A Hundred Thousand Worlds
As they travel west, encountering superheroes, monsters, time travelers, and robots, Val and Alex are drawn into the orbit of the comic-con regulars. For Alex, this world is a magical place where fiction becomes reality, but as they get closer to their destination, he begins to realize that the story his mother is telling him about their journey might have a very different ending than he imagined.
A knowing and affectionate portrait of the pleasures and perils of fandom, A Hundred Thousand Worlds is also a tribute to the fierce and complicated love between a mother and son--and to the way the stories we create come to shape us.
My Review
I thought this book was going to be kind of goofy but it was so much more. Yes, there was moments that had me laughing and smiling but this story was about love, friendship, loyalty, magic, superheroes, and happy endings.
Every character introduced in this story had a purpose and a distinct voice. For example, Val used to be in a sci-fi show. Yet, she does not wear the celebrity banner; instead, her favorite role is playing "Mom". She has her hands full with Alex. He is full of wonderment and wisdom. I like how he believed that there was magic still out in the world. Additionally, the story that he co-authored with Brett was great. Brett is a writer/illustrator of a comic series. Alex and Brett's bond brought out the best in each other. Brett treated Alex with respect and in turn Brett got some of his youth back.
Then, there is Gail. She is a female comic book writer. She does not let the fact that she is in the minority keep her from staking her claim. I like her "can do" attitude.
Finally, as I was reading this book, I was transported into the story. It was like I was a fellow companion with the group as they traveled. I hope to one day visit Comic-Con in person and not just in the story books. True comic fans will appreciate and be thrilled with this book.
A Conversation with Bob
Proehl,
author of
A HUNDRED THOUSAND WORLDS: A Novel
Q: Your novel A HUNDRED THOUSAND WORLDS follows several characters
across the country attending a series of comic book conventions. When and why
did you become a comic fan?
A: When Superman died. I was a big baseball card collector before that
(which makes me sound a thousand years old), and there was all this hype about
how much the issue where Supes died was going to be worth. But by the time I
got my dad to take me to the comic book store, the first print was sold out and
I was stuck with l think a fourth printing. Since it wasn’t worth anything, I figured I might as
well read it. Not only did Supes die, but it set up a whole other story that
would continue the next week.
It was the serial nature of it that pulled me in at first, and the epic
scope. These huge stories that would go on and on, week after week. We lived in
the suburbs, so I would either bike into Buffalo on the weekends, or give my dad
a list on Wednesday to pick up on his way home from work. It was the ritual of
it too. Growing up in the suburbs, you need ways to mark time. Wednesdays were
new comics days. They still are.
Q: What inspired you to write about the relationship between a mother
and son?
A: The setting for this book grew out of my own interests, but the
story grew out of having a kid in my life. I was a new stepdad to a (then)
eight year old when I sketched out the initial the idea for the book. At that
time, the friendship between Brett and Alex was going to be more central and
the relationship between Val and Alex was secondary and drew a lot on my wife
and my stepson. But this book got put on the backburner for a while, and by the
time I got down to writing it, my relationship with my stepson had changed
pretty drastically. I was reckoning with what it meant to be a parent, and
figuring out the kind of parent I wanted to be. So in addition to a sort of
closely observed relationship, the dynamics between Val and Alex started to
include my thoughts and anxieties about raising a kid. About how you function
as an adult with drives and desires, and also as a parent, and the way those
two things are constantly pulling at one another. Parent-child love is such a
sanctified thing, it becomes tough to talk about in any complicated way, and I
really wanted to explore all the currents that move back and forth within that
bond, that trouble it and ultimately strengthen it.
Q: Superhero characters are a massive cultural commodity, are more
people reading comics thanks to big box office releases? If no, is there
anything cultural fans of these characters could benefit from by reading the
comic books?
A: I don’t think there’s as much crossover as there could be from
superheroes in the movies and on TV to reading comics. It can be daunting to
get started on reading superhero comics, not to mention confusing. In comics,
as I’m writing this, Bruce Wayne isn’t Batman, Superman can’t fly, Thor is a
woman, and Supergirl doesn’t even have a monthly comic book. So in the rare
instance someone might walk out of the movie theater and into their local comic
book shop, you might not see anything that matches what you saw on screen. Not
to mention the fact that comics have a visual and formal language all their own
that can be somewhat opaque on a first reading.
