Seaguy The Slaves Of Mickey Eye #3 (OF 3)

Che Guevara as Puff the Magic Dragon! This is a story about growing up. The superhero comic is the perfect genre/medium for that story because we grow up with superheroes. Neil Gaiman took a lot of shit for his Goodnight Moon reference in Detective Comics, but the fact is we loved Batman stories around the same time we loved Goodnight Moon. Our emotions about Batman are undeniably tied to our primal childhood emotions. Alan Moore made a similar, albeit more derisive comment to Newsarama: http://www.newsarama.com/comics/040927-Moore2.html. Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart acknowledge this, but they give us the other side of the coin: Yes, we read them then, but here’s why we KEPT reading them and KEEP reading them!

            The basic thesis of Seaguy is: the first mini was kid Seaguy, this one is teenage Seaguy, and the next one is gonna be adult Seaguy. ‘Slaves of Mickey Eye’ is the  teenage one (the soundtrack’s OBVIOUSLY  ‘Nevermind the Bollocks’). Cameron Stewart inking himself on volume 2 really propelled the metaphor: The images still had the cartoon-inviting-openness of volume 1, but this time the images were surrounded by a thick-thick-thick aggressive black line.

The quickest way to explain the awesomeness of this volume is the Che/Puff thing. In the last verse of ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, Puff dies because the kid grows out of innocent imagination. In the first volume, Chubby-da-Chuna was his fantasy Puff friend. In this volume, Seaguy’s sidekick wears a Che cap. Che is the ultimate symbol of teenage revolution: You start to realize the lies you’ve been told in school and corporate advertising and government and you want to tear it all down. So Che helps you tear it down, just like Puff helped you imagine. But what do you build out of what you’ve torn down? At that point, Che says “Ah, you don’t need a pal like me no more” and you grow up. But that’s fucking hard. Frankly, I've got no idea what to build. I’m glad I’ve got the help of superheroes and superhero creators that grow with me. I can’t wait to see what Seaguy will do next, or Batman or Green Lantern. Thanks, creators, it really helps to help me create.