Man, remember when Stephen Colbert tried to run for president? Wasn’t that awesome?
Marvel Comics sure thinks so. In the Marvel Universe, Colbert’s still running. And gathering speed. That’s a pretty goddamn cool thing, in my humble opinion. Wired.com reports, interviewing Marvel editor-in-chief Joe Quesada, and the Webhead’s writer, Mark Waid. Interview with Joe Quesada and Mark Waid.
On an unrelated note, I think Colbert’s becoming a pretty remarkable figure, passing beyond the bounds of comedy (brilliant comedy, might I add) into what the more pretentious of us might label ‘performance art.’ He somehow manages to lever his celebrity into whole new realms of historic memorialization: from getting a spider named after him, getting his own ice-cream, and now he’s got an ongoing cameo in Spider-Man. He’s becoming a kind of new take on celebrity; a self-aware, self-satirizing kind of media vampire. (I mean that in the best way possible.) The more he feeds, the more powerful he becomes! In that regard, perhaps he’s perfect for a comic book. Few comedians have ever accomplished something so widespread, not even the immortal Yakov Smirnoff.
I’ve written before on the presence of the intangible, and the new realm of popular conception, on our behavior before (on the Anti-Emo Riots in Mexico, here) and Colbert seems to me to be a new breed of celebrity/pop-cultural entity. (PCE, for short.) A PCE traditionally has existed solely as a passive thing to be observed, that has little effect on the real world. But again, as with the anti-emo riots, with Colbert, we’re beginning to see things from that intangible world start affecting the rest of us, even altering (in however small ways) the course of history. These new breed of PCEs are blending into the realms of politics and even into your day-to-day life- Sarah Palin’s a great example. While the old guard of politician are still having trouble adopting a larger than life persona, but Palin is a perfect of example of a character, as opposed to a real person. It’s what makes her so popular. After all, she’s cute and well-written.
(More on PCE’s after the jump…)
Or, as I wrote before, think of your friends, or kids in high school. More than ever, we’re beginning to see youth adopt the garb of a larger, greater faction as a means of self-identification, whether it be the fanatical devotion to a band, or a style of dress, our pop-cultural memes and fashions are more and more what define us in the eyes of the world. It’s pop-cultural feudalism out there; be careful with whom you align your holdings. Even supposedly intelligent people subscribe to this manner of existence: think about how many rabid liberals or self-righteous conservatives you know, how many academics that will arbitrarily defend their position without regard to any other viewpoints, or (this is the easiest one) how many religious people believe solely in peculiar grace- that is to say, only they will be saved, of all religions.
I myself choose a PCE representative archetype, for convenience’s sake: I used to be an hipster, and now I’m a geek or nerd. However, being a geek’s my choice, these days. I’m no more a geek than I am a jock, or a hipster, or academic, or a preppy, or any other character class you could imagine. I’m just myself, and I have an interest in whatever I like. The geekery merely keeps away people who I don’t feel like talking to, or who aren’t willing to look beyond it to the human beneath. I’d encourage you all to think seriously before choosing your own character class: this is reality as RPG. Just don’t forget that it’s a game.
It seems like that the old concept of what makes a man a man is forgotten, replaced by whatever symbol we choose to use as a microcosm of our identity, so that we can be understood and catalogued quickly. Well,so it goes. Each blog entry, each vlog on YouTube, each new T-shirt, puts us deeper into the game. After all, the only way out’s to play, right?
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