The strangest man of all time!!

He is both. We all are.

When I was six or seven years old, I talked my grandmother into buying me an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man off the spinner rack at the drug store in the small town where she lived.

It was my first real superhero comic book, and for a long time, the only one I owned. I pored over it, taking every single word and illustration and advertisement very seriously. I don’t remember the issue number, but I remember that it featured the colourful and cartoonish villains, the Sinister Six.

Marvel’s magic attracts children like ants to a popsicle dropped on the sidewalk. That’s not news to anyone.

But it’s a concept that matters to me, because I lived it. I felt that magic first hand, as a child. That shared universe, which contains both godlike entities – literally surfing through space and devouring planets – as well as street-level heroes who bust up drug deals with their fists, and makes both seem equally important, is an unlimited playground for the imagination.

And I’m finding out, decades later, that an appetite for that magic is still alive within me, somewhere. Not to the same extent that it once was. And Marvel means something very different now than it did in the early 90s. But there’s still something there, on some fundamental level.

I found this out unexpectedly, having walked away from Marvel comics 20 years ago, and away from Marvel entirely once the MCU began to infect all screen-based entertainment, thanks in no small part to Disney’s involvement.

It’s been my four-year-old son who’s inadvertently reconnected me with these characters and their world.

In an effort to distract them for as long as possible from the churning cesspool of content that is YouTube, I let my kids watch Disney Plus. Yes, that same Disney who turned the Marvel brand into a form of Muzak that now permeates global consumer culture. A younger me would cringe so hard at this decision that his skin would slough off of his body, but you’ve got to let kids watch something, or they will drive you insane.

Kids need to see something. It’s how they make sense of the world and their place within it. Occasionally, they need to see something so fucking cool it’s just overwhelming. Magical moments. They define childhood, and if we let them, everything that comes afterward as well.

And I understand the impulse. I feel it deeply. Amidst all this crushing anxiety, and obligation, and mundanity, I want to see something.

I still want to see something. That impulse never goes away.

Three nights ago, I saw a weird green bar of light, just hovering in the sky near Shin-Osaka Station. Other pedestrians also stopped to look up at it, so I’m reasonably sure it was actually there.

What the fuck was that? I have no idea. I’ll never know, probably. But I won’t forget the moment when I saw it, and how that felt. I saw something.

When my son sees Spider-Man, and Black Panther, and Iron Man, and Hulk, he sees something. And it makes him think something really big is possible.

Already, in his mind, all fictional characters are divided into two distinct categories: yasashii (kind), and warui yatsu (bad guys).

He loved Anpanman when he was very small, but now that he’s big enough to resent it when you call him small, he’s developing a love for those costumed “kind” characters, and the emphatic ways in which they stop the warui yatsus.

While my son began his Marvel phase with curiosity about Spider-Man, he’s gravitated especially toward the made-for-little-kids incarnation of Hulk. Marvel is savvy enough now to have multiple versions of all its most iconic characters, one for every demographic. Hulk is the biggest, and strongest, and greenest. And he barely wears any clothes. He is literally every four-year-old boy’s dream scenario.

I can relate to this.

Spider-Man was my gateway drug as well. Through him, I tried Venom and Carnage, and from there it’s always a slippery slope into the X-Men. Back when I was a kid, it was harder to find Hulk. You had to know who to talk to. You had to get connected.

It took years for me to get into Hulk. Didn’t really click for me until high school.

If you’re not aware, Hulk is the huge, angry, radiation-monster into whom mild-mannered scientist Bruce Banner transforms when he loses control of his emotions. It’s very much a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde phenomenon. As if that reference is more culturally helpful than Hulk in 2023. Well.

Hulk was created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the early 1960s as a reaction to the nuclear panic at the time. Boy can I relate to that sense of panic. More on this later.

Hulk’s very first appearance came with the perfectly-crafted tag line: “Is he man or monster? Or… Is he both?” That’s catnip for storytellers.

In the intervening decades, the character has provided countless different creative teams a palette with which to paint stories about addiction, body horror, slapstick comedy, and the dualistic nature of man.

What lurks beneath the civilized surface? What if you couldn’t keep it in check? That’s what makes Hulk endlessly compelling.

Well, that and the fact that he smashes stuff up real good.

But the made-for-kids version of Hulk is cute and cuddly. As far as I can tell, there is no made-for-kids version of Bruce Banner. There’s only this friendly green dude called Hulk, and he’s Spider-Man’s buddy.

