Answering the Call of the Wild

Abstract

I wouldn't read the classics, so my mother bought me comic books-not Superman or Archie (those I had to purchase with my own piddling allowance), but Classics Illustrated, a periodical which offered comic-book versions of major literary works. (This was, in fact, a public-relations coup by comics publishers, who were in those days viewed by responsible parents, like mine, as the corrupters of youth, an unsavory reputation from which producers of Saturday morning television programs now suffer. Classics Illustrated helped sanitize the image of comic books just as Sesame Street has helped legitimize television viewing.) Embracing the principle that any comic book was better than none, I accepted Classics Illustrated into my literary world (as did many of my coevals), thereby allowing myself to be coerced into a close encounter with serious literature. The experience was not all that unpleasant. Urged along by simplified dialogue, full-color illustrations, and (I discovered much later) bowdlerized texts, I readand enjoyed!-such acclaimed works as Ivanhoe, Les Miserables, and Romeo andJuliet. (The editors of Classics Illustrated were somewhat liberal and eclectic in their tastes: listed with works of Shakespeare, Dumas, and Homer were other masterpieces like Tom Brown's Schooldays, The Adventures of Kit Carson, and Wild Animals I Have Known.) Seeing me sprawled in a chair in contented company with Hamlet-never mind that it looked as if I were reading a comic book-my parents must have felt that curious glow of pleasure I now feel whenever I entice my own fourteen-year-old son into doing something which has even the most nebulous intellectual content. Of course, parents were just beginning to become sneaky in the 1950s. Responding to child psychologists who urged understanding and restraint, enlightened parents employed guile rather than violence with their offspring. Manufacturers and advertisers were quick to cooperate, and it was during my boyhood that such products as sweetened toothpaste and children's orange-flavored aspirin began to appearmedicine-chest analogues of Classics Illustrated.