Vinnie Bartilucci said it better than I did. Commenting on a couple of columns that asked, sort of, if the science in comics should be real, Vinnie wrote, “… once a writer chooses to mention actual, proper science, he should get it right.”

Yes. Exactly. Well put.

But I wonder if we shouldn’t extend the idea to other real life areas. Social problems, for example.  Or such knotty personal problems as addiction. One of the difficulties is, there isn’t the kind of consensus on personal and societal quandaries that there is on the basics of, say, physics. All but the most skeptical – or reactionary – can agree that Newton’s three laws are on the money and Einstein was right about relativity, both general and special, and even Heisenberg’s principle doesn’t seem terribly uncertain these days.

But, to pluck just one example from the ether…addiction? What, exactly, is it? My imperfect understanding is that many, if not most, addictions are caused by environment acting on genetics. In other words, nature and nurture combine to rot out somebody’s life. But, with patience, determination, and rigorous self-honesty, the addict can put his demons in the coal bin, and if he’s able to continue being patient, determined, and honest, they’ll stay there until he dies and they die with him. Addiction is not exactly a disease, in the conventional sense, but it’s more that than character defect.

That was, more or less, the version of addiction I posited in an extended comic book continuity some years ago, and most people who saw the stories seemed to agree with me. But not everyone. A source I trust told me that a person much higher on the corporate food chain than either my editor or me thought that the fictional addict should have just…I don’t know – snap out of it? (In fairness to all concerned, the executive in question never confronted me personally, so I am taking a trusted somebody’s word for what happened.) On another occasion, an excellent artist, a man I respect, refused, politely, to draw a one-page shot of a hero dreaming he was drunk – just dreaming, mind you – because, in the artist’s opinion, heroes don’t behave like louts, even when snoozing.

(more…)