Them’s Fightin’ Words

I do have a point this week but you need some back story first so just go with me for a bit…

I was reading an article the other day called “Fighting for our Lives” by Deborah Tannen.  It’s not about what you think, it’s about words.  (It was in an anthropology textbook so no link, sorry.)  The article discusses how we have, linguistically, become a confrontational society.  We are always using analogies about war or sports like boxing.  Headlines read “Storm Wallops Mid-West” or “Mr. So-&-So is fighting to save his store and his life.”

According to the article we are also big into attacking people (instead of ideas) these days.  Everyone learned in grade school that if you disagree with something someone says you need to attack the idea not the person (i.e. the IDEA is stupid not the person.)  Watch the news for five minutes and see if we are still following those rules.  Entertainers to politicians are personally being attacked every five minutes, then 37 people blog about it and 150 people leave a comment.  Tiger Woods is in the news this week.  Are we concerned about his golf game, nope we are concerned we might have missed one of the many women he allegedly slept with.

Do we ever stop to think about what it would be like to be Tiger Woods or worse his father or wife?  I personally have been interviewed and quoted many times and let me tell you what a joy it is to later hear (or read) about the things people who don’t know you are saying about you.  The point is we have become an attacking and more critical society.  What happened to the saying “if you can’t say anything nice about someone don’t say anything?”  That’s definitely gone out the window.

It seems we’ve turned into a society who loves conflict. Now, let’s be clear, I don’t think everyone has to agree and sit around holding hands and singing kumbaya…. but…

Why are we so negative? Does this negativity roll over into other aspects of our lives?

As a kid you could always spot the good guy (he wears white) and recognize the bad guy (in black.)  Metaphorically & literally speaking we’ve become a world full of a whole lot more colors, so are things still black and white?  Don’t you find the older you become the more shades of gray you recognize?

Pretty deep huh? What the hell does it have to do with comics you ask?

Well in the grand scheme of things nothing really but, I happened to be reading this article the same week we were awash in Lanterns… Black, Green, Indigo, Red, Orange, etc. I admit that although we’ve colored A LOT of issues of the Black Lantern series I haven’t read all of it.  Quite frankly I’m not 100% on all that is going on but even without reading it, you’d be hard pressed to find any comic sort of person that hasn’t heard of this phenomenon.

Black Lanterns are creepy, coming back from the dead, skeletal guys, who tend to kill everything (hmm bad guy alert?)  That leaves Green, Red, Orange, Indigo, Yellow, and whoever else I’m leaving out.  Are they automatically good guys since they aren’t black or do we find shades of gray (or other colors) in this story?  Sometimes the good guy does bad things (maybe for the right reason, maybe not), sometimes you have to help out an enemy, sometimes your bestest friend rises up from the dead and needs to be smacked… these things happen.  The question becomes is there a pure good guy? Where’s the white?  Come on you know it’s out there somewhere, as colorists we know you can’t have black without white so what’s the deal?

The article I read talks about all the negative emotions we are expressing (did I mention that all the lantern colors represent an emotion? Green=will; Violet=compassion, etc.) Now I don’t know if Geoff John’s is following my philosophical train of thought (or me his) but this appears to be a pretty nifty analogy of life.

I’m not sure how it will all turn out but the art has been fantastic, the stories I’ve gotten to read are all very cool, and it is a really cool idea.

In real life think about the things I mentioned and see if you notice the negativity seeping in… maybe we do need a few rounds of kumbaya.

Kristy Miller

VP, Development

Hi-Fi Design