The Summer of The Creature
Where in the world did your whimsy go?
By now, you’ve surely seen the viral monsters adorning most Gen Z purses. Labubu—a toothy spin on the elves of Norse mythology—and creator Kasing Lung have reignited a recently-tempered discussion among toy collectors and accessory enthusiasts alike: why do we care so much about whimsy?
The answer could be obvious to those partaking in cultural analysis: while America may appear to be suffering from a national whimsy shortage, our whimsy intake is actually steadily increasing. In 2018, The Simpsons creator Matt Groening premiered his most recent project which ran for five seasons: Disenchantment—a sitcom about the rogue lesbian princess Bean, voiced by Abbi Jacobson, and her two unlikely counterparts, voiced by comedians Eric Andre and Nat Faxon. In an interview with Esquire, Groening says “I just love creating new worlds. I’ve been fascinated since I was a kid by fantasy maps and old Dell crime paperbacks that had maps on the back covers.”
Groening’s desire to build new worlds resonates clearly with fellow creatives, but few of these invented worlds see commercial success with such longevity as The Simpsons. Groening acknowledges that such success is unachievable if an artist lacks mental fortitude: “I think about ideas for different TV shows all the time. What holds me back is knowing how hard it is to actually pull them off, and whether I really want to commit myself to something that keeps on going. You know, my comic strip Life in Hell lasted 33 years. The Simpsons is 29 years and running. Futurama didn’t last as long . . . So I have to really want to do it for me to plow forward.”
This seems an accurate representation of today’s artist, or maybe the whole modern American workforce: overworked, suffering from hurdle-brain or burn-out, but plenty full of unexplored worlds and untold stories. But who would possibly care? Why should your doodles and half-starts and almosts and maybes matter?
In tumbles a quirky little accessory. Why does Labubu appear to have ripped the ears off a rabbit? Why is Labubu squinting devilishly like it just tipped over a gumball machine? You sense some more-than-slight evil in its face, and yet, you can’t help but grin-mimic after spotting one. In Gen Z parlance: where did this thing even come from?
Kasing Lung echoes the sentiment of Matt Groening when discussing Labubu’s origin. When asked what he loves most about his work as an artist, Lung says: “Storytelling. I love telling stories through my work. Before The Monsters, I made a series about animals and a little boy—the name of that series is Toy Forest and I worked on it for four or five years. After, I wanted to create a monster world, so the series The Monsters came out. . . . there’s no such thing as a main character in The Monsters land. All the characters are main characters and they each have their own story.”
Like Groening, Lung spent his childhood sketching, fascinated by maps and other worlds found in books and cinema. Lung describes these things bringing him much tangible, immediate joy, certainly, but they also helped him all but disappear from his family’s restaurant/home nestled in the hills of the Netherlands, where, Lung notes, he was a child in a community that spoke only Dutch.
On nights when the restaurant was busy, Lung and his brother would escape to the movie theater and watch whatever they could. “At that time, we didn’t have YouTube, so we could only watch T.V. or V.H.S. tapes. And I remember repeat-watching cartoons, animation . . . Star Wars. I was more interested in drawing, so that’s what I did.”
Such nostalgia-borrowing, of course, rings familiar: “In any given show,” Matt Groening says, “there might be homages to Buster Keaton and to an Indian filmmaker named S. S. Rajamouli, who has made some of my favorite films of the last decade. I particularly recommend a movie called Magadheera. I’m getting very obscure now. But this stuff just makes me so happy.”
This happiness, described by both creatives, could only be ignited and fueled by curiosity—a budding willingness to engage with the creativity of others. We simply could not enjoy The Simpsons or The Monsters if we didn’t first have Star Wars. And we couldn’t love Star Wars without Enheduanna. And so on.
Daydream back to those days when you were trapped at a school desk, doodling in the margins of your spiral bound notebook, wishing your youth away—a prodigy, an inventor, new worlds overcrowding your imagination. Where are those worlds now? Did you build them, brick by beautiful, merciless brick, the way you promised yourself?
The generous and wise Valerie Laken once said: “I am only a writer on the days when I write.” So we must also accept that we are only inventors on the days when we invent. We are only lovers on days when we love. And we are only craftsmen on the days when we engage with our craft. If that craft is paint, get out the brushes. If it’s pottery, then get out the clay. For most people finding this forthcoming series of Microde entries, your craft probably involves some aspect of the Word. Forget, for a moment, the task of writing every day, or the prospect of “being a writer”—are you having fun every day? What about your craft do you truly enjoy?
My craft is the portal to whimsy—escapism, play. Dorianne Laux, Queen of Fun, says about the difference between poetry and prose: “As a writer, I'm not so interested in Fred getting from the living room to the car. I want to go inside Fred's soul and play there.” All good creativity—writing, painting, pottery, sketching, you name it—involves some necessary element of whimsy. That first decision to stop working and instead play—to sketch, to scratch down a few words on the back of a receipt—is the decision to put energy into a potentially vital new world. Even in the literary canon or other forms of what’s considered “High Art,” you won’t entirely avoid this aspect of play; literary scholars have long said that “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” was composed almost entirely in Wordsworth’s head while walking past a field of daffodils with his sister (the poem, famously, saw no second draft). Other examples might include Aristophanes, the Father of Comedy, who penned Lysistrata—or Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.
When was the last time you made the conscious effort to drop your tools and play? Did that choice reignite your whimsy? Did you find the younger you again, the one you always swore to protect? Let’s call this The Creature Principle: if we are what we eat, then the general populace must intake whimsy at a certain level to then output whimsy in turn. As creative adults, we must recommit ourselves to playtime every day in order to combat Nazar, pessimism, the mental toll of war, the ever-present sense of alienation, isolation, imposter syndrome—to keep ourselves more than simply alive, but thriving.
Just yesterday, I was walking briskly through Trader Joe’s, distracted by a dense fog of reality, when a Thai woman halted me to discuss the Checkmate Queen Labubu hanging from my purse. “It just makes me so happy,” she said, grinning with all her teeth. And I let my lips fall open, too.
Written by Kate Wylie
Art Collage by Katie Erbs
PACT Artwork by Verena Raban
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Don’t Forget
