TM-261: What fictional character would you like to be?
What fictional character would you like to be?
Some have been known to call reading an escape, but Hank McCoy has never held with that theory. Hank has no desire to escape his world. Or, rather, though he sometimes registers that desire, he has no wish to trade his universe for those of the characters in his favorite novels. Even those novels which don't feature a setting of a dark, dismal, and/or dystopian character tend to have been written in the 19th century or before, and Hank would much rather live in a world with indoor plumbing.
No, Hank doesn't read to escape. Instead, he reads to transform. To become, in that too-brief time between the first and last flyleaves, someone else. Someone grander, or simpler; someone happier, or sadder. Someone noticeably different, in some key way, from Hank himself.
Like Walt Whitman, Hank McCoy contains multitudes. At times he is Sherlock Holmes, acerbic and inquisitive; at other times, he is Elizabeth Bennet, sharp-tongued and proud. He's been Ishmael, sailing the seas; he's been Nick Carraway, stuck in a world he can't understand; he's been Miss Havisham, alone in her decrepit wedding dress. He's been Winston Smith, Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, Scout Finch, Hamlet, Oedipa Maas, Humbert Humbert, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, and Dr. Frankenstein. He's been characters he'd be proud to be, characters he loathes and loves in equal measure, and characters he'd run from screaming were he to encounter them on the street. Sometimes, he's even been the Cat in the Hat.
But always, as the cover closes, he returns to himself: Dr. Henry Phillip McCoy, mutant scientist and X-Man, blue in fur and bright in exuberance. With relief or regret, he slips back into his own skin, changed by new knowledge, but still, now and forever, the bouncing blue Beast.
Some have been known to call reading an escape, but Hank McCoy has never held with that theory. Hank has no desire to escape his world. Or, rather, though he sometimes registers that desire, he has no wish to trade his universe for those of the characters in his favorite novels. Even those novels which don't feature a setting of a dark, dismal, and/or dystopian character tend to have been written in the 19th century or before, and Hank would much rather live in a world with indoor plumbing.
No, Hank doesn't read to escape. Instead, he reads to transform. To become, in that too-brief time between the first and last flyleaves, someone else. Someone grander, or simpler; someone happier, or sadder. Someone noticeably different, in some key way, from Hank himself.
Like Walt Whitman, Hank McCoy contains multitudes. At times he is Sherlock Holmes, acerbic and inquisitive; at other times, he is Elizabeth Bennet, sharp-tongued and proud. He's been Ishmael, sailing the seas; he's been Nick Carraway, stuck in a world he can't understand; he's been Miss Havisham, alone in her decrepit wedding dress. He's been Winston Smith, Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, Scout Finch, Hamlet, Oedipa Maas, Humbert Humbert, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, and Dr. Frankenstein. He's been characters he'd be proud to be, characters he loathes and loves in equal measure, and characters he'd run from screaming were he to encounter them on the street. Sometimes, he's even been the Cat in the Hat.
But always, as the cover closes, he returns to himself: Dr. Henry Phillip McCoy, mutant scientist and X-Man, blue in fur and bright in exuberance. With relief or regret, he slips back into his own skin, changed by new knowledge, but still, now and forever, the bouncing blue Beast.