Why Comics?

A few years ago, I attended the opening of a new Barnes & Noble bookstore. Naturally, my priority was to see if the Comics and Graphic Novels section was well-stocked. As I was scanning the shelves, I noticed a young man, about 14 or 15, sitting on the floor reading a Batman book. After a while, a woman about my age, apparently his mother, came over and whispered a few words to him. As she stood up, she saw me standing nearby -- reading a Batman book. She walked up to me and said, "So what you're telling me is, he's not going to grow out of this."

The relative merits of Batman notwithstanding, the attitude that comics are for children and the semi-literate pervades American society. Many critics feel that the worst insult they can give to a book or film is to say it has a "comic book" sensibility. I enjoy poking fun at comics from time to time, but as for the attitude on the whole, I object.

If you're a parent, or if you've ever had a parent, then you're familiar with the struggle of trying to get a kid who's glued to the TV interested in reading books. Sure, there are exceptions, but overall, the video screen has the stronger allure. Why is this? I believe it's because reading a book is an active pastime. It's a partnership between the author and the reader, and requires an effort on both parts to tell an effective story. Watching a movie or TV show, on the other hand, is almost completely passive.

With a book, the author has placed words on a page, and it's up to the reader to interpret those words and create images in his or her own mind. Though the creator offers descriptions and suggestions, it's the reader who ultimately decides what the characters look and sound like, how they're dressed, and how detailed the background is. In a movie, all of these decisions are already made, and the audience just sits back to watch.

Also, when reading a book, you follow the story at your own pace. If you're a fast reader, you might finish a book in a day, while a slower reader may take a couple of weeks. You can skim through the sections that don't interest you, and linger over the more fascinating passages. You can go back and reread earlier sections to pick up on more details, and you can even read the end first and work your way backwards, if you're into that sort of thing. With a film, on the other hand, the story unfolds at a predetermined speed. If you miss an important detail, you can't go back again. (I'm ignoring DVDs and VCRs for the sake of this discussion. Yes, they exist, but most filmmakers still expect their stories to be watched linearly, and not with a remote control in hand.)

But "active" versus "passive" isn't an either/or proposition. They're the extreme ends of a storytelling spectrum. Suppose an author wants to control the pacing of the story, but let the audience's imagination provide the imagery? This can be a powerful combination for building suspense. The best medium for that storyteller is the spoken word, which can take several forms: monologues, radio plays, songs, or the telling of stories around a campfire.

On the other hand, a creator may want to control the images, but allow the audience to set the pace. What medium allows this? Comics.

The written word; the motion picture; the spoken word; and comics. Four different media for telling stories, each with its own strengths, weaknesses, and level of audience participation. There's nothing inherent in any of them that limits it to a particular age group, education level, or economic level. Each of them can be, and has been, used to tell a children's bedtime story or a Shakespearean play; a lighthearted comedy or a deep philosophical parable; a mindbending science fiction odyssey, a tearjerking romantic melodrama, a vast historical epic, or a Batman story.

Theater and film were once considered entertainment for the illiterate. Over the past thirty years, comics creators have been struggling to dispel a similar image, with noteworthy works like Eisner's A Contract With God; Spiegelman's Maus; Satrapi's Persepolis; and Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp achieving critical respect and admiration. Even superhero comics have taken a more serious turn, with Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Moore's Watchmen. But there are still many people who think of these as aberrations, and that comic books always were and always should be written for kids. There's still a long way to go to change that attitude.

** UPDATE 04/06/2011 **
I just came across this excellent essay by Conor McCreery on the same subject.

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"Take Us Out of Orbit, Mr. Sulu, and Don't Spare the Horses"

From Star Trek #9 (Gold Key Comics, February 1971):

"Imagine, Mr. Spock -- a computer capable of attracting and recording the brainwaves -- the very thoughts of every famous person in Earth's history! It has recorded all of that history on these punch cards."

Punch cards? PUNCH CARDS??

**sigh**

The future just ain't what it used to be.

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Where's Wein?

Once upon a time, there was Fantasy Kingdom, a little comic book store in a town called East Meadow, NY. It was run by a jolly old soul named Keith Mallow. It was my main source of comics when I was a student at Hofstra University. It was there that I got one of the more unusual items in my collection.

Fantasy Kingdom was a frequent host of book signing events. One bright, sunny day in 1980, the guests of honor were DC Comics writers Marv Wolfman, Bob Rozakis, and Len Wein, and artist Alex Saviuk. It was a fun afternoon. My most vivid memory of it is Marv tossing a pen in the air with an exasperated look on his face when I mentioned that Ultra the Multi-Alien was one of my favorite superheroes.