But there are so many good places to start, whether it’s with superhero
comics from the Big Two, or the amazing depth and breadth of creator-owned
stuff that’s out there right now, or manga, which I don’t really know the first
thing about but a lot of it looks super cool. And in a weird way, the fact that
the economic stakes of comics are lower means that the creative stakes can be
much higher. The sheer level of imagination in comic books is pretty
staggering. Finding an “in”, or finding the right book for you, can be tough,
but a good bookseller, or comic book store employee, or geeky friend, should be
able to listen to what you’re interested in and point you towards something
you’ll adore. Or, seriously, ask me. I have loads of opinions. Loads.
Q: San Diego Comic Con, and its offshoots, are a huge part of our
entertainment culture with hundreds of thousands of fans making the pilgrimage
every year to see their favorite artists, actors, writers; dress up as their
favorite characters and generally geek out with their fellow fans. A HUNDRED
THOUSAND WORLDS offers readers a glimpse into this fascinating subculture. Why do you think cons have grown so rapidly
over the past decade? What do these gatherings
offer that is so special, and why did you choose to make the cons the backdrop
of your novel?
A: I’ve always been interested in subcultures and intentional,
affinity-based communities. There is something so wonderful about being in a
room where people are excited about something. I’m talking about dance parties,
or sports bars when the game is on, or Trek conventions, or boat shows. People
go through so much of their time on autopilot, and then there’s this one thing
that they completely geek out over, and it’s like a current running through
them all the sudden. It’s amazing to see, and to be near, even if you don’t
necessarily share that same enthusiasm, you know what it’s like to have a thing
that you geek out over.
Cons of course are even more dear to my heart because comics happen to
be that thing for me. Okay, one of my
that things. I grew up reading comics
alone in my room, and then in my dorm room, and then in my apartment. I’ve
never had that many friends who were into comics. So when I first started going
to conventions, the idea that everybody else was into the same thing, and that
I could talk about comics without trying to be “cool”, was pretty amazing. To
have a space like that is really special. It’s funny, I used to think it was
becoming less important to have safe spaces to geek out because the world as a
whole has gotten so much geekier, that “the kids nowadays” didn’t need that as
much as I might have when I was a kid. But I think it’s actually more
important, and that being a kid is tougher than I had it, in ways I can’t even
imagine, and how great it must be to catch a bus to New York City ComicCon and
walk into the Javitz Center and just see your people everywhere. How everyone
who picks on you back home for being boldly yourself must seem so small in that
moment.
As far as the boom in cons over the past ten years, I think part of it
is economics, and particularly the economics of other geeky cultural endeavors
that cons include. A rise in the overall level of geekiness within the culture.
But it’s also more and more fans who want to meet up, who feel like this is a
key component of being a fan. Am I being a total dork to say it’s kind of a
post-internet thing? That people who grew up with message boards and online fan
communities as a given are now over that, and what that ends up looking like is
actualized physical versions of those communities. Instead of posting on a
board about Doctor Who or Steven Universe, you look forward to a con all year,
and you suit up and go.
Q: In A HUNDRED THOUSAND WORLDS you write so many great voices that
could be found at any comic book convention, illustrators, writers, fans,
female cos players hired to walk around convention floors. At times geek
subcultures; i.e. comic fans and gamers, have been traditionally classified as
xenophobic, racist, and misogynist. How, if at all, are these groups changing
in regards to race, and gender?
A: I think any time a traditionally (white) male cultural space is
“threatened,” you get this awful backlash, and one of the wonderful perks of
the internet is that now we all get to watch as this happens. And it is ugly.
In a sense, comics hasn’t seen the worst of it yet (there’s been no GamerGate,
nothing equivalent to the Rabid Puppies). But yes, it is an industry that has
particular problems with harassment, lack of diversity, and a general “get the
hell off my lawn” from a certain demographic within the fandom, and within the
industry itself.
Here’s the thing. These efforts to bar the gates? To keep people out?
They never work. If you’re the guy standing at the clubhouse door in your
Batman tee-shirt saying “No girls allowed”, you’re going to be on the wrong
side of history. And soon. From a mercenary point of view, that attitude is
going to lose out because this is an industry devoted to making money, and
they’re not going to leave huge demographics of potential customers standing
out in the cold. Surprisingly, I think the industry is just now starting to
wake up to that. They’re still working with ideas about marketing and gender
that don’t apply anymore.
