Comic-Con Set: The Inner Child Has Re-Entered the Chat…

Somewhere between the cape, the curse and the talking animal was a life lesson.

This past September, I had a really dope opportunity to perform at PB&J’s first ever Comic-Con meets Spoken Word event in Philly. The function included other stage performers, local comic authors/ vendors, yummy food, magic tricks, video games, a massage station, and folks dressed so whimsical, I immediately felt like my inner child had finally been released from adult captivity considering the tempo of 2026. I’m not even being dramatic. I loved it. When asked to perform, I was selfishly and mostly excited because if you follow any of my work, you’ve probably noticed that cartoons, comics, anime and childhood movies have an extensively large presence in my writing. That influence started early.

I grew up with a brother who was into the “coolest boy” things when we were kids. We were super tight, so morning cartoons, Marvel, anime, fantasy movies and whatever else was happening in his room while our mom was occupied  inevitably became part of my world, too. I understood very early on these weren’t just things we watched. They were things I learned from. Dumbledore hands down has some of THEE best punchlines and advice ever given. Baloo has philosophy gems and a song I still carry today. Marvel movies somehow managed to sneak existential ass questions into two hours of people punching each other in expensive CGI suits. So yes, I wholeheartedly believe most of these stories have delivered some of the greatest “aha” moments possible.

So when it was time to build my Comic-Con set, I went through my catalog and pulled pieces that referenced characters, cartoons, comics and childhood movies that had actually shaped how I think and operate. And what I was inspired by, was highlighting how adult the themes were:

Isolation.

Calling.

Scarcity.

Judgment.

Limbo.

Self assurance.

Identity.

Acceptance.

The more I looked at the pieces together, the more obvious the connection was. Children’s stories are often treated as simple because they are accessible to children. But accessibility and simplicity aren't the same. A story can be animated, fantastical and funny while still functioning as a philosophical argument about grief, identity, morality, responsibility or belonging. In fact tbh, fantasy is just reality with enough distance to make it easier to look at.

So... here are five of the stories (intro piece not included here) and characters that have contributed to my set, and really, my life.

1. BRUCE ALMIGHTY & THE FANTASY OF BEING SAVED

“If I could converse with God, he’d have the voice of Morgan Freeman. ANDDD he’d be disguised as my weed man, because no other guy used to see me that often….” - CC.

  Yeah yeah I know. This is clearly a movie with no references to/for a child. HOWEVER, your girl was dealing with existential thoughts, external frustration and heavy questions from a VERY young age. Along the journey, this movie’s story found its way in our home and has never left. A man so frustrated with his circumstances, for so long, that God essentially and eventually says, “Fine. You do it.” And that premise is just funny to me, because it's also painfully human. Painfully relatable. Bruce Almighty has always ranked high for me because of its rawness. I grew up in a pretty normal religious environment, but have also spent a significant portion of my life questioning religion, faith, God, death, purpose and the whole architecture of belief itself. Probably more than anyone in my family.

So watching Morgan Freeman embody God as this calm, patient, hilariously unbothered figure was oddly humbling. It was like watching an external representation of an internal conversation I had already been having, over and over and over again. Like: Oh. Okay. So I’m not tripping. Other people have apparently been arguing with God too. The deeper premise of Bruce Almighty, though, isn't really about whether God exists. It's about what happens when we become convinced that the person or force we believe should be responsible for our lives, isn't doing enough. There is a very particular kind of desperation that comes with feeling like nobody is coming to save you. Ever.

You can pray.

Beg.

Plead.

Boogies coming out the nose.

The whole nine.

And then life will have the audacity to hand you another problem. Another slap in the face. Another uphill battle to climb. Inserts exhausted sigh. There is something psychologically interesting about the Father/Son dynamic here, too. Beyond religion, there’s  a universal human desire for an authority figure who knows what to do when we don't. A parent. A mentor. A guide. Somebody who can look at the enormous, confusing, heavy thing in front of us and say, “Here. Do this.” That realization can feel like abandonment when we're young. Later, it can become agency.

Because at some point, we have to confront the difference between wanting someone to rescue us and recognizing the resources that have already been placed within our reach. There is grace in that distinction. Annoyance too, but gracefully lol. A fish might look at a bird and envy its wings, but the fish sees depths the bird will never know. Sometimes what looks like limitation is simply a different set of abilities. And sometimes fighting upstream with everything you don't have prevents you from noticing what you already possess. Which is why I love Jim Carrey's performance so much. His character manages to hold grief, romance, frustration, spirituality, absurdity and comedy in the same container.

Which, honestly, is a pretty accurate description of being alive. Am I right or am I not lying? 

2. GHOSTWRITER: JOHNNY, RAVEN, EEYORE & WEDNESDAY ADDAMS. WHEN SOLITUDE BECOMES YOUR LANGUAGE

Raven is guarded and Eeyore is heavy. Wednesday is unapologetically strange and someone like Edward Scissorhands is obviously… built differently. No pun intended. Arthur Fleck (personal fave) lives almost entirely inside his own head.

