The Left Coast Biased

I didn’t read comic books as a child. Chalk it up as a number of things that I didn’t really do that seem to be a bit out of the norm. I didn’t go to many movies, or watch TV, play video games, listen to music… My idle recreational pursuits we limited to petty acts of violence, burning, breaking, blowing up and killing just about whatever I could get my hands on. I balanced this latent sociopathy with a heavy diet of the written word. Given that I grew up in that now archaic age before the profusion of cell phones to any 10 year old with opposable thumbs, that Dark Age before the glorious wings of the internet lifted us all up into shared illumination this meant that I read actual books. For those of you unfamiliar with the media a book is a collection of paper covered with words on each side and bound together at one end. This bound end is called the spine, as it is usually hardened by the glue or the stitching that is holding the paper together. The individual pieces of paper are called pages and are protected by a thicker piece of paper, sometimes a piece of leather, which is called a cover. The height of popular book making as an art form was reached toward the end of the 1800’s where the stitched spine was covered leather with the title embossed in gold leaf, and the front and back covers a piece of marbleized wood with leather again protecting the corners and all the pages were trimmed in gold leaf. You can see some of these marvelous books if you watch period pieces like Pride and Prejudice. Or you can Google it. Since then we have economized our books into paltry things that are printed on cheap paper and bound together with whichever glue is cheapest at the moment, scarcely worth reading let alone keeping in a prominent position in your house. All the better, though, as it creates more room for your DVD collection.

As I was saying, I did not read comic books as a child. While my peers were enjoying the wonders of Superman, Spawn, the X-Men and the like I was burning through every western ever written, Hopalong Cassidy, the Sackets, Zane Grey, Max Brand… You name it, I read it. Middle school saw the introduction of Tolkien and the marvelous world of all things scientific and fantastic. Intermittent sprinklings of historical texts popped up and then it was everything Shakespeare which led into the romantic poets and so on. I disdained comics as juvenile. The point of reading was the writing, not some goofy pictures of scantily clad women who were serving as much as anything else to ease the sexual tension of pre-adolescence, post-adolescence, and all those beautiful years in between.

A series of interactions, none of which had to do with the scantily clad women, opened my eyes to the value of comics as a legitimate genre of literature. The first of these was a graphic novel by Craig Thompson called Blankets. I am not being a nerdy elitist, well I guess I am, but not about calling it a graphic novel instead of a comic. There is a difference. The same way that there is a difference between Saturday morning cartoons and Toy Story. So when reading this graphic novel I was struck by the depth of the story, the occasionally florid prose and the constantly florid drawings. I went out and bought his next book, which was a graphic diary of his trip to Morocco. I was hooked. I started reading all sorts of comics and graphic novels and quickly discerned that the ratio of quality to drivel in the genre was much the same as in literature in general. For every Tolkien you have to suffer through Harry Potter, Twilight, Dragonlance, and the rest. For every Robert Bolano you have to put up with Grisham, Clancy, King, and on down the list.

Just as I was beginning to despair I ran into two authors who saved comics for me. The First was Neil Gaiman, in the Sandman series. The stories of the God of Dreams, and his travails conveyed so much of the power of dreaming, of hope, of stories that it carried me away, bringing me into their world in a way that only literature had ever been able to. The second was Frank Miller, but not the Miller of 300, and Sin City. His graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns was a landmark of emotional commitment for me. If you have ever idly wondered what happens when Batman fights Superman, one of the possible answers is put forth here. Better is the question of why would they fight. After this I more frequently came across the quality work, the Alan Moore, Brian Bendis, and I realized why they had managed to cross the line from sheer pulp to literature.

I know that comics are becoming trendy and cool in pop culture. I mean, there was an entire plot arc of the now defunct OC given over to the creation of a graphic novel. I would caution you against letting that color your opinion of the genre. As one who regularly dismisses things for no reason other than that they are popular, I understand the desire completely. But you would be missing out on one of the most creative and versatile means of literature our society as come up with.

Joseph Campbell has a theory that every hero’s story is the same story, that it goes through the same path, the same challenges, to the same end. Each new hero is but his particular society’s understanding of a different face of this same hero. Comics have been the face of that hero through the development of America’s modernity. We don’t have a predominant religion, mythology, no meta-narrative that we carry with us. We are too broad, too diverse for any common story. So we have born a thousand smaller stories, our own American mythology. For those of you who have never deigned lift a comic, here is a list of the cream of the crop. Most of them are available in a single collected form, but you can get them in the original single issues if you prefer, but please. Read the comic. Don’t let a movie maker steal your right to enjoy your own mythos.

- Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. For reasons listed above, and the fact that one of the true modern instantiations of the ancient hallowed vocation of the storyteller expresses himself best in this media.



- Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Moore does the best job of anyone in the business of letting the superheroes be human, have doubts and conflictions. Before going to see the movie, read this epic retake on the classic American superhero.







- Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. For the reasons above, and because Miller’s vision of Batman is the foundation for the rebuilding of the Batman movie series. And because, seriously, Batman fights Superman.





- The Death of Superman. For all the obvious reasons. Because people would stalk the writers threatening to kill them if they didn’t bring him back. Because The death of the hero is the most central fulcrum of the plot of the hero. Because it isn’t just a clever name.





Now I am not saying that any of these make it into the Canon, the sacred collection of texts that are an imperative read for their quality and importance. Tolkien alone of the fantasy genre has made it in, over the frequent and vehement objections of the literati. Eventually the art form might produce a work that will be granted admittance to that hallowed hall, but for now, it is at least in the yard. If not knocking at the door.