Philosophical Imaginatrix: The Philosophical Understanding of Comics

The comics is the reality morphing layer of imagination. Some love it and some loathe it. But whatever it is for me it has been a huge source of learning and reinventing myself. (In the physical realm) The word comics means humerous. But we have to understand it with a deeper layer of understanding. I love to understand things based on degrees, And the higher the degree, the deeper the stuff. Comic comes from the Greek word Komos. Which means intentionally funny. Reality is truly funny. Even death is humerous. Life is the best comedian. And we have to laugh at it, find it glorious, see ourselves as super humans, laugh at our stupidity, inspire our souls, feed the devil, walk with gods, plant a tree on Eden, dance with Shiva because life is KOMOS. 

Comics is the art of conviction and convincing. It has layers of information coded in each representation. It has myths. It has channelings. It has future and foundation. It has past. And it has singularity. If you read comics, you know it has some deep shit. Multiverse. Shadow universe. The other side. Azgard. Thor's hammer. Nietzsche's Superman is also a character of comics. The internal character. The inbound. The psychic. Nothing to do with hard muscle, but liquid wisdom. Comics is a far reaching (diverse) universe of abstract thoughts. 

Popeye a comic from 1935 has a very profound saying, which says, “no matter what I yam – I yam what I yam an’ that’s all I yam”. Comics are not just cartoons. But something deep. Take for example the comics, Calvin and Hobbes. It was created by Bill Watterson. And he included a deep sense of philosophical undertone. The name itself has a philosophical origin. The Calvin comes from the name of 16th Century Protestant reformer John Calvin. And Hobbes comes from the 17th Century Social philosopher  Thomas Hobbes. And we don't realize how deep are the sense of comics. 

Look at how deep Batman's existence is. And such a hero, needs a villain as deep as him or better than him. The villain has to be the shadow of the hero. Villain is not the negative person, but the negative zone of the hero. Joker is the Batman from the negative zone. They are in constant dance of universe. A flux and fuzz. A moral puzzle of our society. Comics represent the psychological and theological representation. And that's a cat and mouse game of cycle. Our life is the Tom and Jerry of repeatedly repeated incidences. They make us 'US'. And it's okay to flower in the yin and yang of contrast. Comics represents YIN and YANG. YANG and YIN. 

A villain seems to be in a denial of truth. Just as us. We are also in denial of truth. But as Deadpool from the Marvel Universe knows he is a character in a comics. And he uses that to break the fourth dimension, we can use that understanding to go beyond our concerns for unhappiness. We can be superhumans of the inner world. To understand comics, is to understand that our microcosm is the familiarity of that 'maya', of that illusion.  Even our existence is an illusion. And we can go deeper inside our mind to understand that. We can break our fourth dimension, and understand the quantum mechanics of our thought process. The deeper symbolism. This is what Carl Jung was trying to explain, that our thoughts are a deeper thread of beautiful synchronicity. And in that synced premise our unified stories are written. A Gandhi is born with the necessity of time and space. And so is the Hitler. And comics show us just that, Thor needs Loki. Loki needs Thor. It's a symbiosis of reality. 

Comics like Dr. Strange reminds us of the truth of eternal life and longing. One needs to have a deeper longing to achieve liberation. And one can lose the power of sight in the seeking toward eternal life. And to find that is to attain peace. That is the secrets of magic. Magic is the art and creativity of human expression, of a deeper self. The Japanese Manga (comics) are also source of great wisdom. They explain the philosophy of Zen. Taiwanese cartoonist Tsai Chih-chung also used philosophy as a part of his work. He represents the philosophy of Confucius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi. A fruitful dialogue of characters is involved. Comics converts complex abstract art and mysticism into a imagination space, where reader can render their own stories. Even distorted stories represent a deeper metaphor for understandable thoughts. Deliberate sequence of wisdom. These sequence are also the process of understanding the sense of justice and piety. Which has been going on from the time of Socrates. Comics is the multi dynamic study of vivid union of life. 

Comics are also the way to understand deeper science. Something fictitious. It gives us a tool of imagination. We set upon a journey to dive deeper into what can be done and known. A time travelling machine, the batmobile, the iron suit and the cryptic codes. Comics are hardcore science. And myths as well. A galactic being who eats planets for breakfast. A hand held devices which joined with stones of various kinds create power to delete the existence in a snap of fingers. And this is all in comics. And comics grab them from various schools of mysticism and religions. A nordic god. A jew baby from Krypton. A game of illuminati. Comics best represents life if you can read inbetween the likes and images. 

Some beautiful sayings on comics:

1. Words and pictures are yin and yang. Married, they produce a progeny more interesting than either parent. - Dr. Seuss 

2.  Adults...struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real. - Grant Morrison

3.  Verbing weirds language. - Bill Watterson 

4. Comics deal with two fundamental communicating devices: words and images. Admittedly this is an arbitrary separation. But, since in the modern world of communication they are treated as independent disciplines, it seems valid. Actually, the are derivatives of a single origin and in the skillful employment of words and images lies the expressive potential of the medium. - Will Eisner 

5.  Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species: two basic instincts: survival and reproduction. - Scott McCloud