Keys
I’ve never been the biggest fan of Krypto the Superdog. Always seemed a bit of a stupid concept, even when I was little, with the thought balloons and the powers and everything. I quite liked Ace the Bat-Hound though, so it wasn’t just an anti-Silver Age story thing.
I wasn’t keen on Krypto’s modern-age return, even though I think Jeph Loeb’s take was interesting (namely, that a dog with Superman’s powers would be an absolute disaster), but that’s mostly to do with the really shitty Return To Krypton storyline that was running at the time. And then I read Morrison’s All-Star issue with Krypto in it, and finally understood the concept.
I get that a lot with Morrison. Sometimes it takes a writer like him to make sense of otherwise crappy ideas. I mean, as Superman stories go I’m far more of a Golden Age fan than of the chubby Silver Ager, and I usually loathe the shoe horning of Sixties goofiness into more recent runs (like Return To Krypton, in fact), but All-Star really did make something brilliant out of something a bit crap.
It doesn’t take much, I find, to have my opinion changed on something. Usually, all the bits are there, it just takes a single key to unlock everything. Maybe not a key, maybe a lockpick. You know, like in Elder Scrolls, or Splinter Cell, when you’re in that mini-game that stands in for picking a door lock, where you kind of jiggle the right-hand stick until the tumblers slot into place, and you get that satisfying click-thunk that opens the door. It’s like that, but in real life.
When it comes to Krypto, all I needed was to see a young Superman playing catch with his dog, but on the moon. Just a boy and his pet, but on a huge, epic, Superman-type scale. Click goes the tumblers, and suddenly I understand the point of Krypto. Also, this Krypto cover is awesome, and I want it as a poster really badly.
It’s not just comics this happens with. More than once, there are songs I hear that I don’t quite understand until the lock gets picked. Like “Feathers”, a Coheed and Cambria single from the last album. At first, it seemed just like an alright kind of record, and I didn’t get why they chose it for a single release. Then I heard it live, and it was awesome, and it’s really one of the best tracks on an excellent album. Or maybe I’m just easily influenced. Or fickle, perhaps.
I’m not sure how I feel about how English literature is taught in schools, and I tend to think that it just didn’t quite suit me. I know a lot of people who really appreciate the things they learned in their Lit classes, and the tools it gave them to understand what they read. A conversation I had with a friend a while ago still sticks with me, because my mate was so glad she did To Kill A Mockingbird at GCSE as she wouldn’t have appreciated it otherwise. See, I couldn’t disagree more. It’s one of my favourite books, and analysing it in school would have killed it for me. Shit, there were books I used to like that I hated once we were done with them in the classroom.
The problem comes down to keys, or rather how we find the keys. English Lit just works for some people, but it didn’t for me. Take Shakespeare; now, there’s one writer who just cannot be appreciated from being pulled apart and scrutinised by a classroom full of bored thirteen year olds. Up until recently, as in last year, I still had no appreciation whatsoever of his work. Then a couple of things made the tumblers rattle over.
First of al, I read about a Canadian comedy drama called Slings & Arrows over on Siskoid’s blog (think it may have been this bit) that sounded interesting, despite being about The Bard. And it’s really good. Really well written, very funny. But more importantly, the main character (played by Paul Gross, who was Fraser in Due South) speaks so well about Hamlet, that I actually started to understand where the heck the play was coming from.
As an aside, this is how the real information revolution will work. Not from big changes and social phenomena, global trends that make everyone love particular brands, although that’s always going to happen, but from more people being able to connect with smaller things they would never have found otherwise. A short run Canadian comedy from a few years ago? I never, ever would have found out about that in any other way than in the haphazard mode things are distributed over the internet.
About the same time, I went to see an open-air Everyman production of Midsummer Night’s Dream at St Fagans, the Welsh folk museum. And it was hilarious, seriously funny, and I realised that Shakespeare’s work is almost completely reliant on the delivery of the actors. Reading it just doesn’t have the same effect. These things together picked the lock, and I understood the man’s writing far better than I ever had before. I watched the Ian McKellan Macbeth from the 70s, and was completely engrossed, even though the exact same thing had bored me to tears at school.
All that said, I doubt anything will make me want to read about Streaky the Super-Cat.
