. Since I can't stop this, I figured I might as well dive in, so I created this blog. I'll be interviewing any creator who will have me, asking whatever I can get my head to think up, and hopefully it won't suck. Come back, read an interview or two, maybe a review, maybe just some rambling.

-Austin