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Originally posted by myself at Sidekick Comics
Not so long ago I visited a comic book shop for the first time in a long time. One thing jumped out at me, or I should say, one man. Wolverine. His image seemed to be on almost every shelf. In 2008, Wolverine was ranked #1 out of "Wizard Magazine's Top 200 Comic Book Characters of All Time" and was ranked #4 of "Empire Magazine' 50 Greatest Comic Book Characters". His popularity has reached such a level that he is used on the front of comics in which he hardly features.
Wolverine is a character created by Marvel over 30 years ago. He is a member of the X-men team and is one of the few of them to be included in every media adaptation of the X-men franchise, including film, television and computer games. Too popular to be left out he is featured in both the New X-Men and the Uncanny X-men teams. He is the only one to have starred in his own computer game and is now the subject of his own, soon to be released, big budget movie. Marvel recognized how much they used him when Wolverine appeared in an issue of What The?! where he is just trying to have a quiet day fishing and going insane because of all the other characters keep appearing and trying to get him to guest-star.
It is easy to dismiss his popularity as being a product of his no-holds-barred attitude and savage ferocity. However, I believe that there is a deeper and subtler reason...
In your eyes does a black cat crossing your path bring you good luck or bad luck?
Synchronicity or the belief that everything that happens happens for a reason can be a wonderful thing. It can help you feel connected with the divine and inspire awe at the complexity and interconnectedness of it all. It can also provide the subconscious with an alternate means of breaking through your ego defences to confront you with parts of yourself that have been repressed. Integrating and dealing with these parts is called shadow working and is a key part of emotional growth. Unfortunately this process can go wrong..
PermalinkCategories: Philosophy I'm very tired today so I'll leave the post to the words of Neil Gaiman from American Gods. It captures my view on belief.
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen — I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."