One evening my son and I were looking for something new to watch on YouTube, and we stumbled upon the Hulk cartoon from the 1990s. This one is dark, and made for much older kids. In the first episode, we find the military on the hunt for Bruce Banner, because they know Hulk must be stopped, and catching Banner is the only way to do it.

I’ll never forget the look of fascination on my son’s face as he processed all of this. I could hear the gears turning in his head.

“Why are they shooting Hulk? …Isn’t Hulk yasashii? …Why is Hulk being a warui yatsu?”

Try explaining moral ambiguity to a four-year-old. Especially in reference to his favourite fictional character.

I think his world changed inside of the 20 minutes it took to watch that episode. Rarely do you get to witness the exact moments in which “growing up” takes place. I’m glad I was with him for that. I hope I get to share in some more of those moments, whether they involve Hulk or not.

And that interaction got me wondering whether Marvel is still producing Hulk comics? Naïve of me, I know. Of course they are. I signed up for a free trial of Marvel’s online comics service, and read a few issues. Immediately entertaining. I plan to pick up some trade paperbacks of Al Ewing’s Immortal Hulk run from 2018, which posits Hulk as a kind of Lovecraftian nightmare.

Trade paperbacks because, unfortunately, reading comics on your phone or on the computer kind of sucks.

Hulk, though? Hulk still rules.

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First interlude

My job requires that I get up in front of groups of people and talk to them for hours on end. Often about difficult topics. Often in a language that is not my own. In order to make a connection with these people, I need to earn their trust, and that requires a certain degree of vulnerability. Or, at least, a convincing-enough display of vulnerability.

I never work alone. There is always at least one other instructor sharing the “stage” with me. This creates a sense of camaraderie which makes the attempt at being vulnerable somehow easier, because of the degree of trust required to deliver a successful two- or three-person presentation.

I say all this as setup for the following point.

Yesterday, one of my co-presenters got up in front of the group and revealed something incredibly vulnerable, for no reason other than to share a bit of his humanity with them. He wanted to demonstrate the power of building relationships of trust through open communication. His story was simple. He watched a movie that made him cry. He cried for ten full minutes, and afterward, felt incredibly cleansed, like he got out something that he needed to get out.

I’ve been thinking about that revelation. When is the last time I cried? I mean, really cried?

Not ten minutes ago, I did feel a single tear roll down my cheek, after watching the music video for Now and Then, the “final” Beatles song. The video is cheesy and not even especially well-crafted. At least not on a superficial level. I’m sure that it had a multimillion dollar budget and a team of the brightest emotion-manipulation engineers to ensure maximum tear output. All of the top comments on the YouTube video can attest to its success in that regard.

I wrote about the tear I shed in my journal. And now I’m writing about that here. I should edit this, but I won’t.

Because that single tear revealed something to me. I’m afraid to cry. I know that I need to. But I’m afraid of what will happen if I start. What if I can’t stop? What will be unearthed or brought to the surface or expelled if that flood starts and is allowed to flow unabated?

I have any number of reasons to cry. Personal ones and much larger ones. I am terrified of the potential implications of what’s happening in Israel and Palestine right now, for example. I am genuinely worried that future societies will consider November 2023 a month that occurred in the early stages of World War III.

I’m afraid that this newsletter should be called Numb instead of Calm. Maybe that would be more honest.

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Second interlude

Last night, I rode in the back of a taxi with a loved and valued friend.

Our conversation spanned an incredible array of topics and maturity levels, as is always the case. At one point, we talked briefly about writing. He suggested that some of the things I’ve written were things I didn’t want to write. I countered that I don’t look at writing as a series of individual, disconnected efforts.

I look at writing as something you either do or don’t do, over the course of your life.

I’m not a runner, for example. Never have been, never will be. But I am a writer. Even if I’ve rarely been published.

The writing is that other self, coming up from below the surface and wreaking its havoc.

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So this is me, trying clumsily to confront my Hulk, and assuming I’m Bruce Banner, and not the other way round.

Sure, the perfect dualism is really too cute and too tidy to be useful on a deep level. But it’s a place to start.

I do think there is someone inside of each of us that the self we present to the world is afraid to confront. Once Hulk smashes, the damage remains for Bruce Banner and everyone else to clean up.

Bruce Banner doesn’t own things, because he cannot predict when next Hulk will emerge and render those accumulations moot.

Banner relies on his five senses to deliver him simple pleasures, and lingers on those as best he can when they emerge. They’re what he has.

Similarly, the older I get, the more I value sitting in silence on a wooden bench, watching sunlight and flickering leaf-cast shadows play across the wrinkled trunk of a tree.