We Go to a Comic Book Store

It is completely without shame that I confess I loved comic books as a boy.  (And have been known to read some of them in my adulthood with satisfaction.)  In the 1970s, I regularly read such comics (or black-and-white comic magazines, which were my preference) as The Shadow, Doc Savage, Planet of the Apes, Tomb of Dracula, House of Mystery, Sherlock Holmes (sadly, never lasting more than an issue or two), and even The Hulk.  And, to this day, I have a deep and abiding affection for Superman.  Even as a boy, I thought Superman was the great American success story.  An immigrant raised in America’s heartland, he took our national myth to heart and made himself into the embodiment of all that is good about us.  (I was also beglamoured by visions of his lost planet Krypton, which was often portrayed as a 1930s art deco-inspired wonderland.  If heaven exists and mirrors our expectations, for me it would resemble Krytpon to no little degree.)

Clearly, the argument that reading comics in one’s youth “ruins” one for adult literature doesn’t seem to be airtight.  I distinctly remember reading the Planet of the Apes comics and Balzac at the same time … in fact, I would heartily endorse anything that encourages young people to read at all.

When I was a boy, comic books were available in every corner newsstand, in drug and convenience stores, and sometimes in five-and-dime stores, such as Woolworth’s.  Comics were ubiquitous – read in school lunchrooms, in the park, and often found crumpled at the bottom of book bags or rolled in back pockets.

Then, something strange and terrible happened to the comics industry.  (WHAM!)  A new form of sales – comics direct marketing – changed the way comic books were bought and sold.  Instead of being available everywhere, comics were now sold primarily through comic book specialty stores.  (And today, it’s nearly impossible to find comics anywhere else.)  Where comics were once the common currency of kids everywhere, they became a specialized commodity of interest to only those in-the-know.

The effect of this decision was two-fold.  First, it saved comics when they probably would have disappeared completely in competition against laptops, video games, and other youthful time drains.  However, what it also meant is that the audience changed primarily from all children to a devoted (fanatical!) band of devotees.  And – more significantly – this audience has aged, taking comics with them.  By and large, comics are not for children anymore.

To my mind, saving comics also killed them.  Whereas comics reading amongst children once numbered in the many millions, it now numbers in the many thousands among adults.  In addition, it has perverted perfectly delightful adolescent fantasies – such as Batman or Superman – in the misguided struggle to make them “adult,” an aesthetic miscalculation and intellectual dead end.  If you treat much of this material in an “adult” manner, it often becomes even more risible.  What are the recent Batman films, really, other than Lethal Weapon in a shroud?

These thoughts came to mind as I stepped, on a whim, into a comic book store while visiting friends in Long Island.  There were very few young people on hand – though, I must confess, most were younger than I.  (Not all that difficult a proposition these days.)

The thing that struck me the most is that many (many, many, many!) things on the shelves were recreations of things I saw or had as a boy.  Aurora monster model kits; Sean Connery/James Bond model kits; hardcover collections of Superman from the 1970s; figures from the movie Mad Monster Party? (1967) at nearly $25 a figurine; action figures of characters from the sitcom The Munsters (1964-1966); bendable toys of Huckleberry Hound (1958); a Flintstones (1960-1966) watch …. I could go on, but you get the idea. No one under 50 would have any point of reference for most of the wares on parade.  And it dawned on me … comic book stores really don’t even sell comic books anymore --- they sell tired Baby Boomers the youth they so desperately miss.

If ever there was a recipe for extinction, it would be this.  While comic books still operate to a degree as the research and development arm for bloated, senseless “event movies,” the idea that they are a thriving and viable medium is, sadly, no longer correct.  It’s often amusing and even instructive to revisit the passions of one’s youth, but it’s an awful plan for building an ongoing artistic legacy.

Michael Chabon’s Manhood

I just realized that the above title might promise more than I can deliver…

Michael Chabon (born 1963) is very much an anomaly in contemporary serious fiction: he is actively involved in telling a story and he wants you to like him.  As such, his remarkable popularity with the general reading public and with the literati is a happy coincidence that ensures both his continued publication and his serious critical reception.  This interest in narrative (and, to a lesser degree, genre fiction) is a refreshing change in American letters, which for decades has been mired in short, slice-of-life tidbits that read as if they were missing both the opening and closing pages.

I have found Chabon’s fiction to be very much a mixed bag.  I thought The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) to be magnificent; indeed, one of the best books of the decade.  I also found his The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), Wonder Boys (1995) and Werewolves in Our Youth (1999) to be powerful and affecting books.  However, in trying to craft more ‘literary’ forays into genre writing, he has churned out an astounding number of clunkers, including the incomprehensible Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Final Solution (2004), the sword-and-sorcery meller Gentlemen of the Road (2007), and the completely unreadable alternate history, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007).  (In fact, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is such a bad book that the thuggish policemen who so recently attacked peaceful American protestors should be forced to read it twice.  Aloud.)

Chabon’s second nonfiction book was Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, published in 2009.  (His earlier books of essays, Maps and Legends, published in 2008, will be covered in a future post.)  Chabon’s Manhood encompasses a great deal of territory (sorry), and the full range of his musings and concerns make expansive and fascinating reading.  And, more so than after any of these novels, I closed the book thinking, “I like this man a lot.”

Chabon breaks his essays into interesting categories, such as Exercises in Masculine Affection, Patterns of Early Enchantment, or Studies in Pink and Blue.  Each and every section has much to commend it, and the essays in Tactics of Wonder and Loss contain passages that can only be called shimmering.  Here, for example, is Chabon writing about his own, aborted first marriage in his essay The Hand On My Shoulder: The meaning of divorce will elude us as long as we are blind to the meaning of marriage, as I think at the start we must all be.  Marriage seems – at least it seemed to an absurdly young man in the summer of 1987, standing on the sun-drenched patio of an elegant house on Lake Washington – to be an activity, like chess or tennis or a rumba contest that we embark upon in tandem while everyone who loves us stands around and hopes for the best.  We have no inkling of the fervor of their hope, nor of the ways in which our marriage, that collective endeavor, will be constructed from and burdened with their love.

Fine stuff, that. 

Chabon also has a great deal of insight on the richness of childhood imagination, and how the imaginative landscape of our childhood often coalesces into our adult frame of reference.  He, for example, loved the short-lived Planet of the Apes television show he watched as a boy because the format and premise were open-ended enough for his imagination to run riot and play a variety of different games.  He fears that current entertainment for children is so over-produced and so ironic that this lush imaginative landscape has grown smaller.  Chabon also believes that a healthy appreciation of ‘crap culture’ (comic books, junk movies, television) is not necessarily a bad thing, and that: what smells strongly of crap to one generation – Victorian penny dreadfuls, the music of the Archies, the Lone Ranger radio show, blaxploitation films of the seventies – so often becomes a fruitful source of inspiration, veneration, and study for those to come, while certified Great and Worthy Art molders and fades on its storage rack, giving off an increasingly powerful whiff of naphthalene.

Of course, as with any book of essays, there is some dross with the gold.  His Biblical mediations while watching the Barack Obama inauguration feel forced and his article on circumcision could be cut.  (Sorry.)  But for every minor misstep, there is an embarrassment of riches to be found in Manhood for Amateurs, and it comes highly recommended.