Save the world, read a comic book

This year I’ve been working on filling in gaps in the books I’ve read. I’d never read Ender’s Game, Ringworld, Somerset Maugham, Gabriel García Márquez, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, and many more. As good as all those books are I feel they lack a vitality that I get from the comic books of Grant Morrison or Alan Moore. The novels all exist in a very finite universe limited to that book. They may alter the way I understand the world but they don’t give me any new tools to change it.

Morrison and Moore, at their best, write about the power of words to completely alter our perception of reality and change the world. Moore probably does this best in Prometha and Morrison in Animal Man, The Invisibles and The Filth (and to a lesser degree Seven Soldiers of Victory). According to Douglas Wolk’s review of Promethea Alan Moore said

“The idea of the god is the god”

Snow Crash almost goes there. It talks about the power of the written word and belief. You get a history lesson about Babylonian priests who wielded magic with their namshubs. But it doesn’t acknowledge the fact that there is a reader reading Snow Crash who can alter his word just like those priests. Gaiman goes down a similar path with American Gods where he acknowledges that a culture’s belief in something can make it real, or real enough. But he doesn’t take the extra step of acknowledging that his book is being read by someone who will alter reality by interacting with the world in a different way. Moore and Morrison go that extra step.