My son and I were talking this evening and got on the topic of cartoon heroes and comic books, among other things. I was a comic book nut when I was a kid, eating up Spiderman and Daredevil comics, a fan of the sharp and witty sarcasm of Peter Parker's alter-ego. Daredevil was an earnest and anxious do-gooder that I liked, too. Some guys had flaws, like Iron Man with his bad heart, Daredevil with his blindness, but those flaws just made them cooler.
I would read anything, and I remembered as we talked that I even read Archie, Richie Rich, Donald Duck, Red Hot, and Casper the Friendly Ghost comics. But the dopeyist comic I remember was Baby Huey, a baby duck that was way bigger than his parents or anyone else. He wore a dopey bonnet, a diaper, and a goofy smile all the time. But, put a comic book in front of me, and I'd read it, whether it was Baby Huey or the Classic Comic version of Silas Marner. What were your 12 cent adventures?
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Batman all the way! I particularly enjoy the Grant Morrison and Dave McKean version of the Bat, dark and creepy and slightly insane. Arkham Asylum is one of the greatest Batman books of all time. And the subtitle of the book comes from a poem by Philip Larkin, "A serious house on serious earth"
Good stuff.
This brings me back to when my friends and I would scour the comic racks to find the cool issues of X-Men. I still have all of my comics sitting in my closet. X-men is definitely on the top of my list, and when the movies became a reality I was more than exstatic. I would have to say that comics ushered me into the world of literature.
Hang on to those comics if you still have them. Mothers aren't all sympathetic to those of us with a comic interest. They might think it's so silly they need to rescue their sons from it and pitch out all the old ones, like my good mother did.
My buddies and I were big fans of Conan comics, but especially the Savage Sword of Conan series. We actually got down to the artist level; we cared whether the particular issue was drawn by Ernie Chan or a lesser artist. On the cover, I preferred Joe Jusko's work to the others'. We had debates over this sort of thing. I'm a little nostalgic for a time when we could know a subject so thoroughly, happily and appropriately ignorant of the lowbrow natue of our aesthetic preferences.
Isn't it funny how that kind of thing comes back to a person--how much it mattered whether one guy drew it or another? We really did debate and consider what it might take to get the best of one of those superheros.
I'm reminded too of some other comics I read--Thor, Sgt. Rock, the Haunted Tank. I was a fan of WWII comics and movies. You wonder how some of this gets past the "idea" people--"So there's this Southern guy in a tank in WWII, right, and his family's been cavalry people forever, right, so he's got this ancestor, Jeb Stuart, right, who was a Civil War cavalry guy, but he's dead, right, but his ghost is always watching out for this guy in the tank. And he talks to this tank guy and the tank guy talks back. Whattya think?"
"Sounds great!"
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