New combinations

Sunday seemed like the first normal day around the old PA household in a while, what with the Thanksgiving holiday and houseguests ever since. My wife Cupria was at work, leaving me and little Zinky to hold things down at home, getting things back on track in terms of packing for the move and generally putting our house in order. Some progress was actually made on that front, and while it seems like there’s a little too much to do in the time allotted, it’s more pain-in-the-ass than impossible-labor-of-mythic-heroes at this point.

One of the packing tasks I managed to check off was sorting through my side of the master bedroom closet, which turned up a few interesting items. Zinky’s room, before Zinky came along, was my geek library and repository of various toys and such, which have since been scattered to various storage spaces throughout the house. Including, apparently, an action figure of Uatu the Watcher which got shoved in the back of a drawer in a plastic chest in the bedroom closet.

A bit of background as to why I own this action figure (I actually own a fair number of action figures, but this one in particular merits extra explanation). Uatu the Watcher is a comic book character who was created as a large walking plot device. He is cosmically powerful but sworn to never interfere in events, and only (as his name strongly implies) to observe. Perhaps needless to say he often bends or breaks this sworn rule depending on the dictates of the narrative; he can warn Earthlings that a massive threat from deep space is on its way, but won’t do anything about it himself, etc. Uatu sees far, knows much, and is a little more sentimentally attached to Earth than he should be; in other words (like a lot of comic book characters) he’s got a good sci-fi hook that is either bafflingly incoherent or intriguingly compelling depending on who’s writing him and how well at any given moment. Here’s what he looks like, by the way:


The backstory is that once upon a time there was a super-evolved (hence the oversized head) race that wanted to spread knowledge (hence the Socrates-style toga, I guess?) to other planets, and gave the theory of atomic fission to a less-developed race. Less-developed race proceeded to lay their entire planet to waste with global atomic war (this backstory was written in the 60’s, obviously) and the super-evolved race was so guilt stricken for causing the disaster that they all swore never to directly interfere with other races. They devoted themselves to being Watchers, and Uatu set up shop on the moon to keep tabs on Earth. Not only did he get so fascinated with humanity that he would play fast and loose with his non-interference oath, but he used his super-evolved cosmic powers to peer into alternate realities and watch those Earths as well, which spawned an entire comic book spin-off series called “What If…?”

“What If…?” is one of my all-time favorite series. It’s kind of symptomatic of the whole comic book industry in general, an industry so in love with tradition and history and continuity and interconnected stories that re-visiting old stories and tweaking them never, ever gets old. A regular comic like Spider-Man generally tries to hew pretty close to an established status quo, which means big changes are rare and even death is no obstacle to a character making continued appearances. “What If…?” throws the status quo under the bus and tells stories with big changes, the bigger the better, but starting with an actual event from the comics. Take a classic Spider-Man story where he could have killed the bad guy at the end, but chose not to. Retell it but change the fateful decision, and then keep going after Spider-Man has killed someone – maybe Spider-Man ends up in prison for murder and isn’t around to stop some other evil plot and therefore America gets conquered by a clone army of Doctor Octopi (Doctors Octopus?) and maybe lots of other heroes die glorious, dramatic irreversible (within that “What If…?” story, of course) deaths. For brain candy, as escapism from the self-imposed rules of the escapism that spawned it, it’s pretty meta, but in the best possible way.

(Incidentally my favorite holiday movie is It’s A Wonderful Life, for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Clarence’s whole plan is to immerse George in the nightmarish alternate-Earth story “What If … George Bailey Had Never Been Born?” It’s A Wonderful Life is a science-fiction movie and don’t ever let anyone tell you any different.)

“What If…?” is an anthology so there’s no need to keep things tenable for never-ending continuity. The stories can unspool to any extreme conclusion, even a major downer ending, and the next issue is a completely new story about a different, alternate Earth. The only constant, as mentioned, is Uatu the Watcher as the narrator, which is how I got to know and love the character.

But even as narrator and unifying thread of a trippy delight of a series, Uatu is still a passive chronicler. Not exactly the kind of dynamic derring-doer that leaps to mind when you hear the phrase “action figure”. So I was doubly compelled to buy the Uatu action figure when I discovered its existence, partly because of genuine affection for the character, partly because of the obvious “more like IN-action figure, amirite?” joke.

So, yesterday. Out of the plastic drawer came Uatu, to be packed with some other toys that will hopefully find more worthy and prominent homes in the new house. At one point Zinky was toddling past the pile of boxes that Uatu was lying atop. He paused to consider this new toy. I’m laying the groundwork as best I can, but Zinky is still working on internalizing the signposts of sci-fi tropes, like an oversized head signifying alien intelligence. He just saw this 10-inch doll with a disproportionately big, bald head and came to the most logical conclusion for his particular worldview: that it was a baby doll. So he picked up Uatu the Watcher, leaned the doll against his shoulder, patted it on the back a couple of times, and then set it back down. (For a cosmic nap, perhaps.)

I know that was an inexcusable amount of exposition for a relatively minor payoff, but that’s the way it goes some times. I thought it was both hilarious and adorable.

After Cupria got home from work the three of us went out for sushi. No, we did not feed Zinky any raw fish, settle down (although we did share the shumai (steamed shrimp dumpling) with him and he liked them a lot, that’s my boy). Mostly Zinky ate spaghetti-o’s brought from home, which Cupria fed to him by spearing the center of each ring with a chop stick. Of course we brought a baby fork with us but Zinky was so much more amused by the chopstick delivery method. And, to be honest, so were we.

We also made a quick trip to the book store after dinner, where Zinky tried to unshelve every single Captain Underpants book. He also sat himself down comfortably on the floor, pulled one onto his lap, and tried to read it, but quickly lost interest – whether this was because of the lack of color art or the fact that paper pages are much harder to manipulate than the cardboard he’s used to, I couldn’t quite figure. He loves books an awful lot, though. So do I, obviously, but I also remember growing up with my nose more or less constantly in one book or another and people usually recalling me as “that kid in the corner with the book.” I think being a compulsive reader ended up serving me well in life (it certainly made school pretty easy, which was key for a slacker like myself) but it still seems in hindsight like something someone somewhere along the line should have intervened against, to try to make me a little more well-rounded. These are the kinds of things that will probably torment me as Zinky gets older, being torn between an awestruck pride that he’s just like his old man, and an almost crippling terror of same, not to mention not knowing what, if anything, I can or should do about it. For now I really am just trying to enjoy it. Maybe if I don’t overthink it I can ride that indefinitely.