Imaginauts, or: The Fortress of Solitude

When I was organizing all my thoughts and ideas into what would become my senior project for SUNY Purchase, I think I already knew I would be nostalgic for it. And its true, both in looking back and my recollection of the time, that nostalgia weighed heavy in my mind. And for good reason; I surrounded myself with amazing humans, I spent the summer before being broke, dirty, and drunk, living up in Harlem, reading romantic books and old comics, trying to work life out, which flowed so nicely into my senior year at school. We all felt like we were on top of the world, doing really cool things, and while school was coming to a close, I really felt like I was just beginning.

My written thesis has been lost on my end (but hopefully-maybe still exist somewhere in a folder or a computer at Purchase), but it most likely contains a lot of thoughts and musings about the nature of comic books, and how I bent my ideas to fit so nicely in those degraded panels. This was right in the middle of super-heroes taking over the world (again); when I graduated we were a few months away from the first Captain America, and more than a year from The Avengers, an event that seems so commonplace now in movie theaters that people tend to forget that it was a pretty crazy-awesome-momentous thing. I wanted to take the things I liked about comic books, the things people didn’t like about comic books, and the things the art world in general over-used and make them feel fresh, at least to the people who never picked up a comic. Comic books inspired me (and still do), and I wanted to put a lot of what I was experiencing at the time- sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, cheap booze, love- and mix everything together.

For the project I ultimately made 11 pieces, with two that go together as a diptych if desired and one that, after its placement at our BFA showcase exists as a singular, non-photographed copy hanging above my bed at my childhood home. Besides one piece that was reworked months later, and a couple ideas and drawings here and there that never got off the ground, they are pretty chronological, and if you were privy to my life back then, could probably form a somewhat coherent story to how I was thinking and feeling at the time. They’re all Screen-printed on RIVES BFK paper (22”x30”) that was all hand dyed by myself with coffee. I wanted each piece to be reflective of old comic books, but not old comic books in the way that Lichtenstein and bad designers reflected them. It feels a little weird now that I had to defend my thoughts and ideas and love for what would later become a multi-billion dollar industry, but what can you do?

When I handed my thesis in to ensure my graduation, it was titled Imaginauts, but later, when discussing it with people, I called it The Fortress of Solitude. The first comes from the first story of Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo’s (awesome) Fantastic Four run, and the latter, of course from Superman. Now, I would probably say either one of the two because-hindsight 20/20-they both work and play at different things I was dealing with at the time. My friends and companions were real life explorers, and Imaginauts played with that quality, and put the ordinary things we were doing into extraordinary situations, (much like the best stories). At the same time, I was dealing with ideas that I was still figuring out, thoughts that were extremely close to me, but I always felt safe within the world that I had made for myself with my friends and mentors. So I sort of knew that I was living in an extremely cool time and armed with those ideas, I was making a strange blend of something really fresh, but grounded in ideas of deep nostalgia. I’ve returned to some similar ideas over the years, but when dealing with memories and nostalgia, some tend to, quite understandably, get homesick for a time past and lean on them like a crutch- something that I still have to fight myself about. So maybe now its less the entire fortress, but something more akin to the bottled city of Kandor; theres life and love happening here but now its just another artifact of Superman’s past that he keeps safe.

I ended with a quote from Will Eisner (via The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), that I don’t believe will ever stop enchanting me: “We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems.”