Run into the future

On Monday I shared my 10-year-old recollection of the first time I encountered Ray Bradbury’s prose poetry in my youth, and how every so often I need a booster shot of Bradbury to jumpstart my creative juices.

Wednesday morning the Ray Bradbury social media page shared a moment I had never seen before, from a 1974 interview with a journalist named James Day. The author talks about the importance of imagination, saying the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow.

“Boys and girls at the age of 10, 11, 12, 13, right on up through, the most important time of their day, or especially at night before going to sleep, is dreaming themselves into becoming something, into being something,” Bradbury says in the clip, “so when you’re a child, you begin to dream yourself into a shape, and then you run into the future and try to become that shape. When I was 10, 11, 12, I began to dream of becoming a writer …”

I love that image of “dreaming yourself into a shape.” When I was 10, 11, 12, I was writing dozens of songs and putting them on Top 40 lists on imaginary radio stations, and I was drawing my own comic books, and writing poems and collecting them into “albums” of 12 poems each, because the average record album had 12 songs, so why not poetry books?

As an adult I found myself fitting into those shapes. I went to work for real radio stations. I kept writing songs, started recording them, and tinkered with sharing them with the world, but it remained basically a hobby. My making comic books evolved into making newspapers, and I spent the second half of my career primarily as an editor.

In my semi-retirement I have published a couple dozen books as both a writer and editor, and thanks to my pastor friend who invited me to add my guitar to the worship team, I have reignited my love for making music. And thanks to modern technology that makes it easier than ever to create recordings that reflect what I hear in my head, and share them with the world, I am more than tinkering.

Ray Bradbury never stopped dreaming himself into new shapes. He dreamed of becoming a writer of science fiction stories, then of becoming a novelist, then a movie screenplay writer, then a TV and movie producer, a playwright, a poet, a mystery writer, and many other shapes.

When he died at 92, he was probably the oldest child in the world. May we all aspire to keep dreaming ourselves into a shape and running into the future to become that shape.

Ray Bradbury remains my single most important human role model.

What Christmas is all about

I would have been 12 years old and fully caught up in the “Marvel Age of Comics” — that Christmas I would get a copy of Jules Pfeiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes inscribed by Mom with, “To Warren, the comic book fiend of 1965.”

Charles Schultz’s comic strip “Peanuts,” of course, was an integral part of the daily diet, and so it was a Big Event for comic book fiends when “A Charlie Brown Christmas” debuted. It was amazing to see all the characters come to life on our TV screen.

I was also a Top 40 music fiend, and so I recognized the unique sound of the Vince Guaraldi Trio, who’d had a hit a couple of years earlier with their tasty rendition of “Cast Your Fate to the Wind.” Of course they’re best known now for this soundtrack.

For the most part the show was everything you might expect from Schultz, as poor old Charlie Brown went from mishap to mishap in his efforts to make it a memorable Christmas, until Charlie Brown cried out in frustration, “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?!”

I’m pretty sure I didn’t breathe for the next minute after Linus replied calmly, “Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about,” and proceeded to recite the story that my father insisted on reading to us every Christmas over cookies and candlelight.

These are the most magnificent 78 seconds in cartoon history.

W.B. At the Movies: Fantastic Four: First Steps

I so wanted to love Fantastic Four: First Steps. The third cinematic iteration of Marvel Comics’ greatest comics magazine of the 1960s is oh-so-close. The characters are there, the familial love is there, almost all of the elements were there.

But you know what it felt like? Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I was back in the late 1970s — an absolute great Superman movie followed not long after by a movie featuring one of my all-time favorite casts of characters, this time the crew of the starship Enterprise, but even with all of the original ensemble in place, it kind of fell flat.

The Fantastic Four casting director got it right — this is a great team, although Pedro Pascal needs to get over himself and shave the mustache. Reed Richards only has facial hair when he’s been working in the lab for days trying to save the world. And what’s with the orange brick beard that they gave Ben Grimm halfway through the movie? And please don’t get me started about H.E.R.B.I.E., the silly robot pal who never appeared in the comics until the TV cartoon invented it to appeal to the kiddies.

Nitpicks, all. The family of superheroes I remember were all up there on screen. As I suspected, they wisely used the immortal Galactus trilogy of F.F. #48-50 as the foundation of the story.

It’s a very, very good movie that checks most of the boxes, but it didn’t give me the comic-book-geek thrill that Superman did just a couple of weeks earlier. Still, if Superman was a home run, Fantastic Four: First Steps is a solid triple.

I believe it will all come together in the sequel, just like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn saved that franchise. That’s if we get a proper sequel — the blurb at the end of First Steps says the F.F. will return in Avengers: Doomsday.

The Fantastic Four were the heart and soul of Marvel Comics, not Spider-Man, not the X-Men, not the Avengers. They came first, and the whole “Marvel Age of Comics” was built around the Fantastic Four. Reed, Sue, Johnny and Ben are not supporting characters in the Avengers; they are the root from which everything else grew.

Maybe someday we’ll get the Fantastic Four movie the characters deserve. They’ve got the pieces in place at last, and they’re oh-so-close.