Avengers and Philosophy: Earth's Mightiest Thinkers, The Read Online Free PDF

also reflects a deep insight into the way that truth works in fiction. Although Jen did not meet them, both Weezie and Towers appeared in issues #2 and #3 of the comic. Since Towers’s marital status is not mentioned in these earlier issues, at the time they were published there was no fact of the matter regarding whether he was married or not. After all, Byrne could have written a different version of issue #4 where Towers is single and begins a romance with Jen! Weezie is aware that her comments on the previous page made it the case that Towers is married. Further, Weezie presumably does not mean that Towers got married just this minute. Instead, he has been married all along, although the fact that he was married only becomes true (retroactively) as a result of the events in issue #4.
     
    The metafictional weirdness continues in the second panel. Here, Jen shouts out, “What?!? Byrne!! What kind of game are you playing?!?” as she tries to climb out of the panel to physically assault Byrne. Weezie, restraining her, attempts to calm her with the words “Jen!! Control yourself! We’re inked and colored! Printed! There’s a reader out there now!” There are a number of interesting things going on here, including the continued metafictional self-awareness exhibited by both Weezie and Jen, and the fact that Jen addresses Byrne directly (we have to wait until issue #50 to see Byrne appear in a panel together with Jen, however). This panel also suggests that Jen can see Byrne. Normally, we treat panels as a sort of one-way window. We can look through these little rectangles in order to see events within Jen’s world, but comic book characters are not meant to be able to look back the other way and see us, much less climb through the panel to assault us!
     
    The most interesting thing in this panel, however, is Weezie’s dialogue. Weezie is acknowledging that the printed nature of comics places Towers’s marital status not only out of Jen’s control but out of Byrne’s as well. By the time these events are happening, the comic has been printed, packaged, and purchased by the reader. It’s notable that the three things Weezie mentions explicitly—inking, coloring, and printing—are aspects of the creation of the comic that are not under Byrne’s direct control as writer and penciller. As a result, there is nothing any of them can do to change things—not even Byrne! Weezie is aware that, in a certain sense, she has no free will, and that her thoughts, statements, and actions for the remaining fifteen pages of issue #4 are already determined, since they are already inked, colored, and printed. Her future has already been laid out and is fixed permanently in ink.
     
    Gutter-Hoppin’ and More Amazing Stories
     
    Let’s consider the third and fourth panels of this page together, since they are in an important sense a single unit. In the third panel a confused Jen sputters, “But . . . but . . . but,” to which Weezie replies, “You’re obviously too distraught to go home just yet. C’mon . . . I’ll buy you lunch and we can talk.” Unlike the previous two panels, there is nothing out of the ordinary in the dialogue here. What is out of the ordinary, however, is how Weezie, dragging Jen along behind her, travels from her office in the third panel to the restaurant in the fourth panel. Weezie crosses this distance in one step, by stepping over the gutter between panels, her right foot touching the floor of the office and her left foot touching the floor of the restaurant. Obviously, the restaurant and the office are not located a mere two or three feet from each other within the fictional world that Jen and Weezie inhabit. But they are located mere fractions of an inch from each other on the page. Here, Weezie and Jen are able to take advantage of the fact that locations far removed from each other within their world are sometimes in close proximity on the page. As a result, it is quicker and more convenient