As a regular customer, I got a special souvenir of that day, which I am sharing with you. Keith had Alex illustrate the event on a ditto master. (Remember dittos? If you were a student before 1980, before bulk photocopying was affordable, then you ought to recall their weird purple ink and intoxicating alcoholic scent.) He ran off several copies, and the next week gave them out to people who had been there. After thirty years, my copy is a bit faded and yellowed, but I cleaned it up to show it to you here. (Click the image to enlarge it.)

The store window didn't really say "Free -- Cheap -- Easy" and the guy at the register wasn't napping, but other than that, most of the scene is as I remember it. There were several customers who showed up in costume, including a skinny Superman (who did resemble a young Christopher Reeve), a senior Lone Ranger, a pretty cute Storm, Moon Knight, and a guy in a gorilla suit. I don't remember if there were any extraterrestrials there, or if they were a product of Alex's imagination.

I don't remember seeing Plastic Man, but there was a minor debate over who was the better character, him or the Elongated Man. Marv settled the issue by declaring that the two aren't really comparable. Elongated Man only stretches, while Plas is primarily a shape-changer.

Len Wein arrived late, so Alex squeezed him in under the table between Marv and Bob, anticipating the "Where's Waldo?" books by seven years. In the real world, they found him a chair.

The bearded chap in the dark suit on the left is Keith Mallow himself. Keith was probably dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, but Bob and Alex had recently used him as the model for a character named "Mallo, Keeper of the Cosmic Balance" in a two-part Atom story in Action Comics #515 and DC Comics Presents #30, so Alex drew him as Mallo here. He looks a bit like Abel from House of Secrets.

Like many other comic shops of the 1980s, Fantasy Kingdom is long gone. There's now a hair salon in its old location. But it was a fun place to hang out while it lasted.

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A Museum With Character

Last week, I had the long-overdue pleasure of visiting the Barker Character, Comic, and Cartoon Museum in Cheshire, CT. The museum has been in existence since 1997, but I only learned about it a few months ago.

The Museum consists of two buildings: the Gallery, where hundreds of animation cels and cartoon-themed paintings are on display; and the Museum itself, which contains two stories of glass-enclosed toys, books, magazines, lunchboxes, Pez dispensers, and other products that should have anyone over the age of thirty muttering "I used to have one of those" more than once.

No photography is allowed inside either building, but the grounds outside are decorated with over two dozen murals and life-sized cutouts of cartoon characters that you can pose alongside.

I used to enjoy visiting the National Cartoon Museum in Rye Brook, NY, before it relocated to Boca Raton, FL, and later closed. The Barker Museum is a different, though equally enjoyable, experience. The NCM was comic strip and comic book oriented, with a huge collection of original artwork. The Barker Museum focuses more on toys and products based on comic and cartoon characters. It has no original comic-strip or -book artwork on display, though the Gallery does include a few framed prints of Peanuts strips by Charles Schulz. There are perhaps a half-dozen comic books on display in the Museum, notably a Famous First Edition reprint of Action Comics #1, which I discussed in a previous post.

Not only fictional characters are recognized here. There is also a large number of toys and items depicting real-life characters, like George Burns, Carol Channing, Dean Martin, and others. The Museum also boasts of its exhibits on the California Raisins and Celebriducks (a line of rubber ducks caricaturing familar faces from show business and politics), which I'd never heard of before.

I especially enjoyed seeing a corner devoted to Myron Waldman, an animator for the Fleischer Studios in the 1930s and '40s, who worked on the Betty Boop, Popeye, and Superman cartoons, as well as a newspaper comic strip called Happy the Humbug. Myron used to live three miles away from me on Long Island, and was the subject of my first column in Hogan's Alley Magazine #12 in 2004.

The closest thing that I have to a criticism of the Barker Museum is that it's too tightly packed. Herb and Gloria Barker could spread their collection over twice the floor space, and it would still feel crowded. The story I was told is that Herb was a nostalgia buff whose collection grew too big for the house, so at Gloria's urging, he moved it out and put it on display. (Now I have an idea about what to do with my collection when it outgrows the basement.) The Barkers also own a company that manufactures promotional products. My friend, Merrill, works for a company that does business with them, and I found out about the Museum from her.

The museum is located on 1188 Highland Ave. in Cheshire, CT, about midway between Hartford and New Haven, six miles west of Route 91. You can take a virtual tour by watching the video on their website, but it's not as good as being there.



On the right, Bugs Bunny faces down Yosemite Sam; on the left, Baba Looey watches as Quick Draw McGraw faces down himself.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto, with their horses, Silver and Scout

Remember the Real Heroes

Ground Zero, 10/17/2008

Let's spend today remembering and thanking the real-life heroes of September 11, 2001, all of whom risked their lives, and many of whom lost them, at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and onboard UA Flight 93.