Harry Potter and the Unread Comics
It’s Monday afternoon and I still haven’t read any of my comics from last Wednesday. Okay, I read New Avengers since it was this week’s Book of Doom, but other than that I haven’t read a comic in well over a week.
Instead, I’ve finished Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix and started reading Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince. I’m not sure if this is a testament to the quality of the Harry Potter books or a general apathy I feel towards today’s comics, but every time I considered sitting down to read Countdown or Fantastic Four, I opted instead to pick up the Half-Blood Prince.
I’m not really even much of a reader. It’s been five years since the last time I read more than one book in a short period of time (those books being the Lord of the Rings trilogy), but something about Harry Potter is compelling me to get to that last chapter of Death Hallows as fast as I can.
The fact that I’ve been able to remain relatively spoiler-free and am able to read all seven books in quick succession instead of waiting years between books is certainly part of it. But I think an even larger part of it is the internal logic that all the books have.
Nothing in the Harry Potter books is inexplicable. If a bit of information is essential to the climax, you can be sure it was introduced somewhere in the previous 300-800 pages. Nothing happens that contradicts something earlier in the story. And there’s certain rules that apply to the magic involved, even when magic is one subject that could easily ignore any rules placed upon it.
All that deliberate thought, planning and execution that went into these books is a breath of fresh air when many of my favorite past times (like comics and professional wrestling) seem to have no regard for what makes sense now, in the past or in the future.
By the time I finish the Harry Potter series, another two Wednesdays probably will have passed. I’m hoping this unexpected break from comics will recharge my love for the medium a bit. But if nothing else, I’ll hopefully have a better sense of what’s crap and what’s not and will reduce my weekly purchases a little.
I think it definitely helps that J.K. Rowling is the sole mind responsible for crafting her stories and the world that the characters live in – wheras, in the Marvel and DC Universes, even if you’re writing a book that is relatively detached from the Big Event of the Week, you still have at least one editor, and the EIC (to take it to an extreme) who can nix any portion of your story at any possible time, no matter if everything you’d written to that point was logically moving towards said portion. As a writer, you presumably have complete control over your story, unless of course you’re writing, say, a Star Wars novel or something.
Not to mention that Half-Blood Prince is very, very good, and I can’t blame you one bit for reading that instead of comics.
-M