My first comic book for free … no fooling!
“Since it is so likely that [our children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.”
C. S. Lewis from On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
This is a scary time, even for those of us who can put the images and numbers into context. But for those who can’t, it is especially frightening. How do we equip our children to process and confront the Covid monster?
Story is one of the key coping mechanisms that humans utilize to make sense of the world around us, especially when the world seems out of our control, hostile or chaotic.
Story can be a respite, a distraction, and an escape. Story can give us an outlet to share our experience as well as share in the experiences of others. Story can give us heroes and help make us courageous.
For those of you (which is almost all of us) locked in your homes, we are making the first issues of our comic series from www.cavepicturespublishing.com free, including my series The Blessed Machine, based on the E. M. Forster short story The Machine Stops. Keep reading to find out more!
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Story is often a solo exercise, but story is often also communal. For example, in the era story was communicated generationally through oral tradition, storytelling involved families and tribes. But theaters have existed for millennia, and the stories told in them have been key in defining the aspirations and personas of a culture. When we went to a movie theatre together, or when we tuned in to TV on the same night at the same time to watch a story being told, we were creating a shared experience and common narrative.
This shared experience is especially important now, when we feel isolated, and our stories are atomized. Reflecting on her (probable) bout with our cruel enemy, the virus, Peggy Noonan observed recently that she,
“didn’t want to binge on Netflix, I wanted to watch what other people were watching and watch it with them. ‘A League of Their Own,’ and ‘Les Miserables’ have been in cable rotation, and moments in them which in the past hadn’t moved me moved me now. I watched, ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding,’ and in the restaurant scene when they all break into ‘I Say a Little Prayer for You’—it choked me up. I’m choked up now!”
In this current moment, we crave connection and the opportunity to still create shared experiences and narratives. Technology is serving as such a tool. It’s hard to knock our 22-year-old son playing Fortnite when it is one of his only outlets to connect with his friends and be in community. And it’s been wonderful to see music artists telling their lyrical stories through free, online concerts open to their fan bases and curious onlookers.
Through our sister production company www.moreproductions.co, we launched a comic book and graphic novel publishing venture www.cavepicturespublishing.com as a wall for modern mythmaking. Cave’s mission is to produce content that is excellently crafted, deeply questioning, and spiritually meaningful.
As we note on the Cave website, humans have always tried to make sense of their world through stories. We tell each other myths, parables, and poems to interpret our lives and reveal the order and meaning that we only see in hints and shadows out of the corner of our eyes. The earliest evidence of our collective myth making can be found on the cave walls of Lascaux and El Castillo. We pursued our quest for meaning through pigment and paint long before we could communicate through words and in writing. Whether oral or written, however, questions that could not, and cannot be answered by reason alone have always been explored through myth-making.
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We are making the first issues of each of our comic series available for free on our website. We also have our illustrated comic of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave for free on the website, as well as a study/activity guide for our Light Princess series based on the George MacDonald short story.
Taste and see! If you like, you can buy the full series in hard copy on Amazon or digitally on Kindle or through ComiXology. In the next several months, we will also be issuing collected editions for each of the series in paperback form.
We hope that our stories help you and your family process and navigate the monsters we are facing together. And share whichever of our stories that resonate with you. We want our stories to give hope and foster courage during these scary times. As C.S. Lewis concluded in his reflection on the importance of story:
“Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel. For, of course, it wants to be a little frightened.”