Ryan Gorcey: Connecting People Through Storytelling
Pop Culture IP
From his senior thesis on the Arthurian roots of comic book superheroes to his work researching and assessing the value of Hollywood memorabilia for Julien's Auctions to spec work on theme park design, Ryan is intimately familiar with a wide range of pop culture intellectual properties.
Scholarship
Before "Avengers: Endgame," before the DCEU, before comic book superheroes became billion-dollar box office stars, they were inspired by stories five millennia old. But how did we get from Samson, Hercules, David, Gilgamesh and Achilles to Superman, Captain America, Iron Man, and the Green Lantern? The answer can be found in post-Roman Britain.
The Arthurian Roots of Modern Super Heroes
The Auchinleck Manuscript is the earliest known monolingual Middle English manuscript. Dating to the early 14th century, it is an anthology of works produced with intent of reclaiming English language and history from the Normans. These stories from England's history (and others the editors appropriated) were intended to form the literary backbone of England's national identity. At its center: "Of Arthour and of Merlin."
An avid comic book reader in my youth, I've also had a lifelong obsession with Arthuriana. I'd always known there was some connection, but it took the study of this manuscript during my sophomore year at Berkeley to discover what that was: In their means of transmission, their modes of production, their literary evolution, their themes and their inventions, the stories of King Arthur are the literary missing link between ancient heroes—King David, Gilgamesh, Hercules, Samson, Alexander the Great—and the panoply of super-powered heroes that emerged in the mid-20th century: Captain America, Superman, the X-Men, Spider-Man, Thor, the Flash, the Green Lantern and more.
The same week "Iron Man" premiered in theaters across the United States, I turned in this honors thesis.
I have gone back and made small additions, the last in 2012. However, were I to return to this work now, I would not only change many of the pronouns, but I would make it more expansive and inclusive. I would dig into how my trope of outsidership has expanded from comics' earliest incarnations to include the wonderful spectrum of race, creed, gender identities, and sexualities that have found on-page expression in the past decade as comics and their creators increasingly represent their diverse readers.
As it stands, this 200-page work is a jumping off point that I hope will inspire and inform such discussions. Even though this work has not been available to scholars since I turned it in, others have already taken up the baton and made the study of superheroic literature a legitimate academic pursuit.
In the early months of 2024, Ryan revisited the thesis for the first time in more than a decade. A simple reorganization and re-chaptering turned into a comprehensive editing effort, stretching the work from 200 pages to over 300 in hopeful preparation for publishing. Read the current manuscript below.
In 2021, as part of an evaluation process for a theme park design group, Ryan was asked to ideate the E-ticket ride at the center of a new, Lord of the Rings-themed land, in a 1,500-word proposal.
Ryan wrote the 1,500-word treatment not just about the ride, but the entire land, including its in-universe history and how its architecture, environment and even plant life would tell an immersive story (drawing from Disneyland's Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge and the Gotham City Backlot at Six Flags Magic Mountain). He packaged that with a vectorized hand-drawn conceptual map of the land and the activations and other attractions within it.
As I stood with my mouth agape, staring at the multicolored lights dancing across the ceiling of Savi’s Workshop, I knew that what I was experiencing was engineered (or, Imagineered). I knew that Frank Oz’s disembodied voice, the musical cues, and the very room I was standing in were meticulously designed, market tested and curated to elicit specific, powerful emotions. Nevertheless, the feeling I experienced as I ignited my lightsaber was nothing short of magical. This was the stuff of dreams that gave chills even to a jaded longtime journalist, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.