The Beauty of Failure: Samuel Johnson and Mark Gruenwald


 


Dammit, I don't want every piece about comics I write to be about dead friends. But my Earth-2 counterpart Peter Sanderson reminded me that it's the tenth anniversary of Mark Gruenwald's death. But Peter's already done a finer encomium than I could: after all, I missed out on Mark's ascendancy during the 90's comics boom: while I was getting in touch with my graphics side and things Macintosh, Mark was Executive Editor of Marvel, married again to a woman I've never seen nor met, deeply immersed in a pool I'd climbed out of and for which I'd lost an affinity I've never regained. And one day he was dead and amid the grief I felt I felt, shit, I've lost those years that I could have regained with one weekend together because we were brothers of the Bandar-Log and knew each other's secret names.

So instead I'm going to talk about Samuel Johnson . Dr. J is something of a personal hero, and that requires some explanation. I don't find Rasselas all that wonderful, and his criticism reminds me of great marble edifices rather than piles of gaudy machinery studded with Wimshurst machine s, which is my usual taste. No, I admire Johnson the outsider, the struggler, the man who fought for every ounce of recognition a class-heavy English society would dole out to him, defiantly gouging out a place for himself on the brutal basis that he thought more and wrote better than all those around him. But the real reason this man is a hero to me is that he took on a ridiculously impossible project and did it better than any one had a right to expect. He failed (of course), but that failure still created something so fundamental the today we think of it as something The Wallflower Order commissioned in 1538 when they decided to create modern English.

I'm talking about the Dictionary of the English Language. It's a polymath's wet dream of a project, and requires a hefty dose of arrogance beyond what the world can bestow. Those folks who know Dr. johnson through Boswell (or, sadly, more likely know him through a Dymo label picked up in a college survey course) as a flashing wit might find this bewildering: Oscar Wilde would never have written a dictionary! (Except maybe that part about oats. )
Wilde and Johnson were both brilliant and both outsiders, and both shot off the rotted parts of society with the same weapon--but Johnson's wit came from deep, careful, and systematic thought.

Which brings me to Mark and his Dictionary, a/k/a the Handbook of the Marvel Universe.

Mark and I, while comics fans, were of an imagination all compact, and we were scarcely alone in this: we were entranced, not by the men in tights, but by the outrageous world (and world of worlds) in which they moved. And wipe that smirk off your face: the Marvel Universe (and in nuce the DC Universe) was as amazing a fictional construct as anything world literature had ever seen. scores of writers and editors all worked on this dada cathedral, welding pipe A to pipe F, and dropping in the keystone to arches that other craftsmen didn't know they were making. (I can't talk about this without a brief adulatory mention of Roy Thomas . While the demiurgoi, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, were turning out creative energy by the square yard, it was Roy who, both out of sheer delight and also the cynical awareness that creating new characters for Marvel was basically giving them away free to the company, started to tie things together, systematize them, and give these elements definite relationships. In a medium that would whip up an alien race for each five-page backup story, Roy began to re-use, and connect. And we who watched and read shivered with delight as an immense canvas, far greater than the individual stories, unfurled.)

With Mark, these structures were a deep and abiding passion. As a fan, he published a fanzine called Omniverse--which neologism has found its way into SF and fantasy (Piers Anthony is one author who's used it.) And if you look in Omniverse #2, there's an article by yours truly, attempting to give Superman's power and origin some relationship to real physics. But Mark wanted to do for DC what had been done for Marvel--and to put forth a metafictional theory that brought these wonderful spiderwebs into relation to our big hard and dull world.
Mark could draw, he could write fiction--but he said time and again that the one job in the whole world he wanted was Continuity Cop. As somebody who could rattle off in order the villains in the first hundred issues of the Fantastic Four (I still can), I knew where he was coming from. And we knew, with a thrill down to our toes, that we were no longer the get-a-life fanboys writing letters about continuity glitches--we could shape. We could build.
Mark was always the most single-minded of us in that regard--and while I toiled away doing my bit in the stories I wrote to weld pipe A to joint F, and while Peter Sanderson took a path where he became at different times an archivist at both Marvel and DC Comics--becoming perhaps the only human being to read EVERY DC and EVERY Marvel comic--and not don a big carrot mask with fire at the top and run around in frogman flippers--Mark worked towards his goal with utter determination.

Mark got his Dictionary. It's a long jump from the English language to the Marvel Universe, and it was actually (once again) Peter Sanderson who wrote most of the entries the first go-round, the reason I can mention Mark and the Great Cham is that their intent was the same. More than a catalogue (Like George Olshevsky 's Herculean set of Marvel Indexes), and removed from the Bible that most team creative project tended to develop in TV and Hollywood), Mark wanted to take this magnificent thing and make sense of it.

Dr. Johnson failed, and his failure was beautiful. Without his big stake being driven into the ground, further theoretical work on language would have been that much harder. The problem, of course, was that Johnson's big stake was being driven not into ground but into water. Every use of language change language, if only submicroscopically, and if you look at meaning itself too closely, you tend to become incomprehensible.

And Johnson's Dictionary also did its damage: prigs could become self-righteous about orthography and act as if the meaning of a word was a thing now completely and satisfactorily determined. The world where Shakespeare could simply make words up while writing a play further faded from view.

Similarly, Mark's effort to make sense out of the Marvel Universe tended to cool the fevered inventiveness that made the Marvel Universe such a wild enormous place to begin with. Like Johnson's dictionary, it did tend to prevent fumblers and tyros who were neither Shakespeare nor Jack Kirby from blithely committing disfigurements, (with the world a better place for it) but it changed the collaborative nature of ye olde universe.

The political changes that changed Marvel Comics were things that Mark regretted as much as the rest of us--and Mark's grand rationalizing gave rise later, combined with an a new authoritarian Marvel, to wholesale top down modifications of the Universe that were badly thought out and as clumsily executed as a polo game played with bulldozers. One of the results of that is the fact that a Marvelite deciding to return to the fold after five or ten years, finds the castle surrounded by vast continuity brambles.

But Mark's vision was beautiful. And he devoted his large energies to his vision, and he ultimately failed, but his failure was beautiful.

So ave atque vale, Mark. Ten years into the undiscovered country. Hope it's working out well for you.

And yes, I've still got the red jumpsuit. It no longer fits, but I've still got it.

Posted: Sunday - October 15, 2006 at 11:31 AM        

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