While the devastating situation in Japan is a serious, real-world event, concerns of nuclear fallout and radiation have historicaly influenced fiction writers to great dramatic effect.
Our current interview guest Dave Dorman was interviewed by the Christian Science Monitor, and here’s what he had to say.
While mass entertainment may be treating nuclear power more seriously, that doesn’t necessarily mean more accurately, says Eisner Award-winning comic book cover artist Dave Dorman.
The entertainment industry capitalizes on the general public’s ignorance about radioactivity, he says via email. Most of what the public knows factually typically “is drawn from the atomic bomb and their doctor’s X-ray machine.”
Because radiation is still a mystery to the general public and to most writers in the entertainment industry, he says, it’s used as a catch-all for creating things that don’t exist in nature, such as the giant lizard Godzilla, the mutant ants in the movie “Them,” the use of gamma ray radiation to create “The Fantastic Four” and “The Hulk,” and the radioactive spider that bites Peter Parker.
While the carnage wrought by the earthquake and the subsequent problems in Japan are undoubtedly tragic, the power of fiction – to show the impact radiation can have on a society, no matter how fantastical – isn’t necessarily wholly negative and highlights the undeniable fact that no matter where on the planet we live, we’re all in this together.