The comic book is also a legitimate metaphor for over-simplification for the purpose of innocent entertainment. The best graphic novels (and videos, T.V., and cinema) now demonstrate that the intention to entertain simply does not preclude the problematic and horrifying. The images and stories on the page and screen are visible too behind the choices both children and adults make. Treating images too simply is part of the denial that contributes to adults not understanding or being able to respond to very real and potentially explosive dilemmas. Put another way, even if one remains suspicious of the dark imagination, it is difficult to look at the industry generated by the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter franchises and argue that comic book notions of heroism, evil, evolution, apocalypse and power do not change the world.

 

Within this theme of violence and notions of progress, let’s consider an off-the page incident. Due to his planning and execution of the latest mass murders in Colorado, James Holmes is now infamous. Unless additional facts regarding conspiracy and accomplices are sufficiently validated, his name alone will be associated with "the worst mass shooting in the U.S. since the Nov. 5, 2009, attack at Fort Hood, Texas, [wherein] an Army psychiatrist was charged with killing 13 soldiers and civilians and wounding more than two dozen others."[i] The Toledo Blade went on to report the following:

As the new Batman movie played on the screen, a gunman dressed in black and wearing a helmet, body armor and a gas mask stepped through a side door. At first he was just a silhouette, taken by some in the audience for a stunt that was part of one of the summer's most highly anticipated films. But then, authorities said, he threw gas canisters that filled the packed suburban Denver theater with smoke, and, in the confusing haze between Hollywood fantasy and terrifying reality, opened fire as people screamed and dove for cover. At least 12 people were killed and 59 wounded in one of the deadliest mass shootings in recent U.S. history.[ii]

It is a common practice to characterize violence like this as “senseless.” This is becoming a more and more serious mistake. Some might say that, as an academic psychologist, I should probably be more reserved and scientific, clearly separating facts from opinion in discussing the tragedy before wielding even a poetically diagnostic pen. However, it is images that hold together the cultural complex through which horrors like this are interpreted. This process demands dirt-flying-over-the-shoulder excavation, and racing on foot to trace where their power comes from and wherever their convictions reach, just in case more understanding might become available to those with a mandate to prevent events like this from happening in the future.