Put them all in one room and somebody would probably call a therapist. Or should. I'd personally feel right at home but I've been therapized for years now "so we good". But beneath the difference in story arcs, the common theme would be when: the internal world is not always visible from the outside. Initially inspired by Johnny Blaze’s story itself, that’s what writing Ghostwriter (play on rider) was all about… Being so deeply inside your own head that engaging with the outside world becomes difficult. Not because you don't care about people per saaaaay, but because there’s already so much happening internally, which can be exhausting.

I remember writing that piece like it was yesterday. At the time, I had just returned from a creative hiatus, recovering from an unknown sickness, experiencing the beginning of my first breakup, and generally just trying to process more than I had the capacity to explain. I mean for the life of me, I didn't feel like there was anybody I could fully trust with my thoughts anyway. My beliefs. My hurts. My questions. My past had already established a pattern of not feeling heard until I wrote about whatever I was experiencing. I didn't (at the time) purposely or intentionally choose to be as secluded as it seems my life was requiring me to be.

There’s a difference between isolation and solitude, even though we often collapse the two and assume withdrawal means something is wrong. Meh, sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes a person is not disappearing from life, they're just going somewhere inside themselves to figure out how to return to it. I accepted that my brain might move a little differently. My questions might be more introspective. My curiosity might take me into places other people didn't necessarily understand. And instead of constantly trying to translate myself into something more digestible, I leaned into solitude. I never stopped wanting connection. And

that's what I appreciate about characters like Eeyore. Nobody requires him to perform happiness before he is allowed to belong. Raven's distance isn't necessarily coldness. Wednesday's refusal to assimilate is part of her identity. Edward isn't defective because he cannot seamlessly integrate into a world that was never designed around him.

You don't have to be easy to understand or constantly visible to be worthy of belonging. “Because it isn’t you, it’s me. Multiple thoughts at once are subtly seducing, this is mental polygamy at its rest. Where rest is forbidden, I dream where the Wild Things Are…” - C.C

3. Judge Thy Neighbor. THE PROBLEM WITH THINKING THEY’RE THE MAIN CHARACTER IN YOUR LIFE

Deadpool comically and unapologetically does more than break the fourth wall. Loki is persistent in questioning the morality of people calling him a villain. Bart Simpson questions authority as a hobby (things I understand). Rick Sanchez critiques everybody while remaining incredibly  unqualified to run a group project. Killmonger forces Wakanda to confront the consequences of the world it created outside its borders.

These characters don't agree on much. But they all make judgment interesting because they complicate the relationship between the person being judged and the person doing the judging. Could you imagine living in The Truman Show? Or living in that bizarre ass neighborhood where Squidward's music loving “opp” seemed to exist in a world where every house, routine and preference was pretty much identical? That's how I feel sometimes watching one person advise another person on how to live their life. And not in the reflective, helpful way but in the snooty, nose up in the air kind of way. Because what fascinates me isn't that people have opinions. Of course they do. It's the assumption that their interpretation of reality should become somebody else's instruction manual.

I intentionally try to consider other people. I try to be honest, diplomatic, level headed and respectful. I try to live authentically and practice what I preach. But when I wrote this piece,  I was also extremely clear that: I do not give a flying fuck about somebody else's opinion of a life they are not responsible for living. That they haven’t lived. And that isn't the spoiled brat version of autonomy as much as I do wish I was raised a spoiled brat. It isn't: “Nobody can tell me anything because I'm perfect.” Absolutely not. It is however: My life. My choices. My lessons. My mistakes. My missions. My consequences. My purpose. Mine. There is a difference between accountability and judgment. There is also a difference between offering perspective and attempting to govern another person's existence and the lessons tailored to their own life. People often carry what was taught to them into rooms where nobody asked for it. Inherited beliefs. Inherited fears. Inherited definitions of success. Inherited ideas about relationships, gender, family, money, morality, adulthood. Sometimes what they call an opinion is simply a belief they received so early that they forgot it was ever someone else's. And that's where projection becomes interesting.

Someone's inability to understand your choices doesn't necessarily make your choices irrational. Often time it means they're interpreting your life through a framework that is honestly none of your concern.

What was put in your ear at birth was not put in theirs. So why would we expect two people with completely different histories to arrive at identical conclusions about how a life should be lived? Curiosity would make more sense. But curiosity requires humility. Judgment doesn't.“You can't call my life assignments a myth, just because my decisions don't fit your Vision. That’s not how Jarvis works, Mr. Stark” - CC

4. STUCK BETWEEN. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BEING IN LIMBO.

Aladdin wants palace level possibilities with “street rat” resources lmao. Tiana is building a future while working inside the limitations of her present realities. Miles Morales is literally suspended between worlds. Cinderella can imagine another life while living inside a house that continually tells her who she is supposed to be. Oliver Twist is forced into adulthood before childhood had a fair shot.