But more importantly than that, those people you’re trying to keep out
are not asking your permission. They love these characters as much as you do,
and they are not waiting for you to say it’s okay to play with them. They will
beat down the doors to get in, and they will be the ones writing these
characters with new voices, drawing them from new perspectives, and basically
pumping lifeblood into geek culture. I feel terrible for the fans and creators
that have to suffer the petty vindictiveness of a waning minority of relics in
comics right now. But I also believe it’s a transitional phase that will pass,
and comics will be better and more interesting for it.
Q: Readers will immediately fall in love with the character of
nine-year-old Alex. Was it challenging
to write from his perspective?
A: It was tough. I had the advantage of a real-life nine-year-old in
the house for some of the time I was writing. There is a kind of magical
thinking that is specific to kids that age. Nine is a hinge point where kid
logic has all this accumulated material to work with, but it hasn’t yet been
replaced by the kind of sociopathic logic of teenagers. So on one hand, you want to avoid writing a
kid who’s cutesy or precious, but on the other, there are modes of thinking
that you can’t access from that voice. In the early drafts, Alex was too
perfect. He was cheerful and precocious, and I was really trying my best to
keep him safe. Which is a good way to parent, but not a great way to write.
Alex’s voice didn’t fully click for me until I allowed myself to put him in
situations where he’d get angry or depressed.
Once I let that get out, I had a better sense of who he was, and how
much he was keeping in check all the time. People often talk about kids in
terms of full-bore honesty and candor, and they miss that kids are incredibly
savvy in their emotional thinking and responses, and that they’re juggling
these really outsized emotions.
Q: What can we learn from reading superheroes?
A: We can learn the power of “To be continued.” If there’s a basic
power all superheroes share, it’s a resilience, and in a sense we go into a
comic with the confidence that whatever happens, the superhero is going to come
out on top. When you think about the cliffhanger in serial storytelling,
there’s a central mistake people make. The reader doesn’t close the comic
thinking “Oh my gosh, is Spider-Man going to get out of this?” They think, “How
is Spider-Man going to get out of this?” and that kind of thinking churns in
the reader’s head till the next issue. This problem is going to get solved, so
how does it get solved? A superhero’s not allowed to look at seemingly
insurmountable odds and throw up their hands and give up. If they do that, the
story stops. But the story is perpetually “to be continued.” I think that’s an
important thing to understand about life, the ongoingness of it, its state of
constant motion. To look at a problem and say, “I’m going to get through this,
I just need to figure out how.”
Q: Do you have any favorite comic book writers/illustrators?
A: Too many to name.
For writers, Grant Morrison, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Warren Ellis, Scott
Snyder, Gail Simone, Rick Remender, Matt Fraction, Brian Michael Bendis. For
artists: Mike Mignola, Cliff Chiang, Fiona Staples, J.H. Williams III, Mike
Allred, Chris Bachalo, Carla Speed McNeill. I’m making this list away from my
bookshelves, so I’m sure I’m overlooking a dozen folks.
Q: Describe your ideal reader.
A: To steal blatantly from Dan Savage, I think the ideal reader would
be good, giving, and game. Someone who reads attentively and with a generous
mind. And who’s willing to try something that isn’t necessarily in their usual
wheelhouse. I think the locked-down genre borders, to the extent they still
exist, are boring and stifling, to both readers and authors. Anyone who picks
this book up needs to be willing to tolerate a little geeking-out. But I tried
as much as possible to make it a book that is less of a collection of in-jokes
that reward people with deep genre knowledge, and more of a book about how
exciting it is to geek out about anything. So I’m hoping for readers who won’t
look at this book and pull back because it’s about comics and they don’t read comics. It’s only about that a
little bit, and if a reader’s willing to give it a try, I think there’s a lot
more there for them to find.
Q: What is your favorite classic video game?
A: Super Mario Brothers 2. Magical root vegetables and a frog who eats
your dreams? Sold.
Q: Favorite childhood comic book?
A: Superman, during his mullet period.
Q: If you could have any superpower what would it be?
A: Superspeed. Or self-duplication. Or time stopping powers. God, those
are all basically productivity-related. I am so lame.
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