12 | June | 2014 | Sourcerer

I wanted to reblog this much earlier. I take Rose’s view of hashtags, and this is my favorite post in a week when I’ve read a ton of good posts. Hashtags are tools, and they’re handy as long as you’re mindful of their limitations and smart about using them. You can’t change the world with just hashtags, but they certainly help. For people interested in activism, dismissing hashtags outright is like taking your home toolkit and throwing out the 3/8-inch wrench because it doesn’t work on 1/2-inch bolts. And we shouldn’t assume that just because people are tweeting to hashtags about social issues, that’s the only thing they’re doing about them.

There were some comics recommendations I left out recently. Marvel comics, which are awesome. Independent comics, which are brilliant. Comics, by Jonathan Hickman.

I think Jonathan Hickman has really risen to prominence recently, has become incredibly prolific. I don’t know if it’s that he’s finally gotten the chance to write stories he’s been sitting on, or what, but he has a number of great ongoing series coming out right now.

Once I figured out who he was and tracked his stories, I have started to see some story similarities, some ways that he thinks about the world. And I love it. He focuses on science, on the far edges of it, the possibilities – especially quantum mechanics and alternate realities. He focuses on mythology, on stories of creation, on stories of the end times. So let me present his comics by these themes, and at the end, some more reading possibilities, ones I haven’t gotten to yet but want to!

Universal Creation and Universal Destruction

The great idea was expansion. And it started with two men. One was life. And one was death.

From Avengers #3 by Jonathan Hickman

Avengers is about heroes – is about saving the Earth, and then it expands to saving a lot of worlds. They start with a concept: expansion. The threats are getting bigger, so the team needs to get bigger too. Not that they need everyone all the time. So they have a base roster – the Avengers from the film. Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Hawkeye, and of course Iron Man and Captain America. Then they have a ton of other heroes – ones who are pretty well known, and others who are less known, or new, or new iterations.

So Hickman takes the time to introduce the new heroes, as well as the new villains he has crafted. And he ties it all back to his new villains, to universal-level threats. To the story he is telling of how the Marvel Universe began, about the first race, the Builders. And about the systems they have built.

From Avengers #3 by Jonathan Hickman

In New Avengers, Hickman is telling the opposite story. About universal destruction. About the end of not just one universe, but all universes. The New Avengers keep this a secret, and prepare to do whatever it takes to defend the Earth. Iron Man is the only one on both teams – the only one who sees all the threats.

These are great comics to read together. Getting to see the parallels between these two stories, to see the opposite stories happening.