Comic Books, the Paranormal, and Precognition

Since 1944, nearly sixty films have been made or are scheduled for production through 2019 that are based on Marvel Comics characters and properties. Many of these films involve super heroes who have become as well-known as the actors who portray them. Super heroes, naturally, have supernatural abilities of one kind or another:  X-ray vision, the power of flight, healing powers, clairvoyance, telepathy, memory manipulation, animal communication, teleportation, invisibility, shape shifting, and precognition.

Jeffrey L. Kripal, author of Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, theorizes that these illustrators and writers draw upon their personal paranormal experiences for some of their material. Take prolific comic book writer Doug Moench.

In the 1970s, he wrote and worked on Planet of the Apes for Marvel Comics. It was Marvel’s longest-lived series and featured original Ape stories as well as adaptations of the various movies. In 1975, it ran eleven issues that included color versions of the adaptation of the first two films, which Moench wrote.

On one particular day, Moench had just completed writing a scene for a Planet of the Apes comic book about a black-hooded gorilla named Brutus. “The scene involved Brutus invading the hero’s home, where he grabbed the man’s mate by the neck and held a gun to her head in order to manipulate the hero.”

Typical bad guy stuff. But what followed was anything but typical. Just as Moench completed writing the scene, he heard his wife calling for him from the other side of the house. Her voice sounded strange. He walked across the house and when he entered the living room, there stood a man in a black hood who had one arm around his wife’s neck and clutched a gun that he was holding to her head.

“It was exactly what I had written…it was so, so immediate in relation to the writing and such an exact duplicate of what I had written, that it became an instant altered state,” Moench told Kripal.

In the aftermath, the experience made it difficult for Moench to write. He was frightened that whatever he wrote might actually happen. “It really does make you wonder,” Moench said. “Are you seeing the future? Are you creating a reality? Should you give up writing forever after something like this happens? I don’t know.”

Moench didn’t give up writing, but as Kripal notes, the black-hooded intruder became his obsession for months, then years.

What’s intriguing about Moench’s experience is how quickly the real-life situation occurred after he had written the scene. Was the black-hooded intruder already in house when he began writing the scene? If it took him only a few minutes to write the scene, then the experience would qualify as clairvoyance rather than precognition. But if the scene took him several hours to write, then it’s likely it was an instance of precognition.

Kripal believes that the paranormal often needs the pop-cultural form to appear at all. “The truth needs the trick, the fact the fantasy. It is almost as if the left brain will not let the right brain speak (which it can’t anyway, since language is generally a left-brain function), so the right brain turns to image and story to say what it has to say (without saying it.).”

Perhaps, as writer and researcher Lynn McTaggart suggests in her book The Intention Experiment, the future “already exists in some nebulous state that we actualize in the present.” Or, as Moench asked, was he, through the act of writing the scene, creating a reality? Maybe so. Quantum physics tells us that subatomic particles exist in a state of potential until they are observed or thought about. If, as David Bohm suggested, consciousness rises from the implicate order, if it operates at what McTaggart calls the “quantum frequency level,” then we can impact moments other than the present through intense focus, as during the creative process, visualization, meditation, and any number of other ways.

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Take a look at Adele’s comment. The image below pertains to what she said.