The Bright and Shiny Future.

Whenever someone asks me to tell them about Star Power at conventions, I give them a quick summary I feel I’ve perfected over the years.  I end my little pitch with a quick aside that goes, “It’s the bright, shiny future that no one bothers to write about any more.”

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, mostly because I gave that summary so many times over my three-consecutive-conventions marathon, but also because the constant state of the news seems to be… well… bleak as hell.  Just today I read a BBC article that reported humans threaten the extinction of approximately 1 million plant and animal species.  That, combined with the constant insanity and outrage that is U.S. politics, makes it difficult to envision the future being anything other than a Mad Max wasteland.

But I refuse to subscribe to a dark and gritty future.  I refuse to give up on us.  I refuse to let my son inherit an apocalypse.  I believe in the bright and shiny future because I still believe in us, and I believe humanity can believe in itself again.

Maybe it’s because much of the science fiction I was raised on was that bright and shiny future.  The horizon to aspire to.  Jetpacks and space travel.  Distant worlds and exotic aliens.  Technology so advanced you would believe it was magic, and having grown up in the 1980s some of today’s tech still seems like the stuff of my boyhood sci-fi!  We can do this.  We can come together and turn this around.  We just have to believe we can.

I feel like I’m doing my small part with Star Power.  Every person who comes to believe in the bright and shiny future is one more person working to make it our reality.  There’s more to it than just writing comics, of course.  I vote, advocate, and donate when possible!  But in those other times, I’m doing what I can to help us believe in us.