On unlovable imaginary mentors
How totally unsympathetic characters, usually men, have stewarded me through the lowest points of my life
It’s important I say one thing now before we go any further: Dr. Manhattan was my patron saint. I recognize it’s a little inexcusable. But ever since I encountered the brilliant blue deity, the man reduced to crumbling quarks only to be rebuilt in rippling neon blue muscle, I was hooked by his 1950s bodybuilder physique and nonplussed demeanor. It’s not an exaggeration to say the good doctor crosses my mind most every single day, a long-stayed guest coming down the stairs. I wonder, “How would Dr. Manhattan deal with this?” and, for those familiar with his work, “Do I even want to consider how Dr. Manhattan would deal with this?”
His being an early spiritual guide would explain a lot of my behavioral issues. I’ve always had a shut-down mode, a kind of turning off from the world, going deep into my own castle, the intricate glasswork Dr. Manhattan built on Mars somewhere inside myself. I head there when my life hits a boiling point of dark absurdity. A man punching me in the side of the head on the corner of 4th and Market streets while my boss and I walk to Trader Joe’s for snacks. A man offering me his place to stay on the heels of a breakup before he begins massaging my thighs and kissing my shoulder. Waking up to a man, my father, beating his wife in the other room, her calling my name for help as I fiddle with the doorknob in the dark to flee.
For all of those tender breaks, I say to myself what Dr. Manhattan concluded in his time as an atomic god: “The existence of life is a highly overrated phenomenon.”
I got the Dr. Manhattan poster that came out with the Zack Snyder movie in the 2009 when I was 13. He lived on the back of my door at my mom’s house, the bedroom between the garage and the laundry room. Billy Cruddup riddled in muscles, his empty white eyes meeting mine as I desperately did jumping jacks to Michael Jackson in an attempt to lose weight. I would fail to impress on the raid in World of Warcraft, strike out at the Magic the Gathering draft tournament, or, more likely, have spent the day in bed after leaving school at lunch. I remember that shotgun room for all my sobbing over photos of family, curled in a ball in a silver Papson chair like a tadpole.
It was in middle school that I was diagnosed with celiac, my father remarried, and I learned my dad was a convicted sex offender. Those years are a blur; pieces come through in blips, like remembering a night in seventh or eighth grade when I walked around Seattle all night until I stopped at the now-demolished Hurricane cafe at 1 or 2 in the morning, the memory will-o-wisping into me as I jog through the hills of Cobh.
But Dr. Manhattan would point out these events, and remembering them, is meaningless. I’m just a collection of electricity, water, and hormones firing in a clearly unstable collection of inputs and outputs. This thinking is overly reductive, and not useful in living by my values. That’s what the many therapists in the Acceptance Commitment Therapy school I’ve seen throughout my life chirp in the back of my mind when I return to these dark thoughts. It’s nihilism, it’s defeatist, it’s simulated universe bullshit. It’s what I call my lower frequency thinking, or in Alcoholics Anonymous what we call “stinkin’ thinkin’.”
I couldn’t help it as a kid, hitting nitrous whippets to Cat Stevens and Kendrick Lamar and, in my lowest moments today, I often return to that sick strain. In so many moments, this detached reasoning is not just attractive. It’s the one approach and paradigm, my one inspiration, that strikes the right balance of intellectualism and self-pity. It’s the perfect high.
It’s important to call attention to one thing: there are more than just problematic men in comic books to idolize. Bon Clay and Ivankama in One Piece come to mind, two delightful and zany queer gender-bending godsends for me in high school. Kitty Pryde’s ever-expanding deus ex powers in the face of adversity, and her sudden, lovely complexity in the Ultimate universe. Nausicaa. Ramona Flowers. Thi Bui’s family in The Best We Could Do. And there are mentors in the real world far, far more important to pay attention to. But here we are in the realm of make believe and nostalgia, core memories and puzzle pieces that come to us in intimate dreams, far less practical pictures than aspiring to live like Octavia Butler or Bobby Sands.
Thanos was an inspiration of mine in 2018. I recognize it’s a little inexcusable. This was not just the year that Josh Brolin took his jaw — a mountain that’d make the Crimson Chin weep in envy — through Infinity Wars. It was also the year I moved to San Francisco on the fumes of, likely, the most intense romantic relationship I’ll ever be lucky enough to see end. I had moved from my self-pitying mentorship days to predominantly Buddhism and orthodox Christianity, a heavy foundation of critical race theory by the likes of David Stovall, bell hooks, and Derrick Bell beneath it all.
His purple lordship as inspiration snuck up on me, didn’t really square on paper with the pedagogy of the oppressed. Coming out of college I was feeling a lot stronger than when I was a kid: I’d gone to treatment for an arresting eating disorder, and was, on the whole, a lot more optimistic about life. I did, however, move from pointlessness to brazenness. A favorite word of mine at the time was “bold,” taking big swings that bordered on or pushed past recklessness. The jump from college to this intense romance was a part of that cartography. Sure, doing a lot of cocaine in a shitty apartment in Seattle and taking turns with my ex spending the day crying is not a lot like battling the Avengers in Wakanda. But Thanos was the weird, out of the blue role model I needed at the time.
I, like legions of annoying people on the Internet and in the moldy corners of thousands of comic book stores going back through the aeons, read the comics growing up. Yes, this is the cultural cache I want it to be and is not embarrassing. Thanos was always smart, focused, and, yes, evil. I didn’t read a ton of comics where he was featured as a kid; I’d encounter the mad titan through Fantastic Four adventures here and there, and he was a starring antagonist in Annihilation which I returned to for the art alone. Unlike Dr. Manhattan, he was uncomplicated. His approach to the universe was a cruel simplicity: persevere. Overcome one’s foes, call bluffs.
