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Sometimes, I read comics while musing on the roads not taken
“See you in the funny papers:” Did your loved ones say goodby that way? My brother often did.
People who read the funny pages of modern newspapers don’t know what they’re missing. The four-panel newspaper comics of my day were funnier because they were bigger. Today Editors shrink too much what the Artists draw so big …“Oh, so that’s how they draw those skinny little ankles!”
On Sundays continuing stories would appear full page, in colour. Father would dramatically read to the kids comics like Tarzan, Dick Tracy and Batman.
I liked how each Sunday strip of Dick Tracy started with a “Rookie take note” diagram to advise about catching criminals. My grade six teacher told us Detective Tracy wore a two-way wrist radio in earlier decades, which became a two-way wrist TV. “So amazing!” When the movie came out, with Warren Beatty and Madonna, I bought an adult-sized banana-yellow wrist TV. As phoney as a Mickey Mouse watch, of course. The spring for two pictures eventually broke because my friend’s little girl delighted in me showing her over and over. I was pleased that although I had no children of my own, I had learned how to play.
Perhaps you read today’s elderly Funky Winkerbean— I remember when Funky was afraid of the climbing rope at school. I never expected him to leave high school, but he aged in real time down the years. His path was not mine; I was about 40 before I got a degree. Funky became a teacher. Wearing his white shirt and tie, he decided, one day after work, to order a pizza. And the scruffy delivery person at the door, to their mutual shock, was his school buddy! I can relate: I probably would have avoided the tavern near my high school, had I not left town.
While comic characters like Superman and Archie were in the newspapers, they were also in comic books, to be found on spin racks at drugstores.
Comic book stores came in the 1970’s; my local one appeared in the early 1980’s. The owner-manager wrote to companies like Marvel and DC for advice. He told me that originally a comic character belonged to the company, and the script writers had to endlessly crank them out. Like old-time weekly shows of radio and TV. But once independent artists could create their own characters, and could have characters who could grow, quit or die, as in a movie, then there were lots of quality comics out there.
My favourite indie company is Dark Horse comics, run by independent artists, inventing characters like Hell Boy. Sometimes, for DC or Marvel, a big name artist or writer —maybe from Dark Horse— would be brought in for a limited time to revive an ongoing series, with their name prominently on the cover. I remember when Calgarian John Byrne did a limited time on She Hulk (She knew she was in a comic book!) and Wonder Woman. Then Byrne turned it over to the in-house talent—or corporate flacks. I wonder if house writers ever felt like that poor Hollywood hack in the movie Barton Fink? (Footnote)
It was Dark Horse who pioneered bringing over Japanese comic books, manga, such as Battle Angle Alita, (back when manga was still italicized as a foreign word) taking the trouble to “flip the pages” to read the panels left to write, like reading English. Their imitators don’t do that: You have to read the whole issue backwards, ostensibly to “be authentic,” but probably to save money.
A Chinese manga artist advised how to fully enjoy a comic: Don’t rush from word balloon to word ballon, but instead take the time to soak in the picture before the words. Whenever I read the series Blade of the Immortal, (Dark Horse) where a samurai travels from town to town, I often think of which gorgeous landscape or townscape I would want on a T-shirt.
Lately, my own path of collecting comics has almost petered out. As a young poor adult I couldn’t afford comics, but now I can! But I changed, stopped buying; I haven’t outgrown comics, rather, now I worry about spending the money, about shrinking space to display a pretty collection, and about my growing have-no-fun Puritanism. A temporarily growth, I hope.
I collected some great series back in my day. At first so I wouldn’t have FOMO, after my years of penny pinching. Later because I was grateful that comics added to my quality of life.
I remember one day—only because I had accompanied someone else who knew him—standing in the office of a Mount Royal College published English teacher, Richard Harrison. He had comic books on his wall like paper trophies. I learned that besides being published in prose and poetry, he had made comics. “Wow,” I said, “my respect for you just went up.” For my part, I said I had looked into scriptwriting comic books, but I had decided it would take fewer man-hours to get published for prose than for comic books—he agreed—so I was sticking to prose.
Today, humbled by determined comic artists getting themselves published, I hope to trudge my prose path, investing more man-hours, progressing a little faster to my own publication… See you in the funny papers!
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Sean Crawford
Calgary
September
2023
Footnotes:
~I saw the dark movie Barton Fink at a showing in the basement of the Edmonton Public Library. Our host said it was based on folks like the literary lion F. Scott Fitzgerald. The poor man went to Hollywood only to discover he was a mouse, that movies were produced by fellows who owned, say, garment factories, by capitalists who from believing movies should be assembled according to a formulae, as garments were, had little or no respect for writers!
~Turns out the Calgary artist mentioned above, John Byrne, also wrote with Tom Batiuk for Funky Winkerbean, as I learned from the first comment in a blog I have mentioned before —and blogged my comments to— Whatever by novelist John Scalzi. He blogged about being very moved by the comic when a lady has cancer.