Different stories. Same tension: I know there's more, but I don't currently have everything required to reach it. That tension has become increasingly familiar to me. Wanting more. Wanting bigger. Hearing the calling. Trying everything you know how to try. And still swimming upstream. There's a particular frustration that comes with being able to imagine a life your current circumstances cannot, and have not yet accommodated. You can see the apartment. The career. The creative freedom. The person you could become. You can almost feel the version of yourself that exists on the other side of the circumstances. And then you look around and realize your environment did NOT get the memo. Hence the “psychological limbo” You're no longer satisfied with where you are, but you haven't yet arrived where you're going. So you exist between identities, what you've inherited and what you're trying to create. That’s why Miles Morales is such an interesting metaphor. His conflict isn't “Which world do I belong to?” It's also Can I become who I'm becoming without abandoning who I already am?

We want growth, but don't always want the grief that accompanies outgrowing things. We want independence, but sometimes independence means admitting that the support system we needed never materialized. We want the dream, but we don't always have the foundation that would have made pursuing it easier. And sometimes you grow up early because life didn't give you the luxury of waiting. Which is why journeys like Tiana or Oliver hit differently. Their stories aren't about getting what they want, but about maintaining some internal relationship with possibility while reality keeps presenting evidence against it.

“Stuck between using what I’ve got and thinking bigger. I'm a big fish in a small pond, stuck at the Southern Cross, still reaching for the big dipper…. “ - CC

5. HITCHHIKING.  WHEN WISDOM DOESN'T LOOK LIKE AUTHORITY

Iroh, Yoda, the Genie, Rafiki… the wandering sage: one of fiction’s oldest archetypes.  They show up seemingly out of nowhere, often carrying a strange combination of humor, insight and absolutely zero interest in letting you continue lying to yourself. They aren't necessarily there to tell you who to become. They're there to interrupt the version of yourself you've become too comfortable performing.

That is the energy behind Hitchhiking. I call it hitchhiking because I'm interested in what happens when you move through different worlds, different people and different philosophies without becoming so attached to any one of them that you lose your ability to observe. Now while I referenced costumes and masks in this piece as opposed to actual cartoons, the characters mentioned above are for good reason. Iroh isn't compelling because he has a s*** ton of inspirational quotes. He's compelling because he continually asks Zuko to separate who he is from who he has been told he needs to be. Rafiki does something similar to Simba: he doesn't hand Simba a new identity. He forces him to confront the one he's been running from. Yoda spends less time convincing Luke that he is special and more time challenging the limitations Luke has placed around what he believes is possible.

Having the ability to perform a role does not mean the role is who you are. That's the part of adulthood I keep finding inside these ridiculous, colorful, fantastical worlds. We get very good at costumes.

Not just the literal ones, but the psychological titles. The Responsible One. The Strong Friend. The Successful One. The Good Daughter. The Difficult One. The Healer. The Provider. The Rebel. The One Who Has It All Together. Eventually, people can become so committed to the costume or label or box or expectation, they forget the person underneath it.

And unfortunately, sometimes society rewards that forgetting.

“Inhale and unveil yourself or they'll blackmail you and call it building character” : if you never investigate who you actually are beneath the roles you've learned to perform, eventually those roles & other people get to define the costume for you. And then the costume itself starts defining you.

“Find your truth before you find your tomb and they bury you in that costume”.

And maybe that's one of the reasons we keep returning to comics, anime and cartoons as adults. These worlds make identity visible. Heroes have uniforms. Villains have masks. Vigilantes have alter egos. Characters transform, shapeshift, lose powers, gain powers, switch sides, discover secret origins and very often spend an entire season figuring out who the hell they are. It's exaggerated, for sure. But that's the point. Fantasy taking something abstract (identity, fear, shame, purpose, belonging) and giving it a body we can actually see.

The mask becomes a mask. The transformation becomes a transformation. The villain becomes the shadow. The journey becomes a literal journey. And suddenly we're able to look at ourselves without having to admit (at first) that we're looking at ourselves. Because the goal was never to become somebody impressive enough to be remembered. It's to become somebody honest enough to recognize yourself. 

Comic-Con Closing…

Maybe that's what I love most about the world of comics and fantasy. They allow us to remain connected to the parts of ourselves adulthood tends to discipline out of us. Imagination. Wonder. Curiosity. Play. Idealism. Absurdity. The willingness to believe something could exist simply because we haven't yet been given evidence that it can't. We spend so much of childhood trying to/being forced to become adults, only to spend adulthood trying to recover the parts of ourselves we had to suppress in order to become one. 

So here's the question I'm leaving you with:

If the cartoons, comics and movies you loved as a child were actually teaching you how to survive adulthood, which character has been trying to/has successfully shown you something about yourself this entire time? And when are you going to get out the house and start finding people you like what you like?? Talk to me, but til then, take care! Ci.

PS: I have about 6-7 other pieces I really considered for this set because I mention hella cool references, you'll have to check them out fam.