His panache, and his resilience, impressed me. Aforementioned daddy issues contributed to it, I'm sure. In third grade, at my friend’s house down the street, I would make a Marvel Legends Thanos action figure sing Blackbird by the Beatles and Elton John’s Tiny Dancer. In the company’s companion book Marvel Universe comic historians wrote about Thanos and Silver Surfer’s dueling commitments like both were knights serving far away lords, not good or bad. Just vigilant, just priests in opposing churches. Like his character in the comics, he was always around in my life, persevering.
I was hooked when I saw the Avengers’ post-credit scene in 2012 teasing his landfall. I was proud none of my casual friends or hopelessly lost high school girlfriend recognized him. No one cared about or knew who Thanos was until he wrecked shit hard in 2018, the second coming of Empire Strikes Back. My MCU relationship may have soured over time — some of those movies are not just bad but full-on military propaganda — but Thanos remained large in my mind.
When I saw Infinity Wars in a movie theater in Daly City, I was enraptured. He spoke of willpower, the strength to overcome. I didn’t want all the planet-ending genocidal stuff. But I wanted willpower. In a universe I’d often found so needlessly cruel, so outrageously painful, I wanted the courage to hold on. I wanted willpower more than anything.
I knew no one when I got to San Francisco. In fairness, my nonna had a cousin in some place called Walnut Creek. This person had lunch with me once and said good luck! (She’s from the non-Italian side of the family.) Even my soon-to-be ex girlfriend landed outside the city, south in Santa Clara. So, I knew no one. I hit Couchsurf and found a place in the Bayview with a man who’d massage and kiss me, hold me in my loneliness. I went out in the Castro and SoMa constantly and drank like I had a hole in my stomach, finding myself in stranger’s cars held up for cash and coke. I was, as friends and family relayed to me later, a big concern.
In that hazy miasma I got my own place, just after seeing the movie. I borrowed my sort-of sugar daddy’s van and got a humongous desk for free off Facebook Marketplace. It was the size and weight of a husky sixth grader, also known as me in 2009. I thought it would be the perfect companion for turning my life around. My new place was a room in a house with a flight of stairs running from the askew, San Francisco-ass sidewalk outside. I didn’t think I could muscle it up those stairs.
But I thought of Thanos, his sitting outside that hut and resting in his glory. Hard-earned winning. Flowers and sun sprouted around him like dazzling rays off a disco ball. Step by step I pulled and pushed the desk up the stairs. I jimmied it between the door and into my room, shoved it against the wall where it sat for more than six years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere in all my life. Above the desk I wrote a list of goals, quotes to repeat to myself in low moments, and inspirations. “Thanos — willpower.”
It’s important to note this here at the end of things: there are darknesses worth praying to. And are there other dark deities in the comic book world for me? You bet. No less inspiring to the general audience, nor should they be. As my mid-20s crept into my late 20s, Mike Mignola’s demonic anti-hero became my animus. I’m talking, of course, about Hellboy.
The gothic graphic novel is praised much like Watchmen for subverting the medium, incorporating English and Gaelic mythology alongside a slew of other religious and cultural inspirations. Hellboy is a demon who is sent to earth on a fluke, raised by a government agency trying to understand his purpose, and countless warlocks and demons do their best to nurture his evil origins. While I find all of that cool, what I most see in the titular character is abandon. He saunters from adventure to adventure smoking in a duster, cursing and gambling, slurring and shooting. These days, I need abandon like a sapling needs sun.
After landing in California and seeing to that list above my desk, I came further into the fold on stoicism. Sadly so did a lot of douchey tech bros and divorced dads. I still like the general dogma as it gave me a lot of what I enjoyed about orthodox Christianity without all the terrible politics. The idea of experiencing all my emotions and thoughts each day without letting them control my life appealed to me. I became familiar with defeat and rejection, trial and error, and attempting after attempting. As I got my first white collar job and took my writing more seriously, I needed more than willpower. I needed acceptance.
Hellboy’s origin story is so unlike Superman, Iron Man, any of the other men. He’s not even a man: he’s a boy, and a harbinger of world-ending apocalypse at that. All of his life, all of the comic’s short run, is about him fighting against his destiny, snapping off the horns that grow on his massive red head to keep his sinister nature at bay. When he dreams of splitting the world in two, is tempted over and over by foes and even told of his ultimate role as a prince of hell, he just grits his teeth and does his job. He copes — hence the drinking and general rude behavior — but he always shows up, he always does his part.
The sins of my father, my own issues, and the various political commitments I’d assigned to myself were not going to be solved by avoidance or a mind over matter approach. Some of those things were, are, never, ever going to get better. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to summon my hardest-working self to face them and work on them whenever opportunity calls. So I do.
I want that understanding, the knowledge that it is good to do yours and get by. I want to look my inevitabilities in the eye and shoulder on. I want to know life is a pointless dog-eat-dog slugfest and cling on anyways, the hedgehog in my Irish garden burrowed in the soil despite the storming winds at night.
In my deepest sadness I turn toward solitude and detachment, high-minded pointlessness on Mars. When I needed a buff, Thanos’ warrior king attitude of might equals right kept me upright, helped me hulk that desk up those stairs. But for the living, for the daily driving, Hellboy’s ethos mentors me. His determination to do right despite the powerful knowledge that this disappointing world will continue to spin toward its inevitabilities, with or without my skill-less input, inspires me. Which heroes, real or imaginary, are wise enough, or well-lived enough, to don their cape if they knew in the end it wouldn’t matter? Those are my heroes. That’s where you’ll find me when the tides rise and the wildfires choke the sky.
“When I die, if I die,” a mermaid tells Hellboy on one of his adventures. “I’ll be nothing more than seafoam on a wave.” He says nothing, joins her in looking toward a distorted radiant light above.