Magen’s Road Map for Existing in 2011

• I want to read more. Not reread the piles of stuff that’s on my bookshelf or best sellers or what people keep telling me to read because it’s fashionable and I’ll look good doing it. I want to go out and find new things to read. I want to raid book stores and secondhand  shops. I want to find weird things about butchers and mermaids and three-ring circuses that nobody’s ever heard of and read it because that what interests me.
• I want more piercings. I’m tired of feeling like I have to cover up my piercings to have Respectable Day Job and blend into the crowd. I’m tired of looking like Nice Girl. I’m not Nice Girl. You’re not going to be seeing her around her anymore.
• I want a tattoo. I say this every year, then I shuffle my feet and find excuses. I don’t have the money, I don’t want to get something I’ll get bored with, I don’t really have to have a tattoo. Blah blah blah. I have a design in mind and in May I’m going to do it.  End of.
• I want to wear whatever I want to wear, however I want to wear it. I’m throwing out my high heels and bright colors for high-waist skirts, tuxedo jackets and combat boots. I really don’t care what I should be wearing. I really don’t care that men find spikes and studs and straps unappealing. That’s the joy of not dating men: I don’t have to listen to them.
• I want a job that doesn’t make me feel like crap. Day Jobs suck. Nobody knows that better than me. I’m just tired of feeling like I’m stuck working for the same violently stupid people who would torch their employees just to make a buck if they could manage it. The economy sucks and I need a job, but I don’t want to let myself get trapped this time. You can’t get anywhere working for people who don’t value you as a human being.
• I want to live better with others. I just want to associate with people with my best interests in mind. I’m so tired of fair-weather friends who lie their way out the door at the end of the day. I don’t need you. You are baggage. Don’t think for a moment that my life would be poorer for your absence.
• I want to write things that I care about. I want you to care about them, too.

I just want to do better than 2010.

In a magical time known as 1996, I was living in an old white farmhouse with wide porches and tall fences. The house used to belong to the town of Boyd, a little speck on the map in the Middle of Nowhere, Texas, where the house served as the office for the power company some thirty years before my family moved from the city to the country.  This house is not important.

I was nine-years-old at the time, moved far away from my friends in the city. There was nothing to do in Boyd. The town was a stretch of road called Main Street with an IGA grocery store, a Texaco station, a video store, a city library (kept in a double-wide trailer on the other side of the train tracks) , and a lawyer’s office. There was only one lawyer, and she handled the business of the entire town. I remember this because she handled a custody dispute for my parents, and I used to amuse her two-year-old son while he played in the kid-container at her office. We had to make our own fun in Boyd, and while other kids were running around and climbing trees, I chose to live in comic books.

More specifically, I lived at the House of Ideas. Batman was boring and Superman was a whiner in blue-and-red tights, and DC Comics was full of angst and dark days. Marvel Comics was where I spent most of my time:  Spiderman, the X-Men, Silver Surfer, Daredevil, the Avengers and all the rest. Shiny ideas wrapped in bright costumes, justice and social advancement sought through fantastic adventure. You know the drill. I was nine and this was the best game in town.

My favorite character was Dead Pool. The Merc with a Mouth, red-and-black spandex-clad designated Pain-in-the-Ass of Cable, Wolverine, and anyone else who Dead Pool decided to throw rocks at. But my most favorite, my most beloved, my most cherished character of all time was Pete Wisdom. I still love Pete Wisdom.

This is the reason why.

From his Wikipedia page:

Pete Wisdom was initially created by Ellis and drawn by Ben Dilworth, in a pitch for “Electric Angel” for publisher Trident Comics. Wisdom was an angry young Essex man, with the power to summon electricity. Ellis said at Toronto Comicon 2005 that the character is based on Jack Regan from The Sweeney. ^[1] Later, at Marvel, Wisdom formally debuted, his first appearance was as an agent for the British covert organization Black Air in Excalibur vol. 1, #86 (February, 1995). Thereafter he left Black Air and joined the X-Men-related Excalibur team, where he would meet Kitty Pryde.

The pair starred in the Pryde and Wisdom three-issue miniseries, which introduced Wisdom’s sister Romany, as well as his father Harold, a retired Scotland Yard inspector. Soon after, Warren Ellis became the ‘plotmaster’ of X-Force – Ian Edginton was the actual scripter. Pete Wisdom would fake his own death and resurface some time later to a shocked X-Force. He next appeared in New Excalibur scripted by Chris Claremont. Originally, the series’ mandate was to explore the fallout from House of M in Britain.

In November 2006, Pete Wisdom also starred in a six-issue limited series titled Wisdom under the MAX comics imprint. From May 2008 to July 2009 Wisdom appeared as one of the main characters in the series Captain Britain and MI: 13.^{[2] [3]}

Nobody remembers Pete Wisdom. It’s understandable. He was a lesser-known character from the assorted collection of X-Men cousins, Excalibur and X-Force, making appearances in various alternate realities such as House of M, Ultimate and Earth-9586. He didn’t have his own cartoon show or movie spin-off, and didn’t even get his own mini-series until Paul Cornell gave him a brief run involving fairies and a Skrull John Lennon. He’s a spy, a loner, a traitor, a conspirator. He’s the guy in the dark suit in the back of the pub who smokes too many cigarettes and knows all your secrets, and is willing to do business with you if it plays into his favor.

Pete made fun of Charles Xavier and wore eye-patches to pick up chicks. He wasn’t afraid to poke fun at the cliches and catch-phrases that were being recycled by his costume-wearing associates, even as he kept a tight hold on the pain he wore on on the edges of his trench coat sleeves. Over the mother whose death he felt responsible for (murdered by a spree-killer while waiting at the window of her home for Pete to visit when he had no intention of showing up) and the untold number of people he’s killed in the service of ugly faceless intelligence organizations. He’s done things that would make Xavier’s fold of costumed adventurers cringe, but he owns up to it, and makes up for it, in his own way. One day at a time, with every mission, every deal struck to quietly further Charles Xavier’s dream of peaceful coexistence in the face of overwhelming obstacle.

Pete Wisdom does the right thing, even if he takes the hard, ugly way around it. He takes risks. He accepts sacrifices. He’s always looking at the big picture and he’s not afraid to get his hands dirty. Pete smokes, drinks, makes jokes at everyone’s expense and claims to hold no loyalty to anyone, even when he’s working in the background to help them. And as a child, stuck in a tiny town with nothing to do and a head full of shiny super-humans and grand ideas, I loved him for that.

For years I drove from little towns and across big cities to the comic book store, where the guys behind the counter knew me by name. Every month I came in they pointed me to the latest issue Pete was in, eager for the smell of new paper and fresh ink. I devoured every page, from the good days of Warren Ellis’ Excalibur to the not-so-good and the outright crappy, and kept every issue I ever purchased. Pete made me want to write comics. He made me want to write about tarnished characters with strong backbones and even smarter mouths. He just made me want to write, even if I was a girl and girls had no place in comics.

He made me want to write and prove everybody else wrong.

I don’t know what’s happened to Pete now, fallen to the wayside under the wave of new titles and story arcs. I don’t keep up with mainstream comics anymore. I didn’t become a comic book writer either, but that’s okay, because I still keep all my Pete Wisdom comics. They’re in a big box under my bed. Some are newer, purchased to replace issues fallen apart of old age or lost in moves. Some are original prints, smelling like summers sitting on my wide porch reading comic books. I still take them out and read them every so often, because they remind me why I wanted to write and why I do what I do.

And that’s why I still love Pete Wisdom.