In the spring of 2008, my niece Leslie Anne Jones collected her degree in print journalism from the University of Southern California, joined the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, and flew off to Taiwan for her first gig, teaching English to 4- through 8-year-olds. When she complained about the paucity of teaching materials at her school, I thought I new exactly what the kids needed. I promised to send her some comic books. That’s when I discovered the terrible demise of the comic book as I knew it.
My first challenge was finding a comic book whatsoever at all. They used to be everywhere, displayed on rotating racks just inside the door of grocery stores and pharmacies where the check-out clerks could keep an eye on them. Children didn’t get lost in the store while their parents shopped. Instead,they sat on the floor next to the rack, reading comics as fast as they could without having to buy them. If they did purchase, the price was a dime for a regular sized comic book that might contain two or three stories, or a quarter for a thicker special edition. But now, the grocery, the pharmacy, the convenience store, and even the Wal-Mart offered no comic books at all.
The week I started my quest for comic books, I was vacationing in Wenatchee, in the center of Washington state. When I couldn’t find comic books on news stands, I started telephoning book stores. The city isn’t large enough to support a chain bookstore—I found one listed in the phone directory, but the number had been disconnected. Most of the other bookstores in town were second-hand books or Christian books only, with no comics. “Hello, do you sell children’s books or comic books?” Pause. “Um, this is an adult bookstore.” Okay, probably not.
I found one comic specialty shopkeeper over by the college who kept only part-time hours. Even he didn’t have what I was looking for. His comics were packaged in plastic see-through envelopes and cost dollars and dollars, but they were morbid, humorless stuff. They featured battles, fighters, explosions, warfare. I told him what I was looking for, and he gave me some samples of special edition, small-format comics that had been printed for vendors to hand out as Halloween treats. I bought something gruesome from him for a couple of bucks just because he had been nice.
The comics I wanted thrived in the 1950s. What I really wanted to find was something like Donald Duck and his three nephews, Hughie, Dewey and Louie, or Mickey Mouse and his friends Minnie, Goofy, Clarabelle and their dog Pluto. Uncle Scrooge McDuck had given me the only impression I had of immense wealth: He sat on top of his pile of treasure in a room full nearly to the roof with loose coins and gems, but longed for a simple scone. Bugs Bunny constantly outsmarted his nemesis, Elmer Fudd, who dressed in a hunter’s hat with earflaps and stalked the rabbit with a shotgun. Bugs lived in a warren with a sign next to the entry that proclaimed “Bugs Bunny, Esq.” (Years later, when I became a lawyer, I refused to use the title “Esq.” like some of my colleagues did, because I associate the title with comic book rabbits.) I wanted Little Lulu, who wore her hair in ringlets (and who later became the shill for Kleenex when it was available only in sanitary-looking blue and white boxes), and Lulu’s her buddy Tubby, who was fat. Sometimes she walked through the woods in search of beezleberries, and almost encountered the vaguely scary Witch Hazel. I wanted Nancy, who was fat and whose hair was a kinky dark helmet, and her buddy Sluggo, who was also fat. The two of them were a contrast to Nancy’s Aunty Fritzy Ritzy, the glamorous model from the 1930s comic strips. I wanted Richy Rich, the poor little rich boy, and Li’l Lotta, the fat girl who could eat a sandwich two feet high or an ice cream cone stacked with a crooked tower of 30 scoops, who defeated evil with her tremendous strength. I wanted Casper, the friendly ghost with the round head, and his cousin Spooky who had freckles and wore a derby, who wasn’t quite as nice; but they were not scary at all compared to Casper’s three pointy-headed uncles.
My mother detested comic books. I’m not sure why, unless she thought they would corrupt the morals of modern youth, or detract from serious reading. She shouldn’t have worried. The featured characters in the comics were always the good guys, maybe rascally in a harmless way, or in the case of Superman, they stood for truth, justice and the American way. And aside from the onomatopoeia of various crashes and booms, the vocabulary of the comics was not especially simple. Never the less, Mom marched me and my sister to the library to take out library cards and to get real books--where I discovered genre fiction and read every episode of Nancy Drew, who was surely a comic in text instead of pictures.
I got my comics from my boy cousins, David, Arnold and Sam. They were allowed to buy comics whenever they wanted. They stored the comics in the deep drawer in the bottom of a wardrobe in their hallway, and whenever I visited, Aunt Kathleen scooped up an armload for me to take home. My mother’s rules were clear. The comics had to stay in my bedroom neatly stacked. If they were left lying in the living room, they were tossed into the fireplace.
With time, my cousins’ tastes in comics began to change. Little Lulu gave way to teenaged characters like Archie and Jughead, the blonde girl next door Betty, and the privileged brunette Veronica. There was Superman, whom I liked, and Batman, who was too gloomy for my taste; but they, in turn, gave ‘way to car and hunting magazines that I did not read at all. But by then, I was ready for Mad Magazine, anyway.
Eventually, I found a substantial bookstore in Wenatchee, after all. I telephoned ahead, and a clerk at Hastings assured me that they carried both children’s books and comics. The comics were still not what I was looking for. They were violent and dark, with hard-edged pictures and sharp edges, not plump figures in Easter-egg colors. The exception was Archie, upgraded from the 1950s to play an electric guitar, but Archie cost $2.49 for only a scant few pages.
The package I shipped to Taiwan contained only a couple of comics. But because he wrote with the same wit and good humor that I used to see in the comics, I sent volumes of Dr. Seuss instead. ###
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