I have a lot of admiration for a wide range of people, I really do.
But I don't have many heroes, at least not by my own definition. To me, a hero is someone who has earned my unmitigated respect, a rational human being (real or imagined) whose choices, in their context, mirror those I'd like to make in my own life.
So while Batman is clearly a hero, he isn't exactly "my hero." [ed. note: it's the batarangs... don't you realize how silly the batarangs are, Batman? Don't you see?] Celebrities don't usually count either... they're so distant, so nebulous and so "managed" that I just can't bring myself to feel a close connection to them. I've never sat under a blanket, crying about a mouseketeer... it just doesn't seem healthy.
My list of heroes is a private tally that includes four, maybe five people.
This last Wednesday, I met a possible addition to that short list.
Flint Dille has a list of writing credentials that reads, at first, like a short summary of my childhood. Among his many cartoon credits, he was a writer on G.I. Joe and Transformers, in the Good Era, when there was a vague whiff of a massive underlying story beneath the half-hour toy commercials.
Apparently he was also one of the principal writers on Transformers: The Movie. For anyone who hasn't seen this movie... well, it may be too late. But venture back in time with me for a second, and imagine watching your favorite toys dying their heroes deaths, actually DYING, being blown to pieces. Imagine that little Ragnarok that you played out on your living room floor every afternoon, broadcast at last; good and evil destroying each other in a final reckoning. It all happens in the first HALF HOUR. Goodbye, Ironhide, you will not be back next week. No sugarcoating, just high drama played out on a plastic scale. How cool is that?
Anyone responsible for the plot of Transformers The Movie, anyone even partially responsible for Unicron , deserves more than a little admiration. But it gets more interesting.
This guy ALSO went on to make Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, one of the few first-person shooters I've ever enjoyed and the ONLY movie-based game that has outclassed its source material. So add this pitch perfect gritty sci-fi prison story, to the resume.
And finally, he wrote and directed a little complementary-movie-with-a-board-game called Dragonstrike. For those of you too afraid to follow the link (after the Britney thing I don't blame you) and too cool to remember Dragonstrike from the back page ad on every comic book made in 1993, I will only say that this endeavor , too, brought a lot of happiness into the world.
Flint sat at the front of us 15-odd smirking Interactive Media students last Wednesday night and just sort of... talked, looking back on his career as if he'd never before considered stringing the years together to make a whole. And he slowly earned my admiration... I mean, this guy has range. He's jumped from light to dark and back again, and though most of his work seems to come from a fairly pulpy place, its GOOD pulp, with a surprising variety of high and lowbrow content.
But more important was the attitude Flint took to his successes and failures. He could laugh at Dragonstrike without denying that it was his own. He could be proud of Butcher Bay without preening over its significant accomplishments. And he could admit that he really cared about the stories he wrote for Transformers, even though it will always be labelled as kids stuff by those who were too old (or too young) to get it. That's what I noticed most in Flint, really; that ability to reflect happily on a life of creative endeavors without hubris. It's a rarity, and something I aspire to.