Fantasy’s dirty little secret. Superheroes and fantasy…zombies. Trolls. Magic. Dragons. Mind powers, dimensional travel. If the art of the comic is a medium, why is so much of it centered around the single genre of mindless escapism that has saturated all media? I tend to think it’s because readers don’t realize what really makes a good story a good story. And why should they? Nobody’s forcing anyone to like what they like. But writers in the act of writing, take on the burden of creating something worth reading, else why do it?

It seems very clear that the majority of fantasy writers are interested more in the genre than the medium.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a great deal of really excellent fantasy comics out there but there’s something profoundly simple that distinguishes the good from the bad. Something seemingly unapparent to the great Lion’s share of people out there who attempt to do it. What is this all encompassing maxim that can mean the difference between comics that keep an audience coming back for more and an audience that doesn’t? While it may be simple-minded to think that it’s one thing, my own evaluation is that most of it can be attributed to this simple rule that is so often ignored. As a publisher of comics I get a good many submissions of work and though I don’t usually publish works of pure fantasy, that doesn’t prevent me from having to evaluate it.

I should mention that this is not just a rule for fantasy but for ALL creative writing and something any creative writing course will tell you. It is essential to write what you know. There are several layers to this statement that should be mentioned before explaining why this is the case. By “writing what you know” I mean you can only draw from your own experiences when creating a work of fiction, never mind if it’s fantasy or historical or futuristic or not. That’s merely window dressing. The meat of any story comes from within and draws from one’s own experiences.

Let’s take two fairly different examples from literature. Ernest Hemingway and JRR Tolkein. Both writers of fiction, both from roughly the same generation. But that’s where the similarity ends. Or does it?  They were both soldiers in WWI, both saw the horrors of war first hand. They both became intimately aware of human suffering, of the complexity of the human condition with all its imperfections, paradoxes, desires, and hopes. And were witness to people at their most noble and most base. Certainly they wrote in opposite genres. Hemingway writing from the most personal of autobiographical experiences. But did Tolkein not write from his own experiences? I would argue that his time in the trenches was integral to what would become the lord of the rings. In fact he wrote most of the back story while trying to survive in those trenches. “But what about all the fantastic elements to Tolkien’s work?” You might ask. Yes, no doubt he had a brilliant imagination. But one that was rooted in a lifetime of study of ancient culture. As a doctor of anglosaxon and among the most respected historians of ancient European cultures, he was well equipped to lift from history to create a structure to his work. He also worked from a very personal and passionate viewpoint on the destruction of nature by industry. The metaphor or what he called “applicability” was what gave the fantasy teeth. It made us accept hobbits and orcs and elves as real. “Why?” “Why can’t I create a world of my own with nothing but my imagination as my guide?”

The answer is simple. Nothing comes from nothing. Or more to the point, everything comes from somewhere. To assume that a story comes only from “imagination” is to ignore the fact that we are all products of our experience. What may seems like a totally creative work with no basis in anything is almost always going to show itself to be a variation on something that’s already been done and in many cases, a pale imitation. My point is, since we must work from some point of reference, it is important that we are aware of our reference. “What about works from people like R.Crumb?” His psychedelic work seems to have no point of reference, no conscious structure.” While it’s true that much of Crumbs psychedelic comics are somewhat free form, to think that they are without reference is incorrect. By the time Crumb entered his psychedelic phase, he was already an accomplished artist, having suffered through years of drudgery at American greetings and his own tortured childhood. These experiences along with his being well read and very knowledgable of outsider culture fueled his rebellion against all things “normal” and influenced these comics greatly. And of course his use of psychedelic drugs didn’t hurt either.