Pseudo-sublimity and Inarticulate Mumblings in Violent Juxtaposition: The World of Comic Books

Abstract

Pseudo-sublimity and Inarticulate Mumblings in Violent Juxtaposition:The World of Comic Books Jon C. Stott (bio) When Perry Nodelman asked me to write about comic books, I found myself remembering, for the first time in many years, a special part of my life between the ages of eight and eleven. On May 16, 1948 (I still remember the date), I suddenly became a devotee of the comic strips, and I eagerly awaited the weekend, when both of your papers had special comic sections (not yet in full color). However, neither of our papers carried what soon became my favorites: The Lone Ranger, Tarzan, and Superman. And so I spent ten of my fifteen cents weekly allowance to purchase the Star Weekly, a national publication which included a rotogravure, two magazine sections, a full length novel and twenty pages of comics in full color. I devoured the comics, cutting out my three favorite strips and putting them in scrap books. My interest was in more than the adventures; I was concerned with their format: the sizes of the panels, the style of the artists (none of whom were the authors). If a new style or technique were added, I noticed immediately. Shortly after I started to buy the Star Weekly, I started listening to The Lone Ranger and Superman on the radio with as passionate and regular a devotion as I had given to the strips. Like most children of that era, I created vivid mental pictures of the heroes and their adventures. But I am sure that the pictures were shaped largely by what came first. My Lone Ranger looked like the one drawn by Charles Flanders; my Tarzan was Burne Hogarth's The three comic books I regularly bought—The Lone Ranger, Tarzan, and Superman—were extensions of the strips and radio programs. Superman and The Lone Ranger were my favorites because the same artists drew both the strips and the comic books. The results were better than movies (I was disappointed with Tarzan, Superman, and The Lone Ranger when I did see them on TV or at the Saturday morning movies). The stills moved in my head, and I supplied the radio voices. I did admire the various heroes, and took one or other of them as my role during play time. But I never really believed in them. As I look back, I think that what I most enjoyed about the comic heroes was the ritual of finding the familiar characters, drawn by familiar artists, undertaking new but familiar adventures. I stopped reading comic books shortly after I entered junior high school, and it was only a few weeks ago, in preparation for this piece, that I once again bought and read several of them. So that my purchases would be representative, I telephoned the local magazine wholesaler and surveyed the students at the elementary school I'm connected with. At the wholesalers, the representative informed me that Star Wars and anything else in the science fiction area sold well. The children confirmed this. Talking to about one hundred students from grades two to six, I learned about such new characters as Captain Carrot (I rushed out and bought the first issue, bound to be a collectors item, said the vendor), Conan, Arion: Lord of Atlantis, Arak: Son of Thunder, and ROM: Spaceknight. If there was anything surprising about my student survey, it was the fact that only about twenty-five percent of the children regularly (at least once a month) purchased comic books. No doubt this results from the fact that with television, most of them get their visuals from Saturday cartoons; for those of us of thirty years ago, comic books were our primary source. When I asked the children what comics they read and liked best, I was surprised at one name that kept recurring in all grades: Archie. That ageless teenager from Riverdale, torn between the docile blond Betty and the raven-haired and rich Veronica (Leslie Fiedler could make much of this, as could Poe), supported by his moronic friend Jughead, and forever [End Page 10] combating that slick, but mean, teen-idol Reggie, still speaks to children. In the early...