I just finished reading the wonderful Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, edited by Sean Howe. Sean sent me a copy after he interviewed me about the good old days in the Marvel Comics Bullpen for a book he’s doing on the history of Marvel, and now that I’ve had a chance to read it, I regret not having come across it on my own when it came out back in 2004.

It features essays on comics by 17 writers such as Jonathan Lethem, Brad Meltzer, Aimee Bender, and Greil Marcus, and each of them spoke to me. It’s as if the book was written for me alone. Of course, that shouldn’t stop you from tracking down a copy, since if you’re bothering to read my blatherings here, you’ll probably find it enjoyable, too.

The most moving essay in the book was “Oui, Je Regrette Presque Tout” by Glen David Gold, which concerns his conflicted feelings about collecting. It begins—”All stories of collecting are about self-loathing, self-love, and self-deception, confused with the piquant cologne of loathing, love, and deception that drenches the object so desired.” The Lethem piece on Jack Kirby and growing up in Brooklyn comes a close second. (I think you can also find it here over at the London Review of Books, though that might only be an alternate version.)

But the passage I’d most like to share with you today is from Lydia Millet’s piece on the dream world of Windsor McKay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. These ending paragraphs resonated with me, because they relate to my own issues as I struggle with what constitutes a story:

It strikes me that the main difference between self-reflective fiction and fiction that wants primarily to tell a story—at least in our culture—may be an assumption about what constitutes power.

Storyteller fiction often seems to work on the assumption that people run the world, and that people are in fact the center of the universe. Real power, this storyteller fiction seems to say, is power over other people.

And so storyteller fiction is chiefly about individual’s relationships to each other, the ins and outs of their romances and family dynamics and career paths and triumphs over obstacles. Further, it is written as though all ultimate truths lie in personal relationships. More than that, truth lies the the narrative line of these relationships, in the logical and orderly sequence of what happens, from beginning to middle to end. And all of what happens has to happen between people and other people. In general, with just a smattering of exceptions, what is most important does not happen between people and the rest of the beings in the world, people and their perceptions of the world itself, or even people and their own inner workings. Meaning resides in what humans do to each other, and just as there must be story, there must also be meaning. A world without meaning would be too cold to live in.

Not only that, the meaning must be highly visible. It should announce itself boldly.

Fiction that is fill of self-consciousness, on the other hand—fiction of language, so called experimental fiction, naval-gazing fiction, even, prose or graphic—presumes a more subtle, submerged and ineffable universe in which humans, for all their foibles and strokes of genius, are powerless, in which meaning may exist but can never be grasped. It acknowledges with every phrase of its breath that people are only a small part of the world, and recognizes that somewhere in the air and beyond our fingertips is a vastness before which we can do nothing.

But it is not silenced by this. It may tremble at the sights or revel in it, but before and after everything it shows how beauty brims all over, with or without significance.

There’s a lot more food for thought where that came from, so I recommend that you try to get your hands on a copy of Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers! Think of it as this millennium’s All In Color For A Dime.