Can Superhero Comics Really Transmit Esoteric Knowledge?

Summary

I may be well placed to answer that question, for my home study resembles a UFO crash site. Take a look (colour plate 11). My desk purports to be an old aluminium airplane wing (it's not). I sit in an “aviator chair” to read. A “propeller” above me functions as a chrome ceiling fan (it actually is a ceiling fan). Basically, I sit and think in what looks like a dismembered plane from the WW II and early Cold War era – the actual origin of the UFO phenomenon and all of its subsequent American extraterrestrial invasion (read: Cold War) mythologies. Superheroes, particularly a life-size mercurial statue of the Silver Surfer, that pop-cosmic transformation of Hermes (on a silly Californian surfboard), and traditional religious iconography populate the room further, significantly confusing any attempt to place it (or me) in a particular mythological register, either “classical” or “contemporary,” either “East” or “West,” either “high” or “low.” That is all intentional in this particular physical space that is also a kind of extended mind – my own.

The same is true of my office at the university. Undergraduate and graduate students, faculty colleagues, administrators, and visitors have all walked into this space and expressed something between delight, awe, and query. It is a scene of beautiful excess. A few thousand books line the walls and stack totteringly high on the floor, each a different colour, each encoding a lifetime of human experience and thought in some form. The question always comes fairly quickly from the visitor, and it is always the same question: “Have you really read all of these books?” My answer is always the same: “A library is a sign of desire, not of accomplishment.” I am smiling as I say it. My visitors giggle in return. Or in relief. I think they are happy to hear that I have not read all of those books.

Amidst all of those books that I hope to read dwell any number of superheroes and teasing pop-cultural images. A bust of Spider-Man, with those hypnotising alien eyes, gazes down from above me, to stare into the eyes of whoever has just sat down.